In case you didn’t hear, we’re knee deep with Salesforce. We spent resources developing a Lightning Component in time for the
annual “Biggest Event of All Time vs. Oracle”, aka Dreamforce ’15. Some of us thought the decision to go ‘all in’ with Salesforce and prioritize developing a Lightning Component a ‘pivot’, you can also call it just plain being fluid.

Anyhoo, I wrote a different post about that, read it here. Nuff said.

So, we spent precious and finite dev & product resources to build a Lightning Component. What does that mean? It means you’ll be able to view any Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in your Dasheroo business dashboard right within the Salesforce.com application, cool huh?

Our friends at Salesforce were impressed with what our team, and especially Alex, developed in a very short amount of time! And I must say, so was I. SFDC was so happy, they invited Josh and I to speak about it at Dreamforce.

So, the next logical decision was: “hell, should we sponsor as well?”, meaning, should we have a booth at the event. It’s a $25,000 investment for a tiny pod alone, not to mention the cost for a rotating crew of 2-3 Dasheroo folks to staff the pod for 4 days.

Exhibiting at events can be very expensive, and I get pretty frugal when that decision comes around. We’ve only exhibited at one other event, the Market New York Expo last May. And that was less than $5,000 for a full 10′ x 10′ booth for 3 days.

So what were the factors I used to make a decision in this case?

• Q: Do we want to be 1/2 in or go all the way?
  A: We already made a significant investment in product and engineering, so it seemed like a reasonable investment to go ‘all in’ to hopefully build on our relationship and get Salesforce behind us and our Lightning Component. It worked well for us back in the early days at VerticalResponse when we integrated and got listed on the AppExchange and became the most downloaded application at the time.
• Q: How close of a match is our market to the Dreamforce attendees?
  A: We knew most DF attendees would be larger businesses than our core SMB target, and we’d be asked to compare ourselves to enterprise offerings like Salesforce Wave, Tableau and Domo. So not a great match, but we really wanted to learn from this type of feedback. And what we confirmed was that Dasheroo is more of a complementary offering to the big guys than a straight-up competitor. Valuable info!
• Q: Will there be solid feedback and learnings we can use to improve our product development strategy?
  A: If you ask some questions and really listen to the folks that stop by your booth, you should always learn some important things. So Josh (VP Product) and James (VP Engineering) spent a lot of time at the booth and heard challenges and needs first hand. For one, a “BI-light” approach, meaning perhaps we should go one level deeper in uncovering trends or the proverbial ‘canary in the coal mine’.
• Q: What are the all-in costs (inclusive of travel and lodging)?
  A: Since Dreamforce is in San Francisco, travel and lodging costs were nil. All but one of us that attended lives here. Otherwise, we may have decided to not attend, or may have decided to really trim down the number of us who attended.
• Q: Will there be partnership opportunities?
  A: I felt we’d get in front of companies that we could have long term growth opportunities with, that we may not get in front of otherwise. And yes, there are a few of those in the hopper!
• Q: What do we consider an acceptable ‘ROI’?
  A: Contrary to my ROI for most events, I didn’t base this purely on number of leads and estimated sales close rate. That would be a tough calculation to make work, when you have a freemium business dashboard product! I based it on the factors above. Plus, we will measure the ROI on more traditional ‘payback’ approaches. But if we took an estimated $35,000 total investment on the 160 leads we generated, that’s $218 per lead. So we’ll see what happens – maybe we’ll get some larger deals or a couple great partnerships that pay that off. I’ll let you know.

So, yes we attended and 4 of the 5 of us co-founders said ‘yes’ it was worth it. The 5th was on the fence for valid reasons. Now, don’t get me wrong – we have no plans to throw around $25,000 willy nilly, it’s just not in our budget. Plus it hampered our productivity for a full week. But sometimes you have to look past short term traditional ROI to get to a logical decision in these cases when the strategic value can far outweigh the short-term investment.

What’s your take on trade show investment? Let me know!