Spendflo’s Event Marketing Playbook: From Empty Dinners to Waitlists in 18 Months
Most B2B companies plan events backwards and wonder why the wrong people show up.
In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Siddharth Sridharan, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendflo, a SaaS spend management platform that’s raised $15.4 million, shared how his team transformed from hosting dinners where nobody showed up to running events with waitlists. The secret? Starting with your target account list, not the venue.
The Humbling Beginning
“The first version of this is me and Rajiv, like showing up to events and then hosting dinners ourselves with nobody showing up,” Siddharth recalls. “And now we have waitlist for our events.”
That journey from empty dinners to waitlists didn’t happen by accident. It came from systematically rebuilding their event strategy around a single insight: events should serve your account strategy, not the other way around.
Most B2B companies pick a venue, set a date, create a theme, and hope their ideal customers show up. Spendflo inverts this entirely.
Start with Your Account List
“First thing you need to do is have an account list of accounts that you think really matter to you and are your ideal customer profile,” Siddharth explains. “And you map them across different cities or countries, for example. And then you kind of map out your events for the quarter.”
This is the foundational shift. Pull your target account list. Filter by location. Identify which cities have enough concentration of your ideal customers to justify an event. Only then do you start planning.
This means some cities won’t get events. If you only have five target accounts in Austin, skip it. If you have fifty in San Francisco, that’s your highest-ROI location. The event exists to get face time with specific accounts.
The Partnership Strategy That Cuts Costs
Running high-quality events in multiple cities gets expensive fast. Spendflo solved this through strategic partnerships.
“We partner with a lot of communities, finance communities, procurement communities, as well as other SaaS companies that kind of sell to the same ICP,” Siddharth shares. “That’s to bring down the cost. You’re sharing the cost, but you’re also getting lead volumes from both ends.”
The key is finding partners who target the same buyer but aren’t competitive. Each partner brings their audience, splits the cost, and everyone benefits from cross-pollination.
Format Selection Isn’t Random
Event format must align with who you’re trying to reach. “Event format matters depending on, hey, do we want controllers to be there? We want vps of finance. Do you want business system leaders?” Siddharth asks. “Who is the Persona, what is exciting and what’s the most in demand thing?”
Last week in San Francisco, Spendflo hosted a pickleball event. “Pickleball is like the hottest thing ever right now,” Siddharth notes. Stay ahead of trends. If your target audience is talking about pickleball, host a pickleball event. The format can’t stay static—what works now might feel tired in three months.
The Executive Participation Requirement
Here’s where most B2B companies fail: they send junior team members to work the room. When a VP of Finance attends your event, they expect to meet your executives.
“Whoever is attending the event, either be your sales teams, your founders executives, and if their executives there, then you make sure that your executive team is also there,” Siddharth emphasizes. “That’s what it takes to build genuine relationships with these customers.”
This means serious travel commitment from founders and executives. This isn’t optional. Executive presence signals that these relationships matter to your company.
The Post-Event Orchestration
The event itself is just the beginning. “You need to make sure that your tag team with like an SDR who’s kind of like providing value to them, even post the event,” Siddharth shares. “Once they’re in your funnel.”
Every attendee from a target account gets assigned an SDR who provides ongoing value. “You can’t expect immediate ROI,” Siddharth cautions. “It’s long term, it’s relationship building.”
The SDR and Marketing Coordination
Getting target accounts to actually attend requires orchestration weeks before the event. “You need to make sure that your SDR team and your marketing team are driving signups to that event and creating that excitement for that event,” Siddharth emphasizes.
SDRs identify contacts at target accounts and nurture them specifically toward event attendance. Marketing creates excitement through targeted campaigns. The goal isn’t maximum attendance—it’s getting the right people from your account list into the room.
The Post-COVID Timing
When Rajiv and Divas joined from Freshworks with event marketing expertise, the timing was perfect. “As were coming out of COVID in 2022, people wanted to be in person,” Siddharth recalls. “They were craving some in person time to be social in late 2022 and early 2023 onwards.”
People were starved for face-to-face interaction, creating outsized returns for event marketing. While that specific advantage has normalized, the principle remains: events create relationship depth that digital channels can’t match.
The Eighteen-Month Evolution
From hosting dinners where nobody showed up to running events with waitlists took about eighteen months. Event marketing isn’t a quick win. It’s a long-term investment that compounds.
The first few events feel rough. Low attendance. Wrong mix of people. But each event teaches you something about what actually gets your ideal customers to show up. The sophisticated playbook emerges through iteration, not planning.
The Replicable System
Here’s the complete system:
- Start with your target account list, filtered by city
- Map quarterly events to cities with highest account concentration
- Partner with complementary brands to split costs
- Match format to target persona and current trends
- Ensure executive participation when executives are attending
- Orchestrate pre-event nurture through SDR and marketing
- Execute post-event follow-up with assigned SDRs
- Measure long-term relationship building, not immediate ROI
This system works because it’s built around serving your account strategy. Most B2B companies plan events backwards—they start with the venue and hope the right people show up. Spendflo starts with the people and builds everything else around getting those specific accounts in the room.
That’s why they went from empty dinners to waitlists. Not better venues or bigger budgets. Better strategy.