The first order was a trial. The account is what the trade show was for.

Industrial buyers usually test a new supplier with a small order before moving more of their spend to it.

Ranked on the first order, every source looks modest and the differences between them are noise.

Summing each account's invoices over two years shows which sources opened accounts that grew into meaningful customers.

That is the ranking that should set next year's trade show and campaign budget, and it usually differs from a first-order ranking.

The report shows the median account beside the total, because one very large account can otherwise decide a source's result on its own.

Trade shows are often the largest marketing line for a manufacturer or distributor, and among the least measured.

Badge scans and meeting notes carry the visitor's company, phone and email. Kept as a lead file, they match against the accounts that later ordered.

Over two years, the report shows what each show produced in account revenue against what it cost to attend.

Shows that produce a lot of conversations and few accounts become visible, as do smaller shows that quietly produce the best customers.

The scans are the part most often lost. They sit in a rep's inbox or a spreadsheet after the event and never reach a system, so the show's results can only be argued about. Keeping them as a file, with the show named on every row, is what turns a line in the events budget into something that can be ranked.

Much industrial business is quoted: a request for quotation arrives, engineering or estimating prices it, and the customer accepts or goes elsewhere.

Every quote costs time whether or not it is won, and sources differ in how many quotes they generate per order.

Including quote requests, lost ones as well, shows the win rate per source beside the revenue.

A source producing many requests from buyers gathering prices is expensive in estimating time, which no revenue-only report shows.

The report also shows the lag from quote to first order per source. In industries where a qualified supplier list is reviewed once a year, a quote that loses today can become an account at the next review, and a short window would count it as a loss for good.

In a business with field sales, the rep who manages an account shapes how much it grows, and reps are not assigned to accounts at random.

Without the rep in the file, a source whose accounts happened to go to the strongest reps looks better than it is.

Carrying the rep and territory through lets the report compare sources within the same rep's accounts, which removes most of the distortion.

It also shows the reverse: a strong source whose accounts are struggling under a particular territory, which is a sales-management finding rather than a marketing one.