As digital advertising gets crowded, live events become the rare asset that builds trust and closes deals. Elon Musk said live events will be the only luxury that lasts. The speaker shares case studies from YPO summits and HubSpot conferences showing how intimate dinners and owned events generate multi-six-figure revenue that competitors can't copy.
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Elon Musk said something that changed how I think about marketing. He said that in the future, events will be the only luxury that lasts. The scarce commodity will be live events. Everything else is going to get automated, digitized, commoditized, but you can't automate breaking bread with someone. And while every marketer is fighting over the same paid ads and cold email lists, I've been generating serious pipeline from 10-person dinners all the way up to major speaking gigs. This is the most slept-on channel in marketing right now. And in 2026, it's going to be your biggest competitive advantage. Here's why. So first, let's talk about the digital-first problem. If you're digital-first, everyone's running the same playbook. Meta ads, let's go Instagram, let's go Facebook, let's do LinkedIn outreach, let's do SEO, let's do cold email, let's do content marketing. And because it's so competitive, cost per lead is up 40 to 60% in the last 2 years. And ad platforms are completely saturated. I mean, you're bidding against everyone in your space. Everyone knows that you gotta jack up the creatives. Everyone knows that you gotta play the influencer game. And we know cold email deliverability is coming down. Google's making different changes to email all the time. And people, to be frank, are numb to digital. So banner blindness is real. Inbox fatigue is real. That's not to say that digital is dying. It's not dying. But if everyone's doing the same thing, you gotta zig where people are zagging. And so the reason why events work now, the reason why Elon is saying that events are luxury and the events are gonna become more valuable in the future is that trust is built face-to-face, faster than any funnel can build it. Your competitors can copy your ads, they can funnel hack you, they can copy your funnels, they can copy your messaging. But what they can't copy is you actually doing the work and showing up in person. That's why when we look at high-ticket deals, when we talk about B2B deals where it's 7 or 8 figures plus, when we talk about even DTC deals, when we talk about high-ticket, relationship currency is what matters. It's not so much a transaction-type business. When you're looking to sell high-ticket B2B software, you've got to be able to talk to someone. Ideally, you're breaking bread with that person. And if you're able to break bread with that person, your conversion rate is a lot higher. Elon's insight here is that as everything digitizes more and more, scarcity shifts to in-person experiences. That's why the brands right now that are winning are actually showing up where their customers are. And so I'm going to share a couple examples with you why I've continually bet on events. And when I say events, I mean dinners. I'm talking about conferences. I'm talking about hosting your own conferences. I'm talking about speaking at conferences. I'm going to give you real-world examples and talk about real-world revenue that we've driven from this. The first example I'm going to give you is the YPO Global Marketing Summit. So that's a business group that I'm in. We did this event in Miami. I ended up planning this event out for about 2 years or so. And we had about 200 people that showed up. The minimum revenue is about $13 million a year in revenue to join YPO. For this event, the average revenue was about $52 million a year or so. And then we had a couple of companies doing a couple billion dollars a year. And so it was a very operator-heavy group, and everyone just wanted to get better at marketing. And the formatting for this is that we had a lot of speakers. So an example of a speaker would be like my podcast co-host Neil Patel. And we had a lot of other people that were great. Greg Eisenberg would be one, Eric Jorgensen, who runs Scribe. The format is we had a bunch of speakers, we had multiple dinners. We had dinner the first night where we had like the Cuban Adele come out and she sang for a little bit. We were like on this terrace overlooking the water. It was at this beautiful hotel. I would say that most of it was just people speaking for about 30 to 45 minutes or so. We had a lot of ample room for, for breaks and networking. All YPOers, if you're people of this caliber, everyone wants to meet with each other. They want to break bread with each other. So the reason why The reason that we do this again is that sure, you're there to learn, but the caliber of the people that you meet, eventually you end up doing business with each other. I'll also give you another example of a deal. We already had a deal that was— we had a