Odoo Is Doubling Its Roadshow. Here's How to Make It Count

• The investment: Odoo ran 47 free Business Shows across the US in 2026 and plans to double that in 2027, which is exactly why it's worth asking who they're for. It's also worth a thank you from community - including myself (see below).
• The room: every show mixes users, partners, students, and service sellers, four audiences with different means and goals.
• No choice is a choice: Odoo should pick one target per show, set a KPI for it, and let the city, venue, time, and content follow.
• The buyer: if the target is net-new customers, the person to design for is a time-pressed owner or executive leaving their own business at the end of the day.
• The location: 35 of 47 shows were downtown, manufacturing and distribution offices are generally not. Plus, big hubs like Upstate South Carolina, Northern Indiana, Alabama, and the Inland Empire have not seen a show nearby in the last 24 months.
• The content: a full day of beginner accounting doesn't match what buyers need (IMHO); half-day tracks could be synced to the audience. All of the content should lean hard on case studies.
• The outreach: buyers aren't finding their next ERP on Instagram (I hear about attendees learn about the show from IG); outbound calls, chambers of commerce, and industry associations get closer - especially in smaller markets targeting decision makers.

First, A Thank You

Let me start with a thank-you, because what follows is going to sound like a complaint and it isn't one.

In 2026 Odoo ran 47 free Business Shows across the United States, from Phoenix in January to Fort Worth in December. Next year the calendar roughly doubles. The US is now Odoo's single largest market, at 12% of revenue, and the company is putting real money into showing up in person. Most software companies at this stage would cut the travel budget and run webinars.

I've been to 11 of these shows. I'm building my business on the back of them. And I'd never be asking the question in this piece if Odoo hadn't had the foresight to make the investment in the first place.

The question is simple: who is the roadshow for?

Who's in the Room

Walk into any Business Show and you'll meet four kinds of people.

The users. The people who run a business on Odoo today, and the ones who might tomorrow. Current users come to add modules, add users, or get more out of what they already pay for. Prospective users come because they've outgrown their current system and want to see what's next. Either way, these are the owners and executives who buy licenses. They are the hardest people to get in the room, and the most valuable once they're there.

The builders. Partners, sponsors, solo developers kicking the tires on becoming partners, and people like me who've built a niche practice around Odoo. Sean from Avalara comes to mind.

The future. Students and career-changers with some accounting background asking "what's this Odoo thing about?"

The rest. People selling services to whoever else is in the room. DC had a lot of this, mostly government services folks working the crowd.

Every one of those groups has a reason to be there. That's the problem. One room, one agenda, four audiences with almost nothing in common.

No Choice Is a Choice

When I asked Odoo's events team how they measure success, the honest answer was that it depends on the city. Smaller cities bring in more people new to Odoo; bigger cities bring more partners.

That's not a KPI. That's a description of who happened to show up.

The order should run the other way:

1. Pick the target. One audience per show.
2. Set the KPI for that target. One number that says whether the show worked.
3. Let strategy and execution follow. The city, the venue, the start time, the agenda, and the ads all come from the first two answers.

Skip step one and the format picks the audience for you. A free evening event at a downtown hotel picks students, partners, and people who work three blocks away.

Here's how it plays out for the two audiences that matter most.

Target: net-new buyers. The KPI is qualified buyers in the room, the owners and executives who could sign an ERP contract in the next few years, and the pipeline that comes out of it. Not headcount. Not sponsors. I think this is where the growth is, so it's the case for the rest of this piece. And if the target is the buyer, every decision should start from one person: the one who signs.

Target: current Odoo users. The KPI is something like module adoption or expansion revenue after the show. That points to deeper content: real workflows in the modules people already run, taught by people who've built them. Today's hands-on day is all accounting, pitched at the beginner. If you already run Odoo Accounting, you're not learning anything.

The Shows Are in the Wrong Part of Town

35 of Odoo's 47 US shows this year were in downtown or near-downtown hotels. That's convenient for those of us who fly in. It's not where the buyers are.

The numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics are blunt:

• Manhattan holds 4.5% of the New York metro's manufacturing jobs. The other 95% are somewhere else.
• Gwinnett County has more manufacturing jobs than Fulton County. Atlanta's show is downtown, in Fulton.
• In Chicago, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Minneapolis, the highest concentration of manufacturing is in a suburban county every time: Macomb, Waukesha, Anoka, Kane, Lake.

