Lodago

Trust isn't the deliverable. It's the vehicle. I was at a gathering recently, and a few people were talking about what tradeshows really do. The words that kept coming up were relationships, trust, connection, building something real with people. All true. I don't disagree with any of it. But something was missing from the conversation and nobody seemed to notice. Not one person said revenue. Not one person said pipeline. Not one person connected all that trust back to why the company is actually spending the money. So I said it. I said look, the company isn't sending us to build friendships. It's sending us to create customers. Trust and relationships are how we do that, but they're not the end goal. And the room went quiet for a second. Not because it was controversial. Because it was obvious. The kind of obvious that gets forgotten when you spend too much time in the human side of events without tying it back to the business side. I think the industry has drifted a bit. We got so good at talking about connection and experience that we stopped finishing the sentence. This relationship led to XXXX. If you can't put a number at the end of that sentence, the impact stays invisible. And invisible impact is the first thing that gets cut. Trust is essential. I genuinely believe that. But it's the vehicle, not the destination.

Over the past months, I used to use AI a lot, maybe too much. For personal life more than any other topic. Asking questions, analyzing doubts, sometimes even seeking guidance when discomfort was too strong. Yesterday, I realised an important thing, AI is taking away from me what makes me a human being, my contribution to the world with my flows and my errors. I always try to do good and question a lot my intentions and the impacts of my deeds, but what I realised yesterday more than ever, life’s mechanic is beyond what i call good or bad. We have all heard about Ying and Yang. This is the nature of life. I will not stop using AI, but I will stop rushing to it whenever I have doubts or a questions. I will allow myself to be a human, i will impact others with whatever I have within and let life follow its course. While writing this post, I had to resist the urge to ask ChatGPT and I didn’t. Wish you a great weekend :)

No tool will save you if your sales team won't log. I just spoke with a fast-growing startup. Smart leadership. They know exactly what's broken. They can't track what comes out of their events. Pipeline disappears between the booth conversation and the CRM. But here's the thing, they know this. The blocker isn't the tool. It's that sales won't adopt the process and management gave up pushing. I'll be honest this hits close to home. Building Lodago, we see the same pattern from the inside. If you're not the person with authority over sales, you're stuck. You can build the workflow. You can make it easy. You can show the ROI. But if nobody enforces it, you're decorating a process that doesn't exist. That's the part nobody talks about. Companies keep buying tools to solve what is actually an authority problem. The CRM isn't broken. The integration isn't broken. The chain of command is broken.

The event industry didn't just grow back after COVID. It grew up. Most teams didn't. I've spoken with thousands of event managers over the last few years, and the shift is real. We went from "let's go to events because we can" to "we need to justify why we're here, what it costs, and what it returns." And here's the thing most people misread, CROs and CFOs aren't trying to kill your event budget. They want to know where it goes. They want to understand what comes back. That's a reasonable ask. But a lot of the people accountable for events still can't answer that question. And I don't just mean event managers. I mean CMOs, VPs of Marketing, revenue leaders the people whose names are next to the budget line. I saw this clearly during an onboarding recently. Almost 10 people on the call. Each one viewing events from their own angle, logistics, leads, content, budget, partnerships. All valid perspectives. But nobody could connect the dots. Nobody could link the effort to the revenue. Not because they weren't smart. Because nobody had built that bridge before. And that's the part that concerns me. The industry got more crowded, more expensive, and much more demanding. But the way most teams think about events didn't evolve with it. So the real question isn't whether events work. It's whether the people accountable for them can prove it. And if they can't what happens next?

