LIGNA 2027
Hannover.

What LIGNA is, in two lines

LIGNA is the world’s leading trade fair for woodworking and wood processing technologies: machines, systems and tools for the entire production chain, from forestry and sawmilling all the way to furniture production and timber construction. It is held in Hannover every two years (odd years) and the latest edition, the 50th anniversary in 2025, brought together 1.433 exhibitors from 49 countries, around 78.000 visitors from 156 countries across 114.078 m² of exhibition space. This is not a generalist fair: it is the place where those who make furniture, panels, timber houses and sawn goods come to see, concretely, which machines and which suppliers to work with in the coming years.

Precisely because of this scale and the long purchase cycle typical of capital goods, the thing many exhibitors underestimate is that the real purchasing decisions are not closed at the booth: a processing line or a plant is evaluated for weeks, sometimes months, after the fair, when the buyer returns to the company, compares the suppliers they met and opens the internal technical and economic assessment. Those who handle leads poorly in the weeks after LIGNA lose, right there, the pipeline they paid dearly to generate. Being present at the fair is one part of the job; the rest is what happens to the contacts afterwards.

What to exhibit, where to exhibit

LIGNA is organized by the wood value chain, spread across about ten halls plus two pavilions and a large outdoor area (the layout of the 2025 edition). The positioning logic is not just by product category but follows the production flow, and this is exactly where choosing well matters:

• Halls 11-15 and 27: tools and machines for custom and series production, the heart of processing for joineries and furniture factories
• Halls 16-17: surface technologies, components, automation and robotics, the area where process innovation is concentrated
• Halls 25-26: sawmill technology, wood-based panels and energy from wood, the world of primary processing
• Outdoor area and dedicated halls: machines for forestry, log handling and sawn-timber production, where space and live demonstrations are needed

The practical positioning advice: choose your hall based on who you are looking for, not on what you are. A supplier of software or robotic cells can technically sit in several areas, but it only intercepts the right decision makers if it faces the flow of the segment it wants to serve (custom production vs series vs sawmill). Study the floor plan and the flows before signing for space: in Hannover the distance between halls is a real logistical problem for the visitor, and the location decides how many of the right profiles walk past you. If you exhibit large machinery, also consider the demonstration areas and the outdoor space: a machine working live is worth more than a thousand brochures.

Visitor profile

The LIGNA visitor is technical, international and with high decision-making power: in 2025, 93% were trade visitors and 60% held managerial positions, coming from 156 countries with a strong axis on the European wood industry, from the DACH region to Italy. The typical composition of the audience:

• Furniture manufacturers, joineries and carpentry shops (the largest share, roughly 30-40%): they arrive with concrete needs for custom or series production and look for machines applicable to their department
• Sawmills and primary wood processing (~15-20%): they evaluate technology for cutting, edging, yield optimization
• Timber construction and prefabricated housing companies (growing): driven by the trend towards sustainable construction and frame and CLT elements
• Manufacturers of panels and wood-based materials (~10%): interested in lines, presses and surface technologies
• Forestry and woodland management operators: the typical audience of the outdoor area and the log machines
• Buyers, procurement and industrial top management (a minority share but extremely high value): they walk the fair with a shortlist or an investment vision

Average seniority is high: that 60% in managerial roles means a significant part of the people you meet decide or heavily influence the purchase. This is the reason the risk is not a scarcity of contacts, but the opposite: in five days at this density you speak with hundreds of people and, without a structured capture system, you remember a fraction of them. The quality of the data collected at the booth matters more than the number of scans.

How to prepare in the 4 weeks before the event

Week -4 → Messaging audit

Verify that your value proposition answers the three questions every technical visitor asks within the first 30 seconds at the booth:

1. What you do, in one sentence (e.g. “robotic cells for palletizing panels”, not “solutions for wood”)
2. For whom, a precise ICP segment (e.g. “furniture factories with 50-200 employees in series production”)
3. What changes, a measurable benefit (material yield, pieces/hour, waste, man-hours, cost per piece)

The industrial wood audience rewards technical concreteness: data, machine cycles, ROI, not marketing. At LIGNA, where direct competitors are often in the same hall a few metres away, a generic promise makes you indistinguishable. No slides, one clear sentence repeated identically by every person on the team.

