Roundtables at B2B Events: A Favored Format, and the Easiest to Get Wrong

Picture the ideal roundtable session at an industry event: a dozen or so attendees sitting at a circular table in a brightly lit conference hall, facing one another with notebooks open, coffee cups in hand. The moderator starts the clock, introduces a pressing business challenge and opens the floor with a thought-provoking question.

One person shares a recent issue at their organization, prompting a peer from across the table to suggest a solution that worked for their team. More people join the conversation, and the group engages in a lively, collaborative problem-solving and brainstorming session, while the moderator skillfully keeps the dialogue moving, ensuring each person has a chance to share their own experiences and strategies. No one looks bored or stares at their phone, every attendee is an active contributor and the hour flies by.

That is the roundtable format working as it should. Built for peer-to-peer connection and conversation rather than broadcasting information, highly interactive, small-group discussions are a planner’s favorite. According to the 2026 Experience Design Report from Encore and Boldpush, nearly half of the 447 event professionals surveyed (49%) rank peer-to-peer connection as the single biggest driver of a successful event. (Encore, which commissioned the report, sells the event production and experience-design services the report covers.)

At events with up to 5,000 attendees, planners rank roundtables the top format for satisfaction at 27%, ahead of hands-on workshops at 21% and panels at 18%. Above 10,000 attendees, the order flips, with panels leading at 29% and roundtables falling to 18%, though Jill Hunt, vice president of customer experience and insights at Encore, calls that larger-event finding directional rather than settled.

Topping the rankings, though, does not make the format easy to pull off.

“A strong roundtable has a clear purpose, the right mix of people, a skilled facilitator or structured prompts and a well-understood outcome,” Hunt said. “A weak one is simply a table with a topic and no direction.”

If peer connection is such a strong driver of attendee satisfaction, then why do only 8% of the event planners surveyed make connection a primary design principle?

“Planners understand the value of connection, but designing for it is harder than just leaving time for networking,” Hunt said. “It requires knowing who attendees want to meet, what they want to learn and how to create moments that feel intentional rather than forced.”

That kind of deliberate design is hard to get right, but it’s not guesswork. The B2B event organizers who run the format well keep coming back to the same essentials.

Someone Has To Run it

Ask the operators who have built their events around peer discussion how they make it work, and the same consensus keeps surfacing: someone must be in charge of the room.

A clear example is the Cybersecurity Marketing Society, which has made peer connection the foundation of its events business, including its 21 monthly virtual meetups and the roundtable-heavy CyberCMO Summit inside its CyberMarketingCon conference.

“The people who will be at the roundtable design the roundtable,” said Gianna Whitver, co-founder and CEO. “There is always a leader… someone who knows when to switch the subject, draw in or call on someone quiet and politely move on from someone who is talking too much.”

Some larger operators follow the same method with a different kind of leader in the chair: a subject-matter expert. At Forrester’s B2B Summit North America, a conference for marketers and other leaders, roundtables are led by principal analysts.

“The analyst leads with their own read on the topic, but depending on the topic, may put more effort into designing how they want to facilitate the conversation,” said Tavar James, vice president of global events at Forrester.

At B2B Ignite in London, produced by community intelligence business B2B Marketing, the roundtable-style sessions in its new Ignite Exchange stream are led by specialist experts drawn from Propolis, the company’s marketer membership.

“The Propolis Experts regularly run workshops and small group sessions for our members, so they are experienced in facilitating outcome-led, highly practical sessions for B2B marketers,” said Richard O’Connor, CEO of B2B Marketing.

Read more: From One Annual Event to a Year-Round Subscriber Business: B2B Marketing’s Evolution

Even a room full of obvious peers stalls without that hand on the wheel.

“The connection opportunities at traditional B2B events are built for extroverts,” Whitver said. “Even the simple ‘get people who are all like each other in a room’ will fail if dedicated connection opportunities are not created.”

When roundtables break down, she said, it is usually because they are “too vendor-focused and transactional, or the quiet attendees are bored but no one is paying attention or notices,” or because of “one person dominating the conversation [and] weak moderation.”

