Last month Collingwood’s Adam Shaw wrote in TSNN about how cooling data valuations are actually strengthening the investment case for events businesses. His central argument was that as generic information becomes easier for AI to access and summarise, proprietary data (the kind that is hard to replicate and deeply embedded in professional relationships) becomes more valuable, not less. Events, he argued, are one of the richest sources of exactly that kind of data.
While correct, there’s a problem that sits directly underneath this argument, and it’s one that most hybrid subscription / data and events businesses have not yet confronted: they are generating this extraordinarily valuable proprietary data every time they run an event, and then largely leaving it unused.
The data doesn’t disappear. Rather, it sits in a CRM, an event management platform, or a registration system, but rarely makes it into the weekly commercial decisions of the marketing and sales functions that could act on it. That gap, between data collected and data operationalised, is where growth stalls and where value is being left on the table.
What events data actually tells you
Consider what a well-run B2B event generates in terms of commercial intelligence. Every registration is a statement of intent. Someone in a specific role at a specific organisation has decided this topic matters enough to give up their time. Every session attended is a signal about where their priorities sit. Every roundtable conversation, every networking interaction, every exhibition stand visit is a data point about where buying interest is forming and who is in the decision-making process.
When a delegate attends a session on procurement transformation 3 years running and then shows up at your digital subscription platform the following month, that isn’t a coincidence. It’s a buying signal. When a cluster of attendees from the same organisation start appearing across your events portfolio over a 12-month period, that organisation’s buying committee is expanding. When attendance from a particular sector spikes at a specific event, that sector is moving.
Every session attended, every roundtable joined, every stand visited is a data point about where buyer intent is forming. Most businesses collect it. Almost none of them use it to sell data.
None of this intelligence appears on the open web. It cannot be scraped, summarised, or replicated by an AI tool. It exists only because your community showed up and it’s yours.
This is precisely the asset that Adam Shaw’s piece identified as increasingly valuable to investors and acquirers: proprietary, first-party engagement data embedded in real professional relationships. The question is not whether you have it. The question is whether you are using it.
The operationalisation gap
Most hybrid businesses treat their events data as a retrospective record rather than a forward-looking commercial tool. After an event, the data flows into a CRM or databas; a post-event report gets written; attendance figures are noted; the top-attended sessions are flagged for content repurposing. The next event cycle begins and the data is used in the hopes of capturing that person at yet another event. After all, the event team has their own P&L and financial targets.
What almost never happens is this: the engagement signals from the event being connected, in real time, to the sales and marketing decisions of the following week. Which accounts showed accelerating engagement across the event programme? Which organisations sent multiple delegates to sessions on a specific topic signalling that topic is now on their strategic agenda? Which attendees consumed both the live event content and the associated digital content in the weeks that followed, indicating a buyer moving from awareness toward active consideration?
These questions are answerable with the data most hybrid businesses already hold. Answering them requires connecting events data to subscription data, to digital engagement data, and to sales pipeline data and then reviewing that connected picture frequently enough to act on it. Weekly, not quarterly.
The businesses that do this, that treat their events not as standalone revenue moments, but as the richest data input into a continuous commercial intelligence system, operate at a fundamentally different level of commercial efficiency than those that do not. They know which accounts are moving before their sales teams have made a single call. They know which content is accelerating deal velocity. They know which event formats are generating the highest-quality pipeline, not just the highest attendance.
Why this matters more now
The context Adam Shaw set out makes the urgency of this clearer. As AI compresses the value of generic information, the businesses that will command premium valuations, and premium growth rates, are those with data assets that are genuinely defensible. First-party, consent-based, relationship-embedded engagement data is about as defensible as it gets.
Defensible data assets only translate into enterprise value if they are being actively used to drive commercial outcomes. An investor or acquirer looking at a hybrid events and subscription business is not simply asking “do you have data?” They are asking “what does your data enable you to do that a competitor without that data cannot?”
If the honest answer is “we produce a good post-event report and we know which sessions were popular,” that is not a defensible data asset. That is a filing cabinet.
If the answer is “our events data feeds directly into our account prioritisation, our subscription renewal outreach, our content strategy, and our pipeline forecasting reviewed weekly, acted on within days,” that is a genuine competitive moat. It commands a very different valuation conversation.
Where the connections are broken
For C-suite leaders of hybrid businesses, the path from ‘data collected’ to ‘data operationalised’ typically requires closing three connections that are currently broken: events data to subscription data, engagement data to sales pipeline, and historical event data to forward planning. Most businesses have all the raw material for each of these. What they lack is the connected operating picture that turns signals into commercial action. Closing those gaps is where the step-change in growth and enterprise value sits.
The elephant in the room: ‘Our contacts will be over-solicited’
There is an argument that surfaces in almost every hybrid business the moment someone proposes connecting events data to marketing and sales activity. Events teams make it. Editorial teams make it. It deserves a direct response rather than a polite sidestep.
The argument goes like this: our event delegates have a trusted relationship with us. They come back year after year. They are not leads to be worked: they are community members to be respected. If we hand their data to marketing or sales, they will be bombarded with irrelevant messages, the relationship will be damaged, and we will lose the thing that makes our events valuable in the first place.
Both concerns are legitimate. And both are being used to protect the wrong thing.
The events team is right that bad, untargeted marketing will damage relationships. They are wrong that the solution is keeping the data siloed. Better data use means more relevant contact, not more frequent contact.
The over-solicitation risk is real, but it is a symptom of poor data use, not of data use itself. When the same contact appears simultaneously in the events database, the subscription CRM, the sales pipeline, and the marketing automation platform, with no unified view of who they are or what they have already received, they will get hit from multiple directions by teams who have no idea what the others are doing. Events teams have seen this happen and they are not wrong to be alarmed by it.
But the solution to that problem is not siloing the data. It is using the data better. A delegate who attended three sessions on supply chain resilience and then receives a carefully targeted invitation to a senior roundtable on exactly that topic is not being over-solicited: they are being served. The problem was never contact frequency, but was contact irrelevance. The richer the events data feeding into that contact decision, the more relevant and the less frequent the contact needs to be.
The answer to the over-solicitation concern, then, is not to keep the data locked inside events teams and editorial departments. It is to use that data as the intelligence layer that makes every subsequent commercial contact smarter, more targeted, and less frequent. Done well, operationalising events data does not increase the volume of contact your community receives. It reduces it while making each contact more likely to land.
The gold mine is real. The question is whether you are mining it.
Are you getting full commercial value from your events data?
Most hybrid businesses already have the data. What they lack is the operating discipline and commercial framework to turn that data into faster decisions, a stronger pipeline, and demonstrable enterprise value.
A structured marketing assessment identifies exactly where your organisation sits – which data connections are missing, where the most significant commercial opportunities lie, and what a practical path to closing those gaps looks like across your events, subscription, and data businesses.
Collingwood adviser Michelle McCann provides this assessment for scaling hybrid B2B businesses. With more than 25 years as a strategic marketing executive across PE-backed companies, start-ups, and corporates, Michelle works with leadership teams to diagnose where commercial marketing transformation will have the most direct impact on growth and enterprise value.
