The Third Pillar of Event Intelligence
By Peter Micciche, CEO, Certain
Your sales rep just got a Slack notification. It says: “Sarah Chen, Director of IT Security from Acme Corp, is demonstrating readiness buying signals at your event. Since the event started, she has attended your compliance session, answered a poll sharing that SOC 2 certification is a must-have requirement, and has just downloaded your enterprise security guide. This is Acme’s third event of the year, and the first one where Sarah is involved. Two other Acme stakeholders attended your product demo this morning.”
Once your rep sees Sarah’s complete engagement history, she immediately reaches out to set a meeting. Within 30 minutes, she’s scheduled a call with Sarah and her team for next week.
That’s what good orchestration looks like.
Now compare that to what happens most of the time. Some of Sarah’s behavior, for example, her session attendance, gets logged in the event application and makes it way into a spreadsheet and is flagged for sales in a long list of leads for review. A few days later, the same data is uploaded to the CRM, and eventually, Sarah is added to a nurture campaign for automated follow-up.
That kind of execution is just not good enough anymore.
The truth is, you can capture the perfect signals and get them into your systems in some way, but if those signals don’t reach the right people with the right context, in the right place and at the right time, they won’t be useful in driving up conversion.
That’s why, as you consider how to make the most of the buying signals your events produce, it’s important to consider how to orchestrate these signals at scale, which is the third pillar of the event intelligence framework, completing the loop from signal capture to action.
What Orchestration Actually Means
Orchestration at scale in an enterprise event context means automatically routing event buying signals to all revenue teams, including marketing, sales, and customer success, in their existing workflows. Signals should be not only delivered, but also enriched with context and tied to specific, predefined actions. Orchestration means doing as much heavy lifting for teams as possible, delivering signals as soon as they happen, with as little manual effort as possible.
There are a few key elements that matter for effective execution, including:
- Multi-team delivery.
Events do not generate value for just one team. For example, a single attendee interaction can create:- Optimization and segmentation signals for Marketing
- Intent and opportunity signals for Sales
- Renewal and expansion signals for Customer Success
Real orchestration ensures all teams get the signals they need, in a format they can act on in a seamless and integrated workflow.
- Native tool integration.
Your teams live in Salesforce, a marketing platform like Marketo or Eloqua, Slack, and email, not in your event platform. Orchestration means signals show up where people already work. No extra logins, or dashboard hunting, or spreadsheet links. The intelligence comes to them.
- Contextual action.
“Jane attended your session” is not intelligence. It is a log entry. Intelligence sounds more like: “Jane from Beta Industries attended your enterprise deployment session and brought two colleagues from her infrastructure team, shared that multi-cloud architecture is a priority, and downloaded your implementation guide. This is Beta’s fourth event touchpoint this year, and they have an open RFP with a close date at the end of this quarter.” That is something a rep can act on immediately. Everything else is just faster noise.
The Multi-Team Orchestration Problem
Events are uniquely complex because they simultaneously serve multiple revenue teams, including Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success. A single attendee’s behavior throughout the course of an event can reveal different signals for different teams.
- For Marketing: content preferences, campaign effectiveness, segment fit, scoring factors
- For Sales: buying intent, stakeholder mapping, budget and timing alignment, pain points for conversation starters
- For Customer Success: renewal risk, product adoption gaps, upsell and cross-sell signals
Separate event workflows treat these as three problems. Marketing uploads event data to automation; Sales updates CRM manually; Customer Success keeps a separate spreadsheet.
That legacy approach produces an incomplete picture where each team is focused on their core metric, for example, with Marketing tracking leads, sales tracking opportunities, and customer success tracking renewal conversations. Success metrics are disconnected, and as a result, real opportunities decay while teams cross-reference behavior.
This is an obvious orchestration problem. To fix this, as soon as buying signals are captured, they should be enriched with context across revenue teams, scored by consistent rules, and delivered to the right teams right in their workflow. And in terms of timing, this should happen in minutes, not days or weeks.
