“Your network is your net worth.”
Porter Gale literally wrote the book on it (I know, a little ~cringe~, but that really is the title). Field Marketing works on a similar equation: get the right people into the right room, then show what came out of it. We couldn't find a platform that helped us do both, so we built one ourselves.
What we learned after six years of connecting people
A little context first, because you should probably know who's giving you this advice. Our first product, now called Epoch Engage, is an employee engagement platform. For the past six years, HR and internal comms teams have used it to run all hands, company offsites, manager trainings, and the programs that keep employees connected.
As Engage grew, we kept hearing a version of the same thing from customers: they couldn't find an event platform that worked the way they needed it to on the marketing side.
We understood the problem because we were running plenty of events ourselves. The earliest ones were tiny: a handful of prospects in a Zoom room, with wine shipped ahead of time to improve the odds people would actually show up (bribery, technically, but the classy kind. AND remember Covid days?). Selfishly, I loved those calls. There was no better way to hear directly what customers cared about.
Four people on Zoom turned into ten. Ten turned into a 30-person half-day in San Francisco. Three years later, we were running a roadshow across six-plus cities a month, alongside a 300-person conference spanning three days.
Cut the grind before and after the event
Somewhere between city four and city forty, something became obvious: putting on the event wasn’t actually the hardest part. Everything surrounding it was.
- BeforeThe guest list. Hours bouncing between the CRM and LinkedIn, trying not to overlook the one lead your CEO will inevitably ask about by name.
- AfterThe scramble. Uploading lists, cleaning data, then chasing sales to follow up before that precious 24-hour window disappears.
- Weeks laterThe heist. Someone from your dinner closes, and somehow the opportunity winds up attributed to a webinar.
If reading that made your eye twitch… hi. You're among friends. This is for you.
You shouldn't need an army to host a dinner
The biggest event platforms were built for the annual 20,000-person conference. They're powerful, absolutely, but they also assume there's a dedicated operations team behind the curtain. A 40-person executive dinner gets treated like you're producing the Super Bowl.
At the same time, the expectations around your job have changed. Peter Drucker gets credit for “what gets measured gets managed,” and field events spent years being difficult to measure. Unsurprisingly, they were often managed like a nice-to-have.
That's changing fast.
Attendance and applause aren't enough anymore. The question is whether accounts engage and opportunities move after everyone leaves the room. A stack of badge scans doesn't answer that.
Get the right people in, get the credit out
EpochX is built around that marketing scoreboard. Most event platforms begin when somebody registers. We think the work starts well before then and continues well after.
- Get the right people in the room. EpochX pulls from your CRM, accounts, firmographics, open opportunities, and the relationships your team already has, then helps you build the guest list around them. Because if the room is the strategy, the room should come first.
- Build the event in minutes, and make it on-brand. AI helps draft the registration page, email sequence, and agenda, with brand guardrails built in so event number ten looks as polished as event number one. Even when someone else on the team is building it.
- Connect the room to pipeline. Invitations, registrations, and attendance sync back to the accounts and opportunities in your CRM. So when the dinner helps move the deal, the dinner gets the credit. Not the webinar.
Come shape what ships next
Today, EpochX handles much of the before and during: it can draft your registration page and email sequence with AI and build a guest list from your CRM. Attendance syncs back once the event is over. The harder piece, connecting all of that activity to real influenced pipeline, is what we're building toward now.
And that's where you come in. We're bringing on a small group of field and ABM teams as design partners. You'll get early access, a direct line to me, and a real voice in the roadmap while the biggest decisions are still being made. In return, we get to learn from the people actually running these rooms every week.
For three years, I basically ran a shadow version of your job with 1.5 people and no real tools. If it was that painful for us, I can only imagine what your quarter looks like.
Your job is to build the network. Ours is to help you prove what it's worth.
Come see what we’ve built. And help shape where we go next.
Book a demo