What Meaningful Intent Signals Look Like at Events

[00:00:00] Nick Bennett: So many people think of events as a siloed thing. How do we do integrated campaigns with events as the starting point, as well as the main point, and then funnel everything else around it?

[00:00:13] Alyssa Peltier: 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.

[00:00:24] Rachel Andrews: I'm Rachel.

[00:00:25] Kelly Cheng: I'm Kelly.

[00:00:26] Felicia Asiedu: And I'm Felicia.

[00:00:28] Alyssa Peltier: And you are listening to Great Events, the podcast for all event enthusiasts, creators, and innovators in the world of events and marketing.

[00:00:37] Stephanie Sweetland: Hey, everyone. What's been going on in this wide, wide world of events? My name is Stephanie Sweetland, and I am your host for this week's episode. Today, we're going to be covering a question that a lot of marketers struggle with, which is: You had a really incredible event, but how do you tie that in-person success to the pipeline? Traditional success metrics, like registration numbers and surveys, just do not cut it anymore. So, we're excited to delve a little bit more today into how AI can help us connect the dots.

My guest today is Nick Bennett. We're so excited to have him join us. Nick has 15 years of experience as an in-house marketing operator and now runs his own consultancy. Nick spends lots of his time advising clients on demand generation, ABM, community engagement, and more. Nick is also a published author, so we're really excited to have him on board today. If anybody can help us answer this question, it is Nick.

[00:01:26] Nick Bennett: Thank you for having me. Excited to be here.

[00:01:29] Stephanie Sweetland: So Nick, the first question we wanted to ask you is: How have you traditionally seen marketers measure event success?

[00:01:35] Nick Bennett: I think the traditional way has always been through registrations. It's been through, "Alright, yo, booth scans. Alright, hey, we're going to get 500 booth scans. Fantastic."

What does that get you at the end of the day? It doesn't really get you pipeline, which is ultimately what we want.

I think the way people used to look at events, I always called it "Field Marketing 1.0." It was very much logistical. You're planning the event, and you're having a great experience. You move on from the event. What happens next? Who knows?

I, for so many years, started talking about "Field Marketing 2.0." How do you act as an actual part of the sales team's arsenal? How do you make it so that events are a huge part of pipeline, attribution, revenue, and all of those things? And I think we're finally getting to the point where it makes a difference.

[00:02:21] Stephanie Sweetland: Yeah, absolutely. Where do you think that those traditional metrics fall short when it comes to actually connecting them to the pipeline?

[00:02:28] Nick Bennett: I think there's a big disconnect between sales and marketing. I think it starts with that. Sales is like, "Alright, marketing. We're doing all of these events. You're getting all these leads. You're throwing them over the fence." Sales is like, "Alright. What do I do with them? These are terrible people. They're tire kickers. They're people that just want the free swag."

Alright, so what do we do? You're spending $100,000 to $300,000 to be at an event sometimes, and all you're doing is counting these badge scans? You're sending out a non-personalized email after that says, "Thanks for stopping by the booth. Want to book a demo?" No one's going to book a demo right off of that.

So it's like, how do you create an experience that people want to be a part of and activations around that, that create the experience of where people want to be?

[00:03:08] Stephanie Sweetland: Yeah, absolutely. What are some best practices that marketers can use to try to connect those dots?

[00:03:13] Nick Bennett: I think it goes back to the sales and marketing relationship. How do you be a counterpart to the sales team where they feel valued? It's not just, "Hey, sales team, go do these events. Hope for the best." It's more of like, "Hey, how can we support each other?" It's a two-way street. And how do we make sure that everything from both pre-event, during the event, and post-event all flows, basically, perfectly?

[00:03:35] Stephanie Sweetland: Yeah, absolutely. What signals do you think are most important for marketers to send to sales?

[00:03:40] Nick Bennett: I think it's the hand-raisers. Definitely the hand-raisers. And what does a "hand-raisers" actually mean? Maybe it's if you are having a booth, it's like, hey, someone comes by, wants to see a demo, and you go through a little bit demo, but they want to see a little bit more. Those are hand raisers. They should be followed up with, I wouldn't even say within 24 hours, immediately a couple hours after the event. It's all of the people that are showing intent of wanting to learn a little bit more.

And maybe they're not at the right stage. Maybe they are. But again, they're raising their hand. They want to know more. Those are the people that sales should be following up with.

[00:04:12] Stephanie Sweetland: Let me ask you a question that might be a little tricky, a little bit of a curveball for you. We used to always look at it as: You attended an event, and you were an MQL. But like you're mentioning, hand-raisers are definitely MQLs. How do you figure out who else at an event should be considered a marketing-qualified lead?

