Experiences with Data
Challenge
Harvey Building Products Waltham, MA Hosting a private event for your target audience to attend provides an opportunity to engage with multiple levels of customers and prospects, especially those deemed as higher lead quality by your salespeople. It also provides an opportunity to show how much you value all of your prospects and customers regardless of how much potential revenue that they may or may not bring to your sales team. Trigon Creative was tasked with building an engaging experience for Harvey Building Products’ two annual custom events that would: 1.allow participants to take part in something fun 2.provide the partakers with an incentive to provide some information on themselves 3.allow for real-time lead qualification during the event, based on the provided data by the individual, so that the salespeople could get a quick understanding of each participant’s level of product engagement and converse with these leads accordingly. For this event, customers could register to attend based on buying a product from Harvey, whether it was a single door purchased by an individual or a bulk order of materials by the owner of a major construction company. Registrants were not automatically categorized by spend level, and so there was a real need to help Harvey to segment their attending audience.
Solution
Working with Harvey, Trigon created the Customer Coupon Catch. Our inspiration came from the old-school money booth, a fun and exciting activity that typically entices participation from a wide-ranging audience. Instead of filling the booth with money, however, we created green and blue coupons with various dollar amounts for discounts towards Harvey products. The visual appeal of seeing green and blue “money” blowing around, with people lining up to take their shot at capturing the savings, was the star of the engagement. However, it was only the beginning for Harvey. Each person who wanted a chance to get into the booth and capture the coupons had to answer a short number of questions on an iPad. To start, the participant only had to enter their attendee badge number into the system, as the program we built was able to match registration information to identify them. Then, they were asked a series of multiple-choice questions, such as “How many jobs do you think you’re going to quote this year? 1-5, 6-15, 16-25, 26+” and “Does the idea of opening an account with Harvey that could save you money on building supplies make sense to your business needs? Yes, No.” The more questions the participant answered, the more time they earned in the booth; and so, answering all the data collection questions would also benefit the participant. There were only eight questions in the system, so the questionnaire responses went quickly, and didn’t hold up the line. The system scored the questions in real-time and presented the money booth facilitator with the participant’s total seconds, but also with a score based on averages created in “weighing” the answers. We developed the program app to rate certain questions as higher than others and calculate a perceived “value” of the participant based on the potential for sales over the next year. This score was for internal-use only, and so participants were not made aware of a score assigned to them. To mark each attendee who had already played the Customer Coupon Catch game, however, the facilitator hole-punched each ID badge and used the provided score from the system to mark the badge in one of its four corners. What appeared to be a random marker from the perspective of the participant was a system for the salespeople at the event to prioritize who of the 1,500 people at the event had self-identified as a best customer opportunity. This custom program ran on two iPads and on the facilitator laptops. Although this system was built to be a cloud-based platform, so that all information could feed into a centralized database, one of the events was to be hosted in the middle of an area with no WiFi or mobile data accessibility. Networking a laptop and two iPads to a centralized database and web server when there is no access to the internet can be a challenge, but we built a self-contained network from an offline mobile device and a router that allowed the system to report back data when it came online and run completely independent of the outside world throughout the event. After the event was over, we fed the collected data on how the customers segmented themselves back to Harvey’s own CRM tool. This data will be used in future sales and engagement events, having helped determine which participants were more likely to buy from Harvey repeatedly. The salespeople reported that the conversations they had with prospects were much more productive based on their ability to gauge lead quality from the Customer Coupon Catch activity. As this event occurred towards the end of February, all sales data is not available, but there was a definite positive ROI on the event, and the preliminary sales information gathered so far from the event confirms that they will be continuing this approach in the future.
Results
As for the activity itself, the rate of engagement illustrated its success for both events. The participants earned valuable coupons and enjoyed the entertainment factor of watching their friends try to frantically catch blowing dollar bills around. Moreover, the competitive nature of the booth—seeing who can grab the most coupons—led to a 97% total completion rate, with only three participants not completing all of the questions.
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