131: How to Build High Quality Prospecting Lists

Welcome back to The Practical Prospecting Newsletter!

Over the past few weeks, we built a fully automated workflow that identifies every event organizer, conference company, and expo producer in North America and Europe. It also tells us when their next event is and what the theme is. We can reuse these signals across clients whenever their niche aligns with the event topic.

This newsletter breaks down exactly how we built the list. Even if you don’t sell to event organizers, the point is to give you a behind-the-scenes look at what real, high-quality TAM building looks like when industry filters are useless and creativity is required.

Most of the time when you’re building a list, there is no perfect industry filter. If you want to be thorough, you have to get creative.

Agenda:

• Our Approach to List Building

• Step 1: Find the Event Listing Sites

• Step 2: Scrape Event Organizers From LinkedIn

• Step 3: Set Up an Alert for New Events

P.S. If you want us to build systems like this for your team, you can book a time here.

Our Approach to List Building

Our goal was to build a master list of every event and conference organizer in North America and Europe. This was for a client who wanted to book keynote speaking gigs.

When you’re building a Total Addressable Market list, it is rarely as simple as selecting a few industry filters and company size ranges. Many companies aren’t even on LinkedIn or in any standard data platform, and a large portion span multiple industries.

It becomes chaotic quickly…

To get a list we trust, we needed two things.

1. First, confidence that we captured a majority of companies in the TAM.

2. Second, confidence that the companies included were truly qualified.

To do this, we took a different approach.

Here was the strategy:

• First, find the major sites where events and conferences are listed and promoted

• Second, scrape every event or conference organizer on LinkedIn using company description keywords

• Third, set up an alert for new event announcements so the list stays fresh

Step 1: Find the Event Listing Sites

I started with a simple ChatGPT search: “What are the top sites where I can find upcoming events, tradeshows, and conferences?”

There were a ton of results, but after reviewing them manually, we chose these five:

• 10Times 

• Industry Events 

• Conference Alerts

• Conference Locate

• All Conference Alert

From there, we used Instant Data Scraper (a free Chrome extension that scrapes websites — it’s a MUST have) to scrape all the 2026 events from each site.

We then uploaded those event names into Clay.

The first enrichment was finding each event’s website. Clay has a free enrichment for finding websites from company names, but you can also plug in your OpenAI key to get better coverage with a more detailed prompt.

Once we had a website, we used an OpenAI prompt inside Clay to pull the event name, theme, and date. We also created a second prompt to classify whether the event was free or paid, in person or remote, and other helpful categories.

Finally, we used Clay’s “Find people at these companies” search to pull contacts.

Step 1 complete.

Step 2: Scrape Event Organizers From LinkedIn

As I mentioned earlier, there is no clean LinkedIn industry category for event organizers. This is the same issue most teams run into during TAM building.

That’s why we rely heavily on LinkedIn company description keywords. For event organizers, the keywords were simple:

“conference, conferences, event, events, expo, expos, exhibition, exhibitions, summit, convention, conventions”

If you’re unsure which keywords to use for your ICP, take a list of your customers, copy their company descriptions into ChatGPT, and ask it to identify patterns across them.

But a keyword in a description doesn’t guarantee a fit. You’ll get false positives.

To fix that, we built a qualification prompt that visits the company website and returns a simple YES or NO.

We do this for every TAM build. You just give ChatGPT a detailed explanation of what a fit and non-fit customer looks like, including edge cases, and ask it to turn that into a website qualification prompt.

Once we confirmed the company was an actual event organizer, we ran the same prompts from Step 1 to pull their event names, dates, themes, and additional details.

Step 3: Set Up an Alert for New Events

Finally, we wanted a system to catch newly announced events.

For this, we used Trigify.io. It creates always-on social listening alerts for specific keywords across Reddit, LinkedIn, and YouTube.

Our keywords were simple: event, conference, tradeshow.

Whenever someone posts about a new event that matches those terms, Trigify pushes the link into Clay automatically.

Clay then runs an OpenAI prompt to check three things:

1. Is this post actually about an event or is it a false positive?

2. Is the event in the future?

3. Is the theme relevant?

If all three are yes, Clay enriches the contacts and sends them to Smartlead for email outreach and HeyReach for LinkedIn.

This gives us a continuous real-time stream of qualified prospects tied to buying signals, with no manual work after setup.

Here’s a quick two-minute video overview of the workflow if you want to see it in action.

Thanks for reading,

Jed

P.S. Check out tons of additional free content here!