Zuant : Issue 2

ISSUE 1

MOBILE LEAD CAPTURE | ANYTIME, ANYWHERE

H OW TO S AV E T H E L I F E O F A TRADESHOW SALES LEAD

Z U A N T. C O M

C L I E N T S P OT L I G H T ADP

NEW TECH Z U A N T VA U LT

ZUANT LOVES CITYMAPPER

W H AT D O E S F A C I A L R E C O G N I T I O N T E C H MEAN FOR MARKETING?

H OW TO S AV E T H E L I F E O F A TRADESHOW SALES LEAD

ISSUE 1

Z U A N T. C O M

Since the dawn of marketing, tradeshow and other in-person events have been the largest items in the B2B marketing budget, often exceeding more than 50 percent of the total budget. And yet, have you ever seen an ROI report on tradeshow activity proving this huge investment is paying off? If they exist they are as rare as Beluga caviar.

Sadly, most event managers focus on creating great looking booths and coming home with a load of leads at the end of the show. There’s no regard for quality.

It’s all about volume because unfortunately, quantity (vs quality) is how their organization measures their success. Those tasked with this job, have no interest or time for lead follow-up or ROI; they’ve already moved on to producing the next show.

Ironically there is a marked resurgence today in tradeshows and events. Why? Because in our digital, always on(line) world of maximum productivity and efficiency (i.e. email and web meetings), tradeshows are one of the only channels to connect with customers and prospects face to face. On the flipside, from a booth visitor’s point of view, the opportunity to evaluate a wide range of potential suppliers in one location is priceless.

Clearly tradeshows are a win-win scenario.

Despite their resurgence, however, tradeshows can result in a bottomless pit of wasted marketing dollars.

Too often potential sales leads are left to die a slow death on the showroom floor. If you are like me, perhaps you’ve experienced the same treatment at a show that you find when visiting a company’s website. You leave a request for information and get no response. The same is often true when you visit an exhibitor’s booth and although you might have a meaningful conversation with one of the company representatives, your actual request for follow-up never happens.

Given the tremendous potential of tradeshows to produce high quality sales leads, let’s highlight what a day in the life of a tradeshow sales lead should look like to deliver ROI. It starts with preparing a year in advance for a major show. CRM segmentation into the following four key target group should be your first order of the day: CUSTOMERS Major targets for significant growth opportunities CUSTOMERS Routine ‘keep in contact’ but not in the buying cycle segment

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PROSPECTS Major targets PROSPECTS Known, ‘keep in contact’ but not in the buying cycle segment The beauty of modern data capture systems is that all this data is pre-loaded on lead retrieval devices for an event. This enables the booth staff to know exactly who they’re talking with and who the sales executive is so that they can make an introduction in the booth.

This data enables you to deliver four unique pre-event campaigns for each category. For instance, armed with these insights you can book interesting restaurants around the tradeshow city to host more intimate dinners for major target customers and prospects, while those in ‘keep in contact’ mode can receive an invitation to visit the exclusive bar and restaurant area within the booth itself at a large show.

Technology plays an important role here as well. The cost of NFC (near field communication) chip plastic cards allows you to produce very upmarket VIP cards for release to all customers and prospects for ongoing use. They can then be scanned into events so that the individual can build up loyalty points and you get the tracking information to see who is the most active for follow-up purposes.

Naturally your digital marketing team will create an email/newsletter program to introduce products and other news surrounding your presence at the event. Once again, this links back into the CRM data sets preloaded on the lead retrieval devices, so that you can actually see who has been the most active clicking through and reading items about your products or services.

WHY THE SHOW ISNT OVER WHEN IT ENDS Actually, the show is only the start of the real sales activity. Good, detailed lead capture is absolute key to ROI. From our experience, a typical breakdown of leads captured at a show usually fits into one of the following categories: 5% are immediate, “sales ready” hot leads for sales follow-up.

20% are fully qualified, but the timing is just too early, so still go to sales for them to keep in contact as warm leads.

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40% are fully qualified, but are long range ‘nurture’ leads to be managed internally.

