I produce experiences for a living. I run WONU, an experiential marketing agency, which makes me an outsider to most of what fills a blog like this one. I’m not going to tell you how to run your paid funnel, model your attribution, or scale your lead gen. That’s your craft, not mine, and I’d be faking it if I tried.
But I ask one question at the start of every project that I think B2B marketing has quietly stopped asking: what feeling do we want someone to leave with?
It sounds soft next to a pipeline report. I’d argue it’s the most practical question on the table, because the rest of your funnel is getting easier to copy by the week. Your competitor can generate the same email, the same landing page, the same thought-leadership post from the same model you’re using. The one thing nobody can regenerate at a prompt is what a person felt in a room with you.
The metric the funnel keeps avoiding
Sentiment beats impressions. I know that runs against an industry built on dashboards, but hear the distinction. Impressions, opens, even MQLs count exposure. They tell you who showed up. They do not tell you who believed you, and belief is what actually moves a considered B2B purchase across the line.
Most marketers I meet already know their attribution model is part fiction. They live by it anyway, because it’s measurable and a feeling is not. So the feeling gets treated as a nice-to-have instead of the thing the whole effort is supposed to produce. That’s the gap my side of the business lives inside, and it’s the one I’d want a B2B team to close.
Experience convinces where information only tells
We once built a launch dinner for a beauty brand inside a room walled on four sides with LED. A gorgeous space, built for everything except dining: no kitchen flow, no service infrastructure, none of the quiet machinery a seated meal depends on. The easy move is to fight a room like that. We did the opposite, bringing in full catering and a service plan and letting the space carry the product’s story around the meal. The education landed because people felt it, not because anyone read them a feature list.
I think about that every time I see a B2B “education” play that’s really an information dump. The webinar that recites the deck. The whitepaper nobody finishes. Information tells. Experience convinces. The same fact lands differently when a person arrives at it themselves, inside a moment built for them, than when it’s pushed at them in a slide.
Say the part where it didn’t work
I’ll be plain that not every project lands. We supported a retail rollout where the fixtures we produced kept taking damage after delivery, store-level handling, repeated repair cycles, a timeline that never gave quality room to breathe. We stayed accountable on every fix, but the work didn’t reflect our standards. We like to get it right the first time. That time we didn’t.
The lesson translates to any channel you run. The time, money, and quality triangle is real, and the corner you quietly cut to hit a launch date is usually the one your audience ends up feeling. The fix wasn’t to work harder. It was to treat the timeline as the lead character of the plan from day one, and to price the quality in rather than bolt it on. It was disappointing. You learn from it. You’ll survive.
Four things I’d hold to, from the experiential side
You know your verticals and your buyers better than I do. But if you’re weighing how to show up in person, at a trade show, a field dinner, a customer summit, here is what my discipline would tell yours:
- Decide the feeling before the format. Before you choose the booth or the webinar, name what a prospect should believe walking out. The format serves the feeling, not the reverse. If you can’t name the feeling, no production budget will manufacture it.
- Measure sentiment, not just reach. Counting who attended is easy. Whether they came back, brought a colleague, or changed how they describe you is harder and far more honest. Build the harder measure in.
- Respect the constraint. The budget that’s too tight or the space that wasn’t built for it is usually where the idea gets interesting, not where it dies. The discomfort is the craft.
- Lean on the channel you can’t automate. In a market where your content can be replicated in seconds, in-person experience is the one thing a competitor can’t copy at the prompt. That’s not a soft extra. It’s the moat.
Nothing replaces in-person engagement. In a funnel being automated toward sameness on every other front, the experience a buyer actually felt is the part no one else can regenerate. The brands that remember that won’t always have the most impressions. They’ll have the people who remember being in the room, and in B2B, those are the people who sign.
