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Marketing in Progress is a spinoff of Work in Progress that digs into what’s moving the needle in B2B. We feature marketing leaders, sales leaders, and agency owners sharing real stories, smart ideas, and no-filter perspectives—so you walk away with practical guidance to help you do your job better.
Stephanie Worthington (00:00):
As an event professional, you should care what the lead source is. You should care what kind of ROI you're getting out of your event. Are you able to reduce sales cycles? You need to care about that and you should always be tracking those numbers.
Gayle Kalvert (00:14):
Welcome to Marketing in Progress. I'm Gayle Kalvert. This show is for B2B marketing leaders who are under real pressure to deliver results without a clear roadmap. Each episode is built to give you practical insight you can use right away. We focus on what actually matters, how success is measured, and the decisions and trade-offs necessary for success. If you're trying to cut through the noise, do better work and build credibility inside your organization, you're in the right place. Let's get into it. Hey, everyone. Welcome back to Marketing in Progress. I'm your host, Gayle Kalvert. Today I'm joined by Stephanie Worthington, head of events and field marketing at Upstart. Stephanie is a strategic marketing leader and a CTSM Gold certified expert, known for building high impact customer-centric programs that drive pipeline and accelerate revenue growth. Currently leading B2B event marketing at Upstart, Stephanie oversees a portfolio of 25 plus trade shows annually while creating standout experiences that deepen relationships and deliver measurable business outcomes.
(01:24):
Stephanie brings a powerful blend of storytelling, operational rigor, and innovation to every campaign she touches. If you're looking to learn how to design and scale successful event marketing programs, this episode is for you. You'll also hear how to balance big picture strategy with hands-on execution to create campaigns that truly resonate and convert. Steph, events are a huge line item in a marketing budget. So do you have any criteria for how you prioritize events and how do you determine if an event is really worth the investment?
Stephanie Worthington (01:58):
So I really look at three things. I look at audience fit, I look at commercial performance, and I look at strategic role within the mix. So for audience fit, I start with the basics, like who actually shows up at the event, how many of them are in our ICP? And then for us, because we focus mostly on credit union and banking shows, that's usually things like asset size, institution type, and then the seniority of the attendee base. For example, I've passed on or downgraded certain conferences where only 15 to 20% of the attendees were in our sweet spot, despite the fact that the sales team is like, "We have to be there." I have event workbooks that I use to keep track of all of our events. In our event workbooks, every show gets aligned with audience notes, ICP quality, and then attend versus sponsor versus skip.
(02:45):
We also link to last year's event report because every event gets its own report at the end of the show, and then the lists that we have collected. So you'll literally see comments like speed dating event. ROI was horrible. Never gotten any deals from this. When we look at commercial performance, I'm not looking at did we have a busy booth. I'm looking at things like how many conversations did each AE and BDR have? How many opportunities did we create? What is the 12-month closed one attribution? And also what is the cost per op or cost per closed one deal? Now, our event overview and debrief templates force that discipline. So each event has predefined goals and then a formal debrief where we compare reality to those targets. That's what lets us say this show looked fine anecdotally, but it's not pulling its weight relative to the spend.
(03:36):
Or as we like to say, the squeeze is not worth the juice. And then finally, the third lens is that strategic role. Some events are tempols, NADA, CBA, GAC, and then our own fall summit. We'll invest more because they're doing brand pipeline and customer engagement all at once. But others are more about testing a new segment or geography. And in those cases, we'll often start with an attend only or a very light sponsorship and explicitly say, "We don't have enough information about this new show we're considering. Let's just send a rep, gather data and see what they can get out of it this year." So the framework is ICP fit, historical and projected ROI, and then what's their role in the overall event portfolio. And if it doesn't clear those bars, it doesn't stay on the list, or I'll dramatically downgrade it.
