$9M in Pipeline By Hosting Their Own Event [Breakdown]

Intro 

Hello and welcome to the Mark Sourced newsletter, where we break down successful B2B marketing programs that you can leverage to hit your growth goals.

Today, we’re looking at how Experity generated $9,000,000 in pipeline by hosting their own in person conference, a case study that’s detailed on Bizzabo.com.

Let’s dive in!

Summary

Experity is an urgent care software provider that powers over 5,700 healthcare clinics worldwide. In the urgent care space, smaller regional events were the norm, but Experity set out to change that. They wanted to create the thought leadership event of the year in their industry and bring clients, partners, and the urgent care space as a whole together for a large national event.

And fortunately for them, they were able to do exactly that, beating their attendee goal, generating millions of dollars in pipeline, and closing six figures worth of business.

The Results

365 attendees vs. a goal of 300
$9M in pipeline influence at the conference and $5.4M generated after the conference
$332,000 closed won/influenced since the conference

Why This Worked

While there aren’t a ton of details within the case study itself about how Experity launched and promoted the event, I’ve been involved in organizing various company-hosted conferences over the years, and can give you a sense of how to make them work.
Here are some of the key concepts for why I think Experity was so successful in launching this event:

1. They had a sizable audience, a good customer base, and a reputation for delivering good content.

If you’re looking to get someone to fly across the country to attend your in person event, you need an established level of trust for them to believe it will be worth their time.

Your customers serve as the strongest group to have that level of trust in you. For Experity, they were used by thousands of healthcare clinics and likely tens of thousands of users, so they had an initial base of promising invitees to bring to their event.

On top of that, Experity had built a broader audience within the industry, with a newsletter that had tens of thousands of subscribers and a sizable social media following.

Lastly, Experity had shown that they could deliver valuable content, consistently putting out high value webinars, guides, and blog posts.

All of that to say, Experity had the right foundation to run this event successfully - an established audience, lots of trust, and a reputation for producing good content.

2. They had a focused and value packed agenda

While I’m no expert on the urgent care space, I can tell you that Experity appeared to have a thoughtful agenda that was completely focused on serving their target audience. Nothing about the content came across as potentially being “sales-ey” and their educational mission was clearly reflected in their chosen topics and tracks.

You can get a sense of how they curated the agenda for their initial event here.

3. There were compelling reasons for people to attend in person

In a world where so much content is available online for cheap, you need to give people a reason to attend in person.

Experity was able to do that in a few different ways:

They hosted their initial event shortly after the pandemic

They launched the event coming out of COVID, during a time that people were hungry to come back together and re-establish some human connection

They incorporated an awards ceremony

One of the aspects of the agenda was something called the Limelight Awards, which were industry awards where folks could nominate industry leaders for excellence in the urgent care space. The potential to receive an award and/or support someone in receiving an award is certainly motivation to get people there in person.

They provided valuable networking opportunities

Potentially the single most compelling reason to attend an in-person event is to connect and network with your peers. With an event so tightly focused on the urgent care space, attendees knew that they would be able to connect with folks that were relevant to them.

Who Should Consider Running This Type of Program

Organizing your own user or industry conference is not for every type of business. 

The reason is that conferences like this are expensive to run and you typically lose money on the event itself. 

For the events that I’ve been involved with, my company has typically spent north of $300,000 to put it on, which is a pretty modest budget for this type of thing. Other companies I know have spent north of $2,000,000.

Now, I’ll caveat that by saying that there are ways to do it much more affordably. And you also try to offset that cost by selling tickets and sponsorships. However, that’s difficult to do in practice, particularly when you’ll end up comping many tickets to get key customers or prospects to the event.

With all of that being the case, you make your money by being able to sell clients and prospects in person, which is what Experity did. 

Ultimately, to generate a return, you generally need to have high ACV products that you can sell through the event to make this work. That was definitely the case for Experity, with estimates having their software cost six figures annually on the low end. In reality, organizing this type of event is probably best for companies that have an ACV of >$50,000.

On top of that, you need to be an established company to run this type of play. It will be difficult for an early stage startup without a large customer base and established brand to successfully execute this type of an event.

How to Run This At Your Company

If you do decide this is something that you would like to run at your own company, there are a few things that you need to do to set yourself up for success:

Have a Strong Agenda In Place At Launch

While you don’t need your whole event built out in detail when you launch it, you do need some meat on the bone.

Most importantly, it helps to have your headline speakers in place + a rough agenda in terms of any educational tracks and key sessions defined. 

Get all of that worked out at least six months in advance of the event so you can start promoting.

Equip Your Sales Team

In my experience, a lot of attendees for this type of event are sourced from personal, 1:1 invites. It’s imperative that your sales team is bought in on the event and equipped to be able to invite their customers and prospects.

Align with your senior sales leaders early, create resources for the sales team to do their invites, and work with leadership to maintain accountability about getting folks to the event. 

Give Yourself Marketable Moments

As you approach the event, give yourself marketable moments as you get closer that you can use to make noise about the event.

Once you have the full speaker list locked in, promote that publicly and equip your sales team to talk about it. Do the same for the agenda. And for when you lock in an agenda.

You want to give yourself as many reasons to keep the event top of mind as possible.

Conclusion

Hosting your own event can be a powerful way to give your team facetime with your customers and prospects. It can also be a way to create a brand experience that your attendees are going to remember forever.

However, it’s an expensive and risky endeavor. So make sure your ACV can support the level of investment, and establish internal alignment with your sales team to get the right folks in the room.

-Founder @ Mark Sourced

P.S.

If you’re looking to find inspiration for programs that you can run in 2025, be sure to check out our database of 25+ B2B marketing programs that drove real results (like Experity’s).

It's sortable based upon factors like what marketing channels were used, the size of the company, and the results that were achieved so you can find the programs that would be most relevant to your business.

Don’t reinvent the wheel in 2025, leverage established templates playbooks that companies like you are using to hit their growth goals.