Sponsor and exhibitor revenue is not just a commercial opportunity for event organizers. For most commercial shows, it is the financial foundation everything else stands on.
That was the frank starting point of Grip's recent webinar, From Scans to Sales: How to Drive Sponsor ROI and Increase Event Revenue, where three event professionals with deep hands-on experience managing B2B sponsors came together to share what actually works.
The panelists were Nick Westerman, Head of Strategic Partner Events at NHS Confederation; Chiyon Yoon, Senior Sponsor Logistics Manager at Yotta; and Kelly Hogan, Director of Product Development at DealCatalyst. The session was hosted by Hew Leith, SVP of Marketing at Grip.
Between them, they covered shows of vastly different sizes and models — from NHS ConfedExpo with over 5,400 delegates to DealCatalyst's private credit conferences and Yotta's rapidly growing B2B show, which has achieved 200 percent year-over-year growth and a 55 NPS. What united them was a shared view: getting exhibitor ROI right is not optional. It is existential.
Nick Westerman opened the session with a statement that framed the entire discussion. If sponsors and exhibitors cannot see a return on their investment, the show itself is at risk. Not in a vague strategic sense, but practically. As Nick put it, if you cannot give those sponsors and exhibitors ROI, you have to ask whether the show can continue to exist. It is the fundamental mission of an event organizer to treat exhibitors and sponsors as strategic partners and deliver for them. Because if you are not delivering for them, you will not have an event in a few years' time. And it snowballs quickly.
But the relationship is not one-directional. The panel was equally clear that sponsors and delegates are interdependent. If you build a show purely around sponsor revenue without giving delegates a genuine reason to attend, your sponsors lose out too. The leads dry up. The rebooking conversations get harder. And you end up in a cycle where neither side feels the event is working. The organizers who break that cycle are the ones who take responsibility for both sides of the equation at the same time.
One of the earliest practical insights from the session was the danger of being too granular about sponsor goals. Kelly Hogan explained that when you try to get too specific about what individual sponsors want, you create a version of the problem you were trying to solve. Offer too many variations and you risk failing to deliver on any of them precisely. Her approach at DealCatalyst is to keep goals organized into around four or five broad buckets for both sponsors and delegates — broad enough to accommodate the full range of sponsor needs without becoming unmanageable.
Nick Westerman described a more specific version of this challenge at NHS ConfedExpo. Almost every sponsor arrives believing they need access to C-suite NHS individuals. They see those relationships as the deal-makers, the policy influencers, the people who justify the entire investment. But a third of the audience being C-suite also means two thirds are not. Nick's team actively reframes that narrative for each sponsor, pointing out that graduates, trainees, and emerging organizations represent the future of the NHS ecosystem, and in many cases the more accessible entry points to long-term relationships. For some sponsors, particularly those in technology and AI, a meaningful ROI at an NHS event may be three to five years away. The role of the organizer is to help them understand that upfront, rather than allowing unrealistic expectations to create disappointment after the event.
All three panelists were unanimous on one point: impersonal communication does not work. The sponsors and exhibitors who get the most out of events are the ones who have been genuinely prepared for them by their organizer contact.
Kelly's team at DealCatalyst uses individual sales representatives who go directly to their sponsorship contacts before each event and ask a simple question: how can we deliver for you at this conference? Those conversations feed back into the logistics and audience development teams, who align their planning around the answers. But pre-event communication also reveals a consistent operational challenge: the person who signed the contract is rarely the person on site. The team attending on the show floor often has different goals, different levels of context, and different expectations from the contact who arranged the sponsorship months earlier. Kelly flagged this transition as a critical moment where exhibitor experience can fall apart, and one that deserves far more attention than most organizers give it.
Nick's approach at NHS ConfedExpo has evolved toward task-based communication rather than long email chains. Moving from detailed emails to assigning specific, dated tasks inside a portal has significantly reduced the volume of confused follow-up from exhibitors. When someone logs in and sees a clear action with a deadline rather than scanning an email for buried instructions, completion rates improve. An email per week from about three months out, focused on that week's specific actions, combined with an exhibitor manual and a task-based portal, is the model that now underpins their whole pre-event workflow.
The proof of how much exhibitors value this preparation is in the webinar attendance data. NHS ConfedExpo runs a 90-minute pre-show webinar for their exhibitors. Attendance consistently runs at 92 percent of their total exhibitor base. Even returning sponsors who have been through the process multiple times attend, because they want to know whether anything has changed, what updates there are to platforms like Grip, and how to brief their own teams. It is highly technical, runs longer than scheduled every year, and generates detailed follow-up questions for weeks afterward.
