The 5 Stages of Event-Led Growth: Your Roadmap to Real ROI

Camille Arnold (00:00): 

Teams are still being asked to scale their events or deliver more impact from their events without necessarily always being given more resources, headcount or budget, right? So that's a lot of pressure, and we don't want to burn out. We don't want our teams to burn out. So I am excited for this kind of first cohort of marketing and event professionals to become really masterful at leveraging AI to make their jobs and lives easier.

Alyssa Peltier (00:28): 

Great events create great brands, but pulling off an event that engages, excites, and connects audiences? Well, that takes a village.

And we're that village. My name is Alyssa.

Rachel Andrews (00:40):

 I'm Rachel.

Felicia Asiedu (00:41): 

And I'm Felicia.

Alyssa Peltier (00:42):

 And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

Felicia Asiedu (00:51): 

Hi, everyone. What has been going on in the wide, wide world of events? I'm Felicia, and today we are all together again for the first time in a while. So I'm joined by my co-host, Alyssa and Rachel. Hi, guys. How you doing?

Alyssa Peltier (01:04): 

Hey.

Rachel Andrews (01:05): 

Hi, hi.

Felicia Asiedu (01:06):

Phenomenal. Today we are joined by our special guest, Camille, who has come to us from her very own podcast. So Camille, could you just introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your podcast maybe?

Camille Arnold (01:17): 

Thanks, Felicia. Hey, Rachel. Hey, Alyssa. So excited to be chatting with you guys today. I'm Camille Arnold. I'm also part of the marketing team here at Cvent. And I'm also the host of another show called Checked In, which is a show dedicated to helping marketers figure out how to unlock event-led growth for their organization and level up in all things marketing, events, event marketing, all the things we love.

Felicia Asiedu (01:40): 

Perfect. You fit right in with this crowd. Between us, you've got marketer, event guru, I'm just going to call you event guru now, like head of everything that is events, and former marketer-type event person, Alyssa. Like we've pretty much done it all between us, I think. So you are in with the right crowd right now. So I know we've spoken about event-led growth before, so some people might be thinking, "Is this a replay?" But it isn't because you are taking us in a new direction. Today we're talking about maturity, right?

Camille Arnold (02:08): 

Yeah. I think it's really important to understand that different organizations are going to be at different places in their journey of either implementing or scaling their event-led growth strategy. So today we're going to walk through a five-stage framework,

so that marketers or teams listening in have a way to assess their current strategy today and understand how event-led their organization is, and then identify some gaps and kind of make a game plan for how they can either get their organization on board with event-led growth, or take what they're already doing and just make it more impactful, scale it, and then have bigger business outcomes to report and celebrate.

Felicia Asiedu (02:52): 

Awesome. I'm looking forward to diving right in. Before we do that, I was having a conversation, literally, just yesterday with someone. We're having an event for marketers about events, and they said that thing about how events and marketing are way disconnected. So Rachel, just before we kick into this with Camille, I just wanted to ask you, are you still seeing that? I felt like that was like a thing of the past, but maybe Cvent's advanced, and marketers and event planners are just working together more. So what do you think? Do you think there's still a disconnect happening?

Rachel Andrews (03:21): 

It really depends on the organization's maturity, and I also would say that it depends on like what project you're working on, if there's a disconnect or not, if it's a new tactic. There's so many factors at play, I feel like, but I don't know. Sometimes I feel like I wake up, and I'm like, "Everybody's well-connected." And then other days I'm like, "We're not doing it well." And I think I'm not probably alone there. I think it just depends on what you're trying to do at your organization, if the goalposts have been moved, which happens I feel like all the time. Are you all in on this tactic? Are you all in on that tactic?

(03:54)

So I don't know if I can really answer that question efficiently. We're all Cvent people. So I would also love to hear what Alyssa says because I don't know if other organizations that you're working on, consulting with, feel like that as well.

Alyssa Peltier (04:08): 

I think generally the market is moving in a maturation state, if you will. I think there is an appetite to consolidate systems, to better understand the value of events. I think Camille is going to walk us through kind of the levels of maturity, and I'm sure that there, we'll say like the market is not at the upper echelons of this maturity.

