Gianna’s Gem: Stop Running Events. Start Building A Portfolio That Moves The Needle.

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Hi there,

If you're reading this in Q4, you're in the perfect position to get ahead of the curve. While most event teams are scrambling to close out this year's calendar and reactively filling next year's dates, the truly strategic organizations are using this window to step back and build an intentional portfolio for the year ahead. 

This is exactly why Q4 is my favorite time to work with clients—there's still time to influence budgets, challenge assumptions, and architect a portfolio that's tied to business priorities before you're locked into legacy commitments and resourcing pressures. The difference between organizations that plan their portfolios in Q4 versus those that piece them together in Q1? About six months of strategic advantage, clearer ROI stories, better sponsorship opportunities and pricing, and the confidence that comes from knowing every event on your calendar has a defensible reason for existing. Let's talk about why that matters and how to make it happen


The Business of Events vs. The Events Business: Why Strategic Portfolio Planning Is Your Competitive Edge

Here's something that I’m thinking a lot about lately: the difference between just running events and strategically deploying a portfolio of experiences that moves the business needle. After years of leading events at Google, Airtable, AWS, and now consulting with AI, VC and tech companies of all sizes, I've seen too many organizations treat their event calendar like a random collection of activities rather than what it should be—an integrated, purposeful channel designed to guide audiences through every stage of their relationship with your brand.

Let me tell you why this matters more than ever, and how to get it right.

The Fundamental Shift: Speaking Business Language, Not Just Event Language

Most event teams are stuck in what I call "the events business"—focused on logistics, budgets, task lists, and execution. Yes, those things matter. But they're table stakes. The transformational leap happens when you shift to "the business of events," where strategy leads, outcomes drive decisions, and every single experience is purposefully designed to achieve specific business results.

This isn't semantic wordplay. It's the difference between being seen as a cost center and being recognized as a revenue and relationship driver. When you speak in business language—pipeline acceleration, customer lifetime value, market penetration, brand equity—now you’re driving real outcomes for your company, not just executing someone else's vision. I’ll never forget at my very first agency role, my CEO, Dave Mana, told me “Never be an order taker”. 22 years later, I have never forgotten that and help my clients and agencies also think more strategically rather than tactically.

Your Event Portfolio Is Not Just A Calendar—It's An Integrated Ecosystem

Let’s clear up a misconception: An event portfolio isn't a calendar of things happening. It's an integrated series of events, specifically selected and engineered to motivate audiences to act at each stage of their relationship with your company.

Think about that. Every event should have a strategic reason for existing based on where your audience is in their journey with you. The customer journey has fundamentally changed, and we're now responsible for the entire lifecycle—pre-sale and post-sale, acquisition through expansion, awareness through advocacy.

Your flagship customer conference? It's phenomenal for deepening relationships with existing customers, building community, and driving adoption. But it's actually one of the least effective ways to reach new prospects. That reality should fundamentally shape how you allocate resources, when you plan hosted conferences during your sales cycle and the split between your brand and business goals and how you’ll achieve them with each type of events.

Regional roadshows? They're your secret weapon for prospect acquisition. Go to where your customers and prospects are instead of expecting them to travel to you.

Third-party industry conferences? Fish where the big fish are. They’re powerful for brand awareness, thought leadership, meeting new customers and nurturing your executive prospects and also  reassuring existing customers that you're still relevant in the market. Plus, there’s an opportunity cost of NOT showing up to these when your competitors are there in a big way.

The Portfolio Planning Process: Three Strategic Steps

After conducting countless portfolio assessments with different size organizations, I've refined this into a systematic approach that actually works. To distill it down into a high level overview:

Step 1: Current State Assessment—Know Where You Stand and What Else is Happening in the World

This is where brutal honesty meets strategic opportunity. You need two critical inputs:

The Macro Environment: What are the industry trends? What are competitors doing with their event strategies—where are they exhibiting and at what level? What's their hosted event approach? What geographical and event marketing trends are shaping the landscape?

The Internal Assessment: Your current event strategy, goals, and actual results. The reality of your portfolio by event type and customer journey stage. Your spend distribution between owned and third-party events, and within sponsorships, your ratio of booth investment to activation investment.

The intersection point between these two assessments is where your event strategy should be built. Complete an honest portfolio assessment for your current mix. Are you too heavily invested in one area? How does your current distribution compare to your overall marketing objectives?

This moment of clarity is gold. I've watched organizations realize they're spending 70% of their budget on customer-focused events while their biggest business challenge is new logo acquisition. That's a strategic misalignment that no amount of execution excellence can overcome.

Step 2: Develop Clear Portfolio Objectives—Connect Events To Business Strategy

This is where you get rigorous about prioritization and allocation. The key question isn't "What events should we do?" It's "Given our business priorities, where should we concentrate our investment?"

Pick your priorities. Choose two primary dimensions from: Product, Objective, Industry, Audience Type, Geography, or Department. You cannot be all things to all people. The companies that try to evenly distribute their event investment across all dimensions end up creating mediocre impact everywhere instead of market-moving momentum somewhere specific.

