Thirteen things that decide the return on an event. Only a few happen at the event.

Black Hat in Vegas rolls around next week and if you work in cyber half your feed will be photographs of stands and queues by Wednesday.

If you don’t work in cyber, stay with me, because none of this is about Black Hat. Every industry has its version. Swap in your own big one, or a regional show, a partner roadshow, your user conference, or a function room above a pub with forty people in it. The mechanics are identical. Only the number of zeroes moves.

For most marketing teams, events are the single biggest thing they spend money on outside of digital. Gartner’s CMO spend survey puts event marketing top of that non-digital list, and that’s in a year where overall budgets have flattened at under 8% of company revenue and more than half of CMOs say they haven’t got enough to deliver their plan. So it’s the largest bet on the table, placed in a year where there’s nothing spare to cover it if it doesn’t come off.

And they can be worth it. A few thousand of the right people, out of the office, unusually willing to talk to strangers. Four days can do what six months of polite emailing cannot.

The catch is that almost none of the return is decided on the day. It’s decided in a planning meeting months earlier and in a follow-up process three weeks afterwards. Which is the good news, because those are the parts entirely within your control.

There’s plenty of advice doing the rounds this week on how to work a stand, most of it sound, nearly all of it about the four days themselves. What follows here is an extended version. What to settle before you commit, how to use an audience once you’ve paid to be near it, how to behave when you’re standing there, and the part afterwards that separates the programmes that get funded again from the ones that quietly vanish off the plan.

Thirteen of them, for whoever signs the purchase order as much as whoever stands on the trade show floor.

Before you commit

1. Go to fewer events and fund them properly

Every company has the show that’s been on the plan for six years that nobody can remember choosing. Ask why and you’ll get an answer about building relationships, delivered slightly too quickly.

Every time I’ve cut an events programme down it has performed better overall. Not because the cut shows were bad, but because an event isn’t a purchase, it’s an operation, and no small team runs twelve of them well.

I’ve written before about the strategic no, and this is where it earns its money. Is this event driving the outcomes the business needs? If not, why are we doing it?

• Write one sentence next to every event on the plan explaining why it’s there. Anything that reads “because we always do it” comes off.
• Set a floor per event covering space, build, people, travel, a plan to drive people to you, and the evenings. If the budget won’t clear it, don’t go. Half a presence doesn’t get you half the result, it gets you almost nothing.
• Move the money from what you cut into what you kept, rather than handing it back.
• Attend a show once before you ever sponsor it. A flight and a ticket is a cheap way to find out whether your buyers are actually in that hall.
• Budget everything that sits on top of the sponsorship fee. Brand and stand design, AV, internet, scanner hire, printing, giveaways, travel and expenses, and shipping both ways. It routinely adds 20% or more to the number in the contract.

2. Agree what good looks like before anyone books a flight

The event ends, the numbers land, and the argument starts. Sales says the leads were rubbish, marketing says nobody followed them up, and both are usually right because nobody defined the job in advance.

Pick one primary metric. Pipeline. Visibility and press coverage of a key launch. Time with existing customers. New data on who your ideal customer actually is, which a hall full of them will give you cheaper than any research project. Or a year of analyst and journalist meetings compressed into three days. All legitimate, all bought differently, and none of them achievable simultaneously on one budget.

• Write one sentence that finishes “this event is a success if we” and make it specific enough to argue with.
• One primary number, and no more than two supporting it. A dashboard of twelve metrics is the same as having none.
• If the goal is awareness, say what you want people to walk away remembering and where they’ll actually hear it. Every company in that hall is claiming much the same thing, so your tagline on a banner is not a plan.
• Then decide how you’ll know it worked. Press and analyst coverage is the usual proxy and a fair one, provided you count whether your language showed up rather than counting clippings. Branded search, direct traffic and engagement from target accounts in the fortnight afterwards is the cleaner read.
• Sales, marketing and the exec sponsor all sign it. That sentence settles every argument you’ll have down the line.

3. The real work starts three weeks before the doors open

Most attendees arrive with the week already booked. Turn up hoping for passing trade and you’re competing for the gaps in a diary that filled while you were choosing carpet tiles.

Watch where attention goes in a planning meeting and you’ll see the imbalance. Forty minutes on merchandise, samples round the table, a genuine debate about sock quality. Nothing on who you’re trying to meet.

This one isn’t marketing’s job alone, either. If the reps won’t work the list beforehand, you haven’t bought an event, you’ve bought a stand and some hope.

