In-person events are back — here are 4 steps to improve the planning process
This blog is based on an article that was originally published in SUCCESS. It has been updated for 2025 and beyond
Large-scale events like sales kickoffs and leadership summits have long been a staple of business strategy. They’ve served as annual milestones—moments to align, inspire, and energize teams around the path forward.
But in today’s environment, their role has become even more vital. As organizations navigate dispersed teams, shifting strategies, and relentless change, these events are no longer just ceremonial—they’re one of the few chances to create clarity, connection, and culture at scale.
How you bring people together is now just as important as why.
Virtual fatigue, rising costs, evolving team structures, and hybrid expectations have transformed event planning from routine to strategic. The most effective companies are moving beyond default formats and asking: What does this moment demand—and how do we design for it?
There’s no one-size-fits-all anymore. The best events flex—tailored to your business, your people, and the outcomes that matter most.
So is there a gold standard? In-person still delivers unmatched energy and connection—but in 2025, the smartest strategies are context-driven.
- In-person builds energy you can feel. It’s unmatched for connection, culture, and rallying teams around big shifts.
- Hybrid expands reach. It connects distributed teams while maintaining presence and participation.
- Virtual is fast, inclusive, and cost-effective—perfect when timing or accessibility is the priority.
- Hyper-local brings people together in smaller, regional gatherings—minimizing travel while maximizing face time and relevance for specific markets or teams.
The question isn’t which format is best—it’s what does this moment call for?
This updated post explores how to design high-impact events—tailored to your context, your people, and your goals.
Let’s dive in.
Set the tone—and build something that lasts
It’s not just the format that’s shifting. Structure, length, content, and tone are evolving too—which creates a powerful opportunity for leaders to shape more meaningful, memorable experiences.
To make these moments count, it helps to pause and consider:
- What do you want this experience to be remembered for?
- How do you want people to connect with it—and with each other?
- What kind of follow-through do you want to inspire?
Approaching event planning through this lens turns it from a one-off activation into a long-term investment. As a leader, you don’t have to manage every detail—but you do need to set the tone. When your vision is clear, your team can build something truly intentional.
Here are four strategies to help you get there:
1. Empower teams to make the right decisions.
Many meetings are unproductive or a waste of time, and meetings involving event coordination may become nothing more than project updates. Though these aren’t without merit to gauge progress, it shouldn’t be the sole focus. For execution teams to act on the right decisions around every detail, the meeting agenda should also touch on the vision, benchmarks, next steps and any obstacles that might require additional support, among other topics. And it should do so at a cadence that makes sense for you, the team and the event itself.Perhaps all that’s necessary is to meet once a month until the event date closes in. Maybe every two weeks is a better option. Information is power, as they say, and you can empower your team to take initiative on their own. Research has shown that empowering team members may lead to innovative behavior and improved work performance, among other benefits. This potential boost to innovative, proactive and knowledge-sharing behaviors may be especially useful when it comes to the team developing innovative ideas and the wherewithal to put those ideas into action. Engage all team members early in the planning process. Provide them with the freedom necessary to make decisions on their own so that when things deviate from the plan, they can adjust accordingly instead of being left unsure of the next steps.
2. Find a balance between internal vision and external engagement.
You’re essentially building a legacy for how you want to be remembered. This can have a sizable impact on not only creating a memorable and lasting experience for your audience, but encouraging them to return year after year.Just look at the Consumer Technology Association’s CES® event, which claims to be “the most influential tech event in the world.” At this year’s event, CES welcomed nearly 120,000 attendees from around the world and offered massive visibility (print and social media) to its exhibitors and presenters. The planning and execution of this event, which showcases other companies’ solutions, requires months of vetting potential exhibits, working with venue and event teams and organizing high-profile keynotes.While staying true to your vision is critical, make sure that you don’t lose sight of the customer in the process. Get boots on the ground and make a habit out of listening, relaying what’s learned and even following up with customers. Then, it’s just a matter of striking a balance between your vision for the event and what the audience is saying. It’s important not to go too broad or too narrow when homing in on your audience and vision; it’s more about finding something in between that speaks to what’s really going on in the business and what attendees want in an event.
3. Create a purposeful, intentional atmosphere for meetings.
All discussions should be connected to the company strategy—“connected” being the operative word here. Think about the purpose and desired outcome. What conversations do you need to initiate? What is the red thread or throughline for everything you’re doing at the event?Without that connection, the focus can shift away from the strategy. Our company uses a pyramid diagram to divide ideas into sections and organize the meeting structure to ensure all discussions are intentional and purposeful.At a recent sales kickoff for a large client, we ensured the client’s new methodology and customers were at the core of every design element. Everything from the digital solution to the scenarios that participants engaged in to how facilitators led debrief conversations was designed to reinforce the new methodology and drive the effectiveness of a cross-functional team in service of customers. As a result of that intentionality, the client saw a 54% uplift in their pipeline coming out of the event and a 40% adoption growth of a newly introduced scorecard for account executives.
