Surrounding priority accounts at the moment that mattered.

The 42 priority accounts included senior marketers, media leaders, measurement specialists and other stakeholders who were relevant to the buying process.

The conference temporarily concentrated many of those people within the same city, which gave us an opportunity to design the programme around the accounts themselves rather than treating each interaction as an isolated touchpoint.

I wanted to understand who we were trying to reach inside each organisation, what would make the conversation relevant to them and how the different interactions surrounding the conference could reinforce one another.

We brought together CRM history, information from existing relationships, recent company announcements, relevant press coverage and developments within each organisation's market.

I used AI to help synthesise those fragmented sources into structured account research, identifying recurring strategic themes, recent organisational changes, likely areas of concern and questions that could lead to more useful conversations.

Account teams reviewed the research and added context from their existing relationships, giving us a richer picture of the organisations and people we hoped to engage.

That intelligence informed both the programme and the briefing materials prepared for Sales, allowing the same customer understanding to shape what people encountered before the event and the conversations they had once they arrived.

Contacts within priority organisations received communications ahead of the event introducing our presence and the themes we intended to discuss, while paid media reinforced those ideas digitally.

We also invested in digital out of home placements at carefully selected locations along routes used by conference attendees and around the venue itself. The placements were concentrated around locations where our target audience was likely to spend time, allowing the physical environment around the conference to become another part of the experience.

By the time someone from a priority organisation reached the event, they could already have encountered the programme through several connected interactions.

Each salesperson attending the event received briefing materials for the organisations they were most likely to encounter.

The briefs brought together relevant company developments, information from existing contacts, likely areas of interest and questions worth exploring in conversation.

AI helped reduce the research burden involved in bringing those sources together, while account knowledge and human judgement determined how the intelligence should actually be used.

The result was a more useful starting point for Sales conversations because the preparation reflected what was happening inside the organisation rather than relying only on a generic event narrative.

Our physical presence gave contacts from priority accounts a recognisable place to continue the interactions that had begun before the conference.

Sales teams could use their account preparation to make those conversations more specific to the organisations in front of them, while the stand provided a focal point for both existing relationships and prospective customers.

Selected contacts had also been invited ahead of time to a smaller side event around the conference, creating space for deeper conversations and giving promising relationships somewhere to progress beyond the initial interaction.

Enterprise buying decisions involved several stakeholders, so account engagement needed to reflect more than the activity of a single individual.

I looked at the number and type of relevant people we were reaching inside each organisation to understand whether engagement was developing across the buying group.

Across engaged accounts, the programme reached an average of 3.4 relevant stakeholders, spanning functions including media, performance marketing, measurement and senior marketing leadership.

That gave us a more useful picture of account engagement because it showed whether our activity was reaching multiple people who could influence the commercial decision.

Of the 42 priority organisations, 30 engaged meaningfully with the programme, producing a 71% account engagement rate.

We reached an average of 3.4 relevant stakeholders within each engaged account and generated 21 qualified Sales conversations during and immediately after the conference.

Those conversations contributed to £4.6 million in influenced pipeline, while 11 priority accounts progressed into new or materially expanded commercial opportunities during the following quarter.

Together, those measures allowed us to follow progression from engagement across the buying group through to Sales conversations, opportunities and pipeline.

The conference created the moment, but the account strategy determined what we did with it. Research, communications, media, the physical experience and Sales preparation were designed around the same priority organisations, allowing each interaction to build on the context created by the others.