IDS 2027
Cologne.

What IDS is, in two lines

IDS (International Dental Show) is the leading dental trade fair in the world: it brings together manufacturers of equipment and materials for dental practices and dental laboratories, and showcases innovations, technologies and trends for dentists, dental technicians, the trade and industry. It is held every two years in Cologne, in odd-numbered years, at the Koelnmesse exhibition centre. The most recent edition held, IDS 2025 (41st ed.), recorded 2,010 exhibitors from 61 countries and over 135,000 visitors from 156 countries, across 180,000 m² of space (official post-show figures).

It is not a fair where deals are signed at the booth. It is the place where dentists, practice owners, dental technicians, distributors and industry buyers evaluate intraoral scanners, materials, practice software, CAD/CAM solutions and equipment that will then enter practices and laboratories in the months that follow. Purchase decisions close in the weeks after the fair, when the prospect is back at the practice, comparing quotes and talking to their accountant or their distributor. That is why lead management weighs as much as your presence: a name with no context on the type of facility and the need is an opportunity that vanishes in the noise of 2,000 exhibitors.

What to exhibit, where to exhibit

IDS spreads across a layout of 7 halls of the Koelnmesse exhibition centre. The exact hall numbering and assignment for 2027 has not yet been published on the official site (it usually comes out in the months before the event), but the fair has always been organised into large thematic blocks that mirror the three fronts of the dental market:

• Dentistry & dental technology, equipment and materials for the practice and the laboratory: dental treatment units, instruments, impression and prosthetic materials, consumables
• Medical devices, equipment and products regulated as medical devices (sterilisation, hygiene, diagnostics, surgery)
• Digital dental technology, intraoral scanners, CAD/CAM, 3D printing, practice and laboratory management software, imaging and end-to-end digital workflows

Practical positioning tip: pick the block based on who you want in front of your booth, not on what you do on paper. Whoever sells laboratory materials is looking for dental technicians; whoever sells an intraoral scanner is looking for the dentist decision-maker or the clinic’s purchasing manager. In a venue with 7 halls and 135,000 visitors the buyer walks kilometres of aisle: the winner is the one who makes their offering readable in 5 seconds, with a claim and a concrete reference (CE/MDR marking, integration with the software already in use, processing time) visible from a distance.

Visitor profile

At IDS the audience is B2B, strongly international and highly focused on dental: with 156 countries represented in 2025, a large share of the contacts collected come from outside Germany and Italy, and within Europe Germany remains one of the largest and most technological dental markets. The typical mix at the booth:

• Dentists, practice owners and clinics (roughly 30-40% of useful traffic), those who decide on the investment in practice equipment; often the sole decision-maker in the dental micro-business
• Dental technicians and dental laboratories (20-30%), they evaluate materials, CAD/CAM and digital workflows for the lab; very technical, they compare output and cost per piece
• Distributors and specialist dental trade (15-25%), they look for lines to represent in their own markets; for a foreign exhibitor they are often the fastest channel to enter a country
• Industry and sector manufacturers (~10%), scouting on components, OEM, partnerships and materials
• Dental hygienists and practice staff (~5-10%), they influence the choice of consumables and everyday-use products

The purchase decision is often concentrated in a few people (the practice owner, the laboratory manager), but the cycle is short: whoever goes back to the practice convinced buys quickly. This makes post-fair follow-up, with proper qualification and enrichment, even more critical: a foreign badge with only a name and company, no context on the type of facility and the need, is a lead that gets lost.

How to prepare in the 4 weeks before the event

Week -4 → Messaging audit

Make sure your value proposition answers the three questions a dentist, dental technician or distributor asks within the first 30 seconds:

1. What you do, in one sentence (e.g. “intraoral scanner with open workflow”, “composite material for CAD/CAM labs”, “practice management software”)
2. To which standard / what it integrates with, the compliance and compatibility that buyers want to hear right away (CE/MDR marking, integration with the software and scanners already in use, open file formats)
3. What changes, a measurable benefit (processing time, cost per prosthesis/per impression, fewer reworks, integration into the existing workflow)

No generic brochures. In a dental hall the concrete claim and the live demo weigh more than the logo.

