By Peter Micciche, CEO of Certain
Your highest-intent prospect joined a product session in the morning where they shared their number one business priority, their most important AI project, and the pain point they are trying to solve within the next 6 months. An hour later, she attended your case study session. She’s evaluating your product seriously, and it would be the perfect time for sales to engage with her.
However, your sales team won’t know about her behavior at the event for a few days. In today’s environment, where time is limited, decisions move quickly, and much of the buying process is happening behind closed doors, this time lag becomes a major problem to wrestle with.
This isn’t a hypothetical. It’s happening right now at conferences, tradeshows, and customer summits everywhere. Teams capture incredible buying signals, and then watch them decay in spreadsheets, siloed databases, and batch export purgatory. The signals were gold, but the timing killed them.
In our last article on capturing buying signals, we covered what to look for and why most event platforms miss the intelligence that actually matters to marketers and customer-facing teams. Capturing signals is only half the equation. The other half? Getting those signals to the right people fast enough to act.
That’s Pillar 2 of the Event Intelligence framework: Deliver in Real-Time.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Delivering Event Data
The uncomfortable truth is that marketers aren’t integrating event data into their go-to-market operations nearly as much as they should. Events deliver what digital channels can’t: a wealth of rich buying signals wrapped in real-time behavioral context, all captured within days instead of months.
This is exactly the kind of data that can unlock both a deep understanding of prospects as well as revenue outcomes for sales teams. Getting this data into their hands as soon as possible so they can take action is imperative.
It’s easy to see why this data is not yet consistently delivered in real-time to the teams that can take immediate action. Until now, that data has been largely inaccessible to marketers. Event technologies have done such a poor job of making their data accessible that marketers have given up on using anything beyond basic registration data. This is a miss for both the event teams that orchestrate events and the larger marketing teams that rely on events for results.
As Scott Brinker points out in his latest Martech for 2026 report, marketers are under intense pressure to deliver results while also figuring out how to apply AI internally and as a part of their go-to-market playbook.
The most obvious place to gain a quick win in the race to implement AI meaningfully is from events. Event data is plentiful, context-rich, and looks at trends for individuals and across an entire account. Event data can be delivered in real-time, right where sales teams can take immediate action in person. There isn’t another marketing channel that enables that kind of immediate impact.
Think about how event data typically flows. Registration information, badge scans, and session attendance data are captured, and then that data sits trapped in a spreadsheet or siloed in a tool somewhere. Days pass, and the opportunity to strike is missed.
The research on the impact of speed is brutal. A MarketingProfs study found that 74% of B2B marketers take four days or longer to follow up with event leads and only 2% follow up the same day. Events are a channel just waiting to be capitalized on.
What “Real-Time” Actually Means (And What It Doesn’t)
Unfortunately, “real-time” has become one of those marketing buzzwords that sometimes is accurate and sometimes means whatever someone wants it to mean.
Real-time signal delivery means buying signals captured at your event reach your revenue teams in seconds or minutes, not hours or days. It means that your CRM is updated while your prospect is still at the event, and your sales teams get notifications through Slack or other tools they use with complete context about their buyer’s behavior and the entire buying committee’s behavior at your event.
This is about capitalizing on the opportunity to deepen relationships while your prospects have a learning mindset. When a prospect shares their goals, indicates pain points, and seeks understanding through meeting new people and attending sessions, their brain is turned on, which is the very best time to engage.
This kind of open-mindedness is at a high during events. It doesn’t pause, wait for your data to be processed and shared with the right teams, and return to that level of peak interest a few days later. The opportunity to engage is right during the event.
Traditional event platforms use batch processing. Data is collected throughout the day and then exported in large chunks at scheduled intervals, often days later. Latency ranges from hours to days. The information is accurate when it finally arrives, but the context has faded, and the urgency has dissipated.
Event Intelligence platforms use streaming architecture. Data flows continuously, signals trigger actions immediately, and your teams respond at the speed of buyer intent.
The Real Cost of Delayed Data
Most organizations don’t calculate the cost of missed opportunities from delayed data, but they should.
Consider a typical conference where your company spends six figures or more to host a major industry event. Your team captures leads with at least registration data and some level of engagement at the event. Based on industry averages, 10% of those accounts show genuine pipeline potential, and of those, 20% demonstrate clear buying signals with immediate opportunity.
