INTO MarCom Open the countdown

Event Strategy Playbook

How INTO runs events

Owned dinners and workshops, sponsored conferences, and attended presence — decided, budgeted, run, amplified, and converted. This is the doctrine layer, readable end to end. Bound by team/TEAM.md, the AI Studio SOP, and the Event Manager role; where this and a live CMO brief disagree, the brief wins.

Chapters13Lifecycle states8Pack spine12OwnerEvent Manager

Start where you are

Four ways into the playbook

A prospectus just landedScore the room before anyone answers the call.01 Strategy and selectionIt is approved — now what?Objectives, quotas, jobs, and the money test.02 Objectives and jobsWe fly in three weeksThe countdown, the briefing, and the meeting gate.The countdownWe just got homeThe follow-up is half the event. Start the sprint.10 Follow-up and conversion

The lifecycle

Eight states, five stage gates

Recorded in the event brief, and distinct from the asset state machine — events contain assets, they are not assets. No commit without a scored scorecard; no spend without an approved budget; no travel without a green manifest; not live until logistics and the sales pack are complete; not closed until the T+90 readout carries a repeat / scale / shrink / kill decision.

  1. scouted
  2. evaluated
  3. committed
  4. planned
  5. live
  6. follow-up
  7. debriefed
  8. closed

Side states, from any stage with the reason logged: passed (evaluated, declined) · withdrawn (committed then pulled out) · cancelled (organiser cancelled).

Doctrine

Seven rules that govern everything below

  1. An event is a pipeline instrument with brand side-effects. Every event starts from a written business objective tied to a BU goal. "Be visible" is not an objective. If no objective survives writing down, the money goes elsewhere.
  2. The room is the product. Audience quality beats event size, production value, and stage prestige. Evaluate the actual room — past attendee lists, not the sponsorship deck's adjectives.
  3. Meetings are the unit of event ROI. For a B2B firm selling six-figure engagements, badge scans are noise. Book meetings before you fly; the booth is a stage, the calendar is the scoreboard.
  4. Small and curated beats big and loud on cost per relationship. Dinners, workshops, and focused demos are INTO's default modes. Big-show presence is justified when ICP density and access pass the scorecard — and often as attend-and-hunt rather than a booth.
  5. The follow-up is half the event. Budget people and days for T+0→T+21 like you budget the venue. An event with no named follow-up owner before kickoff is not committed.
  6. Everyone travels with a number. Every attendee has a quota and a job. No passengers, no "showing face".
  7. Every event improves the template. Instances are copies; learnings flow back into this pack via the post-event report. The second edition of anything should be cheaper and sharper than the first.
  8. A client saying it beats us saying it. Where a client will describe the work, INTO does not describe it — and is never asked to sell on our behalf. This decides who takes the microphone, kills the capability slide, and sets what a guest may be asked for. See 13 Client-voiced sessions.

The chapters

Twelve chapters, in lifecycle order

Doctrine lives here; the working files for a single event are the event pack, instantiated per event in the ops repo.

01Strategy and event selection
Is this room worth money?scouted → evaluated02Objectives, goals, and jobs
What must it produce; who does whatevaluated → committed03Budget and ROI
Is it a good investment?evaluated → committed04Formats and the ROI menu
Which format fits the objective?any stage05Logistics, booking, and travel
Book, contract, ship, flycommitted → planned06Team onboarding
Brief the teamcommitted → planned07Audience comms
Tell clients + prospects; fill calendarscommitted → planned08Social amplification
Squeeze the content valueplanned → live → after09Lead capture and engagement
Engage + capture properlylive10Follow-up and conversion
Convertfollow-up11Post-event and measurement
Measure, learn, decidedebriefed → closed12Workshops and evening events
Run dinners + workshops wellowned formats13Client-voiced sessions
Should clients be on this stage, and howevaluated → live

Read once, apply always

INTO-specific constraints

  • BU routing. Consulting is the active growth BU — exec-audience events, AI/product conferences, owned dinners and workshops feeding Path A / Path B. Hospitality is Active (BU reconciled 2026-08-24): event collateral is a live surface at the Help-Center claim baseline, and event commitments are permitted. The boundary is the enumerated gated-claim list (service coverage / 24-7, performance, pricing, roadmap, partner status, Hostaway availability, customer proof, revenue lift, staffing replacement, long-term direction), not a blanket hold — run ./scripts/check-claims.sh <draft> --bu hospitality on every artefact. Paid acquisition stays frozen and new public campaigns need CMO + Jay. Hospitality-specific doctrine, gates and countdown: knowledge/hospitality/.
  • Escalations (TEAM.md §6). Spend over the campaign envelope, client-named content, and launch-adjacent events go to Jay. When in doubt, escalate.
  • Approval classes (SOP §8). Scorecards, budgets, briefs: Class A/B internal. Anything sent or shown externally — invites, sequences, posts, signage copy: Class B minimum with Editor pass and human gate. Spend commitments: Class C.
  • Language. CEF v2.0 terms for Consulting (Path A / Path B / Phase 1 / Phase 2, two-week sprints, production-ready MVP). Brand forbidden patterns apply at events too — spoken and printed: no client names without approval, no "chatbot", no hype-cliché claims, no competitor talk.
  • Market language (Québec). For any event held in Québec, the operating assumption is French-first, not French-also: the stage, the print, the giveaway, the kiosk copy, the pre-event sequences and the follow-up all originate in French, with English as an internal working copy or a short-run secondary. Translation is not transliteration — the FR version is the artefact and it gets the Editor pass, which means the Copywriter brief has to be written for FR from the start rather than retrofitted. Two consequences worth planning for: FR copy needs a real reviewer in the loop (budget the pass, do not assume it), and the brand's forbidden patterns need their FR equivalents settled once rather than argued per artefact — « révolutionnaire », « propulsé par l'IA », « 10x », and "chatbot" in any language. First applied at ev-2026-11-le-salon.
  • Confidentiality. Guest lists, speaker lists pre-announcement, and green-room knowledge are embargoed by default (role SKILL.md).

Evidence

Where the numbers come from

Statistics in these chapters carry citations in research foundations — the thought leaders, annual reports, and benchmarks the playbook draws on, with vendor-published figures labelled as ceilings rather than planning numbers. Anything uncited is INTO operating doctrine, not an external claim.