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The Event GTM Playbook

The operating manual for turning a sponsored event into sourced pipeline: a 28-day sprint, tiered targeting, a daily floor rhythm, and triage with real SLAs.

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The short version

Start 28 days out, tier the list and triage every lead with an SLA

The complete guide is on this page. The PDF has the same content.

Start 28 days out

T-4 list and ICP filter, T-3 persona messaging, T-2 sequences live and AEs briefed, T-1 dinner invitations and nudges.

Tier the list before a rep sees it

Direct buyer, influencer, passive ICP, excluded. Filtering out consultants and vendors keeps reps trusting the list.

Run a fixed daily rhythm on the floor

A morning digest of the top 10, outreach from the AE's accounts, and a 5pm log of hot, warm and nurture.

Triage every lead with an SLA

5 named categories. Qualified within 48 hours from event end, warm within 72, everything else logged and closed.

Review 4 conversion rates per event

A single ROI number does not show which stage broke. The conversion rates do.

Who this is for

Teams whose events carry a pipeline number

Written for B2B marketing and RevOps teams using Salesforce or HubSpot, where third-party events already carry pipeline targets, sales follow-up, and CRM attribution pressure.

Event marketing managersField marketersRevOpsSeveral third-party events a yearOr 1 to 2 major events with real spendSalesforce or HubSpot

Execution stops being improvised

The scramble becomes a coordinated sequence of dated steps, so the 28 days before the event run to a plan.

AE time goes to conversations

Bandwidth stops going into list hygiene and badge-export cleanup, and goes into the meetings the event was funded to produce.

Finance can check the number

Every touch is tagged when it happens, so the post-event report is ready to pull.

The names on the list are usually fine. What goes wrong is timing and ownership: follow-up lands 5 to 10 days late, AE attention has moved to next quarter, and by the review meeting nobody can say which opportunity came from which conversation.

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The system

Target before the event, enable AEs on site, convert and report after

Pre-event targeting and warm-up

Build the attendee picture, enrich it, filter it to ICP, flag account overlap, and put persona messaging live before anyone boards a plane.

In-event AE enablement

A live channel per AE, a morning digest with the day's priorities and context, a 5pm log, and dinner RSVPs tracked across every channel they arrive on.

Post-event conversion engine

5 triage categories, an SLA per category, sequences live within 48 hours from event end, and CRM tags for event, tier, channel, persona, owner and opportunity status.

Reporting and attribution

One funnel, reviewed weekly: lead, MQL, meeting, opportunity, pipeline. Broken out by channel, persona and event stage, synced to Salesforce campaigns or HubSpot.

Pillar 1, in detail

Start 28 days out so sequences are live before anyone travels

4 weeks, 4 handoffs, one named owner per week. Steps without a date slip, and later steps wait on them.

T-4

Build and cut the list

Source the attendee picture from the open web and the event platforms you are entitled to.
Enrich every record through the enrichment vendor you already pay for.
Apply the ICP filter on company, title, seniority and target-account list.
Flag overlap: named accounts, open opportunities, existing customers, and anyone already in an active sequence.

Owner: Event marketing owner

T-3

Message the personas

Product marketing submits persona pain points against a hard deadline. This is the dependency that slips most often, so it gets a date and a name.
Draft persona and account-specific copy for email and LinkedIn.
Write the dinner or side-event invitation separately. It is a different ask from a meeting request.

Owner: Product marketing plus event owner

T-2

Go live and brief the floor

Sequences live in the sequencer the reps already use.
Open a live channel per AE for the event.
Share the target brief: top accounts per AE, why each one is on the list, and one line of context for the first message.
AEs review and edit their top targets.

Owner: Event owner plus AEs

T-1

Book the room

Dinner and side-event invitations go out, tiered A, B and C.
Multi-channel nudges start: LinkedIn, the event app, and messaging apps where the relationship already exists.
Lock the meeting calendar per AE per day and publish it where the whole team can see it.
Confirm the capture path for the floor: who logs what, on which device, into which CRM object.

