Patience, persistence, positioning | Top tips for converting your data build

Natalie Gurney
3 days ago
11 min read

How much of your data investment are you actually putting to work?

Two weeks after a new dataset ships, the question always comes. Where are the leads?

There's a conversation I keep having with clients, and it always arrives at roughly the same moment. The list has been built, cleaned, tiered and mapped against the right exhibitor or visitor archetypes, the first campaign has gone out, the inbox is mostly silent, and the question lands by Wednesday lunchtime. It's a fair question, it's the wrong one, and the gap between why it's fair and why it's wrong is more or less the whole job.

Flip the inbox around

You're a senior person at a target company, and your inbox is a war zone. Your email address has been scraped a thousand times, you get random pitches every day mixed in with the actual work you're supposed to deliver, and an email lands from an event you've never heard of asking you to book a stand. What honestly happens in your head?

You probably skip it. If you open it, you don't act. If you act, you don't act today. You might forward it sideways with a one-line “is this anything?”, and the person you send it to has their own war zone, so they leave it for a week, decide it's the distributor's call, escalate it to global brand HQ, park it, or all four in sequence. Would you reply? To a cold email about a stand booking, from a brand you've never heard of, with no warm-up and no context? Of course you wouldn't, and yet event organisers send that email every day and then conclude the data is the problem when nobody answers.

The data is fine. The buying committee is doing what buying committees do, which is everything except replying.

What's actually happening inside the building

A real exhibitor decision rarely sits with one person, and a meaningful one almost never does. It travels. A senior commercial lead picks it up, forwards to marketing, marketing pulls in events, events flags it to the regional team, the regional team asks whether HQ has cleared it, HQ wants a market opportunity case, the case loops back round, and somewhere along that chain, in a budget meeting, a quarterly planning session or a year-end review, somebody finally says yes or no. Every step is a human asking another human to spend money or attention on something the rest of their team has never heard of, which is the hard part, and a single cold email can no more do that work than a CV can land a job.

Across regions like the Middle East, the chain bends differently. Approvals route through regional HQs and government-linked entities, WhatsApp does much of the work email does elsewhere (a forward inside a group chat will move a decision faster than three follow-ups ever will), and “have we seen them before” carries unusual weight, because relationship-led buying compresses some parts of the committee and lengthens others.

The argument doesn't change. The channels you have to be present in, and the patience required to be present in them, very much do.

The job is to start the conversation, not to close it

This is the bit that gets missed, and missing it is the difference between a campaign that pays for itself and one that gets blamed when it doesn't. The job of an email is to give one human enough to forward, mention, raise or quietly defend internally. The watercooler moment, the “did you see this?”, the BD director pinging marketing with “this looks interesting, what do you reckon?” Cold email becomes forward becomes meeting becomes stand booking is the genuine sequence, and almost none of it is visible from the organiser's side of the screen.

So a campaign has to do work the organiser will never see: good enough to forward, interesting enough to mention, credible enough that when it gets escalated, the person it lands with takes it seriously instead of binning it as spam. That's a content marketing job, and it takes months, sometimes years, to build the credibility that makes a brand worth forwarding internally in the first place. Which is also, incidentally, why sequencing is a relationship and not a chase. When we say email sequencing, we mean something other than three increasingly impatient emails in a fortnight asking when the booking lands. We mean repeated, varied, soft-sell exposure to a brand and an opportunity, doing four things in patient order: introducing the event so it stops being random, building credibility so the recipient can defend it internally if asked, giving them something genuinely forward-worthy so the conversation starts inside the company, and giving them a reason to act when the timing in their organisation is right, which is almost never when the timing in yours is.

A cold email asks the reader to convert. A sequence asks them to remember, then to talk, then eventually to act. Two different jobs, and only one of them works.

The buying committee is a data design problem, not just a sales one

Here's where the build gets interesting, if you do it properly. The temptation, with five names at one company, is to message all five with the same campaign and consider the account covered. Resist it. The CEO doesn't care about hosted buyer programmes, the procurement lead doesn't care about brand exposure, the BD director doesn't care about the technical content track, and each of them has a different reason to care, and each of them, reached with the right one, becomes an internal advocate for a different part of the offer.