Week -3 → Stand operation playbook

At a fair of this scale and duration, the risk is overload and dispersion. Define who does what:

• Who staffs the front line of the booth and welcomes the flow
• Who handles the technical demos and the senior decision makers who show up
• Who stays in the back office (HQ) to start the follow-up already during the event on the hottest leads
• How the shifts rotate: in Hannover the days are long and the quality of conversations drops after a few hours, so plan the team rotation across five days

Decide in advance also how appointments are set: part of the best traffic at LIGNA is organized before the fair, including through the networking features of the official app.

Week -2 → 3-question qualification form

Every contact collected must be qualified on the spot, not “later”. With tens of thousands of visitors over five days, “later” is an indistinct mass of business cards. The critical questions are only three:

1. Timing, when is the machine or plant needed? (this quarter / 6-12 months / beyond / I don’t know)
2. Budget, is there already an investment budget allocated?
3. Decision, who decides and how many people are involved (owner, production manager, technical office)?

Everything else, company size, revenue, segment (furniture/sawmill/construction), machine fleet, is found in the 30+ public data sources that good automatic enrichment covers without you having to take precious time away from the conversation to ask for it.

Week -1 → CRM integration

The classic mistake: contacts on paper, photos of badges, scans in the app, and then nobody pours them into the CRM. In capital goods, follow-up often starts with days of delay, when the prospect has already spoken with your competitors, who at LIGNA were in the same hall.

Configure the system so that every scan, at the fair, lands already in the company CRM, with event tag + qualification answers + the salesperson’s voice note. Not in an Excel, not only in the fair app, not in a sheet “we will sort out when we get back”. This is the step that decides whether the five days in Hannover become pipeline or remain a pile of names.

Is the official LIGNA app worth it?

Yes, the LIGNA App (iOS/Android, free) is a useful tool and should be installed: exhibitor and product search, event programme, hall floor plans with indoor navigation (decisive across ten halls plus an outdoor area), watchlist, digital ticket and networking/appointment features. For the visitor it is an excellent orientation tool; for the exhibitor, the networking features help to pre-build the agenda.

That said, you need to understand what the app does NOT do, because that is exactly the piece that generates pipeline:

• It does not export to your CRM. Contacts and appointments live in the fair’s ecosystem, not in HubSpot, Salesforce or Pipedrive
• It does not enrich the data. What you read is what’s there: no company size, revenue, segment, machine fleet, verified role
• It does not qualify. It does not collect timing/budget/decision on the spot; they remain indistinct scans and contacts
• It does not send follow-up. You have to build the post-fair sequence yourself, manually, after re-exporting the data
• It does not generate executive reports. At most a list
• It changes with every edition. Login, features and data format are not a stable system of yours: it’s theirs

The app is a good navigation and networking tool. As a commercial lead capture system fair → CRM → follow-up, it leaves uncovered everything that turns traffic into deals. This is the gap Linkly fills: scan at the booth → contact directly in your CRM with event tag, qualification answers and the salesperson’s voice note → 6 AI agents that enrich the data from 30+ public sources, qualify and trigger the personalized follow-up → executive report. See how Linkly works.

What to do during the 5 days of the fair

Day 1 (Monday 10 May), opening and calibration

• Team briefing before opening: go over the 3 messages and the roles. The first day is for tuning the machine
• Quick calibration: the first 10-15 leads serve to adjust the qualification questions and the demo timing, then you hit your stride
• On Monday the flow is already substantial but more “exploratory”: many do a scouting round to come back on the central days. Capture everything anyway, even those who say “I’ll come back tomorrow”
• Short debrief at the end of the day: what works, what to fix, which hot leads to call back this evening

Day 2 (Tuesday 11 May), rising traffic

• Traffic grows and the profiles who only did reconnaissance on Monday arrive: concentrate the first main demos here
• Keep one person in the back office on live follow-up: Monday’s hot leads must be touched now, not after you return
• Maximum discipline on on-the-spot qualification: timing, budget and decision maker must always be noted in the CRM, not left to memory