client that was there already. That deal expanded into— we basically doubled the size of that deal. And a lot of things that we talk about, what ends up happening is people will hit me up afterwards. Even if we don't do a deal immediately, what ends up happening is you become friends with these people. I'm always, you know, we have— we still have like a WhatsApp group from people that attended that summit, and I'm still always making introductions for people. I'm still trying to be helpful. So the name of the game here is you're just trying to always be helpful and you're not looking to necessarily get anything back. Because I would just say that the quote that always sticks with me from Zig Ziglar is, as long as you help others get what they want, you're going to get everything that you want. And so in terms of what it costs and what it generated, I didn't make any money from it because me as a YPO member, I volunteered as a champion. So a lot of this stuff comes from volunteering. And I would say that this event generated, we'll just say, multiple 6 figures in revenue for YPO. Okay. And for me, it actually cost me money to do this. Okay. Even though I was the leader of the event, it was a YPO-led event, I still had to pay money to sponsor sponsor my own event. So I spent about $15,000 sponsoring my own event. Now, that being said, I would say that the relationships end up paying off. When you're looking to throw an event like this, it's going to take you at least a year of planning. So they like to be a little more conservative and do 2 years of planning. But really, the planning started, I'll say, like a year out from doing it. And one more thing to keep in mind too. So you might be thinking about, okay, like, what are the business deals I can get? So earlier I just mentioned, like, the relational capital that you're going to get is helpful because the more people you meet, they're going to introduce you to other networks. The more people you help, your network's going to continue to grow. It's going to continue to compound. Also, keep in mind, 99% of people are not ready to buy. Even the speakers that I invited. So we had Kat Cole from, from AG1. And so looking at my friend Kat Cole, who was one of the keynote speakers, and looking at everybody else, we might not do business today. We might do business in the future. We might make introductions for people. Maybe they're looking to acquire a business. Maybe they're looking to hire someone. That's how these things compound. It's not so much I want a business deal now and I want to close now, now, now, now, now. People can smell that. And so when you do events, What ends up happening is that you actually increase your surface area of luck, right? They like to call this increasing the opportunity to have serendipity. Okay, so we talked about hosting events. That's one piece. But what about speaking at events? So recently I spoke at HubSpot's Inbound. They usually have about 25,000-30,000 B2B marketers there. For HubSpot, they've always been very gracious to my podcast co-host and I, and they actually reached out to us to get a deal done in terms of speaking at their events. They didn't pay us anything. For them, they already have a lot of amazing speakers. And so that's how this went about. But how did I go about getting a speaking gig? What ends up happening is that, one, I spoke at a lot of other events internationally, and that's how I met one of the APAC HubSpot guys from a very long time ago. I've also known a couple other people who have worked at HubSpot, but also I've been creating content for a very long time in the marketing space. And so I wouldn't say I'm famous or anything, but at least I'm a semi-known entity when it comes to marketing. And my talk was more— I actually had 2 talks. One was a Marketing School Live event that I did with, with Neil and I. So he has his own talk, and then we did our Marketing School Podcast Live. I also had my own talk as well. My solo talk was mainly about how we're using MCPs, how we're using AI as it relates to marketing. I think it was a little, it was a little, it was a little tactical. Okay. And then the Marketing School one, that's where Neil and I kind of just shooting from the hip and we're just talking about the latest trends in marketing. In terms of the leads that came from it, these were all ICP fit. So ideal client profile fit for B2B software. The type of size for these deals, I would say like these budget ranges in terms of what they would probably be paying us a firm each month or so, probably anywhere from $15,000 to $30,000 or so per month. But keep in mind, these types of deals can grow really big. I'll say a handful of people who worked at other large companies, they reached out not necessarily to do business, But to build a relationship. And I'll always take those because who knows, maybe we want— we might want to work together in the future, right? So I would just encourage you to think about when you think