Send the CEO the market opportunity report and the conference invitation, send procurement the exhibitor pack and the cost analysis, send the BD lead the hosted buyer programme, send the technical specialist the content track, send the marketing director the audience overview. Five different reasons to forward, mention or raise; five different watercooler moments inside the same building; and if even two of them land internally, you've started a conversation inside the company that the company is now having on your behalf, which is a meaningfully different thing from being read.

And the part nobody costs in: that company might not exhibit this year. They might attend free of charge to see what it's like, or come as a buyer, or bring a colleague along, or politely ignore the lot of it until the year after, when they're suddenly your biggest account.

That's the actual conversion path, and it stubbornly refuses to fit on a quarterly dashboard.

What “invest in the customer thinking” actually means

Most of the customer-thinking conversation in marketing happens at the wrong altitude.

Personas built from third-party research nobody on the team has ever met, ICPs sketched in a workshop and quietly never revisited, segmentation slides from a strategy day that nobody applies to a live campaign — none of it survives contact with an inbox. The version that does work is smaller, slower and far more useful, and the genuinely good news is that AI has finally made it doable for one person in one week.

Pick eight to ten exhibitors or visitors across a deliberate spread (your best accounts, yes, and a few you'd quietly rather not call), book half-hour conversations framed as research and not as a pitch, and use the time to map how decisions actually get made inside their organisation. Not their pain points. How the building works. Walk me through how a decision to exhibit gets made in your company, who raises it, who has to be convinced, who signs the budget, who signs the contract. How many stakeholders sit between the initial “we should do this” and the stand going up. Does the same group sign off the stand concept and the activation, or does another team take that on once the booking is in. Do you use a marketing agency, and where do they sit in the chain, or is the whole thing your event team's job. What KPIs is this event meant to deliver against, what wider company direction does it ladder up to, and who internally is watching whether you hit those numbers. Then stay silent, because the most useful sentence is almost always the one that comes after the uncomfortable pause.

And then, the part most marketing teams skip and shouldn't: talk to sales. Properly, in a conversation, with time on the diary. Sales already know who the buying committee is at every account, because they live in it. They know who gets CC'd into every email and which name only appears once the contract is being countersigned. They know who actually turns up to the calls and who sends the polite apology. They know which clients have told them, sometimes in frustration, exactly how long it takes to get sign-off and which three people have to nod before anything moves. That knowledge is sitting inside your business already, free, and the marketing team that bothers to extract it will run smarter campaigns than the team that builds personas from scratch.

Record everything, transcribe it, and feed the lot into Claude or ChatGPT with one instruction: map the buying committee that emerged across these conversations, who initiates, who influences, who signs, who can kill it, what each role actually cares about and where in the cycle they get involved. Skip the polite summary. What comes back is an evidence-backed picture of who your email marketing is really speaking to (and through, and around), which is the architecture campaigns are built on. The role-by-role messaging drops out because different people in those rooms told you different things matter. The 70/30 split between solutions and problems writes itself, because you've heard which problems are big enough to surface in a budget meeting and which never make it past the event manager. And you finally know what your message has to battle, because you know exactly which conversation it's walking into.

This is what AI changes. The depth of customer thinking that used to need two people and a quarter, an analyst and a campaigner who never quite shared a diary, now fits inside one person's week. The time you save on the analysis goes back into the asking and the interpretation, which is the part only a human can do well, and the bit the inbox can actually feel.

Why all this matters more in 2026

Two things have changed at once and they pull hard in opposite directions. AI has made cold outreach faster and cheaper than ever, every event organiser and adjacent service provider and agency and B2B sales team is sending more email than they ever have, the inbox is louder, the bar to be worth opening is higher, and the bar to be worth forwarding is much, much higher. And in the same breath, AI has finally made it possible to understand customers properly, doing the deep work that used to live in dusty slide decks nobody read.

The teams that win this cycle will spend the extra time AI gives them on the human side, on the asking and the listening and the noticing. The teams who lose will treat AI as a faster way to do the same cold-email volume play that wasn't working before, then wonder why louder didn't translate into landed.

Volume was never the lever. It's just the one that's easiest to pull.

Your data is an investment. Treat it as one.

This is the bit that quietly costs organisers the most, and it's rarely done properly. When you commission a data build, you're buying something far more valuable than a column of email addresses; you're buying a permission slip to be in front of a defined audience across every channel they actually use. If the only thing you do with that list is email it, you're using maybe a fifth of what you paid for, and then wondering why the return is thin. Buying a property and only living in one room is roughly the right analogy.