Ask yourself the hard questions (or have someone like me guide you through them):

  • What's the right balance of objectives? (Awareness vs. lead generation vs. pipeline acceleration vs. customer adoption vs. brand awareness, vs. loyalty and advocacy)

  • Who are our priority audiences?

  • What are our priority industries and geographies?

  • Which press and/or analysts matter most? Which partners and competitors?

  • Which products or solutions are most important right now?

  • What about pure brand plays?

  • What other marketing campaigns are we planning for the year that events can feed into?

Once you have clarity on prioritization, establish your recommended distribution. I typically see effective portfolios allocating investment between owned and third-party events based on their acquisition vs. retention goals, then layering in spend by marketing objective to ensure balance. 

Gianna’s Gem: A general rule of thumb is that earlier stage companies typically spend 60% of their budget on third party hosted events and 40% on owned events, whereas more mature companies switch to 60% budget spend on owned events vs. 40% spend on third party events.

Step 3: Select Appropriate Events—Format Matters More Than You Think

Now comes the tactical execution of your strategy. Three critical steps here:

Select the correct event formats based on what you're trying to achieve. Roadshows for prospect acquisition. Customer conferences for community building and expansion. Third-party conferences for awareness and ecosystem alignment. Digital events or field marketing training days for scalable education.

Invest time and budget in activating accordingly. A strategic portfolio with poor execution is just an expensive plan. Your activation approach should be as thoughtfully designed as your strategy.

Establish consistent evaluation criteria so you're comparing events against objective standards rather than gut feelings or political pressure. Every event should be measured against the same framework aligned to your portfolio objectives. 

Gianna’s Gem: There is NO BAD DATA, so no matter what, measure what happens at your events and you will walk away learning something - marketing gold!

Why This Matters: The Value Proposition of Strategic Portfolio Planning

When you approach your event program as a strategic portfolio rather than a collection of activities, everything changes:

  • Your investment decisions become defensible because they're tied to business priorities

  • Your team can communicate impact in language executives actually care about

  • You can identify gaps and redundancies that are draining resources

  • You create a framework for saying no to events that don't serve your strategy

  • You shift from reactive to proactive, from tactical to strategic, from cost center to growth driver

The organizations I work with that embrace portfolio planning don't just run better events—they fundamentally transform how their companies view and value the event function. They earn seats at the strategy table because they speak strategy language and deliver measurable business outcomes.

The Bottom Line: Strategy + Execution = Sustainable Event Excellence

Strategic portfolio planning isn't about making your event calendar more complex. It's about making it more intentional and repeatable. It's about having the clarity and conviction to invest heavily in the experiences that will genuinely move your business forward, and the discipline to divest from those that won't and optimize along the way based on what you learn.

This is the work that separates good event programs from truly exceptional ones. This is how you build sustainable excellence rather than scrambling event to event, quarter to quarter, wondering if your events are really achieving the results you desire and are worth the investment.

Some strategies are worth the investment in getting right. This is one of them.

What I'm Loving This Week: And for all my favorite vendors, partners and products, visit: https://www.giannagaudini.com/gianna-recommends

The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey

I love playing tennis… but that’s not what drew me to this book. The Inner Game of Tennis revolutionized my understanding of performance under pressure, and it's become one of the most influential books in my approach to both events and strategic planning. Gallwey's central insight is that your biggest opponent isn't external—it's the interference you create in your own mind.

He introduces the concept of Self 1 (the conscious, telling self) and Self 2 (the unconscious, doing self). Self 1 is the voice that judges, criticizes, tries to control every detail, and creates performance anxiety. Self 2 is your natural ability, trained reflexes, and intuitive capacity to execute at a high level when you get out of your own way.

Why I loved it: This framework completely transformed how I approach high-stakes planning and execution. The best event strategists I know have learned to quiet Self 1's anxiety and trust their trained judgment. They've done the work (the portfolio assessment, the stakeholder interviews, the data analysis), and then they trust themselves to synthesize that into clear strategic direction without overthinking it into mediocrity.

They know that peak performance comes from relaxed concentration rather than tight control. That's the mindset shift that allows you to present bold portfolio recommendations to executives without hedging, to make tough prioritization calls and to execute with conviction.

For anyone managing complex strategic initiatives, this book offers a mental framework that reduces interference and amplifies your natural strategic capability. It's taught me that confidence isn't the absence of doubt; it's the ability to act decisively despite it. Read it. Trust yourself. Execute brilliantly.

Ready to assess your current portfolio and build a strategic roadmap that connects your events to business impact? Let's discuss how portfolio planning can transform your program from successful to indispensable.

Book me here 👉 intro.co/giannagaudini

Let me guide your team 👉https://www.giannagaudini.com/learn-from-me

Gianna Gaudini is an event strategist, advisor, and author of the Amazon bestselling book "The Art of Event Planning." She's held leadership roles at Google, AWS, SoftBank Vision Fund, and Airtable, creating unforgettable experiences that drive business results.