4. Reflect on operational successes and failures.
You may not think of reflection as a competency, but research shows that such a habit can be the differentiator between extraordinary and mediocre workplace performance and engagement, and it may serve to benefit your team as well. As such, make after-event discussions more than just debriefing sessions. Did the experience lead to the desired outcomes? Were there any unanticipated outcomes? More importantly, how do you plan to track results over the next few weeks or months?Our company worked with one client who was exceptional at this process. Naturally, the event’s theme fed into the experience from start to finish, and the outcomes were as expected. But instead of checking off that box and returning to business as usual, the client took reflected on the outcomes. They found ways to incorporate that specific experience into their organization so they didn’t lose any traction made with the target audience.
Thinking more strategically about how to execute an event and incorporating these event planning tips will put you a step ahead of the competition. It will also help you create an experience that’s both memorable and a critical part of establishing a legacy for you and your company.
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There’s a specific kind of strategy meeting getting scheduled right now, in nice hotels with bad coffee: the AI reset off-site.
And for good reason. In a 2026 WRITER survey, 48% of leaders described their AI rollout as, in their own words, a "massive disappointment." That's nearly half the room.
What that number really measures is the distance between what these tools can do and what people are doing with them. In our experience, that distance is almost entirely human.
Which is why the off-site is the right instinct. Making the most of that time is the harder part.
What separates an AI reset that actually changes the game from an expensive two-day conversation? In our experience, it comes down to avoiding four common design mistakes.
Mistake 1
Blaming the bots
The gap between AI investment and real adoption is almost always about people, not technology. And when adoption stalls, we usually find it's one of four things.
- They don't think it will help them
- Nobody around them is using it
- They don't feel capable
- Or they don't have real access to the tools they were promised
Four different problems, and four completely different fixes.
That's why diagnosis comes first. If you don't know which barrier you're dealing with, every intervention becomes an educated guess. And you cannot tell which one you have by staring at a dashboard. A belief gap and a skill gap look identical in a status report and need opposite interventions. Show up guessing, and you'll spend real money teaching people to use a tool they simply don't trust yet. Congratulations - you've just catered the wrong conversation.
Mistake 2
Letting leaders off the hook
One of the biggest predictors of whether change sticks is also one of the most overlooked: leadership.
If your executives show up as observers, nodding along and quietly answering email under the table, your people clock it in about four minutes.
That doesn't mean your CEO has to emcee the thing. It means they use the tools in front of everyone, participate in the conversation, and make it clear this isn't someone else's initiative.
Recently we’ve been working with a Fortune 200 global professional services firm who’s top 120 leaders were at very different points with AI. Some were redesigning entire processes. Others were using it to summarize emails, or not at all. Rather than focus on the technology, the four-hour session focused on what leaders could do with AI, applying it to a live strategic challenge and ending with a personal commitment to lead differently. The response was strong enough that the organization is now cascading the experience globally.
The lesson is simple: when leaders experience AI as a strategic capability, they're better equipped to model the behavior that makes adoption stick. Nothing you build during those two days survives without that entire chain of leadership doing its part.
Mistake 3
Chasing the wrong outcome
Without a behavioral baseline, you have no way to prove anything actually moved. No baseline, no ROI. You're just hoping the energy in the room was good, which is a wonderful feeling and a terrible metric to bring to your CFO.
But the baseline isn't just about proving the off-site worked. It's about understanding where you're starting in the first place. And you'll want that clarity, because the quiet resistance is real. In that same 2026 research, nearly a third of employees admitted to actively working around their company's AI strategy. If you don't win their belief in the room, some of them will keep politely ignoring the whole thing from their desks. You can't measure your way out of that. You have to earn your way out of it.
Which brings us to the biggest reframe of all.
Mistake 4
Leaving follow-through to chance
We've been working with a Fortune 100 medical device company on their AI strategy for three years. It started with their leadership team, a three-hour session built around what those leaders would do differently, and it landed. What became clear afterward was that the same experience needed to happen everywhere else. So, it expanded: 90-minute activations for 15,000 people, and this year intact teams redesigning their own workflows.
Three years in, that first session is the smallest part of the story.
Your event is where momentum gets created. What happens at 30, 60, and 90 days is where results get made.
If you're planning one of these and want to change what happens on Monday, not just how everyone feels on Friday, that the work we do.
We'd be glad to help you design it.
Candidates now arrive at interviews pre-coached by AI, with their resumes optimized to pass every checkpoint. Polish has stopped being a signal. The traditional hiring process was built to read exactly the cues that AI is now best at producing, and the signals hiring managers once relied on have weakened as a result. And for roles where the wrong hire carries real business consequences, losing the ability to tell who will actually perform is not a minor inconvenience. It is a material risk, and it exposes the business to unnecessary turnover, reduced performance, and heavier investment for talent growth and development.