Gayle Kalvert (04:23):
I mean, that is a ton of, like you said, operational rigor that you put behind these events. Is that something that you learned over time? How did you get to this point where you're able to really build that kind of criteria? That's incredible.
Stephanie Worthington (04:41):
Well, that comes from 30 something years in this business and I take my job and events very seriously. I think some people look at events as, oh, I get this big budget. It's a free for all. I just want to have pretty booths and as much traffic as possible. I do think of myself as a part owner of any company that I work for, and I am one of the biggest, or can be one of the biggest cost centers for any company with my event budget. I take that seriously. I do not like wasting money personally. If I see that we're going to go to a show and I don't think we're going to get out of it, what we're putting into it, I will have conversations with leadership. I've even had conversations with CEOs and I've been like, "That $50,000 I can use to either do two other shows or we can improve our presence at this particular show and get more out of it.
(05:40):
" That's where I get my need to make sure that we're spending our money the right way. Now, when it comes to how did I come up with all these plans and the way to do things, part of it is because I'm just a hyper organized person. The more you can cookie cutter an event from beginning to end, the easier it is to do those events. And the easier it is with the end of the event to actually compare apples to apples versus always trying to figure out apples to oranges. So I have developed show templates for the overview documents that I create and that I run through with all of my staff beforehand through what is the plan when we're on site and have booth meetings about that. All the way through to at the end of the event, we're going to do a wrap up report that's going to list all of the highlights from the event.
(06:29):
We're going to talk about what deals we're going to follow up on and what our next steps are. And I then put in how many opportunities were created, how many deals got through into the pipeline, how many closed or won. I'll do it the three-month mark, then the six-month mark, and then I'll do it again when I start looking at that show for the following year.
Gayle Kalvert (06:49):
Are you a marketing leader in B2B tech? Do you want to hear what your peers are actually doing, what's working, what they're ditching, and how they're navigating the pressure we're all under? Well, you're in luck. We just launched the Marketing In Progress community. It's a space for sharing ideas, learning from your peers and having fun along the way. Visit creocollective.io/marketinginprogress to learn more and join us. So many good tips for anybody listening to how to properly organize and then also how that lets you track success. One question I have is, is there anywhere you've seen event teams maybe spending time and energy that you'd say are a waste right now? Every marketer is having to do more with less budget and also more with less time.
Stephanie Worthington (07:41):
A lot of times where I will see the waste is in things like overspending on a show. Back in the day, I had a VP of sales that I adored, but he always wanted to go to AWS Reinvent. And I was working for a startup and I only had so much budget throughout the year. And if we went to AWS, now given this was 10 years ago, but if I remember correctly, a two-foot kiosk started at like $30,000 and went up from there. And that was a huge chunk out of our budget. And so I would insist on things like we're not at a place yet where we're ready to try to compete with the big boys who have these 60 by 60 or 60 by 80 booths who are going to suck all the oxygen out of the room while we're in the very back praying that somebody comes visit our kiosk and is so impressed by our color palette and messaging.
(08:40):
It just doesn't happen. How can we be more strategic with these shows? How can we be smarter about these shows? Let's set up meetings beforehand. Let's arrange a dinner. Let's arrange coffee time with these folks. And sometimes you push back like that on your sales team and they'll respond back with, "Well, I reached out to a bunch of people and I couldn't get them to agree to a meeting." Or, "We did a bunch of invites to have people come up to a whisper suite and nobody's RSVPing or they RSVP, but they don't really believe they're going to come." That is a telltale sign of you really need to rethink why you're at that show because if you're going to spend that much money on a hope and a prayer, you're better off putting that money into your travel spend and having your reps go out and visit each of these prospects with a big box of donuts in their hand or whatever it is that is going to resonate with the people that you're trying to visit at that event.
(09:37):
COVID is over. It's okay. You can get back out there, get into the planes and go have face-to-face time. You do not have to rely on waiting for everybody to try to find you like a needle and haystack at a big show.
