# After an event or exhibition

Upload what you collected, let Connect research each organisation from public sources and attach evidence to every claim, then send only where a real contactable address exists. The rule that shapes the whole exercise is that Connect never generates a pattern address, so a card with a name and no email becomes a researched prospect with a different next action rather than a guess sent into the dark.

- **Status:** Available
- **Audience:** both
- **Channels:** email, phone
- **In the app:** #/prospects, #/follow-ups
- **Last verified:** 2026-09-10
- **Canonical:** https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/event-followup/

## From the box to the records

1. Get the list into the workspace. A CSV through the prospect upload is the reliable path; a photograph of a card can be attached as a file and read, since PNG, JPEG and WebP are among the formats the file service handles.
   - Result: Rows exist as prospects. Nothing has been contacted.
2. Let identity resolution run before anything else.
   - Result: Anyone already in your relationships is separated out. `prospect_identity_resolution` exists precisely to stop an existing customer being prospected, which at an event is common — half a stand's visitors are usually people you already know.
3. Let public-source research fill each organisation in.
   - Result: Claims arrive with evidence attached. A claim without evidence does not reach the record, so the fields you see are the fields something supports.
4. Read the contactability column before the qualification column.
   - Result: It separates the people you can write to from the people you cannot, which is a different question from whether they are worth writing to.
5. Run the compliance check, then send.
   - Result: Suppression, unsubscribe, complaints and do-not-contact are all checked in one place first, and the first outreach goes under the channel's autonomy rule.

## Why an unusable card is not a failure

Connect does not guess email addresses. No pattern-generated address is ever produced, tested or sent to. A card with a company, a job title and a scribbled mobile number produces a researched prospect and a next action that is not email — a call, a follow-up for a person to make an introduction, or nothing at all if the fit is poor.

This costs volume deliberately. A tool that manufactures `first.last@company` addresses will always show a bigger sendable list from the same box of cards. The list is bigger because part of it is invented, and the price is paid later in bounces, spam complaints and a sending domain that stops being trusted.

> **Note** Evidence is attached to claims rather than asserted alongside them. When a record says a company does something, the page it came from is recorded with it, which is what makes a research pass auditable months afterwards.

## Speed, and the follow-up that carries it

The value in an event list decays because the person who took your card is meeting other stands the same week. Connect helps with that in a specific way rather than a general one: research runs in the background across the whole list, and each prospect that becomes contactable gets a follow-up with a reason and a date, so the ones needing a second touch are not the ones you happen to remember.

- Research spend is routed so a deeper pass runs only where it can change a decision — a clearly poor fit does not get the expensive treatment.
- Duplicates are proposed, not merged. `merge_people` is a human decision, and it preserves identities, stages, follow-ups, deals, demos, cases and onboarding from both sides.
- A follow-up on the `task` channel is work for a person; no drain ever sends it. That is where 'introduce this one to Priya' belongs.
- Phone follow-ups drain two per tick through the same gates as any outbound call, and a row more than 24 hours late is closed as missed rather than rung.

## Limits worth knowing before the show

**No bulk SMS blast** — Outbound SMS is provider-dependent and the live carrier carries none. In India it also needs DLT entity, header and template registration with the operators.
**No promises about terms** — `safe_sales` refuses a price, an SLA or a warranty Knowledge does not support, and escalates to a person. An event conversation that ended on 'send me a quote' needs a person to supply the number.
**No call recording to check what was said on the stand** — Recording is foundation and is not enabled on the live carrier. Follow-up calls made afterwards leave a transcript and a summary, not audio.
**Counting is only as good as the import** — Two badges for the same person become two prospects until somebody merges them. Duplicates are surfaced; the merge stays a human decision on purpose.

## Where the money goes

Research, not sending. Each organisation costs a research pass, and the deep pass costs several times the shallow one — which is why the cost router exists and why a tight discovery brief is worth writing before you upload three hundred rows. Email drafting is one model call per person. Calls are the expensive tail: audio tokens at four times the text input rate, and a session re-billed for its whole context every turn.

## Questions

### Can I just give it the company names and let it find the emails?

It will find addresses that are discoverable from public sources and attach the evidence for each one. It will not construct an address from a name and a domain, test one, or send to one. Rows that end without a discoverable address stay as researched prospects with a non-email next action.

### What happens to the people on my list who are already customers?

Identity resolution separates them before outreach, so they are not treated as cold discoveries. They belong in the relationship path instead — a reply on the thread they already have with you, which is a different gate from cold outreach and always has been.

### Can Connect read a photo of a stack of business cards?

Images are a supported file type and the model can read one, but what it extracts is a reading rather than a verified record. Treat it as a draft of the list: check the rows before research runs, because a wrong domain sends the research at the wrong company.

## Related

- [Connect does not guess email addresses](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/no-guessed-email/)
- [Uploading your own list](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/prospect-upload/)
- [Evidence on a prospect](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/prospects/evidence/)
- [Merging two records](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/relationships/merging/)
- [Outbound prospecting without buying a list](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/use-cases/outbound-prospecting/)
- [Follow-ups for a person to do](https://connectbyjbrh.com/docs/follow-ups/task-channel/)

## What this page is based on

- docs-source/sources/CHANNELS.md §4 — prospecting stages and no guessed email
- docs-source/sources/GENERAL.md §7 and §9 — follow-ups, files and formats
- Connect capability registry (docs-source/facts.py)
- docs-source/sources/PHONE.md §12 — recording and SMS on the live carrier