By Peter Micciche, CEO of Certain
Your best prospect just left your booth. She asked sharp questions about enterprise deployment, downloaded your security documentation, and attended back-to-back sessions on compliance and scalability.
This is a buyer with demonstrated intent, but at best, your sales team won’t understand this complete picture until a few days after the event, or in the worst case, ever.
In a few days, she’ll get a generic “Thanks for stopping by!” email, but it will be after the opportunity to meet face-to-face to learn more. Maybe she’s already talking to your competitor.
This scenario plays out thousands of times at every major B2B event. Not because teams don’t care. We know they care deeply. The problem isn’t a lack of effort or intention from the marketing and event planning teams. It’s that most event technology isn’t capturing all of the buying signals that matter and aggregating them to paint a complete picture of buyer intent.
In our first article introducing the Three-Pillar Framework for Event Intelligence, we covered the big picture to drive event outcomes: capture buying signals, deliver them in real-time, and orchestrate at scale. This article goes deep on Pillar 1, capturing buying signals, the foundation that makes everything else work.
The Difference Between Data and Intelligence
Walk the floor of any trade show, and you’ll see badge scanners everywhere. Booths collect thousands of scans over a three-day conference. Data is basic, a simple count of the attendee with name, job title, and email address.
Augmentation that processes in a few days tells you more. For example, it identifies the other technologies that the buyer uses, and company trends. But this type of data is incomplete and misses the actual buying signals that happened throughout the event itself.
Badge scans are data. Buying signals are intelligence.
A buying signal captures behavior that reveals purchase intent. Someone asking detailed questions about your API architecture is different from someone asking where to find coffee. Both interactions might register as “booth visit” in your current system. Only one matters for pipeline.
The gap between what most event platforms capture and what sales teams actually need costs companies real revenue. I’ve watched organizations pour six figures into conferences, collect impressive lead numbers, only to convert a small percentage of them into pipeline. Not because the leads weren’t real, but because nobody could tell which ones deserved attention and what they cared about most.
What Buying Signals Actually Look Like
Buying signals come in different flavors. Understanding the differences changes how your team prioritizes follow-up and where and how your best reps spend their time.
Interest Signals
These signals show up early in the buyer journey. Someone registered for your event and stopped by your booth. They may have downloaded a general overview and attended a keynote session.
Interest signals confirm awareness. The person knows about your company and maybe has an overview of your product suite. That’s valuable, but it doesn’t tell you much about buying readiness. These prospects need nurturing, not aggressive sales outreach.
Many teams make the mistake of treating every interest signal like a hot lead. This creates a lot of busy work for marketing, burns out your sales team, and annoys prospects who aren’t ready for a conversation yet.
Pipeline Signals
Pipeline signals indicate active evaluation. Someone attended a product demo session and asked technical questions at your booth. They may have downloaded an implementation guide or indicated in a live poll that integration flexibility is a top pain point. Maybe they even came back to your booth for a second conversation with more detailed questions than before.
These behaviors tell you the person isn’t just browsing. They’re doing their homework, and they could even be comparing you against alternatives. Pipeline signals deserve immediate, personalized follow-up from someone who can have a real conversation to address specific needs.
Readiness Signals
This is where deals get won or lost. Readiness signals mean someone has moved into decision mode. They’re asking about pricing structures, discussing implementation timelines, and maybe even bringing a senior leader you were unaware of into the conversation to meet your team.
When you spot readiness signals, speed becomes critical. These windows close fast. The prospect who asked about enterprise pricing on Tuesday morning may have made their shortlist by Thursday.
Barrier Signals
Here’s one most teams completely overlook. Barrier signals tell you something is blocking the purchase. Maybe they asked about an integration you don’t support yet and went quiet when your workaround didn’t meet their needs. Maybe they mentioned concerns about change management or showed strong early interest and then ghosted you.
Your sales team needs barrier signals as much as they need positive ones. These signals tell you exactly which objections need to be addressed before anything moves forward. Ignoring them means wondering why promising deals stall without explanation.
Seven Types of Signals Your Events Generate Right Now
Whether you’re capturing them or not, your events produce these signal types constantly.
1. Goals Classification
Your attendees’ goals can be revealed and classified early in the registration process if you progressively ask questions about the challenges they experience and solutions they are most interested in learning about. Questions can be both explicit, for example, asking about goals, or implicit, such as asking for interests in networking and mining those details for insights.
Generalized answers to goals like “Gain efficiencies” or “Learn about this product” might signal early awareness and a prospect that is still early in the buying journey. The person is browsing, maybe just learning about the product category.
Answers to detailed product questions like, “Learn how your API handles authentication,” can reveal not only goals but also more serious intent. They’re comparing approaches, probably against two or three alternatives.
