Dinners are the new trade shows. Here’s how to run them well
Insights from a professional B2B event planner + my learnings from MKT1 Supper Club
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The hottest B2B marketing trend right now isn’t AI, it’s dinner. Okay, that’s probably an exaggeration. But it’s true that founders and marketing leaders are getting multiple invites every month to some kind of “dinner”: small group dinners, executive roundtables, salons–or even flower arranging classes. We’re right on top of this trend at MKT1, we hosted our own MKT1 Supper Club dinner last week in NYC with Profound.
Whatever you want to call these events, it’s clear that somewhere in the last 5 years, the company-hosted “dinner” replaced the trade show as the B2B event du jour…and I support this “trend.”
I’ve podcasted and written about in-person events before and cautioned against the old strategy of throwing your whole budget at conference booths. But a dinner done right is increasingly a high-leverage way to stand out in a sea of AI slop, and it’s an elegant way to put your ecosystem to work. Especially for high-ACV businesses, getting the formula for a successful dinner right can be transformative.
So I called Sheena Badani, who works with companies to host standout events through her company RevAura, to get an expert take on running dinners that work in 2026. At RevAura she’s running dinners, cooking classes, and even nail salons, all aimed at getting the right people in the room. Sheena was previously a marketing leader at Gong, but decided to double down on executive events after seeing their impact firsthand.
In this newsletter, I’m sharing her best tips along with my own to help you get the most value out of this strategy.
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In this newsletter:
Why dinners have replaced trade shows as the reigning champ of B2B events
How to make sure your dinner is worth the investment
Why a good dinner nails the 3 Ps: people, place, and programming
Operational tips for making dinners repeatable
For paid subscribers: A map of SF & NYC dinner venues hand-picked by the MKT1 community
MKT1 Unboxing: A quick break to unbox Wistia
Learn how to leverage video in the AI era from video marketing GOAT, Chris Savage, Co-Founder + CEO at Wistia. Wistia has evolved from “video hosting” into a one-stop video marketing shop. They handle hosting, embeds, analytics, recording, editing, social clips, podcast distribution, and multi-language dubbing—so if you’re looking for tools to help you manage video marketing, watch this:
Some stand out moments in this episode of MKT1 Unboxing:
LLMs don’t watch videos, so you need to add context for AI search.
AI tools read text, not video. Wistia makes video embeds LLM-friendly so your videos can actually be indexed and show up in AI search. Watch this clip »
Most social clipping tools only grab what’s obvious.
Clipping a single moment is easy. Finding the best moments across an entire recording is harder. Wistia’s new (beta) Remix feature does this for you, watch at 12:04 »
Webinars work better when they’re part of your video stack
Running webinars in the same place you host, edit, analyze, and repurpose video makes them easier to re-purpose and measure over time. Here’s how Wistia approaches it, watch at 19:49 »
Get started with a free trial of Wistia here »
MKT1 Unboxing is our new video series, each video is a 30-minute demo + conversation where I (Emily Kramer) unbox marketing and GTM tools — no slides, no scripts, no sales pitch. Just real tools, real workflows, and real talk. The goal: help you find AI tools worth using.
Now back to in-person events…
Why the “dinner” replaced the trade show
“Events used to be more trade show-oriented, taking advantage of other people’s events to leverage for lead generation. Now attendance at those just looks different. People are less inclined to travel to those large trade shows. So the new event model is using your own hosted events for deal acceleration.” –Sheena
Trade shows were the primary event model for decades. You’d sponsor someone else’s event, set up a booth, and hope decision-makers wandered by. But post-Covid, which forced everyone to figure out deal cycles without conference infrastructure, companies started questioning the ROI.
Companies were investing so much money sponsoring, not to mention their own employees’ travel costs and time, then crossing their fingers that the right people would come find them. As I said in one of my most successful LinkedIn posts to date, when I look at most conference booths, I just see dollars in trashcans.
But what many of these booth exhibitors noticed was that the most valuable moments were the side conversations: the dinner the night before, the coffee meeting in the lobby, the drinks after a long day on the floor. At some point, people started asking: Why not just do those things directly?
You control the budget, the venue, and the guest list. You can get the right mix of existing champions, active prospects, and warm accounts. You’re not trying to collect 500 badge scans from people who will never respond to follow-up emails. You’re connecting directly with ~12 people who are actually in your pipeline, actually evaluating you, and giving them a reason to move forward. Seems like a better use of money.
In some ways, the prospect and/or customer dinner is the oldest trick in the GTM book. Wine and dine your potential customers, close the deal. In my recent rewatch of Mad Men, which is the true historical record for how marketing once was, I saw Don Draper do this on repeat (though usually inappropriately).
But I’ve definitely seen this surge recently. The other reason these dinners are a go-to strategy is not just the reaction to the trade show reboot post-Covid, it’s of course, AI-related too. In the age of AI-generated everything, this kind of authentic human connection is a strong differentiator. A dinner forces real conversation. You can’t automate your way through it. That’s why it works.
And the last reason I think these dinners are surging right now: It’s never been easier to access and fully enrich account and contact data. What used to be a massive, manual process now takes minutes. You can do this quickly with tools like Clay, then feed it into your CRM—or even manage the entire event invite flow in Attio (like we do at MKT1).
Watch my 1 min walkthrough of how I manage exec dinners in Attio ➜
Watch our in-depth Attio Unboxing with Head of Success, Zev Leibowitz ➜
“People who go to these dinners tell me they want to either meet their peers, somebody interesting, or they want to learn something new that they can take back to their business. That’s ultimately what they care about. And ideally, it’s both. You’re helping facilitate those connections, and you’re helping facilitate the exchange of ideas.” –Sheena