In today’s competitive landscape, organizations must transform their revenue processes by aligning marketing, sales, and customer success teams to meet buyers’ needs. B2B events should play a critical role here. To maximize event impact, organizations need to rethink their planning in four key areas:
1. Break Down Silos
One of the biggest barriers to leveraging events effectively is siloed planning. According to Forrester’s Q1 2025 State Of B2B Events Survey, 17% of organizations reported that different teams — including event, field, demand, and sales — were running events independently. This fragmented approach leads to inconsistent execution and suboptimal attendee experiences. Success requires collaboration across departments to create an integrated event strategy that places the audience at the center.
2. Harness B2B Event Data
Another common misstep is undervaluing event data. Functional silos leave valuable insights stuck in spreadsheets or disconnected platforms, limiting their potential. Leading organizations, on the other hand, aggregate event data and analyze it to better understand buyer’ behavior and preferences. This data-driven approach ensures events deliver relevant content and experiences at every stage of the customer journey.
3. Treat B2B Event Technology Strategically
Event technology is too often treated as a tactical execution tool rather than a strategic component of the technology stack. Forrester’s 2025 survey revealed that just one in four enterprises integrate their primary event platform into their wider technology stack. To unlock the full potential of events, organizations should centralize event technology selection and management and build deep, bidirectional integrations into CRMs and CDPs.
4. Tailor Events to the Customer Lifecycle
The most successful organizations align event formats with where buyers are in their journey — from pre-sale awareness to post-sale engagement. For example, webinars and virtual events are cost-effective ways to educate large numbers of buyers and capture early-stage data for presale stages. Field events, on the other hand, excel at helping buyers in the pipeline stage evaluate solutions and close deals. For post-sale relationships, customer conferences and user groups deepen engagement, provide opportunities for cross-sell and upsell, and help sales teams extend their reach within client organizations.
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B2B events are powerful vehicles for driving revenue process transformation, but their success hinges on internal alignment, thoughtful data capture, and strategic use of technology. By breaking down silos, leveraging event data, and tailoring event formats to buyer needs, organizations can create meaningful experiences that fuel growth and build lasting customer relationships.
Forrester clients can read the new report Build An Integrated, Aligned, And Data-Centric Event Plan To Power Revenue Process Transformation to learn more about the four focus areas. I’ll also be running a session on this topic at Forrester’s B2B Summit EMEA 6-8 October and look forward to talking with attendees about how to adapt event plans to support revenue process transformation.