Owner: Event owner

Targeting model

Tier the list before reps see it, so they keep trusting it

4 buckets, applied before a rep sees anything. Consultants and competing vendors left on a target list make a sales team stop opening marketing's lists.

Tier	Who	Typical titles	Treatment
Tier 1	Direct buyer in a proven vertical	Head of Compliance, Chief Product Officer, Director of Fraud, Product lead on the relevant surface	AE owns before the event. Personal outreach, meeting ask, dinner invitation.
Tier 2	Influencer around the buyer	Product Operations, Strategy, Innovation and Partnerships leads	Sequenced with persona messaging. The goal is a booth conversation.
Tier 3	Passive ICP	Business Analyst, Technical Architect, individual contributors inside a fit account	Nurture. Useful for account coverage and for the next event.
Excluded	Out of scope	Consultants, competing vendors, agencies, press and communications	Filtered out before the list reaches a rep.

Score dinner and side-event invitations on 2 axes

Run the invitation list as a separate tiered exercise. ICP and intent gives you the first axis: a reply, activity in the event app, a comment on a relevant post. Strategic value gives you the second: a named account, an open opportunity, an existing customer with expansion room. Tier A gets a personal invitation from the AE who owns the account, tier B gets the invitation with a follow-up nudge, tier C is a fill list held until the week of. Track acceptances daily against a fixed reminder in local time, and log every acceptance and no-show back to the CRM record, so the dinner appears in the report.

Pillar 2, in detail

A fixed daily rhythm keeps reps on their top 10 leads

Reps on a floor cannot hold a process in their heads, so the process has to be 4 things that happen at the same time every day.

9am

The digest

10 leads, ranked, one line of context each, with an urgency tag and a link to the sequence that covers them.

Head of KYC, tier-1 bank → replied on LinkedIn, booth conversation yesterday [SQL / T1 / LinkedIn]

Product lead, payments platform → commented on the launch post, missed the dinner [Hot MQL / T1 / Social]

VP Risk, digital wallet → replied late, asked for a recap [SQL / T1 / Event app]

9 to 11am

The outreach window

Messages go from the AE's accounts, on the channel the recipient is reading that week: LinkedIn, the event app, or a messaging app where a relationship already exists.

5pm

The log

Every conversation gets a tag of hot, warm or nurture, plus the objection raised and the next step agreed. 15 minutes, once a day, while the memory is intact. This entry decides whether the follow-up 3 days later is specific or generic.

Next day

The recap

Each AE gets a personal recap: what they logged, what they missed, and who from their target list was seen on the floor by someone else.

Meeting targets. Plan for 15 pre-booked conversations per AE per day at a large conference, counting scheduled meetings, confirmed booth slots and dinner seats together. That is a planning ceiling. Its use is in the T-1 review: if the calendar is at 4, the pre-event motion did not work and there are still 7 days to fix it.

Pillar 3, in detail

Triage every name within 24 hours, follow up on SQLs within 48

Every name that came off the floor lands in one of 5 categories within 24 hours of the event closing. Categories with no follow-up matter too, because reps ignore an uncategorised list.

Category	What qualifies	Owner	SLA
SQL	ICP match, role match, and a real signal. A booth conversation plus a direct message from a decision maker is the canonical example.	AE	Under 48 hours
Hot MQL	Warm interest without a meeting. Engaged with content, attended a session, replied late, did not make the dinner.	SDR or AE	Under 72 hours
Passive ICP	Fits the profile, produced no signal at the event.	Nurture sequence	Next campaign cycle
Non-ICP	Outside the filter. Vendors, consultants, students, press.	None	No follow-up. Logged and closed.
Event intel	Market, competitive or product insight rather than a person to sell to.	Product marketing	Logged in the retro

Tag every record on the way through with event, tier, channel, persona, owner and opportunity status. 6 fields, written once, at the moment the triage decision is made.

Pillar 4, in detail

Conversion rates by stage show which week of the sprint to fix

A single ROI multiple tells you whether the event worked. These 4 rates point at the stage that broke.

