Trades Exhibitions has teamed up with organisations across the beauty industry in an effort to inform, educate and promote the professional beauty industry. They are the organisers of the Professional Beauty shows – the top health and beauty events in the UK, Ireland, India and South Africa. They publish the UK’s leading magazine (Professional Beauty Magazine) for professional beauty, nails and spa industries. They also organise the prestigious European Spa Convention and Professional Beauty Awards.
With all of these products and services, Managing Director Mark Moloney is a man with a vision. To realise his vision, he identified the need for a CRM system in 2013. The system needed to reduce the administration overhead associated with managing stand bookings and re-bookings. He also wanted to ensure that exhibitors and advertisers were aware of all the different opportunities to engage with the professional beauty industry.
Trades Exhibitions was rapidly growing. Their exhibitions were attracting ever more stands and they were launching more exhibitions across the world. The sales team were building excellent links to the professional beauty industry, but struggling with the growing administration overhead. It was becoming apparent that investment was required to ensure that a simple mistake didn’t upset a major customer.
A further challenge resulting from the rapid growth in exhibitors and events was a growing credit control requirement. As the payment profile for exhibition stands includes multiple payments, each booking could result in three invoices. Ensuring that even very large customers paid on time was taking an increasing amount of time. Often, this was time that should have been spent upselling and cross-selling.
Collier Pickard understood our business and our systems to the point where they took responsibility for the integration of the sales team and their data. We don’t have IT staff and rely on Collier Pickard to ensure our CRM system continues to deliver. – Mark Maloney, Managing Director
Collier Pickard, the UK’s leading independent CRM consultancy, showed Trades Exhibitions how Maximizer CRM could address these issues. In the first instance, it would help boost their re-bookings with the use of real-time sales dashboards. The dashboards would measure sales activity and results, and highlight any clients that had not been contacted in the last 90 days. This improved engagement with the client and made sure opportunities were not missed.
The system also collated all of their data into one, easy-to-access place. Once the Opportunities were closed and turned into bookings, they could be tracked through the payment process using Opportunity stages.
Collier Pickard provided in-depth product demonstrations, helping Trades Exhibitions at every stage of their decision process. The team worked with Trades Exhibitions to ensure the installation and support services got them up and running quickly. From the non-biased consultancy sessions to finding the ideal solution, its implementation and importing of data and staff training, Collier Pickard assumed the role of mentor and guide. Once the system was live, they provided ad hoc administrator services that kept the system working.
One of the key factors in our growth has been a CRM system that reduces the administration burden for our sales people. The system ensures that we spend more time working to help our clients achieve their goals and less time on non-productive administration and reporting. – Mark Maloney, Managing Director
The system has grown with the business and now manages even more exhibitions, stands and advertising sales. The managers of the business have real-time dashboards that are used to steer the business in the right direction. They have immediate visibility on which spaces have sold and which are still available. Once a new booking has been placed on the system, the sales team can easily manage what is required on each stand. This includes any additional sales associated with the booking: for example, any extra banners, standees or promotional materials for the exhibitors.
They are also able to analyse lost sales, helping them to understand why they were lost and make adjustments to what they offer at shows to boost future sales. Steve James, Sales Director, explains the benefits in more detail: “Keeping the sales team focussed on selling is the key to our success. The more people they engage with, the more opportunities they have to sell. Maximizer finds who to call, when to call and what to call them about. I can see instantly who is working their patch, and who needs help.”
As well as becoming more efficient, Trades Exhibitions have also reported a substantial improvement in cash flow because staged invoice payments are now automatically issued, ensuring that exhibitors are always invoiced on time. They are now able to control ‘phased payments’ more easily, where the exhibitor pays 30% of their fee upfront and pays the remaining balance over an agreed time period. The system ensures that all billing is done at the correct time and produces pro forma invoices as requested.
Finally, the system was flexible enough to manage the acquisition of HJi (Hairdressers Journal International). Over a few days, 8 years’ worth of historical sales data was imported. The HJi sales team were re-trained and set to work using Maximizer to secure re-bookings at their major exhibition.
Brighton Based, Experience Education has multiple brands working with groups from schools, universities and supporters.
They started using Maximizer CRM in the 90’s which worked well and grew to more than 230 users across 20 brands.
When system ownership shifted from the brands and became centralised, the incoming Digital Director reviewed the situation with Matt Royal, the newly appointed CRM Manager.
They realised that adoption varied hugely, from 100% usage in some brands and almost no use in other parts. So, although the CRM system was originally implemented to increase revenues, reduce costs and minimise risks, the benefits had become patchy. Matt was tasked with bringing back the benefits that senior management were looking for.
The first step was to review the system with the users. This highlighted a number of points:
This meant that the various brands’ experiences were diverse – different databases, different versions, different adoptions and different expectations.
