Scrappy ABM is Mason Cosby's ABM consultancy. His standard for every event program: make it ROI-positive before the plane takes off. He and his team plan and run event-based ABM for B2B clients, and leaned on UserGems to do it at a personalized level no manual process could match. Increasingly, the highest-leverage asset in that plan is the strength of the client's existing customer relationships.

The best asset in the room was customer trust, and it was going to waste

Six weeks before a major industry event, a franchise-technology client brought in Scrappy ABM. They'd already committed $200,000 to the sponsorship, with zero pre-event plan.

What they had, though, was rare: a speaking session with executives from three recognizable customer brands, Fogo de Chão, Chili's, and Dunkin' Donuts, who'd agreed to talk about their experience on stage.

They had a partnered happy hour, high-end gifts, a private meeting space, and an executive car service picking people up from the airport.

None of it was connected to a plan. "They just had all this stuff and they're like, 'Well, we'll just do something,'" Mason said. A room full of prospects was about to hear real customers vouch for the product, and there was no system in place to turn that moment into a meeting.

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Building the path around the customer voice, not around the swag

Before touching any asset, Scrappy ABM mapped the five audiences that exist for any event: last year's attendees, this year's registrants, accounts near the event geographically, people posting about attending on social, and the event's own sponsor base. "Those audiences are actually fairly standardized across all events," Mason said.

The centerpiece of the plan was the speaking session itself. Rather than treat it as a side activity, the team built the entire pre-event push, especially the executive-connect outreach to this year's registration list, around getting the right people into that room to hear directly from Fogo de Chão, Chili's, and Dunkin' Donuts. Once someone had heard a peer customer speak, the path moved them to the happy hour (with a deliberately rigged raffle: "we want to make sure we actually create conversations with our target accounts," Mason said), and from there into the private meeting suite.

The standout mechanic was the "half a gift" play. Instead of handing over the AI meta glasses gift in the car service, the team gave attendees only the case, with instructions to visit the meeting suite for the glasses. That single move brought 80% of the executives who rode in the car service into a live demo. "That one play alone more than covered everything else," Mason said.

UserGems running the personalization behind all of it

UserGems, specifically Gem-E, is what let this run at the speed and personalization level a plan like this needs. Each of the five audiences became its own workflow, synced to Salesforce, sequenced through Apollo, with messaging written and personalized per account and signal, not one static template reused across every segment.

"You'd be hard-pressed to find better research than what UserGems, or AI, can support with, in a way that doesn't suck away your entire day," Mason said. That let the outbound team run highly customized outreach without losing the time they needed to actually take the meetings it created.

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• 31 opportunities created from the event, within three days
• 80% take-rate on the highest-converting single play in the program, run through the executive car service
• A speaking session built on genuine customer advocacy became the anchor for the entire conversion path, instead of a stand-alone brand moment nobody followed up on
• A repeatable playbook: the audience segments, the conversion path, and the UserGems workflows behind them carry forward to the next event

"I want to be very clear, it wasn't magic," Mason said. "But because we were intentional on the front end with how we segmented our audiences and the signals we wanted to activate on, this became something you can repeat for pretty much every event."

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