The DMO Guide to: Getting Higher ROI from your Sales Leads

July 26, 2017

Sales managers run into questions on conversion all the time, and DMOs are no
exception. Everyone in sales wants great leads, but understanding the cost of those
leads and whether they translate to solid conversations is a key part of a DMO
executive’s job.

For any DMO, leads may originate from an array of possible sources. The first step in
the analysis of your lead source ROI is to inventory your existing lead sources.
Remember to include all types of lead sources including association (e.g. DMAI), lead
generation companies (e.g. Cvent) and even state/provincial partnerships.

Lead Source Best Practices
Knowing the value of your lead source begins with some best practices. Accurately
tagging your lead sources in your CRM is a critical step in calculating the ROI. As
painful as it may be, it is likely worth the effort to go back in time and “clean-up”
your data by ensuring that each past and future meeting is tagged accurately with a
lead source. As well, you need to ensure that expenses in your accounting system
have been accurately attributed to the vendor that represents your lead source -- -
e.g. membership fees, tradeshow costs, etc. These financial records provide another
important input into the ROI calculation.

Calculating ROI
At Watercooler, our data scientists can analyze lead sourcing expenses to build an
accurate picture of ROI. We do this by looking at the source, leads generated,
bookings generated from these leads, and then the cost analysis for the same. By
looking at these data points, we bring a dollar value on the cost per booked room
night, allowing you to now see the true value of each source.

In our experience, we’ve seen this number fluctuate from as little as a few cents per
room night, to thousands of dollars per room night. The worst case scenarios that
we’ve seen are where a whole team goes to an expensive foreign trade show and
then there are just a few, small resulting meetings.

Once the ROI results have been calculated, then the sales team can re-evaluate their
expenditures for the next year, with a focus on the highest value lead sources. As
well, dropping ineffective lead sources frees up budget for new, more productive
lead sources.

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