I'm on a plane heading to Miami for our user conference, Inspire. Laptop open, listening to my poppin’ Spotify playlist, and sippin’ on a Celcius. It’s more caffeiene than I need, but why not, right? Tomorrow, Inspire kicks off... over a thousand customers, partners, prospects, analysts, and one very caffeinated CMO. It’s our Super Bowl and we are about to find out if a year of budget decisions were the right ones.

Because, the only thing that makes me (or anyone in marketing) relevant is the positive experience an individual has with our brand. 

And what better way to drive it home than a massive event? 

As many of you would expect, Inspire is one of the larger spends we have over the year. Every decision I've made over the last twelve months about brand, spend, taste, story... it all gets judged in public this week. Was the rebrand worth it? Does the stage feel like Docebo or does it feel like every other B2B conference in a Miami ballroom? Will the customer stories land? Did we bet on the right speakers? The right hotel? The right food? (And yes, our team thinks about food. Food is super important). 

So it felt right to anchor this next piece in the Don't Get Fired series around Inspire. A year ago in Entry 28, I wrote that our customer conference was a strategic asset, not just an event. This week I find out if I took my own advice.

I mean, I think I did? We shall see. 

If you are new here, Budget & Brand is the third category in a series of 20 lessons across 15 years of running marketing at software companies. Built it for the first class of Pavilion's CMO School, where I am Dean this year. Revenue & Pipeline first. Team & Culture second. Budget & Brand tonight.

Here’s to the sleepless nights that deliver the best experiences, 

♥️ kyle

Don’t Get Fired: Events & Protecting Brand Budget

Look around any user conference. The stage, the booth, the swag, the band, the food, the post-event content plan. Every single one of those is a bet by the marketing leadership team.

And every bet has a moment attached to it. The one where you're sitting across from your CFO. Or your CEO. Or your board. They're looking at a line item... the sponsorship, the rebrand, the podcast, the agency retainer, the customer dinner.

The question is always some version of: "Why is this worth it?"

If you can't answer that in plain English, with a line to revenue you can draw in ten seconds or less... you are one bad quarter away from losing that budget. And possibly your job.

That's what makes Budget & Brand the most dangerous category in the Don't Get Fired series.

Revenue & Pipeline has numbers. Team & Culture has people you hired. Those are categories where the work is visible. Budget & Brand is where you make invisible bets on behalf of a business, and then defend those bets.

Most CMOs don't get fired for spending too much. They get fired for not being able to defend what they spent. (Small but important difference.)

So, on the eve of our Super Bowl, I thought what better way to celebrate than three lessons. Earned over 15 years of making bets... some wildly right, some painfully wrong.

Lesson 1: Treat your biggest brand moments like a product launch.

Most CMOs get fired because they let their biggest brand moments just... happen.

They show up. They execute. They take the team photo. They move on to next quarter. I mean, come on. First off, that’s boring as well. Secondly, I’d rather die than be a “fly-in” executive who is task master and corporate ladder climbing aficionado. 

A year ago, before Inspire 2025 and my first week at Docebo, I wrote this: "Marketers should treat events like product launches. Build pre-launch hype, overdeliver in the moment, and turn the outcomes into content, case studies, and campaigns for the next six months." I believed it then. I believe it more now. And this year we are doubling down.

A user conference, or any event with customers and prospects, is a ton of work compressed into a small period of time. The team starts planning immediately after the current event finishes. We build the agenda, recruit customers, draft/re-draft/re-re-draft the keynote, choose the stage set up, and argue about the color of the booth and signage. By the time I am on a plane from Indianapolis to Miami, probably 95% of the work is already done.

If you treat that as "a conference" you have already lost. You will execute for three days and then move on. That is wasting the moment and wasting the money.

If you treat it as a launch, you get six months of value… maybe even more! Case study footage. Customer video. Analyst quotes for the next deck. Keynote clips that become webinars that become blog series that become tools for the revenue team.

The leaders (CMO, VPs, SVPs) I have see get fired over brand moments didn't overspend. They didn’t think beyond the event. They signed the contracts, spent the money, hit the stage, took the photo with the team, and moved on. Meanwhile the board is looking at the line item asking, "Where's the return?"