Most clients get excited about the 5 percent who need to be converted quickly; the problem is that they are being picked up right at the last stages of a prospect’s buying cycle, and other competitors maybe involved at this stage, which diminishes the opportunity.

As in other parts of B2B sales and marketing, the magic is found in the 20 percent warm leads; the guys who are fully qualified on your lead capture app, and need unpressurized, high quality follow-up to close the deals.

The rub here is that most sales people are too busy to manage this process, so our successful clients issue these leads to their inside sales team or external call center as well, to ensure good quality contact until the close of the sale. This may take a year of two, so updated CRM reports at least on a monthly basis are the final, vital ingredient to show true ROI data ‘by sales executive’ and ‘by show’.

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NEW TECH Z U A N T VA U LT In a world focused on security and privacy issues, Zuant Vault provides precise control and management of contact data to meet the most stringent regulations such as GDPR. Zuant CEO, Peter Gillett, warns, “While most industry coverage of data issues in a GDPR world focuses on in-house systems, managing contact data on mobile devices poses a huge risk because it is stored on individual devices. Zuant Vault deals with this risk head-on.”

SIMPLE 1X OPT-IN

ENHANCED DATA INTEGRITY

The cloud-based administrator management system guarantees 100% compliance by ensuring companies market only to those who have granted permission.

Zuant Vault is a secure datastore that lives in the cloud.

Each account has a database in the Vault, and each database contains the entire history of every change made to every contact record. Every detail of every data load is also recorded, so that the entire history of the interactions between the company and its prospects and customers is properly maintained.

Two years in development, Zuant Vault is designed for ease of use, and allows sales teams to obtain consent from the individual one time only via a smooth opt-in process. Their consent is stored in Zuant Vault and transfers to all devices automatically, so that the process never needs to be repeated for that individual.

Zuant Vault eliminates duplicate contacts being created, which greatly improves data integrity. Sometimes circumstances such as iPads used offline at a tradeshow can reate duplicate contacts at the point of data-capture. Now, when information flows into Zuant Vault, each contact will be de-duped automatically. This process is essential to GDPR compliance rules, because it ensures that previously captured consent settings are correctly interpreted when further interaction with a contact takes place.

As you can see, in terms of time investment, full exploitation of a show may well be a year before and two years afterwards, something that marketers must fully understand and embrace.

The experience of event marketing becomes a continual quality monitoring and improvement process, especially if you have many events and shows to support. And that individual sales lead goes from being warmed up pre-show, to presented to in the booth, to nurtured until ‘sales ready’ and then bounced out to sales to close the sale and generate that topline revenue for your organization – This is quite a long journey, requiring modern marketing automation to successfully manage and prove ROI over time.

FLAWLESS SECURITY Controlled access to contact information is also vitally important. GDPR stipulates that contacts have the right to be erased from a system. Zuant will ensure that the details of any contact will not be revealed unless Zuant is able to guarantee that the relevant consent is in place.

This is of particular importance given that Zuant can operate offline and on occasion

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may not be able to refer to the cloud-based Vault for the latest situation regarding consent for the contact in question.

Zuant can perform various actions with regard to individuals, such as sending emails, pushing data to third party systems, and storing data. The value of having data stored in Zuant Vault is assurance that the individual has consented before an action takes place.

Z U A N T. C O M

W H AT D O E S F A C I A L R E C O G N I T I O N TECH MEAN FOR MARKETING

Panos Moutafis, Ph.D. is Co-Founder and President of Zenus Inc., which specializes in facial recognition systems for multiple applications.

A computer scientist by trade, he is well-known for his work ethic, diligence, and persistence.

Zuant CEO, Peter Gillet, caught up with him over breakfast in Houston recently, keen to discover if facial recognition technology could become mainstream, or sit on the fringes like many other great ideas such as RFID and iBeacons.

FACIAL RECOGNITION: FACT OR FAD? PETER: Panos, first, is facial recognition technology in its heyday?

