Recipes / Conference speaker outreach: find an event's speakers and write notes about their talks

Conference speaker outreach: find an event's speakers and write notes about their talks

Exa + Firecrawl + Hunter

IntermediateSDRsMarketing

Who it's for

SDRs and marketers who want to reach the people speaking at an industry event with a note that refers to their actual talk, not a generic 'saw you're speaking'. Exa can be swapped for Tavily or Perplexity, Firecrawl for Apify, and Hunter for Findymail, Prospeo or Snov.io.

What you get

Speaker table, email lookups and one draft note. Sample output: every company and person in it is fictional.

Event: Northbank RevOps Summit 2026 (fictional), Nov 12–13
Speaker page: https://northbank-summit.example/2026/speakers (dated 2026 on the page)
Scraped: 1 page, 18 speakers. Kept 4 that match 'RevOps or sales ops leaders at B2B software companies'.

| Speaker | Title | Company | Talk | Email (Hunter) |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dana Okafor | VP Revenue Operations | Fernhill Software (fictional) | "Retiring the Friday forecast spreadsheet" | [email protected] (verified) |
| Sam Whitlock | Head of Sales Ops | Quarry Lane Analytics (fictional) | "Territory planning with half the data" | Not found |
| Priya Raman | Director, GTM Systems | Mossgate Labs (fictional) | "One CRM after three acquisitions" | [email protected] (accept-all, not confirmed) |
| Alex Rivera | RevOps Lead | Larkspur Freightworks (fictional) | Title only, no description on the page | Not looked up. Skipped |

Hunter usage this run: 3 Email Finder searches, 2 verifications.

Draft note to Dana (text only, not sent):
Subject: Your forecast spreadsheet talk at Northbank

Hi Dana,

Saw you're speaking on day two at Northbank about retiring the Friday forecast spreadsheet. The session description says Fernhill moved its weekly forecast out of a shared sheet in one quarter. I'd like to hear how you got managers to stop keeping their own copy.

If you're open to it, I'd be glad to grab 15 minutes at the event.

Jordan

Source line from the page: "How Fernhill moved its weekly forecast out of a shared sheet in one quarter, and what broke along the way."

Nothing has been sent, and no Hunter leads or sequences were created.

Time and cost

Estimate About 20–30 minutes per event, most of it reading the speaker table and the notes.

Assumptions: One event with about 20 speakers on a single speaker page, 4–6 kept as a fit, and one email lookup and verification per kept speaker.

Exact credit costs depend on your plan with each vendor. Check the tool pages before a large run.

MCP servers

Every server is confirmed in: ClaudeChatGPTClaude CodeCursor

Set up in a chat app

Every server in this recipe is confirmed for Claude and ChatGPT. Connect each one, then paste the prompts below into one conversation.

Developer setup

Auth setup and mcp.json for Claude Code and Cursor
  • Exa: Use OAuth sign-in for interactive use. For headless runs, use an API key in the X-Api-Key header.
  • Firecrawl: Sign in with OAuth, or pass an API key as a Bearer token for headless use.
  • Hunter: Use OAuth sign-in for interactive use. For headless runs, use an API key in the X-Api-Key header.

Put this in .mcp.json (Claude Code, project root) or ~/.cursor/mcp.json (Cursor). Swap the example keys for your own, and don't commit real ones. Remove the // comment lines if your client requires strict JSON.

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "exa": {
      "url": "https://mcp.exa.ai/mcp"
    },
    "firecrawl": {
      "url": "https://mcp.firecrawl.dev/v2/mcp-oauth"
      // headless alternative: "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" }
    },
    "hunter": {
      "url": "https://mcp.hunter.io/mcp"
      // headless alternative: "headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_HUNTER_API_KEY" }
    }
  }
}

Step-by-step prompts

  1. Use Exa to search for the speaker or agenda page for {event name} {year}. Show me the top results with title and URL, and tell me which one is the official speaker page and what year and dates it shows. Don't open anything else yet.
  2. Use Firecrawl to scrape {speaker page URL} with JSON extraction. For each speaker, pull name, job title, company, talk title, session date and the talk description exactly as the page writes it. Scrape only that page. Show me a table, the speaker count, and flag anyone with no talk description.
  3. Keep the speakers who match {target titles or company types} and have a talk description. Use Exa to find each company's website domain. Tell me how many Hunter Email Finder searches that is, and run them only after I approve it. Then, after I approve it, verify each email found with Hunter Email Verifier.
  4. Write a short note to each speaker with a verified email. Refer to their talk using only what the event page says, and put the exact source line under each note. Ask one question about the talk and suggest {meeting ask}. Show me the text only. Don't send anything.

Run it on a schedule (optional)

Where this goes wrong

Gotchas

Download

Get the prompts, guardrails and expected output as one Markdown file. Paste it into a Claude Project or ChatGPT project's instructions, or save it as CLAUDE.md for Claude Code.

Download conference-speaker-outreach.md