Dynamic Events scales rapidly with Salesforce

Dynamic Events scoured the market for a solution, even dipping its toe in the water for a couple of options. “Salesforce is known as the number one CRM solution in the market. We liked what we saw with Salesforce,” said O’Connor. “Being able to customise the solution to fit our needs is really important for us; we’re quite a niche market, so our business systems need to be quite bespoke.”

Salesforce implementation partner FLUIDO (previously Clout) helped the events company bring Salesforce to life in 2016, building a platform based on Sales Cloud and Pardot in less than six months. The Salesforce implementation has helped the Dynamic Events team scale to serve a larger number of customers and serve them fast. Sales Cloud, for instance, provides instant access to details of what events they’ve done, who attended their event, what activities they did, and who looked after them. Chatter provides an internal enterprise social network where the team can collaborate.

Salesforce handles the whole event lifecycle, from the opportunity arriving with the sales team, which converts opportunities to a closed deal before handing them over to the project management team. Dynamic Events has even integrated Xero invoicing into the process. “Salesforce custom objects have allowed us to build the system we need to make our processes very slick,” noted O’Connor.

Dynamic Events is happy to have a trailblazer and Salesforce champion like O’Connor on the team. Very Salesforce savvy, he rapidly adds and changes fields to support new processes within minutes. Sales Cloud is so intuitive and agile that he can make changes in-house and build dashboards quickly, so the team can access the real-time data they need, whatever their role the company.

When social distancing measures forced the business to close its doors, the team behind the innovative events company was ready. When the COVID-19 pandemic started to take hold, cancellations started coming in. Within a matter of weeks, Dynamic Events went from a healthy-looking 2020 to no prospect of any events.

The team put its heads together and reinvented its business with help from Salesforce. “We had technology – including Salesforce and some event technology that we were using for in-person events – and a really smart team of people,” remembered Phelan. “We are part of a global team building network of event professionals whom we meet every Monday and Friday to create a new series of online events.”

With the throttle to the floor, Dynamic Events delivered its first virtual event within weeks of the world locking down. With all customer details and interactions captured in Sales Cloud, the team could identify contact details of everybody they needed to reach out to. “At the beginning of the pandemic we contacted everyone in our Salesforce customer database as we realised how important it was to engage with employees while they are working from home,” said O’Connor. “They’re isolated. They’re disengaged. And we have a solution for that. Join a free demo.”

Dynamic Events offered a free demo to engage and visualise its new digital offer for clients - which was a huge success. With that, Dynamic Events bounced back fast and strong. Bookings came in fast, rising exponentially throughout the year and reached 250 monthly events by December 2020 – including 110 events in the week running up to Christmas.

“It’s just unimaginable what sort of position we would be in without Salesforce over the last 18 months,” revealed Phelan. “The Salesforce platform, it’s a very, very cool product; I just don’t know how we would have scaled without it - especially with 2021 looking to be another bumper year.” For Dynamic Events, 2021 is on track to surpass a record 1,500 bookings in 2020. The number of bookings during the first quarter has exceeded the number reached during the whole of 2019.

And with the business expanding rapidly, O’Connor is confident that new staff can plug straight into the system; Salesforce has made the old days when newcomers needed to get their heads around a bundle of different technologies a distant memory.

Salesforce has transformed an office once filled with thousands of folders of paper and multiple printers. “Salesforce allows us to be a paperless company,” stated O’Connor. “We’re no longer hanging onto paper, and we no longer need to worry about the GDPR issues that come with holding people’s data that way.”

Ridding the office of thousands of paper files has been key to Dynamic Events ability to scale to meet the growing demand for its events – especially as the world re-emerges from lockdown and reengages in in-person events. “When an enquiry comes in, we can turn that around using the functionality within Salesforce to reply to that customer within five to ten minutes,” conveyed O’Connor. That response includes a link to the free demo that has proved a hit for converting opportunities to sales, contributing to conversion rates rising from 22% to 43%.

Only real time access to a 360-degree view of customer data can achieve the rapid response today’s customers expect – and that is precisely what Sales Cloud provides. “Salesforce gives us a complete view of our customers and how they have interacted with all of our processes: the sales process, customer service, and event delivery,” said O’Connor. Everyone can see relevant customer and attendee data via role-based dashboards in Sales Cloud.

Constructive feedback from customers helps Dynamic Events shape and improve its products and services. “Pardot makes it really easy to reach out to our customers for feedback,” voiced O’Connor. “They tell us what went well - and what we could do better.” This insight is vital; it helps the company ensure its events hit the spot with clients, so they return again and again. The organisation now has a ‘world class’ net promoter score (NPS) of 83, which has been captured using Pardot functionality.

An automatically generated email invites the event organiser to share their experience on a Pardot landing page. They rate their customer service experience, sales experience, and event experience – and Salesforce automatically logs all that information against relevant profiles.

Salesforce’s built-in automation is also helping Dynamic Events market its services. When a customer inputs feedback, for instance, that triggers and feeds into the testimonial process. The customer satisfaction report includes event details and a testimonial quote that Dynamic Events can share on social media.

Dynamic Events is also exploring how Pardot can enhance engagement with players throughout multi-day events, firstly by implementing a registration page in Pardot as part of a bespoke solution for specific customers. After creating the page, the event organiser emails a link to team leaders to register participants. “Once they’ve registered, we can communicate with the players through Pardot: leader board updates, photos and videos from some of the challenges, and just general communications around the event,” explained O’Connor.

O’Connor is also working on creating dynamic content on landing pages, where if a player on team ten goes to the landing page, the page will show team ten’s score, its position on the leader board, and more.

Expanding its use of Pardot is just one of many innovations in the pipeline at Dynamic Events. Having reimagined its services through digital transformation, the company now finds itself on the global stage. “Salesforce means we’re able to take things to a whole new level,” expressed Phelan. “We’re now working across the globe.”

The potential is enormous. Dynamic Events has, for instance, just finished an eight-week event programme across 14 different countries around Europe for a large German company. “With Salesforce, we can grow without having to hire more people because the platform is looking after the scale for us,” concluded O’Connor. “We could scale even more now; we have capacity because of the Salesforce systems we have in place.”