Few topics divide opinion in B2B marketing quite like events and tradeshows.
Mention exhibitions, conferences, customer events, or hospitality and you’ll usually get one of two reactions: some people absolutely swear by them, others see them as expensive distractions that consume budget, time and resource for questionable returns.
I’m usually somewhere in the middle.
Events have been a fixture of B2B marketing for decades because, when they’re done well, they really can work. Relationships are built, deals move forward, customers spend time with suppliers, and quality conversations happen far more quickly face-to-face than they ever do over email or Zoom. It’s why so many organisations continue to invest heavily in them.
But events also have a habit of escaping the scrutiny that might be applied to other areas of marketing spend and activity. Businesses will forensically interrogate campaign performance, challenge ad spend and content investment, and question marketing tech spend, while signing off on six-figure exhibition budgets with remarkably little debate.
I’ve seen organisations generate and close significant pipeline from a single event. I’ve also seen businesses spend £ tens of thousands on exhibitions that delivered very little. The difference rarely comes down to the event itself. More often, it’s whether the event (and the activity surrounding it) is serving a clear, well-defined commercial strategy… or just becoming a substitute for one.
Why we love events
Events are highly tangible
There’s something reassuringly visible about events. Unlike many marketing activities, you can see where the money has gone. There’s a stand! With customers! There are meetings in the diary! People are talking! Competitors are over there! And leaders can attend and feel that something meaningful is happening.
Whether that visibility correlates with commercial impact is another question altogether. But events benefit from something many marketing activities don’t: they’re difficult to ignore. A busy show stand often feels more valuable than, say, a nurture programme or digital ABM campaign.
Face-to-face relationships still matter
People (still) buy from people. For complex B2B purchases, face-to-face conversations remain one of the quickest ways to build trust, and a 15-minute chat at an industry event can sometimes achieve more than months of outreach and follow-up.
Events also bring together an entire ecosystem in one place. Customers, prospects, partners, suppliers, industry experts, competitors suddenly all within walking distance. Few marketing channels offer that kind of concentration of opportunity, and that’s why events remain such a powerful part of the mix.
Nobody wants to be the one missing
There’s another reason many organisations invest in events, although it’s one that rarely appears in any business case: fear.
“Our competitors are exhibiting.” “We’ve always attended.” “Our customers expect to see us there.” Sometimes the decision to exhibit has less to do with strategy and more to do with avoiding the discomfort of being absent.
Now, market visibility absolutely matters. But it’s always worth asking the question: Are we attending because the event will demonstrably help us achieve our commercial objectives, or because not attending feels ‘risky’? The two aren’t the same thing.
Multiple objectives make events easy to defend
Part of the appeal of events is that they can support so many different objectives at once.
A single event might strengthen customer relationships, generate pipeline, support channel partners, create content opportunities, build brand visibility, and provide valuable competitor and market intelligence. That’s a pretty compelling proposition.
The challenge, of course, is that ‘might’ often gets mistaken for ‘did’.
But because events can theoretically be delivering multiple outcomes, they often escape clear accountability. Success becomes easier to claim and harder to prove.
Why we hate events
They’re expensive
The biggest criticism is obvious: events cost money. Often a lot of it. Start with stand space, then add exhibition build and branding costs, sponsorship packages, travel, accommodation, hospitality, and bar bills (!) and true costs can escalate quickly.
Consider also the time required: planning and executing an event well takes a fair degree of time and attention, often from multiple people.
Then there’s the opportunity cost. Every pound invested in an event is a pound that can’t be invested elsewhere. And every day spent planning a show or manning a stand is a day that sales and marketing teams aren’t focused on other commercial priorities.
The financial investment is visible, the cost of staff time and distraction from other things is harder to measure, but just as real.
ROI is often difficult to prove
The challenge of measuring success doesn’t help either.
Marketing might focus on leads, sales might talk quality about conversations, or (hopefully) opportunities, finance wants revenue, leadership wants commercial outcomes.
All related, but ever-so-slightly different, so it’s hardly surprising that opinions on event performance can vary wildly.
And that’s before you consider the fact that many businesses never properly define success in the first place! If the objective wasn’t clearly articulated and quantified before the event, evaluating whether it delivered becomes little more than an exercise in hindsight.
Activity =/= impact
Too often, events become a bit of ‘hope marketing’: book a stand, turn up and scan some badges or collect some business cards, then pack everything away and hope something eventually happens.
The event itself becomes the strategy, rather than being one tactic within a wider commercial plan.
Similarly, too many businesses celebrate the wrong metrics after an event. Footfall, badge scans, giveaway numbers and stand traffic are all useful indicators, but they don’t really tell you whether the event created commercial value.
Activity matters, but activity alone isn’t evidence of impact. The more important questions are usually different: Did we engage the right accounts? Which buying group members did we reach? What opportunities were created or accelerated? What pipeline was influenced? What revenue was generated? Those are the questions that matter.
How to make events work harder
Start with strategy
The biggest shift is fairly simple: start with your go-to-market strategy, and not your events calendar.
Too many planning discussions begin with a list of exhibitions everyone attended last year, the assumption being that the same events will automatically make sense next year.
A much better starting point is understanding your commercial objectives, your target segments, ideal customers and buying groups… and then defining the role that events could play. Events should be supporting your strategy, not defining it.
Be rigorous with event selection, and decision making
Not every event deserves a stand. Sometimes a speaking slot delivers greater impact, sometimes a customer dinner might create more value, sometimes sending a handful of salespeople is all that’s required.
A more strategic approach to events usually means making conscious trade-offs. Does this event reach the audience we’re trying to engage? Are the right decision-makers attending? Will we gain something unique from being present? And how does this compare to alternative uses of the time and money?
Event selection should be treated like any other commercial decision – not an annual tradition that nobody quite remembers how to challenge.
Plan the campaign, not just the event
An event should be one moment in a much longer campaign or programme, where success is driven by the engagement that happens before, during and after the event day.
So, before the event, create a plan for how you’ll engage target accounts and customers. During the event, capture conversations, insights and content opportunities. Afterwards, execute structured, purposeful and pre-planned follow-up.
And, crucially, decide upfront how every meeting, conversation, and opportunity will be captured in your CRM, so performance is visible, measurable and attributable long after the exhibition hall has emptied.
Align sales and marketing around shared accountability
I’m a firm believer that events shouldn’t belong to ‘sales’ or to ‘marketing’ alone: they should be owned by the entire go-to-market team.
Some of the strongest event programmes I’ve been part of have had shared ownership, with each show belonging to a named marketing leader and a named sales leader: both accountable for planning, both accountable for execution, both accountable for outcomes.
Shared accountability usually leads to better planning, stronger collaboration… and far less finger-pointing when it’s time to review the results. If marketing only owns the stand and sales only owns the conversations, nobody really owns the overall result.
I also love to force the discipline of setting an objective or target for each show, so you’re going into the process with a clear, quantified commercial goal and starting with an end in mind.
Events are neither guaranteed successes nor outdated relics from a pre-digital age. Used well, they’re still one of the most effective ways to build relationships, accelerate opportunities and strengthen market position.
But the organisations seeing the greatest returns aren’t simply attending more events. They’re the ones making more deliberate choices, the ones integrating events into a wider go-to-market strategy, the ones measuring outcomes rather than activity, and the ones treating events as a commercial investment rather than a marketing ritual.