(04:30)

But certainly, Felicia, just to come back to your question, I think we're moving out of the ad hoc one-off. And if not that, there is an acknowledgement that we are ad hoc and one-off, and we want to do something about it. And I can say I was on a client meeting recently, within the last month or so, with a very large financial services organization that we had player stakeholder within the marketing organization coming to their centralized meetings and events program, trying to understand how can we connect the dots? How can we better do this? And some of the storytelling that Cvent provided was a narrative around event-led growth and that resonated so well with this organization. They acknowledge that they are disconnected, but they can see the connections, and so they're moving towards, again, maturity in that way. So I'd love to hear more on the specifics around how we segment that, Camille, when we get into it.

Rachel Andrews (05:21): 

Last year I think we talked about the same thing, and we were in a prioritization exercise and benchmarking exercise. Now marketing is closely aligning with sales on our verticalization persona-based thing, so we're getting even deeper into alignment. So I do feel like sometimes it does feel disjointed, but not when I take a step back. I'm like, "Wait a minute. We were opening this door to get more aligned last year, got more aligned this year, and now we're getting even deeper in alignment."

Alyssa Peltier (05:48):

 You're at the table. I mean like that and alone, like just saying that out the gate you're talking to sales, there's strategic alignment being forged.

Felicia Asiedu (05:57): 

Yeah, and this is really cool because we're, literally, in all these meetings together. This group, we used to get together when we kind of had to because we were running an event or we're doing something specific. Whereas now, we're all at the table all together, pretty much all the time because we're in all these meetings, which is cool.

(06:12)

But Camille, to bring this back to you, event-led growth, I know that there's times where we kind of say, look, some people see events as nice-to-haves, and you're kind of saying they should sit in the heart of marketing. That's quite a bold statement because actually, I think some of the marketers will be like, "Okay, yeah, I do events, but the heart of marketing, like right at the center is events?"

Is that right that it should be right in the middle of everything?

Camille Arnold (06:35):

 I think that if your organization is either already committed to, or can become committed to, these four prerequisites that I always talk about before you jump off the deep end and decide we're all in on event-led growth, I think you have to first understand if your organization is really set up to take advantage of an event-led growth approach. And I think kind of the four prerequisites are a commitment to like measurement, attribution, measuring the right KPIs because you have to… if you're going to go all in, you have to be able to prove ROI. To do that, you need a commitment to the right technology because the right tech stack is going to enable you to set out what you're trying to accomplish through event-led growth. And then the fourth prerequisite is a commitment to developing and deepening your internal alignment.

(07:33)

So Rachel, what you were talking about of, "Sometimes I feel like we're really connected and other times I'm like, 'Oh, we have more work to do,'" that's totally normal, and I think that is a really good indicator that we are practicing event-led growth. Because I think when you commit to it, that fourth prerequisite of internal alignment across all your go-to-market teams, it's a forcing function. It kind of forces you to get your act in gear, and make sure everyone's rowing in the same direction. That we have all of these different strategic plans for different functional areas that understand how events can be really a powerful growth lever and channel that really runs through all of those different functional areas, whether you're in marketing or you're in sales or you're customer-facing and you're working to kind of expand and renew or support your customer or member base.

(08:23)

So that's first thing is like, yes, events can be the center of your marketing or go-to-market engine if you can get the right stakeholders internally to agree to commit to those four things.

And if you can do that, that's where we see insane growth. I know Alyssa probably sees this with a lot of the clients she speaks to. I see it and hear it when I talk to a lot of my peers in the space as well. Being able to say, "Our events as a channel are generating 7x ROI for an investment," that's amazing. You put a million dollars into your event strategy and you're going to get $7 million? I'll take it.

Alyssa Peltier (09:06): 

Well, and I think elephant in the room right now is like we're in an era where like, artificiality, dare I say it, is kind of coming into competition with humanity. And so there is a doubling down on the human-to-human touch points enabled by artificial intelligence, right? We've done many episodes on that throughout this year. It's not going to die down next year. Just a heads-up, foreshadowing.

(09:31)

But I think that there is such an interest and an intensity of need to maintain all that is good about events and all that is great about events. And so, there's now this intense scrutiny to measure and quantify, but really, really understand this channel, which has been channeling for a very long time, but now we're going to treat it as such, right?

