Your CMO wants strategy. Your trade show is in three weeks. Your team just lost a headcount. Sound familiar?

Ashley Keating runs the entire events and field marketing function at CallMiner: trade shows across the US, Canada, UK, and now Central Europe after a 2025 acquisition, plus webinars, field accelerators, and a newly expanded multi-city customer conference.

All of it with a team of three.

In this episode, she gets specific about the tension most senior event marketers live in daily: expected to think at the CMO level, but still deep in execution. She and Matt talk about how that reality shapes everything—who you hire, how you measure success, and how you keep your seat at the table when budgets are scrutinized.

Learn:

✅ What "agile" actually means when hiring for a lean events team and why traditional event experience can work against you

✅ The field accelerator model: how Ashley uses intimate, targeted micro-events to move key accounts and protect her budget

✅ Why strict pre- and post-event process is the only thing standing between your program and a budget cut

Stop running events. Start running outcomes.

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Connect with Ashley Keating
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/akeating7/

Connect with Matt Kleinrock
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-kleinrock-9613b22b/

Company: https://rockwayexhibits.com/

🚨 Register for the show: https://tinyurl.com/EventMarketingRedefined

Most event marketers know when a stakeholder's direction is off. Few have the line that turns that instinct into influence.

In this episode:

✅ The strategy session Felicia interrupted to ask one question, and how it reshaped the entire agenda

✅ A hard number versus a changed conversation, and why she'll defend the second one to a room full of CFOs

✅ Her exact sentence for challenging stakeholder direction without starting a fight

Felicia Kaban, Director of Event Experience & Production at Kenvue, spent years going along with stakeholder direction even when her instincts said no. That changed once she started asking a harder question in planning meetings: what are we actually trying to change?

She tells Matt about the leadership strategy session that forced that shift, why she measures event ROI in decision speed instead of dashboard metrics, and the specific line she now hands to event professionals who want to move from stakeholder alignment as a checkbox to stakeholder alignment as a strategy.

Tune in if your next planning meeting needs fewer order-takers and more advisors.

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Connect with Felicia Kaban
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/feliciakaban/

Connect with Matt Kleinrock
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-kleinrock-9613b22b/
Company: https://rockwayexhibits.com/

🚨 Register for the show: https://eventmarketingredefined.com

Your event wasn't the problem.

Ask any event marketer to be honest, and they'll tell you exactly how they'd build a stronger show if they had the budget, the runway, and the right people in the room saying yes at the right time.

But shrinking resources, last minute executive pivots, and stakeholders who show up late with big opinions are quietly wrecking programs that were never broken to begin with.

This conversation echoes what senior leaders spent two days saying out loud at Event Marketing Congress 2026.

In this episode, Matt Kleinrock and Coty Adams get honest about:

✅ Why leadership keeps chasing the shiny object instead of sticking to a plan

✅ The sales and marketing gap nobody wants to name out loud

✅ Who actually owns event decisions and why the answer is usually nobody

It's the conversation event marketers wish they could have with their own leadership team.

Tune in live August 5 at 1 PM ET. Bring your own war stories, we're reading comments live.

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Connect With Us

Matt Kleinrock: https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-kleinrock-9613b22b/

Coty Adams: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cotykadams/

Our Company: https://rockwayexhibits.com/

🚨 Register for the show here: https://tinyurl.com/EventMarketingRedefined