Are You Purchasing Events or Just Booking Them?

Most companies spend significant money on events, such as conferences, investor days, sales kickoffs, training programmes, and customer events. The budget adds up quickly.

Yet when I ask corporate leaders how they purchase these events, the answers are often vague. There's an annual budget but there’s no clarity around who gets what, there's an agency (or an internal team) but not all corporate planners know about them. Things get organised and event happens, but it’s booking rather than purchasing.

This distinction matters more than most companies realise.

The Gap Between Events and Everything Else

Consider how companies purchase other significant investments.

Marketing campaigns have clear objectives, defined audiences, measurable outcomes, and post-campaign analysis. Technology purchases go through evaluation frameworks, ROI projections, and vendor assessments. Real estate decisions involve strategic planning, stakeholder alignment, and long-term considerations.

Now consider how the same companies purchase events.

Often, it starts with a date and a budget. Someone decides an event is needed and an agency is briefed, or an internal team gets to work. The focus shifts immediately to logistics: venue, catering, AV, speakers, invitations.

Objectives? Sometimes stated, but rarely specific. Success metrics? Often determined after the fact, if at all. Strategic alignment? Assumed, but rarely ever verified.

This isn't a criticism of event teams, as they're usually working with what they're given. I’ve been there and even when asking clients critical qualifying questions and/or more information, you’re often told to just get on with the job. It’s incomplete and the problem is upstream, in how events are conceived, commissioned, understood and evaluated.

What Strategic Purchasing Actually Means

Strategic event purchasing means treating events with the same rigour as other significant business investments. It means asking certain questions before the brief goes out:

Why are we doing this event? Not "because we always do" or "because the CEO wants it." What business outcome are we trying to achieve? What would success look like?

Who needs to be aligned? Events typically serve multiple stakeholders, from sales, and marketing, to HR, finance, and the executive team. Are they all agreed on what the event should accomplish, or will they evaluate it against different (unstated) criteria?

How will we know if it worked? Not vanity metrics like attendance or satisfaction scores, but actual business outcomes. Was pipeline generated? Were new relationships formed and built? Did messages land? Did behaviours change?

Is an event the right format? Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes a different approach would achieve the objective more effectively. Strategic purchasing asks the question before assuming the answer.

Why This Doesn't Happen

If strategic purchasing is obviously better, why don't more companies do it?

Several reasons.

Events are fragmented. Different departments commission different events with different agencies and different budgets. There's no portfolio view, no consistent framework, no institutional learning.

Events are urgent. By the time someone decides an event is needed, there's often pressure to move quickly. Strategic questions feel like obstacles to getting things done.

Events are emotional. They involve brand, culture, and relationships, all things that feel resistant to measurement. The ROI or ROO conversations get dismissed as missing the point.

Events are delegated. Senior leaders commission events but delegate execution. They're not close enough to the process to see the gaps. And the people doing the work often don't have authority to change the approach.

The result is that events get treated as execution problems rather than strategic investments.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

When events are purchased tactically rather than strategically, several things happen.

Budget gets wasted. Not obviously because the event happens, people attend, and photos get taken. However, the connection between spend and outcome is unclear. Resources go to the wrong priorities and opportunities are missed.

Stakeholders are disappointed. Because objectives weren't aligned upfront, different people evaluate the same event against different criteria. The event "succeeds" for some and "fails" for others, depending on unstated expectations.

Learning doesn't happen. Without clear success criteria and post-event analysis, there's no way to know what worked. The next event starts from scratch rather than building on what came before.

Events become vulnerable. When budgets tighten, events are often first to be cut, and it’s precisely because their value hasn't been demonstrated. Strategic purchasing protects events by making their contribution visible.

The Question Before the Brief

Here's a simple shift in mindset that can make a difference: ask the strategic questions before the brief goes to the agency or the internal team.

Not "We need a customer conference in October, can you find us a venue?"

But "We're trying to deepen relationships with our top 50 customers and identify three expansion opportunities. We think an event might be the right format. What would that look like? How would we know if it worked?"

The second version changes everything. because it puts objectives at the centre. It invites strategic thinking rather than just execution, and that creates a framework for evaluation.

Agencies and internal teams can work with either brief, but the outcomes will be very different. Good agencies will do their best to guide companies on this and should not agree to begin the event planning and/or sourcing process until there is clarity. These questions are also important for the venues and that means the agency has a reputation to protect and manage with their venue partners. Everyone is invested and if one party doesn’t take it seriously and/or fully understand the brief, then it’s a recipe for disaster.

Where This Leaves Us

I'm not suggesting that every corporate event needs a six-month strategic planning process. Sometimes you need a venue for a meeting next month, and logistics are the priority.

But for significant events and training programmes — where real budget is consumed and expectations are real — the strategic questions matter.

Are you purchasing events, or are you just booking them?

The answer might explain why some events feel like investments and others feel like expenses.

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Alan Newton spent 14 years managing £70M-£250M in annual meetings, events, and hospitality spend for corporate clients across pharma, finance, automotive, and professional services. He advises companies on strategic event purchasing and programme design.