Construction · Electrical Contracting
Turning trade show spend into a repeatable demand engine.
How Sector Growth helped Knight Electric, a $60 million electrical contractor built on relationships, turn its trade show investment into a measurable channel, with Marketing Hub and Content Hub layered onto its existing Sales Hub.
- Industry
- Electrical Contracting
- Client
- Knight Electric, Inc.
- HubSpot Products
- Marketing Hub · Content Hub (on an existing Sales Hub)
- Scope
- Eight-week Marketing Hub onboarding with partner-assisted data migration
- Timeline
- July to September 2026
- $20K+
- Invested per trade show, now read as its own campaign
- 8wks
- From kickoff to the fall trade show season
- 20
- Reports across two marketing dashboards
- 6
- Weekly working sessions, one real campaign built live
01 · The challenge
Demand generated on the show floor, then left on the table.
Knight Electric built a $60 million business in six years almost entirely on relationships. It was investing upward of $20,000 per trade show, yet follow-up was limited to the handful of conversations the team had hand-picked. The long tail of contractors, developers and buyers who stopped by the booth quietly fell away.
A very lean commercial team
- Sales was effectively one and a half people.
- Marketing was a part-time job shared with recruiting and operations.
- There was no capacity for manual nurture at scale.
No marketing infrastructure
- A WordPress site, Google Analytics and a few ad accounts, with no intake, segmentation, scoring or nurture.
- LinkedIn spend focused on recruiting, not customers.
- In the team's words, “Excel sheets to the death of us.”
A demanding bar, a hard deadline
- An earlier four-to-six-week crash course in HubSpot had lost momentum.
- Any investment had to show its return, its benefit and its long-term value.
- Trade show season ramps up in August and September, so it had to be live before the first fall show.
“Two weeks later… I don't remember any of this.”
02 · The solution
See one, do one, teach one: one real campaign, built live.
Rather than tour every feature, we built one real trade show campaign end to end with Knight's staff at the keyboard, then handed over the playbook to repeat it. The engagement ran as a kickoff, a marketing process-mapping session and six weekly working sessions.
- 01
Foundation and process mapping
Teams, permissions, defaults and brand kit configured, the sending domain authenticated, a website grade and SEO scan run as a baseline, and HubSpot calling set up with call outcomes, recording and transcription. A mapping session documented the lead journey from booth to follow-up.
- 02
Booth-ready capture
HubSpot forms behind QR codes on the booth floor, plus the mobile business-card scanner, capture company, role, qualification and marketing consent at the point of contact. The rule: no lead from a show should live on a business card again.
- 03
Event tagging and segmentation
An event property tags every contact with the show it came from, and setting it enrolls the contact in the right follow-up. Lead tiers, segments and a lead scoring approach send sales attention where it matters, and content branches by the service a prospect asked about.
- 04
Campaigns and automation
Each show is a HubSpot campaign that ties together its forms, segments, workflows, emails and social posts. Pre-show emails drive booth traffic, post-show sequences warm the long tail, and lifecycle workflows welcome new customers. Historical lists were cleaned and imported with our data lead's review.
- 05
Reporting and handoff
A Marketing Channel Performance dashboard and a Marketing Contacts dashboard, ten reports each, and a walkthrough of campaign attribution, buyer intent and website analytics, so the return on each show can be measured directly.
“She was very thorough in the explanations and any questions that we had… I felt like I definitely understand HubSpot.”
03 · The outcome
A working demand engine instead of a stack of business cards.
Every booth conversation enters the system
Leads are captured digitally at the show, tagged by event and segmented automatically, not just the few the team remembers.
Follow-up no longer depends on headcount
Automated sequences nurture the long tail of attendees, so a sales team of one and a half people can focus on qualified conversations.
ROI measurable by show
Campaign-level attribution gives leadership a direct answer to “what is the return?” for each $20,000+ event.
The team owns the system
Knight's marketing lead runs HubSpot day to day. Knight bought support hours for its Q4 marketing rollout and booked its first post-onboarding portal audit with us.
“Everything went great… Best HubSpot trainer we've had so far.”
04 · Stack
Products & integrations used.
| HubSpot Marketing Hub | Campaigns, forms, segments, lead tiers, workflows, emails, social publishing and two dashboards. |
|---|---|
| HubSpot Content Hub | Layered onto the existing portal alongside Marketing Hub. |
| HubSpot Sales Hub | The existing portal, now fed by trade show leads, with calling, recording and transcription configured. |
| QR forms and the business-card scanner | Booth capture with marketing consent on the form itself. |
| Data migration | Historical contact lists cleaned and imported, with our data lead reviewing the formatting first. |
Spending on events without knowing what they return?
We build capture, follow-up and attribution in HubSpot, so every show can be measured as a campaign of its own.