Ask a DMO CEO where the growth is coming from next year and you’ll usually hear some version of the same answer: leisure. More reels. Better paid media. Sharper creative. A sharper brand. A content partnership with a creator nobody has heard of yet. That answer isn’t wrong, exactly. It’s just incomplete.

The part of the business most DMOs systematically underinvest in is the one that actually moves the needle on economic impact, hotel tax revenue, and political legitimacy with elected officials: group and meetings business. Convention delegates spend multiples of what a leisure visitor spends per trip. They arrive mid-week, fill compression windows, and drive F&B, ground transportation, and after-hours activity in the neighborhoods that need the economic oxygen most. And unlike leisure travelers, they’re a measurable, bookable, recoverable audience — there are finite meeting planners with finite RFPs, and your sales team either gets in the room or doesn’t.

And yet, in most mid-market CVBs, the meetings and sales function operates as a legacy department running on autopilot while marketing gets the executive attention and the budget increases. That asymmetry is costing destinations real money.

The group market is where “economic impact” actually lives

When a board member or a city councilmember asks what your organization returned to the community last year, the honest answer is almost always built out of the group segment. Leisure travelers’ tax contribution per head is small; they come in volume. A single 2,000-room-night citywide convention, by contrast, is a visible, bookable, defensible number that turns into a direct local economic development story.

Destinations International’s own research programs continue to reinforce that the per-visitor economic impact of a meetings delegate sits well above the leisure benchmark, and the U.S. Travel Association’s Meetings Mean Business work has spent more than a decade telling the industry the same thing. The internal budget allocations at most DMOs have not caught up.

Why sales keeps losing the budget fight

Three reasons it happens, and all three are fixable.

First, marketing produces visible output — a campaign, a video, a partnership — that boards and stakeholders can see in real time. Sales produces a pipeline that takes 18 to 36 months to close and looks, to the untrained eye, like a spreadsheet full of “maybe.” The asymmetry of visibility creates an asymmetry of investment.

Second, meetings sales teams are still often measured on leads generated or site-visit counts, not on lost-deal analysis, pipeline velocity, or competitive win rates. Without modern sales analytics, sales leadership can’t make the ROI case at the exec table the way marketing can.

Third, the tools have lagged. The Cvent Supplier Network, Knowland’s event intelligence data, and modern meeting-planner intent platforms are now delivering levels of competitive visibility that were unthinkable a decade ago. Most DMO sales organizations are still only partially using them.

What “fixing it” actually looks like

Start by demanding that your sales team report on the same analytic footing as your marketing team. Pipeline value, win rate, average deal size, lost-deal reasons, and competitive set — monthly, in front of the exec team, in language the board understands. If that data doesn’t exist yet, that’s your Q2 project.

Next, reallocate. The argument isn’t that marketing should lose budget — it’s that sales should grow in parallel. If your CVB has been running a 70/30 marketing-to-sales split for a decade, that ratio deserves scrutiny given what meetings delegates actually contribute to the local tax base.

Third, rebuild the meetings brand. In most markets, the sales pitch to a meeting planner is a deck from 2018 that describes hotel room blocks and a convention center floor plan. The destinations winning right now are the ones telling planners a story about the delegate experience: neighborhood culture, offsite venues, culinary, after-hours, and DEI-forward programming that helps the planner sell their own internal stakeholders on the choice.

The takeaway

The next 24 months will be unusually favorable for group business. Corporate travel budgets have been slowly recovering, in-person conferences are anchoring association calendars again, and global sporting events are pulling ancillary business meetings into host cities in ways most planners haven’t priced in yet. DMOs that enter this window with a modernized, fully funded, data-literate sales organization will capture a disproportionate share of the pipeline.

DMOs that enter it assuming leisure marketing alone will carry the year will not.

Photo by yanzheng xia on Unsplash