Every trade show exhibit marketer wants to quantify the value of their trade show participation (measure ROI). This methodology, developed by our 3D Exhibits metrics team, does exactly that.

Potential Revenue Touched (PRT) is a metric that utilizes your lead gen system to predict the volume of business opportunities likely to result from your exhibit marketing efforts. The benefits of this approach are:

PRT demonstrates the value of your program to upper management by giving your efforts a quantifiable number of sales dollars you've touched—thus making it easier to earn budget increases and raises.

Not only does PRT eliminate the need to wait out the sales cycle to calculate ROI, it separates the responsibility of the trade show team (to create qualified opportunities) from the responsibility to of sales (to close the leads collected). Your program gets judged on the volume of potential business you add to the pipeline—not sales' ability to close it!

How to implement PRT:

1. In order for PRT to work, you need to have a system in place to qualify your leads—as you will only want to include the real prospects in your calculation.

2. Count the number of new contacts you designate as highly qualified.

3. Multiply this number by the average price of a sale.

4. Multiply your result by your company's close ratio to determine the eventual new business outcome of your show (assuming the sales team follows up on the leads).

This formula can be adjusted for specific companies' needs. For instance, if you are selling multiple product types, the calculation can be customized to take into account the specific product or products each lead is interested in. Varying close rates across product lines can be accounted for as well.

For existing clients, you can calculate the current volume of annual sales these people represent, the dollar volume of upsell opportunity created—or both.

Once you have these figures, it's easy to graph and compare results across all shows or across shows for a market. You can also cross-graph this with your budget for each show to illustrate which shows are yielding the best ROI.

Are you currently using Potential Revenue Touched to measure your trade show performance and ROI? If not, our 3D Exhibits measurement team would love to help you get started.