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150 Exhibitors. One Question. Fewer Than Five Had the Answer.

16 Oct

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150 Exhibitors. One Question. Fewer Than Five Had the Answer.

· @Paul Daigle

What three days o

n an MSP conference expo floor revealed about how the channel measures its most expensive marketing.

The question I kept asking

Over three days on the expo floor of a major MSP conference in late September, I asked roughly 150 exhibitors the same two questions. What

 does it cost you to acquire one new IT Managed Service Provider (MSP) from this show? And what return on investment (ROI) do you expect from being here?

Fewer th

an five had the number.

Many of

 the people I asked were the most senior executives their companies had sent. One young vendor told me it was not concerned with acquisition cost yet. Another told me plainly, “This is all branding.”

In a June 2026 Cvent survey of more than 900 event and marketing professionals acros

s 12 countries, nine in ten said their event programs face high scrutiny over results. Bizzabo’s 2025 State of Events report found that 70 percent of business-to-business event organizers had difficulty demonstrating return on investment for in-person events in 2024. Both companies sell event software, so treat their numbers as directional. Leadership is asking for the n

umber. Almost nobody in the booth had it.

Bar chart: nine in ten event marketers say their programs face high scrutiny over results (Cvent, June 2026), versus under 3 percent of booth leaders who had their cost to acquire an MSP (fewer than 5 of about 150)

Nearly everyone is under pressure to prove results. Almost no one had the number at the booth.

Where the number goes missing

The cost side adds up quickly. One exhibitor on this floor told me a 10-by-10 booth now runs about $10,000 for the space alone. Add sponsorship, flights, hotels, meals, giveaways, and the days your senior people spend away from their desks. Based on what exhibitors described to me, a mid-sized vendor’s all-in cost for a show like this commonly lands somewhere between $40,000 and well past $100,000.

When the person spending that money cannot say what one new MSP costs, next year’s decision gets made on feel. I call that hopium. A busy booth feels like progress. The real answer arrives about 30 days later, when the follow-up math comes in, and by then the energy of the show has worn off.

Part of the reason is plumbing. Cvent reported in July 2026 that 80 percent of teams have event data that never fully connects to their customer relationship management or marketing automation systems. If the conversations from the booth never reach the system that tracks revenue, even someone who wants the number cannot calculate it.

Operationally, this is where channel marketing budgets quietly lose their discipline. For any vendor backed by private equity or venture capital, customer acquisition cost is one of the first numbers a board or a buyer asks for, because it drives payback period and, ultimately, what the business is worth. A channel program that cannot report its cost to acquire an MSP is harder to defend in a budget review and harder to value in a transaction.

To be clear, branding is a legitimate objective. If you are Dell, Intel, or a major distributor, being seen is the strategy, and you can afford to be Coca-Cola. Most companies on that floor were cybersecurity, AI, compliance, and services firms with finite budgets and teams measured on net-new MSPs. For them, a show is an acquisition investment, and it should be measured like one.

There is a second question worth asking: who is actually walking the floor? One carrier representative told me the people who make buying decisions at MSPs don’t typically come to these. A buyer I spoke with, there to acquire MSPs, said he saw far more vendors than MSPs.

Events still earn their place. The show I attended reported growth of about 25 percent year over year, and some of the best hallway conversations in the channel happen there. What needs fixing is spending without a target.

How to put a number on your next show

It does not have to be that complicated. Do this before you book the booth.

  1. Count the full cost. Booth space, sponsorship, travel, lodging, meals and entertainment, giveaways, and staff days away from other work.
  2. Define an acquired MSP before you go. A signed partner agreement, a first order, or a qualified opportunity. Pick one definition and keep it.
  3. Log every conversation the same day in your customer relationship management (CRM) system, tagged to the show.
  4. Track for 90 days, then divide. Full cost divided by MSPs acquired within 90 days is your cost to acquire one MSP from that show.
  5. Compare it to every other channel using the same definition: distribution, marketplaces, outbound, referrals, associations, and peer groups.

Here is an illustrative example, not data from the show. A $60,000 all-in show that produces four new MSP partners within 90 days costs $15,000 per MSP. If a new MSP partner is worth $30,000 to you in its first year, that show paid for itself. If it is worth $8,000, it did not, no matter how busy the booth felt.

One more step matters as much as the math. Give the number to the people in the booth. If the most senior person you send cannot say what a new MSP is worth to the company, the show is being run on hope.

What I heard on the floor

A young managed detection and response provider with roughly 25 to 30 MSP partners told me it was not concerned about acquisition cost yet; it was focused on growth. At that stage, that is a reasonable answer. It stops being reasonable the day growth is funded by someone else’s capital, because the first question in that boardroom will be what each new partner cost.

A security vendor told me, “This is all branding.” That was the most honest answer I heard all week, and it is a fine answer when it is a deliberate choice with a budget to match. The problem starts when a company with a net-new MSP target is buying brand and calling it pipeline.

In fairness, I have a stake in this question. I run the MSP Business Growth Marketplace, where vendors pay an annual listing fee and MSP executives arrive having already identified their revenue stage and what they need. That is a different acquisition model than a booth, and it is why I kept asking. It also means I have to hold myself to the same standard. We report what we can measure today, which is introductions delivered to each partner. We do not yet see what closes, and we are asking partners to report it. A number I cannot see is no better than the one I was asking vendors for.

The number is the strategy

Trade shows will keep growing, and they should. The vendors who get the most from them next year will be the ones who walk in knowing what a new MSP is worth, what they are willing to pay for one, and how they will know within 90 days whether they did.

Do you know your number? If you do, I would like to hear how you calculate it. If you don’t, that is a different conversation, and it is a good one to have.

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About Paul Daigle

Paul Daigle is Senior Managing Partner of BizAdvisoryBoard. Over more than 30 years inside the IT services ecosystem, he has built, scaled, acquired, and exited MSPs, unified communications providers, and channel organizations, served on 23 private and public company boards, and been involved in hundreds of mergers and acquisitions (M&A) transactions. He created the MSP Business Evaluator and Accelerator and the MSP Business Growth Marketplace, and he publishes MSP Executive Intelligence every week.

Book a strategic session: https://outlook.office.com/book/BizAdvisoryBoardStrategicSessionSocialMediaRequest@bizadvisoryboard.com/?ismsaljsauthenabled&utm_source=LinkedIn.com

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