Camille Arnold (09:52): 

Well, yeah, because I think we've thought about it as a channel. We're the insiders. We understand inherently the value that events can provide to an organization. But I think it's the rest of your go-to-market squad, which can be very broad and fast, depending on how your organization is structured and set up. And we need to get those people bought in and understanding the value of events, the power of event-led growth. And especially for like my counterparts in sales or customer success, the hill that I will die on is just beating the drum on making them understand that events are one of the only marketing channels where you can hit every stage of the customer journey if you design it intentionally.

Rachel Andrews (10:37): 

Event people, event professionals have a lot of job security because of this antitrust of big machine, or whatever you want to call it, coming in. And people are going to be, to your point, Camille, of the whole buying journey, they're going to be seeking that out, is face-to-face to trust in the buying process. There's definitely going to be other channels that emerge out of AI, but I think that the human aspect that Alyssa just mentioned is going to be super important as this event-led growth hopefully continues to be a channel. I think a lot of business owners already know COVID helped make that channel even more powerful, but in this AI trajectory that we're in, I think events are going to emerge as even more of a strong channel because of that trust aspect.

Alyssa Peltier (11:24):

 Yeah, there's like this sanctity about this thing that we have to preserve it and not let that erode because there is something that could potentially come into jeopardy, and this is what we're keeping. These are the pieces that we've decided humans need. It's human-to-human connection, right?

Camille Arnold (11:40):

Yeah.

Felicia Asiedu (11:41): 

So let me sort of take this in because we're going to obviously go through this framework, and the framework starts at the bottom with ad hoc one-off. And what you're all talking about is the importance of events, and I don't know if anyone was ever denying that. Like we knew that throughout COVID, "I wish I could get to an event." Post-COVID, "Thank God I can get to an event." Your sales team will constantly come and tell you, "I need a lunch, I need a dinner, I need another event."

(12:04)

Since business has been done, we know that it's done well face-to-face, right? So if we're thinking about this as a maturity model, I love the fact that ad hoc one-off is starting at the base because no one's denying the importance. But what we're saying is, "Yeah, and?" So you're having events, good. But if you're having them in this kind of sporadic motion, I think Camille, what we're saying here is like, that's not it.

Camille Arnold (12:29): 

Right. We want to go from the one-off ad hoc, some might call it random acts of marketing, to a true strategy that maps to your most pressing business priorities. If you're an organization or you're a marketer that's focused on revenue growth for example, because there can be lots of different types of growth that you're trying to achieve for your organization. It's not always going to only be revenue, but for many that's one of the crown jewels, right? I think we want to get to a place where we have a strategy, as I said, that maps to those business priorities where you can tie it to actual metrics, whether it's revenue… there's so many we could get into. I get asked all the time like, "What are the most important metrics to track?"

(13:19)

And I'm like, let's just do a one-on-one because I need to dig into it with you in order to really effectively advise you on the specific metrics that you should be tracking. Because let me tell you, it depends on the goals, the business priorities first and foremost. Then it depends on how your organization kind of operationalizes the whole buying journey or revenue funnel, so to speak, right? But yeah, that's the point. We want to get away from random acts of marketing. We want to get to a place where we have a really buttoned-up strategy. So that, one, you know what's worth investing your time, your budget, your resources into because you have some way to predict what the business impact is going to be, instead of hosting an event and then saying, "What was the impact after?" And not having a good understanding of what you should even be looking at to measure said impact.

(14:16)

Or you might say, "We're going to do this event, and it's going to be a VIP dinner, and we're going to do it in these markets," and your sales leader might say, "Hey, we actually need to go to different markets or we don't need more VIP dinners. We actually have enough VIP dinners. That's great. What we really need, we're struggling because we don't have really good quality leads coming from marketing. We want better quality leads," right? If that's what I'm hearing, I'm going to invest in a different event program that has different goals. So I think it's just like, if I had to sum it up with one word, which would be really hard because I'm very wordy, as you know, but it would be intentionality. Let's get really intentional and not be so reactive, you know?

Rachel Andrews (15:03):

Can I say something on behalf of the planners that I know? Not to play devil's advocate, but how? When do I do this? Because it's been a long time where it's like you have 85 different stakeholders and they all want fringe events, wraparound events, the VIP dinners, experiential things. Add to the laundry list. Like I just looked at our TEP today and we have 50 slides of every different tactic that we could do. And I was like, "Gosh, that is a lot of tactics," 50 tactics for planners to know how to do and then be strategic or intentional about, but it's coming from a place of 80 different stakeholders wanting different things. Let's drill it down for people that maybe don't have the luxury of being aligned. How do you even start?