Applying the research on the timing of follow-up, for those high-intent prospects, you have the strongest shot at a meaningful conversation if you engage them immediately, within 5 minutes after they’ve demonstrated intent. If you reach them 30 minutes later, your odds of strong qualification drop by 21 times. If you reach them the next day, you’re fighting a 60 times disadvantage against competitors who may be engaging at the same time.
The math gets ugly. You’re not just losing a few deals at the margin. You’re systematically degrading the value of your entire event investment because the delivery system can’t keep pace with the signals you captured.
Here’s another way to think about it. You paid to generate those buying signals. You invested in the booth, the sessions, the sponsorship, and travel to create a memorable and impactful experience. All that money went into creating moments where prospects revealed their intent. It’s not acceptable to let those signals sit in a silo, decaying, when they could be put to incredible use by your go-to-market teams.
What Real-Time Delivery Actually Looks Like
Let me paint a different picture that shows what Event Intelligence enables.
Tuesday, 10:15am. A prospect downloads your enterprise security whitepaper from the event mobile app.
Tuesday, 10:40am. She stops by your booth and asks detailed questions about scalability and multi-tenant architecture. Your booth staff captures her questions through a quick survey on the event app.
Tuesday, 11:10am. She attends your product deep dive session on enterprise deployment.
Tuesday, 11:45am. She attends a customer panel featuring your security-focused customers.
Tuesday, 12:10pm. Your sales rep receives a Slack notification. The message includes her name, company, role, and complete engagement history. It flags her as a high-intent enterprise prospect with security and scalability priorities. It notes she attended two relevant sessions and had a substantive booth conversation. It recommends connecting her with your Solutions Architect.
Tuesday, 12:45pm. Your rep approaches her at the networking lunch, not with a generic pitch, but with specific acknowledgment of her security concerns and an offer to discuss scalability requirements with your technical team.
Tuesday, 1:00pm. Your team has scheduled a meeting with her and your Solutions Architect for 3pm that afternoon.
This is the outcome you can create for prospects and for your teams when signals arrive early enough to influence action.
The Technical Reality Behind Speed
For the revenue operations leaders reading this, let’s talk architecture.
Batch processing works like this: data accumulates, gets exported at scheduled intervals (hourly, daily, or triggered manually), runs through transformation and cleanup processes, then lands in destination systems. Each step adds latency. Error handling happens after the fact. The whole process assumes that some time delay is acceptable.
With real-time processing, data flows continuously through streaming pipelines. Events trigger immediate actions. Transformations happen inline. Destination systems update within seconds of capturing data.
The infrastructure requirements differ significantly. Real-time processing needs event-driven architecture, streaming capabilities, and continuous integration points. It’s more complex to build. It’s also dramatically more valuable when speed determines outcomes.
Modern Event Intelligence platforms handle this complexity for you. Native integrations with Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, and Eloqua. Direct connections to Slack and Teams. API-first architecture that supports custom workflows. Two-way data flows that keep systems synchronized.
The question isn’t whether real-time integration is technically possible. It absolutely is. The question is whether your current event technology supports it.
Beyond Speed: The Context Problem
Fast data without context is just noise delivered quickly.
Imagine your sales rep gets an instant notification that Jane Smith visited your booth. Great, but now what? Without knowing what Jane asked about, which sessions she attended, what content she downloaded, and how her engagement patterns suggest buying stage, your rep is shooting in the dark.
Real-time signal delivery isn’t just about speed. It’s about delivering intelligence that enables informed action.
This is where the integration of Pillar 1 (Capture Buying Signals) and Pillar 2 (Deliver in Real-Time) creates compound value. You’re not just piping data faster. You’re piping classified, contextualized, actionable intelligence to people who can use it.
Your CRM record doesn’t just show “event attendance.” It shows specific sessions attended, questions asked, content downloaded, and AI-classified buying stage. Your sales rep knows someone visited, and they know what that person cares about and how ready they are to buy.
Rockwell Automation, which manages over 200 global events annually, described this shift: “Certain has helped raise the bar on what we track and how we act on it. We can now measure event impact with a level of precision we never had before.”
Precision plus speed. That’s the combination that transforms events from cost centers into revenue engines.