about events or when you think about getting deals from these things, it's not just business deals. Maybe you can hire someone in the future. Maybe you can partner with someone in the future. There's a lot of different angles that you have, and it all starts with good relationships first. And I would say the long-term ROI of that talk, why it's important, and even going back to my— the YPO event that I helped with, the long-term ROI of this event is one, they give me the recordings from that talk and I post it to my podcast. I also post it to our YouTube channel as well. And so sometimes we'll post a talk like last year I spoke at a conference in Germany. That talk already has 113,000 long-form views on it on YouTube, and that's actually led to business deals for the software side of things and also for the agency side of things. Oftentimes we'll ask people, how did you hear about us? It'll be like from YouTube or it'll be like from like a talk a long time ago. Sometimes I'll speak at HubSpot, a deal won't get done for maybe a year and a half, 2 years or so, but it's someone that watched me from a year ago. Okay. When you're speaking, And there's maybe 2,000 people watching you on stage or 500 people watching you on stage or even 50 people watching you on stage. Maybe if they're, you know, very relevant for your ICP, that's going to be relevant for you. These people might reach out in the future. And then if you're constantly creating content out there, they see you and they're on your email list, they're going to come back to you, right? So you're trying to, you know, you're trying to get known by as many people as possible. And I remember when I was doing a podcast interview with Gary Vee, I was just asking him because I was just like, hey, like, how many people do you want to know? He's like, I want all 8 billion people in the world to know me. I'm going to go as wide as I can when it comes to wine TAM content. Whereas when I talk about it on Marketing School, we kind of talk more about creating content that converts, right? And so all that to say is that, look, if you're building a relationship at scale with somebody, the long-term ROI is exponential. And it's very difficult to measure this because I look at this as a form of brand marketing. So next up, let's talk about dinners. Let's say you're hosting a dinner of 8 to 10 people or so. I've done so many dinners. This is countless amount of dinners. I started probably doing this when I was age 27 or so. I just thought to myself that, look, if I want people that think like me that have similar problems as me, then I probably want to host dinners because dinners are very intimate. I've always enjoyed small intimate dinners with high caliber people where we can talk about problems, we can talk about, you know, what it is that we do, what challenge we have, what we can help with, and one thing that we're looking to get right. I would just say that the types of people— I remember when I was 27 years old, I didn't have a lot of money, but who I invited was a bunch of marketing directors and CMOs to my house. And I remember the first dinner was I only had like a half eaten bag of chips. And so there wasn't really a dinner, it was just a meetup. We go around the room introducing ourselves. We do these hot seats for 20 minutes or so where someone would introduce their problem, and then all of us would kind of jump on that person and give as much feedback as we could, or sometimes maybe do some experience shares, and that person would get a lot from that. And I still continue to do that today. When you look at the people who have compounded their networks the best, these people are doing these small events. It could be like a poker, for example, as well. So it could be 10-person dinner, 10-person poker. But the main idea here is that you are inviting high-caliber people. So And if you're offering dinner as well and you have a nice format, then you're going to be seen as the one who's a connector. And what ends up happening next is you end up getting invited to other dinners. So I'll give you an example. I hosted an AI dinner a couple of months ago, and one of my friends, Nancy, she actually ended up hosting an AI lunch with 40 founders there. You had, you know, founders for people that have companies that have sold for, you know, 9 figures plus. And you have, you know, founders of multibillion-dollar companies there all talking about AI. Right. And so you end up creating a room. And what ends up happening is people remember you and you get invited to other rooms. You know, in some cases, sometimes I'll invite someone, they'll end up inviting inviting me like a fight with like a popular boxer. I'm not going to name names here, but that's the whole idea. You are planting the seed for the things that you could actually end up harvesting. You might not harvest it now, but you might harvest it in a year or 2 years, 3 years or so. But people will definitely remember you because people