On Tuesday, September 1, EpochX took over a private dining room at Upland in New York and brought together 20 event and field marketing leaders as part of our Event Marketing Salon series.
Everyone showed up and showed out in style.
We had people from Zapier, Vercel, AdRoll, monday.com, Locala, Croud, and more around the table. The food was delicious, the room was beautiful, and the private dining setup gave the night exactly the right feel: intimate, relaxed, and small enough for people to actually get into the weeds.
And did they ever.
We started with a few prompts around what’s working, what’s painful, and what event marketers are spending way too much time doing behind the scenes. Pretty quickly, the polished answers gave way to the real stuff: messy workflows, clunky integrations, sales handoffs, spreadsheets, and all the invisible work that goes into getting an event off the ground.
The hardest part often happens before the event even exists
One of the biggest themes of the night was something we’ve been hearing a lot lately: building the right room is hard. And it usually starts with the guest list.
For a lot of B2B events, the information is technically already there somewhere. Your CRM knows which accounts matter, sales knows who they’re talking to, LinkedIn adds another layer of context, and someone probably has a spreadsheet from the last event.
Yet the field marketer is often still the one pulling all of it together.
One person talked about how much manual work can go into getting the right people in the room, and that landed with the group. Everyone seemed to have some version of the same process, even if the tools and spreadsheets looked a little different.
Because for a small executive dinner, getting 20 registrations isn’t necessarily the goal.
It’s getting the right 20 people.
Friction around CRM integrations came up quickly
Ah, the CRM.
The friction around CRM integrations came up quickly, and there were a lot of knowing nods around the table. Most event teams aren’t short on data. Let’s be real, if anything, they have too much of it.
The problem is making that data useful when they actually need it.
Contacts live in one place, account context lives somewhere else, event activity gets tracked in another platform, and sales and RevOps both have their own processes. Somewhere in the middle, someone ends up exporting, cleaning, tagging, uploading, and trying to keep everything straight.
There were some genuinely impressive systems described over dinner. There were also a few that sounded like they were being held together by Sheets, Slack, and sheer force of will.
And after the event?
Unsurprisingly, follow-up came up too.
Everyone knows that what happens after the event matters. But knowing it matters and having a process that actually works are two very different things.
Who owns the follow-up? Which attendees matter most? What did they talk about? What should sales do next, and how quickly? And maybe most importantly: does the event marketer have any way of knowing whether it happened?
Too often, the answer is still some version of “send the list to sales.”
That’s a tragic ending for an event that may have taken months to put together.
“Wait, you deal with this too?!”
The best part of the night wasn’t any single insight. It was watching everyone in the room realize they weren’t the only ones dealing with these challenges.
People found their people, and there was a real sense of, “Wait, you deal with this too?!”
And because the room was small, people had time to actually connect. New introductions became long side conversations, people swapped LinkedIns and Instagram handles, and the night genuinely felt like a group of like-minded people finding their community.
Big thank you to everyone who joined us in New York and shared their experiences so openly. This is exactly what we wanted the Event Marketing Salon to be: a small room, a great meal, and a chance to connect with people who truly understand the work.
Next up: Los Angeles. If you’re in town, join us on Wednesday, September 30. RSVP for the LA Event Marketing Salon.
We’ll also be making stops in Chicago, San Francisco, and New York again. See upcoming events.
Next salon
Los Angeles, September 30