Week -3 → Stand operation playbook

Define who does what across the five days:

• Who is on the front line for first qualification and routing the flows (dentist? dental technician? distributor?)
• Who runs the technical demo of the scanner, the software or the material (at IDS the live demo is the sale)
• Who stays in the back office (HQ) to do live follow-up already during the event, a real accelerator
• Who is the point of contact for the foreign distributors and the chain and clinic buyers who turn up

With an audience from 156 countries, factor in the language barrier: a team with fluent technical English doubles the quality of conversations, and for distributors it matters to be able to move quickly to terms, territories and exclusivity.

Week -2 → 3-question qualification form

Every contact must be qualified on the spot, not “later”. For IDS the critical questions are:

1. Type of facility and role, is it a practice, a laboratory, a clinic, a distributor? Is it the owner/decision-maker or practice staff?
2. Timing, are they replacing equipment now, evaluating within 6 months, or scouting trends?
3. Market and channel, for which country/facility, and through which channel (direct sales, distributor, representation agreement)?

Everything else, the size of the practice/lab, the software already in use, the corporate structure, a good automatic enrichment finds across dozens of public sources, without having to steal precious time at the booth.

Week -1 → CRM integrations

The classic mistake: contacts on paper, photos of badges, the fair app, and then nobody pours them into the CRM. Follow-up starts on average many days after the event, when the prospect has already spoken to other suppliers, often at IDS itself in the next hall.

Set the system up so that every scan, at the fair, lands already in the company CRM, with event tag + qualification answers + the rep’s voice note. Not in an Excel, not in a fair-proprietary app, not in a Google sheet “we’ll sort out on Monday”. This is where the Linkly pattern comes in: capture → enrichment → qualification → follow-up, run by 6 AI agents that work on the contact while the rep is still at the booth.

Is the official IDS app worth it?

Yes, as a navigation and networking tool the official app is solid. The official IDS app (expected release December 2026) offers an exhibitor and product directory, a hall plan with Bluetooth/GPS navigation, ticket management (entry + public transport), networking with profiles and contact exchange via QR, an event programme and push notifications, plus a lead export to CSV. To find your way around a venue with 7 halls and to organise meetings, use it.

What it does NOT do, and the reason it is not enough as a commercial lead-capture tool:

• It does not integrate with your CRM (HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive). The contacts and meetings stay inside the event platform; at best they give you a CSV to re-import by hand.
• It does not enrich the data automatically. If from the badge or the QR you only have name + company + country, that is what you keep.
• It does not send follow-up to the prospect. You have to do the follow-up yourselves, manually, afterwards.
• It does not generate executive reports on the booth’s commercial performance.
• It changes its interface and logic at every edition (and IDS is biennial: two years between one version and the next), and it lives in the event silo: once the fair closes, the data does not flow into your sales process.

The official app is excellent for moving around and setting up meetings (use it for that). As a lead capture → CRM → follow-up tool it is insufficient: a CSV export is not a sales process. For that you need systems designed for the fair → CRM → enrichment → follow-up workflow: here is how Linkly works.

What to do during the 5 days of the fair

Day 1 (Tuesday), opening and calibration

• Team briefing before the doors open, go over the 3 messages, the roles and the list of meetings already booked
• Calibration: the day’s first leads serve to fine-tune the qualification questions and to route the flows well (practice vs laboratory vs distributor)
• At the end of the day, first debrief: what works in the demo, what to fix tomorrow

Day 2 (Wednesday), traffic on the rise

• The venue gets up to speed and the first top buyers and international distributors arrive
• Keep a senior person ready for the technical demo: questions on integration, materials and processing times come point-blank
• Update the pipeline mid-day: today’s hot leads are the ones to invest in on Thursday

Day 3 (Thursday), decision day

• Historically the peak of qualified traffic: practice owners, laboratory managers and distributors who have done their reconnaissance and come back to decide
• Concentrate the most strategic meetings and the in-depth demos here
• It is the day the most important prospects of your event come through: maximum booth coverage, no gaps in staffing

