At a Glance
- • The argument: In-person connection earns its place in the ROI conversation when a team defines what each event is meant to do, builds measurement in from the first day, and keeps testing what it counts.
- • Why it matters now: Most marketing leaders have had to defend an event budget, and AI is increasingly used to plan and navigate events. The case for being in person rests on what happens when people are together.
- • The proof points: Salesforce tracks how many attendees get hands-on with its products, how many meetings take place and how much open pipeline is in them, from the first day of an event. At Salesforce Beach at Cannes Lions 2026, meetings, guests and net new pipeline all exceeded Salesforce’s goals. At Dreamforce, looking at NPS and attendee journeys alongside session counts gave a fuller picture than session counts alone.
- • Source: Notes from a fireside on the B2BMX Stage at Advertising Week New York 2026, with Madeline Schofield, VP, Strategic Events and Executive Marketing at Salesforce, and Melissa Levy, President of Sparks. Sparks was the design-and-build and production partner for Salesforce Beach at Cannes Lions 2026.
Most marketing leaders have had to defend an event budget at some point. That conversation is easier when the event had a clear job and the measurement was built in from the start.
That was the subject of “The ROI of Human Connection,” a fireside on the B2BMX Stage at Advertising Week New York on October 8. Madeline Schofield, VP, Strategic Events and Executive Marketing at Salesforce, joined Melissa Levy, President of Sparks, to discuss how Salesforce approaches the question across its events, from Dreamforce to Salesforce Beach at Cannes Lions, the beachfront destination Sparks designed, built and produced with Salesforce in June.
Levy opened the session with an idea she said every marketer has felt and is getting better at proving: “a room, a handshake, a shared meal, or anything else like that can move a campaign in ways that nothing else can.”
Taken together, their answers point to one idea: connection earns its place in the ROI conversation when a team is clear about what each event is for, builds measurement in from the start, and keeps testing what it counts.
Start With What Each Event Is For
Schofield’s starting point is how Salesforce defines the job. “We think about our events not as an investment for the business, which events often are, but as a true growth engine,” she said. Her team looks at every facet of an event and asks what it needs to measure to show where the event is making a difference.
That clarity extends across a portfolio. Third-party events reach net new customers and those close to Salesforce’s ecosystem, Schofield explained, while Salesforce’s own events serve specific audiences, from industry events and free one-day World Tours to Dreamforce, “our closing event of the year.” Each one gives customers a next event to move into. Levy observed that this treats events as a connected strategy rather than one event at a time, and made the point that strategy has to come first.
At Dreamforce, Schofield said that discipline runs through a nine-month process with three planning summits, and a checkpoint after operations planning: “Are we really doing the thing we set out to do for the person we said we were going to do it for?”
The job differs by event. Dreamforce is Salesforce’s own three-day event, and most attendees are already deeply engaged with its products, so the opportunity is to help them find more. At Cannes Lions, Schofield explained, the focus is “a bigger strategic opportunity” to partner with C-level leaders, including many who are already in Salesforce’s CRM. A business might use Marketing Cloud because its marketing team implemented it. At the executive level, the conversation goes a step further: what becomes possible when you activate, say, Agentforce or the broader Salesforce portfolio. At events like Cannes, she said, more than 90% of the C-level executives Salesforce engages haven’t attended its first-party events.
Levy’s takeaway: “You need both first-party and third-party. They serve different purposes.”
Build Measurement In From the First Day
For Schofield, measurement begins before the event, when campaign data shows who is coming and what opportunity that audience represents. On site, her team counts how many attendees get hands-on with products, which she called “absolutely critical” for B2B. “You’re not going to move the business forward if developers don’t know how to implement your products,” she said. The team also tracks meetings and conversations.
Because that tracking is built into the event and the systems Salesforce runs, the team knows on day one how many people were enabled hands-on, how many meetings took place and how much open pipeline was in them. “Events are an incredible vehicle,” she added, “but it takes the whole organization to really take that opportunity and convert it into something meaningful in the business.”
At Salesforce Beach, Salesforce tracked attendance, net new contacts (separated into those already in the Salesforce ecosystem and those new to it), meetings and the pipeline attached to them, C-level attendance, and the marketing-driven pipeline the destination touched. Meetings, guests and net new pipeline all “blew the doors off our goals,” Schofield said. The destination was “lighter on the brand message” than other Salesforce events, built as a place to welcome customers. Levy pointed to two questions to ask of any event: “What is the objective? And how do you want someone to feel?” What set the beach apart from Dreamforce, she said, was that Salesforce “met the audience there at the moment in how they wanted to feel.”
Keep Testing What You Count
Salesforce also revisits the numbers themselves. Schofield said total attendance, badge scans and sessions attended can be indicative, but “correlation is not causation.” At Dreamforce, average sessions per attendee rose from six to about 7.6 one year and fell to about five the next. The team looked at the journeys attendees had taken and asked how many sessions someone needs to attend to grasp the message Salesforce is trying to land. NPS was higher that year, she said, and attendees were still leaving with a deeper understanding of the brand. “You really have to look across all the pieces in order to understand what you achieved.”
Levy put the discipline as a rule: question your metrics every year, because “just because something goes down doesn’t mean it’s bad, and just because something goes up doesn’t mean it’s good.” The test, she said, is whether a metric is meeting the strategy “at this place and time,” and Schofield agreed that the measurement keeps evolving.
Budget decisions follow the same logic. When a line is trimmed, Schofield said, Salesforce watches drop-off within the event, total event engagement and NPS, which are “always going to come through.” It applies this when it trades theater sessions for more hands-on ones, then checks whether the hands-on sessions fill. Levy’s summary: when budget moves, measure what the change does.
Use AI for the Logistics and People for the Story
Salesforce uses its own technology across the event process, Schofield said, from targeting outreach to using Agentforce to build custom schedules, recommend the next best session when one is full, and help attendees navigate the campus. With a thousand sessions on offer, she noted, reading every title and abstract is not a good use of an attendee’s time.
None of that replaces the experience itself. In-person experiences “matter more than they ever have,” Schofield said, and “push the needle more than they ever have.” What in-person does best is “telling the story”: attendees can ask questions, find the people they need to talk to and compare notes on shared hurdles. Levy drew the parallel to working in person versus hybrid, where you can see a person, build trust and give them the benefit of the doubt.
Carry the Event Beyond the Venue
Dreamforce, Schofield said, sets the tone for the company’s vision for the year ahead. “The event is the message,” and her team works to carry it beyond the venue through social platforms, influencers and creators. Levy added that because event content now feeds large language models, planning for what happens after the event is no longer optional. Schofield said the return on that reach is harder to measure and explain, and that her team is working on it.
At Cannes Lions, these ideas took physical form. Salesforce wanted a base where it could host private client meetings, run a full agenda of conversations and welcome anyone who wanted to walk in, and Sparks designed, built and produced Salesforce Beach around that brief. Schofield offered a simple account of why that matters. People have their professional conversations, she said, but they connect in the moments around them. “That’s where you build trust. That’s where you build relationships.”
