Well...that is a popular question these days now that trade show season is starting again. Trade show attendance is clearly down and event managers are quick to tell us "it's gotten rid of the tire kickers." If someone is coming to a trade show today, they are really interested in what you have. That's an interesting premise but not one you can answer at the show (where they would like you to renew for next year, by the way). Marketing operation management is important for answering this question. To truly track the Marketing ROI of an event, you'll need to track the results and the cost. It seems so simple, but keeping an accurate accounting of both is a challenge. A strong Marketing Operations Management component will track the cost of the activity in one place. This aspect of Marketing Financial Management software should not be taken lightly. The ability to show a view of financial status the way that marketing wants to track cost is the elegant benefit of MRM software. The marketing software application will provide you a foundation for tracking the results of an event. How many names did you collect? How many move to the next stage in the marketing funnel (downloaded a white paper or attended a webinar)? How many became an appointment? How many did sales pursue as an opportunity? How many closed as new deals? Depending on your business, your metrics and expectations will be different, but these metrics need to be tracked to express your marketing ROI.
I have a confession: Back in my early days in marketing, I was doing a national tour for sales training with a large multi-national high tech company. It was one of those "If this is Tuesday, it must be Raleigh" tours with a different city and the same presentation each day. To say the least, it got a little old delivering the same presentation. To stave off the boredom, we challenged each other to weave in some nonsense phrases in our presentations (purple aardvarks for example). 
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