like doing business with people. Now look, if you're, if you're trying to specifically just generate leads, what you could do is you could invite maybe 2 or 3 of your customers. Let's say it's a B2B dinner. So invite 2 to 3 of your customers and then invite a bunch your other, maybe the 6 other people are ideal client fit people that you might want to work with in the future. What ends up happening is the 2 customers that you have, the 3 customers that you have there, they're going to end up pitching you to all these other people. Okay? You can have different partners there too, referral partners and things like that if you want to do that. Right. But I would recommend keeping a dinner to 8 to 10 people because I've hosted dinners with 40 people before. You just can't have an intimate connection with everyone. It becomes more of a party. And that's not something I'm looking to do. And by the way, when I host events too, I'll do a private speakers dinner and The speakers love that because they get to break bread with other speakers, right? Just keep in mind, like, who is your audience? What do they want exactly? And don't think about you. Don't think about what am I going to get out of this? Just think about if you be the connector, you're making all these connections, everything is going to come back to you because you are indirectly helping everyone else. Actually, in this case, you're helping people directly here. In total, if we're talking about cost for these dinners, I would say that usually these dinners, if it's a really fancy place, it might run you $2,500 to $5,000 or so. Now, I will say, though, when I hosted a dinner of 40 people, it cost me $10,000. Okay. And by the way, you can also do a dinner that costs you you like $200 or so. I've hosted dinners, like even recently did dinners that cost $200 or so. And my mindset is, look, if you have the money to afford it, just pay for it. Because if you're gonna invite everyone, just invite everyone, facilitate good conversation, pay for it. That makes it easy for everyone. Now, in terms of pipeline generating, I'm going to give you an example of a dinner that I threw that maybe cost— it had to be like $500 or $600 or so. And this was in San Francisco. That dinner led to us working with Lyft, the rideshare company. It led us to work with like an analytics company and also a healthcare company too, just from that one dinner alone. Now, that's not always going to happen. Just understand that this is a marketing cost. Okay, so it could be like $200, $500, $1,000 or so. Maybe you're just meeting with the client, or maybe it's 4 people, maybe it costs you less. But just think about the fact that you are not just marketing yourself, you're marketing yourself for the long term in a different way. Because the real estate that you occupy in someone else's head is that person, Eric, that person's a connector. Also, that person has taste, that person knows how to connect the right people, knows how to pick the right food, knows how to pick the right restaurant, and knows how to keep everyone connected. I like that person, I'm going to stay connected to that person. So this next one is interesting. I speak at a lot of conferences around the world. What will happen sometimes is I'll try to throw a mini dinner, just like the type of dinner that I told you about, that's tied to this conference. I'll just invite the speakers, I'll invite other entrepreneurs in the area, I'll invite people, friends that I know that maybe live in London or maybe Dubai or something like that. So I've done this in Dubai, I've done this in London, I've done this in Spain. I think I've done this everywhere. You want to maximize the time that you're spending. So Meet with customers, meet with your employees there if it's relevant. And the setup here is that I'm going to pick a restaurant that it's in that area. I'll ask people what's a nice restaurant. I don't do afterparties because I like to sleep early and I don't drink. That's what the setup is. It's similar to what I just mentioned. My podcast co-host Neil, what he does is when he speaks at events, his team will actually set up a mini event with maybe 10 to 20 people or so. And these are— you might think they're VPs of marketing or CMOs. They're not. These people are like directors or senior directors or heads of marketing. When you're part of a large organization, you're not— the VP or the CMO is usually just too busy. So you want to get these people who ultimately they're going to have more say and they can push their CMOs to do things. And what ends up happening is Neil books a conference room at a 5-star hotel right after breakfast, but right before lunch. And the reason he picks that time is because you don't actually have to pay for breakfast. You don't have to pay for lunch. You just pay for maybe some snacks, some drinks, things like that. You occupy that conference room for 3 hours. The hotel gets revenue. They're happy with it. And what ends up