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ROI: Executive Buy-In Just the Start

October 25, 2026

Corporate leadership generally understands the value of events. The rub is getting finance to pay for them.

The problem isn’t convincing corporate leadership about the value of meetings and events — that battle has, for the most part anyway, been won. However, getting the budget approved to bring that value to life can be a very different story, according to the ICEN Annual Benchmarking Report 2026/2027, supported by Cvent.

The report, which surveyed 115 corporate event professionals between July and September, found that 79% of the 115 corporate event professionals surveyed rate their senior stakeholders’ belief in events at 4 or 5 out of 5. Only 13% find budgets easy to approve. Beyond timing, cost cutting and cost-per-head, the most common pushback, reported by 45%: “We can’t measure the ROI.”

The report outlines where the proof backing event ROI tends to break down, including:

A mismatch between demand and supply. More than half of respondents (54%) say proof that events drive pipeline or revenue is the data that would most help justify their program. Unfortunately, pipeline outcome appears to be the most difficult to come by: only 37% rate their evidence as strong.

Limited metrics (most get stuck at attendance). While 83% said they track registrations or attendance, just 34% said they track revenue attribution. So while headcounts are strong, they’re not tracking what the return is from those attendance numbers.

Volume factors. Easy approval drops from 22% for teams running 30 or fewer events a year to 4% for those running 60 or more, even though executive belief stays flat.

Manual processes a drag on evidence. Teams that shift event data into the CRM by hand give their pipeline evidence the lowest average rating of any group, 2.48 out of 5.

While budget and headcount are important, the report’s findings suggest that it’s even more important to define your terms and document everything:

Document your engagement scoring. Teams with a written scoring model rate their pipeline evidence 3.71 out of 5, versus 2.82 for teams without one — and it doesn’t seem to help to track those touchpoints informally. A good starting point would be to cover attendance, session engagement and follow-up meetings, with thresholds agreed with sales.
Integrate before you analyze. Teams with even partial CRM integration score 3.28, well ahead of manual teams. This would suggest it’s a good idea to automate the data flow before buying more analytics.
Set the measures with finance and marketing first. Agree which figures will judge the program before submitting the budget request. Simply assigning an ROI owner doesn’t help on its own: easy approval sits between 13% and 16% whoever holds it.
Begin with owned events and existing customers. Most teams (78%) put at least half their budget into owned events, where they control the data. Retention and expansion, clearly evidenced by 43%, are a quicker commercial win than new pipeline.
Aim AI at measurement. Only 13% have AI widely embedded. Reconciling attendee lists with CRM records is a practical place to start.

ICEN argues that the long-term fix would be to develop and implement an industry-wide standard for measuring events — one finance would recognize across companies.