Pecan AI, Inmar, and Calendly top index that ranks 100 B2B companies on the effectiveness of their in-person event strategy and budget allocation

Vendelux, the first AI-powered event intelligence platform, announced the debut of its inaugural Event ROI Index, a ranking of 100 top enterprise brands based on the ROI derived from their in-person event strategy and budget. For the Event ROI Index, Vendelux leveraged its proprietary 65M+ data points from over 160,000 events to quantify the business value of leading enterprise brands’ events strategies; to identify the variables that most impact event ROI; and to determine areas for optimization with regards to in-person event attendance, sponsorship, and speaking engagements for businesses to derive the best outcomes.

“Today it’s clear that no B2B brand’s event strategy is 100 percent perfect, yet these strategies are built by teams that have been drastically underserved by technology that’s purpose-built to bring transparency and quantification to their efforts”

“In a complex world of enterprise buyers, where digital and in-person touchpoints all matter to closing a deal, events are truly the foundation of those relationships and of the communities these brands rely on for growth,” said Alex Reynolds, CEO and co-founder, Vendelux. “Each event a brand invests in – whether sending one sales person or having a sponsorship with a massive booth – serves as the glue that binds together various channels’ efficacy to contribute to a lead becoming a customer. We have worked tirelessly to collect, clean, qualify, and analyze the industry’s first dataset looking across hundreds of thousands of events and millions of data points to truly understand the ROI from companies’ strategies as everyone from event marketers, to sales leaders, to CFOs and CMOs seek this visibility as they plan their budgets.”

Key takeaways for B2B brands from the Event ROI Index include:

• Strategic Importance: ROI doesn’t always scale with spend and meaningful ROI can be derived from the right small or even regional events strategy that hypertargets prospects. Just because everyone else invests in a conference doesn’t make it the right event for your business outcomes. The more unique a strategy, the more effective it can be.
• Precision and Insight: Precision around individual event investments and measuring granular ROI is possible today. Anecdotal or experiential reasoning for keeping an event on your annual plan is no longer sufficient. Numbers matter to everyone inside of an organization now more than ever, and with greater precision will come greater respect and, with it, potential budget.
• Room for Improvement: Top brands in the study maxed out at a score of 7.2 out of a possible 10; to derive greater ROI from events, enterprise brands should focus on gaining a better understanding of where their strategies fail to ensure they stand out from the crowd.

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Vendelux created the Event ROI Index as countless enterprise brands used the platform to derive a better understanding of where competitors were investing their event budgets. The clear desire for granular insights into event strategies, attendees and attendee profiles, cost transparency, and alignment with a company’s own CRM data prompted the analyses that make up the Event ROI Index results and ensure event marketers, CFOs, and CMOs know that event ROI is quantifiable and meaningful as they head through budgeting season.

Scores were awarded on a scale of 0-10. Pecan AI earned the highest honors on the index with a score of 7.2, followed by the next top five brands: Inmar (6.7), Calendly (6.6), Signifyd (5.9), InMobi (5.6), and Riskified (5.3).

“Year in and year out, the relationships built at events and conferences drive meaningful business outcomes for us at Signifyd. Before Vendelux, we relied on manual tracking of meetings, anecdotal feedback from event attendees, and – frankly – our best guesses as to where we needed to be based on competitive intel we could derive from conference websites to inform our event strategy,” said Mark O’Sullivan, Senior Event Marketing Manager, Signifyd. “With Vendelux, the guesswork around maximizing our event marketing budget, measuring ROI, and remaining ahead of our competition is gone. There is no wasted effort at low value events – every event we invest in and send team members to pays off. That assurance, leveraging AI, delivers more meaningful business outcomes for Signifyd.”

The 100 enterprise brands included in the Index were selected based on an analysis of the events they invested in or attended and factors of their presence at those events including: volume of a brand’s potential customers attending, volume of competitors attending, on-stage speaking opportunities, ticket costs, sponsorship costs, attendee seniority, attendee industry, number of employees attending, event budget, and more. Vendelux’s machine learning models were utilized to analyze personas / predictive attendees and normalize those across factors like company size.

“Today it’s clear that no B2B brand’s event strategy is 100 percent perfect, yet these strategies are built by teams that have been drastically underserved by technology that’s purpose-built to bring transparency and quantification to their efforts,” said Stefan Deeran, COO and co-founder, Vendelux. “Every customer data platform seeks to solve for multi-touch attribution, yet underpinning every closed deal are foundational relationships that get it over the finish line. As founders growing our own business by attending events ourselves, we understand the powerful connection between in-person interactions arranged by event marketing teams, and the sales organizations that close those deals. To facilitate brands improving their event strategies with a data-driven approach, and therefore optimize budgets and improve time to close, is our mission at Vendelux.”

For the Event ROI Index, Vendelux studied brands’ event investments from January 1, 2023 through September 30, 2023 and scored 100 enterprise brands, as selected by Vendelux, on the value they derive from their event strategies. Vendelux is a data-driven solution that provides event marketers with the ability to analyze the impact of events, trade shows, and conferences worldwide. Leveraging the power of artificial intelligence (AI) and predictive modeling, Vendelux combines first-party data from its network of conference organizers and partners with real-time data monitoring, enrichment from more than 185,000 unique sources, and historical insights to forecast upcoming event attendee personas. With never-before-unlocked visibility into the potential revenue at every event based on pipeline, ABM target lists, and ideal customer profiles (ICP), event marketers can now easily take strategic action to build the best event strategy aligned to business objectives.

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