What to know before you fly in Modex 2026
MODEX 2026 runs Monday April 13 through Thursday April 16 at the Georgia World Congress Center in downtown Atlanta. The show co-locates with the Material Handling & Logistics Conference (MHLC), which pushes the total attendee count past 36,000 across all four days. Registration is free for qualified attendees through MHI; exhibitor passes run from $895 (basic) to $4,500 (Diamond).
Show floor opens at 10:00 EST Monday and closes at 16:00 EST Thursday. Day 1 traffic is typically slow until 14:00 once registration congestion clears — block your Tier 1 booth visits for Day 1 afternoon or Day 2 morning.
Field Marketing Tip
Pull your target account list 6 weeks out, not 2 weeks out.
The MHI exhibitor list publishes in late January. The session catalog drops mid-February. Cross-reference both against your CRM's open opps and renewal-cycle accounts. Six weeks gives your SDR team time to send pre-show outreach to the Tier 1 accounts — at 6-week lead time, response rates run 18–24%; at 2 weeks, they drop to 4%.
Who's actually on the floor
MODEX's audience skews operations and distribution — the buying committee for warehouse execution, robotics, yard management, and supply chain visibility software. The ICP breakdown across recent years:
- VP / Director of Operations — ~31% of attendees. Economic buyer for $100K–$500K supply chain tooling decisions.
- Director of Distribution / Logistics — ~22%. The champion for WES, slotting, and yard management.
- Plant / Site Manager — ~18%. Field-level user advocate; can kill a deal even if HQ signs.
- Supply Chain VPs / Chief Supply Chain Officer — ~9%. Strategic deals only — RFPs, multi-site rollouts.
- Procurement / Vendor Management — ~7%. Late-stage, but their pre-show RFI list is gold.
The companies sending the biggest delegations are mid-market and enterprise distributors, third-party logistics providers (3PLs), retail-side supply chain teams, and CPG manufacturers. Pharma and cold-chain teams come, but in smaller volume.
The 4-day walking strategy
Most teams treat MODEX as a four-day event. It's actually three-and-a-half days of real selling, sandwiched by a slow opening and an empty Thursday afternoon. Here's the rhythm we see customers run:
Day 1 (Monday) — Tier 1 only
Light traffic morning, decent traffic 14:00–17:00. Block this for pre-booked Tier 1 meetings. Don't try to demo cold scans — your booth team is jet-lagged and the Hall A floor plan is confusing.
Day 2 (Tuesday) — Peak day
Highest traffic, longest aisles, most decisions getting made. Run aggressive capture. This is the day your booth team should hit 60–80 scans per rep. Pre-event-booked dinners run 18:00 onward.
Day 3 (Wednesday) — Capture and book
Traffic peaks at lunch then tapers. Use the morning to walk the floor and capture intel on competitors and adjacent vendors. Use the afternoon to book follow-ups for the meetings you didn't close on Days 1–2.
Day 4 (Thursday) — Close and exit
Half day. Floor empties by 14:00. Use the morning to revisit any Tier 1 you didn't get to. Use the afternoon to debrief the booth team on the plane home — the sooner you capture context, the higher the show rate on the meetings you booked.
Vendors and sessions to know
MODEX's session catalog covers automation, sustainability, labor management, and AI in supply chain — the four themes underwriting most 2026 budgets. A few sessions and zones worth blocking on the calendar:
Robotics and autonomous mobile robots (AMRs)
Hall A is robotics-heavy this year. Locus Robotics, Geek+, AutoStore, and Symbotic have full-aisle footprints. The robotics keynote on Tuesday at 11:00 typically draws 800+ — if your ICP is robotics adopters, post a B2Brain rep at the session exit for capture.
Warehouse execution software (WES) and yard management
Hall B and the western edge of Hall C. Manhattan Associates, Blue Yonder, Körber, and Tecsys typically take the largest booths. Smaller WES players (Logiwa, FlowSpace, Lucas Systems) cluster in the 2,000–3,000 sq ft booths along the same aisle — high foot traffic, easy to capture.
The "Innovation Zone" — Hall D, southeast corner
About 80 startups, mostly Series A–B supply chain SaaS. If competitive intel is your goal, this is the highest-density 45 minutes of your week. Walk it Tuesday afternoon when the founders are at the booth (not their reps).
The cost math for your booth
A typical 20×20 MODEX booth runs $90K–$140K all-in: $42K–$58K for the booth space (around $40–$48 per sq ft), $18K–$24K for booth build and graphics, $8K–$14K for drayage and electrical, $4K–$8K for AV, $1.5K for lead-retrieval scanners, and $14K–$30K in team travel for 4–6 reps.
At a 9% LTM rate (badge-scanner-only baseline), a 950-scan booth converts to ~85 meetings booked. At a 47% LTM rate (B2Brain customer median for manufacturing), the same booth converts to ~447 meetings. The delta is the difference between "MODEX was a brand investment" and "MODEX was a pipeline channel."
Per-meeting cost = booth spend ÷ booked meetings. At MODEX 2025, the customers running B2Brain hit $290 per booked meeting on the median. The customers running scanner-only hit $1,420.
— B2Brain customer benchmark · MODEX 2025 cohort
After the show closes
The week after MODEX is the most expensive week of the year for the marketing team — every prospect cools 5% per day post-show, and SDR cadence work on un-captured leads has the worst hit rate of any time in the calendar. The teams that win the week after MODEX are the ones that capture cleanly on Days 1–4 and have meetings already booked.
If you're running B2Brain at MODEX, the Friday April 17 morning-after report lands in your CMO's inbox before 7 AM EST. By close-of-business Friday, your AEs are working a clean list of qualified booked meetings — not a CSV of 540 ambiguous scans.