Chiyon Yoon manages sponsor logistics for Yotta, a show that achieved 200 percent year-over-year growth and a 55 NPS. At their most recent event she was managing 177 sponsors, largely on her own. Her workflow is instructive.
The foundation is a master spreadsheet that maps every sponsorship product to a description and a list of associated tasks. That spreadsheet feeds directly into the Grip sponsor management portal, where each sponsor sees only the tasks relevant to their package with deadlines already applied. When anything changes in the spreadsheet, it is reflected in the portal.
Sponsors are onboarded with an email that explains the portal, sets expectations, and gives them a home page with key links: the exhibitor kit, order forms, and the floor plan. The portal sends automated reminders at three days out and at the deadline. Chiyon supplements these with bulk monthly emails summarizing outstanding tasks and, for those who still do not complete them, direct personal outreach by email or phone.
One underappreciated feature of a well-configured portal is that organizers can act on behalf of sponsors when needed. When a sponsor sends information by email rather than logging in, Chiyon simply submits it on their behalf. For returning sponsors who want to reuse assets from the previous year, she copies the prior entries across. It adds work, but the priority is completing the sponsor record, not enforcing a preferred method of submission.
One of the most distinctive parts of the webinar was Nick's discussion of floor plan design as a direct driver of exhibitor ROI. The comment he hears after every show with a poor floor plan is the same: it was a quiet event. And that comment, he argued, is almost always a floor plan problem.
Dead zones, dog-leg layouts, and poor traffic flow concentrate footfall in parts of the hall and leave others empty. Exhibitors in low-traffic areas cannot generate the interactions they need to justify their spend, and they will tell you about it after the event in terms that sound like a fundamental failing of your show.
NHS ConfedExpo has built eight content theaters directly into the show floor, with exhibitor stands positioned around them. Because content drives movement, people flowing out of sessions are naturally directed back through the exhibitor zone. Activations are placed at deliberate intervals — headshot lounges, hydration stations, catering activations — that give delegates a reason to stop and interact with brands in a context that feels natural. A well-designed activation at the right point in the floor plan can generate four to five hundred or more badge scans from delegates who would not otherwise have stopped at that stand.
Kelly's approach at DealCatalyst adds another dimension. Her highest-value sponsorship is access to a private lounge reserved for a specific high-demand audience. Sponsors who take that package get dedicated, uninterrupted time with exactly the people they came to meet, in a quieter setting where real conversations can happen. That kind of premium access commands a corresponding premium price and delivers a quality of interaction that general booth traffic rarely matches.
Yotta takes activations even further. Their show floor has included a puppy lounge, a tattoo parlor, and an arcade lounge alongside coffee bars and headshot lounges. The puppy lounge was rebooked on site before the event ended. The logic is the same regardless of format: give delegates a genuine reason to linger in the exhibitor zone, and the sponsors around that activation will benefit.
Kelly Hogan shared one of the most concrete data points of the session. Between DealCatalyst's 2025 and 2026 editions of their PCDL private credit conference in Nashville — a conference with around 1,500 delegates and hundreds of sponsors — lead retrieval purchases increased by 50 percent. The change was driven almost entirely by one upgrade: moving from a three-person access limit to full team transparency.
In 2025, a sponsor could have twenty-five or thirty people attending the conference but only three of them could scan badges. There was no shared visibility across the team. Each person was essentially operating a separate list, and combining everything required manual work after the event. In 2026, every team member can scan leads, see the same qualified prospect records, add qualification notes, and tag colleagues for relevant follow-ups. A team member who speaks with an attendee can note that the person is more relevant to a colleague and assign them immediately. The entire sponsoring organization operates from a single shared picture of their leads in real time.
The result was a 50 percent increase in lead retrieval licenses purchased, driven not by a price reduction or a marketing push, but by a genuine improvement that made the investment obviously worthwhile for larger teams.
Chiyon's approach at Yotta offers a different model. Lead scanning is included for all sponsors at no additional charge, which reduces friction and ensures high adoption. The upgrade Yotta monetizes is the ability to email targeted segments of the attendee list — by company, title, or seniority — to invite them to private dinners and off-floor events that sponsors organize themselves.
The attendee list is one of the most frequently requested assets by sponsors and exhibitors, and one of the most dangerous to hand over. Once it leaves your organization without controls, you lose visibility over how it is used. Sponsors may pass it to third parties, use it for outreach that conflicts with your own event communications, or blast it in ways that reflect poorly on your brand.
