How Backtrack Helped Shepard Measure Event ROI Faster and More Efficiently

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Event: IMEX 2025 (International Meetings & Events Exhibition)

Spokesperson: Taylor Elliot, VP of Marketing

Testimonial: “Backtrack enables us to measure event ROI faster and more efficiently by giving us direct access to the conversations our sales team is having.”

— Taylor Elliot, VP of Marketing, Shepard

The Challenge

At IMEX 2025, Shepard’s team participated in dozens of high-value, fast-moving conversations with prospective clients. These discussions were critical to future revenue, but the insight inside them was traditionally difficult to capture consistently and analyze at scale.

From a marketing perspective, this created a familiar challenge: measuring event ROI quickly was difficult without direct visibility into what sales conversations actually covered.

From a sales perspective, reps were burdened with manual note-taking, keyword tracking, and post-meeting reconstruction — slowing follow-ups and increasing the risk of lost context.

Shepard needed a way to:

• Capture real conversations automatically
• Reduce manual post-meeting work for sales
• Give marketing direct access to conversation-level insight
• Understand opportunity quality and buyer readiness across the event

The Solution: Backtrack at IMEX 2025

Shepard deployed Backtrack across their IMEX 2025 meetings to automatically capture, summarize, and analyze conversations.

Across the event, Shepard had an average conversation length of 27 minutes, generating a meaningful dataset of real buyer interactions that would otherwise have lived in fragmented notes or memory.

Backtrack transformed these conversations into structured summaries, surfaced themes, and delivered a post-event Manager ROI Report that marketing and sales could review together.

What Backtrack Revealed

Buyer Readiness & Funnel Reality

Backtrack analysis showed that most conversations fell into Consideration to Late Consideration stages — with buyers actively evaluating options via RFPs, pilots, or internal comparisons, rather than early discovery.

Key signals included:

• Authority: Strong influencers typically led conversations, though final decision-makers were often part of committees
• Need: Clear pain points were present, but many opportunities remained exploratory
• Timeline: Few firm purchase dates were shared, with timing often tied to seasonal windows or RFP cycles

This gave Shepard a more accurate picture of pipeline maturity coming out of IMEX — helping marketing and sales align expectations and prioritize follow-up.

Results & Impact

Marketing Impact: Faster, Clearer ROI Measurement

With direct access to real sales conversations, marketing could quickly assess:

• What buyers cared about most
• Where interest was strongest
• Which themes repeated across meetings

Instead of relying on anecdotal feedback or delayed CRM updates, Shepard could measure event ROI faster and more efficiently, grounded in actual buyer language and intent.

Sales Impact: Smarter, Faster Follow-Up

For the sales team, Backtrack removed much of the manual burden associated with post-event work.

By automatically capturing notes, keywords, and executive-style summaries, reps were able to:

• Stay fully present in conversations
• Follow up faster and with more precision
• Reduce time spent reconstructing meetings

As Taylor noted, Backtrack helped the team work smarter and faster by removing manual friction without disrupting the flow of live conversations.

Execution & Coaching Insights

Backtrack’s reporting also surfaced actionable insights into meeting execution:

• Strong first impressions, with high warmth and rapport early in conversations
• Talk time skewed toward Shepard, signaling opportunity to deepen buyer-led discovery
• Next steps often implied rather than calendarized, creating follow-through risk

The takeaway was clear: trust and credibility were strong — structure and close discipline were the unlock. These insights gave Shepard concrete guidance for improving hosted-buyer outcomes at future events.

Why It Worked

A key differentiator for Shepard was Backtrack’s balance of automation and personalization.

Rather than replacing human interaction, Backtrack used AI to empower sales teams, removing manual work while preserving the authenticity and nuance of live event conversations.

Takeaway

By using Backtrack at IMEX 2025, Shepard:

• Gained visibility into real sales conversations
• Measured event ROI faster and with more confidence
• Reduced manual workload for sales
• Identified coaching and process improvements immediately
• Aligned marketing and sales around a shared source of truth

Instead of leaving IMEX with fragmented notes and assumptions, Shepard left with structured insight across every meeting — and a clearer path to improving future event performance.

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