Felicia Asiedu (15:46):

 I have a good answer for you. You did it, and I love the fact you're asking the question, you did it this year. But I'm saying you as a leader, you said, "This is too much. My team are going to burn out. If you keep doing this, my team will not be able to cope and that is too much."And that's a good leader. That's a leader that's like looking at, "Fine, there's a business need, but there's also a need from my humans and my humans, they're good, they're really good, but you cannot keep doing this."

(16:14)

And I think that really helped our business leaders to say, "Oh, how many events are we running? Why are we running these events? What is the ROI?" And actually that was a really good driver for all of that prioritization. Now whether we hit the nail on the head and came out the end completely solid and we know what we're doing, I don't know. But it really turned people's heads

to at least look at it and at least say, "Why are we doing this?"

Rachel Andrews (16:41): 

We used to do 1,200 events a year, now we do like 500. But we do some bigger events so it did balance each other out as well. Like yes, the numbers aren't there, but we are not doing like 800 product seminars, lunch-and-learns a year. Like we drilled it down to be more intentional, but yeah, we did do it. Now we're drilling down even further.

Camille Arnold (17:02):

 I think you just brought up something, a really important point that I want to just call out and highlight, Rachel, which is practicing event-led growth does not simply mean you're just hosting more events. That's not what we're necessarily saying here. In some cases, yes, that might be the case. You might want to or need to scale some of your programs and host those kinds of events more frequently, but that's not a given. And I think what instead I would reframe that thought, if that is a thought in anyone's mind listening, it's more about thinking about are we investing in the right kinds of events and are we targeting the right people and are we targeting those people for those events at the right time in their journey with our brand or our organization?

(17:52)

And then is our approach to deliver, like I said, the right experiences to the right people at the right time? Does that approach support our business priorities, right? And you kind of have to do a matching up there of like what does the business need, what does our audience or our different audience segments, what do they need and kind of meet in the middle somehow.

Now what you're talking about, Rachel, of like then getting the buy-in from all the different stakeholders, no small feat. No small feat. Truly, sometimes I'm like, I don't envy you.

Alyssa Peltier (18:31): 

That sounds like those are the level of the building, or the stages of this maturity model. I think we started with ad hoc, the one-off. Rachel, what you were describing is kind of this repeatable, but siloed. And the thing that just came to my head as we were talking was like you're kind of stuck in 'do mode', to the point where you got to 1,500 events. We're doing. We're on the hamster wheel. Let's go. We can get it done. The shift out of that, and Camille, I'd love to hear your perspective on this because you're kind of the subject matter expert here, but as I'm just trying to digest it for myself, that strategic alignment is: stop, pause, why, and when? And for whom? I think that's the big thing, too, right? Who is the audience that we're trying to get here?

(19:12)

But Camille, that's what it feels like to be strategic versus to be doing, and to be repeated, repeatable. We've got a factory, we've got a process, but is it impactful? Is it aligned to the actual outcomes that we need for this business, or this organization, or this foundation, like all of these objectives that you could be operating on. Do I even know what I'm doing, or am I just doing to do, right? And I think that is a very conscious decision and not easy, because it's not easy to step off of the do, especially for a planner who is typically programmed to do and do really well and to complete, right? So to push back and say what, why, when, how, whom, all of those things, it's an act of kind of defiance within the organization.

Felicia Asiedu (20:00): 

Yeah, I agree.

Alyssa Peltier (20:02): 

What's after that, Camille? Like, okay, everyone gets aligned. That sounds like the dream. Why can't we stop there? Like what else is left to do?

Camille Arnold (20:10): 

I think there's kind of two things that we're kind of talking about here, so I just want to call that out. One is I feel like we're talking about like what are the key steps to implementing event-led growth at your organization, right? How do you get people aligned? How do you decide on which event programs you're going to invest in, so on and so forth. And then there's another that correlates to this framework of maturity. Where at stage one, if we're thinking through this in a five-stage framework, stage one is an organization has no real event-led growth strategy, meaning there's no real audience targeting because this framework, I'll break it down for you.

(20:55)

Category one is thinking about audience targeting and reach through your event strategy, right? Let's stay on category one for a second. Audience targeting your reach. Are we getting the right people to engage with our events, to attend our events from a prioritization for our business perspective? Let's just take a B2B SaaS company as an example. You'll know what your top accounts are, you'll know what your top industries or verticals are or business segments. So do you have the ability in your event strategy to get really dialed into audience targeting and then make sure you're reaching the right people?