happening is for, for Neil, it's 30 minutes of him talking. Maybe his team talks for 15 minutes or so and everyone just kind of networks afterwards and that actually ends up leading to deals. Even he himself has said that these deals take a year, 2 years, 3 years to manifest, but you keep compounding starting now and they end up paying off and they're not that expensive in terms of getting these people to show up. The luxury of having a team to reach out to these people, or if you're starting out, maybe you have the time luxury to reach out to the people that you want, the ICP fit, the people that you want to work with. And this one's a little more salesy because it's like, yeah, you're just trying to hit senior directors of companies that you want to work with, and maybe you can have a couple of your clients there as well to hang out. I can't speak to this specific example, but I know for Neil, this has got him, you know, we're talking about driving, you know, 7, 8 figures plus of pipeline just from doing these types of things. And he mentions that they crush it. So the next one is an oldie but still a goodie because it works well. So webinars, webinars crush it still because one, not a lot of people want to do webinars. And 2, the people that end up applying or showing up to your webinars These people are watching you for an hour or so. And so if you're talking about building a relationship at scale and then also restreaming your webinars to not just LinkedIn, but YouTube, to X, all these different channels, even Instagram as well, what ends up happening is people will remember that you are constantly the ones that's out there. For me, I'm always talking about marketing, right? So what ends up happening is, again, the rule of marketing now is not necessarily the rule of 7. So 7 touches for a transaction. I think it's actually a rule of 28 now where people need to see you that many times because people are just so busy. And again, 99% of people aren't ready to to buy and market. And so especially if you're in B2B, webinars crush it. Webinars in terms of what's working, it's still largely the same as before. When you want to promote your webinar, making it— maybe you're promoting to your email list 2 weeks before, 1 week before, 24 hours before, and then starting now. And then you can, you know, make your webinar on demand afterwards so people can opt in for it. You can drive traffic to it as well. That works well. Also having your team look at all the people that are attending the webinar and looking at who's ICP fit. And then reaching out to those people and seeing if they need any help with whatever products or services that you have. And then for us, I mean, we use— you can use Restream. We use Restream. You can use StreamYard for this. You want a combination of webinars and in-person webinars. You can probably make it a little more salesy and try to drive it more towards conversions versus you speaking at a conference. You probably shouldn't be trying to sell on stage too much, like a HubSpot, for example. It's frowned upon if you're trying to sell on stage. If you want to run personalized LinkedIn ads at scale and get these ads up in minutes instead of weeks, You've got to check out Karrot. So Karrot, K-A-R-R-O-T dot A-I, will allow you to create personalized ads on LinkedIn, personalized landing pages. We are also adding in different automations to spin up these ads quickly. We have different creative options as well that will integrate even cool things like Google Nano Banana. A lot of cool things coming down the pipeline. If you are serious about B2B marketing, you're serious about LinkedIn, you've got to check out Karrot, and we'll see you on the other side. So I'm going to rate the event formats in terms of S-tier through D-tier in terms of driving real revenue. So if we're talking about 10-person dinners, I would say that's B-tier. It's more of a long-term play and the costs aren't that high though. So that's a good thing. So I'll put that as B-tier. Now in terms of mini events, I'm going to score that as A-tier because you can laser target or snipe your ICP fit people that you want to talk to, invite them to the scene. You have 10, 20 people in this room and maybe you have a couple of customers in there. It's not going to drive immediate conversions usually, but what's going to happen is you are driving larger pipeline deals and it might manifest in 1, 2, 3 years or so. So now this is going to cost you a little more money, but it shouldn't be too expensive because it's right before lunch and right after breakfast. Speaking at major conferences, I would rate as A-tier. And the reason for that is even if I speak at HubSpot, so the talks that we did this year, one stage was maybe 1,500 people. That was my solo talk. And then the Marketing School live podcast that we did was 2,000. Now it's good for brand building because we can push this, these images out to social media. We can also push the 2 talks to our