Event Pipeline

Event Pipeline

An in-person event is a system with a hard capacity constraint. One person holds roughly 12–16 meetings in a five-hour day. Everything upstream — how long the target list is, how many artifacts get built, how many people you chase — is a function of that number. Skills that skip it produce 200-row target lists for days with fourteen slots.

This skill is the in-person sibling of webinar-brief. That one is virtual and owns the run-of-show; this one is physical and owns the pipeline.

Doctrine inherited

Output complies with output-tenets.md, output-simplicity.md and doc-output-structure.md.

Also binding: crawl-cost-discipline.md (free discovery before metered extraction), quantitative-evidence-floors.md (no ROI verdict below the floor), pii-redaction.md (delegate data), outbound-research-hygiene.md (dated signals only).

When to run

Invoke when:

• "we're sponsoring / exhibiting at / attending [event]"
• "plan our conference" / "trade show plan" / "what do we do at [event]"
• "event follow-up" / "we just got back from [event]"
• Any physical gathering with a delegate list: conference, trade show, summit, roundtable, awards dinner, self-hosted meetup

Do NOT invoke when:

• The event is virtual → webinar-brief
• There is no event anchor, just a named account list → abm-campaign
• The ask is only the follow-up email copy → outreach-emails
• The ask is only a booth handout → one-pager

Inputs

If mode or headcount is missing, ask before anything else. Both change the arithmetic in step 2, and every later step depends on it.

Steps

Phase A — Pre-event

1. Qualify and set the mode. Go/no-go against audience fit and cost. Confirm sponsor, exhibitor or attendee-only. Each yields a different day, so this is not a label — it is the branch. See the premium reference.
2. Set capacity. Hours on site × headcount, split by mode: an exhibitor loses hours to stand duty; a sponsor gains access to private zones; attendee-only is fully mobile. Output: N, the number of real meeting slots. Every later number derives from N.
3. Build the raw list. Participant, exhibitor and speaker lists. Free discovery first (spider_links, sitemap) before any metered crawl — per crawl-cost-discipline. Many events publish the delegate list; check before buying one.
4. Enrich and resolve. Firms to named contacts, 2–3 per target account. Phone numbers acquired here go through the screening gate in the premium reference before any call.
5. Score and rank. Join the list to CRM account scores. Sort descending. Each row carries its reason: adviser count, recent acquisition, headcount, whatever the ICP actually keys on.
6. Cut to capacity. Take the top N from step 2, plus a reserve of roughly 50% for no-shows and chance encounters. This is the hit list. Everything below the cut is a post-event email, not a meeting target.
7. Build per-firm artifacts for the top tier. A firm-specific number from public data beats a pitch. Emailed pre-event as the reason to meet, shown from an iPad in the conversation. See the premium reference.
8. Run the layered cadence. Email at T-3 weeks, LinkedIn at T-2, phone or a light nudge the week of. Each touch references the event and the artifact. Timings and copy shape in the premium reference.
9. Prep the booked meetings. One short prep per confirmed meeting. Chain to client-discovery.

Phase B — At-event

10. Route the day. Map the hit list onto the venue's zones and agenda, in time order, with travel between them. Mode decides the shape: an exhibitor anchors to the stand and sends one person walking; a sponsor works sessions and private lounges; attendee-only is all floor and pre-booked slots.
11. Approach and capture. Pre-read before each approach. Record where permitted. Capture the schema in the premium reference — contact, next step, and the anchor: the specific thing said that follow-up will cite. No anchor, no usable follow-up.
12. End-of-day batch. Notes → CRM → tomorrow's re-prioritised list. This is the step teams skip and the reason conversations evaporate. Chain to transcript-analysis.

Phase C — Post-event

13. Segment. Met and warm / met and cool / booked-but-no-show / target-not-reached / met-but-out-of-ICP. Different segments get different sends; the last gets none.
14. Follow up. Within 48 hours, each message citing its anchor. Sequences via outreach-emails, sent per the client's actual stack, replies triaged by reply-scoring. See the premium reference.
15. Measure and present at Gate 2. Cost per qualified meeting, meetings held against N, pipeline sourced — with the volume floor stated. Feed the numbers back into the model for the re-book decision.

Self-roast (run before ship)

• Capacity honoured? Is the hit list actually cut to N, or is it a wish list with a cap written next to it?
• Anchors specified? Does the capture schema force a citable moment, not just a business card?
• Stack real? Does every tool named appear in the client's CLAUDE.md, or did one leak in from a template?
• Modes distinct? Do sponsor, exhibitor and attendee-only produce visibly different day plans?
• No invented delegates. Never fabricate an attendee name, a firm's size, or an adviser count. Public register fields carry a pull date; anything else is [UNAVAILABLE].
• Benchmarks attributed. Any external ROI figure names whose figure it is. Ours are the client's own numbers or nothing.
• Seven-tenet gate per output-tenets.md.

Final ship gate

Run /premortem --output before ship. See /premortem for the 5 execution domains (will-it-resonate / will-it-convert / will-it-stay-on-brand / will-stakeholder-push-back / will-it-degrade-over-time) and output template.

Persuasion & stickiness pass

Output complies with persuasion-and-stickiness.md — Cialdini's 7 levers + Heath's SUCCESs. For event outreach the levers that usually fit are Scarcity (a real, dated event with finite slots) and Unity (the shared professional room). Both are true here by construction, which is exactly why they must not be inflated: do not manufacture a "limited places" claim the event does not have. Run the SUCCESs diagnostic over the near-final copy, then the rule's pre-ship gate.

MCP credit gate

This skill can call Apify, Exa and Firecrawl. Per crawl-cost-discipline.md, enumerate the participant list with free discovery (spider_links, sitemap, or a plain fetch of a published list) before any metered crawl, and triage to the kept rows before extraction. Per apify-credits.md and apollo-credits.md, enrichment is credit-spending and needs an estimate and a confirmation first. Searching is free; enriching is not.