The solution Chiyon described at Yotta is controlled, targeted access rather than a raw export. Through the Grip platform, sponsors can filter attendees by company, title, or seniority level and send targeted communications via the event system, without ever receiving the underlying data. They get the targeting capability they need to fill private dinners and side events; you retain ownership of the data and the relationship. A basic name, company, and title list is provided to all sponsors for context. The value-added product is the targeted outreach capability, offered as a premium sponsorship tier and priced accordingly.
The session included a frank audience question about managing sponsors who do not honor deadlines. The answers were more candid than the standard event industry response.
Nick's view was unambiguous. When a sponsor is contributing significant money to the show, the leverage shifts. Threatening to withhold platform access or withdraw services often results in an implicit suggestion that they will not rebook if you follow through. In that scenario, most organizers cave. The honest answer is that money speaks louder than process in those situations, and the most realistic response is to adapt rather than enforce.
Kelly's approach is structural. She builds in hard lines where errors genuinely cannot be corrected after a deadline — particularly for anything involving print. Where some flexibility is possible, she offers it at a higher fee, which filters out genuinely last-minute requests from those who are simply disorganized, and recovers some of the cost of accommodating them.
Chiyon's tactic is to publish internal deadlines well ahead of her actual deadlines, so that the extensions sponsors inevitably ask for still keep everything within the real schedule. The strategy exists specifically to absorb the predictable lateness of a subset of the sponsor base without disrupting production timelines.
Watch the full discussion with Nick Westerman, Chiyon Yoon, and Kelly Hogan for deeper insights, live Q&A, and practical examples from their events.
See how Grip's lead retrieval, sponsor management portal, and AI-powered matchmaking help commercial event organizers deliver measurable value to every exhibitor on the floor. Book a free demo today.
Exhibitor ROI refers to the measurable return a sponsor or exhibitor receives from their investment in an event. This typically includes qualified leads generated, meetings held, brand awareness with a targeted audience, and longer-term sales pipeline attributed to conversations at the show. Organizers who actively help sponsors measure and maximize this return see higher rebooking rates and stronger revenue growth over time.
Proving ROI requires giving sponsors tools to capture, qualify, and track leads throughout the event lifecycle. This includes badge scanning with lead qualification questions, shared team visibility across all scanned contacts, post-event reporting, and data on attendee engagement such as profile views and session attendance. The organizers on this webinar also emphasized the role of pre-event preparation — helping sponsors understand the audience composition, set realistic goals, and arrive on site fully briefed — as a critical part of the ROI story.
The most common request is access to senior decision-makers. However, as Nick Westerman explained from NHS ConfedExpo, this expectation often needs to be reframed. Two thirds of any audience are not the C-suite individuals sponsors are targeting, and the organizer's role is to help them see the value in the broader audience. The underlying need is a measurable sales pipeline, whether that comes from a C-suite meeting or from ten high-quality conversations with emerging buyers.
Lead retrieval is the process by which exhibitors scan attendee badges to capture contact information and qualify prospects during an event. Modern lead retrieval tools allow entire exhibitor teams to share a unified view of scanned contacts, add qualification notes, rate prospects, and tag colleagues for follow-up in real time. DealCatalyst saw a 50 percent increase in lead retrieval purchases after upgrading to full team transparency, demonstrating how much more valuable the tool becomes when the whole exhibiting team can use it together.
Rebooking is driven by demonstrated value. Organizers who help sponsors arrive prepared, capture qualified leads efficiently, access their target audience through smart floor plan design and activations, and leave with a clear picture of their pipeline are far more likely to retain those sponsors the following year. Practical steps include pre-event briefing webinars, task-based onboarding portals, floor plan design that drives traffic past exhibitor stands, and post-event reporting that ties attendance and lead data to commercial outcomes.
The most effective activations combine something delegates genuinely want — coffee, headshots, entertainment, food — with a natural reason to interact with an exhibiting brand. NHS ConfedExpo generates several hundred badge scans per activation by placing them at strategic points in the floor plan. DealCatalyst uses premium audience lounges and specialty coffee bars. Yotta has successfully run a puppy lounge and tattoo parlor alongside more conventional options. The key is that the activation creates a moment of genuine engagement rather than a passive brand placement, giving exhibitors a reason to start a conversation.
The most scalable approach combines a master inventory spreadsheet with a task-based portal. Chiyon Yoon at Yotta manages 177 sponsors largely solo by mapping every sponsorship product to a set of tasks in a spreadsheet, then pushing those tasks with deadlines into the Grip portal. Each sponsor sees only what is relevant to their package. Automated reminders handle the majority of follow-up; personal outreach handles the remainder. Organizers can also complete tasks on behalf of sponsors when needed, which keeps records complete without requiring every sponsor to be equally self-sufficient.