Gayle Kalvert (09:49):
I love that. So you've said two things that you've focused on I want to emphasize is how you are working with leadership, whether it's the C-suite or the sales leadership team to educate them and make them part of the process and really understand where the ROI is as opposed to just sort of saying yes and doing and spending. ROI, of course, is a big part of that conversation. So why in your opinion or experience do you feel event ROI is hard to prove?
Stephanie Worthington (10:22):
There is so many different anecdotes for how people try to justify the ROI. I have seen some people do it by how many people they've scanned in their booth or how many times somebody came back and picked up a giveaway gift or something like that. I've seen people say even, and we do this too, we track how many of our conversations actually get into pipeline. So for us, we look at how many conversations do we have and how many of them go into pipeline and then how many of them go on to actually be a live opportunity and then how many close? And that is hard, very hard to track. I will tell you that there are plenty of times where I will see the one deals come through either through Slack or email or however your company will announce that somebody won a deal.
(11:08):
And as an event person, you'll be like, "I remember we met with that person at that event, but the lead source says AE originated." Although event people out there, I know you're feeling your heart crush right now.
Gayle Kalvert (11:22):
Exactly.
Stephanie Worthington (11:22):
We understand.
Gayle Kalvert (11:23):
We marketers understand. Yeah.
Stephanie Worthington (11:26):
Yeah. All this work I'm doing and I'm not getting credit. And one of the things I've even told salespeople in the past is like, if you like doing your own event sourcing, if you truly like being able to go into a phone book and pull people out of the blue and close a deal with them, keep telling the world that you're not getting any leads from an event. By all means, I will shut down, I'll move on to another company and you can do it all yourselves. But if there is trace possibility that it came from an event, we need to track that. Now, AEs can only do so much. They'll usually, and depend on your company rules, sometimes they'll say, if you get an opportunity within a month, then it will get credit from the show. But if they had a meeting three weeks before the show and then they went to the show, you're not going to get credit.
(12:18):
Well, for those kinds of outlier cases, that's when attribution comes into play. So work really closely with your RevOps team and get attribution going for your events if you're not doing that now because what you can track is for this particular opportunity, here are all the various touches that they had along the way. And usually three or four times, some of it's going to be they had an event, they came to a dinner, right? They did something event related. And while you can't directly point that closed opportunity to a ... Because of this event, we got this deal, you're still showing that the mix works and you can still do comparisons between deals that closed without any event touchpoint and the length that took for deals that close with event touchpoints and what that duration is. And if you're doing a really good job of your events, you should see a decrease in time to close because of your events.
(13:19):
And one of the other things I'll also hear a lot when I'm at trade shows, especially with the reps is they'll have a conversation with somebody at the booth, they'll turn around and they'll go, "Stephanie, I have been trying to get ahold of that person for three years, three years. I've been trying to get ahold of them. I have emailed them. I have called them. I sent them every gift you could possibly think of and they wouldn't talk to me. I just met them. We had a great conversation. They want a follow-up meeting." Now that for me, that's my win. That's when I go, yes, that is why these events are so important. It's a unicorn activity. You don't hear it all the time when it comes out of your booth, but when it does, it's like, yes, that's it. That's why we're here.
Gayle Kalvert (13:59):
Yes, I love that. I love that you mentioned time to close. So not just the impact in numbers, but how events can shorten sales cycles. It's very cool. One of the things that we see with events a lot in my work at Creole and our clients is we really focus on helping them turn an event into part of an all year strategy as opposed to, we've got this event, how do we get ROI out of this event? In my mind, that's the wrong way of looking at it. Can you share how you make events part of that full funnel revenue driver? I
Stephanie Worthington (14:35):
Understand at a very deep level how my events, how my leads when they come in can then be used by everybody else on the team and how it makes sense that you want to serve them up and how coordinating with other people in your department makes that event so much stronger. You want to have conversations with DemandGen ahead of time. You want to have conversations with your media team. You don't want to wait until the last minute and go, "Oh, hey, I have an event next week. Can we run an ad?" All you're going to do is piss them off and it doesn't work. They don't just start on day one and end after the event ends. They are full campaigns. In some cases, they can go from three months to a year. And by that, I mean that I am already planning some key events that are going to take place in 2027.