Answers to commercial questions like, “Understand pricing for 500+ users with SSO requirements,” signals buying readiness. They’re building a business case.
Most event teams ask some questions in the registration process, but often these are basic logistics questions. Progressively understanding a prospect’s interests unlocks a much deeper understanding of their intent.
2. Content Engagement Patterns
Not all downloads carry equal weight.
Someone grabbing your company overview shows basic curiosity. They want to know what you do. Someone downloading your implementation guide shows evaluation intent. They’re thinking about what deployment would actually look like. Someone requesting security and compliance documentation shows they need to satisfy internal requirements before moving forward.
The depth of content engagement maps directly to the buying journey stage. Surface-level content means surface-level interest. Technical documentation means serious consideration.
3. Session Attendance Sequences
One session tells you someone has general interest in a topic. A sequence of sessions across a buying committee tells a comprehensive story.
Keynote attendance alone? Probably passive interest, maybe just filling time between meetings. But when a target account attends a keynote followed by a product demo followed by a technical deep-dive followed by customer panel across three different personas in the buying committee? This team is doing serious evaluation work. They’re building conviction or looking for red flags.
There is so much data beyond attendance to be captured during sessions. You can look for engagement with session content, downloads, comments in the room and in chat, survey participation and live polling responses.
Pay attention to the progression of learning through session content, both for an individual and across an entire account.
4. Booth Engagement Quality
This is where the limitation of badge scans becomes painfully obvious.
A scan captures that someone physically came to your booth, but it doesn’t reveal anything about why they are stopping by and what happened during their visit. Did they engage with your team or just grab swag? What kinds of questions did they ask and how did they respond to polls or surveys? They might reveal a pain point or bring along a colleague who is actually part of the buying committee and you weren’t aware of that before.
High-quality booth conversations produce high-value buying signals, but these can only be understood if you capture the data.
5. Buying Committee Formation
B2B purchases are committee decisions. According to Gartner’s 2022 B2B Buyer Survey, the average enterprise B2B buying group consists of five to 11 stakeholders, representing an average of five distinct business functions. Forrester’s 2024 State of Business Buying report pegged this even higher, finding that, on average, 13 people within an organization are involved in the buying decision.
Events are one of the few places where these committees reveal themselves before you know they exist. Watch for multiple attendees from the same company showing up across your sessions, at your booth, evaluating similar technologies from your exhibitors, and in who they are networking with. You may see different personas attending different types of sessions, but they are related. For example, a technical lead might attend your integration session and a finance lead might attend a session on ROI.
When you spot multiple stakeholders from one account engaging across your event, you’re probably watching an active buying process form in real time. These opportunities deserve coordinated, account-based follow-up, not individual outreach to each person.
6. Timing and Sequence Patterns
When someone engages matters as much as how they engage.
Same-day meeting requests indicate urgency. A customer or prospect who spends time setting up meetings and reaching out for networking likely has an active need. After-hours activity on your event app suggests personal investment is solving a problem. They’re doing homework on their own time. Early registration followed by aggressive session scheduling suggests they came with specific objectives.
The sequence of behaviors tells you even more. Someone who attends awareness content on day one, consideration content on day two, and decision-stage content on day three is walking through a buying journey right in front of you. Your follow-up should absolutely match where they landed and not make the mistake of sounding generic and geared towards top of funnel awareness.
7. Negative Signals
Nobody likes talking about these, but they matter.
Someone registered and never showed up? That’s a signal, just not a positive one. Session abandonment halfway through? Signal. Brief booth visit with zero engagement? That’s a signal too. Any combination like this, such as strong early interest followed by complete silence, are signals that are absolutely worth investigating and understanding.
Negative signals keep you from wasting resources on people who were never serious or who hit a blocker you could potentially address. This data reveals important information for your sales team. Of course, a no-show might be for a reason that has nothing to do with your event. Understanding this ensures that a future opportunity isn’t lost.
Separating Real Signals from Noise
Not every interaction deserves the same response. A practical prioritization framework helps your team focus energy where it matters.
High-Fidelity Signals: Connect The Right Sales Reps, Immediately
There are a few signals that predict purchase intent reliably. These require fast follow-up from your salespeople with personalized, non-generic, messaging that responds to the insights the buying signals have generated. High-fidelity signals you might encounter include:
- Direct responses to questions or polls about pricing or implementation
- Multiple people from the same company engaging
- Meeting requests made during the event
- Implementation guide downloads combined with technical booth conversations
- Return visits with escalating engagement
Medium-Fidelity Signals: Actively Nurture
There are other signals that show you that there is real, demonstrated interest, but the timeline is unclear. These prospects deserve personalized attention and ongoingnurture. The goal with prospects in this category is to build relationships and be available to engage at any time without being pushy. Examples include:
- Session attendance on relevant topics
- Case study downloads
- General product questions
- One solid booth conversation or demo
- Email engagement on follow-up content
Low-Fidelity Signals: Monitor, But Don’t Chase
Registration without attendance. Keynote only, no breakout sessions. Generic survey responses. Contest entries. Passive browsing without interaction.