[00:04:28] Nick Bennett: I think it depends on what your lead-scoring model looks like, too, because what is an MQL? I don't want to say I've talked about it a lot, but is MQL the wrong thing to be looking at? Should you be looking at it from an account level, like, "Hey, these are the accounts that are showing intent." It doesn't matter as much who the individual contacts are, but how do we show the accounts and surface that intent level so that we're following up with the right people in the ICP around that?

But I also don't agree that any...

say we get an attendee list from an event. Should all those people be MQLs? Probably not, because they just registered for an event. I think hand-raisers should. I think people who see a demo should. I think people who take multiple steps at an event should. But I don't think everyone you scan at a booth or everyone you talk to should be considered an MQL.

[00:05:16] Stephanie Sweetland: Yes. So you anticipated my next question, which is a good one. You're bringing up some really good points for events that we're hosting. Does that change at all for events that you attend?

[00:05:23] Nick Bennett: When you say events that you attend, can you give me an example?

[00:05:26] Stephanie Sweetland: Like, for a trade show.

[00:05:26] Nick Bennett: For a trade show?

[00:05:27] Stephanie Sweetland: Yeah.

[00:05:28] Nick Bennett: I think it still plays the same, to be honest with you, because, I mean, again, I've done lots of trade shows over the years. I'm not saying that booths are the worst thing because I do think you should have a booth, but I also think that you should have other activations around the booth. And I think those other activations show intent of, hey, maybe you met someone at the booth, maybe they're coming to a dinner with you. How do we create more signals to get people to want to talk to you?

And just showing up at a booth to take some things and maybe talk for five minutes, I don't think that's an MQL. I think it's someone you can have a conversation with, someone you can nurture, but I don't think it's someone you're going to follow up with immediately.

[00:06:02] Stephanie Sweetland: Yeah, that's fair. You mentioned we're gathering lots and lots of different signals at the event, which is fantastic, you can track tons of data, but what actually matters?

[00:06:11] Nick Bennett: For me, it's a few things: pipeline influence and pipeline source. I think when you think about influence, field marketers, and field marketing is what I've done for the majority of my career, a lot of field marketers play in the middle and the bottom of the funnel. So they're not always sourcing stuff, but they are influencing a lot of that pipeline. Now, when I think of an event like this and other events, such as trade shows, a lot of times you are sourcing that pipeline, and maybe that is the first touchpoint. So I think pipeline source and influence have to be both looked at.

I think cost per opportunity is another thing that you should be looking at. For us at Reachdesk, one thing that we look at is a $1,200 to $2,000 CPO. That's our goal. If we can hit in that window with any event that we do, we know it's a good event. We also look at what's the ROI on this specific thing. I aim for any event that I do is 10x. I'll give you an example.

Last year, second half of 2025, we did eight events. We spent, I think it was $335,000, which in events isn't actually a ton of money. We generated 1.2 million in pipeline-

[00:07:18] Stephanie Sweetland: Wow.

[00:07:18] Nick Bennett: ... from that. So, it's about a 10X return on that. And that actually all closed as well.

[00:07:23] Stephanie Sweetland: That's such a good point, because a lot of times people just look at one-to-one spend, which obviously does not scale.

[00:07:28] Nick Bennett: Exactly. And then it's like, how do you then take those and how do you do micro-events around that, that again, maybe you're accelerating those plays as well.

[00:07:38] Stephanie Sweetland: A question around timing for you. How far out from when an event ends do you track pipeline success?

[00:07:45] Nick Bennett: 90-day rolling window.

Yeah. So 90 days, I like to look at, "Hey, we have a 90-day rolling window post-event. We're looking at all of the things." There's about maybe 7 to 10 things I track. Registration's cool, attendance, great. But again, it's more of like, if I'm going to go sit in a board meeting or if I'm going to go present to a CFO, they're going to want to know what's the pipeline. Are we getting anything back for this? Those are a lot of the metrics that I look at.

[00:08:09] Stephanie Sweetland: Yes, definitely. You've created an impact tracker. Is that right?

[00:08:14] Nick Bennett: I did, yeah.

[00:08:14] Stephanie Sweetland: Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

[00:08:16] Nick Bennett: There were really no tools for field marketers and, again, people who do events. And it was just like, I want to know. And I was using spreadsheets. Spreadsheets aren't the answer to a lot of things. I just went on Lovable, and I literally vibe-coded it. And I was just like, this is what I want. This is the way that I know I want to get the data across. I built it, and I just put it out there as a free tool for event marketers. And I was like, "Go check it out. If you want to use it to see if your events are making an impact, here's benchmarks." I actually use Cvent benchmarks in there as well.