Why Real-Time, Routed Signals Matter
Speed without context creates problems, including irritating prospects with generic and “not quite right” messaging that doesn’t match what they’ve shared with you and where they are in their buying journey. But speed with context is a competitive advantage.
McKinsey’s work on AI-driven personalization reveals that companies excelling in personalization generate up to 40% more revenue from these activities than their peers. Additionally, AI-driven personalization can enhance customer satisfaction by 15–20% and increase revenue by 5–8%.
Those gains rely on the same underlying ingredients that orchestration requires:
- Relevant signals
- Delivered quickly
- Routed to the right owners
- Used to tailor the next interaction
Event signals are some of the richest personalization tools a company has to improve outcomes. They reveal what prospects actually care about when they are spending meaningful time with your company.
Do you have confidence that the systems you have in place can:
- Recognize a high-value sequence of behaviors (e.g., three technical sessions + product demo + pricing question)
- Surface that pattern instantly in the right place (e.g., the account’s Slack channel or the rep’s task queue)
- Tie the follow-up and outcome back to the event program
Without orchestration, the potential to learn, engage, and convert is lost in data exports, spreadsheets, and ad hoc follow-up.
What the Research Says About AI and Revenue
The ROI story behind orchestration is not theoretical.
McKinsey’s work on AI in growth and marketing shows that organizations that implement AI across sales and marketing functions see:
- 15–25% increases in revenue within about 18 months
- 10–20% improvements in sales ROI for organizations that invest deeply in AI-enhanced commercial capabilities
IDC’s research on sales management and AI underscores the operational mechanics behind those numbers. AI and automation significantly reduce the time sales managers and reps spend on administrative work such as logging interactions, updating systems, preparing summaries, which frees them to coach, strategize, and engage customers more effectively.
Orchestration is the connective tissue that makes it possible to automate and contextualize event intelligence so sales teams can be as effective as possible. Capturing event signals is one thing. Embedding them into these optimized go-to-market workflows is where the economic value shows up changes the game for sales, which is exactly what cohesive go-to-market teams want to achieve.
First-Party Proof: the Result of Orchestrating Event Data
In addition to third-party research, there are real-world examples of what happens when enterprises orchestrate event signals properly.
National Instruments, a Certain customer, reshaped its event follow-up and orchestration model and saw measurable gains:
- Lead follow-up time cut from 14 days to 1 day after events
- Resources involved in post-event follow-up reduced from eight to zero (fully automated workflows)
- Event programs now generate roughly half of their total demand
The story here is not just faster emails. It is the compound benefit of standardizing how signals are captured, contextualizing them with behavioral data and history, and routing them automatically to the right systems and teams for revenue impact.
Another enterprise customer runs more than 200 global events annually including conferences, roadshows, and partner events. By centralizing and orchestrating their event data, they gained portfolio-level visibility into which event formats and geographies produced the strongest pipeline and fastest sales cycles.
That insight enabled them to reallocate millions of budget dollars from underperforming programs to the highest engagement and conversion formats, and also enabled them to defend those decisions with internal stakeholders.
Seven Capabilities That Define Effective Orchestration
From our work defining event strategy with hundreds of companies, seven capabilities consistently emerge as the components of orchestration that impact outcomes the most.
1. Real‑time notifications
Signals should trigger alerts right away, and they should be sent to the person who can take immediate action, such as the account owner.
2. Context‑rich alerts, not activity logs
An alert should answer the basics like: Who is this? What did they do? How does it compare to previous behavior? What context matters? What is the suggested next step?
3. Bi‑directional sync with core systems
Changes in Slack or other collaboration tools should write back to CRM, and those updates should flow through routing rules to form a consistent picture in the systems of record.
4. Automated task and workflow creation
High-value signals should automatically generate tasks, sequences, or plays in the tools teams use every day without manual intervention.
