The Follow-Up Is the Pitch: What IMEX, Destinations International and TEAMS Showed About the Proposal That Wins
A destination never closes in the room. The planner, the minister’s office and the event owner all make the call later, on their own screen, usually with a committee that never met the destination at all. Whatever gets sent after the conversation is the only thing in that room arguing for the destination, and it has to do the job alone.
October 2026 made that point three times in three weeks, to three audiences that have almost nothing else in common. At IMEX America in Las Vegas, convention sales teams opened RFP cycles with meeting planners that will run for months and end in a procurement committee. At Destinations International’s advocacy event in Ottawa, destination leaders talked about briefing ministers, councils and trade officials whose staff read, summarize and forward. At TEAMS ’26 in Birmingham, sports commissions took thirty back-to-back appointments with event owners who flew home to compare bid books with a board.
A convention proposal, an economic impact briefing and a host city bid are the same document with different content. They face the same moment, and the destinations winning with them are following the same five practices.
Send the experience, not a summary of it
Destinations sell a feeling, and in person they are superb at it. Ottawa’s hosts put the welcome reception in the glass Great Hall of the National Gallery of Canada with Parliament Hill in the windows, then walked attendees to a projection-mapped show inside Parliament itself. Birmingham put 1,300 people on the outfield grass at Regions Field on opening night. Nobody at either event needed to be told the city could host.
The practice is to send that, because the reader of the follow-up is almost never the person who walked the venue. They are a board member, a procurement lead or a legislative aide reading on a phone between other things, and for them the follow-up is the site visit. The venue walkthrough should play, the map should move and the reader should be able to click through an event week the way they would live it, with the capacities, the room block and the impact numbers beside the footage so the operational answers are never more than a tap away. The destinations that treat the appointment as the audition and the bid as the performance send material that competes with a site visit instead of a file that looks like every other file in the folder.
Build every version from one library
Every audience in October wanted a different version of the same facts. The IMEX floor was full of teams describing how they produce them: one special events group re-customizes a roughly 93-slide Canva master deck for every sports bid, another keeps a Canva library next to its CRM’s e-proposal module and reconciles the two by hand. In Ottawa, the “Tourism Is Trade” panel laid out why a single tourism story has to be told in export language to a national government, in workforce and infrastructure language to a council and in economic development terms to other partners. At TEAMS, the soccer organizer wanted field complexes and team rates, the championship director wanted arena capacity and airlift, and the adaptive sports organizer needed to know which entrance has the ramp.
The practice that holds up under that volume is to treat approved content as one library rather than a pile of documents. Venue inventory, hotel packages, economic impact history, brand and the data a research team signs off on live in one source, and each proposal, briefing or bid is assembled from it. A new arena opens and it is added once. A hotel partner changes and no older deck carries the old name. The trade version for a minister and the workforce version for a council share identical numbers and differ only in emphasis and order.
It also settles where the CRM ends and the proposal begins, which was the most common question at IMEX. The CRM, usually Simpleview, with iDSS Tempest, Momentus, Cvent and HubSpot in the mix, stays the system of record for dates, rates and space. The proposal is a presentation layer that pulls from it, so nothing is re-keyed and nothing is reconciled by hand. A small team can send thirty bids after a show with the confidence of one.
Lead with the proof
The strongest argument a destination can make to any audience is evidence it already has. At the SportsTravel Awards Luncheon in Birmingham, the room was full of the people who decide where next year’s events go, watching this year’s hosts get recognized for delivering. Nearly every destination in that room has the same kind of proof in a post-event report: the last three comparable events, the attendance, the economic impact, what the organizer said afterward.
In Ottawa, Don Welsh, President and CEO of Destinations International, kept returning to the work of turning research into a story that moves people outside tourism, and the research leaders were on stage rather than in the back producing reports. A table of visitor spending is an input. A council member understanding what that spending funded in their district is the output.
The practice is to move the proof to the front and frame it for the reader. For an event owner, the comparable events. For a council, what the money built. For a planner, the outcomes of the last group of similar size and the people willing to vouch for them. Most destinations are sitting on more of this than they have ever put on page one, and moving it there costs nothing but the decision to do it.
Make the printable copy come from the interactive one
The most welcomed feature on the IMEX floor was PDF export. Planners, procurement offices and legislative staff still ask for a printable copy, and the print button is not going away.
The practice is not to choose between a document and an experience. It is to make sure both come from the same source so neither has to be rebuilt and the facts stay identical across the two. The interactive version does the selling to the person who opens it on a phone and forwards it. The printable version satisfies the procurement checklist and the staffer who prints. The destination maintains one proposal, not two, and a long-running either-or becomes a non-issue.
Know what happened after send
The question that came up at all three shows, in almost the same words, was the one with the most upside: after the proposal, the briefing or the bid goes out, who opened it, what did they read and did they pass it along?
