Building scenarios to project event revenue, costs and opportunity can help you arrive at accurate and believable projections, which you and your management can use to make event decisions with confidence.
A good place to start is with event history and current trends analysis.
- Revenue: review percent of total sales by week for past events. Is there consistency over the years? How likely is this year to mirror past years?
- Costs: review cost per attendee and cost per registration dollar earned. How have these trended over the years? Are they in line with your industry or corporate standards and/or the audience value to your company? What goal would you set for future events?
- Projections: review variance between past projections and actuals. How close is the variance? What circumstances led to significant variances? How likely are any of those circumstances to have an impact in the future?
- Opportunity: review data concerning prospect conversion, customer entrenchment or upsales, business partner relationship-building, press mentions, etc. that resulted from stakeholders participating in the event. Has the opportunity been well exploited in the past? How likely is it that your experience will be continued or improved in the future?
- No history for your event? Look for other models that you could reasonably present as trends or experience. Has your company done something similar in the past? Have you produced a similar event for another company? What about your network: peers or vendors who could share their experience?
As you use your analysis to build your plan, consider the following:
- Revenue: Are your goals supported by your audience acquisition and sponsorship sales plans? For example, if you are projecting 20% more attendees, are you reaching out to 20% or more prospective attendees than in the past, or do you have a more robust experiential marketing plan that can reasonably be expected to deliver a higher conversion rate?
- Cost Alignment: Are your projected costs aligned with the projected participation? Consider having a plan to deal with fluctuating projections along the way, one that prioritizes potential cost cuts by alignment with projected attendees, lowest impact on stakeholder experience and value and highest impact on savings.
- Opportunity: How will you best exploit the business opportunity? Often, the most effective plan is to ensure your sales and operations teams are engaged and that there is a follow-up plan in place that is supported by top management.