Strong return on investment is based on how effective your company’s exhibit program is in helping achieve key corporate priorities. At the end of the day, these priorities need to show a connection to increasing profitable sales from new leads or existing customers.

For example, trade shows can often involve hospitality functions or account meetings to increase customer retention or accelerate existing opportunities. The focus might also be on fostering positive influencer (analyst) or media coverage. Although these goals may not seem to tie directly into generating sales, there is often a positive correlation to increased sales that can be tracked and measured.

To make any business investment worthwhile, the investment – your trade show -- needs to show a return on investment greater than the cost of participating in the event.

Our goal is to partner with you to not only design an exhibit to reflect your company’s brand, but to measure how that investment impacts your company’s key corporate objectives, and profitable growth.

Without measurable objectives in place, there is simply no good way to judge success…or lack of it. This becomes a particularly big issue at budget and planning time. Without a measurement system in place, decisions about which trade shows to include or eliminate from the event calendars may be based on politics or gut feelings, which are not necessarily the best criteria to use in effectively planning a show calendar. It’s often been said that what gets measured gets done. Simply by setting measurable objectives for your trade shows and events, you can increase the chance of meeting your objectives. Here are some advantages to measuring trade show results. The biggest advantage, as shown in the center puzzle piece, is contribution to profitable growth.

All too often, however, there are little or no budget dollars or effective resources allocated to improvement of lead followup processes or measurement of the positive impact of trade shows. Since results at trade shows generally result from the positive prospect and customer behaviors before, during or after the show, not having a process to measure and improve outcomes can be a problem.
If there are any issues with target prospect identification and related messaging, there can be negative consequences in terms of following up with non-prospects after the show. Similarly, if followup processes for sales-ready leads are ineffective, there can be opportunities, as well as sales lost, which adds up to dollar wasted, rather than gained, as the result of trade show participation.

Some experts recommend spending a minimum of 5% annually of your event budget on development of effective lead management processes and tools, as well as measurement reports tools and reports that can highlight effective strategies and positive results.

The bottom line is, the more data you have on results from your events, the better the business case for funding your future events. But which data? There are only two questions to be asked – what is important to measure, and how it is going to be measured?

1. Results that have credibility at the C- and V- level.
2. Number of leads that convert to opportunities.
4. Recommendations for investments in yearly show and event schedule, based on pre-established thresholds for success.
5. Pipeline opportunities generated from access to top-tier accounts.
6. Return on investment for leads handed off to partners, distributors or brokers or non-sales business units.

Needs (Gap) Analysis
The next step is to uncover obstacles and gaps in where you’d like your program to be. We’ll conduct a Needs Analysis among your key stakeholders to determine where the gaps are in processes, performance or knowledge. Normally, there are areas you are currently doing well, along with areas that need improvement. You’ll get a report that identifies both.

The report and presentation will cover not only strategic planning, measurement and lead management processes, but may also encompass gaps in results company database/CRM results reporting and alignment between sales, marketing and C-level goals.

The report may also include a plan to gain stakeholder buy-in at the staff, business unit or even executive level, to maximize successful implementation and launch.

We’ll work in tandem with you with you to suggest and develop metrics for success. These can vary by company, industry, as well as corporate and business unit focus. Our goals will be to recommend metrics and associated measurements that serve as the cornerstone to demonstrate return on investment. If desired, we can also identify strategic marketing metrics that correlate key corporate priorities and outcomes.

Also, we’ll also recommend lead management and reporting processes that will work with either existing internal resources or which may require an additional resource to execute.

We’ll also work with your staff to launch a report structure that contains the data needed to track and present results effectively to management. You’ll also receive a project timeline, which will include timeframe for implantation of all activities recommended and approved in the Implementation Plan.

Launch
Equally important is a plan to manage changes in roles, responsibilities and resources required to execute your measurement program. Plan on collaborating with us to develop a program that works with any constraints you might have, while making a case for the best use of your internal staff time and budgets and other resources.

To make sure changes recommended are implemented, we’ll train your team, as well as work directly with you to onboard you and your team through one trade show. Our mission is to make sure phases of the plan are implemented successfully in your environment.