Customer story
Americold: atEvent goes above and beyond lead capture
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When Americold’s Senior Director of Marketing Daniel Cooke set out to find a simple event lead capture solution, he wasn’t aware that there was a solution out there that did it all, from initial contact to final contract. He was simply looking for a scanner to address his ever-growing stack of business cards. Then, he stumbled on atEvent. Thanks to atEvent’s robust lead automation solution, Americold was able to: |
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Background
Americold Logistics LLC, based in Atlanta, GA, provides temperature-controlled warehousing and logistics to the food industry, offering the most comprehensive warehousing, transportation, and logistics solutions available. Americold owns and operates 158 temperature-controlled warehouses in the United States and around the globe.
Challenges
The sales team at Americold followed a pretty common lead capture process at the 15-20 events it attended every year: They acquired a stack of prospects’ business cards, set them aside until the event was over, and then contacted each prospect as time allowed. If a prospect seemed to be a “dead-end” after a call, their business card was discarded--along with any information on why they were dismissed.
If a prospect turned out to be a promising lead, the salesperson would manually enter the lead’s information into Salesforce. Data entry often occurred days or weeks after the event, and by this time, details of the event interaction were forgotten, including the name of the event and any follow-up notes. This led to confusion about where leads had come from, and why they were deemed worthy of follow-up in the first place.
“We just weren’t doing a good job of recording the people we met,” Cooke said.
All of this prompted Cooke to search for a business card scanner that would automate lead capture, eliminate the need to manually enter prospects into Salesforce, and reduce errors. Cooke was weighing his scanner options when he attended INBOUND, the annual conference for HubSpot users. There, Cooke came across the atEvent booth and discovered the solution that would not only end the sales team’s woes but would introduce workflows and event intelligence that would help streamline Americold’s sales process and save the company money.
"It's really done a good job of making us an innovative organization in the way we handle leads, but it has also done a phenomenal job on evaluating which events we should attend," Cooke says. |
How atEvent Helped
The implementation of atEvent marked a turning point for Americold. On the back end, Americold was able to integrate atEvent with HubSpot and Salesforce to take advantage of their marketing campaign workflows. Now, when a salesperson captures a prospect in the atEvent app, the prospect is automatically moved into the appropriate nurture stream for follow-up, and the salesperson receives a reminder of the conversation and a prompt to check in on the prospect.
On the front end, the sales team is pleased with the simple design of the mobile app, which allows them to select their event, scan a business card, and add some quick interaction notes that will help them remember the conversation. Salespeople can spend less time transcribing business cards, and more time making contacts.
“All of the admin[istrative tasks] that salespeople were frustrated by is done for them,” Cooke says. “It’s almost foolproof.”
atEvent has also provided Americold a key benefit they weren’t even seeking when they started searching for an event app--insight into event ROI. Americold is now able to associate leads with specific events, which means they have access to the cost-per-lead of a specific event in the atEvent web platform. This allows Americold management to make key financial decisions on events, such as increasing investment in the Produce Marketing Association Show and the Seafood Expo and dialing back on a show that wasn’t giving them the return on investment they sought.
Thanks to atEvent, Americold has changed the way it approaches event marketing and sales.
