How we generated SQLs for a software company at MWC Barcelona using our LinkedIn Social Selling approach

Disclaimer: We anonymize most of our case studies, especially the information-dense ones, for obvious reasons. We respect our clients’ confidentiality and the strategic work we create for them. This applies even when clients approve promotional case studies. The strategies, frameworks, and results are real. The competitive advantages stay protected.

Quick summary

The traditional “booth-and-wait” strategy has rendered itself obsolete and it started to look a bit like dial up internet. That was a clear premises.

You pay for a booth, ship a few roll ups, print some tote bags, and then stand around hoping that the right people will magically walk past your booth and ask you to give you money.

At Mobile World Congress Barcelona 2023, our client, a US headquartered software development company decided to do the opposite. And it worked pretty well. Keep in mind one important aspect: MWC Barcelona attracts 109,000 attendees and 2,400 exhibitors. That’s yuuuuge.

Instead of waiting for traffic at the booth and meetings, we treated MWC as a 3 day field test of focused social selling campaign 2 weeks before the event: one founder’s LinkedIn account, a curated list of companies and roles, and a workflow that mixed human-led personalized outreach, social listening, and light ABM ads.

The result: 198 relevant contacts approached, 132 new connections, 17 agreed meetings at the booth, and 9 highly qualified sales opportunities in a market where deal sizes regularly hit five or six figures.

With this case study we want to walk through the full strategy: how we set up the founder’s profile, built the target list, used social listening beyond the official hashtag, layered content and ads for “air cover”, and kept the outreach non spammy and respectful of a real person’s brand. It is a practical blueprint for B2B tech and software leaders who want their next big event to show up in the pipeline report, not just in the travel expenses.

So grab yourself a beer, a coffee, a tea, or whatever your choice is and enjoy.

Intro to set the context

MWC Barcelona is not a quiet event, noooope. It is one of the largest conferences in the world. Thousands of companies, tens of thousands of people, a sprawling labyrinth of neon lights, aggressive badge scanning, the hum of thousands of conversations happening simultaneously, multiple halls, endless demos, and a constant stream of notifications telling you that someone, somewhere, is “open to networking”.

For the unprepared, it looks like opportunity. For the veterans, it often looks like a very expensive way to collect business cards that will eventually end up in a recycling bin three months later.

In many cases the standard operating procedure for the average attendee goes something like this: buy a flight, (optional) get a booth, stand there for eight hours a day with a frozen smile, and pray that a decision-maker with a budget accidentally stumbles over your carpet. We call this “Hope Marketing”. And frankly, hope is not a very good strategy.

Yes, yes, we know we are exaggerating just a tiny bit for dramatic effect.

Our client wanted something different. They’re a software development company with headquarters in the United States and tech teams in Eastern Europe. They’d been invited to exhibit at MWC 2023. The invitation came with a booth, a participation kit, and the standard promise of “exposure”.

And they wanted more. They wanted meetings. Real ones. With people who had budget, authority, and actual software problems to solve. And they wanted proof that spending five days in Barcelona would generate more than jet lag and expense reports.

They wanted a way to track results beyond “it felt busy”.

That’s why the question for this project was simple: How do you help a mid sized software company behave like a sniper in a crowded arena, instead of one more booth in the background noise?

About the Client

To understand the strategy, you must understand the client. The CLIENT (anonymized, for obvious reasons) a software development company that specializes in building custom software and product teams for startups and scale-ups.

Their sweet spot? Companies that need to move fast but don’t have time to recruit, onboard, and manage entire engineering departments. They handle everything from initial architecture to ongoing product development.

They are the people you call when you have a vision but lack the engineering horsepower to execute it. Their typical buyers are Founders, CTOs, CPOs, and Heads of Product (people who are notoriously allergic to sales pitches and fiercely protective of their time).

• Headquarters: United States
• Delivery Team: Romania
• Core Offering: Custom software development, staff augmentation, and digital transformation.

The project explained

The initial situation looked pretty promising on paper.

• The client had secured a booth at MWC Barcelona 2023
• They had an official participation kit and presence in the MWC program
• Their team had people on site who were able to hold senior level conversations about product and technology

The challenge was not “will there be people there”. MWC has more than enough people.

The big scary challenge was:

• How do we find the subset of attendees who are actually relevant to the client’s services?
• How do we start a conversation with them before everyone boards the plane?
• How do we make it easy and natural to meet at the booth, instead of improvising in the aisle?

The challenge with mega-events like MWC is the density paradox. You are surrounded by thousands of potential buyers, yet there is a low structure to facilitate meeting them. I think our grandparents used to say something like:

It’s like trying to find the needle in the hay stack.

We proposed something just a tiny bit different. Treat the event like a highly targeted account-based marketing campaign, using social selling as the main results driver.

