Situation
The company committed to NVIDIA GTC 2026 with booth #4017, an LED truck activation, and a $175K compute-credit raffle prize. Event scope spanned booth ops and team logistics, pre-event prospect outreach, on-floor lead capture with attendee qualification, raffle and legal compliance, post-event measurement and follow-up. No existing playbook for event ops at this scale.
Mandate
Own the event end-to-end as the cross-functional coordinator. Build the operating apparatus that turns an expensive event into a measurable pipeline lever.
Approach
- Build the operating apparatus first (tracker, KPIs, lead capture flow), then layer the activation specifics on top.
- Design every artifact for reuse, so the next event runs on the same infrastructure.
- Instrument for measurement up front, so the team would know during and after the event whether it worked.
What I built and ran
- GTC prep tracker in Notion: team roles, booth logistics, LED truck coordination, pre-event content calendar, owner per workstream.
- 10-KPI measurement framework spanning pre-event, at-event, and post-event — published as both xlsx and Notion-friendly markdown. Defines what success looks like before the event so the team has a shared scoring rubric.
- Raffle structure: form fields, terms and eligibility logic, $175K total compute-credits prize structure with clear governance.
- RainFocus lead-capture flow with closing qualifying questions branched by attendee type — End Users, Partners, CSPs, Competitors, Other. Each branch optimized for what we'd need to know to follow up well.
- Booth slideshow: 11 dark-themed slides built in Keynote, exported PPTX → MP4 for the booth screens, with the company logo processed to white-transparent.
- Team comms for remote support during GTC: drafted in three tonal variants so the on-floor team had clear messaging guidance from anyone supporting off-floor.
Outcomes
- Event executed with the full measurement apparatus running from the start.
- Lead capture yielded segmented, qualified data — captured End Users, Partners, and CSPs as distinct buckets, each scored for follow-up priority.
- Operating apparatus is reusable: tracker, KPI framework, raffle template, lead-capture flow, and comms templates all become first-class artifacts for the next event.
Why it matters
Trade shows, customer summits, and major sponsor events are often run as one-off projects with little measurement and a lot of post-hoc rationalization. With the operating apparatus in place — tracker, KPIs, lead capture flow, comms — each event compounds on the last and the team can answer "did that event work?" The same approach applies to any company with events on the calendar: B2B SaaS user conferences, manufacturing trade shows, consulting client summits, channel partner events.