Every show starts at 5:30/6:00 PM. Claude and I mapped the drive from every county in each metro to each venue, weighted by where the manufacturing jobs are, and adjusted it for typical rush-hour traffic using TomTom's 2025 data. The typical person from a manufacturing company would need ~50 minutes to drive to the downtown.

And some of the biggest concentrations of buyers didn't get a show within driving distance at all:

• Upstate South Carolina. Greenville and Spartanburg together have about 101,000 manufacturing jobs, roughly the same as Charlotte at nearly twice the concentration. BMW's largest plant in the world is in Spartanburg: 412,799 vehicles in 2025, with a supplier network built around it (GreenCars). The closest 2026 show is Charlotte, about 100 miles away. The state's only recent show was in Myrtle Beach.
• Northern Indiana. Elkhart, Fort Wayne, and South Bend add up to about 114,000 manufacturing jobs, more than Milwaukee. In Elkhart, 46% of all jobs are in manufacturing, the highest share of any metro in the country. The area builds roughly 80% of America's RVs (HUD).
• Alabama. Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery, Tuscaloosa, Mobile, and Decatur add up to about 149,000 manufacturing jobs, more than Phoenix. Hyundai's Montgomery plant built 362,000 vehicles last year (Business Alabama). Huntsville has added 9,600 manufacturing jobs since 2019. No 2026 show in the state.
• The Inland Empire. 95,000 manufacturing jobs, plus 205,000 in transportation and warehousing. That's the fifth-largest logistics workforce in the country, and in 2025 the region led the nation in big industrial leases (CBRE). Odoo ran three shows in the LA area this year: Koreatown, Irvine, and Granada Hills. None was in Ontario.

To be fair to Odoo: manufacturing isn't the whole base. In Odoo's own public US customer references, manufacturing and wholesale together make up about half. The other half is services, retail, tech, health, and construction (Odoo customers). Those businesses sit closer to city centers. So the answer isn't to abandon big metros. It's to move the venue toward the industrial park and add the places that have been skipped.

What They Came to Learn

The current hands-on day is eight hours of accounting. I usually leave early. It's a slog for everyone.

The room is too mixed for one curriculum. Some people don't bring a laptop. Some can't get on the Wi-Fi for the first two hours. Some know accounting better than the trainer and want to talk about deferred payments to retirement accounts. You need a CPA for that.

Here's what the installed base actually runs. Across 100+ North American implementations, Accounting is in 100% of projects, Sales in 94%, CRM in 87%, and Inventory in 76%. Manufacturing is in only 28% (Octura Solutions).

So, a starting position:

• Half a day, not a full day. Respect the buyer's calendar.
• Tracks, not one agenda. Accounting; inventory, purchasing, and manufacturing; sales, CRM, and website. Let people pick the one that matches their business.
• Separate the audiences. Run student events in college towns that are also manufacturing towns, like Ann Arbor or Ypsilanti instead of downtown Detroit, and invite local manufacturers to meet them.

How You Get Them There

Ask people at the shows how they heard about it and a lot of them say Instagram. The owner who's about to buy 30 licenses isn't finding his next ERP on Instagram. That's my biased POV.

Odoo already has an outbound sales team in Buffalo. Give them the event as a hook and have them calling the six to eight weeks before every show. I've never met anyone who said they came because someone called them. That's the opportunity.

Then go where the owners already are: local chambers of commerce and manufacturing and distribution associations. Most will send an email to their members. In Greenville, that's the outreach I'd start with. Full disclosure, I worked for a distribution company with a DC in Spartanburg, SC (which is close to Greenville).

And ask. Survey past attendees and the people who bought: what associations they belong to, what they read, whether they're on LinkedIn or Reddit. Odoo's own Survey app can do it in an afternoon.

The Bottom Line

Every business owner I know is drowning in outreach right now. AI writes the cold emails, AI writes the LinkedIn messages, and most of it gets deleted unread. The more automated the inbox gets, the more a room full of real people is worth. A handshake, a demo on a real database, a beer with someone who runs a business like yours: none of that can be faked at scale.

Odoo already knows this. That's why it's putting serious money into 47 shows this year and roughly twice that next year. It's a big bet, and getting the most out of it is in everyone's interest: Odoo's, its partners', and the business owners who walk in the door looking for a better way to run their company.

The 2027 calendar doubles. That's twice as many chances to get it right, and I want to help. See you on the road.