Most BA ROI decks are fiction. Beautiful, well-formatted, totally disconnected from what the program actually produced.
Visit counts, social media impressions, number of trainings conducted, number of accounts visited: these are activity metrics. They measure what the BA did. They don't measure what changed in the market because the BA did it. There's a difference, and the people who fund these programs are starting to notice it.
If a BA visited 40 accounts and depletions didn't move, the program didn't work. The visits happened, but the outcome didn't. A deck that shows 40 visits as evidence of success is measuring activity as a proxy for results. The proxy breaks down eventually.
Depletions by account. This is the metric. Track depletion volume at Tier 1 and Tier 2 accounts quarterly. Compare before and after increased BA activity. If depletions are flat or declining despite regular visits, the visits aren't driving sales. Something else needs to change: the approach, the relationship, the menu integration, or the account tier assignment.
New menu placements. Not just listings. Cocktail menu placements specifically, because those drive reorders and create a reason to train staff. Track how many were placed this quarter, how many are still active three months later, and how many resulted in a reorder.
Reorder rate at visited accounts. Of the accounts your BA visited this quarter, what percentage reordered? This is a cleaner conversion metric than placement count alone, because it shows whether the visits translated into commercial momentum rather than just a new bottle on the back bar.
Staff activations with measurable follow-through. Did the training you ran at a Tier 1 account result in the bartenders actually selling the cocktail? Track this by checking depletion data in the 30 days following a training. The delta tells you whether the training did anything.
Social posts. Visit counts. Impression estimates from events. These go in the activity log, not the ROI deck. They're useful for understanding how the BA spent their time. They don't tell you whether the time spent produced revenue.
Presenting activity metrics as outcomes is a way of avoiding the harder question: did this program produce depletions? Build the deck around that question and you'll either have a good answer or you'll know what to change. Both outcomes are useful.
One more thing: pull the same report at the same interval every quarter. Consistency in measurement matters as much as the metric itself. A depletion number measured in April against a visit cadence measured in January tells you nothing. Run the same analysis, same window, every time.