The launch responds to a shift in how B2B buyers are engaging with marketing. AI-generated outreach has driven buyers to tune out: 82% of B2B buyers report fatigue from email, and at the same time 94% now use LLMs somewhere in their buying process, arriving at conversations already researched and harder to impress. Against that backdrop, in-person engagement has become disproportionately valuable: 77% of event attendees say they trust a brand more after meeting it face-to-face, and those who do are 60% more likely to purchase.
Most marketing and sales teams are trying to capture that value with smaller budgets and leaner headcount than they had two years ago. Speaker Watch is built to laser focus those efforts, so marketers can equip sales and internal leadership with insight they can use to spark real conversations with priority accounts.
How it works
Speaker Watch tracks named accounts against the global events calendar and flags when someone from that account, ideally the specific person the client wants to reach, is recorded publicly as attending (primarily, if they’re speaking). An event where a top-tier prospect’s CIO is speaking gets treated differently to one where a mid-level buyer is attending, and seniority is matched accordingly: the biggest opportunities get the most senior attention.
The service doesn’t stop at identifying the opportunity. Ei’s team can then help clients create outreach to secure meetings, build the agenda, and brief execs and sales teams on what that person cares about, so the in-person window is used well once it’s secured.
Underpinning the service is Mercury, Ei’s proprietary database of the global B2B go-to-market ecosystem, built over nearly two decades. Combined with Ei’s AI workflows, it allows Speaker Watch to run this kind of account-to-event matching accurately and at a scale (thousands of accounts against thousands of events) that would not be feasible manually.
For example in one of its first Speaker Watch projects, Ei identified a priority senior executive who was speaking at the same event as the client. With this insight and supported, smart outreach, the client was able to connect with the executive and have them attend their own proprietary event at the same time, creating a major relationship building opportunity.
Matt Harper, CEO at Ei Advisory, said: “Clients don’t need to attend more events. They need to know, with certainty, which ones their most important buyers will actually be at, and to show up prepared when they are. That’s a data problem before it’s an events problem, and it’s exactly what Speaker Watch was built to solve.”
Speaker Watch is available now. For more information, contact Tony Jarvis on LinkedIn.
About the Author: Amit Patel
