Most go-to-market teams treat the conference itself as the deliverable. They optimize for booth aesthetics, badge scan volume, and swag quality — then wonder why event ROI is so hard to defend in the quarterly review. The conference is a point in time. What happens before, during, and after is the actual strategy.
In a recent RevOps Co-op webinar, Matthew Volm, CEO and Founder of RevOps Co-op and Eventful, was joined by Camela Thompson, Head of Marketing at RevOps Co-op, and Kayla Drake, Event Career Coach and Field Marketing Advisor (formerly Head of Field Marketing at Apollo and StackAdapt). Together, they walked through the full lifecycle of an event motion — from building the target list months before the show, to routing leads in real time, to ensuring follow-up actually happens the week after the event ends.
An opening poll framed the conversation plainly: nearly two-thirds of attendees said their event pipeline breaks down most in the "after" — the follow-up phase. That result set the agenda.
When event pipeline goes cold, the culprit is almost always the same: nobody owns what happens next. As Thompson explained, the failure mode is predictable — the sales team holds onto the list because they want to pick and choose which contacts to follow up with, often limiting outreach to people they already know or spoke with at the show. While the team waits, nothing else happens.
"The biggest issue is the follow-up has no owner. We're waiting for that list. While we're waiting for that list, nobody else is doing anything, instead of defining the rules of engagement early on." — Camela Thompson
The fix is not a better email template. It's defining the rules of engagement before the show begins — who owns which leads, what triggers routing to an SDR versus an account executive versus an autonomous outreach sequence, and what the fallback is when no one acts within a defined window. Speed to lead is not just a mantra here; it is the mechanism by which warm leads stay warm.
Before any infrastructure conversation can be productive, the team needs to agree on what success looks like. This sounds obvious. It almost never happens cleanly.
Thompson described a scene that will be familiar to many operators: a CEO appearing at marketing's desk two days after a major conference, asking how much revenue the event generated — despite a six-to-eight-month sales cycle. The problem was not the CEO's question. It was that the marketing leader had never set appropriate timeline expectations, and reporting was not in place to show progress toward the right milestones.
"Marketers should know inside and out their sales cycle. They should know how long from deal create to close, and how long from first touch to close, and they should be communicating regularly about when they expect different benchmarks to mature." — Camela Thompson
Drake reinforced this with a practical framing: the data points available two days after a show — leads scanned, demos booked, badge counts by temperature — are useful primarily for the event marketer evaluating booth traffic. Sales leadership wants to know something different: how many qualified conversations happened, how many meetings were booked in advance, how many accounts in active pipeline showed up. Those are the numbers worth tracking.
The session's slide deck outlined three categories of event goals that often get conflated: new pipeline generation, customer and partner engagement, and brand presence. Treating "more leads" as a strategy collapses these distinctions and makes it impossible to evaluate whether a given event was worth the investment. This is also why getting attribution right for events requires thinking through multi-touch campaign influence well before the show — not reconstructing it afterward.
One of the most actionable sections of the session addressed what to do when the conference organizer doesn't hand you a clean attendee list as part of the sponsorship package. The answer, according to both Drake and Thompson, is to stop waiting.
Drake outlined several practical approaches: ask for the blind attendee list from the prior year as a baseline, cross-reference it against your existing CRM database to find accounts headquartered in the event city, and task one or two BDRs with jumping into the conference app two to three weeks out to send meeting requests directly. Thompson added that the blind company list — even without contact names — is enough to run ABM air cover, route CSMs toward customer accounts that will be on-site, and give the sales team a head start on pre-event outreach.
"Getting that pre-show blind list, being able to get your sales team ready to start the outreach in advance. You can also cross-check it with your database on accounts that are even just in that city, so that whether or not they're going to the show, take advantage of the fact that you're gonna be in that state, in that city." — Kayla Drake
For teams with access to AI tools, the list-building process has become considerably more tractable. Thompson mentioned Clay and Perplexity as ways to enrich partial lists, identify influencers or speakers who have blogged about the event, and surface contact details for companies on the blind list. The goal is to walk into the show with a prioritized account list and pre-booked meetings — not to figure all of that out at the booth.
This kind of pre-event account prioritization connects directly to a broader principle that RevOps teams sometimes underweight: territory management and account assignment determine who should be reaching out to which accounts in the first place. Getting that right before the event prevents the chaotic post-show scramble over who owns which lead.
The panel was uniformly in favor of pre-event outreach — but equally firm that generic outreach does more harm than good. Volm described the failure mode clearly: cold outbound messages that use the prospect's first name and pitch a completely unrelated product. The event version of this is the follow-up email that says, "Hey, saw you went to this event. Want to buy?"
Effective pre-event outreach starts with genuine relevance. If a prospect is attending, let them know about a sidecar dinner, a speaking session, or a meaningful introduction you can facilitate. If a key account is headquartered in the conference city but isn't attending, use the trip as a reason to ask for a meeting. The value exchange has to be real.
Drake framed it as a mindset shift: field marketers are not event planners. They are event marketers, and the distinction matters. A field marketer thinks in terms of pipeline and business outcomes — which accounts will be accessible, what conversations need to happen, and how to set the sales team up to close from those interactions. Showing up at a conference without this orientation, and hoping booth traffic converts itself, is not a strategy.
Thompson outlined the pre-event infrastructure checklist in detail. Several items stand out as particularly high-leverage.
Badge scanning tool selection matters more than most teams realize. A universal badge scanning tool — like Eventful's — pushes data directly into the CRM in real time, allows for talk-to-text notes on each scan, and supports lightweight ICP indicators that populate automatically. A CSV download from the conference's provided scanner delays everything and introduces manual steps that create gaps. Thompson was direct: "I hate CSV uploads."
