The Global Leadership Summit 2026 has announced 14 faculty speakers, including Craig Groeschel, Jim Collins, and Arthur C. Brooks. If you sell to founders, operators, or anyone with a leadership title, this conference puts your buyers in one room. That's the whole pitch.
We've written about the pipeline case for this event before. The speaker list just made it sharper.
Who's actually on the faculty
The 2026 lineup leans hard into practical leadership frameworks. Jim Collins wrote Good to Great and has spent two decades studying why some companies compound and others stall. Craig Groeschel runs one of the largest churches in the US and talks about organisational culture in a way that translates to any team. Arthur C. Brooks writes about happiness and purpose at work, which sounds soft until you realise every founder you're selling to is quietly worried about burnout.
There are 11 more names. The pattern is consistent: authors, CEOs, and operators who give attendees something they can use on Monday. Not motivational speakers. Not celebrities. People whose books are already on your prospect's shelf.
What makes this faculty useful for outbound isn't the star power — it's the specificity. A roster built around named frameworks means attendees leave with shared vocabulary: Collins' flywheel and Level 5 leadership, Groeschel's language around staff culture and burnout, Brooks' distinction between happiness and meaningfulness. That vocabulary shows up in how teams describe their own problems for months afterward. It also shows up in job postings, internal decks, and the language a VP of Sales uses when they're justifying a new tool to their CFO.
For a founder running outbound, that's the actual signal. You're not guessing at pain points from a generic industry report — you're working from a documented set of ideas your prospect has already paid to sit with. A message that references the flywheel, or frames your product as reducing the cultural drag Groeschel describes, lands differently than one that opens with "I noticed you're hiring."
That matters for outbound. When you know what your prospect is reading, you know what they care about.
Why this conference is different from the usual circuit
Most B2B conferences are vendor floors with a speaking track bolted on. The Global Leadership Summit is the inverse. People pay to attend the sessions. The vendor presence is lighter. Attendees show up because they want the frameworks, not because their company sent them to scout tools.
That changes the outbound math.
At a typical SaaS conference, your prospect is there to evaluate. They expect to be pitched. At a leadership summit, your prospect is there to think. They're not in buying mode. They're in reflection mode.
Which means the email you send after the event has to match that headspace. "Saw you were at GLS, here's our product" gets deleted. "Saw you were at GLS, curious what you thought of the Collins session on Level 5 leadership" gets a reply.
There's a structural reason this works, and it's worth understanding before you build a sequence around it. A paid leadership summit filters for a specific buyer profile: someone with budget authority, someone whose company trusts them to spend on their own development, and someone who has already decided that thinking about how they lead is worth two days of their calendar. That's a narrower list than a trade show floor, but it's a higher-intent one — just not purchase intent. It's intent to change something about how they operate.
That distinction should shape everything downstream. The follow-up isn't a pitch, it's a continuation of the conversation the speaker started. Reference the specific session, the specific claim, the specific tension the speaker left unresolved. Ask what they took from it. You are not asking for a meeting. You are asking a question a peer would ask.
We've seen this play out. A customer running outbound to UK accountancy firms used a similar approach after a finance conference. Instead of pitching, they referenced a specific session and asked a question. Reply rate was 3x their baseline. The prospects who replied weren't ready to buy. But they were ready to talk.
That's the trade. You give up the immediate demo request and get a real conversation with someone who remembers why they replied. For a founder or a small team without the headcount to burn on volume, that trade is usually the right one.
The pipeline playbook for GLS 2026
Here's what we'd do if we were running outbound around this event.
- Build the list now. Speaker announcements are public. Attendee lists are harder. Start with companies whose leadership teams are likely to send someone. Mid-market firms, faith-based organisations, and founder-led businesses are the core demographic. Work backwards from the faculty roster: each speaker implies a cluster of organisations that already invest in that kind of thinking, whether through leadership development budgets, conference travel, or internal culture programmes. Those clusters are your addressable market, and they're identifiable months before anyone books a flight.
- Segment by speaker interest. If your prospect's LinkedIn shows they follow Jim Collins, that's a signal. If they've posted about culture, Groeschel is the hook. Match the reference to the person. The mistake most teams make is treating the event as a single campaign. It isn't. It's fourteen overlapping conversations, and the relevance of your opener depends entirely on which one your prospect is already having.
- Time the send. Two weeks before the event, people are planning. One week after, they're processing. Both windows work. The week of the event, your email gets buried. If you're targeting attendees specifically, the post-event window is usually stronger, because the intent to act on a takeaway is highest in the days immediately after, before operational reality reasserts itself.
- Lead with a question, not a pitch. "What was your takeaway from the Brooks session?" is a better opener than anything you'll write about your product. It works because it's answerable in one line, it signals you paid attention, and it doesn't ask for anything. That last part matters more than most outreach advice admits.
