Your B2B Event Is a $200K Gamble (a Pre, Mid & Post Playbook)

Trade shows and conferences can eat up to 30% of a B2B marketing budget — and for growth-stage companies, a single industry "Super Bowl" can run $150,000 before the booth footprint is even built. So why do so many teams fly home with a stack of badge scans and nothing that looks like pipeline? Summer Poletti sits down again with Sandi Green of Miracle Max Marketing to break down the full event lifecycle — pre-event planning, mid-show execution, and post-event follow-up — the three phases where money gets made or left on the table.Sandi opens with the million-dollar question every company should answer before signing the contract: why are you going? Skip it and you show up with a beautiful booth and no plan. From there, she and Summer walk the timeline. At 100 days out, gather a cross-functional team — sales, marketing, product, customer success, and finance — into one room to align on goals, story, and who owns what. That single meeting surfaces what teams usually miss: customers quietly at churn risk who'll be walking the floor, a speaking slot marketing already negotiated, a market shift worth building your whole campaign around. Your pre-show outreach doesn't have to be "are you going, are you going?" — it can lead with research, a point of view, or a reason to care.They dig into booth giveaways your ICP actually wants (and why the $100 gift-card raffle is dead), the merch-store approach that beats a table of pens, tying giveaways to a creative theme, and calling your vendor to ask "what's hot, what's played out." On the customer side: the non-logoed gift that gets remembered, why sending customer success pays dividends, and how a busy booth creates its own FOMO.Mid-event, they cover working the floor instead of guarding the booth, designating a photographer and videographer 100 days in advance, action shots over static setups, rotating the team so the booth stays inviting, and the partner "treasure map" that drives reciprocal traffic. On outreach: pulling the show manager's pre-registration list early, enriching it, running lookalike ads, and re-engaging deals that went dark.Post-event, Summer makes her case for blocking the entire following week as sacred follow-up time — book the next step at the booth, not by email later — while Sandi layers marketing "air cover," nurture streams, the 30-second teaser that earns a 30-minute meeting, and the post-event event that catches everyone who couldn't attend. Two messages from a company you visited won't offend anyone. One dropped ball between sales and marketing will cost you the deal.The throughline: an event is a growth lever that produces zero ROI without a plan and clear ownership. Badge scans aren't pipeline. Brand awareness isn't enough. What moves the scoreboard is coordination decided before you ever step on the show floor — including a shared definition of what a sales-ready lead actually is.Guest: Sandi Green, Miracle Max Marketing100-Day Event ChecklistAbout Rise of Us: Summer Poletti is founder and CRO of Rise of Us, a revenue architecture consultancy for growth-stage B2B companies. Summer helps founders and CEOs stop wasting money and momentum on growth strategies that fall flat — diagnosing where revenue stalls and building systems that convert. More salespeople won't fix a broken system, and more pipeline won't help if nothing moves it. It's never just sales.Listen wherever you get your podcasts