In Ottawa the context was Florida’s HB 7033, a bill proposing changes to how counties can use Tourist Development Taxes, which Frida Bahja, Ph.D., Director of Research at Experience Kissimmee, walked through as a live example of funding defense as a continuous campaign. A campaign runs on feedback, and when the audience is a legislator’s office, knowing whether a briefing was read is the difference between knowing a message landed and hoping it did. At IMEX, the follow-up question to PDF export was whether a downloaded PDF could be tracked too. At TEAMS, engagement is the clearest signal of which of thirty expo-floor conversations is moving.
The practice is to send the version that reports back, with the PDF alongside it. A sports commission that knows which five of thirty bids are being read on a committee’s screen follows up like a team with five bids. An advocacy team that knows which coalition partner forwarded the briefing knows where the next conversation is.
Use AI inside the workflow, not instead of it
AI was on every agenda in October, and the applications that went somewhere at IMEX were narrow and specific: rewriting a cover letter for one planner in the destination’s own voice, and checking a finished response against every requirement in the RFP. Nobody who was getting value from it was generating a proposal from nothing.
The practice is to point AI at a single source of approved content and let it do the tailoring. Used that way, it makes a lean destination team produce like a much larger one, with thirty consistent bids where there used to be thirty copies. The library comes first, and AI is what makes it move.
What October adds up to
Put the three shows side by side and they describe one document that works for every destination audience. It carries the experience of the place to the people who were never there. It is built from a single source of truth so the facts hold up across every planner, council and event owner in a quarter. It leads with proof. It exists as a printable copy and an interactive one without being built twice. And it tells the destination what happened after it was sent, which is where every decision in October was actually made, and where the next one will be.
This is the workflow DIGIDECK was built around. A destination keeps its approved venue, hotel, impact, brand and economic data in one Master Deck Library, builds the convention proposal, the council briefing and the host city bid from that source, exports a PDF from the same place when someone asks for one, and sees in DIGIDECK Analytics who opened each version, which slides held attention and whether it reached the committee. Any destination team that wants to see what its own content looks like built that way can see it on their own content.
The takeaways
- The follow-up is the pitch. The decision is made after the room empties, by people who were never in it. Build the proposal, briefing or bid to win on its own.
- Send the experience, not a summary of it. Video, moving maps and a clickable event week, with the operational detail beside the footage, so the reader gets the site visit they never took.
- Build every version from one library. Keep venue, hotel, impact, brand and economic content in a single approved source and assemble each audience-specific version from it. Update a fact once.
- Keep the CRM as the system of record. The proposal is a presentation layer that pulls dates, rates and space from it, not a second place to type them.
- Lead with the proof. Comparable events, what visitor spending built, outcomes of similar groups. Put it on page one, framed for the reader.
- Make the PDF come from the interactive version. One source, two formats, no rebuilding, identical facts.
- Know what happened after send. Send the version that reports who opened it, what held attention and whether it was forwarded, and follow up on what is actually moving.
- Point AI at the library. Use it to tailor cover letters, check RFP compliance and draft audience versions from approved content, not from the last file.
Frequently Asked Questions
IMEX America, October 13 to 15 in Las Vegas, which connects destinations, hotels and venues with meeting and event planners. Destinations International’s advocacy event in Ottawa, October 20 to 22, focused on funding, policy and economic impact. TEAMS ’26, produced by SportsTravel and hosted by the Greater Birmingham CVB, October 26 to 29 in Birmingham, Alabama, for roughly 1,300 sports event organizers, sports commissions and CVBs.
In all three, the destination makes its case in person and the decision is made later by people who were not there: a procurement committee, a legislator’s staff, an event owner’s board. The proposal, briefing or bid sent afterward carries the case on its own, which makes it the highest-leverage document a destination produces for any of those audiences.
Whatever the specific audience needs to decide, led by proof. For a meeting planner, meeting space, dates, rates, the hotel package and outcomes from comparable groups. For a legislator or council, the economic impact of visitor spending framed in that body’s priorities, such as jobs, trade, workforce or infrastructure. For a sports event owner, venue inventory with capacities and layouts, the room block, transportation and airlift, and the attendance and impact of similar events hosted. In every case, interactive media of the place alongside the operational detail.
Most DMOs, convention centers and sports commissions build from a mix of PowerPoint, static PDFs, Canva libraries and the e-proposal module in their CRM, most often Simpleview, re-entering dates, rates, space and approved content for each opportunity. The emerging best practice keeps the CRM as the system of record and adds a presentation layer that pulls from it.
By maintaining one approved library of venue, hotel, impact, brand and economic content and assembling every proposal, briefing and bid from that source instead of copying and editing a previous file. A change is made once and flows to every version. Presentation platforms such as DIGIDECK are designed around this model.
No. Planners, procurement offices and legislative staff still ask for printable copies. The best practice is for the PDF and the interactive version to come from the same source so neither has to be rebuilt, and for the interactive version to report engagement the attachment cannot.
Yes, if the material is sent as a trackable interactive presentation rather than an attachment. Engagement analytics show who opened it, how long they spent on each section, which venues or data points held attention and whether it was forwarded, which lets the destination follow up on the opportunities that are actually moving.