(21:31)

The second category is channel content and optimization. So that's really thinking about are you delivering the right message, the right content, the right experiences to those people that you've identified through your targeting, right? The third category is engagement and insights. So, what data are you capturing and insights are you capturing through your events? If you have a more mature event-led growth strategy, you are going to have a really sophisticated engagement or like contact profiling strategy, right? You're able to get really personalized not only your promotion and the marketing of your events, but even thinking about the actual design and experience of your events or that post-event journey that you want people to go on because you're using all of the signals and interaction data from your events to inform that, right?

(22:22)

But at no strategy, you basically have no engagement tracking, right? I mean, and I know there are marketers out there if we think about even just like webinars, for example, that are not really tracking engagement in their webinars or an in-person event. And we know how impactful on-site engagement data can be, right? And fueling your entire marketing strategy from one event, let alone a whole portfolio of events. So that's that third category. The fourth is when I talked about the commitment to the right tech, we're talking about technology and analytics because you need the right tech to be able to get to regular reports on not only performance and impact from your events, but what else are you learning about your target audience? Like I said, that can then inform the rest of your marketing strategy.

(23:13)

And then the last two categories we have in this framework are brand and partner ecosystem. So thinking about how, through your events, you are engaging in your partner ecosystem because that's also really a powerful lever to bring into your events channel. Rachel, I feel like you know this firsthand because we have some amazing partners that we work with or that ask us to come and be a part of their events, right? And then why are we doing all of this? To get the ROI and attribution, get the credit we deserve for these incredible events that we are hosting and producing for our organization that is helping our companies grow. So those are the different categories. And then when I think about like, how do you go from stage one where there's no targeting, maybe no consistent metrics, no unified tech stack, to a stage five where you're what we call 'Best in Class', really advanced audience segmentation, hyper-personalized content, maybe you've got AI-driven analytics giving you those performance insights into your total events program. You've got a really powerful brand ecosystem with partners, and you have multitouch attribution. So when it's time to do your annual planning and finance is saying, "Hey, how many points are you going to put on the board for us next year with the budget we're going to give you?"

You can say, "Look, boom, look what I did this year." And not only defend, but even maybe justify, defend your budget, but maybe even justify a budget increase for the areas that are working.

(24:51)

So there's obviously a lot that goes into that, into getting from stage one to a stage five, like truly no strategy to advance, but I think one step at a time. So to get started, I would say like you have to set a goal of getting to stage two, which would just be like basic. You are understanding that there's going to be some ducks you have to get in a row to get everyone aligned internally. But I would say your goal should be let's at least start with some broad segmentation, maybe some limited targeting. Maybe we can commit to just getting a layer deeper from generic content used across all events to maybe a little bit of customization or personalization based on that segmentation, right? From there, you'll get some basic data around engagement interactions. It won't be everything that you could have in the world in terms of data capture, but it'll be something. And then you'll have that the basic level of like tracking in place. So we want to get beyond just recording attendance rates, right? 

(26:00)

We want to get to like what was that business impact, and at least being able to have some measurement in place for that. And that will give you the foundational layer of understanding how your events are having an impact on your business. And then from there, that's when you can say, "Okay, we're going to focus on these two areas for Q1 and Q2 of 2026. We're going to focus on audience targeting and channel content optimization. And we're not going to worry about the brand and partner ecosystem stuff yet," and just tweak it truly step by step, kind of area by area. Because it will feel overwhelming if you try to do it all at once. But if you break it off into, "Okay, we're going to do a six-month sprint, so to speak, where we're really hyper-focused on these few areas and leveling those areas up in our strategy," or maybe it's just about getting more alignment and then going from there.

Felicia Asiedu (26:59): 

Love that. That's so comprehensive. It's the end to end. If someone needs, "What do I do? How do I do it?" That is the end to end. And like you say, we have resources for that. So thank you for going through that. It's super comprehensive. Alyssa, this makes me think about you because you're in consulting, right? You help our clients all day, every day. This is your job to kind of say, "Hey, let's see how we can grow you, how we can help you." What common things do you see with clients that are trying to get from one stage to the next and trying to scale, trying to do things differently, but they have to convince all these stakeholders, their CMO, their whoever? Like how do you see that working, and what do people do to overcome that?

