With Vendelux, Drips Generates 4x More Sales Conversions From Events, at Half the Cost
COMPANY
Drips is a leading Conversations-as-a-Service platform that helps enterprises engage customers with AI-powered, two-way outreach across SMS, calls, and voicemail. Headquartered in the U.S., Drips powers hundreds of millions of conversations for Fortune 500 companies in healthcare, insurance, financial services, and education.
The Challenge
When Sara Van Dyck joined Drips about two years ago to run their events strategy, it was an exciting and challenging task. A key part of her job was planning the entire company’s event calendar.
The key factor for ranking conferences was based on the estimated number of relevant target accounts or existing clients that would be attending each show, both to generate sales and to build brand awareness. It was extremely time-consuming to try to predict who would be at which show. Like most companies planning conferences, Sara found herself quickly drowning in spreadsheets filled with potential attendees she gathered from various sources: Last year’s conference, lists shared online, feedback from the sales team, or attendee information someone had scraped together from who knows where.
“Even with all that work, I felt like I was just making an educated guess,” she says. Cross-referencing conflicting data sources with company target accounts and clients wasn’t cutting it, so they would often revert back to the familiar. “Some conferences we attended just because we’d always gone,”
– Sara Van Dyck, Senior Event Marketing Manager, Drips
The Solution
Vendelux is powered by a database of over 250,000 events, including speaker, sponsor, and attendee insights, which is updated daily with its proprietary AI. Sara cross-references prospects in Drips’ Salesforce database with the attendee insights on the Vendelux platform.
“All that guesswork is gone,” Sara says. With hours of work saved for every show, “it makes me feel like I have an additional team working with me. And more importantly, I trust the information.”
– Sara Van Dyck, Senior Event Marketing Manager, Drips
Whether months or days before an event, Sara needs only minutes to produce a report of the exact number of prospects that will be attending an upcoming event.
“I can generate an accurate quantified ROI for each show,” she says, by comparing the estimated aggregate value of the target attendees to the cost of sending sales and account reps. “We also know which sales reps to send,” based on who owns those targets.
– Sara Van Dyck, Senior Event Marketing Manager, Drips
For Sara, the benefits are clear: “More qualified targets, more meetings, more sales.”
The Results
- Sara now does better conference research in less time. “It is faster, more efficient, and far more accurate,” is how she sums it up. Sara can now easily manage the entire company event calendar by herself.
- With Vendelux, the cost of each conference-attributed sales-qualified lead has dropped 52%.
- Even more impressive, the likelihood of one of those leads turning into an Opportunity is up 4x, from 3% to over 12%.
Vendelux has changed how Drips plans and budgets for conferences.
“Now any time anyone suggests a show, senior management’s first question is, ‘What does Vendelux say?’”
– Sara Van Dyck, Senior Event Marketing Manager, Drips
