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Glossary

Event-led growth

Event-led growth is a growth strategy in which in-person interactions are the main engine of new pipeline and expansion, and the company chooses, runs, and defends its event portfolio on measured yield.

Your growth plan depends on events, and that plan rests on your own evidence.

What makes growth event-led?

It takes 2 conditions:

  • Events are a primary source of your pipeline. Events commonly take 20 to 50 percent of the marketing program budget at event-dependent companies, and at the events-led end of the market one company can trace most of its revenue to them.
  • You manage your events as a portfolio. You ask which events produce, for which accounts, and why, and you use the answers to decide what to attend next year.

Without the second condition, your company is only event-dependent.

Why is it hard to run?

Your company has never measured events the way it measures digital. Your media buyers analyze every dollar of a digital campaign down to per-lead outcomes by reflex. Then your company commits far more to an event season and flies blind.

So event-led growth depends on what Measure every dollar argues for:

  • A plan for every event.
  • A record of who talked to whom.
  • The conversation itself.
  • Follow-through your sales managers enforce.
  • Yield that updates itself as the work happens.

“Before you even commit, can you have more insight than what the company is trying to give you, because they’re always gonna hype it up?”

A digital agency founder who buys media for a living, on choosing events

How do you recognize it in practice?

You’re event-led when, before you sign the next sponsorship contract, you can say what a comparable show produced last time and for whom. Most companies decide on the organizer’s pitch and tribal memory. The goal is to base the largest discretionary line in your budget on your own record of past shows.

Related terms

  • Event-driven GTMEvent-driven GTM is a go-to-market approach in which events are a primary pipeline source, so the company plans, staffs, and measures them as a revenue channel.
  • In-person pipelineIn-person pipeline is the set of sales opportunities that an in-person interaction started or advanced, which a team tracks from the conversation to the CRM record to closed revenue.
  • Event-driven revenueEvent-driven revenue is closed-won revenue that a team can trace to an in-person interaction, whether the event sourced it or influenced it, and report with the same rigor a board expects from digital channels.
  • In-person GTMIn-person GTM is the go-to-market channel that covers trade shows, field marketing, hosted events, executive dinners, alliance events, satellite events, and roadshows, treated as one revenue workflow.
  • Event portfolioAn event portfolio is the full set of events a company commits to in a year, from trade shows to hosted dinners, which the company views together so it can compare results event by event and move budget to what produces.

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