How we turned conferences into a lead engine

If you’ve ever prepared for a conference — flights, hotels, tickets, team time — you know how expensive and operationally heavy these trips are.

Add the reality on the ground: chaotic schedules, overlapping meetings, no-shows, and constant last-minute changes.

On top of that, many teams end up treating conferences as a necessary but low-ROI activity. Hard to measure. Hard to attribute. Easy to justify as “brand”, but very difficult to turn into pipeline.

Not because conferences don’t work, but because most teams don’t know how to consistently bring qualified leads back from them.

For context, I’m Rinat, founder of Sally, a B2B outbound agency. We’ve run hundreds of outbound campaigns across SaaS, fintech, and enterprise, and the same pattern keeps showing up: conferences only start paying off when they’re treated as part of a structured outbound system, not a standalone activity.

This case is about doing exactly that.

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One recent example comes from a crypto-fintech team we worked with — Gateaway Crypto, a crypto payments service that regularly attends industry events.

Over 5 months, across conferences like SBC, IFX, Sigma, and ICE Barcelona, we built and ran an event-driven outbound process around their conference schedule.

That system generated 30+ qualified leads — not meetings, but opportunities that moved forward in the pipeline.

Here’s how that process was structured.

The idea

A conference shouldn’t be treated as a one-off spike.

It’s a cycle that starts before the event, continues during it, and extends well after it ends. Once you accept that, outbound stops being reactive and starts behaving like a system.

Step 1. Build the event database

For each conference, we parsed the attendee list directly from the conference app using our Crona Scraper (you can also use Outsraper, Browserflow or other tools)

A typical database contained 10,000–20,000 contacts per event. This gave us access to the full attendee pool, not just booth traffic or badge scans.

Step 2. Segment aggressively

At this stage, we moved the raw attendee list into Crona — our data and enrichment platform that we use at Sally to turn large, unstructured datasets into workable outbound inputs.

Inside Crona, we used a Call AI enricher to segment the full list by ICP.

We focused on three core cohorts:

• iGaming operators

• iGaming platforms

• payment orchestration platforms

Each cohort was further split into teams already working with crypto and those that weren’t. Offers and messaging changed accordingly.

From the full database, only ~7% went into active outreach.

Step 3. Pre-event outreach

Before each conference, we launched invitation campaigns across email, LinkedIn, and the conference app itself.

The goal was straightforward: book meetings before the event starts, instead of trying to catch people on the floor.

At some conferences, the success rate was so high that the team physically couldn’t handle all requested meetings during the event days.

Step 4. On-site amplification

At ICE Barcelona, where Gateaway Crypto had a booth, we added another layer.

We ran a mass outreach campaign directly inside the networking app, inviting targeted attendees to visit the booth.

Step 5. Post-event follow-ups

After each conference, we ran a simple but effective follow-up:

“We planned to meet but didn’t manage to connect during the event.
Let’s schedule an online call.”

This recovered a meaningful share of missed conversations and helped transition the pipeline into the post-event phase.

As soon as one conference ended, preparation for the next one began using the same framework.

Operational reality

During some events, the project lead actively coordinated meetings in real time. This included handling reschedules, cancellations, and calendar conflicts as they happened.

This part is rarely mentioned, but it’s critical. High event ROI requires active orchestration, not passive booking.

Results

Each conference resulted in a fully booked calendar and a stable pipeline of conversations between events.

Across this system, the team generated 30+ qualified leads that moved forward in the pipeline.

TL;DR

Conferences already concentrate your ICP better than almost any channel, yet most teams waste that density by treating events as one-off networking trips.

When conferences are built into a structured outbound system — with data, segmentation, and follow-ups before and after the event — they become a repeatable acquisition channel.

If you want to apply the same approach to your events, let’s talk

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