Guide

How to tell which labs are worth a visit

A lab is worth a visit when something has just changed. New money, a new method, a new principal investigator or a facility replacing equipment: each one opens a window in which a purchase is possible, and outside those windows most labs are not buying anything from anyone.

Last checked 29 September 2026

Sales teams in this market are usually given the wrong ranking. Lists arrive sorted by how well known the laboratory is, or by how many people work in it, and both are close to useless for predicting a purchase. A famous lab with a full complement of working instruments is not a customer. A quiet one that was funded four months ago for work your instrument is built for is.

The four signals that matter

New funding. A grant is the clearest signal there is, because it is public, dated, and specific about what the money is for. The window opens when the award is announced and stays open for the first year or so of spending. What matters is not the size of the award but the fit: read what the work requires, not what it is called.

A new method in the methods section. When a group publishes its first paper using a technique it has not used before, something was bought, borrowed or shared. If it was borrowed, there is a purchase behind it waiting for the next grant. This is the signal most competitors miss, because it takes reading rather than filtering.

A new principal investigator. A newly appointed group leader has a start-up package, an empty room and a deadline. They are the most likely buyer in any department, and they are almost never on a list sorted by reputation, because they have not had time to build one.

A shared facility at the end of a service contract. Core facilities replace equipment on a schedule and buy in larger units than single labs. The signal is usually visible in a facility's own publications and its listed instrumentation.

The signals worth ignoring

• ·Citation count and h-index. They measure the past. They are a good guide to who will be busy at the meeting, and a poor one to who will buy.
• ·Laboratory size. A large group with settled methods buys consumables, not instruments.
• ·Institution prestige. It predicts what a central facility owns, not what an individual group needs.

Ranking them against what you sell

Once the signals are collected, the ranking is a judgement about fit, and it has to be made against one company's products rather than in the abstract. Three questions do most of the work:

1. Does the work they have been funded for actually require what we make, or merely allow it?
2. Do they already have something that does this job, and how old is it?
3. Is there a person we can name who would be the one to decide?

A researcher who passes all three is worth crossing a hall for. One who passes the first only is worth a polite conversation if they walk past.

Doing this at conference scale

For one lab, this is an afternoon of reading. For a meeting with several thousand presentations, it is the reason most teams give up and work the footfall instead. That is the work a conference dossier does in advance: the signals collected, the fit judged against what you sell, and the result handed over as a list with reasons and a floor plan, before anyone flies.