Campaign structure should reflect how the event actually runs. Rather than a single campaign for the event, create a parent campaign with child campaigns for each activation: booth scans, speaking session attendees, raffle participants, sidecar dinner attendees. This gives the sales team context when they receive leads — a warm lead who attended a CMO keynote needs a different follow-up conversation than someone who stopped by for branded merchandise. Drake noted that this context is often the difference between a follow-up that converts and one that gets ignored.
Routing logic needs to be pre-built, not figured out after the show. Define the lead temperature criteria (cold, warm, hot, hand-raiser) and map each to a follow-up owner before the event begins. Cold leads go to marketing nurture. Warm leads route to SDRs. Hot leads go to account owners. Hand-raisers — demos booked on the show floor — are calendar holds that already exist. When this logic is built into the system in advance, the post-show process is execution, not decision-making.
Reporting should be live before the event starts. Thompson described using Petaview, a tool that aggregates data from Lemlist, HubSpot, and other key systems into a data mart with a visualization layer and a Claude-powered MCP for querying. The practical outcome: Slack alerts that fire automatically when contacts on a rep's list haven't been touched within a defined window, giving reps a last chance to act before automated sequences kick in.
This level of operational sophistication doesn't have to be built all at once. Thompson was clear that their current infrastructure was assembled event by event: first they got their own badge scanner, then they added autonomous AI outreach, then auto-routing. The key is to build a foundation and iterate — not to try to do everything in the first show.
Drake's specific cadence guidance is worth capturing precisely, because most teams either don't have one or don't enforce the one they have.
The day after the show ends — even if it's a Friday — a marketing catch-all email goes to every lead captured. It doesn't need to be sophisticated: a brief "great to meet you" message with a link to a relevant resource and a demo-booking option. This accomplishes two things: it puts one touch on the record before anything else happens, and it allows cold leads to opt into a marketable database rather than being dropped entirely.
The following Monday, the sales team has marching orders. AEs and SDRs have their sequences pre-drafted, their call scripts ready, and calendar blocks already in place for outreach. The goal is two touches to all warm and hot leads that first week.
"If you wait two weeks to follow up to those leads, they're basically cold again. And there's nothing that irks me more than when a field or event marketer is told by a show provider, 'We'll get the list to you in two weeks.' Don't accept that as an answer. Go back to the show provider and tell them, 'I need it within 48 hours. I want it written into my contract.'" — Kayla Drake
This connects to a point Thompson made about the relationship between field marketing and sales: the marketing team's job is not to hand off a list and hope for the best. It is to make the follow-up so well-organized that the sales team has no excuse not to execute. That means pre-drafted sequences, clear routing, prioritized lead lists, and an escalation path when reps don't act. For more on how these handoff dynamics play out in practice, Episode 38: Perfecting Team Handoffs covers the structural issues in detail.
Having a follow-up plan is not the same as the follow-up happening. Thompson described the operational layer that closes that gap.
In the stack she outlined, Lemlist is integrated with HubSpot so marketing can see which sequences are being run and which contacts are getting touched. The autonomous outreach layer — in this case, Woven — has pre-defined rules for who handles initial outreach and who does the follow-up. An intent score and engagement score are used to up-level contacts that haven't been reached within a week, pushing them to the autonomous layer if a rep hasn't acted.
The Petaview layer handles alerting: account and contact owners receive Slack notifications listing which leads on their assigned list haven't been contacted. It is a final trigger before automation takes over.
The broader principle here is that change management and follow-through don't happen through goodwill and good intentions. They happen through systems that make the right behavior easy and make inaction visible. This is especially true in post-event contexts, where the urgency created by the show fades quickly and competing priorities fill the gap.
The final section of the session covered reporting — specifically, the difference between measuring event activity and measuring event effectiveness.
Badge scan counts measure booth traffic. Pipeline generated measures revenue potential. Both matter. But the metrics that tell you whether your event motion is actually working are the ones most teams skip: Was pre-event outreach sent? Did it generate meetings? Were sequences actually launched the week after the show? What was the ICP quality of the contacts scanned, not just the volume?
Thompson recommended segmenting reporting by timeline — KPIs for before the show, during the show, and after the show — and marking each metric by how difficult it is to measure given the current tech stack. That last piece is a kindness to the RevOps team, who often inherit event reporting requests without the infrastructure to fulfill them.
Volm closed with a point about the broader context: digital channels — email, LinkedIn, paid ads — are getting noisier, not quieter, as AI accelerates volume across all of them. Face-to-face interaction, done with operational rigor wrapped around it, is increasingly one of the few channels where trust can be built at speed. The teams that treat events as isolated moments of activity will continue to struggle to justify the investment. The teams that build repeatable event motions — with pre-show infrastructure, real-time lead management, and disciplined post-show follow-through — will find that events compound in a way that digital channels rarely do.
Thompson put it plainly when describing what happened when she finally started building reporting before shows and thinking through follow-up systematically:
"Instead of going to an event and feeling good about it because we had lots of conversations, we could actually start tracking the impact and deciding which ones were actually worth doing and not doing." — Camela Thompson
The practical implication for RevOps teams is that events are one of the highest-investment line items in most marketing budgets, and they are also one of the most under-operationalized. Wrapping the right infrastructure around in-person moments is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a conference that builds the business case for more events and one that gets cut in the next planning cycle.
Learn more about how Eventful helps revenue and marketing teams manage event lead capture, routing, and follow-up — the operational infrastructure that turns conference activity into measurable pipeline.
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