Entering a new market means identifying the people that matter, making your story relevant to that market and building awareness. It means earning trust, keeping every member of the buying committee engaged through channels that work together, and equipping sales to convert the way that market buys. The goal is a pipeline you can count on, properly resourced and sustained for as long as that market takes to decide. Expecting a series of trade shows to do that work instead is unrealistic. However well run, shows can accelerate a market entry, but they cannot carry one.
That said, events still command the largest single share of offline marketing spend. Gartner's 2025 CMO Spend Survey put them at 19.3 per cent of offline budgets, ahead of sponsorships and linear television. Yet in a September 2026 Outcomes Rocket survey of 841 B2B marketing and sales professionals, 68.9 per cent admitted the event ROI they had reported to leadership was not fully trustworthy.
The reason is rarely the events themselves.
In our experience at Accelerato, the events list more often than not becomes the de facto go-to-market plan in regional launches and scale-ups. It is asked to do what only a strategy can, and when the pipeline fails to materialise, the blame usually lands on the market, the market conditions or the sales team, rather than on the approach. The list is usually assembled from the shows the regional sellers attended in previous roles, or from a US headquarters view of the region's largest and best-known events. Because no strategy sits behind the list, nothing defines what each show is meant to achieve.
Under-resourcing compounds the damage. In a market being entered for the first time, a thin stand, a single seller flown in for the week and no local-language material can do more harm than not attending at all, because buyers read the presence as a measure of the company's commitment to their market. If the aim is market entry, that needs a strategy of its own, with the budget and the people to match.
At Sumo Logic, Paul Wilcox, then Vice President and General Manager Asia Pacific, described the APAC programme before Accelerato's involvement: 'Previously everything was very eclectic. We would assume it was a good idea to do events, or a good idea to do digital marketing. We were reacting and responding, not planning and strategising.' What changed was the existence of an overarching plan, and the discipline to stay on it rather than chase what looked like market dynamics but were, in his words, just moments in time. 'Accelerato brought the different components of lead generation and business building and marketing together,' he said. 'Suddenly marketing was all working in sync, integrating together seamlessly, instead of operating like separate and siloed initiatives.'
Even well-run events cannot replace a strategy
Suppose every execution problem has been solved. The stand is staffed by people who speak the market's language, meetings with target accounts are booked in advance, and the follow-up is localised and lawful. The event is still a single moment in a buying process that does not happen at events. Gartner's research on the B2B buying journey found that buyers spend only 17 per cent of their purchase time meeting potential suppliers, which leaves each of three competing vendors with roughly 5 per cent. A well-run show captures a fraction of that fraction, usually with one or two members of a buying group whose other members were never in the hall.
Everything that turns that moment into revenue happens before and after it. In trust-heavy markets such as Japan and DACH, confidence is built over months: strategic intelligence consultant Richard Mort puts the Japanese sales cycle at six to nine months. Across that period something has to carry the conversation with the whole buying group, from one event to the next. Without that work, each event starts over with cold conversations, and the follow-up falls flat. Forrester found that fewer than 1 per cent of leads ever reach closed-won. Leads on their own are not pipeline; it takes a strategy, connecting each touchpoint to the next, to carry a buying group from first conversation to signature.
The problem is real and more common than not. Dan Ross, who led Optimizely's launch in the region, recalled: 'We weren't joining the dots, and we had a lot of false starts. But with Audrey, we were able to pull together a cohesive message.' Wouter Koch, former head of Asia Pacific for SurveyMonkey, was blunter about the content that surrounded his team's activity: 'We literally copy-paste corporate content into our regional communications. That didn't work.' An event can only carry the narrative the company brings to it. If that narrative was built for a completely different market, it will fall flat: an expensive failure at the very moment the company is making its first impression.
Reframing the role of events through a market-specific lens
The US events playbook rests on unspoken assumptions: that delegates will walk up to a stand, that a scanned badge signals interest, that a fast SDR sequence converts that interest into a meeting, and that the person in the meeting can move the deal. Each of those assumptions comes from US buying culture, and each breaks somewhere along the way in EMEA and APAC.
| US default | Japan | DACH | |
|---|---|---|---|
| How delegates engage on the floor | Walk-up traffic; delegates approach stands readily | Visitors hesitate to approach a stand whose staff are on laptops or phones, talking among themselves or eating; organisers advise staff to stand and open the conversation | Trade visitors arrive with agendas; AUMA found 45% plan further appointments around their visit |
| What a scan or a card means | A lead, often scored as an MQL on the spot | An exchange of meishi is a formal introduction and courtesy, not a statement of commercial interest | Contact data passes to the exhibitor only with the visitor's consent at the scan |
| How the decision travels | A champion with budget can move quickly | Nemawashi builds informal consensus before ringi circulates a formal proposal for sign-off | Larger, trust-heavy buying committees expect technical depth and proof |
| What follow-up has to look like | Automated sequence within days | In Japanese, referencing the actual conversation, ideally in person while the contact is fresh | Lawful basis first: email advertising needs prior express consent under the UWG, typically evidenced by double opt-in |
As a measure of success, badge scans rarely work outside the US, because the person being scanned does not read the scan the way the person scanning does. What follows is familiar. The standard US demo runs on a loop, a seller or two scan passers-by, and the stand builds little awareness, creates little trust, reaches few of the people that matter and leaves little pipeline to show for any of it.
Where an event does earn its place, we recommend running it as a local channel with its own rules: staffed by people who can hold the conversation in the market's language and conventions, with an agreed definition of what a qualified interaction means in that market, reported on accounts engaged and opportunities advanced, and with the follow-up designed before the show opens.
The difference between an event and a GTM strategy
A market entry strategy is the thing an events list can never be: a deliberate account of who the company must reach in that market, what it will say to them, and how every channel, events included, moves them towards a decision. At minimum it settles six things before the first stand is booked:
The buyer matrix. The priority segments, accounts, roles and buying committees for each market, distilled into a target list that every activity is measured against.
A narrative built for the market. Positioning and proof that make sense to buyers in that market, not a translation of the HQ deck.
The channel and partner mix. Digital demand, content, outbound, partner marketing and events, each with a defined job and a defined handoff to the next. In partner-led markets such as Japan, the partners' relationships may matter more than any show.
Sales enablement for how the market decides. Material, proposals and talk tracks shaped to the local buying process, so that a conversation started at an event can be carried through to a signature.
A pipeline model, budget and resourcing plan. What each channel is expected to contribute, what it will cost, and whether the team can show up properly wherever it chooses to appear.
Measures that fit the market. Leading indicators (target accounts engaged, buying-group coverage, opportunities created and advanced) tracked at the level of the plan, over a window that reflects how long decisions take there.
Events live inside the third item and should be judged by how far they move target accounts along, and they work because the other five are in place.
For this reason, we always advise that events sit within the market-specific go-to-market strategy as one line item among many, never in place of it.
Sumo Logic made exactly that shift in APAC, moving from a reactive mix of events and digital activity to a single regional plan. Paul Wilcox described the effect on marketing ROI as exponential: 'If we were getting 20 per cent value from our spend before, it feels like 100 per cent now.' The Sumo Logic APAC case study shows how.
Partnership Fuels Global Growth
Markets evolve. Buyer behaviour shifts. What drives lasting success in a new region is a plan built for the market in front of you, one that respects how that market buys, builds trust and decides. The most successful SaaS companies don’t simply turn up at the region’s biggest shows. They learn, localise and listen, and they give every event a clear job within that plan.
At Accelerato, we help SaaS leaders do exactly that. If you’re ready to turn an events calendar into real traction across EMEA and APAC, we’d love to partner with you.