Capture more at the point of build, because the marginal cost is almost nothing and the marginal value is enormous. Company LinkedIn pages and personal ones, Instagram handles where they're public, the website URLs your digital team can use as retargeting fuel for the next six months, location data that gives your regional sales teams a bit of territory context. Then orchestrate the lot. The email goes out on Monday, the sales team sends a LinkedIn connection request on Tuesday with a one-line note that references the event by name, the marketing team follows the company's Instagram (and a couple of personal accounts where it makes sense) on Wednesday, the digital team uploads the list to retargeting so paid social and display now know who these people are, and the data team checks for matches against your existing CRM so anyone who's touched the brand in the last three years gets a warmer sequence than a true cold contact would.

That's one prospect, touched four or five ways in a week, each touch a different excuse to remember the brand and a different chance to start the internal conversation. The Instagram follow alone might get followed back, and now someone else in their marketing team is inside your audience without you lifting another finger. The LinkedIn connection gets accepted, and your future content reaches them organically every time you post.

The list isn't the asset. The audience it unlocks is the asset, and the audience only unlocks if you actually use every channel the data has handed you the keys to.

Eight things you can actually do about it

Distil the argument above into the working week, and it more or less looks like this.

Build three to five contacts per account, mapped across the buying committee and the campaign tracks • The full buying committee inside one company is worth fifty individuals across fifty companies.
Build dedicated email sequences with beautifully designed HTMLs that properly introduce the brand • Stop injecting new prospects into the universe sends that go to your already-warm base. A sequence's job is to introduce. The universe send's job is to remind. Confusing the two is why neither lands.
Maximise the data you've researched, across every channel it gives you access to • Email is one channel into a buying committee that lives across many. Capture the LinkedIn pages, the Instagram handles, the website URLs, the location data, all at the point of build, because the marginal cost is almost nothing and the marginal value is enormous.
Coordinate the outreach with sales, social and digital, on one timed window • The email goes out on Monday, the sales LinkedIn note on Tuesday, the social follow on Wednesday, the retargeting fires by Thursday, and the same prospect has now been touched four ways inside one week, each touch a different excuse to remember the brand.
Think about reaching them in real life. Consider a cheeky printed direct mail to the CEO, inviting them to the show opening (or a box of cookies to the marketing team) • Or quietly collect the address details for geofencing, because well-targeted physical mail and well-aimed location-based digital are two of the most under-used channels in the regional events playbook, and both work disproportionately well against an inbox the rest of the market is busy clogging.
Get creative with the build, and stop treating campaigns as email-and-hope • Send someone with a sandwich board outside their building. Sponsor the coffee shop the procurement team uses on Tuesdays. Buy a billboard on the road your main accounts work. Five hundred well-researched accounts of people you genuinely need, properly maximised across every channel they touch, will convert far better than five thousand unfortunate names injected into a CRM and left to fend for themselves.
Time your warmer touches to moments that already matter to them • A thoughtful comment on a prospect's keynote post, a LinkedIn engagement two weeks before they fly to a competitor's show, a personal note when their company announces a new market entry. Showing up at the moment they're already paying attention beats a cold email to the same person every single time.
And finally, be patient, consider the positioning, and consider the person behind the email • What is on their mind today, what is on their to-do list, what is the last thing they want to read at 4pm on a Thursday. Marketing that respects the answer to those three questions tends to land. Marketing that doesn't, doesn't.

The short version: persist, properly

Patience. Persistence. Positioning.

Patience, because data takes 18 months to do its real work and judging it at three is judging the wrong thing on the wrong timeline. Persistence, because one email is a coin toss and a sequence is the beginning of a relationship, and relationships are how exhibitor decisions actually get made in buildings you'll never set foot in. Positioning, because the goal isn't to convert the human who receives the email, it's to give them something worth telling their colleagues about. The rest is just craft, and craft is what we're here for.

Marketing Alchemist works with senior marketing leaders at regional event organisers, associations and media companies on data, campaigns and the things that actually drive exhibitor and visitor growth. If you're building your 2027 data plan now (and you should be), or wondering why this year's sends aren't converting, that's a conversation worth having.