When Ashley Incardone began planning the 2027 event calendar, she faced a familiar measurement problem: The invoices for this year’s events had already arrived. Their full return, in many cases, had not.
Incardone, director of corporate marketing for Marketbridge, calls this the event ROI trap: spending is judged immediately, while impact is expected to materialize on a timeline that has almost nothing to do with how complex B2B buying actually happens.
For example, the 2025 6sense B2B Buyer Experience Report found that the average B2B buying cycle lasts 10.1 months. It also found that winning vendors were already on the buyer’s shortlist 95% of the time, and that the “vendor favored” before “direct” seller engagement ultimately won roughly four out of five deals.
“That is a big deal for event marketers,” she says. “It means the relationship built at an event may influence a purchase long before an opportunity exists in the CRM. The event might help a company earn a place on that initial shortlist, build familiarity across the buying group, reinforce trust, or move an existing relationship forward.”
Incardone’s event program is on track to run more than 40 events next year. To have a clear picture of how best to invest, Incardone tracks and measures event performance through the lens of three clocks.
ROI Clock One: Did We Win in the Room?
The first clock starts immediately. Within about 30 days, Incardone evaluates the quality of the audience and the experience itself. She measures with both quantitative and qualitative indicators, such as the mix of new and repeat attendees, seniority, engagement and participation, as well as the quality of conversations.
The goal isn’t to claim revenue immediately. It’s to determine whether the event created the conditions for revenue later and identify opportunities for follow-up content, sales outreach or additional engagement.
ROI Clock Two: Is Anything Moving?
Starting at around 30 days, Incardone is looking for shifts in account behavior. She watches for new meetings, increased engagement, dormant accounts becoming active, sales gaining better access to target accounts, and opportunities advancing.
“This is where event influence begins to become commercially visible, even if revenue has not closed,” she says.
ROI Clock Three: Show Me the Business Impact.
Between six and 18 months, Incardone starts looking for traditional ROI, tracking pipeline, closed-won revenue, revenue influence, deal velocity, cross-sell and upsell.
As far as tools, she uses HubSpot and Salesforce, as well as hapily, an event management integration for HubSpot that allows her to better track the relationship between accounts and events. She also sits in on the weekly pipeline calls and makes sure that relationships and business progress are attributed correctly in the CRM, because not all salespeople take the time to enter the information.
“It’s so, so easy to lose that measurement side of events when it’s considered offline sourcing,” she says. “If you’re only measuring based on the data in your dashboard, you’re going to miss something in the picture, especially for events.”
A Bigger Budget Story
The framework sets up a more complete story when it’s time to defend the event budget in front of the board. Rather than answering with a single revenue number, Incardone reports on all three levels: the quality, the momentum and the bottom line.
“If I get X amount of dollars, I can expect to move X amount of accounts forward,” she says. “That ‘second clock’ allows me to tell that momentum story. And then I get to ‘clock three’—we can affect X amount of ROI within the 12 months.”
Sharpening the Event Portfolio
Incardone is finding that some large conferences and side-of-conference events perform well on “clock one” but struggle to generate account movement later. Smaller, owned events with tightly targeted audiences are performing better across the three clocks.
The team is also reconsidering its trade show presence. For Marketbridge, a B2B services company without a technology demo to pull people onto the show floor, Incardone doesn’t see booths as the strongest use of its event dollars. She’s also increasingly requiring speaking opportunities before committing to conference sponsorships. Instead, they’ll be putting more emphasis on hyper-targeted events at bespoke locations where audiences like select cmos get to discuss pressing issues behind closed doors, no phones present.
Next year, Incardone is considering taking a closer look at individual seller performance at events and using that data to inform staffing decisions, since their performance directly impacts ROI.
One element that’s still hard to measure? Human connection. “You have to build trust,” she says. “People should be leaving feeling seen and feeling like they can trust who they’ve just spent time with, and that’s what leads to the win.”