The Buying Committee Visibility Advantage
Here’s something that makes real-time delivery even more critical for enterprise sales.
B2B purchases involve committees. Gartner’s research shows the average enterprise buying group includes 5 to 11 stakeholders representing five distinct business functions. Forrester puts the number even higher at 13 people involved in typical decisions.
Events are one of the few places where these committees reveal themselves before you’ve formally identified them.
Picture this scenario. On Monday, your technical lead attended three sessions on integration architecture. On Tuesday, a finance director from the same company stopped by your booth asking about total cost of ownership. On Wednesday, a VP of Operations attended your customer success panel.
Traditional event systems capture these as three separate leads. Interesting, but not obviously connected. Event Intelligence platforms with real-time delivery identify the pattern immediately. They see buyers in multiple functions across the same company executing a coordinated evaluation. This is an active buying process forming right in front of you.
With Event Intelligence platforms, this account-level understanding reaches your teams while the event is still happening. They can coordinate the right approach across stakeholders and position themselves to influence the entire buying committee. They can accelerate an opportunity that might otherwise take months to identify.
The buying committee was always there. Real-time intelligence made it visible, so you can actually do something about it.
What Different Roles Should Do About This
Signal delivery requires organizational alignment. It isn’t just a technology problem.
For Marketing Leaders
Start measuring events by signal-to-response time, not by attendance and satisfaction scores.
Track how quickly high-fidelity signals reach sales. Monitor the gap between signal capture and first sales action. Report on whether your event technology accelerates or delays revenue conversations.
Design your events to create signal-generating moments that can be acted upon immediately. If you’re capturing great intelligence but delivering it days late, you’re investing in signals that decay before they create value.
For Sales Leaders
Demand real-time intelligence, not next-week lead lists.
Your team’s effectiveness depends on acting while prospects are still engaged. Push for technology that delivers context alongside contact information. Refuse to accept generic lead exports that ignore the behavioral intelligence your marketing team worked hard to capture.
When you see a high-intent signal from an active event, prioritize it. Those windows close fast. The prospect asking about enterprise pricing on Tuesday morning will have built their shortlist by Thursday.
For Revenue Operations
Build systems that eliminate lag between signal capture and sales awareness.
Audit your current event data flow. How long does it take for a booth conversation to appear in your CRM? How many manual steps exist between session attendance and lead scoring update? Where do signals get stuck?
The goal is zero delay. Every hour of lag costs in the conversion rate. Automate the routing. Enable real-time scoring updates. Ensure high-fidelity signals reach your best reps immediately, not after a queue and a review process.
The Competitive Reality
Your competitors are thinking about this too. The 2% of organizations that follow up on the same day of engagement aren’t randomly distributed. They’re the ones winning a disproportionate share of the opportunities in your space.
Forrester’s 2024 research found that 92% of event teams plan to improve their post-event follow-up. That means the bar is rising. What counts as “fast” today will be table stakes tomorrow.
The window for competitive differentiation through speed is narrowing. Real-time signal delivery will shift from a competitive advantage to an absolute necessity.
The question isn’t whether your organization will adopt real-time event intelligence. It’s whether you’ll lead the transition or spend years playing catch-up.
What Comes Next
Capturing signals solves the intelligence problem. Real-time delivery solves the timing problem. But there’s still a scale problem.
Organizations running dozens, hundreds, or thousands of events need systems that work across their entire portfolio. They need to aggregate intelligence, identify patterns, and optimize continuously.
That’s Pillar 3: Orchestrate at Scale. We’ll cover it in depth in the next article.
For now, ask yourself: How long does it take for your best buying signals to reach your sales team? If the answer is measured in days instead of minutes, you’re leaving money on the table at every event you run.
The signals are there. The technology exists to deliver them instantly. The only question is whether you’ll capture that advantage before your competitors do.
Peter Micciche is CEO of Certain, the leading AI-powered Event Intelligence platform for enterprise B2B companies. Connect with Peter on LinkedIn or visit certain.com to learn more about transforming events into revenue engines.
Ready to see real-time signal delivery in action? Schedule a demo to learn how Certain captures buying signals and delivers them to your revenue teams instantly.
Want to go deeper? Download our comprehensive guide, The Ultimate Guide to Event Buying Signals, for frameworks that connect event engagement to closed-won revenue.