So, you're able to take these benchmarks and validate if your events are making a difference or not, and then export that, send it to your CFO, send it to your CMO, whoever it is.

[00:08:56] Stephanie Sweetland: Can you walk us through how it works? What things does someone need to input into it?

[00:09:00] Nick Bennett: Yeah. It's really just spend. What did you spend on the event? It's more of opportunities generated. It's literally four or five different fillable moments. It takes maybe five minutes to fill it in, and it does give you a lot of ideas of what can you put in there, or here are other events that are maybe in your industry that you can put in there as well.

I literally did it only because I had the issue and I was like, "Well, if I'm going to do it for myself, I'm not going to gatekeep anything. I'll put it out there for everyone else too."

Lots of people used it and it probably needs an update now. It's something I still use regularly.

[00:09:38] Stephanie Sweetland: That's awesome.

[00:09:38] Nick Bennett: Yeah.

[00:09:39] Stephanie Sweetland: Let's say you're taking this impact tracker or your results, you're sharing them with the C-suite...

[00:09:44] Nick Bennett: Yes.

[00:09:44] Stephanie Sweetland: ... how do you approach that conversation?

[00:09:47] Nick Bennett: Field marketers have to be able to paint a really nice picture because, again, it's like going back to the attribution conversation: How do we attribute events? Is it first touch? Last touch? Is it multi-touch? What does that look like? If you can more so paint the picture of, "Hey, we saw you at this event, we listened to this podcast, then we checked out a few of these pieces, landed on your pricing page."

If I can go to the C-suite and be like, "Hey, here's how the experience actually shaped, and events were a core piece of it." Then I think it's a great way to think of events as a growth engine.

[00:10:20] Stephanie Sweetland: Can you talk a little bit more about that, "Events as a growth engine"?

[00:10:24] Nick Bennett: I think so many people think of events as a siloed thing. So many organizations that I talk to say, "Oh, we do events. Cool." But they don't talk to content. They don't talk to design. They don't talk to brand and content, all of these other pieces. And it's like, if you do events, it needs to be integrated.

Integrated campaigns is a great way to think about it. How do we do integrated campaigns with events as the starting point, as well as the main point, and then funnel everything else around it?

[00:10:51] Stephanie Sweetland: Do you look at events as a channel or a tactic or both?

[00:10:54] Nick Bennett: I think it can be both. Yeah, I think it can definitely be both. In the talk that I did the other day, I forget what the number was, but I think it was 50% of people were saying that events was the highest generating revenue channel for them. I forget the number of people that looked at this, but it was like events obviously work. How do you tie that picture and that story together to make it more impactful?

[00:11:17] Stephanie Sweetland: Nick, how is AI changing the game when it comes to reporting for events?

[00:11:21] Nick Bennett: I think it actually gets rid of a lot of that manual task. When I think about it, you're downloading lists, you're putting things, you're trying to dedupe all of these names and everything. AI helps automate a lot of those things that, to be honest, people probably don't even really want to do. But I do think that when I think about this whole AI wave, and obviously I use AI on a regular basis, signals and AI, when I think of those two specific things. AI can change or maybe fake a lot of signals, but the one signal it can't change is the people in a room. When I think about AI, when I think about events, AI will always be there to support the back end of events, but the people in the room, the people that you're going and creating this experience for, AI will never be able to replicate that.

[00:12:06] Stephanie Sweetland: Absolutely. 100% agree with that. AI cannot replicate a person's experiences.

[00:12:11] Nick Bennett: Not yet at least.

[00:12:12] Stephanie Sweetland: Yeah, not yet. Maybe someday. How do you feel about using AI for analysis of that event data?

[00:12:17] Nick Bennett: I use it all the time. When I built that impact tracker, it uses AI on the backside through the benchmarks of being able to tell, “Alright, great.” When you put in your stuff and you benchmark across all these other people who are submitting their data, you can see, “Alright, great. Here’s the analysis. Here are your Tier A people who maybe came from this, or your Tier B people, or whatever it is.”

Honestly, it makes it so easy. All the MCP connections out there now, it makes it so much easier like, "I need to go into Salesforce, but I don't really want to go into Salesforce. Go find me this. Pull me this list. Tell me this." I can't tell you how much time I save from events just by leveraging it for that.

