How to get ROI out of Roundtables and Think Tanks

It's corporate table-stakes to ensure your marketing dollars equate to trackable, defined, return on investment. The easy path is to throw out some content on a webcast, gather leads, send the leads to sales, have sales qualify them, then move them through the sales funnel. But the catch-22 is that we also know that an over-reliance on one-way webinars has diminishing returns and almost eliminates conversation and engagement if not produced and managed properly.

Conversely, running a completely conversation-based event can make it very hard to track leads and quantify the investment, and while everyone knows that there's value in them, without buy-in, they can be hard to sell up the chain.

There are hundreds of companies that purport to run roundtables and will bring you qualified leads. They'll find 10 prospects, put them in a Zoom room with your execs and let your execs present to them and have a conversation, but there seem to be mixed results from these companies, and participants have low turn-up rates due to the formulaic and sales-y nature of these experiences.

So I thought I'd share how we get ROI out of roundtables and think tanks that we run through Haute Dokimazo. It's not an autopilot thing (it takes a little work), we admit, but the formula is tried and true. Our secret? We call them Engagement Reports.

Whether your roundtables are spontaneous (like a Haute Dokimazo where we crowdsource the topics during the event) or the topics are pre-planned, the ROI secret is rarely in the topics; It's in the conversation! Our secret? Make sure you have someone in each of your breakout rooms whose job it is to track the participants, track how often they contribute to the conversation (are they offering knowledge or asking questions?), and track what the topics of those contributions are. It's this engagement report that will provide your sales team with the insights and lead qualification they need to follow up with the participants.

If you're evaluating hiring a 3rd party company to run roundtables for you, make sure they provide Engagement Reports. If they don't, you need to assign someone from your company to the rooms to track this information.

Interested in running your own roundtable? Join my upcoming Haute U class on July 14th from 1-3pm Central, and learn how to use Zoom meetings to create and manage breakout rooms, learn how to set up engagement reports, and more! Check out How To Run Roundtables in Zoom. We're excited to help you not only add conversation into your event portfolio, but actually get ROI out of it, too!

Liz Lathan, CMP is co-founder and CEO of Haute Dokimazo, a "spontaneous think tank” company that empowers participants to solve their business challenges through the wisdom of peers. Haute Dokimazo and Haute Rock Creative are part of Haute Companies, a family of companies anchored in human connection, from events to media (podcasts, videos, and more) to direct mail to swag to entertainment talent management to strategy session facilitation.