Curate the Table

Curation starts with who is in the room and how many get a seat. At Forrester’s B2B Summit, tables are capped at 10 attendees or fewer, and that exclusivity is the point.

“We do consider analyst-led roundtables to be a huge value add for our delegates, so it is a limited opportunity,” James said. Forrester puts that to work, using the sessions to drive early registration, since, as James put it, “special programming is the highest-rated at our events.”

B2B Ignite decides who belongs in each session before the doors open, not once people arrive.

“The sessions were sign-posted pre-event to clearly indicate the level it was suitable for,” O’Connor said, speaking of the most recent B2B Ignite held in July. The Leaders’ Tables are “aimed at senior marketing leaders only,” and anyone who did not fit “was contacted ahead of the event and reallocated to a more relevant session,” he added.

For Whitver, curation is also about who should not sit together. To keep conversations candid, the Cybersecurity Marketing Society seats competitors at separate tables.

Give it a Brief and a Destination

Even a capped, well-matched table can fall flat if it doesn’t have a clear purpose and end goal.

“Done well, roundtables are designed, rather than used as moments that are improvised,” Hunt said. That means “asking attendees what they want to discuss before the event, grouping people around shared interests or challenges, giving each table a clear prompt, assigning a facilitator, defining the desired outcome and capturing insights after the discussion.”

At B2B Ignite, each Propolis Expert designed a session around a defined focus.

“They built their session around their area of expertise and using the insights gained from their recent discussions with Propolis members,” O’Connor said, so “delegates could leave the session with something new they could take back and action right away.”

Forrester designs the outcome into its choice of moderator, a principal analyst who anchors the discussion in their own research. The appeal, James said, is that delegates “get both the peer-to-peer engagement with the analyst insights and grounding of the conversation.”

Whitver builds the topics with her members, not just for them.

“Make sure to involve the people who will be at the roundtables in designing them,” she said. “I have a good pulse on what the topics are that will resonate, but we build a small coalition of member advisors to share their feedback and identify blind spots in programming.”

Keep the Sponsor Out of the Driver’s Seat

Then come the sponsors who may want to pay for a roundtable—and dominate it.

Whitver’s Society has never run a paid or sponsored roundtable. Its model is community-first, or “inside-out,” and she reads the industry-wide connection gap as a matter of incentives.

“B2B events get connection wrong all the time because many are not motivated by true community building,” she said. “They are motivated by money, PSF (per square foot), ROI, sponsor churn, or some other metric.”

Forrester and B2B Ignite both allow a commercial angle but keep it subordinate to the room.

“Some events have roundtable sponsorship opportunities and therefore there is a commercial angle, but it’s always driven by delegate experience first,” James said. In Ignite Exchange’s first year, that happened with a single workshop.

What Scale Changes

Scale is where the fragility of the roundtable format can become most apparent. Hunt said workshops hold up better than roundtables as events grow “because the structure is built into the format” and can be replicated across rooms, while “roundtables depend more heavily on group chemistry and facilitation.” Operators manage scale by capping the rooms, not filling them.

Forrester builds its roundtable program to serve at least half its roughly 1,800 delegates, and B2B Ignite, which draws 500-plus marketers, would add Ignite Exchange sessions rather than seats if demand grew, O’Connor said.

Different formats do different things, Hunt said, and the order matters. A keynote sets shared context for the whole room, while roundtables, workshops and curated breakouts create the smaller, designed moments.

For now, the harder task is measuring a roundtable’s impact. The operators track attendee satisfaction closely through post-session surveys and session ratings, but what an attendee actually carries back to the job is tougher to capture. O’Connor’s team is starting to reach for it. As part of its research for the 2027 event, a conference producer will conduct one-on-one interviews with Ignite Exchange attendees “to assess what impact the sessions and takeaways have had on their day-to-day roles,” he said.

The operators who make roundtables work treat them as a discipline, with the right mix at the table, a clear brief, a sponsor kept from turning the session into a pitch and a leader who knows how to move things along. The reward—attendee engagement and satisfaction—goes to those willing to put in the work.

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