(15:30):
I'm already actively planning those events and it's more than just going ahead and buying the sponsorship. It's looking at how we're going to set ourselves up for success and how we're going to take the lessons that we learned from doing the event this year and roll it over into next year. So a couple key things that you can do to help your events be more of a campaign or more of a long-term success is make sure your pre-event game is on track. So what we do is our RevOps team, who I work very close with, we'll upload registration lists that we get within 24 hours of receipt, and then we'll cross-match that against our existing pipeline so we know who matters at that event before we land. Now, I want to caveat by saying that I know that tech shows don't give out pre-registration lists.
(16:23):
That was always the frustration of every event person I've ever worked for when I was directly in the tech industry, but you can still prepare yourselves by looking at the scams that you got from last year. Or one of the things that I like to do back in the day is I would get with our partners and we could sometimes pool our lists from last year. Obviously, this isn't a direct competitor or anything like that, or even a partner that kind of you compete with. It's just a regular tech partner. So in that sense, you do, you're all responsible, not just for events, but you're responsible for building partnerships with your vendors and then with other companies in your segment. That will come back and pay dividends when you're trying to figure out, I want to do a dinner event, but I don't have the money, see if I can partner with somebody.
(17:08):
So when you're at an event, make sure you're walking around talking to other people and building friendships because that will come back to help you. Now, the other thing that we do is that we make sure our outreach plans are well thought of ahead of time and we look at things like what is the sequence going to be? Are we going to run a separate sequence for dinners versus the actual meet us at the booth kind of thing? And then we separate out another group of high value targets that we will contact directly from our AEs or we'll do an AE send. So instead of it coming from a junior person, it actually will come from the AE that has already had contact with that client. And then the other thing you can do, and this is really simple stuff, right? This isn't rocket science, but have some goals.
(17:54):
Figure out your goals before you go to the event. Don't wing it. So the goals that we have are things like how many conversations do I want each AE who's going to be at that booth to have? And then from those, how many of those conversations do I want to have turn into opportunities? Now, if you've never done this before, you're literally going to be pulling numbers out of thin air and that's okay. But once you've done a show once, twice, three times, you're going to be able to see like, okay, last year I had a goal of 20 conversations per rep. They only were able to do 12. So this next year we're going to pump it up to 15. We're only asking for three more from last year. And if you hold yourself accountable to those goals, it makes it easier, like I said, to trap things, but it also, believe it or not, it'll motivate your team.
(18:44):
These guys are competitive. That's why they're in sales. So use that. Every person walking past your booth is a potential lead, every single person. And that works in two ways. One is you have to be really proactive and trying to get out and meet these people in a way that doesn't creep them out. But the other thing you have to keep in mind is you do not want to have long conversations with these folks at your booth. The goal is to qualify, get the meeting, move on. Because again, every person you're talking to, there's another lead walking right behind them.
Gayle Kalvert (19:13):
You're making yourself a friend of sales. You're a friend and you've earned trust, and that comes up in every successful marketing conversation. How are marketers successful? Being friends with sales, being strategic and helping them pays dividends back.
Stephanie Worthington (19:29):
When it comes to turning an event into a campaign, don't give up on it. It doesn't stop just because I'm onto the next event. I am looking for, are we still closing deals from that event or because of that event? I'm still asking sales reps. I'll occasionally look through a report and I'll see that we had 50 conversations in an event and only 20 of them have actually turned into opportunities or been disqualified and the others are sitting in limbo. And so I'll take that and I'll go to the sales manager, the head of sales, or even my boss, and I'll be like, "Hey, we need to disposition these people. " I spent good money. I spent our company money to get those names. They should not be sitting in this black hole limbo. So let's figure out, can we revive them or do we kill them?