Start conversations weeks before anyone boards a plane to Barcelona.

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Use the founder’s personal LinkedIn profile as the primary outreach channel.

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Focus on quality over quantity.

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Book meetings.

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The founder handed over his LinkedIn credentials.

We had three weeks do execute the plan and manufacture serendipity and trust before the doors opened.

Situation analysis

Before designing the campaign, messages or any materials, we mapped the starting point.

Assets:

The client had solid fundamentals:

• Strong tech team with real case studies
• A decent brand and website that did not need emergency revamps before MWC
• Founders comfortable with speaking about their work at a senior level

Gaps:

• Limited internal marketing capacity
• No existing SOPs for social selling or event based outreach
• Previous events where conversations happened, but were not clearly tied back to deals or pipeline

Constraints:

• Limited time before the event to build everything from scratch
• No appetite for aggressive automation or generic sequences

In plain terms:

• They had a booth and a presence
• They did not have a pre booked pipeline of meetings that would justify that presence
• They did not have a dedicated internal team to spend months on event prep

That is where Milk & Cookies Studio entered. Our job was to turn a one off event into a structured campaign.

The core challenge: Cutting through the noise

Did we already say “MWC is huge” already? Yeah, MWC is huge. Physically, mentally, and in terms of inbox volume. If you land in Barcelona without a clear strategy, you spend the week reacting.

The core problem had three parts:

1. Identification:Find the people and companies who matched the client’s ICP and were actually planning to be on site.
2. Conversation:Start contact in a way that felt like a human talking to another human, not like a script coming from an automated tool.
3. Protection:Make sure everything sent from the founder’s LinkedIn account respected his personal brand and long term network. One event is not worth burning years of reputation.
4. ObjectivesWe did not want to call this “brand awareness” and leave it there. The objectives were specific and measurable.

Primary objectives of our social selling campaign:

• Book qualified meetings at the client’s booth during MWC
• Generate a set of sales qualified opportunities with clear next steps after the event

Secondary objectives:

• Grow the founder’s LinkedIn network with relevant contacts in their ICP
• Increase familiarity with the brand among companies building or scaling digital products in Europe and the US
• Capture enough data to improve the strategy & procedures for future events

Internally we aligned on target ranges for number of conversations, meetings, and opportunities. The actual results sit in the “Results” section, but the key idea was simple: the event should show up clearly in the CRM.

Target audience

We built our prospect list around three criteria.

• Company profile: Product companies and tech startups that would be at MWC. Companies building or scaling digital products. Organizations with engineering bottlenecks or plans for rapid technical expansion. No agencies, consultancies, or service providers. They weren’t buying what we were selling.
• Roles / Decision makers: Founders and co-founders who could write checks. CTOs who owned technical strategy. CPOs and heads of product who controlled roadmaps. VPs of engineering dealing with capacity problems. Sometimes heads of partnerships or innovation, but only when they had clear budget authority.
• Geography: Primarily European and North American companies. Places where the client already had reference customers and understood the business culture. No point booking meetings with companies from markets where they had zero presence or expertise.

What is Social Selling in B2B Lead Generation?

Let us be clear about what we mean by “social selling”. This is often a buzzword that agencies use to disguise the fact that they are going to spam 5,000 people with an automation.

Our Definition: Social selling is the art of using social networks to find, connect with, understand, and nurture sales prospects, in a non-spammy way. It is the modern equivalent of working the room, except the room is digital and you can see everyone’s resume before you say hello.

The Difference: Classic outbound says: “Hi, I don’t know you, but can I sell you something?” Social selling says: “We are both going to be at MWC. Based on what you are building, it makes sense for us to compare notes”.

Real social selling means understanding that LinkedIn is a professional community, not a simple lead database. People are there to build relationships, share knowledge, and advance their careers. When you respect that context, you can start conversations that feel natural rather than intrusive.

It focuses on relationship-building and adding value, instead of aggressive pitching. It is manual. It is curated. It is personalized. It is relevant. It is human.

(You can read more about our philosophy on our Lead Generation page).

Core principles:

• Relationship before opportunity
• Manual, curated outreach
• No tools blasting generic messages with {{Hello first_name}} customization

Best Practices We Actually Used

Profile optimization came first. The founder’s LinkedIn profile needed to answer three questions instantly.

• Who do you help?
• How do you help them?
• Why should I care during MWC?

We rewrote his headline, updated his about section, and added specific language about meeting at MWC, without the corporate jibber-jabber or buzzwords. Simple and clear value proposition.

Secondly, targeted outreach meant quality control at every step. Every single person on our list had to meet our ICP criteria. They had to be attending or exhibiting at MWC. They had to have a problem we could credibly claim to solve. Volume was explicitly not the goal.