• Get the attendee, exhibitor and speaker lists the day they publish. Match them against target accounts and open pipeline in your CRM.
• Start outreach three to four weeks out, offering a specific time rather than a vague hello. Go to existing customers and live opportunities first, because they’re the easiest yes and the most valuable meeting.
• Give every rep a personal target for meetings booked before they land, and report on it before you fly.

4. Use the audience while they’re all in one place

This is the bit most companies leave on the table. You have paid to be in a building containing your entire market, and then done nothing with it beyond standing behind a counter.

Speaking slots are the best of it. A captive room, thirty minutes, no competitor within earshot, and a queue of people afterwards who came to you.

Scale-ups, listen up, because this is where you can beat companies with ten times your budget. A call for papers costs nothing but a deadline and a decent idea. You can be the most talked about company in a hall without renting a square metre of it. Submissions usually close months out, so put the deadlines in a calendar now and treat them as deadlines rather than aspirations. If you’ve missed them, there are almost always partner sessions, panels and sponsor theatres still going.

Then look at what the stand itself can do beyond conversation. Rolling demos on a schedule give people a reason to come at a particular time and give your team a natural opener. Competitions genuinely work, provided the prize attracts buyers rather than collectors.

And run something in the evening. Twelve of the right customers and prospects around a table costs a fraction of a bigger stand and does more. Keep it light. No pitch, no deck, no awkward thank you speech. People do business with people they’ve had a decent evening with, and that is the entire mechanism.

• Diarise every call for papers a year ahead. It’s the cheapest visibility available to you.
• Schedule rolling demos and short talks on the stand, and publish the times in advance.
• If you run a competition, pick a prize your buyer wants and nobody else does.
• Host a dinner or drinks for a mixed room of customers and prospects. Customers sell better than you do.

5. Send the right people, not the available ones

Your SDRs will work an aisle for eight hours and enjoy it. Good ones anyway. This is the one week a year when their instincts are exactly the right instincts, so give them a target and something worth winning and let them off the leash.

You also need someone who can answer the awkward technical question without phoning a friend. The person doing a real evaluation will find your limits in about ninety seconds, and will think more of you for saying so.

And if the revenue side won’t release sellers for the week, take that seriously rather than working around it. It tells you exactly what they think this event is worth, and it’s a conversation worth having before the money is committed rather than after.

• Set the ratio deliberately. If marketing outnumbers sales on your stand, something has gone wrong.
• One genuine expert on the rota at all times, named, so nobody has to promise to come back to someone.
• Remember that every extra person you send is a flight, a hotel, and a week of their time not spent on anything else.

6. Brief them like they’ve read nothing, because they haven’t

You spent a week on the deck. They didn’t open it. You ran a pre-brief call. Half of them were on mute doing something else. This isn’t disrespect, it’s a busy quarter, and the answer is to be prescriptive rather than disappointed.

• Get everyone there early. On site the day before, or at the stand well before doors, not arriving with the first attendees.
• Huddle on the stand before doors every morning. Five minutes. Who’s on, what’s changed, what we’re pushing today.
• Publish a rota with names and times, plus the key moments of each day. Keynote clashes, lunch dips, the quiet last afternoon, teardown.
• Four hour shifts maximum. A tired person on hour six is worse than an empty stand.
• One page in their hand. Who demos, who qualifies, what happens to a name once captured, and what to do with a journalist or an analyst.
• Wrap up at the end of each day. What worked, what to change tomorrow.

7. Build the follow-up before you fly

We’ve all had the email. “It was great to meet you at [EVENT NAME]”, sent eleven days later by a company that spent six figures to have the conversation.

Nobody has ever written a good follow-up at 11pm in a hotel room with sore feet. Write it before you go and schedule it in advance, because this isn’t a follow-up problem, it’s a planning problem.

• Templates, sequences, routing rules and owners built before anyone travels.
• Make the notes field mandatory at capture. A name with no context is a stranger, not a lead.
• First wave out within 48 hours, referencing what was actually discussed.
• Decide in advance what happens to the people who aren’t ready. They’re most of the list and most of the eventual value.
• Set the campaign codes and CRM fields up before the show, not after. Attribution you bolt on later is attribution nobody trusts.

While you’re there

8. Twenty actual conversations beat four hundred scans

There’s one at every show. Parked at the back of the stand, picking off lanyards at 200 metres like it’s Call of Duty. He’ll finish with 1,400 scanned “leads” and nothing anybody can put in a forecast.

He isn’t lazy. He’s doing exactly what he’s measured on, which is the oldest trap in measurement and one that works on everybody. Give a team a scan target and you get scans.

