from one show a year to six

For two years the company exhibited at one show: Dreamforce, the largest event in the Salesforce calendar. Then we decided events were a serious channel for demand generation, and in 2025 went to six.

Five regional shows added on top of Dreamforce, not instead of it, inside a single year. All of it designed alongside everything else the marketing team had running, which is the constraint that shaped the approach.

Designed every piece the shows needed. Booth graphics, backdrops, signage, giveaways, and the iPad presentation the team pitched from. At Dreamforce the structure itself came fixed, so everything applied to it and everything standing around it was mine. In 2023 and 2024 that meant a customized prize spinner. In 2025 it was a Plinko board, built to pull people into the booth with an on-theme game before anyone had to pitch them anything.

Reused where reuse made sense. The smaller regional shows could share graphics and digital assets (iPad and Monitor presentations) between them, which is what made running that many in a single year survivable.

Designed the promotional products. Giveaways, printed pieces, and the shirts the team wore on the floor. The test for a giveaway is whether it survives the flight home, so the job is making something worth keeping rather than just something with a logo on it.

Designed the pitch to be non-linear. The team worked the booth from an interactive presentation I designed in Google Slides, chaptered by product with navigation buttons instead of a running order. A rep could open it straight to whatever a prospect had just asked about and move between sections mid-conversation. Screenshots, short animations, and text, built for a conversation rather than a talk.

Took the booth to people who weren't there. A post before each show announcing where to find us, videos of the team and the booth while it ran, and a wrap-up afterward on the people we'd met. The during-show videos did two jobs at once: pulling people across the floor to the booth, and showing everyone following from elsewhere exactly what they were missing.

Two years of Dreamforce is what made the sixth show survivable. By 2025 the big one was a known quantity, so the new work was figuring out which of the regional shows could share graphics and which had to be their own thing.