Building and Customising High‑Quality Event Prospect Lists with B2B Data Partners
Published on: 23 Dec 2025
Last updated: 23 Dec 2025
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From Strategy to Execution: How Custom Research Translates into a Prospect List
In Part 1, we looked at why custom, research‑driven prospecting is essential for high‑value B2B events. Now, we turn to the practical side: how to work with a B2B data partner to build and customise a high‑quality prospect list for delegates, sponsors, speakers, and other key stakeholders.
The goal is not just to get a list of names and emails, but to create a rich, structured dataset that supports targeted, compliant, and effective marketing campaigns. This requires close collaboration between the event team and the data partner, with clear objectives, criteria, and quality standards.
Defining the Scope and Criteria for the Research Project
Before any research begins, the event team and data partner should agree on:
Event objectives: Is the focus on delegates, sponsors, speakers, or a mix? What are the key metrics (e.g., registration targets, sponsorship revenue)?
Target audience: Job titles, departments, company types, geographies, and any other relevant filters (e.g., company size, funding stage, product focus).
Data requirements: Which contact fields are essential (e.g., direct email, phone, LinkedIn, company website)? What level of verification is needed?
Compliance and privacy requirements: How will data be collected, stored, and used? What consent and opt‑out mechanisms are in place?
This scoping phase is critical: it ensures that the research is aligned with the event’s goals and that the resulting data is both useful and compliant.
The Role of Secondary Research in Event Prospecting
Secondary research is the backbone of custom event prospecting. It involves gathering and analysing information from publicly available and licensed sources, such as:
Company websites, annual reports, and press releases.
Industry directories, association memberships, and professional networks.
News articles, funding announcements, and M&A activity.
Academic publications, conference proceedings, and clinical trial registries.
A skilled research team can use these sources to:
Identify companies and individuals that match the event’s target profile.
Verify and enrich contact details (e.g., confirming a person’s current role and company).
Add context that supports more relevant outreach (e.g., recent product launches, funding rounds, or published research).
This approach is especially valuable for niche or emerging domains where standard databases are incomplete or inaccurate.
Building a Custom Contact List: Step by Step
A typical custom research project for event prospecting follows these steps:
Define the target universe: Identify the relevant companies and individuals based on the event’s theme, geography, and other criteria.
Source and collect data: Use secondary research methods to gather contact information and relevant context from multiple sources.
Verify and enrich: Cross‑check contact details across sources, resolve discrepancies, and add missing fields (e.g., direct email, reporting lines).
Segment and prioritise: Group prospects into segments (e.g., by role, company size, geography) and prioritise them based on relevance and potential value.
Deliver and integrate: Provide the data in a format that can be easily imported into CRM, marketing automation, or event management platforms.
Throughout this process, the data partner should work iteratively with the event team, refining criteria and addressing any issues as they arise.
Customisation: Tailoring Data to Event Needs
One of the biggest advantages of custom research is the ability to tailor the data to the specific needs of the event. This can include:
Role‑specific targeting: Focusing on specific job titles or functions (e.g., “Head of Clinical Data Management,” “VP of Digital Health,” “Chief Medical Officer”) rather than broad categories like “healthcare professionals.”
Company‑level filters: Targeting companies based on size, funding stage, product focus, or recent activity (e.g., “biotech firms with a recent Series B round” or “hospitals with a digital health initiative”).
Geographic precision: Building lists for specific regions, countries, or even cities, with localised contact details and language preferences.
Event‑specific context: Adding information that supports more relevant outreach, such as past conference participation, published research, or recent product launches.
This level of customisation is difficult or impossible to achieve with prebuilt databases, which are designed for broad, one‑size‑fits‑all use cases.
Ensuring Data Quality and Accuracy
For event teams, data quality is not a “nice‑to‑have” — it’s a business imperative. Poor data leads to low response rates, wasted budget, and reputational risk. A good data partner should:
Use multiple sources to verify and enrich contact details.
Provide clear documentation on data sources, collection methods, and verification processes.
Offer quality metrics (e.g., percentage of direct emails, verification rate, bounce rate estimates).
Support ongoing data hygiene and updates, especially for long‑running or recurring events.
Event teams should also define their own quality standards upfront (e.g., minimum percentage of direct emails, maximum acceptable bounce rate) and use these as benchmarks when evaluating data partners.
Data Privacy, Compliance, and Ethical Prospecting
In today’s regulatory environment, data privacy and compliance are non‑negotiable. Event teams must ensure that:
Data is collected and used in compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and other relevant regulations.
There is a clear legal basis for processing personal data (e.g., legitimate interest, consent).
Opt‑out and unsubscribe mechanisms are clearly communicated and easy to use.
Data is stored securely and only shared with authorised parties.
A strong data partner will:
Have robust privacy and security policies in place.
Provide documentation on data provenance and consent.
Support compliant data handling practices, such as pseudonymisation and access controls.
This not only reduces legal risk but also builds trust with prospects and attendees.
Integrating Custom Data into Marketing Campaigns
Once the custom prospect list is ready, it should be integrated into the event’s marketing and sales campaigns:
Email campaigns: Use the data to send targeted, personalised emails that highlight the event’s relevance to the recipient’s role, company, and interests.
LinkedIn outreach: Combine the custom list with LinkedIn data to support targeted InMail campaigns and connection requests.
Sales enablement: Provide sales teams with rich, context‑rich profiles to support more effective outreach and follow‑up.
Event management platforms: Import the data into registration, CRM, and event management systems to support segmentation, tracking, and reporting.
A custom research approach also enables better measurement: by tracking response rates, conversion rates, and attendee quality, event teams can continuously refine their prospecting strategy for future events.
Measuring Success and Optimising Future Campaigns
To maximise the value of custom event prospecting, event teams should:
Define clear KPIs (e.g., open rates, click‑through rates, registration rates, sponsorship conversions).
Track performance by segment (e.g., by role, company size, geography) to identify what works best.
Gather feedback from prospects and attendees to understand what resonated and what didn’t.
Use these insights to refine the target audience, messaging, and data requirements for future events.
Over time, this creates a feedback loop where each event becomes more targeted, more effective, and more valuable.
Key Takeaways for Delegate and Event Data Managers
Custom, research‑driven prospecting enables event teams to build high‑quality, highly targeted lists that prebuilt databases cannot match.
Success depends on clear objectives, well‑defined criteria, and close collaboration with a skilled data partner.
Customisation, data quality, and compliance are not optional extras — they are core to effective, ethical B2B event marketing.
By treating prospecting as a strategic, research‑led process, event teams can achieve better engagement, higher conversion rates, and stronger long‑term relationships with delegates, sponsors, and speakers.
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