For 10 years, EM has been championing b-to-b all-stars, delving into their career journeys, portfolios, best practices and industry forecasts. Meet this year’s crew: The 2026 B-to-B Dream Team.
Julie DeQuattro, Senior Manager-Global Marketing Events, UKG
They say if you love what you do, you’ll never work a day in your life. And Julie DeQuattro is living proof.
It all began when a colleague at DeQuattro’s former company asked her to step aside from her marketing and sales support role to help execute an event in New Orleans. While on-site, “something clicked,” she says, and she returned from the trip confident that the event marketing industry was exactly where she belonged.
Between her natural aptitude for building relationships, appetite for organizing facts and figures—after college she considered becoming an accountant—and natural inclination to plan events for friends and family, pursuing a career in events became a no-brainer. “I came back from that trip and thought, this is actually a career? It never felt like work,” she says. “It felt like a natural extension of who I am and how I show up every day.”
And DeQuattro wasted no time in aligning herself for success. She returned to school, earned her MBA in international business with a 4.0 GPA, and began seeking out a role at a company with a broader event portfolio and room to grow. She ultimately left her position as a senior trade show manager and landed at workforce management platform UKG as an individual contributor.
Today, as the brand’s senior manager-global marketing events, colleagues call DeQuattro the trade show queen, though her expertise also spans user conferences and sales kickoffs. With her team of three event program managers, she oversees roughly 25 trade shows of varying sizes per year.
You’ll also find DeQuattro managing the 200,000-square-foot expo floor at UKG’s flagship Aspire conference, which draws 5,000 to 6,000 attendees. And this May in London, she’ll add a new Aspire EMEA conference to her résumé.
During last year’s flagship show, DeQuattro was tasked with leveling up the expo floor while operating on a reduced timeline, and in the midst of a rebrand. And for her, it was a milestone moment witnessing the impact of the event after all of the blood, sweat and tears that her team, and her partners, had shed to pull it off.
“We had 19 tractor trailers with scheduled dock times, our I&D teams were running 24-hour shifts, but it’s all worth it the moment your cmo walks in and feels the buzz,” she says. “Those late nights working together paid off. It was in that moment when you realize what a difference it makes having the right partners in place.”
And while DeQuattro is a numbers gal at heart, she’s also laser-focused on leveraging live experiences to foster a “return on emotion” for UKG. With a wide-ranging client base, that strategy looks different depending on the customer’s role within the ecosystem, and how they experience the platform. The brand’s events touch everyone from frontline workers to chief human resource officers.
Regardless of how customers engage with UKG, however, DeQuattro wants every brand interaction to make them feel like they’ve genuinely been seen and heard.
“It’s about delivering a solution while making a connection.” she explains. “At the end of the day, we’re on-site, building relationships in real time. Whether someone is discovering us for the first time or has known us for years, that experience has to feel consistently intentional.”
When it comes to earning that “return on emotion,” a few tricks of her trade include incorporating opportunities for personalization, like offering trade show attendees a chance to personalize an item with their initials on-site. She also leans into nostalgia.
In fact, DeQuattro shook up a ballroom at the Austin Marriott a few years back as part of UKG’s sponsorship of SXSW’s workforce track. Rather than offering coffee and seating, she flipped the brand’s lounge space into a mini golf course, a nod to the company’s array of pro golfer partnerships.
The three-hole throwback experience, which featured dimmed lights and music pumping, included an iPad after each stop that asked a simple “yes” or “no” question, like “Have you ever heard of UKG?” There were no hard sells or obligations.
“It was a brand awareness campaign that caught people off guard, in the best way,” says DeQuattro. “For me, innovation comes down to having the space to try. Not everything will work, and that’s the point. You need both the autonomy and leadership support to say, ‘Here’s the vision, trust me.’ And if it doesn’t land, you learn, adjust and come back stronger.”
Day in the life:
Photo credits: Legacy 26 Photography; Courtesy of Julie DeQuattro
