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Perspective · Event portfolio strategy
Giving Every Event a Job in the Growth System.
A webinar, workshop, user conference, or executive experience should not be planned or measured as though they are interchangeable. Format follows the job.
Point of view
Events are not one channel. They are different business choices.
The job determines the format, audience, investment, Sales role, follow-up, and measurement.
Events can create access, teach, solve problems, deepen communities, move accounts, or strengthen a market position. No format does every job equally well.
When the job is vague, attendance becomes the easiest number to report without showing whether the experience created value.
I manage events as a growth portfolio. The first question is which customer or business need deserves an experience, and whether an event is the best answer.
As my scope grew, event specialists brought deep expertise in designing and delivering the experiences. My role increasingly became connecting that work to audience strategy, Sales, partners, campaigns, investment, follow-up, and performance.
- Webinars and virtual programs make expertise available at scale.
- Workshops, labs, and hackathons help people solve or test something.
- Summits, forums, roadshows, and solution days bring a relevant story closer to a market.
- Annual user and partner conferences strengthen a community and ecosystem.
- Third-party events provide access to an established audience and outside authority.
- Executive roundtables and high-touch experiences help important relationships progress.
01 · Practitioner foundation
Start close to the customer, seller, partner, and work.
Early experience taught me that the event itself and the system around it have to work together.
At IBM Rational, I worked across field programs, webcasts, partner e-learning, user groups, and focused Enterprise Architect Roundtables. I saw how audience selection, content, promotion, volunteer energy, Sales participation, and follow-up shaped the experience.
Rational User Group membership grew 76% year over year as I recruited volunteers, generated sponsorship support, and coordinated user-group leaders across IBM Software Group.
I later established a new Business Partner Development Day format for the annual partner conference. Attendance grew 61% and satisfaction reached 96.3%.
The lesson was not simply how to run an event. It was how to listen to an ecosystem, change a format, and make each participant's role clearer before the doors opened.
02 · Repeatable program builder
Let audience and performance shape the program.
Different results should change the next decision, not be hidden inside one event total.
In 2014, IBM Business Analytics Summits and Finance Forums spanned 15 cities and 28 events. The Business Analytics Summit reached 166% of its registration goal and 169% of its attendance goal, while Finance Forum reached 69% and 67%. I did not predict that contrast. I learned from it. A repeatable model still had to reflect the audience, subject, market, and value of attending.
GARP reinforced the same lesson in a different setting. Third-party authority can provide access, but it does not remove the need for relevant content, coordinated activation, Sales participation, and follow-up. The Annual Risk Convention plan surrounded the sponsorship with speaking, preset executive meetings, a client dinner, research activation, and follow-up. Those were planned elements, not reported outcomes. The design showed that an industry event should be more than a booth and badge scan.
The audience-led approach also shaped company-owned Smarter Risk programs, GARP webcasts, the Meet the BI Customer ON24 roundtable, and the hands-on workshops, labs, design studios, and hackathon area at Insight. The formats changed because the audience and job changed. The operating discipline remained consistent.
At OpenText, my organization applied that discipline across 372 events and 128 webinars in FY25. We connected the portfolio through common platforms, standards, follow-up, and reporting so positive and negative performance could change the next investment decision.
HIMSS showed why downstream evidence matters. We connected the healthcare sponsorship to a pre-event webinar, priority buyers, Sales activity, and follow-up. HIMSS and its pre-event webinar were associated with $2.5M in marketing-sourced pipeline. A later executive review associated HIMSS with a $6.5 million CommonSpirit Health OpenText Fax Private Cloud win; the record does not establish that the event alone caused the outcome.
Campaign reporting associated SAP Sapphire 2024 with 40 opportunities totaling about $10.3M in total contract value. Four later closed for about $1.64M in actual revenue. The event was part of those customer journeys, not the sole cause of the wins.
I have also seen a large sponsorship create strong visibility, demonstrations, executive access, dinners, and 26 scheduled meetings without producing enough downstream evidence to call it a commercial success. Those meetings demonstrated access. They did not prove that the investment worked.
That is why attendance, booth traffic, and badge scans are never enough on their own. I want to know whether we reached the accounts that mattered, whether Sales stayed engaged, whether opportunities appeared or progressed, whether customers moved toward a useful next step, and whether the commercial result justified doing it again. The answer tells us whether to increase, redesign, reduce, or stop the investment.
03 · Cross-format leadership
Build practices that survive a change in format.
Experience compounds when teams can reuse the operating discipline without making every program identical.
During COVID in IBM AI Applications, we applied years of virtual-program experience at greater scale. Virtual summits and an on-demand event center reached 9,000 clients and partners and influenced $30 million in pipeline across five portfolios.
That was a team outcome. The pivot worked because audience selection, speaker preparation, promotion, experience design, follow-up, nurture, and commercial measurement had been developed over time.
Annual conferences increased the number of jobs in one experience: community, product learning, hands-on participation, partner programming, executive access, and commercial follow-through. IBM Insight, Vision, and later Think taught me how those jobs fit together. At Think 2019, the Watson Customer Engagement format was revised using client and partner feedback. Registration increased 45%, and pipeline increased 78% to $12 million.
The lesson was to make operating practices repeatable while keeping the experience responsive to its audience.
04 · Portfolio leadership
Govern the portfolio, not just the calendar.
At scale, the work becomes deciding where the company needs more, different, or less investment.
At OpenText, my organization connected webinars, Summits, Forums, regional Solution Days, OpenText World, third-party events, Executive Briefing Centers, CXO and ABM roundtables, and account-progression experiences through common platforms, standards, follow-up, and reporting.
In FY25, teams ran 372 events and 128 webinars. At OpenText, we standardized the operating approach for webinars and connected the portfolio to common event reporting. Positive and negative performance both informed whether a format, market, or investment should increase, be redesigned, be reduced, or stop.
OpenText World combined the company narrative, customer education, partner programming, community, and strategic-account access. Blue Carpet sat at the high-touch end of the spectrum, focusing on priority accounts and late-stage North American opportunities representing about $400 million in opportunity value.
Hospitality had value only when it was connected to account strategy, relevant access, and an agreed next step. The broader lesson was that scale requires a shared operating model without losing the judgment each experience needs.
- Who needs a reason to attend, and what value will they receive?
- What should be different for the customer, seller, or partner after the event?
- What follow-up needs to be designed before the event begins?
- Which measure will tell us whether to increase, redesign, reduce, or stop the investment?
The question I keep asking
What job does this experience need to do, and what should happen next?
Over time, my role changed from helping make individual events work to building the operating model that helped teams decide which experiences were worth doing in the first place.
I still come back to the same question: what job does this experience need to do, and what should happen next if it works?
Connected perspective: How I Build an Integrated Demand Engine