How Automation & Analytics Transform Event Marketing Playbook with Kent Agramonte

Event Marketing Automation and Data Hygiene: Kent Agramonte on Ops in Motion

Introduction

Trade show and event companies lose money every time a contact goes stale. Not because the marketing is bad, but because nobody caught that the attendee changed jobs, the exhibitor swapped their sales lead, or the finance contact left the company six months ago.

Kent Agramonte, CEO of Marketing on Demand, has spent close to two decades in marketing automation and data analysis, most of it inside the exhibits and events industry. On this episode of Ops in Motion, he joined Shiv and Kawal to break down three problems that quietly erode event marketing ROI, and the automation and data practices that fix them.

Who should read this: Event marketers, exhibit and trade show teams, and anyone running post-event follow-up on a CRM that hasn’t been audited in a while.

Key Takeaways

• Roughly 30% of CRM data goes bad in a given year, from job changes, company mergers, and closures. If you’re not auditing regularly, you’re working off a database that’s already a third wrong.
• It costs about 5 times more to acquire a new customer than to retain one. A 5% increase in retention can raise profits by 25% or more.
• Automating pre-event, lead capture, and post-event workflows doesn’t just save time. It improves attribution, which is what actually proves an event’s value in the broader marketing mix.
• Creative and operations teams don’t need to fight for space. Shared ownership early in the process prevents the tension entirely.
• Marketing operations is a margin lever, not just a brand-building function, especially for companies under private equity pressure to improve efficiency without adding headcount.

Problem 1: Your Contact Data Is Already Out of Date, and You Don’t Know How Much

The problem.

Kent works with exhibit builders and trade associations, and the same issue keeps coming up: companies want to follow up with former customers and can’t, because the contact data has gone stale. One trade association he volunteers with doesn’t even know who the finance or decision-making contacts are at their own member companies.

Why it happens.

People change jobs. Companies merge, get acquired, or close. Event producers in particular deal with this every single year, since a meaningful share of attendee and exhibitor contacts turn over within twelve months. Nobody budgets time to catch it, so the database quietly rots between events.

How they fix it.

Shiv laid out a practical checklist:

• Verify what you’re capturing. Don’t collect incomplete contact or company details just because you can.
• Standardize the data. Pick one format (US or USA, not both) and stick to it across every record.
• Audit regularly. Shiv cited a study putting annual data decay around 30%, driven by job changes, M&A, and business closures.
• Watch for inactive contacts and remove them. Beyond accuracy, this saves real money on tools like HubSpot, Marketo, or Mailchimp, since most platforms charge by contact volume.

Problem 2: Manual Follow-Up Doesn’t Scale, and It’s Costing You Leads

The problem.

Event marketing used to be mostly execution: get people to register, run the show, hope the follow-up happens. That approach breaks down once volume and ROI expectations go up, because manual follow-up is slow and inconsistent.

Why it happens.

Without automation, lead data sits in a registration portal until someone manually exports and routes it. By the time a hot lead gets a follow-up email, the moment has passed.

How they fix it.

Kawal’s team runs three automated layers:

• Pre-event: automated invite, reminder, and confirmation sequences, segmented by job role, industry, and past engagement.
• Lead capture and routing: registration data flows directly into the CRM or marketing automation platform, triggering follow-up sequences the moment a lead is captured.
• Post-event nurturing: attendees who actually engaged with content get a different follow-up track than people who registered but never showed up.

The payoff isn’t just time saved. Kawal pointed to cleaner attribution as the real win, since that’s what lets a team prove an event’s value inside the larger marketing budget.

Key insight: Kent’s math makes the stakes concrete. Retention is roughly five times cheaper than acquisition, and a 5% lift in retention can push profits up 25% or more. Bad data hygiene doesn’t just cost accuracy, it forces teams into the more expensive acquisition motion when they didn’t need to.

“It costs about five times more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain a customer.”

— Kent Agramonte

Problem 3: Creative and Operations Teams Pull Against Each Other

The problem.

Event marketing sits at the intersection of creative execution and operational discipline, and those two priorities can easily end up working against each other under tight timelines.

Why it happens.

When creative and operations aren’t aligned from the start, boundaries get set too late, tools go unsynced, and teams end up scrambling right before an event instead of iterating on it.

How they fix it.

Kawal’s team works from five practices:

• Get creative and operations aligned early, so both sides co-own the vision from the start.
• Set boundaries around timeline and budget that give the creative team room to work within, not against.
• Use shared project management tools so no one is operating in a silo.
• Prioritize impact over perfection when time or resources are tight. Ask what will actually resonate, and double down on that.
• Build in room to test and iterate, even inside a live event, instead of treating the first version as final.

Action Items

FAQs

Talk to Digital DI Consultants

If your event follow-up still depends on someone manually exporting a spreadsheet, that’s a marketing operations gap costing you real leads. Talk to our team about automating the workflow and cleaning up the data behind it.