EventCombo has enterprise proof, a competitive product, and an audience that responds when you speak clearly. What it does not yet have is a system that carries that proof to the people who sign contracts. This is the plan to build one, in stages, with a decision gate at every step.
Every number on this page was pulled from public sources and third-party tools between August 28 and August 31, 2026, and is labelled by how firmly we can stand behind it. Nothing here requires you to take our word for it.
EventCombo publishes 48 enterprise case studies including Porsche, CBRE, Toyota, Hertz, Turo, Cboe, Blue Cross and the University of Tennessee. Not one of the 20 we audited contains a single video. The proof exists in text and stops there.
One film, The Hidden Costs of Event Tech Fragmentation, earned 33,055 views on a 380-subscriber channel. Your Smarsh customer story, posted 3 months later, earned 5. The difference is not production quality. It is what you chose to say and where you put it.
Your organic competitor set is populated by event agencies, not event platforms. Cvent does not appear in your top 50 organic competitors at all. You are not losing the software category. You are not yet in it.
You already employ eight to nine people who can make things. What has been missing since February is someone accountable for deciding what gets made, who it is for, where it lands, and what it is expected to return. Start with a contained pilot that proves the sequence on a small budget, then scale spend against evidence rather than optimism. The roadmap below is built so that the board can stop, continue, or accelerate at four defined checkpoints.
In the August 28 conversation, the brief was specific: bring data, bring a budget you can defend, and bring a plan a board can approve. Three things you said shaped this entire proposal.
So this proposal does not simply agree with the current plan. It challenges two things directly: the assumption that executives are the right entry point, and the assumption that more content is the bottleneck. Both are addressed in the ICP and diagnosis sections.
This is measurably true, and it is the most fixable problem on the list. Discovery is a distribution and positioning failure, not a product failure. We have quantified the gap in the Evidence section rather than asserting it.
That is exactly the right frame, and it is how the budget ladder below is constructed. Each phase has an explicit decision gate: a defined result that must appear before the next tier of spend is released. If the pilot does not clear its gate, the board does not approve Phase 2. That is by design.
This single comparison is the clearest argument for changing how EventCombo invests in marketing. Both films were produced by your team. Both were published to the same 380-subscriber channel. One found an audience. One did not.
What this proves. EventCombo can absolutely earn attention. The category POV films do it repeatedly: 33,055 / 9,816 / 9,733 / 7,952 / 7,193 views. What EventCombo cannot currently do is convert that attention into pipeline, because the assets that would actually close an enterprise deal, the customer stories, are published where no one is looking and linked from nowhere. Your eight highest-performing videos account for roughly 70% of all 116,902 lifetime channel views. The other 338 videos share the remainder.
You have built a real following. It is simply not on the platform where you publish your films.
Your LinkedIn audience is 64x your YouTube audience. Every customer film currently premieres to the smaller of the two. The cheapest available win in this entire proposal is to stop doing that.
Down from 4,287 in June 2026. Verified
43% of it is people already searching your name. Verified
1.9% of your ranking set. Verified
You appear in 88 of 2,005 AI answer boxes. Verified
An internal preliminary report referenced organic visits falling from roughly 7,700 last September to roughly 1,300, and a backlink profile down by more than half. We can confirm the endpoint but not the starting point.
Recommended action before the board meeting: grant us read access to Google Search Console and GA4. That converts this section from “preliminary internal audit” to first-party data you can defend under questioning. It takes about five minutes to arrange.
EventCombo has 141,624 backlinks from 4,230 referring domains. Volume is not the issue. Composition might be.
libnet.info, accounts for 49,070 of those links, roughly a third of the entire profile from one source.ampblogs.com, tinyblogging.com, blogolize.com, bloguetechno.com, diowebhost.com, full-design.com and roughly a dozen close siblings. These share a well-known spam footprint.This is flagged as Needs validation, not as an accusation. These links may predate current leadership or may have arrived unsolicited. The recommended step is a disavow-candidate audit in Phase 1, which is inexpensive and removes a latent risk before you scale content investment on top of it.
An honest diagnosis has to include what is working, partly because the board will ask, and partly because we do not want budget spent re-fixing solved problems.
/resources/webinar-central, is worth a five-minute fix./features/mcp is live. Very few competitors can say that, and almost nobody knows you can.Both are quick, and both sit on pages tied to your most valuable logos.
