Trade shows are a significant investment. After the initial sign-up fee, they come with “invisible costs” like booth design, merch, and team travel expenses. The challenge is that, despite significant spending on marketing, sales, and events, it’s difficult to track expenses in real time. Once the effort and investment are made, CFOs often demand to know the ROI, which has historically been hard to quantify. 

Make your leads “future-proof" with spend intelligence  

Proving a trade show’s value starts with the right data. Enter spend intelligence, a strategy that uses automation to monitor and analyze your budget in real-time. This allows marketing, sales and event teams to make informed decisions and optimize event strategy as the show unfolds. Should the booth incur higher‑than‑projected expenses, the team can renegotiate with vendors and reallocate the savings.  

To maximize impact, integrate your spend intelligence tools with your customer relationship management (CRM) system. Doing so will allow you to not only track expenses but also link them to your lead-generation efforts. This creates a clear picture of your trade show ROI through calculating Lead Conversion Rates (LCR) and Cost Per Lead (CPL) calculations (CPL = Total Trade‑Show Expense ÷ number of Qualified Leads).  

Additionally, tracking the “lead-conversion rate” vs. “opportunity-conversion rate” can be a useful metric when proving the trade show gave the team the leads they needed to close deals. The LCR evaluates the percentage of leads that convert into customers, demonstrating the efficacy of lead creation and relationship building from the team. The Opportunity Conversion Rate is the percentage of opportunities that are successfully converted, indicating the sales team’s ability to close deals.  

Integrating your team’s CRMs with AP processes does more than just allow access to the financial ledger and customer data in one place. You can track how many leads from the trade show convert to opportunities within the next 90 days, the cost associated with each new lead and, with the right application, visualize this information to prove the ROI of your trade show spend. 

Quantifying who you meet   

A huge part of trade shows is making new contacts within an industry, which includes everything from small talk at happy hour to scanning badges or QR codes at a booth. 

The problem most teams encounter is that these longer leads or intangible moments of connection are hard to quantify. Imagine your coworker says they “met some new leads at happy hour who they connected with on LinkedIn.” Was this five or 50 new contacts? How did that activity help your business? Leadership needs data they can see. Spend-intelligence tools within CRM software let you quantify these new leads and track ongoing relationships over the customer lifecycle.    

End-to-end expense and budget tracking inside a company’s CRM offers several advantages: 

• Combining expenditure reporting with lead and sales metrics gives the full picture when it’s time for the official ROI analysis of the trade show.  
• Understanding the cost associated with acquiring each lead helps to prioritize follow-up efforts based on potential profitability.  
• In the coming weeks and months, as leads turn into customers, you can strategize which trade shows to take on next from their business needs. 

Considerations   

To effectively implement real-time spend intelligence, consider selecting a platform or app that is native to your CRM, aligns with organizational needs and integrates seamlessly with existing workflows. Ensure that marketing, events, and sales teams are trained and comfortable using the new technologies to maximize their effectiveness. The ROI analysis will only be as good as the data entered in real time at the show, whether that’s staff expensing back their Uber to the airport or a new lead entering their information at your booth. 

As the demand for accountability grows in businesses everywhere, leveraging real-time spend intelligence is increasingly vital for marketing teams to prove the ROI of trade show participation. With a little integration and automation on their side, organizations can gain a competitive edge and demonstrate the tangible value of their marketing efforts. Tracking every dollar, every badge swipe and every lead in the same place in real time means event teams have the answer to the inevitable question, “what was the ROI of attending this show?” Say goodbye to combing through receipts, staring down the list for the most promising contacts and guestimating ROI. With real-time spend intelligence, leaders will know where the effort stands at any given moment of the show.