An event service company revolutionises its business operations and client relationships using Zoho CRM

The company

Established in 1991, The Pregnancy, Babies & Children's Expo is Australia’s biggest and the world’s longest-running early parenting event. It was incorporated with the goal of fostering unique relationships among parent communities.

With more than three decades of experience and a leading position in connecting top brands and experts with new Australian families, no one understands the baby market as well as they do.

PBC Expo is committed to providing the following:

• A high-quality educational event with rich and informative content
• Advice and knowledge from top experts
• A showcase of the latest innovations and essential products for parents
• A comfortable and enjoyable environment for families

The challenge

PBC Expo hosts 11 expos annually, each of which garners approximately 14,000 visitors. Additionally, they have a client base of 2,000 exhibitors. Fostering better relationships with clients and increasing overall efficiencies have been extremely important for the team at PBC Expo. In 2020—when COVID struck the world and the event industry came to a halt—PBC Expo decided to strengthen its existing infrastructure and update its legacy systems to achieve increased data accuracy within the company.

PBC Expo was looking to address the following requirements:

• A more customisable CRM system to cater to their industry-specific requirements.
• A comprehensive business solution that could maintain data accuracy throughout the different applications used within the company.
• A business solution with analytical capabilities to help the team analyse data and provide meaningful insights.
• A business solution which eliminates the need to copy data between several software packages and maintains data integrity and accuracy.

Why Zoho

The team at PBC Expo further summarises why they moved ahead with Zoho:

• Zoho offers not just a CRM, but also a well-integrated suite of products like Zoho Analytics, Zoho Campaigns, Zoho Sign, Zoho Forms, Zoho Survey, Zoho Expense, and much more
• Zoho has excellent privacy policies
• Zoho's products come at a reasonable cost
• Zoho offers excellent customer service
• Zoho supports a diverse range of third-party integrations

The solution

Implementation with Ardento

Ardento is a Zoho Advanced Partner who specialises in customisation and integration services. Their experience stretches across small and medium businesses, as well as larger enterprises and government sectors.

Along with the team at Ardento, PBC Expo's Business Systems Manager, Paula Wait, envisioned a well-integrated system that would cater to the needs of their growing business. PBC Expo collaborated to set up Zoho One and is glad to have chosen Zoho and Ardento.

An orchestrated system to capture leads from multiple sources

PBC Expo manages two types of clients: exhibitors and visitors. Prospective exhibitors are called leads within the company. Naturally, the sales process at PBC Expo begins with lead capturing and nurturing. There are several sources of leads, such as phone calls, visitors to the company website, social media, word of mouth, and expos. All interested exhibitors from across Australia reach out to PBC Expo to exhibit at their expos. Keeping a tab on all interested prospective clients is vital for the team.

The company's website and social media have a form prospects can fill out. These forms are powered by Zoho Forms, which takes prospects' details and adds them to PBC Expo's CRM account directly. The Zoho CRM mobile application has enabled the sales team to add leads while on-site. This avoids the creation of duplicate records, increases the speed of getting data into the system and improves overall administrative efficiencies and relationship management as there is no longer a reliance on any other system or managing and handling paper notes. The team at PBC Expo is also looking to integrate their telephony system, 3CX, with Zoho CRM to capture phone call details directly in the system and make it even easier for the sales team.

Automating repetitive tasks using workflow rules

Handling data manually and carrying out repetitive tasks slowed down the sales team and hindered their ability to formulate a better sales strategy. With workflow rules in place, the team can now automate repetitive tasks easily. Here are some examples:

• Automate follow-up emails to check on unapproved quotes
• Automatically update fields
• Trigger reminders for the sales team to avoid breakages in communication
• Automate commission calculation
• Automate exhibitor booking validation and stand number assignment
• Automate lead status updates

Reports and dashboards for valuable data insights

The sales team makes extensive use of reports to keep track of their performance and activities. Some examples include tracking their email deliverability rating to evaluate their trends and plan corrective courses of action, tracking the number of leads each sales rep has nurtured and converted, and more.

At PBC Expo dashboards are powered by the integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics. This integration helps the team track real-time data from Zoho CRM and create insightful business intelligence dashboards. The integration has empowered the management to make better data-driven business decisions, as well as analyse the company's financial position, analyse each exhibitor's performance to ensure a better ROI, plan corrective actions based on crucial business numbers, and track financial goals.

Harnessing the power of integration to drive business

Zoho CRM serves as the central nervous system of PBC Expo's business operations and is integrated with other Zoho and third-party products to deliver the desired results to the team. Some examples of these integrations include the following:

Zoho's ability to integrate with non-native products has helped PBC Expo adapt to a new business suite while also retaining a few legacy systems.

Benefits and ROI

Reporting made easier, faster, and more reliable

The integration between Zoho CRM and Zoho Analytics has enabled the team to build faster and more reliable reports. Because PBC Expo's business process and goals are so complex, it used to take a huge effort and a lot of time for the team to collect information from every team member manually and prepare a report. The time it takes has been reduced from a week to mere hours.

"Our goals criteria were quite complex," Wait says. "It used to take weeks of work to record and ascertain where people were up to in relation to their goals and this data was often plagued with errors. Since we've transitioned to Zoho, this entire process has become a breeze. We are now able to set year-on-year goals in just a few hours. We also strategise using the data with relief, knowing that it's correct. We have gone from weeks worth of work to hours ."

Better communication with the clients

Zoho has transformed the way PBC Expo communicates with their prospective clients. Previously, they did everything manually, which involved lots of double-data handling and data manipulation. The data was taken out of one system, manipulated, and put back into another. However, they had no record of how the data was processed, which led to issues with their data's integrity.

Today, the CRM system maintains data integrity and uses workflow rules to automate repetitive tasks. With Zoho, the team has streamlined its operations, allowing for more efficient communication with prospective clients. And—furthermore—thanks to Zoho, PBC Expo can now handle its processes more effectively and confidently.