PANOS: This is more than a cool technology that people will start using ‘sometime in the future’. Facial recognition adds clear value such as improved security and better user experience along with unmatched analytics and insights. It is already used to tag photos on social media, unlock and pay with cell phones, and go through border security. Since people are getting accustomed to the technology, facial recognition is becoming an expected service rather than a nice to have feature. 2018 is the year innovative events are embracing facial recognition!

PETER: And this goes beyond what most people imagine?

PANOS: Couple it with adjacent technologies such as emotion recognition or human posture recognition and the possibilities are limitless. You gain full control. Every powerful technology comes with great responsibility though. Respecting people’s privacy and handling metadata in a transparent and prudent manner is vital.

Every party who has access to this type of information must be thoroughly vetted, 100% trustworthy and held accountable to the highest standards.

extract analytics, and perform lead retrieval.

Facial recognition belongs in the third form of authentication along with other biometric approaches.

It is a software, which can identify a person from a database of faces without requiring a physical token or the user to provide any privileged information.

Technological advancements have increased accuracy and drastically reduced. Therefore, we are seeing increased adoption in other industries (e.g., airports, social media, and cell phones).

PETER: Well, take us from the start of the process; I always chuckle to myself when I check into to a high tech event for a mega-company and I wait in line for someone to tick off a spreadsheet or hand write my badge!

PANOS: The attendees are not always good at following instructions displayed on the terminal. They often cannot find their ticket; it takes them a while to retrieve the QR code on their phone, or they simply need time to type in their email address.

Facial recognition addresses the root cause of the problem by eradicating the need for user actions.

Depending on your preference, you may want to implement a self-service or a hosted check-in mode. In either case, the premise is the same. When an attendee approaches the check-in station they will be instantly identified without them having to take any action. Simple.

The best part is that you do not need to purchase expensive hardware because any device with a camera works. This includes virtually all laptops, tablets, and smartphones.

In addition to making the check-in process more efficient and thus reducing costs, face recognition has been proven to increase user engagement and attendee satisfaction. It is an excellent way to promote the innovative nature of your brand and impress attendees.

PETER: And I guess ID checking is enhanced?

EVENT MARKETING: LET’S GET PERSONAL PETER: Let’s talk about events. How does this technology work here?

PANOS: The use of physical tokens and privileged information have become integral parts of an event lifetime. They are used to check in people, restrict access, personalize the experience, measure attendance,

PANOS: Even though checking the ID of the attendees entering the venue is a step in the right direction, most of the existing implementations have limitations.

Attendees are asked to present their ID and an untrained host is taking a quick look before giving it back. This is not enough. Doing a proper ID check, on the other hand, is time-consuming. One would have to check the issue and expiration dates, scan the code

and make sure it matches the ID unique number, check whether the picture matches the person presenting the document, and so forth.

There is a faster and more secure way to perform this task properly. In particular, attendees can be requested to take a picture of their ID along with a selfie when they register online. A facial recognition algorithm will ensure that it is a real picture (liveness/spoof detection) and that the two faces match; other computer vision algorithms will perform the rest of the checks in real-time. We see this approach being used widely in other applications such as the banking and hospitality industries (e.g., Airbnb).

PETER: Could this be used for Session Tracking as well?

PANOS: Event hosts spend a significant amount of time recruiting speakers, curating the content of their shows, and organizing sessions that cover different aspects of the event theme. In addition, conferences with a deep educational focus often assign credits and accreditation to participants who attend specific sessions.

Face recognition is a good fit for this because it requires minimal setup and extracts analytics in a non-intrusive manner. Depending on different technical factors, session tracking with face recognition can be as simple as putting a tablet or cell phone on a stand near the entrance of each room. The camera will automatically capture the video stream and send it to the cloud for processing. There is no need for special hardware and expensive installation costs.

PETER: We’ve experimented with heatmaps for different clients using RFID technology in the past - could this be done more cost-effectively now?

PANOS: Face recognition can be a great way to compute and draw heatmaps. Tracking the number of faces visible by the camera across the different event locations is straightforward. It does not require special hardware and it is easy to install and configure. Depending on the level of investment, the information can be as high level as how many people on average stood and passed by a certain point of interest or as fine-grained as extracting insights by group type and knowing each attendee’s journey.