Personalization went beyond “Hi {{firstname}}, i’ve seen you exist on the internet, here is what I want to sell you”. Every message referenced something specific. Their company’s recent funding. A product launch they’d announced. A technical blog post they’d written. A post regarding MWC. Something that proved an actual human had spent time understanding their situation. Something they actually cared about

Thirdly, value-first positioning meant never leading with what WE wanted. Instead of “we’d love to show you our capabilities while at MWC” we offered some insights, perspectives, or introductions to other attendees they might find valuable. The meeting request came after establishing relevance, not before.

Consistency mattered more than intensity. We sent 10-15 connection requests daily, not 100 in a Monday morning blitz. Follow-ups were spaced appropriately. If someone didn’t respond after two attempts, we moved on to creating content and retargeting ads.

No “just bumping this to the top of your inbox” nonsense.

The process for this project: social selling workflow

The heart of the campaign was a super simple, repeatable workflow.

Step 1: Account takeover and tone calibration

We got explicit permission to operate from one founder’s LinkedIn account (and their user and password, obviously).

Before writing a single external message, we:

• Analysed his previous posts, comments, and messages
• Mapped vocabulary, tone, and typical ways of phrasing things

The goal was rather simple: the messages we sent had to feel indistinguishable from his natural communication style. When prospects met him at the booth, nothing should feel “off”.

Step 2: Advanced sourcing beyond the hashtag

We worked across several sources:

• LinkedIn search filtered by job title, company, and MWC related activity
• The official MWC networking app
• Public exhibitor lists

We did follow #MWC23, but we did not stop there. Many companies announce their presence with:

• Press releases on their own websites
• Blog posts
• Mentions in partners’ and sponsors’ communication

We actively searched for these, then cross referenced them with our ICP. Big players with large booths received adapted messages that acknowledged their scale and specific needs.

Step 3: Targeted ads as air cover

We ran a short term, highly targeted campaign around the event (short period + low budget + low audience + high frequency:

• Audience: people at target companies identified in the MWC app and related lists
• Objective: light brand recall, not direct lead generation

We did this because we wanted when the founder’s connection request arrived, the prospect to feel “I have seen this name or brand before”, instead of the regular “Who is this random person”.

Step 4: Engagement and connection

Before sending connection requests, we looked for opportunities to:

• Like or comment meaningfully on recent posts
• Reference something specific in the message, where possible

Connection requests mentioned MWC directly, keeping the context clear and honest.

Step 5: The conversation in the DMs

Here the rules were strict:

• No spam
• No scripts that felt like they had been copied 200 times and made the prospects feel like a cell in a spreadsheet
• No immediate jump to a pitch

A typical process looked like this:

• A short message referencing the shared presence at MWC
  • OR
• One or two sentences to offer some form of insights and value to them, before any pitch
  • After some conversation we went for
• A simple question: “Would you be open to a quick coffee at our booth to swap notes on X?”, X being something discovered in the research or in the conversation.

We also made a deliberate choice on the offer itself.

The “why coffee”

MWC is physically exhausting. People walk 15 to 20 thousand steps per day, spend hours in loud halls, and rarely sit down. Instead of offering “a demo”, we offered:

• A good coffee
• A place to sit for a few minutes
• A short, nice conversation

“Good coffee and a place to sit” is a much lower barrier than “15 minute product presentation”. It respects the reality that attendees are tired humans first and buyers second.

Step 6: Email as backup

For prospects who were less active on LinkedIn or who preferred email, we used:

• Follow up emails to confirm times
• Occasional initial outreach when we had a strong, verified email and limited LinkedIn activity

Email was a supporting channel, not the core. The founder’s LinkedIn presence remained the main engine.

Step 7: On site execution

Once on site, the team:

• Kept a shared Hubspot calendar of confirmed and tentative meetings, linked to the CRM for enrichment and note taking
• Logged conversations in a simple structure that captured context, needs, and next steps
• Used the booth and participation kit (booth number, visuals, official MWC materials) as anchors in the conversation rather than as decoration

Content strategy support

Social selling and direct messages do a lot of the legwork. But they do not have to work alone.

Ahead of and during MWC we co-created with the client’s internal team:

• Short posts announcing their presence, why they were attending, and who they were hoping to meet
• Posts highlighting relevant case studies and capabilities, framed around problems that MWC attendees cared about
• Posts explicitly inviting people with specific problems (“if you are struggling with X while scaling your product, come talk to us at booth Y”)

During-event posts created FOMO and urgency. Photos from the booth with actual visitors. Quick insights from morning keynotes. Observations about tech trends visible on the show floor. Each post reminded our prospect list that we were there, available, and having valuable conversations.

We posted in three LinkedIn groups where our target audience congregated. Not promotional posts, but valuable insights and questions that happened to mention we were discussing these topics at MWC.

