The Server’s Guide to Marketing: Why Your Registration Numbers Are Just Empty Tables

While my marketing colleagues obsess over attribution models and customer acquisition costs, I’m over here thinking about table 12’s decaf coffee and whether the gentleman in booth 3 needs more balsamic dressing. Because here’s what nobody wants to admit: marketing isn’t rocket science. It’s waitressing with a bigger budget and fancier buzzwords.

I spent ten years in the food service side of hospitality—from starting as a sixteen-year-old host at Denny’s to managing at both Shilo Inn Hilltop Restaurant and Harvard Square Café. Every day in my current role, where I create digital events and content for the design community, I apply lessons learned from the sugar packet dispensers and the POS system that crashed during rush hour.

The Great Marketing Delusion

Somewhere along the way, marketing forgot it was in the service industry. We’ve convinced ourselves we’re data scientists, growth hackers, and behavioral psychologists. We build elaborate funnels, obsess over cohort analyses, and create personas with names like “Marketing Mary” and “Developer Dave” as if we’re casting a sitcom instead of serving real humans.

In events, we celebrate registration numbers like they’re actual revenue. But a packed event with disengaged attendees is like a full restaurant where everyone orders water and leaves—technically successful by one metric, completely useless by any measure that matters.

But strip away the MarTech stack and the endless Slack notifications about “pipeline velocity,” and marketing is just hospitality at scale. We’re still in the business of making people feel welcome, understood, and taken care of. The only difference is our “tables” are now email inboxes and event registrations.

Lesson 1: Read the Room (Before You Read the Analytics)

At Denny’s, I learned to read a table within thirty seconds. The exhausted nurse coming off a double shift needed efficient service and strong coffee. The teenage couple on their first date required gentle patience and maybe some free pie to make their night special. The regular who came in every Tuesday at 2 PM wanted to chat about his grandson’s baseball game.

No amount of demographic data could have taught me what I learned by simply paying attention to the humans in front of me.

Yet in B2B marketing, we’ve become so enamored with our dashboards that we’ve forgotten to look up. We segment customers into lifecycle stages and behavioral cohorts, but when was the last time you actually talked to someone who signed up for your webinar? Not to qualify them or gather testimonial soundbites, but to genuinely understand what they need?

Your event registration numbers might be up 20% quarter-over-quarter, but if you don’t know whether Matt from Orlando walked away from your last three events with actionable insights he could actually use, you’re measuring the wrong thing entirely.

Lesson 2: Sometimes the Best Marketing Is Just Refilling the Coffee

The best servers aren’t the ones with the most sales techniques or the perkiest personalities. They’re the ones who notice when your coffee cup is empty before you do. They anticipate needs rather than react to requests.

This translates directly to marketing, but somehow we’ve complicated it beyond recognition. Instead of anticipating what our community needs and quietly providing it, we’ve become carnival barkers shouting about our “value propositions” and “unique differentiators.”

Real marketing magic happens in the margins—the follow-up email that actually answers the question someone was too embarrassed to ask during the webinar, the resource that solves a problem they didn’t even know they had access to, the competitive event experience that flows so naturally people forget they’re being “marketed to” and focus entirely on learning.

Events are especially guilty of this backwards thinking. We obsess over attendance numbers, registration rates, and “butts in seats” while ignoring whether anyone left with knowledge they can actually apply. It’s like judging a restaurant’s success by how many people walked through the door rather than whether they enjoyed their meal and came back.

When I was at Stox, our most loyal customers weren’t the ones who came for the aggressive happy hour promotions. They were the ones who knew we’d remember their usual order and ask about their kid’s soccer game. We built relationships, not campaigns.

Lesson 3: Your OKRs Don’t Care If You’re Hungry

Here’s what I think: your metrics are lying to you. Or at least telling you a very incomplete story.

I’ve watched marketing teams celebrate increased email open rates while their community slowly loses trust. I’ve seen “successful” events that hit capacity limits while leaving attendees feeling like they wasted their time (and they tell us in the chat). I’ve witnessed companies optimize their way to maximum registrations and metric their way out of meaningful learning experiences.

In restaurants, there’s one single metric that matters above all others: did the customer leave satisfied? Everything else—table turnover, average check size, upsell percentages—is secondary. In events, the same principle applies: did attendees walk away with something valuable? Registration numbers, attendance rates, social media mentions, all of that should be secondary to actual value delivered.

Because a happy customer becomes a regular customer, and regular customers become evangelists who bring their friends. Those evangelists don’t just increase your customer lifetime value, they multiply it exponentially through word-of-mouth that no paid acquisition channel can replicate.

In B2B marketing, we’ve inverted this priority. We chase the secondary metrics (registrations, attendance, social shares) while losing sight of the primary one: are we actually serving our people well? Are they learning something they can use? Are they connecting with others in meaningful ways?

Lesson 4: The Best Upsell Is No Upsell

Every server knows the cardinal rule: suggest the dessert menu only if the table had a great experience with dinner. Push too early or too hard, and you’ll spoil the entire meal. Oh, and use the Sullivan Nod, which was required when I was working at Claim Jumper.

Yet marketing teams create elaborate nurture sequences designed to extract maximum value from every interaction. We interrupt people’s content consumption with pop-ups, retarget them with ads or in-product after they’ve already bought, and send “limited time offers” that somehow run every month.

The best upsell I ever made was to a family celebrating their daughter’s graduation. I didn’t pitch them the premium appetizer platter. Instead, I brought over a complimentary slice of cake with a candle, and we played “Pomp and Circumstance” over the PA system. They became regulars for two years and brought every family celebration to our restaurant.

That’s what authentic marketing looks like: making the moment about them, not about your quotas.

Lesson 5: Community Beats Campaign Every Time

The most successful restaurants aren’t the ones with the biggest advertising budgets—they’re the ones that become part of their community’s fabric. The local diner where high school students go after prom, where the morning coffee crowd debates politics, and where the night shift workers grab breakfast at 3 AM.

These places succeed because they understand something fundamental: they’re not just serving food, they’re serving connection.

The same principle applies to marketing. The most powerful campaigns aren’t campaigns at all, they’re ongoing conversations. They’re communities where people feel seen, heard, and valued. They’re spaces where learning happens naturally and relationships form organically.

The design community doesn’t engage with our content because we’ve crafted the perfect subject lines or optimized our send times. They engage because we’ve created a place where designers can grow, connect, and feel supported in their craft.

The Service Mindset in a Metrics World

I’m not suggesting we abandon data or ignore business objectives. Revenue matters. Growth matters. Efficiency matters. But they’re outcomes, not inputs. They’re what happens when you consistently serve your community well, not goals to optimize toward directly.

The most dangerous question in modern marketing isn’t “How do we increase conversion rates?” It’s “How do we serve our people better?” Because when you get the second question right, the first one answers itself.

Every morning, I still wake up thinking like a server. Who’s at my tables today? What do they need? How can I make their experience a little bit better? In all honesty, haha, I also still get the occasional table service nightmare… You know, the one where you’ve forgotten about the 4-top in the corner for three hours and they’re all staring at you with that look of quiet betrayal.

The stakes are different now—instead of tips, I’m hoping for event registrations and content engagement—but the fundamental job hasn’t changed.

We’re still in the business of service. We’re still here to help. We’re still responsible for making sure people leave satisfied, and more importantly, that they achieve success and reach their goals.

The only difference is that now my tables are digital, my customers are global, and instead of asking “How’s that taste?” I’m asking, “How’s this serving you?”

But the coffee still needs to be hot, the service still needs to be genuine, and the customer still needs to feel like they matter more than the metrics on your dashboard.

Now, who needs a refill?