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.
The short version
- Start twenty-eight 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 ever sees it: direct buyer, influencer, passive ICP, excluded. Filtering out consultants and vendors is what keeps reps trusting the list.
- Run a fixed daily rhythm on the floor: a morning digest of the top ten, outreach from the AE's own accounts, a five o'clock log of hot, warm and nurture.
- Triage every lead into five named categories with an SLA attached. Qualified inside 48 hours, warm inside 72, everything else logged and closed.
- Review four conversion rates per event rather than a single ROI number. The broken stage is the thing you can act on.
Everything below is the complete guide. Nothing on this page is held back for the download.
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.
Execution stops being improvised
AE time goes to conversations
The number survives finance review
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Four pillars
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 five o'clock log, and dinner RSVPs tracked across every channel they arrive on.
Post-event conversion engine
Five triage categories, an SLA per category, sequences live inside forty-eight hours, 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.
The 28-day pre-event sprint
Four weeks, four handoffs, one named owner per week. The dates are what make it work. A step without a date is the step that slips, and it is usually the one everything downstream waits on.
Build and cut the list
Owner: Event marketing owner- 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.
Message the personas
Owner: Product marketing plus event owner- 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 and it converts on a different promise.
Go live and brief the floor
Owner: Event owner plus AEs- 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 the single line of context that makes the first message land.
- AEs review and edit their own top targets. A rep who has not reviewed their own list will not work it.
Book the room
Owner: Event owner- 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.
ICP tiering
Four buckets, applied before a rep sees anything. The fourth bucket matters as much as the first. Consultants and competing vendors left in a target list are why a sales team stops 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. Booth conversation is the goal, not a calendar hold. |
| Tier 3 | Passive ICP | Business Analyst, Technical Architect, individual contributors inside a fit account | Nurture. Useful for account coverage and for the second event, not for this one. |
| Excluded | Out of scope | Consultants, competing vendors, agencies, press and communications | Filtered out before the list reaches a rep. Their presence in a list is what makes reps stop trusting lists. |
Dinners and side events
Run the invitation list as its own tiered exercise, scored on two axes. 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. A dinner nobody logged is a dinner that will not appear in any report.
The in-event daily flow
Four fixed moments a day. Reps on a floor cannot hold a process in their heads, so the process has to be four things that happen at the same time every day.
9am, the digest
Ten leads, ranked, one line of context each, with an urgency tag and a link to the sequence that covers them. Ten rather than forty: a list of forty gets skimmed and a list of ten gets worked.
9am to 11am, the outreach window
Messages go from the AE's own accounts, on the channel the recipient is reading that week: LinkedIn, the event app, or a messaging app where a relationship already exists. A no-reply address will not get a meeting booked at an event.
5pm, the log
Every conversation gets a tag of hot, warm or nurture, plus the objection raised and the next step agreed. Fifteen minutes, once a day, while the memory is intact. This is the entry that decides whether the follow-up is specific or generic three days later.
Next morning, the recap
Each AE gets their own recap: what they logged, what they missed, and who from their target list was seen on the floor by someone else. The missed-leads line is the one that changes behaviour.
Meeting targets
Plan for fifteen pre-booked conversations per AE per day at a flagship event, counting scheduled meetings, confirmed booth slots and dinner seats together. That is a planning ceiling rather than a quota. Its use is in the T-1 review: if the calendar is at four, the pre-event motion did not work and there are still seven days to fix it.
Post-event triage, day zero to three
Every name that came off the floor lands in one of five categories within twenty-four hours of the event closing. Categories with no follow-up are as important as the ones with an SLA, because an uncategorised list is a list every rep is entitled to ignore.
| 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. Six fields, written once, at the moment the triage decision is made. Adding them later rarely happens.
Conversion funnel targets
Four rates per event. Their job is diagnostic. A single ROI multiple tells you the event worked or it did not, and gives you nothing to change. These four tell you which week of the sprint to fix.
| 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 three things per event: 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 four numbers in the same order, and the fourth event's review takes ten minutes instead of an afternoon.
The summary row
Keep one row per event in one sheet, forever. Spend, meetings, opportunities, pipeline, cost per meeting, hours to first follow-up. A worked example: thirty thousand dollars of spend, thirty-one meetings, five opportunities, six hundred and forty thousand dollars of pipeline, nine hundred and sixty-eight dollars per meeting, thirty-two hours to first follow-up. After four events that sheet is the strongest event planning argument you have.
Before the system, and with it
| Area | Without a written motion | With one |
|---|---|---|
| List building | Manual, late, inconsistent between events | Sourced, enriched, ICP-filtered, overlap-flagged four 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 | Five to ten days, waiting on badge scan exports | Sequences and nudges inside 48 hours |
| 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 |
Six field learnings
These are the corrections that came out of running the sprint across fintech, cybersecurity and regtech events. Each one came from an event where it went wrong first.
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, not at T-1. 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 every time
Attendee lists overstate reality. People register and do not travel, and in-app messages go unread. A hundred contacts inside accounts you already sell to will produce more meetings than two thousand cold names who happen to hold the right title.
Starting late is the single most expensive mistake
Outreach that begins inside two weeks lands while the recipient is thinking about flights. Enforce the T-4 start and the T-2 AE briefing as dates on a calendar with named owners, not as a preference.
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.
What people will say when you propose this
“Our AEs already do this”
Some of it, some of the time, 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, it does not tier them against your named accounts, it does not write persona messaging, and it does not 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 flagship event is roughly one focused person for four weeks, and product marketing plus marketing operations are usually the two most oversubscribed functions in the building. That is why the sprint assigns dates and owners rather than describing a good intention.
“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 exists to fix the inputs, not the reporting tool.
Where Luminik fits
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. That is the honest version, and it is why the playbook is written as a manual rather than as a product tour.
The cost is where you would expect. The T-4 week is days of list building and enrichment. The daily digest is someone's morning, every morning of the event. The triage in the first forty-eight hours lands in the same week the team is jet-lagged and behind on everything else.
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 stays yours. The enrichment vendor stays yours. The CRM stays the system of record.
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Questions about the playbook
What is an event GTM playbook?
How far in advance should pre-event outreach start?
What is a realistic conversion funnel for a B2B event?
How quickly should post-event follow-up go out?
Do I need software to run this playbook?
How is this different from generic event marketing advice?
Who inside the team should own it?
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.