/case-study/porsche, the client name field beneath the headline reads “Smarsh” instead of “Porsche.” It appears to be a template copy-paste that was never caught. This is your single most impressive logo page.Neither is a strategy problem. Both are the kind of detail that an enterprise buyer notices while doing diligence.
Saroosh's read is that EventCombo wins deals against Cvent when it gets into the room. The data supports that being a discovery problem rather than a capability problem, and it also shows the category leader is not invulnerable.
Cvent's organic traffic fell from 418,512 to 380,925 between June and August 2026, roughly 9% in two months. This is not a fortress being defended. It is a category in motion, which is when challengers get their opening.
Cvent's top non-brand traffic comes from a venue marketplace and hospitality glossary content, pages about hotel room types and boutique hotels. They out-rank you with infrastructure, not with a better description of event software.
Cvent's event management software page draws 5,665 monthly visits. EventCombo's event planning software page ranks for 119 keywords and draws 4. Same page type. Same intent. That gap is addressable.
When we pulled EventCombo's organic competitor set, the top 50 was populated almost entirely by event agencies and event production companies: gpj.com, thecastlegrp.com, eventique.com, corporateeventslv.com, emrgmedia.com. Cvent does not appear at all. Meanwhile your best-performing article is a listicle about the top corporate event planners in Dallas. Search engines and AI systems have concluded that EventCombo is an event services company. Your buyers are searching for event software. Correcting that classification is a core Phase 1 and Phase 3 objective, and it is why we are not recommending you simply publish more articles.
ICP means ideal customer profile: the specific type of organisation and the specific roles inside it that we target. The current model has three tiers: executives, middle management, and users. It is not wrong, it is just top-heavy. CMOs and CROs control budget but rarely evaluate event software themselves, and they are the hardest people alive to reach cold.
If EventCombo sells primarily into single corporate events, every dollar of ARR requires a fresh sale. Trade show organisers, exhibition networks and show producers run high-volume recurring events on annual calendars. One relationship can carry many events, multi-year, with expansion built in.
This is the lane most likely to move EventCombo toward $10M ARR through fewer, larger, stickier wins rather than a higher volume of small ones. It also happens to suit your product: multi-organisation hierarchy, badge printing, lead retrieval, exhibitor and sponsor portals and floor plan design are already built and already sitting in the Business and Enterprise tiers.
Needs validation Target organisations to research and qualify in Phase 1 include Informa Markets, Clarion Events, RX (RELX), Freeman and T3 Expo, alongside major recurring shows. We will confirm fit, current platform, contract timing and reachable contacts before any are committed to a target list.
These are not aspirational verticals. Each one is backed by published customer stories on your own site, which means the credibility work is partly done.
Needs validation Deloitte and Volkswagen were named in conversation but do not have published case study pages. Before either appears in outreach or on a slide, we need written confirmation of the relationship and permission to reference it.
Segmented, named, and finite. The goal is roughly 300 to 500 qualified accounts across three lanes, not an unbounded list.
Each account gets a named contact, a role-matched message and a defined proof asset. Coverage of this list becomes a reported metric, which is how the board sees progress before revenue arrives.
We verified each of these against your live public pages on August 31, 2026. Claims we could confirm are marked verified. Claims that need your sign-off before they go into market are marked accordingly. Nothing enters outreach copy without clearing that bar.