Alyssa Peltier (27:36):

 You hit the nail on the head because not only am I on the consulting side of the house, but I'm working with some of Cvent's largest customers. I say this regularly on the podcast: With size comes silos and inability to communicate and inability to change. And so that strategic alignment is actually an area where most organizations are fixated within a large enterprise organization.So most of them, if not all of them, are repeatable, doing tons of events in all pockets across the organization. Whether that's an administrative function, whether that's the corporate meetings and events function, whether that's demand gen, whether you have a field marketing team across the globe, they can't see what one another is doing. And so it becomes almost impossible, but not entirely so, to create strategic alignment.

(28:27)

And a lot of what the advantage of Cvent and also just event technology, of enterprise-wide technology implementation, is the ability for the technology to lead those stakeholders in de-siloing themselves. It kind of brings those people together by nature of its capability is to be a central spot,a central source, central area of information and knowledge base for meetings and events that are happening across a globe so that you can get strategically aligned, so that you can start to compare all of those different programs, whether they're in France, whether they're in LatAm. And so I would say that is the area where these customers are hyper-fixated in this current moment. They want to see what one another is doing within their organization, and they're leaning into technology to enable that.

Felicia Asiedu (29:15): 

Yeah, love that. And Rachel, I'm going to put you on the spot. Love it. You're like, "Oh, thank you." If you could see something change within your own organization— which organization is that? Ours— to help you get closer to this great state that everyone's trying to be at this dream state, what would be a couple of things that you would say, "Look, we need to do this, we need to do this," if you could wave your magic wand? And you can't just hire more people, so it's not an answer.

Rachel Andrews (29:43): 

I think what's hard is, and we just redid this, but like really honing in on your MQL definitions. Because what we've been struggling with for years is just every event had a different MQL definition of what is an MQL for that event. If you can clearly define that, and we've gotten a little bit better in our own organization. I don't think it's a magic wand yet, and then say here is the end-to-end, multitouch percentages that we're doing, waiting for each of these types of events and have that as like part of the playbook, I would like to wave a wand to make it very simple. But we are a very complex organization, so it's not always that simple.

(30:27)

I was joking with somebody earlier about this because I'm sure other people commiserate with me, but you can have a leader come to you and say, "Tell me the performance of this seminar type in this city for this vertical, for this persona in Q4." To be able to be that level of sophisticated and drill down into like the attribution that you hit with one customer success group or seminar or whatever in this one region, in this one timeframe, it's really hard. And I almost wish we could, yes, I want to get to the right numbers, but I wish we could just say, "Okay, these are the averages. Let's work off of this and maybe don't drill down." But we're in this verticalization, prioritization thing saying, "Does this work for this audience?" Like Camille was talking about, and getting to that level of sophistication is what's going to help you use events as a growth engine.

(31:19)

Because if it's not working, if let's say your pharma group doesn't respond to coming in the middle of the day because they have crazy work days, but they will maybe respond to a dinner at a trade show that they go to every year because that's the only time that they can go to something a year,

you just have to know that level. So I guess the magic wand would be just really defining everything clearly, but that's perfect world, right? Because I feel like it changes. The second you define it, the changes the next-

Alyssa Peltier (31:43): 

But that's like the definition of an integrated strategy, right? Like you knowing the entire complexity of the marketing strategy, that was a perfect example, Rach, just like going down like, why it's so important to know all the different audiences that come to your events, but for example, a pharma not being able to come to a seminar in the middle of the day, but there is a different offer for them, a different tactic, if you will, within an integrated events channel that you should deliver to that particular audience. So like you said, that's a dream state because slicing and dicing for a very complex organization with a complex product and we're basically serving all different areas of businesses, right? It's not super, super finite. It can be complicated. And so I think that's the dream state is knowing all those audiences, but you just clearly defined what a dream would look like.

(32:36)

I think the other thing, too, and this is actually having worked for Rachel, I just have to say like there has been so much work that has gone into this. Like I've been watching this from afar, and it's incredible to see. The one area where I think we still have growth is something Camille was talking about earlier, which was getting really specific about those metrics that we are defining as success, right? Growth isn't an MQL for every organization, and it isn't an MQL for every event that we do. In some markets, and Felicia, this is particularly acute to you since you are in an area where our brand is lesser known, our events, our field events often serve brand growth objectives, right? And so what does that measurement look like in an organization that values MQL so heavily, right? How do we shift the tide there?

