AI made outreach so cheap it stopped being worth anything. Alex Reynolds thinks the last channel that still buys you trust is standing in a room with someone — and he has the data to argue it.

Alex is co-founder and CEO of Vendelux, the event intelligence platform tracking more than 250,000 B2B events and influencing north of $5 billion in event spend. Before that he spent a decade in strategic partnerships, then convinced Shutterstock's executive team to green-light a business nobody had asked for — an API partnerships unit called Platform Solutions that he built from an idea in 2017 into a global business unit. He left in 2021 to solve the problem he kept hitting from the inside: events were driving real pipeline and nobody could tell him which ones.

In this conversation with LeanScale co-founder Anthony Enrico, Alex takes apart how companies actually waste money on events — the $10 million booth with thirty reps on their phones, the 3x ROI bar most CMOs settle for, the badge-scan vanity metric, and the fact that half of all event tickets now get bought in the final two weeks. Then the harder argument underneath it: as AI avatars get good, proof of humanity becomes the thing you can only buy in person.

WHAT YOU'LL LEARN

Proof of humanity: why AI avatars make in-person the only channel that verifies you're real

CHAPTERS

00:00 — Cold open + intro

02:20 — The most common way companies waste money on events

04:03 — Why events are the final frontier of outbound

08:01 — The 10% rule — booth presence vs. a suite off-site

10:58 — 3x is a terrible bar. The best teams hit 18-20x

12:00 — Badge scans are a vanity metric — the 6-to-18 month window

13:59 — Events and retention: the renewal impact nobody gets credit for

17:53 — Half of all tickets sell in the last two weeks

26:28 — What good prep looks like: the game plan and the activation calendar

31:58 — Shutterstock, eight-figure deals, and the event that closed them

39:26 — What AI actually did to outbound

42:45 — Proof of humanity in the age of AI avatars

45:04 — The three phases: pre-event, at-event, post-event

50:01 — How much of your marketing budget belongs in events

51:12 — Host your own or ride the tent-poles?

53:01 — Wrap

ABOUT THE GUEST

Alex Reynolds is the co-founder and CEO of Vendelux, the event intelligence platform that tracks more than 250,000 B2B events and has influenced north of $5 billion in event spend, with Ramp, Glean, Deel, Intel and the US Postal Service on the customer list. A third-generation entrepreneur and Emory University graduate, Alex spent a decade in strategic partnerships before joining Shutterstock, where in 2017 he convinced the executive team to green-light an API partnerships unit called Platform Solutions and ran it as VP and General Manager. He previously founded Swift Intro, built on the LinkedIn connection graph. Vendelux has raised $71 million to date, including a $50 million Series B led by Tribeca Venture Partners.

ABOUT THE LEANSCALE PODCAST

The LeanScale Podcast is the show for GTM operators building the next generation of revenue infrastructure. Hosted by Anthony Enrico, co-founder of LeanScale, we go deep with the operators, founders, and executives shaping how modern go-to-market teams are designed, scaled, and transformed.

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KEYWORDS / TAGS

Event Marketing, Event ROI, Event Intelligence, B2B Events, Field Marketing, Trade Shows, Event Attribution, RevOps, GTM, Demand Generation, Pipeline Generation, Outbound, AI, AI in Sales, AI Outbound, Marketing Operations, Marketing Budget, CMO, ABM, Vendelux, Shutterstock, B2B SaaS, Customer Retention, Event Strategy, LeanScale, Anthony Enrico, Alex Reynolds

HASHTAGS

#RevOps #GTM #AI #EventMarketing #EventROI #FieldMarketing #B2BEvents #TradeShows #DemandGeneration #MarketingOperations #B2BSaaS #CMO #Vendelux #LeanScale #LeanScalePodcast

AI Made Outreach Worthless. Events Are What's Left | Alex Reynolds, CEO of Vendelux

The LeanScale Podcast with Anthony Enrico

AI Made Outreach Worthless. Events Are What's Left | Alex Reynolds, CEO of Vendelux