Conferences concentrate your ideal customers in one place — attendees who self-selected by industry and interest, speakers who've been vetted for authority, exhibitors who've committed budget to be there. It's the highest-density prospecting environment that exists.
And you don't need a booth, a badge, or a flight to work it.
Exhibitor and speaker lists publish 2-3 months before the event. Pre-event outreach — "I saw you're speaking at [conference]" — dramatically outperforms post-event follow-up because you're reaching people while they're actively planning, not while they're buried in post-conference catch-up.
Claude scrapes the lists, qualifies against your ICP, and launches pre-event campaigns 4-6 weeks before anyone walks through the door.
How Claude Helps You Build This
Instead of attending conferences hoping to bump into the right people, Claude turns every relevant event into a prospecting channel. It finds upcoming events, scrapes attendee and speaker lists, qualifies them against your ICP, finds contact details, and writes pre-event outreach timed to land when attendees are planning their schedules.
To do this, Claude uses five skills:
- luma-event-attendees — finds event attendees matching your ICP from event platforms.
- conference-speaker-scraper — extracts speaker lineups and exhibitor directories from conference websites.
- lead-qualification — filters attendees and speakers against your ICP, ranking exhibitors and speakers highest.
- company-contact-finder — finds verified email addresses for qualified prospects.
- cold-email — writes pre-event outreach anchored to the specific event and the prospect's role in it.
You provide your ICP and a list of relevant conferences. Claude builds the pipeline.
The Workflow
Step 1: Identify events your ICP attends
Tell Claude your ICP and the problem you solve. Claude identifies upcoming conferences, summits, and meetups where your target customers gather:
- Industry-specific conferences (SaaStr, Web Summit, industry verticals)
- Regional events and meetups
- Virtual summits and webinars with published attendee lists
- Luma events in your space
Claude prioritizes events by ICP density — a 500-person niche conference where 80% of attendees match your ICP is more valuable than a 10,000-person mega-conference where 5% match.
Step 2: Scrape attendee, speaker, and exhibitor lists
Using the conference-speaker-scraper and luma-event-attendees skills, Claude extracts three lists from each event:
- Speakers — highest authority, vetted by organizers, have built-in audiences
- Exhibitors — have committed budget to be there, signaling serious market engagement
- Attendees — self-selected by interest, largest volume
Exhibitor lists are published earliest (2-3 months out), speaker lineups follow (1-2 months), and some attendee lists become available closer to the event. Claude starts with what's available and adds as new lists publish.
Step 3: Qualify against your ICP
Using the lead-qualification skill, Claude filters every scraped contact against your ICP criteria. The ranking:
- Exhibitors + ICP match rank highest (they've invested money to be there)
- Speakers + ICP match rank next (authority signals plus audience)
- Attendees + ICP match fill out the list
A typical conference yields 50–300 qualified prospects depending on event size and ICP specificity. Claude deduplicates against your existing contacts and any other campaigns running in parallel.
Step 4: Find contact details
Using the company-contact-finder skill, Claude finds verified email addresses and LinkedIn profiles for each qualified prospect. For speakers and exhibitors, Claude also captures:
- Their talk title or booth description (outreach context)
- Their company and role
- Any recent content they've published about the event
Step 5: Write pre-event outreach
Using the cold-email skill, Claude writes outreach tailored to each prospect's role in the event:
- For speakers — "Your talk on [topic] at [event] is relevant to something we've been building. Happy to give you early access if you want to try it before your session."
- For exhibitors — "Saw you're exhibiting at [event]. We work with companies in [their space] on [your value prop]. Worth a 15-minute chat before the event?"
- For attendees — "Noticed you're attending [event]. We're helping [similar companies] with [specific outcome]. Interested in connecting?"
The event reference makes every email contextual without fake personalization. You have a real reason to reach out — the event is the shared context.
Step 6: Launch 4-6 weeks before the event
Using the setup-outreach-campaign skill, Claude loads the campaign timed to land during the planning window:
- First email: 4-6 weeks before the event
- Follow-up: 2-3 weeks before
- Final touch: 1 week before (for those who opened but didn't reply)
Pre-event timing is critical. Attendees are actively planning who to meet and what to see. Post-event, they're buried in follow-ups from everyone they actually met. Your outreach lands when their calendar is being built, not when it's already full.
What You Walk Away With
After running this workflow, you have:
- An event calendar — upcoming conferences ranked by ICP density
- Scraped lists — speakers, exhibitors, and attendees extracted from each event
- Qualified prospects — filtered by ICP, ranked by signal strength (exhibitor > speaker > attendee)
- Pre-event outreach — sequences anchored to each prospect's event role, timed for the planning window
- A repeatable system — run this for every relevant conference without booking a single flight
Why This Matters
Conferences are the most underused prospecting channel for companies that can't afford the travel budget. The attendee data is public. The timing advantage is real. And pre-event outreach converts at rates that make the conference worth working even if you never set foot in the building.
This workflow turns every relevant event into a pipeline source. The companies running pre-event campaigns are booking meetings before the conference starts — while everyone else is waiting to swap business cards at the booth.
Build your conference pipeline with Gooseworks