Day 4 (Friday), professionals and channel

• Traffic still high, with a strong presence of professionals (many dentists and dental technicians end their week at the fair) and of the specialist trade
• An ideal day for channel meetings: terms, territories, exclusivity with distributors
• Keep feeding the pipeline: today’s leads are still fully workable the following week

Day 5 (Saturday), closing

• A natural drop in traffic, but high average quality: the decision-makers and technicians who want to go deeper without the crowds remain
• Close conversations and demos with the hot leads from the previous days (quieter booths, ideal for long technical dialogues)
• A tour of the competitors’ halls: see who came and gather ideas for the next edition (2029)

What to do in the 7 days after the fair

Response speed is the factor that separates the leads that stay on the shortlist from the ones that evaporate. For IDS, with dentists and distributors returning to 156 countries once the fair closes, every day of delay drastically lowers the probability of remaining among the candidate suppliers: the practice owner who goes back decided buys quickly, but from whoever contacts them first with the right thing.

The winning follow-up playbook:

1. Within 24h, a personalised email to every qualified lead with type of facility/timing/market. No templates: a reference to one specific thing said at the booth (the material they asked about, the scanner they tried in the demo, the distributor’s market).
2. Within 7 days, 1 referring rep for each qualified lead, with a scheduled touchpoint (technical call, sending a datasheet, a sample or an in-practice demo). No batch email.
3. Within 14 days, deliver on the promises made at the booth (technical documentation, quote, distribution agreement, material sample). Extractable from the rep’s voice notes if the system recorded them.
4. Within 30 days, an executive report on performance vs target, breakdown by rep, country and thematic block, estimated pipeline. To use to justify the event budget to management, especially because IDS is biennial: the investment has to “hold” for two years.

This is exactly the work that Linkly’s AI agents run automatically on the contact: enrichment right after the scan, structured qualification, timely follow-up and a final report, so the sales team works the hot leads instead of typing in badges.

Practical FAQ

How much does it cost to exhibit at IDS 2027?

Costs vary a lot depending on hall, square metres and booth fit-out, and IDS is the largest dental fair in the world, so its rates are among the highest in the sector. As an indicative order of magnitude for an entry-level 12-20 m² booth with fit-out: €20,000 - €45,000 for space + basic fit-out, to which you add €10,000 - €30,000 across services, staff, travel and materials (Cologne during IDS has very high hotel rates). Realistic overall range: €35,000 - €90,000+ for a decent five-day presence. For official figures, refer to Koelnmesse’s sales team on the official site.

Which is the best day for the hottest contacts?

The third day (Thursday) is historically the peak of qualified traffic, with practice owners, laboratory managers and distributors coming back to decide. Wednesday is excellent for getting ahead with strategic meetings before the peak, while Friday is strong on professionals and channel agreements. Saturday drops in volume but stays high on quality: keep a senior person until closing.

When does visitor registration open?

Typically in the months preceding the fair (late 2026/early 2027 for a March 2027 event). The official app, with an expected release in December 2026, manages tickets, the floor plan and networking. Early registration on the official IDS site is worthwhile: it lets you plan meetings and activate networking before the event.

Is IDS held every year?

No. IDS is biennial and held in odd-numbered years: the 2027 edition (42nd) falls after IDS 2025 (41st), and the next one will be in 2029. The biennial cadence has a practical consequence on budget and leads: you have only one window every two years and the value of every contact collected has to “last” until the following edition. All the more reason not to lose a single lead on paper or in an app that locks the data in a silo.

What is the alternative to paper for collecting contacts?

Paper is a bad option: time spent digitising, errors, lost leads and, in a context of 156 countries, handwriting and company names to decipher too. Three practical alternatives:

1. Official IDS app, handy for moving around and for networking via QR, with CSV export, but disconnected from your CRM (see the section above).
2. CRM with native mobile scanning (HubSpot, Salesforce have dedicated features), it works if the team knows how to use them; in a crowded fair they often don’t.
3. A dedicated lead capture + AI agents system for enrichment, qualification and follow-up, the pattern Linkly runs. See how it works.

Page updated ahead of the 2027 edition. For official information, rates and exhibitor/visitor registration, refer to the english.ids-cologne.de site.