The pipeline question you can't quite answer
Marketers say events drive half their wins, CRM attribution credits them with a sliver, and the defensible answer sits in data most teams never collect.
Series
Up at Night
A column on what keeps field marketers awake, grounded in data, with practical moves at the end.
The no-show problem, and what the data says about fixing it
Free events lose more than a quarter of their registrants on the night, and the teams that fix it change who registers first, then use reminders and AI to catch the rest.
The CRM you don't trust is the CRM you report from
Most event reporting runs through CRM data that its own users call mostly inaccurate, and adding AI on top will not fix it until someone owns the join between the guest list and the record.
The budget meeting, where every event has to earn its place again
Event budgets in 2026 are sorting into winners and losers, and which side a program lands on is often decided by the evidence carried into one meeting with finance.
The follow-up that went out nine days late
Slow post-event follow-up usually traces back to an ownership question nobody answered before the event, and fixing it starts with a few decisions made in advance rather than a new tool.
Twice the events, the same headcount
Event calendars keep growing while field teams stay flat, and AI absorbs less of the gap than the pitch decks suggest unless you decide in advance which work it gets.
Proving it to the CFO
The CFO is the executive most skeptical of marketing, and the field marketers who survive that skepticism build their evidence file months before anyone asks for it.