| Position | What we verified | Why a buyer cares | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| No per-attendee or per-registration fee | Your pricing page states it plainly: “Every plan includes unlimited events and unlimited registrations. You pay for your plan, not for how many people show up.” Professional $640/mo, Business $1,120/mo. | This is the single sharpest hook you own. Registration-based pricing is the most resented line item in the category, and your top-performing films already attack exactly this. Lead with it. | Verified |
| Transparent public pricing | Real numbers published on the site, with an Enterprise tier for custom scope. | Enterprise competitors typically hide pricing behind a sales call. Publishing it is a trust asset and a qualifier that saves your team time. | Verified |
| White-label branded attendee experience | “Branded attendee app” and custom domains ship in the Enterprise tier. The Porsche story documents a white-labelled event website across 13 markets with multilingual delivery. | Decisive for premium brands and for show organisers who must own the attendee relationship end to end. | Verified |
| Open API, 250+ integrations, and a live MCP layer | Event API and Attendee API in Enterprise. 250+ native integrations listed. A shipping MCP feature page at /features/mcp. |
Immediate lead action in the CRM instead of a spreadsheet three weeks later. The MCP layer is a genuine forward position almost no competitor can claim today. | Verified |
| Human support, 24/7 | “A real person, any timezone, no bot queue.” 24×7×365 priority support and a dedicated account manager in Enterprise. | When something breaks 40 minutes before a keynote, this is the only feature that matters. It is also your most emotionally persuasive video subject. | Verified |
| Enterprise trust and compliance | SOC 2, GDPR and CCPA stated publicly; accessibility referenced on the homepage. | Removes the procurement objection early. Necessary to compete for show organisers and regulated verticals. | Verified |
| Direct cost comparison against Cvent | Not published. Your films argue the category is overpriced, but no page substantiates it with a like-for-like comparison. | This is the highest-value page you do not currently have, and a primary Phase 3 build. | Needs validation |
| Developer-facing API documentation | /api, /developers, /docs and /api-docs all return 404. The real page exists at /features/integrations/api, which is not where anyone looks. |
If the API, SDK and hackathon push are central to the growth story, a developer must be able to find the documentation by guessing the URL. Today they cannot. | Opportunity |
The positioning line we would test first: EventCombo is the enterprise event platform that does not charge you for showing up. Same enterprise depth, without the registration tax, and a human on the phone when it counts. That sentence is defensible today, on your own published pricing, and it is the argument your audience has already rewarded with 33,055 views.
Forty-eight enterprise case studies exist as text. Zero of the twenty we audited contain video. This is the largest untapped asset on the balance sheet, and converting it is exactly what Whisenhunt Media was built to do.
One broadcast-quality customer story, shot on location with a marquee logo. Cinematic interview, real operational footage, the moment something nearly went wrong and did not. This is the asset that wins enterprise trust and anchors the sales deck for two years.
A 90-second brand and category film that carries the pricing argument and the human-support promise. Built to run as paid media, on the homepage, and at the top of every sales conversation.
Every shoot yields 8 to 15 short-form variants, role-segmented, sized for LinkedIn first. One production day becomes a quarter of distribution rather than one upload.
Producing more film without fixing placement would repeat the Smarsh outcome at a higher cost. So every asset we produce is governed by three non-negotiable rules:
Sequenced by enterprise credibility weighted against likely willingness to participate.
Needs validation Every logo used in outreach requires documented permission. We will supply the release template and manage the approval trail.
Today, content, video, LinkedIn, webinars and white papers each run as separate lanes. In the recommended model they become one sequence pointed at one named account list, where each stage feeds the next.
Named accounts across three lanes, with role-level contacts and a qualifying signal for each. Nothing is sent to an unqualified list.
Multi-touch, multi-sender email and LinkedIn outreach, personalised and direct. Modelled on the sequence that reached Saroosh, because it demonstrably worked.
Every conversation lands on a proof asset matched to that person's role and vertical, not a generic demo page.
Retargeting, GEO and SEO capture, and paid amplification of only the assets that already earned organic attention.
GEO means generative engine optimisation: being cited when someone asks ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI Overview to recommend a platform, rather than ranking on a page of blue links.
EventCombo currently appears in 88 of 2,005 AI Overview results across its own keyword universe, roughly 4.4%. That is low, but the underlying plumbing is unusually good: your llms.txt is well-maintained with 201 of 202 URLs healthy, which is ahead of most companies in any category.
The gap is not technical readiness. It is that AI systems have no comparison page, no pricing-difference page, no public API documentation and no structured proof pages to cite about EventCombo specifically. Building those is the fastest route to being named in the answer, and it is the same work that fixes the category-classification problem. This is a real opening: outside Cvent, no competitor has locked this down.
Each phase has to earn the next one. The gates below are the specific results the board should require before releasing additional budget. If a gate is missed, the correct decision is to pause and diagnose, and we will say so directly rather than ask for more time.
Establish the strategic layer that has been missing since February, and prove the outreach motion on a small, contained budget before anything scales.
Convert existing logos into premium trust assets, and fix the distribution failure that is currently wasting the video work your team already does.
Expand from outreach into a full acquisition system, and correct the category classification problem at its root.
Establish EventCombo as the obvious modern alternative to legacy enterprise event platforms, and move up-market into recurring event networks.