• Target booked meetings, not badges.
• Get the calendar out while they’re standing there. “I’ll follow up next week” is where opportunities go to die.
• Three questions, every time. What are you responsible for, what made you stop, what’s broken right now.

9. Be a normal human being

There’s a stance you see at every show. Arms folded at the front of the stand, feet apart, scanning the aisle like a bouncer deciding whether you’re getting in, or a guard posted over the crown jewels. Nobody is walking into that.

The opposite is just as bad. Slumped on a stool, back to the aisle, halfway through a sandwich, giving off strong “please don’t approach me” energy.

Somewhere in the middle is a person saying hello and asking how someone’s day is going. That’s it. That’s the skill. Most people at a conference are tired, slightly lost and have been pitched at four times before lunch. Being pleasant is a genuine differentiator, which tells you something about the state of our industry.

• Say hello first, ask how their day is going, then get to the business.
• Stand out front with an open posture. No folded arms, nothing between you and the aisle.
• Ninety seconds for everybody, whatever their badge says. The consultant is often the one running the evaluation, and the person with the dull job title is often the one writing the requirements.
• Agree one graceful exit line as a team, for the lovely people who want a chat and a sit down.

10. Leave with more than leads

Everyone you spend the year trying to get on a call is in one building. Customers, partners, executives, press. That is the cheapest content shoot you will ever run, and most companies walk past it.

The floor is also the best competitive research available to you. Not the websites, the actual demos, the claims being made out loud, the stands that have quietly halved in size since last year.

• Book a quiet room and a camera, and line up the customer interviews before you travel. A day of filming feeds six months of campaigns.
• Get proper photography of your own stand and team early, while everything is clean and the aisle is busy. You’ll use those pictures all year.
• Send one person to walk the floor properly on the quietest afternoon, with a list of who to look at and what to note.
• Write the competitor notes up the same day, while you still remember which claim came from which stand.

Afterwards

11. Count meetings, and give it time to work

Scans are an attendance figure. They tell you the hall was busy, which you knew, because you were standing in it.

Event pipeline takes months rather than weeks to appear properly. The 30 day report will always make the channel look worse than it is, and I’ve watched decent programmes get killed on the strength of one.

• Report meetings held, opportunities created, and the all in cost per opportunity. Retire scan counts.
• Agree the measurement window with sales leadership before you go, not after the first number lands.

12. Do the debrief, and say the ugly part out loud

CEOs remember what things cost. The quickest way to lose next year’s argument is to spend heavily, go quiet, and then reappear six weeks later with a fresh ask for something entirely different. It reads as though the last one didn’t work, whether it did or not, and it’s the single most common own goal in marketing leadership.

Close the loop on what’s already in flight before you open the next conversation. Good, bad and ugly, in your own words, early. Nobody has ever lost credibility by being first to say what didn’t work. Plenty have lost it by being second.

• Written debrief inside two weeks, to the exec team, sales leadership and whoever signed the cheque.
• State plainly what didn’t work and what you’d change. Volunteering it is worth more than defending it later.
• Come back at 90 days with what the pipeline actually did, because that’s when the honest number exists.
• The events that earned it get more next year. The honest answer on the rest funds everything else.
• Don’t ask for the next big investment until the last one has been reported on.

And one that runs through all of it

13. Be kind to the marketing team

Some of these events have been twelve months in the making. Contracts, freight, artwork, badge lists, catering minimums, a build that turned up with two left panels, and a hundred small decisions made by people who have been carrying this since last autumn. The stand you walk onto on Tuesday morning did not appear on its own.

So bring some energy to it. Turn up on time, not twenty minutes after doors when somebody else has been covering for you. Be in the room while you’re in the room. And put the laptop down, because the sight of a senior person doing email in the corner of a stand tells every passing buyer exactly how much this matters, and it’s a worse look for you than it is for the brand. If something is genuinely on fire, step off the floor for five minutes and deal with it. A decent rota gives everybody that space.

If the event manager is short with you on the Tuesday, it isn’t personal. They’ve been absorbing other people’s chaos since February so that your week looks easy. Bring them a coffee and ask what needs doing.

Then say thank you. Out loud, to the people who built it, before you get in the taxi.

• No laptops on the stand. Urgent things get handled off the floor, briefly.
• Thank the event team by name, and again in writing when you’re home.

Most of this costs nothing. The events that pay for themselves aren’t the ones with the best stands. They’re the ones where somebody decided in advance what the week was for, used the audience properly while it was in the building, and kept talking to everyone they met after the crate went home.

Wear comfortable shoes and drink more water than you think you need. Halls are hot and days are long.

See you in the swag queue. I’ll be the one in the boring shoes.

Godspeed.