The outcome of this review was the SCV – Single Customer View – project. They started with user forums where other issues were raised, including:
At this point Experience Education realised that the resolution of all these issues was fairly straightforward and they could now plan on getting everyone up to speed. Furthermore, Maximizer CRM was reviewed and the conclusion was that, with clearer direction, Maximizer and Experience Education’s long-time partner, Collier Pickard, could deliver against the newly defined requirements. The key to success was determined to be Central Control with Local Flexibility. As part of the SCV programme, Matt identified the following needs:
The key win and core benefit was that changes occurred at zero marginal cost. Integrations commissioned from CP are, where necessary, unique – but written to a common platform. Since these are generic in style, it means they are configurable by Experience Education marketers without any external spend. This, in turn, delivers massively reduced on-boarding costs for new brands because changes are quick and have zero marginal cost.
Multiple quick wins from this first phase include:
The second phase of the SCV project reflected Experience Education’s growing CRM maturity; much better quality data has enabled high-quality reporting.
Management became streamlined with the use of team Key Performance Indicators, such as pipelines, visit analyses etc. which were re-usable across brands globally. On a granular level, personal KPIs could also be used for individual forecasts. Dashboards also helped with the management of lead distribution and the maintenance of data integrity.
Dotdigital became the chosen email marketing tool for Experience Education, and integration with Maximizer became justified, allowing marketers to map their own settings. This, in turn, has enabled highly focused email campaigns as they are based on opportunity information in Maximizer. Sales-driven segmentation of data is enabling marketing to drive better quality outcomes through focus.
Educating users in the power of the email and Word integration using templates has reduced form-filling time and effort. One brand now gets these booking forms signed using DocuSign.
Other areas of functionality that have helped increase user efficiency include using colouring rules to highlight buyer personas and assigning Priorities to meetings in order to facilitate analysis and reporting.
Whether a brand has 150 or 50,000 enquiries a year, an integration piece which lets marketers define their own fields and rules has reduced costs and speed up on-boarding of new leads. Capturing Google UTM data has enabled the establishment of the complete marketing ROI.
The revitalisation of Maximizer CRM delivered benefits to Experience Education’s users, team leaders, marketers, internal web-designers and senior management as the business grew and developed.
Identifying the issues was the first step towards change. So, how did Matt Royal manage to achieve this success?
Matt Royal sums up the benefits as follows:
“Experience Education has massively reduced the on-boarding costs for new brands because changes are quick and have zero marginal cost. This is down to Experience Education-specific, but generic, integrations built by Collier Pickard which enable our marketers to link to web-forms and dotdigital etc. Other quick wins from this phase include common reporting and language as well as clearer multi-brand relationships.” – Matt Royal, CRM Manager
What we did for Martec International:
Martec International was established 33 years ago as a consulting company dedicated to the retail industry. It was formed in the UK and progressively won clients covering 35 countries in all regions of the world. Roughly 25 years or so ago Brian Hume, the Managing Director of Martec, found Maximizer on a shelf in a CompUSA store in Dayton, Ohio.In those days it was a single PC copy, no networking and its major feature compared to the competition of the time was that it could hold any number of contacts against a company record, without having to duplicate the company data on every contact. This was a big deal back then!
Martec adopted Maximizer and has stayed with the product through every upgrade in the last 25 years or so and now uses the latest cloud version. Early on in Martec’s journey they met Collier Pickard, then (and still) a key Maximizer partner in the UK and have been supported by us ever since. Along the way Martec moved into instructor-led training teaching retail skills, subsequently became an early adopter of e-learning, and latterly also moved into the consumer goods sector.
A year ago, due to approaching retirements, Martec decided to downsize the company and focus on its training business. In recent months the company has been re-structuring its processes to focus entirely on the various flavours of e-learning and web-based training and has been increasing its reliance on Maximizer in order to run a completely digital business with maximum efficiency. This case study will explain how Maximizer supports the company’s marketing, sales, and client service activities.
Throughout this Martec case study, we shall cover the following:
Brian Hume from Martec has reviewed their use of Maximizer in some detail with the objective of showing how tightly woven it is into all their sales, marketing, product, and service delivery processes.He went on to say –
“We wouldn’t be able to run our business this way without a really productive CRM system, which is why we have been using Maximizer for so many years. Over this time, we have continually enhanced our use of the product, taking advantage of the upgrades as they became available. We have also been helped by the support from our partner, Collier Pickard, especially when we take on something new. Our latest example is Collier Pickard’s Head of Support – Robbie Brand – who has made an important contribution to getting our contact scoring to work.”
“Our use of the product significantly reduces the chore aspect of running a business and leaves our team with more time for the creative and stimulating aspects of their roles. Hence, we have no problem in getting our team to use the system to its fullest potential. This means that we can rely on the completeness and accuracy of information, which is another important consideration.”
To find out more, click here to read a full in-depth case study for Martec International and their use of Maximizer.
Collier Pickard has been trading since 2004. The core team, however, has been together for more than 25 years – which means we have a great deal of experience as an independent CRM consultancy.
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