[00:12:54] Stephanie Sweetland: Yes, absolutely. And doing different cuts.

[00:12:56] Nick Bennett: Yeah, exactly.

[00:12:57] Stephanie Sweetland: Absolutely. Are you servicing up any of these AI insights to sales?

[00:13:02] Nick Bennett: I would say a little bit. I think it's still so early that a lot of the companies that I work with, they care more about, "All right, great. Are we making an impact? Are we moving the needle for them?" I'm sharing the data. I don't tell them how I specifically get it. I probably should, but it's more so, "Hey, listen. I did an analysis of this. Here's everything that we come from. Here's how you have to act on it and everything from there." But then we just go from that piece of it.

[00:13:27] Stephanie Sweetland: Awesome. What is your best advice for our listeners?

[00:13:31] Nick Bennett: Ooh. Best advice? I would say, think of the new way to do events. And again, it's not transactional. It's people first. It's, how do you put people at the core of everything that you do? And I was a huge believer of that for years, and I still am a huge believer of that. How do you go from where events were, even a couple years ago, to where events are now, to five years from now? Where are events going to be? And you have to be willing to leverage AI for it. You have to be willing to roll up your sleeves and understand that there's more beyond just registrations and attendees and badge scans and all of that.

It's more of, how do you tie that unified, collaborative story together? And then, how do you share that out to show that events are a true growth engine for your organization?

[00:14:17] Stephanie Sweetland: That's great. Thank you.

[00:14:18] Nick Bennett: Yeah, absolutely.

[00:14:19] Stephanie Sweetland: Well, let's wrap up with some key takeaways. The first takeaway that I got from this wonderful conversation is looking at intent signals that are being surfaced throughout your event and then using that to really help understand: Is this driving pipeline? Yes? No? And then, how do we surface that up to sales?

[00:14:36] Nick Bennett: Yes.

[00:14:36] Stephanie Sweetland: I'd say that's a big one.

[00:14:37] Nick Bennett: Yep.

[00:14:37] Stephanie Sweetland: Next one is definitely leverage Nick's incredible impact tracker. I'm going to be doing that personally, but check it out. There's so much opportunity to connect lots and lots of data with AI. Use that to surface analysis and insights. That's a big one. And then the third one is that events tell a really good story that you can bring to your C-suite, but you have to be connecting it to pipeline and dollars.

[00:14:58] Nick Bennett: Exactly. And I do have one more takeaway if I could add.

[00:15:01] Stephanie Sweetland: Yes, please. Do.

[00:15:02] Nick Bennett: One thing I totally even forgot about, and it's something I do at every single event I do, is: How do you leverage gifting throughout this entire process as well? Because events are such a fantastic way to leverage gifts. You have the gifts at the booth and all of that, but how do I create a personalized experience for you? If you're a VIP, "Alright, great. I want you to have this custom box that is Nashville-based, and it's all the best things from Nashville. You open it, it's a handwritten note.

You can do tiered gifting to not only drive meetings before the event, at the event, but also post-event, as a great way to stay top of mind when everyone else is just going to send the generic email.

[00:15:40] Stephanie Sweetland: Yes, that is such a good point. And we've used gifting throughout Connect. One of the coolest ways, I think, is to thank customers who are joining customer listening sessions and advisory boards, but then also, like you mentioned, some of the custom Nashville-

[00:15:52] Nick Bennett: Exactly.

[00:15:53] Stephanie Sweetland: ... themed gift boxes have been really neat, sending those to speakers, so thank you.

[00:15:56] Nick Bennett: Absolutely.

[00:15:57] Stephanie Sweetland: Awesome. Nick, where can we find you?

[00:15:58] Nick Bennett: LinkedIn is probably the place I'm at way too much. LinkedIn is the easiest place to find me, absolutely.

[00:16:05] Stephanie Sweetland: Awesome. Great. Well, we'll see you next time. Thank you, Nick.

[00:16:07] Nick Bennett: Thank you.

[00:16:11] Alyssa Peltier: 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.

[00:16:21] Rachel Andrews: 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.

[00:16:30] Felicia Asiedu: Stay connected with us on social media for behind-the-scenes content, updates, and some extra doses of inspiration.

[00:16:38] Rachel Andrews: 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@cevent.com.

[00:16:48] Felicia Asiedu: Big thanks to our amazing listeners, our guest speakers, and the incredible team behind the scenes. Remember, every great event begins with great people.

[00:16:57] Alyssa Peltier: And that's a wrap. Keep creating, keep innovating, and keep joining us as we redefine how to make events great.