We will not guarantee a specific ARR outcome, a ranking position, or a date by which EventCombo reaches $10M. Anyone who does is guessing, and a board is right to distrust it. What we will commit to is the sequence, the deliverables, the reporting cadence, and the discipline of stopping at each gate to look at real numbers together. The budget ladder is designed so that EventCombo's exposure stays small until the evidence justifies more.
Enterprise event software carries a long sales cycle. If the only metric is closed revenue, the board is flying blind for two quarters. These three tiers give Saroosh something honest to report every month, well before contracts land.
Early signal that the motion is working at all.
Evidence that attention is turning into commercial motion.
The numbers the board ultimately funds against.
Reporting cadence. A short monthly written update against these metrics, and a full working session at each decision gate. Every number traced to its source so it survives board questioning. Where a number is estimated or directional, we will label it as such, exactly as we have done throughout this document.
Eight to nine talented people producing in vertical lanes without a strategic brain above them will produce a great deal of work and very little compounding. The recommendation is not to replace them. It is to point them.
| Function | Whisenhunt Media leads | EventCombo's team delivers |
|---|---|---|
| Strategy and sequencing | Own it | Input and context |
| ICP and target account lists | Own it | Sales validation |
| Positioning and message architecture | Own it | Product accuracy review |
| Outreach campaigns | Build and run | Sender identities, CRM follow-up |
| Flagship and premium film | Produce end to end | Customer introductions, approvals |
| Short-form and social cuts | Direct and template | Execute at volume |
| Written content and white papers | Brief and set the topic map | Write and publish |
| Webinars and the hackathon push | Position and promote | Run the programme |
| Website, SEO and GEO architecture | Own it | Implementation support |
| Paid media and retargeting | Own it | Budget approval |
| Reporting and board materials | Own it | Revenue data |
This structure is deliberately cheaper than hiring a marketing director. It gives Saroosh the strategic layer he has been personally carrying since February, without adding headcount, and it raises the output of the team already on payroll. If EventCombo later hires a full-time marketing leader, this work becomes their operating system on day one rather than a handover problem.
The ask is a Phase 1 pilot at $3K to $5K per month, with a board review at 90 days against the metrics on this page. That is a contained, defensible commitment that either produces qualified pipeline or tells you something true about the market. Both outcomes are worth more than another quarter of fragmented activity.
Before Friday, the single most useful thing EventCombo can do is grant read-only access to Google Search Console and GA4. It converts the preliminary figures in this document into first-party data, which is what makes the board conversation straightforward.
Everything below is optional reading for the board and essential reading for whoever runs this internally. We have kept our open questions visible rather than tidying them away.
Cvent is the reference competitor and the one Saroosh names in deals. Verified position as of August 2026: 344,552 organic keywords and roughly 380,925 monthly organic visits, against EventCombo's 2,845 and 1,341. The important nuance is that Cvent's traffic advantage is built on a venue directory and a large hospitality content library, not on superior product pages. Their traffic also fell about 9% between June and August 2026. They are large, not immovable.
Eventbrite competes on a different axis, consumer and small-business ticketing, with far less enterprise depth. It is a useful contrast in messaging but not the account you lose to.
The realistic near-term target is not to out-rank Cvent. It is to appear credibly in the same consideration set, which currently does not happen. Recall that Cvent does not appear anywhere in EventCombo's top 50 organic competitors, because search has classified EventCombo alongside event agencies instead.
A note of caution on comparison content: comparison and alternative pages are among the highest-converting assets in B2B software, and they are also the easiest place to create legal exposure. Every claim on those pages will be sourced to a competitor's own public material and dated, or it will not ship.
Directional only. Real sequences are built in Phase 1 against the actual account list, and every one leads with something specific to that company rather than a template.
Your audience has already told you what it wants. The films that broke through all attack the economics and complexity of the category: The Hidden Costs of Event Tech Fragmentation (33,055 views), Why Proving Event ROI is Broken in 2026 (9,816), Why Event Software Got So Expensive in 2026 (7,952), The Event Tech Cartel (4,707). Lean into that lane rather than diversifying away from it.
Research conducted August 28 to 31, 2026, combining a conversation with Saroosh Gull on August 28, an internal Whisenhunt Media strategy session on August 31, and independent verification against public sources.
Third-party SEO estimates are directional by nature. We have labelled every figure by confidence and flagged the one internal claim we could not corroborate rather than repeating it as fact.