Alex Reynolds is co-founder and CEO of Vendelux, the event intelligence platform that tracks more than 250,000 B2B events and has influenced north of $5 billion in event spend. A third-generation entrepreneur and Emory University graduate, he spent a decade in strategic partnerships before joining Shutterstock, where in 2017 he convinced the executive team to green-light an API partnerships unit called Platform Solutions and ran it as VP and General Manager, growing it into a global business unit. He earlier founded Swift Intro, a professional matchmaking product built on the LinkedIn connection graph that ended when LinkedIn closed its API. He left Shutterstock in 2021 to solve the problem he kept hitting from the inside: events were driving real pipeline and nobody could tell him which ones.
“The reality is that the vast majority of event success is determined before you even walk in the room.”
“You're spending two, five, even $10 million for that activation, and I've walked the floor and you see 20, 30 sales reps who are all on their phone or they're sitting off doing something on their own, and you look at that and you know just by looking at that booth that it's a waste of money.”
“Generally when I talk to event marketers and CMOs, their bar of what they're looking for is 3x ROI. I think that's ridiculously low.”
“I've seen companies that I think do this really well that say, no, our bar's not 3x, it's 18x or it's 20x, and you can control both sides of that equation.”
“They might scan a thousand badges, but that's a great vanity metric. But what does it actually mean for your business?”
“In general, we see that it takes anywhere from six to 18 months to see the true impact from an event. But most people don't track events that far out. After three or four months, they've kind of moved on to the next thing.”
“Our data shows that if you have current customers and you see them at an event, they're more likely to renew and they're more likely to upsell, but often marketers get zero credit for that because it's much more difficult to tie the actual attribution to.”
“50% of event attendees buy tickets in the last two weeks, which is kind of wild to think about, right?”