Day 3 (Wednesday 12 May), peak day

• Often the central day with the highest traffic and the highest decision-making density: the real decision makers arrive, owners and production managers
• Concentrate the most important machine demos and the appointments set in advance via app here
• It is the day when most contacts are collected and the dispersion risk is highest: the capture system must run at full capacity

Day 4 (Thursday 13 May), consolidation

• Traffic still full, with conversations on average more in-depth: those who come back on the fourth day often already have a shortlist and want numbers
• A good moment for substantive negotiations and to lock in post-fair appointments with decision makers
• Take a targeted tour of the halls: see the competitors, identify integration partners and understand how you are positioning yourself relative to the market

Day 5 (Friday 14 May), closing, less traffic but more quality

• On the last day the flow drops, but those who come are often very targeted: fewer curious onlookers, more operators with a precise objective
• Dedicate it to closing the loose ends left open, gathering the last technical requests and confirming the next steps agreed in the previous days
• By the end of the day the entire lead base must already be in the CRM, qualified and tagged: the follow-up starts tonight, not next Monday

What to do in the 7 days after the fair

In capital goods the prospect’s memory window is short and the decision cycle is long: whoever touches the contact first, with the right message, starts ahead. Companies that reduce the time between fair and first contact to under 48 hours close on average much more than slow competitors. At LIGNA this counts in an amplified way: your prospect met dozens of suppliers in five days and your competitors were in the same hall.

The winning follow-up playbook:

1. Within 24h, a personalized email to each qualified lead based on timing/budget/decision. No generic template: a concrete reference to something said at the booth (the machine they saw, the department problem they described)
2. Within 7 days, a dedicated salesperson assigned to each qualified lead, with a specific touchpoint scheduled (technical call, on-site demo, site visit). No batch email
3. Within 14 days, deliver on the promises made at the booth (datasheet, quote, machine configuration, yield simulation). Automatically extractable from the salesperson’s voice notes if the system recorded them
4. Within 30 days, an executive report on performance vs target: breakdown by salesperson, segment (furniture/sawmill/construction), hall and estimated pipeline. It is the document with which you justify to management the budget to return at the next edition

This is the point where Linkly’s 6 AI agents work in your place: the contacts arrive in the CRM already enriched and qualified, the follow-up sequences start on their own with the right angle, and the executive report is generated without reconstructing anything by hand from an export.

Practical FAQ

How much does it cost to exhibit at LIGNA 2027?

The official costs must be requested from Deutsche Messe AG and depend on floor area, hall, stand type (space only vs turnkey) and any demonstration areas. As a purely indicative figure for a world fair of this scale, the space item typically starts from several hundred euros per square metre, and a complete outing (space + build + staff + travel + logistics, a heavy item for those bringing machinery) for a medium stand easily lands in the order of tens of thousands of euros, up to far higher figures for large stands with machines in operation. These are indicative estimates, not quotes: ask the organizer for the updated price list and think in terms of cost per qualified lead, not cost of the space.

Which is the best day to staff the stand?

The central days (Wednesday and Thursday) generally concentrate the highest traffic and the greatest decision-making density. Monday is more exploratory, Friday drops in volume but brings very targeted visitors. In practice: every day counts, but plan the main machine demos and the key appointments on the central days.

When should visitors register?

Online and in advance, from the official site. Advance registration is the standard route, it gives you the digital ticket (manageable from the app) and avoids queues at the entrances. For exhibitors, the space must be requested from Deutsche Messe well in advance: since it is a biennial event, the best halls sell out many months earlier.

Is the official app enough to manage leads?

No. The app is excellent for navigation, exhibitor search and networking, but it does not export to your CRM, does not enrich, does not qualify and does not send follow-up (see the dedicated section above). To turn scans into pipeline you need a fair → CRM → follow-up system like Linkly.

What is the alternative to collecting leads on paper or photos of badges?

Paper and photos of badges are the surest way to lose contacts: nobody pours them into the CRM in time and the on-the-spot qualification disappears. The alternative is to capture at the booth with a scan that lands directly in the CRM, with event tag, qualification answers and a voice note, and automatic data enrichment. That way the follow-up starts within 24h instead of after days, essential in a sector where the decision matures in the following weeks.

Page updated ahead of the 2027 edition. For official information and exhibitor/visitor registration, please refer to the ligna.de website.