(33:30)

And I think we talked so much about strategic alignment, but getting those stakeholders on board to say, "Hey, we're going to start reporting in a different way on these events that are supposed to be supporting a different objective, and this is how we're going to talk about success moving forward."

Felicia Asiedu (33:44):

 I could not agree more. You are speaking my language. I am the person at all these meetings that we're having that's like, "I see you've landed on MQL. What about extending my brand across Germany?" So I look forward to this dream state where we do understand that, say I put something out on social media as part of my marketing strategy. I know I want eyeballs. I know I want impressions. I want those impressions at events. I want those eyeballs at events. I want that brand extension at events. You see what I mean? So definitely not all there for the MQL, and I'm going to have a tough time proving if we don't get behind the same goals, so back to what Camille was saying, I'd have a tough time proving the value of my events if we're not measuring the right stuff, if we don't know why we chose to do that thing in the first place.

Rachel Andrews (34:30): 

The magic wand is like, "All right, all 80 stakeholders, you agree that these 10 goals are what we're trying to do at events or some of these 10, but..." Do you know what I mean? That would be it, like across the board.

Alyssa Peltier (34:42): 

"Hey, these are the 10 things we try to do in marketing. These are the stages of the customer journey, and these are how you would measure them in any channel, and events is one approach that we can do." Like, that actually would be an easier way to do this. But instead we all go down to our tactics, and then we tinker with our toys, and then we end up where we are. But that's the dream state. Let's standardize things across the marketing strategy, across the growth strategy, and then those can show up in different ways in our events. It gets complicated when you have like multi-objective, right? Conferences are very hard because you got different audiences with different needs.

(35:17)

But for a particular seminar or I went to a lecture on a product launch for, it was GoPro at the time, it was probably one of the coolest sessions I've been to, and it really put that B2C mindset on me where I was like, "Oh, this is what it looks like to measure brand at an event. They weren't trying to convert sales. They just wanted people to know about the latest camera that they were producing for the market." And I think that's such a much more familiar lexicon for people who operate in the B2C environment, as opposed to B2B. But hey, we can rip a page out of that playbook, too.

Felicia Asiedu (35:49): 

Absolutely. I mean we already kind of do it, yeah. You know, we have people that come to our product road map at Connect and they say, "I feel like I'm at an Apple launch for the latest phone," and I'm like, "That's exactly how you're supposed to feel. That's how it was engineered."  So Camille, I'm going to bring us home with where are we going with all of this? Like we're here painting our dream states, we're championing event-led growth and its maturity, but where do you see it going over the next few years?

Camille Arnold (36:15):

Yeah, I mean I think we talked a little bit about AI, we can't not talk about it people. One, I totally agree with you, Rachel. Like, job security for the us-es of the world, love this for us. I foresee our roles in our organizations becoming even more prominent and, therefore, the role of events as a channel becoming more and more of a dominant strategy that organizations are leaning into. I think one, that is going to be in response to people craving those real like a hundred percent, they know it's authentically a human kind of interactions. And then I also am excited for the ways that we all, for those of us in marketing and events, that we all just continue to get smarter and smarter about how we're using AI. Because we talked about it a little bit, but I do want to double-underline the fact that teams are still being asked to scale their events or deliver more impact from their events, without necessarily always being given more resources, headcount, or budget, right?

(37:26)

So that's a lot of pressure, and we don't want to burn out. We don't want our teams to burn out. So I am excited for this kind of first cohort of marketing and event professionals to become really masterful at leveraging AI to make their jobs and lives easier. I'm excited to see what that does for their event-led growth strategy. You could think of it in terms of like the ROI measurement or analytics side of things, and then also just like the manual repetitive kind of grunt work tasks. And I think events will continue to be content powerhouses. I love that. I'm excited for that to continue.

And I think that, like I said, as we get more sophisticated hopefully kind of across the board in how we're looking at and measuring event success and business impact, I think that, I don't know, I'm just intrigued to see how the culture around or attitude about events continues to heat up and get warmer and, I don't know. My wish if I had a magic wand is like, I wish I could magically make everybody understand how events can be massively powerful for business growth and, therefore, your finance people who control the purse strings are just like, "Here's what you need to be successful in your role, and we trust you to make good on that."