One of the most underestimated benefits of tradeshows is the amount of customer feedback you get on your product. Most of the companies we meet use tradeshows to showcase their newest features, sometimes even products that are not yet fully released. In a few days, they collect dozens, sometimes hundreds of reactions, comments, objections, and questions. I watched this happen with a billion-dollar company over a 4-day show. Hundreds of conversations. Real reactions to real features. The kind of insight you can't get from a survey. But almost none of it made it back in a structured way. The feedback ended up scattered across notes, CRM entries, personal messages, Slack threads, and follow-up emails. Each piece exists, but nothing is really consolidated. And here's the part that doesn't get talked about enough. Sales is usually the entry point for this feedback. They hear it first. But if Product doesn't get involved to implement what's being said, and Marketing doesn't get involved to realign messaging where it's not landin, the feedback dies in the handoff. It's not that companies lack feedback. It's that the cross-team loop after the show doesn't exist. And what should have been one of the richest sources of product insight simply fades away. I keep wondering is this actually a tools problem? Because the tools exist. What's usually missing is the post-show process that connects the right teams to the right insights. Or maybe it's a people problem disguised as a tools problem.

Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it. These words are not mine. They come from The Qualified Sales Leader book and this week I saw exactly what happens when that measurement doesn’t exist. I spoke with several companies preparing for major tradeshows. They all have Salesforce. They all have Marketo. The tools are there but when I asked how a booth conversation actually becomes pipeline nobody had a clear answer. Demo notes lost in someone’s phone. Lead data in one tool, follow-up sequences in another. Nothing wired together. Building Lodago, I keep seeing this pattern. It’s not that companies don’t measure events. It’s that nobody owns the translation layer the part where a real conversation with a real prospect turns into something Sales can actually act on. The data isn’t missing. It’s dying in the handoff. The tools exist. But without a clear system connecting booth to CRM to follow-up, pipeline just quietly disappears.

I met an event manager recently from a company that had raised a lot of money. They were preparing for a major tradeshow. Extra meeting rooms. Hospitality space. More floor than they needed. Why? Because the budget was there. When funding comes in, there's pressure to spend on marketing. Events get a big check. But nobody stops to ask what exactly are we trying to achieve here. Nobody sat down before the event and said here's what success looks like, here's how we'll measure it. They just booked everything because they could. And even if someone wanted to prove the impact afterwards, good luck. The registration data is in one tool, the lead scans in another, the meetings in a third, the CRM somewhere else. You're pulling from five or six platforms just to answer one question. Other channels got infrastructure before they got budget. Events got budget before they got infrastructure. When the CFO asks what did we get from that tradeshow and the answer takes two weeks to piece together events become the first line to cut. Not because they failed. Because nobody built the framework to prove they succeeded.

A lot of technical founders have what I call the engineer syndrome. I say this as someone who catches himself doing it too. Technical founders are often feature driven. Building is where they feel comfortable. It's much easier to write code than to confront the market. When something doesn't work, the reflex is often: "maybe we just need one more feature." AI is going to amplify this behavior massively. The power that AI gives today to build more and more every day will drown many founders. Instead of stopping and asking whether anyone actually needs this, whether customers would pay for it, whether it solves a painful enough problem they'll build the next feature. And then the next one. And the next one. I see this pattern everywhere. In SaaS. In event tech. Vendors shipping feature after feature that nobody asked for, while ignoring the one thing their users are actually struggling with. But in the AI era, building is not the hard part anymore. Understanding the market is. AI will reward founders who can ship fast and validate fast. Not the ones who just build endlessly. Business oriented founders technical or not will have a huge advantage. Because they'll use AI to test ideas faster, validate demand faster, and kill bad ideas faster. AI will not reward the founders who build the most. It will reward the founders who understand reality the fastest. At least, that's what I keep seeing.

C-level executives don’t buy software. They buy productivity but more importantly, clarity. In the tradeshow space, most tools focus on productivity: scheduling meetings, scanning leads, managing logistics. That’s where many event teams spend most of their time. But leadership looks for something else. They want clarity on one simple question: Was this event actually worth it? Did it generate pipeline? opportunities? more revenue? Sales used to rely on intuition too until tools like Gong brought clarity to sales conversations. Tradeshows are still stuck in that world of intuition. That’s the clarity companies are missing.