How Terrapinn increased revenue-per-rep 19% while cutting prospect acquisition cost by 90% with Clay

Building the pipeline to fill 90 events with sponsors, exhibitors, and speakers

Terrapinn has 150 reps selling sponsorship packages, recruiting exhibitors, and securing speakers across a portfolio that spans everything from aviation technology to renewable energy. To put the challenge into scope: a major exhibition requires 300 exhibitors on the floor and 400 speakers on stage to be a success. The reps who fill those slots are the engine of the business. But their productivity was bottlenecked by the quality of the prospect lists they were working from.

For years, Terrapinn relied on manual lead sourcing to build the prospect lists that powered their events. The process was expensive and slow. The team eventually brought on a third-party data provider, which gave them static database filtering. It was faster, but still one-dimensional. There was no enrichment, no real-time signals, and no way to understand why a particular person or company belonged at a specific event. 

The best potential sponsors are the companies already investing in similar events. The most interesting speakers are the executives publishing original research, appearing on industry podcasts, and launching books that shape their fields. The most promising exhibitors are the up-and-comers making noise in trade publications and industry news. None of that intelligence lives in a standard firmographic database.

Clay lets Terrapinn build prospect lists around the data points that actually matter to their business and deliver them to the sales team ready to work. Sharon recalled the moment the value clicked:

"Before, we'd define our ICP, send it off to our researchers, and wait months for the list. Using Clay, we think of a new unique data point, and minutes later have an enriched list of top-tier prospects we hand off to our reps."
— Sharon Roessen, COO

What took two months now takes ten minutes, and the lists are better. Across 150 reps, that's translated to a 19% increase in revenue per employee and a 90% reduction in prospect acquisition cost since using Clay.

With the supply side of their events running on better intelligence, Terrapinn turned the same infrastructure toward filling the other half of the equation: driving the right attendees through the door.

Filling events faster by marketing to more of the right people

Sponsors and speakers make an event credible. Attendees make it valuable. For Terrapinn, filling an event means selling registrations to a completely different audience than the presenting sponsors. The challenge becomes finding practitioners, decision-makers, and industry professionals who should be in the room because the content and connections are relevant to their work. Each of the 35 industry verticals requires its own ICP, its own messaging, and its own signals. Email is the primary channel, and the quality of the data behind those campaigns directly determines how many seats get filled.

Sharon and her team used Clay to orchestrate their GTM by first defining attendee ICPs at the topic level across all 35 verticals. Clay enriches Terrapinn's 8-million-record database against those ICPs proactively, layering on firmographics, industry classification, and behavioral signals so that when a marketing manager needs to promote an event, the enriched audience is already waiting. That same database becomes the platform for TAM expansion: Clay finds lookalike contacts who match the enriched profiles but aren't yet in the system, growing the addressable audience for each event beyond what Terrapinn already knows. For their own exhibitions, the team runs exhibitor company lists through Clay to find relevant contacts at those organizations and invites them to register as attendees.

"Clay allows us to discover unique data about every prospect, why our specific offering matters to them, and tells that story in the outreach. That's a completely different kind of campaign than guessing using generic firmographic data." 
— Sharon Roessen, COO

The results speak in volume and quality: email open rates have increased 25-28% even as email volume has grown 35%, generating 21.5 million more opens year-over-year. Marketing has moved from reactive list-pulling to a continuously enriched infrastructure that scales across every event in the portfolio.

And as registrations started flowing in on that better data, Terrapinn discovered that the attendee pipeline could feed the commercial pipeline, turning every registration into a potential revenue signal.

Using new leads to source additional sponsorship revenue

With sales and marketing operating more efficiently, Sharon was able to look internally to improve their data management and operations. She realized that a non-trivial percent of event attendees turn out to work at exactly the kind of company that should be sponsoring the event, not just attending it.

Now, when someone registers for a Terrapinn event, their record flows into Salesforce, then Clay enriches it within 24 hours, adding firmographic data, company signals, and industry context that a registration form never captures. Clay's scoring identifies registrants whose company profile matches the sponsor ICP and creates a task in Gong for the assigned sales rep to follow up. Without enrichment, that signal stays buried in a spreadsheet. With it, the rep has an engaged lead already planning on attending.

Combined with the 90% reduction in prospect acquisition cost, the sponsor revenue sourced from enriched registrations represents additional pipeline with no incremental cost.

This is where Terrapinn's three Clay workflows work together to create a flywheel. Prospecting fills events with the right sponsors and speakers. Marketing drives the right attendees through the door. Enrichment on those registrations surfaces new commercial opportunities that feed back to the sales team, compounding the value of every event cycle. "We started with marketing and sales, but where I really see the leverage is in enriching, finding signals, and matching new people and companies," Sharon said. "That's where the gold is."

The team is already extending the model further, using signals from enriched attendee profiles to understand what problems people are bringing to an event and matching them with exhibitors who can solve them. For a business built on connecting the right people, that kind of intelligence changes what an event can deliver.