Trade-Show & Event Badge-Scan Importer

The problem this kills

You come back from a conference riding high - and then the lead-retrieval export lands in your inbox. Four hundred rows. Names in ALL CAPS. Companies spelled four different ways. Half the emails missing. Booth notes scrawled on a separate sheet that nobody linked back to the scans. By the time you've finished cleaning it by hand, deduping it against the CRM, and figuring out which rep gets which lead, a week has gone by - and the leads have gone cold.

Every event uses a different scanner vendor, so the columns never line up the same way twice. So you start from scratch every single time. The work is slow, error-prone, and completely unglamorous, and it's the single biggest reason the money you spent on the booth doesn't turn into pipeline.

This plan kills that week of cleanup.

What you'll build

A small internal web app - yours, login-protected, running on your own accounts - that takes the raw badge-scan export and walks it through a controlled assembly line:

• Upload the event's CSV/Excel export, plus your booth notes sheet and rep roster.
• Map whatever oddball columns this scanner vendor used onto your standard fields (the app remembers the mapping for next time).
• Normalize names, company names, emails, and country/region so they're consistent and CRM-ready.
• Rate & annotate each lead with the booth rep's hot/warm/cold rating and notes.
• Dedupe - within the batch and against your existing CRM - using email as the key, falling back to company + last name when an email is missing, flagging the two kinds of duplicate separately.
• Route each lead to an owner by territory.
• Review & approve the whole batch in a staging table where you fix obvious junk before anything is final.
• Export a CRM-ready CSV in exactly the columns your system expects, plus a per-rep follow-up list - and notify each rep by email.

What's inside the Implementation Plan

A complete, paste-and-go runbook for an AI coding agent (Claude Code). You don't write code - you paste prompts and answer questions.

It starts by interviewing you about your business. Before it builds anything, the plan makes the agent ask about your actual process: which scanner vendors you use, the exact column names in your exports, how your CRM names its fields, how you define territories, your hot/warm/cold rules, and the messy edge cases you hit every event. It reflects a short tailored spec back to you for a thumbs-up, then shapes the data model, the validations, and every later step around your answers - so you get a tool fitted to your business, not a generic template.

From there it's a step-by-step build: the data model, the upload + column-mapping screen, the normalize/dedupe/route engine, the human review screen, the approval gate, the CSV export, and the rep notification emails - each step ending in a ready-to-copy prompt.

The governance it includes (this is the point)

This isn't a throwaway script. The plan builds in the controls that make a tool safe to actually run on real lead data:

• Login so only your team can use it.
• Row-level security so each person only ever sees their own organization's data.
• A complete audit trail - who uploaded, edited, approved, and exported what, and when.
• A hard human-in-the-loop approval gate - the app drafts the cleaned, deduped, owner-assigned batch in a staging table, a person reviews and approves it, and only then is anything committed and reps notified. The AI never commits leads on its own.
• Duplicate guards so the same scan, or the same event export, can't be processed twice.

Who it's for

Field marketing and event managers who come home from a conference with a 400-row spreadsheet of scans and lose a week cleaning it. If you own the booth, run the lead-retrieval handoff, and answer for whether the event paid for itself - this is for you. No coding background needed.

You've got this - paste the first prompt and let the plan interview you.