ADIS 2026 | A Lead Score, Not a List, Decided the Follow-Up
A summit built around a $57 billion-plus infrastructure pipeline is compelling to the right person within seconds, and meaningless to someone who has never heard of it. Closing that gap between obvious value and zero awareness was the problem this campaign was built to solve, across a database of more than 100,000 contacts spanning ten professional sectors.
- The Challenge
Reaching a cold engineer and reaching a warm government contact are not the same job, and treating them identically is how large databases quietly underperform their size. Any database of this scale contains people at every stage of readiness, from those who have never encountered the event to those who have effectively decided and are waiting for a prompt.
Most lead generation programmes build one nurture sequence and one ask, send it to everyone, and convert a fraction of what the database should return. This programme also carried a harder measure than volume: a registration taken in seconds from a cold advertisement is a weak commitment, and a campaign optimised for registrations alone would have produced an impressive number and a half-empty hall.
Most lead generation programmes build one nurture sequence and one ask, send it to everyone, and convert a fraction of what the database should return. This programme also carried a harder measure than volume: a registration taken in seconds from a cold advertisement is a weak commitment, and a campaign optimised for registrations alone would have produced an impressive number and a half-empty hall.
The Approach
One Scoring Model Governing Every Contact
Centric separated the programme into attraction and conversion from the outset, governed by score rather than by channel or list membership.
CRM Lead Scoring as the Control Mechanism
Any contact whose engagement crossed 50 points was automatically reclassified as a qualified delegate. That score, rather than which channel had found them, determined everything that followed. Contacts below the threshold remained in nurture, continuing to see the campaign without facing a hard registration push before the data suggested they were ready for one.
Score-Triggered Human Handoff
The moment a contact crossed the threshold without registering, a person at a call centre took over their follow-up directly, rather than another automated email arriving in an inbox already full of them. For an audience of senior professionals who respond better to a conversation than to another touchpoint in a drip sequence, that handoff from algorithm to phone call is a materially different bet from the one most lead generation programmes make.
Stage-Appropriate Creative
Creative aimed at a stranger did a different job from creative aimed at someone already committed. Attraction messaging opened with the scale of the pipeline itself, carrying enough weight to make an unfamiliar summit feel consequential in a few seconds. For qualified contacts the brief inverted: what stood between them and a completed registration was friction rather than persuasion, so native lead forms were stripped to a name and a job title, while landing pages served those still weighing agenda detail before committing.
Centric separated the programme into attraction and conversion from the outset, governed by score rather than by channel or list membership.
CRM Lead Scoring as the Control Mechanism
Any contact whose engagement crossed 50 points was automatically reclassified as a qualified delegate. That score, rather than which channel had found them, determined everything that followed. Contacts below the threshold remained in nurture, continuing to see the campaign without facing a hard registration push before the data suggested they were ready for one.
Score-Triggered Human Handoff
The moment a contact crossed the threshold without registering, a person at a call centre took over their follow-up directly, rather than another automated email arriving in an inbox already full of them. For an audience of senior professionals who respond better to a conversation than to another touchpoint in a drip sequence, that handoff from algorithm to phone call is a materially different bet from the one most lead generation programmes make.
Stage-Appropriate Creative
Creative aimed at a stranger did a different job from creative aimed at someone already committed. Attraction messaging opened with the scale of the pipeline itself, carrying enough weight to make an unfamiliar summit feel consequential in a few seconds. For qualified contacts the brief inverted: what stood between them and a completed registration was friction rather than persuasion, so native lead forms were stripped to a name and a job title, while landing pages served those still weighing agenda detail before committing.
The Outcome
Lead Quality, Audited by a Third Party
The campaign delivered 31,000 registrations against a 25,000 target, with Centric directly responsible for 25,567 of them, 82% of everything the summit brought in. Blended cost per lead came in at $4.84, 39% below the $8.00 ceiling, and cost per attendee at $7.08 against a $20 target.
Inside the Ceiling on the Coldest Audiences
LinkedIn returned leads at $7.79 and Meta at $8.48, both close to the ceiling on their own, which is why blending the full mix mattered. Measured against a 2025 debut that drew 4,100 attendees across two days, total attendance grew to 17,500, a rise of 327%.
Verified Person by Person
The client challenged the file, stating that registrations this far ahead of plan could not be real. Rather than argue, Centric commissioned an independent outbound call centre to work the file by hand, tiered by seniority. 4,990 registrants were called and 2,524 were reached, an answer rate of 50.6%. Of those reached, 1,635 confirmed attendance, 64.8%. A further 1,788 senior contacts were called by name, 1,387 of them C-suite, directors and vice presidents, and 610 confirmed, precisely the seniority the summit's sponsors had been sold. Every rate fell inside normal business-to-business ranges.
56.4% Registration to Attendance
Half of any event registration list is a no-show unless someone does the confirmation work. This campaign converted better than one in two, against a 30% target.
The campaign delivered 31,000 registrations against a 25,000 target, with Centric directly responsible for 25,567 of them, 82% of everything the summit brought in. Blended cost per lead came in at $4.84, 39% below the $8.00 ceiling, and cost per attendee at $7.08 against a $20 target.
Inside the Ceiling on the Coldest Audiences
LinkedIn returned leads at $7.79 and Meta at $8.48, both close to the ceiling on their own, which is why blending the full mix mattered. Measured against a 2025 debut that drew 4,100 attendees across two days, total attendance grew to 17,500, a rise of 327%.
Verified Person by Person
The client challenged the file, stating that registrations this far ahead of plan could not be real. Rather than argue, Centric commissioned an independent outbound call centre to work the file by hand, tiered by seniority. 4,990 registrants were called and 2,524 were reached, an answer rate of 50.6%. Of those reached, 1,635 confirmed attendance, 64.8%. A further 1,788 senior contacts were called by name, 1,387 of them C-suite, directors and vice presidents, and 610 confirmed, precisely the seniority the summit's sponsors had been sold. Every rate fell inside normal business-to-business ranges.
56.4% Registration to Attendance
Half of any event registration list is a no-show unless someone does the confirmation work. This campaign converted better than one in two, against a 30% target.
Demand Generation Built to Be Audited
Lead volume is easy to produce and difficult to defend. Centric builds programmes where quality is defined before the campaign starts, enforced by scoring rather than by judgement, and verifiable afterwards by an independent party.
The scoring threshold, the score-triggered handoff and the verification methodology all transfer directly to comparable B2B demand programmes.
The scoring threshold, the score-triggered handoff and the verification methodology all transfer directly to comparable B2B demand programmes.
$4.84
Blended Cost Per Lead
$7.08
Cost Per Attendee
56.4%
