Smaller, intimate formats are earning a real place in B2B event programs. Here is how teams are making them work.

In this Huddl with Zuddl session, Stephanie Christensen, Head of Brand, Events, and Community at Zuddl, sits down with Ashley Keating, Head of Global Events and Field Marketing at CallMiner, to talk through the real work of building a smaller, more intentional event program alongside a larger one.

Here is a quick look at what they cover.

Why teams are adding smaller formats

The signal first showed up in attendee feedback. Ashley kept hearing the same frustrations: packed agendas, back-to-back sessions, conversations that ended before they had somewhere to go.

It was consistent enough to reshape CallMiner's entire approach, evolving their key event series from two large annual gatherings into four focused events across the globe.

The attendee asking for more networking time, Ashley found, is not asking for less content. They are asking for enough space to finish a conversation.

Designing for the room, not the agenda

Smaller does not mean settling for less, and Ashley's program is a good example of that. The session covers how CallMiner built single-track programming, vertical breakouts, and demo stations modeled on the Apple Genius Bar, each designed so attendees move at their own pace.

When people can choose where to go and when, they leave having done what they actually came to do. That is harder to manufacture in a multi-track event with just 5–10 minutes between sessions.

Who to invite, and why it matters

For Ashley, the mix in the room should be deliberate: customers, partners, and high-intent prospects together.

Her reasoning is straightforward: happy customers are your most credible voice in the room, and strained relationships are better addressed in person than at renewal time. A prospect hearing directly from a customer in their own vertical carries more weight than any stage presentation.

Alignment before anything goes public

Ashley shares a key lesson from a time when limited exec buy-in created visible doubt at the leadership level, and what that cost the team downstream.

The approach she now builds around is to align the CMO, CRO, Customer Success, and CEO before anything goes public. When the full go-to-market team carries the same message, the strategy holds. When they do not, the gaps show quickly.

Measuring what actually moves

Lead volume, Ashley argues, is not the ideal metric for intimate events. She makes the case for tracking funnel progression across separate dashboards by event type, and explains why pipeline influence tells a more honest story than top-of-funnel counts.

The real return on a roundtable dinner, in her view, is a follow-up scheduled before the evening ends, a pain point noted and acted on, a relationship that moves something already in the funnel a step closer to closed.

While large events cast a wide net, smaller ones go deeper with the people who matter most. Watch the complete session for more insights.