Gayle Kalvert (20:17):
If a CMO or a marketing leader needs to improve event ROI without increasing budget, is there anything you could think of as a suggestion?
Stephanie Worthington (20:28):
The first thing is identify your low ROI shows that you don't need to be at or that you can cut back presence. If you are finding that you're getting good quality leads, but the volume isn't there to justify having such a big booth with eight people all out of the field for these conversations, shrink it down to a 10 by 20. That is a tip that doesn't cost you money, will actually save you money and will have a big impact. The other thing that you can do is try to emphasize having meetings at your event, trying to do your pre-qualified meetings ahead of time so that you're more efficient when you're at that event. Again, I caution you, if you're going to an event and you can't set up at least a handful of meetings ahead of time, really think about why you're going to that event, really think about that.
(21:24):
And then doing the standardized overview and debrief, like I mentioned earlier, that is a huge way to make sure that you're getting the biggest bang out of your events. You don't want to half-ass your event program, right? You need to make it prescriptive. You need to make sure you're setting yourself up for success and you need to make sure that you're comparing apples to apples. Even if your executives are like, "Well, I don't really care what the lead source is for the event." You should care. As an event professional, you should care what the lead source is. You should care what kind of ROI you're getting out of your events. You should care about, are you able to reduce sales cycles? Are you able to get conversations happening that wouldn't normally have happened without this event? You need to care about that and you should always be tracking those numbers for your own self-improvement.
(22:12):
Those numbers are going to help justify your management or your decision-making of, yeah, we need to go bigger or nope, we need to cut back. The other thing I would say real quick, don't spend money just to spend money. Don't have the biggest booth or the best graphics. Don't spend money where it's not needed. Okay?
Gayle Kalvert (22:33):
This is amazing. I have one more question. How are you or are you leveraging AI in your event workflows now?
Stephanie Worthington (22:43):
I feel pretty lucky. My company, Upstart, has really leaned into the AI revolution and not just because we've actually been using AI for the last 12 years to run our credit models and help give people in different neighborhoods access to credit that they never had, little plug for Upstart, but because they recognize that this is the way things are going to be from now on. We are moving from horse-drawn carriages to automobiles, folks. This is the kind of dramatic change that we're looking at. AI, I have found so far, and I'm by no means an expert on it, but even for events, it has helped me with minute tasks, proofreading, coming up with email copy so that can save time. There's also, we're now learning about agents. So we have a version of ChatGPT, we have versions of Claude where we're setting up agents, and we're learning how they can make our day more productive.
(23:41):
They can go through my email, they can go through my Slack, they can go through any document that I've ever created for the company, and they can see how I work my day, how I structure my day, and take care of some of the more mundane tasks for me.
Gayle Kalvert (23:55):
Unlike you, I am pumped about the AI revolution. Guys, we're not going back. So just get on board and use it to improve your life instead of being terrified. We've covered so many awesome things. Thank you for being here. And tell everybody before we go where they can find you in the digital world.
Stephanie Worthington (24:12):
Yeah, so you can find me on LinkedIn. That's the easiest. Just look up Stephanie Worthington. Check out Club Itchi, C-L-U-B-I-T-C-H-I. They have an online presence. You can find them on Facebook. You can find them on LinkedIn. It is a great group for event marketers to network with each other, get information from each other like, "Hey, I'm looking at doing an event in Charlotte. Does anybody have some good hotels that they can recommend or I should check out? "
Gayle Kalvert (24:43):
Excellent. Steph, thank you so much. You've made this a great Friday. We're recording on a Friday, so this is a fun one. Thank you. If this episode was helpful, please follow Marketing in Progress and tap like. It helps other marketing leaders find the show. And if you know someone who's navigating similar challenges, feel free to share this episode with them. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.