At the end of the day, the goal was not to go viral. The main goal was to warm up the part of the audience that would later receive a connection request or see the founder’s name in their notifications.

A few inbound conversations came directly from people who had seen the posts and realised they would also be in Barcelona. But those were a nice bonus, not the core KPI.

Short-term, highly targeted ad campaign

We also added a paid layer, but we didn’t go “full media heavy.”

Objective: Create light brand awareness among people in target companies who were in the MWC networking app or exhibitor ecosystem.

Setup: Targeting companies and people who announced the participations in custom lists.

The campaign ensured that when the founder’s face popped up in a connection request, the recipient’s brain registered a flicker of recognition.

The ads generated approximately 30,000 impressions and 200 clicks. Not massive numbers, but that wasn’t the point. We wanted the right people to recognize our name, not 30,000 random impressions from people who’d never visit our client’s booth.

Results

Now for the part that matters to founders and marketing leaders: what did all of this effort produce.

Outreach metrics:

• 198 relevant people contacted from the founder’s LinkedIn account
• 132 accepted connection requests

That is approximately a 66% connection acceptance rate.

Meeting metrics:

• 17 people said yes to a coffee or meeting at the booth during MWC

Pipeline metrics:

• 9 sales qualified leads (SQLs) generated from those meetings

For reasons of confidentiality we will not disclose individual deal sizes or client names. What we can say is that in the world of high ticket custom software, where individual engagements often sit in the five to six figure range, generating 9 qualified opportunities over 4 days is a serious pipeline injection.

Qualitative results:

• The founder’s LinkedIn network grew in directions that will remain valuable long after MWC
• The client left Barcelona with a clear view of which conversations were worth pursuing and why
• We captured a repeatable process that can be used for future events like Web Summit, Slush, SaaStr, How to web, or any industry specific conference where their buyers gather

Perhaps most importantly, the client avoided the all too common scenario of “busy week, no clear outcomes”.

They came home with named opportunities, next steps, and a CRM that reflected reality.

Key takeaways

For B2B SaaS and software leaders who read case studies looking for reusable patterns, here are the key lessons we would highlight.

• Big events can be reliable pipeline sources if you start weeks before the event, not at the first morning coffee
• One well managed founder profile on LinkedIn can outperform a company page and mass outreach combined
• Social selling is about focused research, relevant content, and honest conversations anchored in real context
• A minimal content and light ads plan around the event significantly increases the effectiveness of manual outreach

Underneath all of this sits one simple mindset change: treat events as campaigns, not as annual rituals. When you do that, MWC and its peers move from “line item in the marketing budget” to “a structured part of your pipeline strategy”.

Lessons you can actually use

Start early or don’t start.

Three weeks was minimum viable time. Six weeks would have been comfortable. One week would have been (probably) worthless. The conversation needs to develop before the event chaos begins.

One authentic voice beats ten generic ones.

Using the founder’s actual LinkedIn profile generated trust that no sales account ever could. People knew they were talking to someone with authority and credibility.

Coffee beats demos.

At a chaotic event, offering rest and refreshment opens more doors than offering presentations. Meet people where they are (exhausted), not where you want them to be (eager to hear your pitch). And make sure you have good coffee.

Social selling is manual labor.

There’s no automation shortcut that doesn’t destroy authenticity. Budget time and resources accordingly. If you can’t do it right, don’t do it.

Track everything or track nothing.

Half-measured execution produces half-clear results. Know your numbers at every stage or you’re just creating expensive activity.

Context is everything.

“We’re both at MWC” is infinitely more powerful than “I’d love to tell you about our services.” Shared context creates natural conversation starters.

The network value outlasts the event.

Those 132 new connections continued generating opportunities months after MWC ended. The immediate SQLs were just the beginning.

Your next move?

You’re planning to attend a major industry event. Could be Web Summit, SaaStr Annual, Collision, MWC or any of the hundred other conferences that promise “unparalleled networking opportunities.”

You have three options.

• Option one: Show up and hope. Print beautiful banners. Train your team to smile. Collect business cards. Achieve nothing measurable.
• Option two: Blast everyone. Buy the attendee list. Send thousands of “Let’s meet at {{Event}}!” messages. Annoy everyone. Damage your brand. Still achieve nothing measurable.
• Option three: Run strategic social selling. Start conversations weeks before. Book qualified meetings. Generate actual pipeline. Prove ROI.

If option three sounds like what you want for your next big event, we should talk. We run these campaigns for B2B software companies that understand relationships drive enterprise deals.

Companies that value their reputation too much for spam but need results too much for random chance.

Contact us and we’ll map out exactly how to turn your next conference into qualified pipeline. #NoBS.

Real conversations with real buyers generating real opportunities.

That’s social selling done right.