What criteria do you use to select events that have the highest potential ROI?

For ROI, it's helpful to know what the outcome of the event is meant to accomplish (IE: generate, progress, and or close pipe).Can impact the content strategy and the audience criteria you target. It can be for both, but having clarity here also helps with aligning your criteria for ROI. We currently look at the spend efficiency of a program so that is looking at our Marketing Pipe divided by the total cost to run the program. To ensure we are efficiently spending, I also keep an eye around Host: customer ratios; Customer: Internal Company (Host+ Support) ratios; and Total Program cost (T&E+Marketing Spend), cost per attendee.

For programs where it is targeting an enterprise executive audience and may have longer sales cycles, we look at leading indicators to ensure we're hitting the appropriate quality attendees by ensuring we have coverage of 1) our top accounts list 2) our biggest open deals for the next two quarters 3) specific title floor (IE: VP+), and 4) balance of prospects vs customers. On an annual basis, I also run a cohort analysis to see for the executives who participated in a program against a similar audience that didn't, what was the deal size lift; product penetration (if multiple products); velocity of opportunities, etc. While it's correlation, it is still a helpful one I like to lean on and also a great stat to use on the field to get them to drive further engagement and invites to my team's programs ;-)

Last but not least, asking for qualitative feedback from customers and hosts has always been helpful as well.