Treat every big brand moment like a product launch. Pre-launch. In-moment. Post-launch content engine. That's how you defend the spend before anyone has to ask.

Lesson 2: Yes, Taste costs money and is an important line item.

At some point every CFO is going to ask you to cut the band, the lighting package, the food upgrade, the photographer, the customer dinner, the sweatshirts, the stage, the second screen, the keynote speaker.

And I get some of it… on paper it all looks like juicy fat you can trim. Delicious budget to take back to the bottom line. (It's not. But I get why it looks like it.)

Here's the thing about taste. It is invisible to anyone who doesn't have it. And it is deafening to the people who do.

Your customers walk into your event and they feel something in the first sixty seconds. It’s the same reason B2C brands spend an ungodly amount of money on the “product experience.” They need to feel like you care. 

And honestly, I could give two-shits about the type of industry you are in. It doesn’t matter if you sell software or digging equipment, people still care about the experience,. 

They do not know they are feeling it. But they are. And that feeling is your brand.

Because your brand is a collection of perceptions, and it’s your job to try and influence those perceptions.  

I have been to B2B events that felt like a tech conference in 2014. The fluorescent hotel ballroom, the sad box lunch, the generic swag, the stock music, the speaker intro that sounded like a CVS receipt. Stuffy as hell.

The CFO (well some) doesn't care about lighting. Great. That is why you are the CMO. Your job is to fight for the line items that look optional and aren't. 

That is where brand gets built. Not in the keynote slide. In the details around it.

Taste costs money. And taste is the only thing a competitor cannot copy.

Lesson 3: Brand vs. Demand. It’s a fake fight.

If I had a dollar for every board meeting where someone asked, "Is this brand spend or demand spend?" I could fund Inspire out of pocket. 

It is the dumbest argument in marketing because your event DRIVES pipeline. It drives coverage. It drives retention & expansion. It solidifies, and further strengthens your culture. It builds relationships that drive referrals. The content six-months after will continue to drive new PIPELINE. 

Is that brand? Is that demand? Hell yes.

The marketing teams that continually win in B2B are the ones that stop questioning or pretending that they are two different budget lines. 

I have watched this play out a few companies I have worked at and consulted with. The debate shows up in different forms. "Should we invest in the podcast or in paid?" "Is the sponsorship brand or pipeline?" "Is the rebrand going to drive bookings?"

Wrong question. Every time.

The right question is: "Do our customers believe we are the best at what we do? And is that belief showing up in pipeline velocity, win rates, deal size, and retention?"

If yes, keep spending. If not, figure out where the real gap is and plug the damn hole. Maybe you do not have enough brand. Maybe you have plenty of brand value and a broken demand engine. Maybe you have both and your product story is weak. Maybe your TAM is too small. But do not let the brand-vs-demand argument become the whole conversation. It is a distraction from the actual work.

You HAVE to learn who to articulate how the brand spend is going to ultimately show up in the pipeline number. If you cannot draw the line from brand investment to revenue outcome, that is the real fireable offense. 

Here are some ideas of how to do it.

1. Track pipeline from every event attendee over 12 months. You should be tracking every account and the pipeline contribution over the next year, that’s the story.

2. Tag deals by brand exposure before the first sales call. Did the buyer listen to the podcast? Attend an event? Follow you on LinkedIn for six months? Download a report? Mult-touch attribution, baby! You need to tag it in your favorite CRM. Then compare win rates and sales cycle length against cold deals. The gap between those two numbers is your brand's demand contribution. 

4. Follow the expansion math. Customers who attend your events, engage with your content, join your community... they expand at a higher rate and churn at a lower one. Nobody on a board or leadership team argues with retention numbers.

If you are spending brand money and not tracking the downstream pipeline, retention, and expansion signals... you are asking the CFO to trust your gut. And that trust evaporates the second things get bumpy.

I will know by Tuesday night (after our keynote and press) if we got this year right. Next week: the post-mortem. What worked. What didn't. What I would burn down and rebuild.

I still don't know if we nailed Inspire. Ask me in four days. But I know what we bet on. And I know why.