5. Routing by role
Orchestration engines should route high‑intent signals to the right team members to enable speedy follow up.
6. Intelligence at the contact and account levels
Orchestration should aggregate signals to show account-level patterns such as how many stakeholders attended, which roles engaged, and what their collective behavior indicates.
7. Portfolio‑wide visibility
True orchestration at scale means seeing across hundreds of events, regions, and formats. It should be possible to understand which event types generate the most pipeline, accelerate deals, and convert the fastest.
Without these seven capabilities, orchestration is just a new label on old manual work.
What Scale Actually Means for Enterprise CMOs
It is not unusual for a global enterprise to run hundreds of events annually across multiple teams and regions. Enterprise event portfolios often include:
- Flagship conferences
- Regional roadshows
- Executive briefings
- Partner events
- Smaller, field events like user groups
- Industry trade shows
Orchestration at scale means creating unified intelligence across all events. This means having a common language and taxonomy for buying signals, understanding and agreeing on routing rules, and being able to tell a cohesive story on progress to goals including pipeline creation, customer expansion, and revenue.
With this kind of cohesion across buying signals, teams will be enabled to help leadership make big decisions about event programs such as where to allocate budget, which types of engagements improve outcomes such as shorter sales cycles or higher win rates, and the quality of event-sourced pipeline compared to other channels.
Forrester’s research on insights‑driven businesses shows that companies that truly operationalize data and insights into their processes are 8.5 times more likely to report 20% or greater annual revenue growth than their peers. Event intelligence and orchestration are how event programs participate in that advantage.
Putting Orchestration Into Practice
Orchestration won’t happen without a clear and aligned mandate to transform events into a data-enabled, AI-supported channel.
To orchestrate at this level, enterprises will need an architecture that supports real-time data, the ability to easily integrate and move event intelligence to core systems such as CRM, marketing automation, collaboration tools, and customer success platforms, and governance so data remains trustworthy at scale.
IDC’s work on sales productivity and AI emphasizes that AI and automation programs only deliver their promised gains when they are supported by proper integration planning, change management, and governance.
Orchestration is not a one-off project, it’s a strategic initiative that requires executive sponsorship, cross‑functional alignment between all revenue teams, and a clear roadmap for which signals matter, how they should be used, and how success will be measured.
What This Means for Revenue Leaders
If you are a CMO or Head of Growth, start by asking:
- What buying signals will make the biggest impact across our Product, Sales, and Customer Success teams? Where can we capture those signals seamlessly?
- How long does it take for high‑intent event signals to reach sales? How can we automate this?
- How many teams touch event data before anyone uses it?
- Which events actually create the pipeline we close?
If you are in Marketing or Revenue Operations, you are the architect of orchestration:
- Map current signal flows from events into CRM, automation, and collaboration tools
- Quantify the manual effort currently required
- Partner with Sales and CS to define the signals and workflows that matter most
- Pilot orchestration around one flagship event or priority segment, then expand
If you are in Sales or Customer Success, you should be demanding orchestration:
- Ask for real‑time, contextual signals in your workflow
- Push for account‑level intelligence from event activity
- Give feedback on which signals actually help you move deals or renewals forward
The broader market direction is clear. McKinsey, IDC, Forrester, and Nucleus all point toward the same trend that organizations that systematically apply automation, AI, and insights to their GTM playbooks are growing faster and using their teams’ time more effectively.
The event intelligence framework that enables you to capture the right signals, deliver them in real-time, and orchestrate cross-functionally at scale will deliver these advantages for the channel that has the highest touch with your prospects and customers.
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.
Introduction to the Three Pillar Framework for Event Intelligence
Pillar 1 – Deep Dive into Event Intelligence: Capturing Event Buying Signals
Pillar 2 – Real-Time Signal Delivery: When Speed Meets Context, Revenue Teams Win