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The event-GTM playbook

Pick the room. Map the room. Work the room. The full method: usable with a spreadsheet, better with Skylarq.

Most teams treat events as marketing theater: book the booth, scan badges, hope. The teams that win rooms treat them as accounts: with a named list, a plan per person, and a follow-up motion measured like pipeline. This playbook is that method, in three parts.

01 Pick the room

Your calendar is the scarce resource. Rank every candidate event by one question: how many of your named buyers will actually be there?

→Write your ICP as a list of people, not a segment. If you can't name 50 buyers, that's the first job.
→Read programs, not brochures. Speaker lists and session chairs are confirmed presence, published months out.
→Score each event: confirmed buyers ×3, predicted (attended 2+ recent years) ×1. Work the top two per quarter; skip the rest without guilt.

02 Map the room

A room you've mapped feels half the size. For every buyer on your list, know three things before you land:

→Why now: their most recent public signal: a post, a filing, a launch. Your opener lives here.
→Warmth: have you met, has anyone on your team, and when was the last touch?
→Intro path: the shortest chain of real relationships to a warm handshake. Ask for the intro before the event, not at it.

Label everything honestly: confirmed vs predicted, verified vs inferred. A map you can't trust is worse than no map.

03 Work the room

With a named list, your posture changes: you're not prospecting, you're keeping appointments most of the room doesn't know it has.

→Assign one owner per buyer. Two reps courting the same CISO at the same party reads as chaos.
→Open with their signal, not your pitch. "Your post about X landed" beats "let me tell you about us" every time.
→Take a 10-second note after every conversation, and send the follow-up within 48 hours: it should quote the conversation, not restart it.
→Run the after-action: buyers met ÷ buyers present = coverage. It's the only event metric that predicts pipeline.

This whole method runs on public information and discipline. Skylarq is the discipline, automated: the watching, the ranking, the briefs, the drafted follow-ups. The handshake stays yours.

Test us on a past event

The playbook, chapter by chapter

The full method in eight chapters: strategy, the weeks before, the room itself, and the follow-through that turns conversations into pipeline.

01Strategy
When conferences beat cold outbound

The ROI breakeven: which events earn their cost, and which to skip without guilt.
02Strategy
Test your ICP in three days

One conference produces the qualified signal eight weeks of cold outbound does.
03Before
Book the meetings before you land

Meeting-density math and the 4-6 week outreach runway that decides the whole event.
04Before
The hosted dinner

Eight seats, three hours: the highest-converting format at any conference.
05During
The five-minute conversation

Qualify fast, disengage gracefully, and make the explicit ask every time.
06During
Notes that survive the week

Memory fails at 40 conversations in 72 hours. The 30-minute capture window.
07After
The 24-hour window

24-hour follow-up converts at 25-40%. Day seven converts at under 5%. Same message.
08After
The bespoke follow-up asset

The asset attached to your follow-up decides whether the event produced pipeline.