Measure the ROI of your events

Event ROI is decided before the event, because the rules for counting cost and credit have to exist before the leads arrive. Kite proposes those rules based on how your business sells, and you agree on them once. Then it applies them to every event, so a trade show in March and a dinner in October are measured the same way.

The rules answer a few questions:

• What counts as the event's cost? Kite includes the sponsorship or booth fee, travel and hotels, booth shipping and design, merchandise, and any side events such as a customer dinner. It asks whether you also want to count your team's time, which matters most for small events where the fee is low but three people spend two days away.
• Which leads belong to the event? Usually it's everyone you scanned or met there, everyone who booked a meeting through your pre-event outreach, and anyone who registered for a side event you hosted.
• What counts as sourced and what counts as influenced? A lead who was new to your CRM at the event is sourced by it. An account with a deal that was already open is influenced by it. Kite reports both, but it bases the event's ROI on sourced pipeline unless you choose otherwise.
• How long does the event get to prove itself? Kite sets the check-in dates from your sales cycle. If your deals take about four months to close, it might review the event at 30 days, 90 days, and six months.

Kite then creates the record. In Salesforce, it creates a campaign for the event with its dates, its budgeted cost, and a description of what you're there to do. In HubSpot, it creates a campaign for the event and can add a contact property, such as "Event," so every lead from the show carries the event's name. If your team keeps event results in a spreadsheet instead, Kite builds a Google Sheet with one row per event and a column for each cost, lead count, and pipeline figure.

Kite gathers every cost the event created, because counting only the sponsorship fee makes events look cheaper than they are. A $12,000 booth can easily become a $23,000 event once you add flights, hotels, booth shipping, and a merchandise order.

You can give Kite the costs however is easiest. Tell it the totals in a message, upload the sponsorship invoice as a PDF in the Kite web app, or add the numbers to a Google Sheet it reads. If Kite ordered your booth merchandise through its built-in Printify connection, it already knows that cost. Kite adds everything up and writes the actual cost onto the event's Salesforce campaign or into its row in your Google Sheet, so the cost sits right next to the leads and deals it's measured against.

When an event has leads but no recorded cost, Kite asks for the missing numbers. A dinner that looks free in your CRM because nobody logged the restaurant bill would otherwise rank as your best event of the year.

The ROI of an event can only be as complete as its lead record, so Kite gets your leads into the CRM within days of the event, while you still remember who was a real conversation. Put your badge-scan export in a Google Sheet, share the file with Kite in Slack, or send Kite a quick note about who you met and what you talked about.

Kite checks each person against your CRM before it adds anyone. A new person becomes a new lead, tied to the event. A person who's already in your CRM gets the event added to their record, and if their company already has an open deal, Kite records that deal as influenced by the event rather than counting it as new pipeline. In Salesforce, Kite adds each lead and contact to the event's campaign. In HubSpot, it creates or updates each contact and sets the event property.

Kite also researches each new person and scores them from one to five against your ideal customer profile. That separates the buyers you had a real conversation with from the people who stopped by for a T-shirt, and it makes cost per lead more honest. If 180 badge scans include only 64 people who fit your ideal customer profile, Kite reports both numbers, and the event's cost per qualified lead is based on the 64.

The follow-up emails themselves are part of getting pipeline from an event, and Get pipeline from conferences and events covers how Kite writes and sends them.

Kite measures each event's return against the deals in your CRM, because that's the one place that records which leads became customers and what they paid. It follows the event's leads through the stages your sales team already uses.

In Salesforce, Kite reads the opportunities whose primary campaign is the event, along with each one's stage, amount, and close date. It also finds opportunities created for the event's leads and contacts that nobody linked to the campaign, and it shows them to you so you can decide whether they count. In HubSpot, Kite reads the deals associated with the event's contacts and companies, and it reads the attribution figures HubSpot keeps for the event's campaign.

Here's what that looks like for one trade show. The event cost $23,000. Kite added 64 qualified new leads from the badge scans, for a cost per lead of about $359. Thirty days later, 9 of those leads had turned into opportunities worth $210,000, and three existing deals worth $95,000 had been influenced by meetings at the booth. Six months later, three of the sourced opportunities had closed for $72,000. The event's ROI is $72,000 minus $23,000, divided by $23,000, which is 213%, with six more opportunities still open.

Kite lines up all your events on the same measures, because a single event's numbers mean little until you can compare them with the alternatives. The comparison often changes which events look like winners:

By lead count, the trade show looks like the clear winner. By cost per lead, the trade show and the summit look the same. By the revenue each dollar produced, the summit returned more than twice as much as the trade show, and the dinner did best of all. Kite explains what drove each result, such as the summit's audience being made up mostly of the people you sell to, and it notes when an event is too new to judge because its deals haven't had time to close.

Kite saves each event's results in your team's knowledge base. When it researches conferences for next year, it uses those results alongside each event's audience, timing, and price, so its recommendations reflect what your past events actually returned. It might recommend dropping the big trade show booth, sending two people to the summit again, and hosting two more dinners in cities where you have open deals.

To compare events with your ads, content, and other programs, see Measure the return on each marketing program.

Kite reviews each event on the schedule you agreed on, because an event's return keeps changing for months after the booth comes down. At each check-in, it updates the event's pipeline and won revenue, recalculates its ROI, and tells you what moved since the last review.

You choose where the results go. Kite can deliver them to a Slack channel, by email, or as a conversation in the Kite web app. It can also publish a live event dashboard at a stable link that pulls fresh numbers from your CRM whenever someone opens it, which is useful when your sales leader or CFO wants to see the numbers without asking. When an event's final review is done, Kite marks the event's record as complete and its results become part of next year's planning.