From Speaker Scramble to Strategic Advantage

For many B2B marketing teams, speakers are treated as a last-minute operational problem:

• Who’s available?
  
• Who can speak to this topic?
  
• Who has time this quarter?
  

At Docebo, the marketing team recognized something deeper: their speakers—internal SMEs, customers, partners, and trusted industry voices—were one of their most underutilized marketing assets.

That realization became the catalyst for a fundamental shift in how Docebo approaches thought leadership, events, content, and go-to-market activation.

As Richelle Westhafer, Senior Director, Global Events and Experience Marketing at Docebo, shared on Linkedin:

This case study explores how Docebo moved from reactive speaker sourcing to a deliberate, scalable speaker ecosystem—and why speaker management is now viewed as a core marketing capability.

The Challenge: Strong Voices, Fragmented Systems

Docebo had no shortage of expertise:

• Internal subject matter experts
  
• Customers with deep, real-world experience
  
• Partners and prospects with strong industry perspectives
  

The challenge wasn’t access—it was visibility, structure, and activation.

Speaker knowledge lived everywhere:

• Event spreadsheets
  
• Email threads
  
• CRM notes
  
• Team-specific documents and tribal knowledge
  

Each program—events, webinars, ABM, partner marketing, field initiatives—was treated as a standalone effort. Speakers were sourced transactionally instead of strategically.

This created familiar challenges:

• Limited visibility into who their strongest speakers actually were
  
• Difficulty matching expertise to the right programs and audiences
  
• Reactive outreach instead of proactive planning
  
• Inconsistent speaker preparation and experience
  
• No shared system of record across marketing teams
  

As Richelle and her team stepped back, they began asking different questions:

• How do we identify, segment, and activate our strongest voices?
  
• Do we truly understand each speaker’s expertise, industries, and preferred topics?
  
• How do we prepare, support, and elevate speakers consistently?
  
• Are we giving speakers meaningful visibility and appreciation?
  
• Do we have systems in place to be proactive rather than reactive?
  

Answering those questions required more than process tweaks. It required new infrastructure.

The Catalyst: Solving One Event, Unlocking a Marketing System

The shift didn’t start as a sweeping transformation. It started with a real operational need.

As Docebo prepared for Inspire, their largest global program, the team needed a more efficient way to manage speakers, sessions, and communications at scale.

That’s when Limor Baum surfaced Sessionboard as a potential solution.

“She brought it forward to solve a real operational challenge—and she was absolutely right.”

Sessionboard was discovered through Docebo’s existing registration partner, Cvent, and the seamless integration between the two platforms made the decision straightforward.

As the team built the business case, something became clear:
a tool introduced for one event could unlock a strategic lever across the entire marketing ecosystem.

The Shift: From Speakers to a Speaker Ecosystem

With Sessionboard in place, Docebo reframed how they think about speakers entirely.

Instead of asking:

“Who can speak at this event?”

They now ask:

“Who are our experts—and how do we activate them intentionally across everything we do?”

Sessionboard enabled Docebo to:

• Centralize speaker profiles across internal, customer, and partner voices
  
• Capture areas of expertise, industries, and preferred topics
  
• Track participation and engagement across programs
  
• Streamline communications and speaker preparation
  
• Create visibility across teams and initiatives
  

Most importantly, it created a shared system of record for brand voices—something that had never existed before.

Where They Are Today

Today, Sessionboard is live for Inspire and already delivering value by:

• Streamlining speaker communication and coordination
  
• Centralizing speaker and session management
  
• Providing clarity into expertise across the speaker ecosystem
  

This has allowed the team to move faster, reduce friction, and deliver a more consistent, professional speaker experience—without increasing operational complexity.

Where They’re Going Next

Over the coming months, Docebo plans to expand this approach into a holistic speaker ecosystem across all of marketing.

The goal is simple:

• Know who our experts are
  
• Understand where they shine
  
• Activate them intentionally across every program we run
  

This includes:

• Thought leadership and content marketing
  
• ABM and enterprise field initiatives
  
• Webinars and virtual programs
  
• Partner co-marketing
  
• Sales enablement and customer education
  

By treating speakers as a long-term asset—not a per-event task—Docebo is building infrastructure that scales with the business.

The Infrastructure That Makes It All Work: A Speaker CRM, Not Just a Tool

As Docebo expanded its speaker ecosystem, one capability became especially critical: the ability to treat expertise as searchable, reusable infrastructure.

With Sessionboard acting as a true Speaker CRM, the team can:

• Search internal SMEs, customers, and partners by:
  
  • Topic
    
  • Industry
    
  • Role
    
  • Past participation
    
  • Recency and relevance
    
• Quickly identify the right voice for the right initiative
  
• Activate speakers across multiple programs without starting from scratch
  

Once a speaker is selected, activation is seamless.

Speakers, sessions, and presentations are managed in Sessionboard—and when a speaker is added to an event, everything automatically syncs to Cvent.

Just as importantly:

• Any change to a session
  
• Any update to a speaker
  
• Any revision to a presentation
  

is automatically reflected in Cvent in real time.

This eliminates duplicate work, reduces errors, and creates a single source of truth across platforms—allowing teams to focus on strategy instead of reconciliation.

A Best-in-Class Integration Philosophy That Puts the Customer First

Richelle credits much of this success to the philosophy behind the integration itself.

Rather than forcing marketing teams into a single, monolithic system, Docebo benefits from a best-in-class ecosystem:

• Cvent for registration, logistics, and execution
  
• Sessionboard to enhance speaker, session, and content management
  

Together, they enable speed, flexibility, and continuous innovation—without compromise.

Richelle’s Advice to Other Marketing Leaders

When asked what she’d tell teams considering Sessionboard, Richelle’s answer is simple:

Yes, it solves the immediate problem of managing speakers and content more efficiently.

But the real value is strategic.

It changes how marketing teams think about expertise, credibility, and activation across the entire go-to-market motion.

When speakers feel prepared, supported, and genuinely valued, they don’t just participate—they elevate everything around them.

Why This Matters

Docebo’s story reflects a broader shift in modern B2B marketing:

• Events are no longer isolated moments
  
• Content is no longer channel-specific
  
• Expertise is becoming a core growth lever
  

By operationalizing speaker management with the right systems—and pairing best-in-class platforms through thoughtful integration—Docebo turned a historically manual function into a core marketing asset.

And in doing so, they created a repeatable model for how modern marketing teams can scale trusted, human-centered content.