How to Turn Any Conference Exhibitor List Into a Targeted LinkedIn Campaign Using Claude and Spear
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Conferences are a goldmine that most sales teams mine wrong. They show up at the booth, scan badges, and follow up on the flight home, if they follow up at all. Meanwhile, every event publishes a list of hundreds of companies that have self-identified as relevant to your space, and almost nobody uses it before the event. That's the window. This guide shows you how to use Claude (Anthropic's AI) and Spear's MCP to extract that list, load it into Spear as a targeted company list, and launch a LinkedIn outreach campaign before your competitors have even booked their hotel rooms.
Why Conference Exhibitor Lists Are One of the Highest-Intent Data Sources in B2B
When a company pays to exhibit or sponsor at an industry event, they're sending a clear signal: they have budget, they're actively in their market, and they're looking to be seen. That's not cold data, that's warm intent at scale.
The numbers back this up. 72% of trade show attendees are more likely to buy from exhibitors they interact with, and 67% of those attendees represent a new prospect for the exhibiting companies. On average, trade shows contribute 33% of a company's new business annually.
But here's the thing: you don't have to be an exhibitor to benefit from the list. If you know who's attending, especially who's sponsoring and exhibiting, you can reach out to the right titles at those companies before the event, making yourself memorable when you finally meet in person.
The problem has always been execution. Pulling a clean company list from a conference website, enriching it, and activating it in your outreach tool is tedious enough that most teams skip it. Claude and Spear's MCP eliminate that friction entirely.
What You Need Before You Start
Before walking through the workflow, here's what the setup looks like:
- Claude (via the Cowork desktop app or Claude.ai with computer use enabled)
- Spear connected via its MCP, this gives Claude direct access to your Spear workspace to create lists, configure campaigns, and push prospects
- The conference URL, specifically the exhibitors or sponsors page
That's it. No custom scripts, no CSV wrangling, no manual data entry.
Step 1: Navigate to the Conference Website and Identify the Exhibitor/Sponsor List
Most major B2B conferences publish a public-facing directory of their exhibitors and sponsors. Common locations to look:
- /exhibitors or /sponsors on the event subdomain
- An "Attend" or "Expo Floor" section in the navigation
- A dedicated "Partners" page for tier-based sponsors (Gold, Silver, Platinum, etc.)
Start by giving Claude the conference URL and a simple instruction:
"Go to [conference URL], find the list of exhibitors and sponsors, and extract the company names and any additional details like website URLs, booth numbers, or categories."
Claude will navigate to the page, parse the content, and return a structured list. If the page uses JavaScript rendering or requires interaction (like pagination or filtering), Claude can handle that too, clicking through tabs, loading more results, and pulling every company on the directory.
What you'll typically get back:
- Company name
- Website (when listed)
- Sponsorship tier (Platinum, Gold, etc.)
- Industry category or product focus
- Booth number (for logistics later)
Some conference directories are cleaner than others. If the page is sparse, Claude can cross-reference company names with public data to fill in domains and industry classifications.
Step 2: Clean and Structure the List
Raw scraped data is rarely perfect. Before pushing anything into Spear, you want a clean list. Ask Claude to:
- Deduplicate entries (some companies appear under multiple sponsor tiers)
- Normalize company names (strip "Inc.", "LLC", "Ltd." variants for consistency)
- Validate or infer domains, if the page lists company names without URLs, Claude can make reasonable inferences or flag the ones that need a quick manual check
- Filter if needed, if this is a large conference with 400+ exhibitors, you may want to focus on a specific tier (e.g., Platinum and Gold sponsors only, or companies in a specific category)
This takes Claude about 30 seconds. What used to be a half-day spreadsheet project becomes a quick prompt:
"Clean the list, remove duplicates, standardize names, and add a domain column where you can reasonably infer it. Flag any you're unsure about."
Step 3: Define Your Target Titles
Having the right companies is half the equation. The other half is reaching the right person inside each one. Before you build anything in Spear, get clear on exactly who you're going after.
This depends on your product and what outcome you're optimizing for. Common approaches:
- If you sell to HR / People teams, target VPs of HR, Chief People Officers, Head of Talent
- If you sell to marketing, target CMO, VP Demand Gen, Head of Growth
- If you sell to operations or finance, target COO, VP of Operations, CFO, Head of Procurement
- If you're prospecting for partnerships, target VP of Business Development, Head of Partnerships, Chief Revenue Officer
The key principle: target the person who will feel the pain you solve, not necessarily the person with the biggest title. A VP of Engineering who lives inside the problem you fix will respond faster than a CTO who delegates everything.
Write down your target titles before moving on. You'll use them to configure your ICP in the next step.
Step 4: Create the Campaign
With your target titles defined and your company list cleaned, it's time to build the campaign in Spear. This is where you set the ICP, write the message sequence, and get everything ready to go live. The company list gets attached in the next step.
In Spear, a campaign consists of:
- A connection request (the first touchpoint, 300 characters, no pitch)
- Follow-up message 1 (sent after acceptance, adds context, asks a relevant question)
- Follow-up message 2 (sent if no reply, short, different angle, easy to respond to)
The conference context is your unfair advantage here. You're not sending generic cold outreach, you're reaching someone who has publicly committed budget and presence to an event that's relevant to both of you.
What a conference-anchored connection request looks like:
"Hey [First Name], saw [Company] is exhibiting at [Conference Name] this year. We're going too. Would love to connect ahead of it."