respective YouTube channels. So there's that piece. Speaking at major conferences is good. You're going to have some people reach out to you, but it's kind of similar to the other one where I would say the one that I just mentioned, the mini events, that was actually going to convert higher for you because you've invited 15 to 20 people of your ICP fit. Whereas a conference, especially when you have a couple of thousand people on stage, they're usually not going to be the ICP fit of people that you're working with. But I will tell you that these people remember you. So it's again, it's good for branding. So number 4 is hosting your own event. So whether it's 100 to 200 people, I like having more intimate events. These are kind of like we can call them private events. I like doing this because it's an uplevel of the mini events, right? So I get to pick all the people I like and some they'll invite other people and we try to charge people. We don't try to make like a huge profit on these. In fact, most of these that I've done, I've probably lost money, but we might do it somewhere cool, like a nice hotel and 100, 200 people. You have some cool speakers. We'll do some roundtables as well. We'll play pickleball, we'll have nice dinners, we'll have light, nice lunches. By doing these types of summits, we've generated a lot of revenue and I would say we've generated a lot of good hires too. And some people have even started recruiting agencies just by attending my events. I would rate these events, I would also put them as A tier as well. Last but not least, I'll give you webinars. So webinars to me are S tier because the amount of promotion that goes into it, you can run paid ads against it, you can distribute it to all the different channels that you have, and you can set them on demand as well. They're much more of a conversion-geared activity. You can have sales reach out to them too. So you have a lot more control over webinars. And so, you know, we're probably doing them every 2 weeks or so. And I will tell you that the people that we talk to from these, these are legit companies. And oftentimes when they watch a webinar, our conversion rates go up a lot higher. Let's say someone was already in our pipeline and they watch webinar, they might get interested in other services. And that might be the tip— this webinar might be the tipping point because they like what we're saying versus what other people are saying. So to me, again, people can run paid media, and paid media, don't get me wrong, is absolutely effective. But let's say for example, we'll pay $100,000 for an SQL or a sales qualified lead. When we do an event, the event, by the way, some of these events, I'll just break down some of the costs for you. A summit might cost $50,000 to $100,000, something like that to throw the event. And maybe we break even on that, right? If we break even on it, great. Okay, we're even on the ad cost. So with the free event, but if you get a couple of SQLs from that and each SQL is worth $100,000 or so, you throw an event, maybe you're getting 3 to 4 SQLs in the next year or so. So that's $400,000. But you might get more after that, you know, 2, 3 years out later because some people just— I got a text the other day saying, hey, Eric, we're going to be working with Single Grain. Like he just declared that he's working with us, right? I haven't seen him in a couple of months or so. I think he's actually come to one of my events in the past, maybe one or two of them. And so all that to say is that this is not a strategy that's easy to copy. The other thing is you can take all the other talks that you have, you can distribute it to your email list, you can distribute it online, you can run paid ads against it, but it is something that's unique to you. And the reality is, look, if, if people like Elon are saying these events are going to become more and more popular and more and more valuable over time, then that's something that you want to start looking at right now. Because again, competitors can't easily copy your event strategy because whatever you end up putting together, it's going to be unique to you. And it's very defensible because it's easy to copy someone's ads, it's easy to copy their funnel, things like that. You cannot just copy an event. That's why I believe that events create a competitive moat. So here's the bottom line. Everyone is fighting over digital. Paid ads are expensive. Cold email is getting harder. Content marketing takes forever. But events, events are wide open, and they build trust faster than any other channel. You don't need to host a 200-person summit. Just start with a dinner, 5 people, 10 people this month. Because in the next year, while everyone else is optimizing their funnel, you're going to be closing deals over steak and drinks. And if you want to get the full event playbook— how to structure dinners, how to get speaking gigs, how to fill rooms— I'll have a link of my full breakdown in the description.