- Follow up with something useful. If they reply, send a relevant article or framework. Not a demo link. Not yet. The sequence only converts if the first two touches establish that you're worth replying to a third time.
The goal isn't to book a meeting at the conference. It's to start a conversation that becomes a meeting three weeks later. Treat the event as a timing signal, not a territory. You're not competing for attention on the floor; you're arriving in the inbox at the moment your prospect is already thinking about the problem you solve.
What doesn't work at leadership events
We tried the "are you attending?" email template last year for a different conference. Reply rate was under 1%. The problem: everyone sends that email. It's the cold email equivalent of "just following up."
What worked instead was specificity. Not "are you going to GLS?" but "saw the Collins session is on Friday, are you staying for the whole thing or just the first day?" That's a real question. It assumes they're going. It gives them something to answer.
The other thing that doesn't work: sending to everyone on the attendee list with the same message. If you're going to reference a speaker, reference the one your prospect would actually care about. A 30-year-old SaaS founder and a 55-year-old church administrator are not going to the same sessions.
There's a structural reason generic outreach fails at events like this. A 14-speaker faculty means the attendee list is not one audience — it's at least a dozen overlapping ones, segmented by role, industry, and which sessions they've already flagged in the app. When you send one message to the whole list, you're not segmenting by any of those dimensions. You're guessing, and the recipient can tell. The tell isn't the copy itself; it's the mismatch between what you reference and what they're actually there for.
The fix is procedural, not creative. Before writing anything, map each prospect to the session most likely on their calendar, then write to that session. If you can't make that mapping, the prospect isn't ready for outreach yet — they belong in a nurture sequence, not a send. That filter alone removes most of the list, which is the point. A smaller, correctly-segmented send outperforms a full-list blast on every metric that matters, and it protects the domain reputation you'll need for the next event.
Segmentation takes time. It's worth it.
If you're not going, you can still work the event
You don't need a ticket to run pipeline around a conference. You need the speaker list, the schedule, and a reason to reach out.
We've written before about extracting attendee lists before your competitors do. The same logic applies here. The earlier you build the list, the more time you have to personalise.
The mechanics are straightforward, but the sequencing matters. Start with the faculty roster, since each speaker anchors a cluster of attendees with shared interests — people who registered specifically to hear that person. From there, work outward:
- Map the schedule to segments. A session on operational resilience draws a different buyer than one on talent retention. Tag each block accordingly so your messaging matches the room, not the event as a whole.
- Layer in public signals. Speaker announcements, sponsor pages, and LinkedIn event activity all surface names before the badge list does. Cross-reference these against your existing CRM to avoid duplicating outreach you've already sent.
- Time your sequences to the agenda. A message sent the week a prospect's target session is announced reads as relevant. The same message three weeks later reads as noise.
And if you're selling to founders specifically, the pipeline case for this event is worth reading. The short version: leadership conferences attract decision-makers who are already thinking about how to improve. That's a warm audience for anything that makes their job easier.
The constraint isn't access to names — it's the discipline to segment, personalise, and sequence before the event window closes. Most teams skip that work and default to a generic blast the week of. The ones who don't are the ones who book meetings.
What we'd do next
Pull the speaker list. Cross-reference it against your ICP. Write three email variants, each referencing a different speaker. Send them two weeks before the event and one week after. Track replies, not opens.
That last instruction matters more than it looks. Open rates are a vanity metric in event-triggered outreach, because Apple's Mail Privacy Protection inflates them and because a prospect who opens your email three times without replying is still a prospect who hasn't replied. Reply rate is the only signal that tells you whether the speaker hook actually landed. If variant A (the keynote speaker) outperforms variant C (the breakout facilitator), that's not a coincidence — it tells you which part of the agenda your ICP is actually paying attention to, and it should reshape how you frame the next touch.
The sequencing deserves the same discipline. Two weeks before the event, your prospect is in planning mode: they're deciding whether to attend, booking travel, or declining. A speaker reference at that stage reads as useful context. One week after, they're in follow-up mode: they've collected business cards, they're comparing notes with their team, and they're more receptive to a conversation that connects the event's themes to their own pipeline. The gap between those two windows is where most outreach dies, because senders either front-load everything into the pre-event window or wait so long that the event is stale.
Three variants is also a floor, not a ceiling. If your ICP spans two distinct segments — say, founders evaluating outbound tooling and sales leads evaluating sequencing — you likely need six variants, not three, because the speaker that resonates with one segment may be irrelevant to the other. The cross-reference step is what surfaces that split. Don't skip it.
If you want to see how MiraReach handles the list-building and personalisation side, give it a try. We built it for exactly this kind of workflow.
— Mira