Awareness at best. Add them to your marketing nurture programs, but don’t burn your sales team cycles here.
False Signals: Remove from Sales Lists
Badge scans motivated by prize drawings. Booth visits for swag only. Students and job seekers. Competitor scouts doing research. These look like engagement in your data. They represent zero purchase intent.
Treating false signals as real opportunities is one of the most expensive mistakes event teams make. Organizations waste weeks of sales effort chasing people who were never going to buy because their systems couldn’t tell the difference.
Why Most Organizations Miss These Signals
The technology gap underscores failures.
Legacy event platforms were built for operations. Registration management. Badge printing. Session scheduling. Room assignments. They excel at logistics. They capture what happened at your event but they can’t tell you what any of it means.
Event Intelligence platforms work differently. They capture behavioral data, classify it by product interest or learning stage automatically, and translate it into buying signals while your event is still running. They identify when buying committees are forming and recognize patterns that predict purchase intent.
The distance between event management and Event Intelligence is the distance between having data and having intelligence you can act on.
The Speed Problem
Capturing signals solves nothing if those signals don’t reach the right people fast enough.
This is where most event technology fails. Signals get captured somewhere in the system, then sit in a database waiting for someone to export a spreadsheet. Days pass and by the time sales receives the information and can act on it, the prospect has moved on. The moment that mattered happened on Tuesday. The follow-up lands the following Monday.
The data on this is brutal. Prospects become ten times less likely to convert when follow-up takes more than five days. Yet a MarketingProfs study found that 74% of B2B marketers take four days or longer to act on event leads. Only 2% follow up the same day.
Think about what that means. The vast majority of event investment produces leads that have already gone cold by the time anyone reaches out. The leads were valuable but timing killed them.
Real-time signal delivery changes this equation completely. Your sales team should know about high-intent prospects while the event is still running. They should get context, not just contact information. Your CRM should update automatically. Follow-up sequences should trigger based on specific signal combinations, not manual review.
Rockwell Automation, which runs over 200 global events annually, described the impact this way: “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.”
Putting this into Practice
Different roles need to approach signal capture differently.
For Marketing Leaders
Stop measuring events by attendance and satisfaction scores and start measuring signal capture rate. Track signal-to-opportunity conversion. Report on the quality of intelligence your events generate, not just the leads collected.
Design your events to create signal-generating moments. For example, progressive profiling at registration and qualification questions that reveal intent leading up to and throughout the event. Host session formats that encourage interaction and design booth experiences that produce meaningful conversations, not just badge scans.
For Sales Leaders
At every point your team interacts with leads, require the maximum context. Push back on lead lists with limited info such as names and job titles. Demand behavioral intelligence with every event lead. What questions did they ask? What content did they interact with? Can we identify meaningful patterns of behavior that could influence how we engage?
If you can’t answer those questions, you can’t prioritize effectively. Your team will waste time on tire-kickers while real opportunities cool off.
For Revenue Operations
Build systems that route high-fidelity signals to your best reps immediately. Create scoring models that weight buying signals appropriately. Ensure signal data flows into your CRM automatically, without anyone touching a spreadsheet.
The goal is zero delay between signal capture and sales awareness. Every hour of lag costs conversion rate.
For Event Teams
Think of every touchpoint as a signal opportunity. Registration questions that reveal goals and challenges. Polls during sessions that surface priorities and post-session surveys that reveal intent by product or pain point. Survey experiences at the end of booth conversations that capture ongoing interests.
Intentional signal generation makes events dramatically more valuable. Random interactions produce random data. Designed interactions produce actionable intelligence.
What Comes Next
This article covered the Pillar 1 in the Event Intelligence framework: capturing buying signals. But capture alone doesn’t generate revenue. The signals have to reach the right people at the right moment with enough context to act intelligently.
That’s Pillar 2: real-time signal delivery and we’ll cover it in depth in the next article.
For now, look back at your last major event. How many real buying signals did you capture? How many walked out the door without anyone noticing?
The answer to that question determines whether your events function as cost centers or revenue engines.
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 Event Buying Signals in action? Schedule a demo to learn how Certain captures buying signals and delivers them to your revenue teams in real-time.
Want to go even deeper on buying signals? Download our comprehensive guide, ‘The Ultimate Guide to Event Buying Signals,’ for frameworks and strategies that connect event engagement to closed-won revenue.