So how do you observe the behaviors that matter most, before someone is in the role?
Not by asking better questions, but rather by putting candidates in situations designed to elicit that behavior.
The limits of predicting from paper
Credentials tell you what someone has done. Structured interviews tell you what someone says they would do. Neither lets you observe what they actually do in the moments that count.
This distinction matters most in client-facing, relationship-driven roles, where the performance gap between a strong hire and a weak one plays out in real business outcomes (revenue, retention, client growth). Organizations that hire at scale in these roles carry that gap across hundreds of decisions at a time.
The better approach is to watch candidates do the work before you hire them. Put them in simulated, role-relevant scenarios, and pair the simulation with a second, different kind of measure so no single method carries the whole decision. That combination is what lets you evaluate real performance before anyone is in the role. Organization-specific simulations provide a clear read on who is ready and capable of performing on day one. In a world of AI-supported candidate signals, the use of simulations makes the process harder to prep for. It is harder to fake. And, when designed well, it is substantially more predictive than other hiring methods.
What counts as evidence
Claims about predictive power are easy to make. Evidence for them is rarer than you would expect.
A predictive validity study, the kind that links pre-hire assessment scores to how someone actually performs once hired, is some of the hardest evidence to produce and the rarest to see. Many assessments are validated against proxies: another test, or a theoretical model of the role, rather than real results on the job. Connecting scores to concrete business outcomes and doing the statistical work to show the link holds, takes years of shared data and a level of commitment from both the assessment provider and the client that most partnerships never reach. That is precisely why it is worth asking for. A provider who can show how assessment scores track to training completion, retention, and first-year output is offering something categorically different from one who can only show a correlation with another test.
Why simulation holds up where other methods do not
When a candidate sits across from a trained assessor (someone playing the client or prospect on the other side of the conversation) and has to work through a real situation, they cannot rely on a rehearsed answer. The scenario is specific. The stakes feel real. What you see is close to what you would get on the job.
That is the value of simulation-based assessment: it does not test what candidates know about the role.
It shows how they use what they know when a real person is on the other side of the conversation, before the stakes are real.
For roles that carry significant business responsibility, this distinction is the whole game. The cost of the wrong hire in a high-stakes client-facing role is not just a missed quota for a quarter - It plays out in relationships that do not develop, clients who leave, and productivity losses that compound over time. Getting those hiring decisions right, at scale, with consistency, requires methods that are built for predictive accuracy, not just candidate experience or hiring speed.
What this means for how organizations think about hiring
Most organizations are still optimizing the wrong things in their hiring process. They invest heavily in employer branding, application flow, and interview structure, all of which matter, but less in the core question: does our hiring process actually predict who will succeed in this role?
AI has sharpened the stakes here. If every candidate can present as polished and prepared, screening based on presentation becomes less useful. What holds up is direct observation of the behaviors that the job requires.
A few principles worth building from:
- Measure what the job requires, not what is easy to measure. Cognitive tests and personality questionnaires have their place, but they do not look much like the job. The closer the assessment is to the actual work, the better it predicts performance in it.
- Ask what your assessment predicts. Training completion? Retention? First-year output? Most organizations cannot answer that question today, largely because providers have rarely been asked to prove it. It is a fair thing to ask for.
- Take the human element seriously. In a simulation, a candidate is having a real conversation, responding in real time, navigating a situation that requires judgment. Even with the help of AI, that is hard to game. And it remains one of the strongest predictors of on-the-job performance available.
The data exists to make hiring decisions more accurate, fairer, and more directly tied to business outcomes. For organizations operating in high-stakes roles at scale, there is too much on the line to rely on methods that cannot hold up to that standard.
You may be interested in BTS’ thought leadership in the five talent shifts AI is forcing now.
La IA ya forma parte del día a día de las ventas. Hoy cualquier asesor puede llegar a una reunión con datos, tendencias e insights generados en segundos. Sin embargo, disponer de más información no garantiza conversaciones de mayor valor.
A través de una experiencia real con un consultor comercial, este artículo explica por qué la inteligencia artificial funciona como un GPS: ayuda a interpretar el entorno, pero no conduce la conversación ni entiende las prioridades del cliente.
En este artículo descubrirás:
- Por qué el acceso a la información ya no supone una ventaja competitiva.
- La importancia del business acumen para interpretar los datos con criterio.
- Cómo hablar el lenguaje del cliente genera credibilidad y diferenciación.
- Por qué las relaciones B2B evolucionan hacia relaciones P2P basadas en la confianza.
- Qué capacidades consultivas seguirán siendo exclusivamente humanas incluso en la era de la IA.
La tecnología seguirá evolucionando, pero la ventaja competitiva estará en quienes sean capaces de combinar inteligencia artificial con conversaciones centradas en el cliente, pensamiento estratégico y relaciones de largo plazo.