How events enable your business to grow

Do you review where your customers have come from? What are your top three ways of gaining customers? I suspect meeting people face to face would be one of them. This article will explore how events enable your business to grow.

You can start business relationships with email outreach or social connection, but face-to-face events are one of the strongest ways to turn those relationships into growth. Email, blog posts, social strategies and carefully built personas all do good work. You will get noticed and they help you to keep in touch with potential clients. What they can’t do is put two people in the same room.

Being in the room matters because business growth runs on relationships. Relationships are everything! They are built from signals that a screen just can’t pick up. You probably know all of these, but it’s worth reminding ourselves how events enable your business to grow by relationship building.

6 things meeting someone IRL gives you that can’t be replicated!

1. Body language: helps you read the whole person, not just what they are saying

When you meet in person, you pick up subtle cues like posture, eye contact, and the moment someone leans in. I met someone at an event site visit for the first time last week. I’d hugged her colleagues (who I knew and had worked with for years), so I offered my hand for a handshake, and she just leaned straight in for the hug! Emails show what you chose to write, maybe after some careful editing. Sales personas (though useful) are still an assumption about how a type of person behaves, not solid evidence about the person standing in front of you.

Face to face, you can see whether an idea landed and adjust mid-sentence if you need to because you can read the body language. It works both ways though – the people in the room read you too: how confident you are, whether you listen, and if you mean it. Video calls help, but an event gives signals that a call can’t, such as how someone treats their colleagues and who they introduce you to.

2. Laughter: shared humour builds a bond

Laughing together is one of the quickest ways to build connection. It’s natural and creates a bond and often a story. When we try to be funny in emails it can be misunderstood, on social it’s hit and miss. Events create laughter naturally: conversation, story-telling and a speaker putting the audience at ease with a funny anecdote. Small unplanned event moments can bind people together. Research from Northwestern University on conferences points the same way. Across more than 12,000 pairs of attendees, informal interaction played a bigger role in forming new collaborations at in-person events than at virtual ones.

3. Speed: in person, relationships move faster

A good conversation can do in twenty minutes what an email thread might take weeks to achieve. Questions get answered as they arise, objections surface straight away and introductions happen on the spot. The same exchange by email can stretch across days of replies, and a nurture sequence across months. You can get there much quicker with in-person events. The room still matters. You can read why here. Events quicken the first step. Instead of cold outreach and then waiting, you can meet dozens of relevant people in a day. The Northwestern study found that in-person conferences helped attendees get to know a larger share of the other people there than virtual ones did. Many sales teams also report shorter sales cycles when face-to-face meetings are part of the process, because decisions and next steps are agreed in the room rather than passed along a chain of messages.

4. Trust: people commit to people they have actually met

Trust is the foundation of any business relationship, and it forms faster in person. On my LinkedIn profile I generally connect with people I’ve met. I know this is sometimes frustrating for people, but I’m building a network of people that I’ve connected with in some way. Meeting someone changes what the connection means. The research backs this up. An interview-based study of industrial sales professionals found that in-person contact at trade shows was important for building initial trust, and that personal meetings were linked to higher bid success. Executives say it too: in an IHG global survey, 81% said face-to-face meetings are better for building long-term trust. Trust also carries forward from that first meeting. Every email that follows, and every call you jump on, lands differently, because there is a real person behind the message.

5. Likeability: people buy from people they like

Likeability rarely appears in a business case, yet it shapes who gets the call back. People like to buy from people they like. This connects back to us being hard-wired for connection. Likeability is built from small things: warmth, attentiveness, the connection you made over the type of dog you both have.

An email can be polite, but can it charm you? A blog post shows expertise, not what you’re like to spend an hour with (apart from this one obviously!) Events give people the chance to find out, and give you the chance to be generous: introducing two contacts at an event is priceless, listening properly, remembering a name. SO important!

It works both ways. A recommendation from someone who likes and trusts you? Absolute gold!

6. Brand reputation and credibility: showing up makes your brand real

A brand is what people believe about you, and turning up in person is evidence for those beliefs. Exhibiting, speaking or simply attending signals that you’re invested in your market, and it lets people judge the humans behind the logo.

Credibility is also borrowed. At an event you’re seen alongside peers, introduced by mutual contacts and overheard knowing your subject. Those moments confirm what your website and social channels claim. B2B marketers seem to agree: in one Sagefrog survey, more of them pointed to trade shows and events for return on investment (36%) than to online marketing (33%), email (21%) or PR (20%).

Digital channels then amplify the effect. A photo, a talk clip or a post-event follow-up carries more weight when it comes from something real that happened.

Make events work alongside your digital strategy

Face-to-face events don’t replace digital marketing; they give it a human face. The evidence is strongest for relationships: building trust, opening doors and speeding up introductions. It is less clear that events beat every other channel on cost, so measure your own results.

To get the most from them: