You’ve done the hard part. You’ve audited your tech stack, identified the crippling gaps in consistency, and built a strategic 5-step plan to fix them. You know that investing in a modern event management platform is the key to unlocking your portfolio’s true potential.
NB: This is an article from Tripleseat
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You have the perfect sales and operations pitch. Now, you have to present it to your CFO, owner, or asset manager. This is where most strategic plans die.
It’s not because your plan is wrong. It’s because you’re pitching “consistency and efficiency” to an audience that speaks a different language. They’re listening for ROI, risk mitigation, and asset value.
To get your budget approved, you must translate your brilliant operational plan into an irrefutable financial case. Here’s how to do it.
1. Stop Saying “It Saves Time,” Start Saying “It Optimizes Labor”
As a GM or DOS, you see the daily waste: sales managers spending hours manually building proposals or operations teams re-keying BEO data into three different systems.
- Your Pitch: “This new platform will save each sales manager 5 hours a week!”
- What Your CFO Hears: “My team wants to work 5 fewer hours a week. That’s a cost.”
The CFO Translation:
You must put a hard dollar amount on that “saved time.” Those hours aren’t vanishing; they are being reallocated to high-value tasks.
- For Labor Savings (Hard Cost): “That 5 hours per manager, across our 10 properties, equals 50 hours of administrative work per week. That’s 2,600 hours per year. At an average loaded wage of $35/hour, that is $91,000 in recovered productivity.“
- For Revenue Generation (Opportunity): “By automating those 5 admin hours, each sales manager can make 10 additional proactive sales calls per week. Based on our current conversion rates, that 10% increase in sales activity projects to $250,000 in new group business for the portfolio next year.”
The bottom line: Connect “efficiency” directly to a number on the P&L – either as a reduction in labor/overtime costs or a measurable increase in revenue-generating activity.
2. Stop Saying “It’s Outdated,” Start Saying “It Reduces Risk”
You see a clunky, server-based system that crashes. Your CFO sees a piece of software that was paid for 10 years ago – a “sunk cost” that is “good enough.”
- Your Pitch: “Our current system is old, clunky, and doesn’t integrate with anything.”
- What Your CFO Hears: “You want me to spend money on a shiny new toy when the old one still technically works.”