Felicia Asiedu (38:56): 

Wow, what a dream you paint. Trust. "Give me money and trust me." Phenomenal. "Just give me some cash. It's fine." Okay, very, very last thing before we tell people how they can do this, I'm just going to ask Rachel and Alyssa, one dumb thing that people are doing today that people should just stop doing, or might just become obsolete by the end of 2027 just for some fun, what you got?

Rachel Andrews (39:20): 

I got stop saying AI is going to take your job. Drives me fricking nuts. Stop saying that.

Alyssa Peltier (39:25):

I think, oh, this is funny because my counterpart to that, I agree with that. It's not going to take your job. I think it's going to take the job of like BI. I don't think we're gonna have to make dashboards much longer. Like I don't think we're going to have to be building these reports. 2027 might be a stretch, but I am really, really excited about, Camille was just talking about like the power of bringing people together and the power of content, and I was thinking like the data power of events, right? Like we know that it's an overwhelming amount of data, it's untapped, it has not been realized. We are reliant on analytics teams, who don't care always to go build a dashboard for the meetings and events team, right? I think the ability to self-serve intelligence about our events is like the big thing that I'm excited about. So I think we're going to stop having to make, ugh, dashboards.

Camille Arnold (40:14): 

I love that vision.

Rachel Andrews (40:15): 

I think it's going to take parts of your job that are administrative that you don't like doing and make them easier. So it's not going to take your full job, but then it gives you more time to be more strategic.

Alyssa Peltier (40:25): 

Yes. Or haven't been able to do, right? Like this is one of those things where it's just like, does anybody really have a great event dashboard? I mean like we've seen pockets of greatness, but like pockets, pockets. Mostly it's just an abyss of data.

Felicia Asiedu (40:38): 

See, I can't think of a 'stop doing'. You've made me now so excited about what could happen with AI and we're back around to the whole, we're back around…

Alyssa Peltier (40:47): 

we're going to keep talking about it, so don't worry.

Felicia Asiedu (40:50): 

What if they could do my budgeting? I think I'm going to build an AI budget agent. That's going to be my next thing. I'm going to be like, "Just do the budgeting. You understand my goals, you understand what I need. Just build the budget, man. Go off and do it." That would be fun. All right, let's wrap it up. Camille, if someone wants to see where they rank or how they are in their maturity, what can they do?

Camille Arnold (41:10): 

Well, I'm so glad you asked, Felicia. We have a free tool. It's super quick. It will take you five minutes or less, answer a few questions about the different categories from that framework that I talked about, and then you'll have a really good baseline understanding of how event-led your organization is today. And then I'll give you some food for thought, some fuel to think about, "Okay, what are the most important areas that we can realistically level up in 2026?" Like I said, don't overwhelm yourself and don't feel bad about where you are. If you're at a stage one or a stage two, it's all good. The point is not to judge where you are. It's just to give you a baseline so you can understand how you can build the road map to get to that next level of sophistication.

(41:55)

So cvent.com, go to our Resources page, and we have the Event-led Growth Maturity Model. Like I said, free to take the little quiz, and then it just gives you a really great starting point.

I'm sure all of you are knee-deep, eyeballs-deep into 2026 planning. So now is the perfect time to take the assessment and get a really good understanding of where you are today and where you could go in 2026.

Felicia Asiedu (42:19): 

Brilliant. Thank you so much. Thank you, ladies. This has been phenomenal. Love having us all together, and I'll see you next time.

Camille Arnold (42:26): 

Thanks for having me. Bye.

Alyssa Peltier (42:32): 

Thanks for hanging out with us on Great Events, a podcast by Cvent. If you've been enjoying our podcast, make sure to hit that subscribe button

so you never miss an episode.

Rachel Andrews (42:42):

And you can help fellow event professionals and marketers, just like you, discover Great Events by leaving us a rating on Apple, Spotify, or your preferred podcast platform.

Felicia Asiedu (42:51):

Stay connected with us on social media for behind the scenes content, updates and some extra doses of inspiration.

Rachel Andrews (42:58): 

Got a great story or an event to share? We want to hear from you. Find us on LinkedIn, send us a DM or drop us a note at greatevents@cvent.com.

Felicia Asiedu (43:09):

Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

Alyssa Peltier (43:18):

And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.