“The Nexus of Marketing and Sales”: How to Leverage Event Data

At Adobe Summit 2025, RainFocus’ win as the Adobe Digital Digital Experience B2B Technology Partner of the Year marked an exciting milestone. Fittingly, our executives’ popular conference session, “2025: Revolutionizing B2B Buying Journeys With Meeting and Event Data,” highlighted how events are, more than ever, a critical driver of business impact. 

During their session, RainFocus’ Brian Gates and Marius Milcher discussed the impact of integrating events and marketing data using tools like Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) and RainFocus. Co-presenter Hannah Macking, director of digital architecture at Red Hat, followed with an inside look at how her organization leverages event data pre-, during, and post-event to drive customer behavior. 

Here are some of the biggest takeaways:

Events Far Outshine Other Marketing Channels in ROI

Most enterprise organizations host anywhere from 500 to 2,000 events each year. These events represent a substantial portion of B2B marketing spend, often ranging from 40% to 50%. This is comparable to the investment in digital channels, which account for 50% to 60% of the budget. However, traditional marketing technologies fall short of addressing this significant spend, making dedicated event technology a necessity.

Events offer much higher levels of customer engagement compared to other marketing channels. The amount of time customers spend reading an email or a digital ad is often seconds, whereas at events, they will often spend upwards of 800 minutes fully engaged with marketing content, Gates and Milcher explained. 

Therefore, events provide an unparalleled opportunity to capture first and zero-party data. As technologies advance and preferences evolve, the depth of behavioral data gathered through events is even more critical for understanding customer intent and driving personalized experiences.

Events Are the Nexus of Marketing and Sales

Events can streamline marketing and sales efforts. By integrating events, marketing, and sales technologies, organizations can leverage customers’ touchpoints at events to create a seamless customer journey. Research has shown that event attendance contributes to higher campaign conversion rates, increased deal velocity, and, ultimately, more deals closed. 

Red Hat’s Cross-Sell Opportunity Success

Red Hat uses event data to drive customer engagement at every stage of their journey. The process begins with cross-functional alignment around objectives and business requirements. 

As Macking explained during the Summit presentation, she and her team then reach out to partners like RainFocus to determine what data will be ingested into AEP and Customer Journey Analytics (CJA). Once the data is integrated, they can recommend data-backed actions to stakeholders based on their event data. 

Macking shared a simple example of this process: One of the primary goals of Red Hat Summit 2024 was to identify and act on cross-sell opportunities. Red Hat worked with RainFocus to set up registration forms that asked attendees which products they were most interested in learning about during the conference. All attendee responses were captured in RainFocus and then integrated back into CJA. With this information, Red Hat’s marketing team targeted attendees with appropriate cross-sell messaging during post-event nurture experiences. By connecting RainFocus and Adobe, they harnessed their event data to improve business outcomes.

To learn more, check out the slides and audio from the session.