The Last Unmanaged Workflow in B2B Revenue

Why does your team still run in-person GTM by hand?

When I asked a director of events at an enterprise software company, a team running about 200 events a year, to describe how the work runs today, she didn’t reach for jargon.

“It’s pretty manual and gross right now.”

Hers is one of the most sophisticated event operations I’ve seen. This essay is about why she’s right anyway, and about the conclusion I’ve come to. In-person GTM is the last unmanaged workflow in B2B revenue.

I ran event-driven GTM at three B2B software companies from early stage to $1B+ valuations, and I’ve lived this problem across 300+ events. I’ve built booths at six in the morning, watched scanners die in the opening rush, and flown home with the most important conversation of the quarter living only in my own memory.

I’ve also compared notes with 30+ people who run in-person GTM, operators to CMOs at companies from $5M to $500M ARR.

What’s the most expensive line your company doesn’t manage?

Start with scale. In 2024, 318 million people visited business events worldwide, and 4.7 million companies exhibited, according to UFI, the Global Association of the Exhibition Industry. In the mid-market, events commonly consume 20 to 50 percent of the B2B marketing program budget. At the extreme, one company attributes roughly three quarters of its revenue to the channel.

Now look at how your company manages that money:

• Your target list is a spreadsheet.
• Your pre-event plan is a kickoff doc your sales team won’t read.
• Your record of each booth conversation is a badge scan: a name with no context.
• Your follow-up process is a policy with no system behind it.
• If you own the number, you piece the attribution story together by hand, weeks later.

Every other line this size in your budget has its own software to run it:

• Demand gen has the ad platforms and the automation stack.
• Sales has the CRM and the engagement tooling.
• Finance has the ERP.

Your in-person channel runs on the same tools as a church picnic.

A digital agency founder who buys media for a living described the gap better than I ever had:

“If you were to give me thirty thousand dollars to run a campaign, we’re gonna analyze every piece of data… but how they’re actually optimizing any of this, I just genuinely don’t know how they would.”

That founder tracks a $30,000 campaign down to what each lead turned into. The same company will commit far more than that to an event season and fly blind.

Those two dollars differ only in where they flow. One flows through systems that record as they run, so you get the numbers for free. The other flows through airports, expo halls, and hallway conversations, off the record, so you don’t measure it, so you don’t improve it. And in your budget meeting, the unmeasured channel loses the argument by default.

Why were your events never a measurement problem?

For twenty years the standard diagnosis has been that events are a measurement problem: fix attribution and you’ll see what the channel returns. I used to believe that. I no longer do.

That diagnosis assumes your team’s work is fine and only the record is missing. But walk your own event from start to finish: which accounts matter, who covers them, what buyers said in the aisle, who follows up, and what came of it.

You’ll find sales, SDRs, executives, and customer success each doing a piece of the work. One spreadsheet and a hopeful email hold it all together. Event-driven GTM is work your whole company shares, and it has never had a system to run on.

And if you own the outcome, you can’t compel any of the people who do the work. A head of events put it plainly:

“How can I make this the easiest, so easy for everyone else, but I know my success depends on everyone in the company.”

That’s a coordination problem, and the industry has misfiled it as a marketing problem for two decades. The work breaks down between your teams, and the handoff has no owner.

Why does the failure repeat in three acts?

The failure repeats so consistently across companies that I can tell it in three acts.

Act one: before the event

Your sales and marketing teams need to agree on which accounts matter and who covers them, and they do it in a spreadsheet. A director of events on what happens when the spreadsheet goes out: “You send them a spreadsheet… they’re like, cool, I’m going to look at this. Never.”

Underneath the ignored doc sits a worse problem: your reps don’t trust the list. A director of performance marketing walked me through the chain at their company: “They didn’t have strong confidence in the target account list… it took them weeks… then everybody already has plans for that night.” The outreach that should have filled the dinner started after the dinner was full.

Act two: during the event

Your reps forget what buyers told them. What survives is a badge scan: a name, with none of the context that made the conversation worth having. I asked a head of marketing at a B2B software company how much of the booth conversation reaches the CRM. The answer: “Like, oh my gosh, none. The conversation itself, definitely not.”

Seniority doesn’t fix it. At one company, a CRO-level conversation with a strategic prospect never reached the CRM at all. The rep couldn’t find the person in the system on the floor, and the notes failed to upload over expo-hall wifi. The most senior selling conversation of the show vanished.

As for the VIP who walks up unannounced, the director of events running 200 events a year again: “You just have to hope and pray that the people who are at the booth recognize that’s a VIP situation. Not ideal.”

Act three: after the event

Your follow-up policy depends on each rep choosing to follow it. Leads sit in a spreadsheet and go cold. And when a rep does work an event lead outside the process, your event drops out of the record. A director of marketing events at a large software company, on those leads: “I’ll never see it.”

Every act fails at the same place: a team boundary your people cross by hand.

What happens when your people are the system?

When your events have no system, your people become the system. Here’s what that costs.

From one company to the next, between 65% and 95% of booth-conversation context never makes it into the CRM. Company size, maturity, and tools explain none of that spread. Who staffs the booth explains nearly all of it:

• The least context survives when non-revenue roles staff the booth.
• Mixed seller teams with no enforcement do somewhat better.
• The most survives with trained sellers under a manager actively enforcing capture.

And some companies swing from one end of that range to the other depending on whether one heroic operator is on the floor that day. Heroes produce the best event outcomes in B2B today. Heroes burn out, take PTO, and resign, and the institutional memory goes with them.

