How Exadel’s Events Team Turns Outreach into Connections with Dripify

Meet Exadel

Exadel is an AI-enabled digital engineering company with 2,000+ engineers, 25 years of enterprise software delivery, and a client roster of well-known global brands.

Exadel serves clients globally, with the US and the Americas as its largest region. Inside its marketing organization, a small events group handles lead generation and new client acquisition around conferences. Monika Łukasik leads it and runs the pre-event outreach. Mitchell Carreiro’s lead generation team picks it up from there, supporting the team during the event itself and then taking the leads on afterwards for nurturing and account intelligence.

Exadel started with Dripify in 2024 on three to five seats, moving to ten in 2025. This year it went to fifteen, extending licenses from marketing into the sales organization.

The part nobody sees: what happens after the conference

For a long time, Exadel had no way to follow up at scale.

Everything was manual before. Scalability and time consumption were the biggest pain points we had before we had the tool.

Mitchell Carreiro

Global Head of Lead Generation, Exadel

Contacts were added one at a time. Connection requests were sent one at a time. Every follow-up was someone’s job to remember and send. The team doing it was small. “Just lead generation specialists,” as Mitchell puts it, “a really small team.” That put a hard limit on how many people they could reach.

There was another risk. Sending in large numbers by hand means guessing at LinkedIn’s limits, and the team had guessed wrong before.

Previously we had a situation where we sent too many invites and the account was blocked for a week or so.

Monika Łukasik

Events & Growth Marketing Lead, Exadel

The lost time had a second cost. As Monika put it, even the basic outreach was very time-consuming, so segmentation, message testing and audience experiments always came last.

It freed up a lot of our time and allowed us to run experiments on messaging, on segmentation, and to try different approaches from different accounts.

Monika Łukasik

Events & Growth Marketing Lead, Exadel

Email was not an effective substitute, as Exadel’s audience response rates were higher on LinkedIn.

Building the engine

One campaign per company. Mitchell’s team runs a separate sequence for each target account, working through them to reach everyone involved in the decision — what he calls “the whole broader target audience.”

Sending limits that keep accounts safe. Dripify’s activity controls calculate how many invitations can safely be sent each day, so the team stays inside LinkedIn’s limits. They now plan each campaign to use that daily capacity fully — no guessing, and no repeat of the week they lost an account.

Sales Navigator doing the sourcing. Prospect lists get built with Sales Navigator’s advanced filters and loaded straight into a campaign.

It really took away the heavy lifting. It enabled us to focus on high-impact priorities, improve our output, and drive stronger meeting conversion.

Mitchell Carreiro

Global Head of Lead Generation, Exadel

Event lists straight from CSV. Monika’s team exports the attendee list for each conference and loads it straight into a campaign. Sales Navigator, CSV files and LinkedIn search all feed the same campaigns — whichever source fits the account.

Bulk export into Salesforce. Lead lists Monika once assembled by hand now move across in one go.

I can very quickly do a mass import to Salesforce, which saves really a lot of time.

Monika Łukasik

Events & Growth Marketing Lead, Exadel

Fifteen seats, not one. Executives and salespeople hold their own licenses alongside marketing — so the message arrives from the person a prospect actually wants to hear from.

What the numbers look like

Results came quickly. Within two weeks the team could see whether a campaign was working, and within a month they had the full picture — enough, as Monika puts it, that they simply kept going.

Meetings were the first thing to change. Mitchell’s team had been booking two to three a month. Once the campaigns were running properly, that became six or seven, and kept growing as more people joined what he calls “the nurture pool.”

The more people you reach out to, the more people you can actually sit down and have a meeting with.

Mitchell Carreiro

Global Head of Lead Generation, Exadel

Event campaigns now average around 33% acceptance and 11% response. The strongest of 2026 — TechEx London, targeting speakers — reached 68.5% acceptance and 29.6% response, ahead of the previous best (AI & Big Data Expo Amsterdam, at 61.3% and 20.3%).

The same event shows how much the audience matters. Alongside the speakers campaign, the team ran a larger one to general attendees: 214 leads, around 45% acceptance. Strong by any measure — and still well short of what a tightly targeted list delivers.

About one accepted connection in three now leads to a response, which suggests the targeting is reaching the right people rather than simply more people.

There was one benefit nobody planned for. Exporting Sales Navigator lists through Dripify removed the need for a separate paid tool, and cut into a second cost at the same time.

It saved us some money. In the past we used a third-party tool to export leads from Sales Navigator lists — an additional tool we paid for. Plus we use a separate tool for list building, and each export costs a credit. Now we’re saving credits there too.

Monika Łukasik

Events & Growth Marketing Lead, Exadel

What Exadel has learned about event outreach

1. The sender matters as much as the message

The team tested the same message from two kinds of sender: someone from marketing, and an executive or subject-matter expert writing to people in their own field. The executive accounts converted better. That is why they bought more seats, and it also explains the TechEx numbers above.

Both campaigns were run from executive-level accounts. This allowed us to gain such conversions once contacting other executives and C-level leads.

Monika Łukasik

Events & Growth Marketing Lead, Exadel

2. Know when to turn the automation off

Because executives and salespeople have their own seats, they follow their own campaigns and reply personally as soon as a conversation needs it.

It’s more like a mutual partnership. That moment when we actually have to drop the automation and jump in with a concrete personalized message.

Monika Łukasik

Events & Growth Marketing Lead, Exadel

3. Broad before the event, personal after it

The two halves of an event campaign are not the same job. Before the conference, the goal is reach: fill the booth, book a few meetings in advance, and the messaging can be fairly general. Afterward, the audience is smaller and warmer, and the writing changes to match.

We use it more heavily pre-event, when the message is more generic. Post-event, we mainly focus on nurturing the people we met, and those messages are usually sent with a personalized touch.

Monika Łukasik

Events & Growth Marketing Lead, Exadel

4. Give a message two to three weeks, then change it

Exadel does not wait for a campaign to run its course before deciding whether the message works. Two weeks is enough of a signal to keep going or rewrite.

Two weeks was enough to judge whether the message resonates with that particular audience. If not, after two weeks we just switch the approach a little.

Monika Łukasik

Events & Growth Marketing Lead, Exadel

Why Exadel keeps expanding

The seat count has grown steadily over three years. Three to five in 2024. Ten in 2025, after testing showed which senders performed best. Fifteen this year, now including people in sales as well as marketing.

The events team has grown from one person to three, and the business development team in North America is also expanding. The goal for the coming months is to train them, scale their outreach, and improve segmentation. As Mitchell puts it: “Time’s not a constraint now. We could just go all in.”

Dripify has expanded into a critical part of our lead-gen engine, expanding our reach, and freeing the team to focus on activities that turn prospects into real pipeline.

John Madden

VP, Global Head of Marketing, Exadel