A few months ago, we worked with an event management company offering a concierge service for private events. The company was about a year old and was dealing an ever increasing number of inbound leads, so much so that often, the sales team was unable to meet demand in a timely manner.
Their sales processes looked like this:
- Account Executive studies the request and has a brief phone call with the client, explaining the process (3-4 minutes).
- AE goes through the company's internal database to identify 10 to 15 venues that match the client's requirements. She takes screenshots and copies descriptions, puts them in a word doc and creates a PDF. (12-15 minutes)
- AE sends the email to the client and follows up with them after a certain time. (3 minutes)
- When a client indicated interest in a venue, a proposal was created on behalf of the venue and sent to the client. (10 mins)
- Based on the clients feedback, steps 2 to 4 could repeat a few times.
Since it was such time consuming and labor intensive process, members of the sales team were not able to handle with more than 3 new clients per hour. Even if they devoted 50% of their time to dealing with new clients, they’d still only be able to handle around 12 leads a day.
The other problem was a lack of insight into the client's behavior. The team had no way of tracking whether the client had opened the email, opened the PDF, liked or disliked venues, had questions or comments etc unless they decided to reply to the email.
The company needed to find a way to deal with the increase in demand. Doubling the sales team wasn't a realistic option from either a scalability or financial perspective. They reached out to us to help them solve the problem.
After spending a week studying their process, we prototyped a process automation tool that would drop the lead time from 22 to 5 minutes. Using Byldd's proprietary tools we were able to create the software in about 15 days.
- We build an event dashboard for both the client and AE. On this dashboard, the AE is able to search for and add recommended venues. These are immediately visible to the client on their version of the dashboard.
- The client is able to interact with the suggested venues and able to request a proposal. Clicking that button generates a standard proposal pre-filled with all of the events information. The AE is able to edit whatever needs to change and send it to the client.
- Client event dashboard tracking - we started tracking and notifying AEs whenever a client landed on their event page for the first time and every time they interacted with the suggested venues.
Our implementation dropped the time per client from 22 minutes to 5 minutes. This eventually allowed the company to grow their revenue 10 fold with the same sales head count.
We were later called in to integrate the system we created with salesforce which we did easily because of Byldd's flexible and extensible nature.
Byldd's proprietary technology reduces the time and cost of new product development by 90%. Thinking about building something? .