Event ROI keeps getting blamed on the event team, but the real breakdown often starts once leads land in sales' hands. This episode traces exactly where that handoff falls apart, and who should actually own it. What we get into: ✅ The sales handoff moment where most event pipeline quietly dies ✅ Burnout as a structural failure, not a personal one ✅ A one-line test for whether your team is actually ready to exhibit Event marketers are asked to prove revenue impact from programs they...
Sep 23
45 min
Your CMO wants strategy. Your trade show is in three weeks. Your team just lost a headcount. Sound familiar? Ashley Keating runs the entire events and field marketing function at CallMiner: trade shows across the US, Canada, UK, and now Central Europe after a 2025 acquisition, plus webinars, field accelerators, and a newly expanded multi-city customer conference. All of it with a team of three. In this episode, she gets specific about the tension most senior event markete...
Sep 9
41 min
Most event marketers know when a stakeholder's direction is off. Few have the line that turns that instinct into influence. In this episode: ✅ The strategy session Felicia interrupted to ask one question, and how it reshaped the entire agenda ✅ A hard number versus a changed conversation, and why she'll defend the second one to a room full of CFOs ✅ Her exact sentence for challenging stakeholder direction without starting a fight Felicia Kaban, Director of Event E...
Aug 26
38 min
Your event wasn't the problem. Ask any event marketer to be honest, and they'll tell you exactly how they'd build a stronger show if they had the budget, the runway, and the right people in the room saying yes at the right time. But shrinking resources, last minute executive pivots, and stakeholders who show up late with big opinions are quietly wrecking programs that were never broken to begin with. This conversation echoes what senior leaders spent two days saying out loud at Event Marke...
Aug 19
32 min
Customer events are not prospecting campaigns, so measuring them by leads alone misses their real business impact. The better questions are whether customers become more loyal, engage more deeply, and strengthen their relationship with your brand. Inside this episode: ✅ The customer-event metrics that reveal more than attendance and satisfaction scores ✅ How attendee-versus-nonattendee comparisons can uncover revenue, retention, and participation trends ✅ Why host books, peer interaction,...
Aug 5
30 min
Your VP asks why events deserve more budget next year. You could defend every line item. Or ask for something else entirely. Matt says fighting for more money is usually the wrong fight. Alignment first, results second, budget third. That reframe is what separates event marketers who get taken seriously from the ones stuck justifying their existence every cycle. Part 2 of our summer Q&A series covers what event marketers actually lose sleep over: booth psychology, credibility with...
Jul 29
11 min
What's the point of a stunning trade show booth if nobody inside it knows why they're there? Casey Smalley, Director of Global Events at Avetta, joins Matt Kleinrock to make the case that the smartest line in your event budget isn't the build. It's the briefing. In this episode: ✅ Why treating booth staffing as a "scheduling exercise" quietly costs you pipeline, not just optics ✅ The one trait that separates a floor-ready team member from a liability (it has nothing to do with produ...
Jul 15
32 min
Too many events still rely on the same booths, the same activations, and the same “safe” playbook. The result: experiences people walk past, forget, or never meaningfully engage with in the first place. Ashley Nuske, Director of Field & Event Marketing at Goldcast (now Cvent), joins Matt Kleinrock for a candid conversation about what’s broken in event marketing today and why safe strategies rarely produce standout results. Ashley shares how she approaches audience-firs...
Jul 1
44 min
Are you heading into fall events the same way you did last year? Same booth, same playbook, same hope that something sticks? Most event marketers aren't lazy. They're just busy. And busy has a way of turning strategy into autopilot. That gap between teams who show up and teams who show up READY starts forming right now, in summer. As part of The Summer Circuit, we're dropping a special compilation episode where host Matt Kleinrock shares the unfiltered advice he'd give any event marketer pr...
Jun 24
10 min
Your booth traffic looked good. Badge scans were high. Leadership wants ROI numbers. But none of that fully explains whether your event actually moved deals forward. In this episode, Matt talks with Cynthia Montalvo (Regional Field Marketing Manager at Steno) about the growing gap between event metrics and actual event influence. Cynthia, an event strategist known for pushing teams beyond surface-level reporting, explains why signals like stakeholder expansion, deeper conversati...
Jun 17
26 min
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