Case Study · Event-based lead generation
How an event-marketing SaaS turned SXSW into 320 verified leads and 15 sales conversations
"Filter by conference attendance" isn't a real filter in any B2B database. Agent Jesse rebuilt the SXSW attendee graph from the live web — and turned it into a working pipeline.
320
Verified SXSW attendees
15
Sales conversations
The challenge
An event-marketing SaaS wanted to run pre-event outbound into SXSW: reach the marketers, event producers, and brand-side sponsors who were actually going to Austin — during the 30-day window when their calendars and budgets are wide open for conference-adjacent tooling.
None of the traditional B2B platforms surface that. Apollo and ZoomInfo can filter by industry, title, and company size, but there is no "attending SXSW 2026" checkbox anywhere in the stack. The team had tried buying attendee lists from third parties in the past and burned budget on stale, low-match records.
They needed a fresh list — this year's attendees, not last year's — with a real reason to reach out beyond the generic conference name-drop.
The Agent Jesse approach
Agent Jesse assembled the SXSW attendee graph from scratch by crawling every public signal a real attendee leaves on the live web, then cross-referenced them into a single verified list.
Live-web signals crawled
Official conference pages
The SXSW speaker directory, session pages, exhibitor lists, and panel line-ups — every named participant with a role at the event.
Speaker and panelist announcements
Company blog posts and press releases announcing that an executive is speaking at SXSW — surfacing not just the speaker but the team traveling with them.
Sponsorship and activation lists
Brand-side sponsorship pages, activation announcements, and side-event registrations that name the marketing lead running each activation.
LinkedIn posts mentioning SXSW
Posts and comments explicitly referencing SXSW 2026 attendance — the strongest single signal that a specific person is going, with a personalized outreach hook attached.
"Every other tool told us who works in event marketing. Agent Jesse told us who was standing in the Austin airport next week — and gave us the LinkedIn post that proved it."
The results
The SaaS team ran one Agent Jesse search and pulled a full attendee-signal list — every record tied back to the exact public source that proved the person was going to SXSW.
The list surfaced 320 verified attendees with enriched contact data. Because every record shipped with its source signal — a speaker slot, a sponsorship page, a LinkedIn post — the SDR team wrote outreach with a real reason to reply, not a generic "see you at SXSW" template.
Fifteen of those conversations became qualified sales calls inside the pre-event window. The playbook is now templated: the team re-runs the same signal query for every major event on their target-conference calendar.
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