Spendflo’s Executive Event Participation Rule: Why Founders Can’t Delegate Relationship Building

Spendflo’s Executive Event Participation Rule: Why Founders Can’t Delegate Relationship Building

When a VP of Finance attends your event, they expect to meet your executives, not your SDRs.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Siddharth Sridharan, CEO and Co-Founder of Spendflo, a SaaS spend management platform that’s raised $15.4 million, shared why executive presence at events is the most non-negotiable element of their event marketing strategy. Not recommended. Not optional. Required.

The Rule That Can’t Be Broken

“Whoever is attending the event, either be your sales teams, your founders executives, and if their executives there, then you make sure that your executive team is also there,” Siddharth emphasizes. “That’s what it takes to build genuine relationships with these customers.”

This isn’t advice. It’s a hard rule at Spendflo. If they identify that a particular event will have VP-level or C-level attendees from target accounts, executives must be there. Not might be there. Not should try to make it. Must be there.

Most B2B companies treat executive event attendance as nice-to-have. They send their SDR team or field marketing people to work the room. Then they wonder why relationships stall and deals take forever to close.

The problem is simple: your buyers expect peer-level interaction. When a VP of Finance takes time out of their schedule to attend an event, they’re not looking to meet your junior sales team. They want to talk strategy with someone who understands their challenges at their level.

Why SDRs Can’t Fill This Role

SDRs are critical to your GTM motion. They do great work qualifying leads and moving deals through early stages. But they cannot build the relationships that close enterprise deals.

When your target customer is a CFO making six-figure decisions, they need to believe your company is stable, strategic, and led by people who get their problems. An SDR, no matter how talented, can’t provide that validation.

Executive presence signals that your company takes this relationship seriously, your executives have time to build relationships, and your leadership understands the problem space.

The Travel Commitment Reality

Here’s what this rule means in practice: serious travel commitment from founders and executives. Not occasional appearances. Consistent presence at events across multiple cities.

Siddharth and Rajiv personally attend events. When they map out their quarterly event calendar, they’re mapping out their travel schedules. This is expensive—flights, hotels, opportunity cost. Time spent at events is time not spent on product, fundraising, or hiring.

But the deals that close and the relationships that matter come from this investment. You can’t delegate relationship building and expect the same results.

Matching Seniority Creates Real Conversations

The magic happens when you match seniority levels. VP talks to VP. These conversations operate at a different altitude than typical sales conversations—discussing strategic challenges and market dynamics instead of features and pricing.

This is especially true in Spendflo’s market. They sell to sophisticated finance leaders dealing with complex procurement challenges. When Siddharth talks to a CFO about SaaS procurement chaos, he’s not reciting talking points. He’s sharing war stories from when he lived it—creating Excel sheets nobody used, getting blamed for spend he couldn’t control. That peer-level empathy creates connection SDRs cannot replicate.

How to Make It Actually Work

The travel commitment is real, but there are ways to make it sustainable:

Plan quarterly, not ad-hoc. Map your event calendar for the entire quarter. Block travel time early. This prevents chaos of last-minute decisions.

Stack events when possible. If you’re in San Francisco, can you stack meetings with other Bay Area accounts? Maximize the value of each trip.

Share the load across executives. Not every executive needs to attend every event. Rotate based on who makes sense for that audience.

Make it non-negotiable in your culture. Executive event attendance isn’t optional at Spendflo. It’s part of how they do business.

The ROI That’s Hard to Measure

Events don’t drive immediate pipeline. “You can’t expect immediate ROI,” Siddharth cautions. “It’s long term, it’s relationship building.”

This creates tension with typical B2B marketing metrics. What’s the CAC? What’s the payback period? The honest answer: it’s impossible to attribute cleanly. The VP of Finance you met at that event might not sign for six months.

But Spendflo learned that companies who attend their events and meet their executives close faster and stay longer. The relationship foundation accelerates everything that comes after.

From Empty Dinners to This Standard

Spendflo didn’t start with this sophistication. “The first version of this is me and Rajiv, like showing up to events and then hosting dinners ourselves with nobody showing up,” Siddharth recalls.

The evolution from empty dinners to waitlists came partly from making executive participation non-negotiable. When prospects see that your CEO consistently shows up, it signals something marketing materials can’t convey.

The Delegate-Everything Trap

Most founders try to delegate everything. You hire executives to own functions. You build a sales team to handle relationships. This is right for most things. But relationship building with key accounts isn’t one of them.

The best enterprise deals come from executive relationships. You can systematize lead generation and deal process. You cannot systematize the trust that comes from founder-level relationships.

This doesn’t mean founders should be in every meeting. It means founders need to be in the moments that matter—and events with target accounts are those moments.

Making the Commitment

If you’re building a B2B company selling to sophisticated buyers, executive event participation isn’t optional. It’s the price of entry for building relationships that close enterprise deals.

Map your quarterly events now. Block travel time on executive calendars. Make it non-negotiable in your culture. Your SDR team cannot build the relationships that close six-figure deals with VP-level buyers.

When a VP of Finance takes time to attend your event, they expect to meet someone at their level. Send your executives or don’t host the event. Those are your options.

Spendflo learned this through experience: consistent executive presence at events accelerates everything else in your go-to-market motion. You cannot delegate relationship building and expect the same results.

The travel commitment is real. The cost is high. But the alternative—missing the relationships that close your biggest deals—costs more.