Stage	Target	What a miss usually means
Lead to MQL	35%	If this is low, the list was wrong before anyone wrote a word.
MQL to meeting	30%	If this is low, the messaging is generic or it went out too late.
Meeting to opportunity	20%	If this is low, the qualification bar at the booth was too loose.
Opportunity to SQL	50%	If this is low, the follow-up lost the thread between the floor and the first real call.

Alongside the rates, track velocity from event date to opportunity created, drop-off by persona and by channel, and cost per meeting, per opportunity and per pipeline dollar. Review weekly with the same 4 numbers in the same order, and the fourth event's review takes 10 minutes.

Keep one summary row per event, in one sheet

A worked example. After 4 events, that sheet shows which events to repeat.

Spend

$30,000

Meetings

Opportunities

Pipeline

$640,000

Cost per meeting

$968

Hours to first follow-up

What changes

A written motion cuts follow-up from 5 to 10 days down to 48 hours

Area	Without a written motion	With one
List building	Manual, late, inconsistent between events	Sourced, enriched, ICP-filtered, overlap-flagged 4 weeks out
Targeting	Everyone on the badge list gets the same treatment	Signal-driven: activity, session attendance, account overlap
Messaging	One generic invitation	Persona-specific, validated by product marketing before it ships
AE activation	A spreadsheet dropped in a channel the week of	Daily digest, named targets, live support during the event
Dinner execution	Ad hoc invitations, no tracking	Tiered, multi-channel, tracked daily with a named owner
Follow-up	5 to 10 days, waiting on badge scan exports	Sequences and nudges within 48 hours from event end
CRM and reporting	Spreadsheets reconstructed after the fact	Salesforce or HubSpot synced as the event runs
ROI visibility	None that survives a finance review	Attribution per event, persona, channel and stage

From the floor

Fixes from events where the sprint went wrong first

These came out of running the sprint across fintech, cybersecurity and regtech events.

A bad event app can remove your pre-event channel entirely

Some event platforms have unusable messaging, or gate it behind a tier you did not buy. Find out at T-4. When the app is unusable, fall back to LinkedIn plus a call workflow and reduce the meeting target accordingly. Keep a private list of which events have a workable app so next year's plan is built on evidence.

Named-account overlap beats list size

Attendee lists overstate reality. People register and do not travel, and in-app messages go unread. 100 contacts inside accounts you already sell to will produce more meetings than 2,000 cold names who happen to hold the right title.

Starting late is the most expensive mistake

Outreach that begins in the last 2 weeks lands while the recipient is thinking about flights. Put the T-4 start and the T-2 AE briefing on a calendar as dates with named owners.

Modular messaging outperforms replacement messaging with regulated buyers

Banks and other regulated buyers responded to messaging that named the systems they already run and promised to sit alongside them. Messaging built on replacement got fewer replies from the same titles at the same event.

Product marketing input needs a hard deadline

Persona pain points are the input everything downstream waits on. Give it a T-3 date and a named person. Without both, the sequences slip to T-1, and a late launch looks exactly like bad messaging in the retro.

Calendar-based meeting tracking does not survive the floor

Nobody updates a shared calendar between booth conversations. Round-robin assignment works as a stopgap. The durable answer is capture on the device the rep already has in their hand, writing to the CRM the same day.

Internal objections

How to answer the objections you will hear internally

“Our AEs already do this”

They do some of it, and rarely in a form anyone can inspect afterwards. The playbook does not add work to a rep's day. It moves list building, filtering, messaging and triage off the rep and leaves them the conversations. What changes is that the motion is repeatable and every touch carries a tag.

“Apollo is enough”

Apollo is a sequencer and a data source, and a good one. It does not tell you who is attending or tier them against your named accounts, and it does not write persona messaging or triage what came off the floor. Those are the steps this playbook is about. The sequencer stays where it is.

“Marketing can manage it”

Marketing can design it. Running it for a large conference is roughly one focused person for 4 weeks, and product marketing plus marketing operations are usually the 2 most oversubscribed functions in the building. That is why the sprint assigns dates and owners.

