How effective are in-person events as a pipeline generation channel?

Ishan Mukherjee · published Apr 4, 2025

The dinner after a conference is more valuable than the conference itself — attend events but skip the booth and host a great dinner instead

You get two or three deep authentic relationships rather than being one of a hundred sponsors

Scope: framed as a point from his mentor Manav that he adopted in practice

10:07 20Sales: How the Best Sales Teams Use AI to Win Enterprise Deals | Sales Teams Will Be Dramatically Smaller | How to Ramps Sales Reps Way Faster | Why Unpaid Design Partners are BS | Why this Generation of Sales is Soft with Ishan Mukherjee @ Rox

Carles Reina · published Apr 11, 2026

Executive dinners deliver the best ROI of any enterprise marketing activity, while conferences and trade shows deliver the worst

A 15-person dinner costs only $3-5k, and inviting competing customers into the same room creates FOMO because they all know each other from the same ICP; conferences produce no measurable return

Scope: cost varies by city; judged from an enterprise sales perspective

50:45 20Sales: ElevenLabs: Why We Set a 20x Sales Quota | How to Structure Sales Compensation Plans | Customer Success: 'Total BS' or Growth Engine? | Building an AI Sales Machine: What Tools & Tactics Must CROs Adopt Today with Carles Reina

Patrick Forquer · published May 11, 2026

Expensive thought-leadership fireside dinners are among the highest-ROI marketing spends, despite the cost

Everyone still wants to go to a fancy restaurant and hear someone smart speak; you need real thought-leader talent doing a fireside with Max

Scope: requires securing genuine thought leader talent; they cost a lot of money

45:22 20VC: Inside Legora: $100M ARR in 18 Months | Jude Law Generated $50M in Sales Pipeline: The Economics Broken Down | Competing Against Harvey, the 800 Pound Gorilla | Why Legora is Undervalued at $5.5BN with Patrick Forquer, CRO @ Legora

Ryan Petersen · published Jun 20, 2026

B2B marketing is largely events marketing, and you don't need a CMO to do it

Events work reliably and simple ones like hosted dinners require no marketing function at all — a salesperson with a budget can run them; only large conferences are genuinely hard to pull off

Scope: conferences are the exception and are hard to execute

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Ishan Mukherjee · published Apr 4, 2025

If events aren't already working for you and you don't have a dialed-in operation, don't do them

Better to go all in on what works and bet on finding the next thing

9:32 Skip events unless the motion is already dialed in

Harry Stebbings · published Apr 4, 2025

Events only work with a holistic multichannel approach — sponsoring the hotel card, the billboard and several other touchpoints, not just a booth

Ramp does this well

9:43 Events require a holistic multichannel takeover

Carles Reina · published Apr 11, 2026

Customer events succeed by bringing the right ICPs and designing non-salesy content that showcases partners and customers rather than your own product

If content is too salesy people walk away and never come back; putting partners and customers on stage both teaches you about them and lets them validate that what you're building is right

53:17 Non salesy partner and customer led content makes events work

Ashley Kelly · published Jun 7, 2024

Events have become very effective again for pipeline generation, though effectiveness depends on the persona — HR buyers in particular love attending events

Rippling has had a lot of success at recent SHRM events

41:21 Events work again but persona dependent

Patrick Forquer · published May 11, 2026

Legal tech is in a renaissance with many new players and a lot of capital coming in, and conferences can either waste or make money depending on the playbook you run

Outcome depends entirely on execution, and Legora has developed a good playbook for it

45:02 Event roi depends entirely on the playbook run

Patrick Forquer · published May 11, 2026

Attending roughly a conference a week was excessive — some of those events were not worth repeating

They showed up at every conference imaginable and on repeat found some were not worth doing again

46:03 Prune back from blanket event attendance

Paul Graham · published Mar 2005

The way to learn what customers want is to watch them use your software, and trade shows are worth attending as market research rather than as a sales channel.

At trade shows Viaweb built real working stores with people, so they could watch them use the software and talk about what they needed; trade shows didn't pay off as customer acquisition.

source Attend trade shows for market research not sales since watching customers use the product reveals needs