That's it. No pitch. No ask. Just a relevant reason to connect that the person can immediately verify is true.
The follow-up, after they accept:
"Thanks for connecting. We're bringing a few clients to [Conference Name] and running some roundtable sessions on [relevant topic]. Curious, what's the main thing [Company] is hoping to get out of being there?"
This works because it's about them, not you. It invites a real response and gives you information to personalize the next touchpoint.
Ask Claude to draft these messages with the conference context baked in:
"Write a 3-message LinkedIn sequence for this campaign. The context is that both we and the prospect are attending [Conference Name]. Keep the connection request under 280 characters. The first follow-up should open a conversation without pitching. The second follow-up should be a different angle, shorter, easier to respond to."
Ask Claude to configure your ICP settings in Spear:
"I want to build a campaign targeting VP-level and above in Revenue/Sales roles. Help me set up the ICP filter in Spear for this campaign."
Claude will work with Spear's ICP schema to configure the right seniority levels, title keywords, and function filters directly inside your workspace.
Research consistently shows that signal-based outreach achieves 15–25% reply rates versus 1–5% for generic cold outreach. A conference trigger, especially when you reach out before the event, is one of the strongest signals you can use.
Step 5: Push the Company List into Spear
Now that your campaign is set up and your ICP is defined, it's time to load the company list. This is where Spear's MCP makes the workflow seamless. Instead of exporting to CSV and manually uploading, Claude pushes the list directly into your Spear workspace via the upload_companies_list tool and assigns it to your campaign.
Tell Claude:
"Upload the exhibitor list as a new company list in Spear. Name it '[Conference Name] 2026 Exhibitors' and assign it to the campaign we just created."
Claude will call the Spear MCP, create the list, attach it to your campaign, and confirm it's live. You can verify it in Spear's UI under your company lists.
Why this order matters: Setting up the campaign first means you're uploading the list with a clear purpose already defined. Spear uses the company list as a targeting constraint — it will only surface prospects who work at those specific companies, filtered through the ICP titles you already configured. You're not casting a wide net by industry or company size, you're going straight to the source.
Step 6: Activate and Time Your Outreach
Timing matters more than most teams realize. Here's the framework:
6–8 weeks before the event: Start sending connection requests. People are planning their conference schedules, booking meetings, and thinking about who they want to see. Your outreach lands when they're in the right headspace.
2–3 weeks before: Follow up with accepted connections. Suggest a brief meeting at the event, a coffee, a 20-minute session, anything low-commitment.
During the event: You're not cold anymore. You're following up with people you're already connected to online, which changes the entire dynamic.
1 week after: Send a post-event follow-up to anyone who didn't convert to a meeting. Reference something specific from the event if you can.
To activate the campaign in Spear, Claude can call toggle_campaign_status to flip it live, and set the daily send volume to whatever cadence fits your capacity.
The Old Way vs. The New Way
What to Expect
You're not sending to thousands of people here. A typical industry conference has 200–500 exhibiting companies. If you're filtering for your exact ICP within those companies, you might be reaching 300–800 people total.
That's the point. This is a high-precision, low-volume campaign, which is exactly what performs best on LinkedIn. You're not trying to hit 10,000 people, you're trying to start 30 real conversations with people who are already in-market, already relevant to your space, and already on their way to a place where you'll both be in the same room.
The ROI potential on event-based marketing is significant, 48% of brands report 300–500% ROI from event marketing. That number improves dramatically when you've done the pre-work to make sure every conversation you have at the event is a warm one.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does the whole workflow take, from conference URL to live campaign? For a clean conference directory, the full workflow takes 30–45 minutes. Scraping and structuring the list takes about 5–10 minutes. Defining your titles and building the campaign in Spear takes another 15–20 minutes. Writing and finalizing the message sequence takes another 10–15 minutes. Pushing the company list and going live takes a few minutes more. The first batch of connection requests can go out the same day.
What if the conference website is behind a login or uses heavy JavaScript? Claude's computer-use capability handles most JavaScript-rendered pages, it can click "Load More," navigate pagination, and interact with filters. If a page is fully gated behind registration, you can often find the exhibitor list in event apps like Swapcard, Grip, or Bizzabo, which are usually accessible without a full ticket.
How do I know which titles to target at each company? Start with the person who owns the problem your product solves, at VP level or above. If you sell into multiple functions, run separate campaigns for each, one for engineering leadership, one for product, one for ops, with different message angles for each. Don't try to cover everyone in one sequence.
Should I be targeting both exhibitors and sponsors, or just one? Both are valid, but sponsors (especially Platinum and Gold) tend to be larger companies with more established budgets. Exhibitors are often growth-stage companies that are actively spending. Which matters more depends on your ICP, if you target mid-market, exhibitors are often the better list. If you target enterprise, lead with sponsors.
What happens if a prospect is already in Spear from a different campaign? Spear handles deduplication, if a prospect is already active in another campaign, they won't be duplicated into this one. You can check existing campaign overlap and decide whether to exclude those contacts or let the system manage it.
How do I make the outreach feel personal if I'm sending to 500 people? The conference context does the heavy lifting. Knowing that the person you're reaching is actively exhibiting at the same event you're attending is a real, verifiable fact that makes the message feel relevant, even if it's part of a sequence. Keep the first message short, make it about them, and don't pitch anything until you've had an actual response.
Spear is a trigger-based outbound platform that turns real signals, like conference attendance, into targeted, human-led LinkedIn campaigns. If you want to try this workflow with your next conference, getspear.ai is where to start.
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