You spend hours prepping for your event. Booth shipped, signage up, staff briefed. You land on site. You meet dozens (hundreds?) of new people. You have great conversations. Exchange badges. You capture hopes, pains, business cards, and notes. Then Monday hits, you’re back at the desk … and you face the grind: manually trying to translate information back into your systems, figuring out who to follow up with, crafting messages, booking meetings, routing the right rep.
Here’s the problem: even high-quality leads from events often never get the right follow-up at the right moment. Research shows that up to 80% of event leads never receive a meaningful follow-up. And when you wait too long, studies suggest leads are 10× less likely to convert if follow-up takes more than five days.
So you have this massive investment (event attendance, travel, booth, team time) and then you lose the ROI when you can’t book the follow-up meeting. The good news? You can change that.
Here are a few key reasons:
Speed to first touch: AI-driven workflows can bring down build-time and first-touch delays dramatically. For example, manual segmentation, workflow design, and personalization can take 12–20 hours; with AI, it’s more like 30 minutes.
Consistency and coverage: If you’re meeting 10, 20, or 100 people at an event, you want each one to get a follow-up — not just the “top” few. AI helps scale that process so no one falls through the cracks.
Data capture & enrichment: Using voice recorders, badge scans, and transcripts, you can capture the conversation in real time, turn it into structured data, and feed it into your system. Your follow-up engine then has deeper context, rather than starting from a blank slate.
Personalization at scale: Rather than “Hi {first_name}, great to meet you” generic outreach, AI can use the exact details of your booth conversation, the note you took, the transcript you captured — and generate messaging that speaks to what you talked about. That kind of relevance drives higher response rates.
Optimal handoff & booking: Sending a booking link is simply giving leads a chore. Your AI can propose curated times and handle the details.
Here’s how you can operationalize it.
I bring a voice recorder (in this video I use “Plaud,” but there are many options) that clips onto you. At the beginning of each “session” (say a floor hour) I hit record. I pause during breaks (optional) to avoid recording lunch or downtime. After the session, I stop recording and generate the transcript. I email myself the transcript link.
Open the transcript, copy the text. Then go to your LLM of choice (GPT, Claude, Gemini) and prompt something like:
“Summarize all the people I talked to. Give me one to three bullet points of what we talked about. Write down their name and email. Then clarify for me whether we booked on the floor or whether I need to follow up.”
Paste in the transcript. Hit go.
The output: a table of Name | Email | Notes | Follow-Up needed?
Review it. Validate names/emails (sometimes you didn’t catch the last name on the badge). You can cross-match badge scans, CRM records, etc. Drop that table into a Google Sheet or your CRM.
Depending on your stack, you might update your CRM, trigger a Zapier workflow, or push from the sheet directly into your AI system (in my case, we push into Synapsa). The key is: each lead has the conversation notes and “next step” flag.
In the AI system, you can provide some basic information on the event name and the type of meeting you are hoping to book next. Once you do that, the AI can build you an actual AI workflow.
A workflow is comprised of:
Within this, one of the most powerful elements is dynamically prompting the introduction. What this does is allow you to ingest raw data — like the key discussion points from the floor — and then translate that into a hyper-personalized outreach that converts.
Here is an example:
“Your team met this person at the booth at Inbound and have some notes on them … Here is what you know: … {variables} … Craft an initial outreach in three parts: 1) say we enjoyed meeting them; 2) based on the notes, reference what we talked about; 3) ask what time works best for a follow-up. Always sign off as Sam.”
Configure objectives: e.g., 1) Determine if they’re interested. 2) If yes, propose times and book the call.
Add knowledge base content (in case they ask questions like “How does the platform integrate with HubSpot?” or “What’s your success story?”).
Once you've crafted the conversation, it's time to test the flow and see how the AI writes the messages and responds. From there, you can simply trigger the conversation through your CRM workflow, your Google Sheet, or Zapier.
As replies start rolling in, the AI will provide analytics — how many replies, how many meetings booked, pipeline created — which can help you compare to your manual baseline.
Ultimately, the goal isn't to replace human connection in GTM. Rather, it's to enable those connections efficiently and effectively at scale in a way that reduces friction for both buyers and sellers.
So if you are in mid-market SaaS/service with a focus on using events to generate meetings and pipeline, the event follow-up workflow is an opportunity to:
Attending events is expensive. The payoff doesn’t just come from having a great booth or presentation — it comes from what you do after the event. If you leave your leads in a backlog or in a spreadsheet that sits untouched for days, you'll lose them.
But by adopting a workflow like this — voice recording → transcript → AI summarization → AI outreach → meeting booking — you can ensure every first conversation is followed up on meaningfully.
Q1. How soon should I follow up with event leads?
Within 24 hours if possible. Studies show leads are 10× less likely to convert if follow-up takes more than five days. Using AI workflows ensures your first outreach happens fast — even while you’re still traveling.
Q2. What’s the best way to capture notes at an event?
Use a wearable or pocket voice recorder (like Plaud) to record short recaps after each conversation. AI transcription tools can turn those recordings into structured notes you can later push into your CRM or AI follow-up system.
Q3. How does AI personalize event follow-up emails?
AI reads your conversation notes — names, topics, pain points — and turns them into personalized outreach messages. Instead of “Great meeting you at Inbound,” it might say “Loved hearing how you’re using HubSpot chat and struggling with conversion optimization.”
Q4. Can AI really book meetings automatically?
Yes. When connected to your CRM and calendar, AI can propose times, handle replies, reschedules, and reminders without manual forms. Think of it as your 24/7 SDR that never forgets to follow up.
Q5. What tools do I need to make this work?
You’ll need three layers:
Q6. What’s the ROI of automating event follow-up?
Teams that automate follow-up report 20–50% higher meeting-set rates from the same event spend, simply by ensuring every conversation gets personalized outreach within a day.
