Calculating Trade Show ROI

I talk to a lot of marketing people that are trying to figure out how much money their tradeshows are actually bringing in. A trade show manager that I spoke with the other day, was tasked with figuring out her companies trade shows’ Return on Investment (ROI). If she sent us the leads from her show, could we give her a number? She wanted a “Yes or No” answer. Unfortunately, it is not that simple. It is a tough number to calculate when you’re talking about trade shows, especially if you have a long sales cycle.


The obvious idea is to set up a lead management program that will reference the accounting database and match that against the leads that were collected at the trade shows. Before you run off to your accounting department, let’s think about how effective this reporting will be. What if your sales cycle is 6 months to 2 years, which is often the case. Analysis of the trade show leads may not be complete until 2 years after the event. Along the way, you will be generating a running tally that makes your show lead management look ineffective. And when you finally collect all the trade show sales data, 2 years later, is this information useful?

A different, more immediate, way of reporting on your shows is available if you are accurately qualifying your leads, and generating a lead rating for each lead. Immediately after the show, you should know the quality, or lead rating of each lead collected. Based on this lead scoring, you will know which leads should turn into trade show sales, that is, if the sales reps do their job with the trade show follow up.

The next step after the trade show lead capture and lead rating, is to assign a percentage to each group of leads based on the chance a deal will close. This number doesn’t have to be perfect, just an educated guess (you can fine tune this as you go). If you know a deal will close, assign it 100%, hot leads may be 75%, warm leads 30%, and cold 0%. Then you take the average size of a deal for your company (in dollars), and multiply it with these percentages and the number of leads for each rating group. This will allow you to generate an estimated dollar figure that will tell you how effective your trade show sales effort was.

This will take some effort, but it will be worth it the next time you have a meeting to talk about budget. Not to mention that you will have the info needed to focus the attention back onto sales if management is asking what happened with the tradeshow leads, because at the very least, you will have a list of tradeshow leads that should have turned into sales.

Every company is different, if your company has a short sales cycle, and accounting is willing to work with you, then you should be able to put together a report that details the hard dollars that your show generated. However, if your sales cycle is longer, then a lead management program like the one above will allow you to generate a trade show ROI number.