Five takeaways from EPN’s November meetup to help you rethink repeat events, make the case for resources, and get planning moving.
Sales wants another dinner. A new conference lands in your inbox. Last year’s sponsorship is up for renewal. Suddenly, your 2027 calendar is filling up before you’ve decided what belongs on it.
Sound familiar?
At EPN’s November meetup, Annual Planning Without the Panic: How Event Pros Are Building Smarter Plans for 2027, Lisa Gregory and the community unpacked the real decisions behind a sustainable event plan: what to keep, what to rethink, and what your team can realistically deliver.
Lisa’s reminder set the tone: “The calendar is the output, it’s not the starting point.”
Here are five takeaways worth bringing into your next planning conversation.
1. Give Every Event A Job
Brand awareness, pipeline acceleration, customer engagement – each is a valid reason to invest in an event. The trouble starts when teams expect a single program to accomplish all three.
Ricky Salguero emphasized agreeing on expectations upfront. If you’re investing in visibility, name that goal before the event, then evaluate it accordingly. Getting leadership, sales, and marketing aligned on the true objective makes the decisions that follow much easier.
2. Make The Repeat Events Earn Their Spot
“We did it last year” can keep a calendar full for a long time.
Ricky shared that his team was reviewing two years of performance to decide what should come off the list before adding more. Look beyond lead counts: did you reach the right people, and what happened after those conversations?
Then ask the bigger question: If you were building the plan from scratch around today’s business goals, would you choose the same events?
3. Keep The Opportunity. Rethink The Approach.
A conference can be valuable without requiring the exact same booth footprint, swag order, and sponsorship package every year.
Lisa encouraged the group to consider where that investment could work harder: partner activities, executive briefings, or smaller gatherings. In the chat, Kayla Tollerson shared that partner events and after-hours activities were generating engagement even when her team wasn’t sponsoring the main conference floor.
Before renewing, give yourself permission to redesign.
4. Put Follow-Up On The Planning Agenda
Kayla raised a familiar frustration: getting consistent BDR follow-up beyond the first week. Traci Myers highlighted another – messaging arriving at the last minute, with everyone expected to know it immediately.
Both deserve attention while the plan is being built:
Who owns outreach after the first week?
When will messaging be locked and trained?
Does sales have the bandwidth to follow through on what event marketing brings in?
Those answers belong alongside the venue, budget, and event date.
5. Bring Hard Numbers To The “One More Event” Conversation
An extra event comes with staffing, travel, preparation, and follow-up. Delayed decisions can add rush charges or limit your options, too.
Ricky’s closing commitment was to bring hard data into those discussions: the budget available, the workload already committed, and the support an additional request would require.
Make the trade-offs visible so leadership can make a clear decision – or fund the resources needed to execute.
Give Your Plan A Next Step
You don’t need to resolve every 2027 unknown to make progress. Lisa closed by asking attendees to schedule one action today: request missing data, meet with a stakeholder, or move an overdue decision forward.
Need a starting point? The EPN 2027 Annual Planning Workbook + AI Prompts includes exercises to review your portfolio, prepare stakeholder conversations, and explore lean, expected, and growth budget scenarios. →Make a copy of the workbook
Thank you to everyone who shared their planning challenges and ideas! 🦄✨
Join the conversation in the free EPN Community
Save the dates for the EPN Community’s upcoming events:
Leadership Summit on January 28, 2027
Annual Conference on February 18, 2027.