Even your heroes hit a ceiling. Two operators at different companies each gave me the same number: 50 to 60 events per year is the most one event manager can run. Peak months bring 6 to 8 shows. One of those operators, who ran about 60 shows a year alone, said those months “kind of sucked.”

At that ceiling, a director of marketing events told me, there’s “no opportunity to be creative or even dig into your results.” That’s what it looks like when a person stands in for a system. A senior field marketer: “You’re paying me a six-figure salary and I’m literally in a marketing closet putting together…” and what she was putting together, by hand, was booth kits.

The most telling quote I’ve heard came from a VP of product marketing at a software company north of $400 million:

“The pain is like scabbed over.”

Event teams have hurt this way for so long that they no longer feel it as pain. That’s to their credit. By hand and by force of will, they do the work of a system their company should have and doesn’t.

Why doesn’t your existing software run the work?

The puzzle is that this workflow touches more software than almost anything else your revenue team does. One enterprise events team touched 14 separate systems to stand up a single event. Another operator has 18 different badge-scanner apps on her phone, one per show.

Look at what each of those systems holds:

• The CRM stores outcomes: the accounts, contacts, and opportunities left after your team finishes the work.
• Marketing automation tracks digital touches, and a conversation on the expo floor isn’t one.
• Project tools track tasks, but events break on who covers which account and who follows up, and your task list shows neither.
• Conversation intelligence transcribes calls in apps that already record, and the highest-intent conversations in B2B happen standing up, in a crowd, nowhere near a record button.

Each of these systems stores one piece of your event workflow. Your people run the workflow itself, by hand.

This whole argument rests on one observation: revenue has a system of record, and the work that produces in-person revenue doesn’t. Your company keeps the plan, the presence, the conversation, the follow-through, and the yield in different places, and some only in your team’s memory.

One RevOps leader sketched an internal build to close the gap, and revenue work always won priority over it. That’s what happens to shared work: it loses to the numbers each team answers for.

Why has the technical excuse just expired?

In-person events matter more each year as buyers tune out crowded digital channels. Most marketers agree on that now, so I’ll treat it as background. Three other things changed.

1. AI can finally turn a booth conversation into a lead record. Two years ago, the models couldn’t handle a loud show floor. Now FieldXM records the whole conversation, keeps the prospect’s words apart from your rep’s with speaker separation, and writes the notes and qualification answers into your CRM. The hardest technical reason you couldn’t buy or build this system is gone, because FieldXM built it.

2. The operators aren’t waiting. Event professionals at several companies have each hand-built AI workarounds, like prompt templates that draft prep docs and a custom bot that rates events. One enterprise director of events built an AI notebook from her own lists so she could ask “who have I scanned at my booth in the last year in New York?”

   A senior field marketer, on the chatbot she built to digest scattered organizer emails into pre-show decks: “It’s not always great, but it’s a lot better than having to do it myself.”

   When the people doing the work start building their own tools out of consumer AI, the software they need is overdue. An enterprise director of events, relaying her company’s internal AI mandate: “AI is not going to replace us, but someone who knows how to use it will.” An operator can’t hand-build the part that has to run across the whole company and remember for years.

3. Finance now wants proof from the last unmeasured line. Your finance team expects pipeline evidence from every marketing dollar, and your event spend is one of the largest lines without an answer. Trust me, the show was great stopped being an acceptable board answer.

Could your company answer these five questions?

Picture your company in 2028, running this channel well:

• Your team chooses its event portfolio on its own evidence, before you sign the sponsorship contract.
• Every event opens with an account plan your whole revenue team sees and trusts.
• Your company remembers every conversation that matters, and the memory outlives the rep who had it.
• You and your sales leaders can see which leads a rep worked and which they didn’t, and the gap has an owner by morning.
• Your event manager runs more events than the old ceiling allowed, with more time to think.
• At planning season, you defend the events line with the same per-dollar evidence as paid search.

Now hold your company today up against that and ask five questions:

1. Which accounts were we targeting at our last event?
2. Who from our team talked to them?
3. What did they say?
4. Did our reps follow up on every conversation we captured, and who?
5. What did the event yield, from the booth to closed revenue?

If you can answer all five without opening a spreadsheet and interviewing three people, you’re the exception, and I’d like to meet you. If you can’t, your team is fine. Your company is missing a system that, until recently, you couldn’t buy or build.

What does FieldXM do for your team?

FieldXM gives your event work what every other revenue workflow already has: a system that records as it runs.

Walk into each show knowing who to meet, with FieldXM’s account planning. Your reps capture what buyers say in the FieldXM mobile app. Then you see who followed up in FieldXM’s accountability reports, and what each show produced in FieldXM’s reporting.

The argument stands with or without us. Your company runs one of the largest discretionary lines in B2B marketing on spreadsheets, heroics, and hope, and the technical reason for that just expired. Once your events have the system they never had, in-person GTM becomes the channel that teaches every other channel what a room full of real buyers is worth.

The founder series

Three essays carry this argument further, one question each:

1. The budget argument: You Need to Measure Every Event Dollar Like Your Digital Spend, on why the unmeasured channel loses by default.
2. The throughput argument: the 50-event ceiling, on why 50 to 60 events a year is the most one event manager can run, and what that costs.
3. The build-vs-operate argument: Your best people already built a worse version of this, on why a personal tool and a company-wide system are different species.