“Salesforce already handles our reporting”

Salesforce reports what reaches it. Event touches that live in an event app, a dinner RSVP thread, a LinkedIn inbox and a stack of badge scans do not reach it in a shape any report can use. The playbook's fourth pillar fixes the inputs, so the reporting tool has something to report.

Where Luminik fits

The manual version costs one focused person for 4 weeks per event

Everything above works without buying anything. It has been run with a spreadsheet, a sequencer, a shared channel and one person who kept the dates.

The T-4 week is days of list building and enrichment, and the daily digest is someone's morning on every day of the event. The triage then takes the first 48 hours from event end.

Luminik is the event pipeline platform that runs those steps for teams who do not want to hire for them: source, enrich, sequence, capture, attribute, on the Salesforce, HubSpot, Apollo and enrichment accounts you already pay for. The sequencer, the enrichment vendor and the CRM all stay yours.

Printable PDF

Take the playbook with you

The full guide as a formatted PDF, ready to print or forward to whoever owns the next event.

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What event owners ask before running the sprint

What is an event GTM playbook?

A written operating procedure for a sponsored or attended third-party event, covering the 4 weeks ahead of the event, the days on the floor, and the 72 hours after. It names who sources the attendee list, who filters it to ICP, who writes the persona messaging, which sequences go live and when, how booth conversations get logged, how leads are triaged after the event, and which numbers get reviewed weekly. Without one, event execution is improvised each time and the result cannot be compared across events.

How far in advance should pre-event outreach start?

28 days. The sprint in this playbook starts at T-4 weeks with list sourcing and ICP filtering, hands to messaging at T-3, puts sequences live and briefs AEs at T-2, and runs dinner invitations plus multi-channel nudges at T-1. Teams that start with less than 2 weeks to go report the same failure: the sequences go out while attention has already moved to travel logistics.

What is a realistic conversion funnel for a B2B event?

The targets in this playbook are lead to MQL 35 percent, MQL to meeting 30 percent, meeting to opportunity 20 percent, and opportunity to SQL 50 percent. They are planning numbers. Their value is that they let you find the broken stage. A healthy meeting rate with a dead opportunity rate points to qualification at the booth.

How quickly should post-event follow-up go out?

Under 48 hours for anything qualified, and under 72 for warm interest that did not meet you. The playbook sets those as SLAs against named triage categories, because without a named category and a deadline, follow-up slips behind the AE's other work.

Do I need software to run this playbook?

No. Everything in it has been run with a spreadsheet, a sequencer, a shared channel and a disciplined owner. The cost is headcount and calendar attention, roughly one focused person for the 4 weeks around each event. Luminik exists for teams who want the same motion without that headcount, and the playbook names the steps that take the most time.

How is this different from generic event marketing advice?

It is written from the execution side. It leaves out booth design, swag and session strategy, and covers the parts that decide whether the spend becomes pipeline: who is on the list, when the messages go, who owns each conversation afterwards, and what gets written back to Salesforce or HubSpot.

Who inside the team should own it?

One named owner for the sprint, usually the event marketing manager or a field marketer, with a hard input deadline on product marketing at T-3 and AE briefings at T-2. Late launches usually come from an unowned dependency, most often persona messaging.

Keep going

Put a budget and a number behind the next event

The Event ROI Business Case

Win the budget for the next event with break-even stated as opportunities.

Event ROI calculator

Model expected closed-won revenue for the next event on your calendar.

Outbound sequence generator

A pre-event and post-event sequence for a specific event and persona.

How Luminik runs the pre-event weeks

Sourcing, ICP scoring and sequences, 6 weeks before the event.

Run this on an event you have already paid for

Pick the next event on your calendar. We walk the sourcing, the ICP cut, the sequences and the writeback to Salesforce or HubSpot on that specific event.

Book a 20-min walkthrough

I take every walkthrough myself. Bring the next event on your calendar.

Prasad Subrahmanya, founder