20+ Interested Exhibitor Leads a Month Across Two Flagship Trade Shows

The Challenge

ADNEC Group runs Abu Dhabi’s flagship exhibition venue and organizes its own portfolio of major trade shows, including the Abu Dhabi International Boat Show and Global Food Week.

Every show lives or dies on exhibitor and sponsor revenue, and the easy part of that revenue is rebooking last year’s exhibitors. The hard part is net-new: the equipment manufacturer, food brand, or boat dealer who has never exhibited in Abu Dhabi and is not searching for it. Those companies are spread across the world, they are busy running their businesses, and no amount of brand marketing puts a specific show in front of a specific commercial director at the right moment. That is an outbound problem.

The sales team’s time is best spent closing stands and sponsorships, not hunting for the conversations that lead to them.

The Approach

We built one engine that prospects for both shows at once. Apollo.io supplies the exhibitor universe - verified decision-makers at the companies that belong on each show floor - and email plus LinkedIn reach them as one motion.

The core of it is segmentation. A boat show and a food week do not have “an audience”, they have exhibitor categories, and each category gets its own campaign with its own message: marine equipment and services firms hear a different pitch than on-water boat sellers; food brands, importers, and distributors are approached differently than AgriTech and alt-protein innovators. Every campaign speaks to why that category’s buyers walk that show floor.

Replies flow back into one pipeline. AI tagging flags the interested ones, the CRM keeps the full conversation history, and the ADNEC sales team picks up warm conversations instead of cold lists. Automated weekly refills keep every campaign topped up through the sales cycle, so momentum holds from launch to show open.

The result at steady state: 20+ interested exhibitor leads a month flagged and handed to sales, from 210+ conversations started this cycle. And because the engine is built on the show’s own data and accounts, every edition starts warmer than the last - the targeting, the copy, and the conversation history are all still there when the next sales cycle begins.