Some events are line items. Others are the whole year.
For Rebuy, Shop Talk is the second kind.
"We're at Shop Talk 2026. This is our Super Bowl."
That's Sarah Hatter, Director of Events and Community at Rebuy — the personalization engine powering smart carts for Shopify merchants. She's been running events for 15 years, at every size, and she's clear about what she's not going back to.
"I've been doing events for 15 years, of all sizes, and I'm telling you — I'll never go back to that spreadsheet life."
Rebuy showed up to Shop Talk with 44 employees on the floor at a show with roughly 10,000 attendees.
At that scale, the question stops being whether you'll have good conversations. You will.
The question is whether any of them will be traceable a month later.
The Challenge: Everyone Had Their Own Way of Capturing Leads
Before hapily, lead capture at Rebuy wasn't a process. It was a collection of habits.
"We've always struggled to figure out the right way to manage leads, and everybody has their own way of doing it. Taking pictures of badges, using other unreliable lead capture sources."
That's what happens when 44 people are working a booth without a shared system. Some reps snap a photo of a badge. Some use whatever the show provides. Some rely on memory and a business card in a jacket pocket.
None of it is wrong, exactly. It just doesn't add up to anything. The data arrives in different formats, at different times, with different levels of detail — and the work of turning it into something usable lands on the events team after the show, when the context has already faded.
The constraint that mattered most was on the sales side.
"Our sales team needed something that was not going to slow them down and not interrupt their conversations. That's the number one thing, right?"
Any tool that pulls a rep out of a conversation to log data is a tool reps will stop using by the second day of the show.
The Search: A System the Sales Team Would Actually Use
Sarah came across hapily on LinkedIn, and the reaction internally was immediate.
"I learned about hapily on LinkedIn, and we all said this would be amazing."
What made it worth trying wasn't a feature list. It was that capture happened on the rep's phone, in the flow of the conversation, and landed directly in the CRM the team already runs on — no export, no reconciliation, no separate lead file to chase down after the event.
The Solution: Capture on the Floor, Data in HubSpot
At Shop Talk, every conversation Rebuy's team had was captured in the moment and synced straight into HubSpot.
That gave the team one shared record of the show instead of 44 versions of it.
And because the data landed in the CRM as it was captured, the team could see what was happening on the floor while the show was still running — how many contacts, from which companies, and how they related to accounts Rebuy was already working.
"This kind of sets the tone — like, we met them at Shop Talk. We know that that means that that ROI is going to go back to this single event."
Sarah's read on why it stuck is worth quoting in full, because it's the bar most event tooling doesn't clear:
"You need something that out of the box works for you, immediately does its job without fail."
The Impact: Attribution Their CRO Can Actually See
Rebuy measures large-scale events on more than headcount, but headcount is where it starts.
"Obviously, number of contacts. You want to know how many people did I talk to? How many people did I meet? Are they existing customers? Are they existing partners? Will they be partners?"
Because every contact is tied to the event record inside HubSpot, those questions are answerable without a spreadsheet exercise. The team can segment event contacts by relationship — existing customer, current partner, potential partner, net new — and route follow-up accordingly.
That matters most one floor up.
"My CRO here is going to want to know exactly how much money we're making back from the event, from our investment."
With event data living alongside deal data, Rebuy can connect the show to what came out of it — and evaluate the investment on its actual return rather than a gut feel about how the booth went.
It also gave the team something they hadn't had before: the full arc of a relationship, not just the moment it intersected with the show.
"We've got contacts already that we're meeting again. We've got new contacts from the same company. So we really want to see the entire lifecycle of those conversations — not just from Shop Talk, but before, how Shop Talk impacted the relationships that we had."
"It's so much easier when it comes to attribution, and also just seeing what the impact of showing up with 44 employees to an event like this — you know, does it make an impact?"
That's the question every events leader gets asked after a flagship show. Now it has an answer in the CRM.
The Real Takeaway?
Rebuy didn't need a smaller show or a bigger team. They needed 44 people capturing conversations the same way, in a system their sales team wouldn't fight and their CRO could read.
Badge photos became structured contact records. Scattered capture methods became one process. And a heavy investment in a flagship event became something the team can measure against pipeline instead of defending on instinct.
Sarah's summary of the change was short.
"So I'm never going back. I can just say that!"
Want to see these results work for you? Request a demo to see how hapily helps teams capture event leads, follow up faster, and track event ROI — all directly inside HubSpot.
About Rebuy
Rebuy is a personalization engine for Shopify merchants, powering smart cart, product recommendation, and post-purchase experiences that increase average order value and customer lifetime value. The team meets merchants and partners at industry events throughout the year, with Shop Talk as their flagship show.
