Speaker 1: Today we're going to talk about the one most valuable stat that you should be tracking to drive ROI for your events. So after years of throwing events, there is one data point that I've fallen in love with. There's a lot of data in events, don't get me wrong. You can pull out so many different insights, but there's one data point that I actually find really moves the needle on an event, especially if the goal of the event is sales. I learned this lesson the hard way. I threw a series of events a couple of years back in which everyone thought they were really good events, but at the end of the day, they just didn't drive revenue. At the end of the day, there was no return on the investment of the event. So what I started instituting was consistently looking at one single number and shouting it from the mountaintops. I call this number O-I-T-R, opportunity in the room. I find that this number is simple, understandable, clear, and helps get people really behind your event. So what we're going to do today is we're going to talk about three things. We're going to talk about how to calculate opportunity in the room, we're going to talk about how to project against opportunity in the room and really build your budget for it, and we're going to talk about how to use that number to set goals and get your team really incentivized around this number. So let's dive in. The thing about opportunity in the room is to think about every event really as an opportunity. Maybe more specifically, to think about all the people at the event as opportunities. How much could this attendee eventually buy from us? Now typically, we're tracking this information in Salesforce and let's say that somebody comes in as a $40,000 account and this person is a $30,000 account, this person is a $20,000 account, and this person is a $10,000 account. Each of these would be quantified as opportunities, but more importantly, each of these are humans. These are people that are actually attending our event and have real life needs, desires, and martinis in their hands. So by taking a step back and thinking about each of these people as numbers, it helps us really quantify what this event could eventually achieve. Now so then the next step is to take all these numbers and tally them up. 40 plus 30 plus 20 plus 10 is $100,000. And now this right here, this is the raw opportunity in the room, right? The raw opportunity number. We're going to use that later to actually get our team really excited about this event. But in the meantime, as pragmatists, as event planners, we need to think about the actual potential of this event and the projected potential of this event. Now there's a couple ways to do this. The more sophisticated way is to basically assign a percentage that this opportunity will close eventually. So let's say that this person is at a 50% opportunity to close. This person is at a 75% opportunity to close. This person is really early, so it'll be at a 10% opportunity to close. This person's right on the edge, so we're about to close $10K, and it's like 90%. That's one way to accomplish this, and you would add all these numbers up and assign the percentages. Just for simplicity while we talk this through, let's just use a general opportunity to close ratio of 15%. The way to do this is you basically apply 15% to $100,000, and you come up with the adjusted opportunity in the room, and that's just going to be $15,000. Now let's talk about how we're going to use that $15,000, and we'll come back to the $100,000 number. The way that I use that $15,000 is to build my budget and be realistic about what the eventual ROI is going to be. I try to work backwards. I take that $100,000 like we just did, then I basically adjust it. As you know, we got to about $15,000. Then I basically set an ROI target. For most of my events, I try to make my ROI target two to one. That means for every dollar in terms of people time and actual dollars out time, I try to get about a two to one ratio, so $2 in for every dollar out. What that's going to tell me is pretty simple. It's going to tell me that the budget that I'm allowed to spend here is about $7,500 on my event. I could probably throw a pretty good event for that, right? I don't know. Actually, now that I think about it, I really want to increase that budget, and there's really only one way to do that. If I can increase this to, let's call it, $400,000 in the room, and then I keep that same adjustment, I keep that same ROI, I get to times this now by four, and $7,500 times four. Anyone? Anyone? Ah, come on. It's $30,000. We're good. If you want to increase your budget, it's pretty simple. Show that you can get more opportunity in the room, and that you can maintain the same ROI ratio, and then it's a pretty logical argument that you should be spending more money on the event. That's how to build your budget off of the adjusted opportunity in the room, but now let's talk about how to use the opportunity in the room to get your team really excited. The best way to do this is to put that number in a place that everybody can see. I actually put up dashboards in the office with the opportunity in the room leading up to the event. We send emails weekly with the opportunity in the room and how it's building. We'll even have leaderboards of who's driving the most opportunity in the room. I'll even set cash compensation, or even you can attend this event if you drive X amount of opportunity in the room. The bottom line is this, is that putting a real number gets people to understand that, hey, this is a fun event, that we're going to have martinis, and it's going to be really sweet, but you've got to do your job at this event. This event is an opportunity for you to actually go make some money. Putting that number up and labeling this event as a dollar figure really changes the way people think about that event. That's how I think about opportunity in the room. I use it to project an actual number and build my budget off of it, and I use it to really incentivize and get my team excited about attending and using the event as a selling opportunity. As I've followed and tracked and looked at this number, it's made one thing very, very clear to me. Look, you only have so many attendees that can exist in an event. You might have a small event. You might have a big event. You might have a huge event, but no matter what, you really can't change the number of attendees that you have, but what you can change is how valuable each attendee is. Focusing on opportunity in the room has really evolved my thinking around how I segment, how I target, and how I use each of those invitations to drive the most amount of opportunity for the square footage that I have in that venue. That's it. I would love to hear if you've used opportunity in the room to drive actions or better events. If you could send me comments or ideas about this particular stat, I would love it. Make sure to tune in for our next run of show. Thanks for tuning in. Craving more event content? If so, subscribe below and you can check out more episodes of Run-Up Show Weekly.