PETER: How about other applications out on the show floor?

PANOS: One can use screens (equipped with a camera) around the venue that identifies attendees and display personalized information ranging from where food is being served to what next session they should attend. Likewise, the information desk personnel could be equipped with similar capabilities. Being able to identify a person while they are walking towards the desk allows them to personally greet them and anticipate their needs.

Along the same lines, one could combine face recognition with chatbots to offer the most efficient and personalized customer service. There is a myriad of interactive applications that could be developed. It is up to your imagination.

CALLING ALL MARKETING QUALIFIED LEADS PETER: And my favorite subject of course: Lead Retrieval! How does face recognition factor here?

PANOS: As you know, the current situation is that exhibitors have to manually scan each person’s badge and enter all the relevant information into a lead retrieval application to summarize the discussion. With face recognition, it is possible to automatically keep track of how many and which people visited the booth. The lead generation and conversion statistics are vital in the sales process.

In addition, this technology allows you to keep track of how long attendees stayed at the booth and how they were feeling. Analyzing their sentiments combined with the information collected before/during the show enables lead management like never before.

At the end of each day, the exhibitors will receive a full report. The leads will be automatically scored by their likelihood to make a purchase decision so that the team can focus on the best targets and following up promptly.

Face recognition combined with audiovisual sentiment analysis will have a dramatic impact on leads retrieval.

PETER: I know that some people will think that Facial Recognition is creepy and they feel uncomfortable about it?

PANOS: That is true, but real-world deployments by Zenus and our partners show that the majority of attendees are willing to use facial recognition. That is, the first time an event planner introduces the option they can expect 50-60% of the people to upload their photo.

We see attendees talking to their friends and colleagues about how fast and easy the check-in process was, so we expect the opt-in rate to grow for repeat events.

The great thing about facial recognition is that not everyone must opt-in. Instead, it works in conjunction with name search and barcode scanning. The same check-in station can simultaneously allow attendees to use any of these three ways to get their badge. If you have enrolled in face recognition you will simply go through faster!

It is worth noting that a participation rate of 20-40% is enough to make a difference to the on-site registration process. Speeding up the process for this portion of the registered attendees can address bottlenecks.

PETER: What about collecting the images - is that hard?

PANOS: There are plenty of online registration companies that already allow attendees to upload their headshot or take a selfie. Most devices such as laptops, tablets, and cell phones have a front-facing camera. If necessary, one could opt to use their social media profile picture. It really isn’t as hard as people might think.

PETER: OK, let’s talk money - it still sounds expensive?

PANOS: Some technologies are expensive, especially the ones that require specialized hardware, customizations, and on-site support. However, software-based applications tend to be more affordable.

Luckily, face recognition falls into this category.

Unless the event planner has excessive requirements, the associated investment is just a few cents per attendee expected to register.

C L I E N T S P OT L I G H T ADP had to find new partners and partner with a lot of other applications and we did many trade shows with the Oracles and SAPS, to partner with those companies in tax and compliance solutions, along with their payroll solutions. So, they’re quite, quite interesting organizational and marketing challenges.

Peter: I thought AVS was a bit of a maverick within the overall ADP organization. Not sure if you heard that part of the conversation, but I think that gave you certain freedoms to plow your own furrow and choose systems that suited the business?

Steve: I think our choices were more entrepreneurial. We were trying to grow new business from new channels. But yes, that sits quite well.

Stephen Landry chats to Pete Gillett about ADP and Zuant.

Peter: So Steve, we’ve known each other for many years and we met as a result of some time working at ADP? Refresh my memory. How many years were you there, if you had to admit that?

Steve: Oh yes, I was there for 15 years and I think you and I worked together for about six of those 15 years. So yes, 15 years with ADP - had quite the career there from the sales, sales training to most recently sales management - and sales enablement and sales operations where you and I got to be friends for quite some time.

Peter: Okay, excellent, and how did your role develop there, did it change? The world’s changed so much in that period…

How did that affect your career?

Steve: ADP is the payroll company, so it’s a very large organization. The nice thing about ADP, is that there’s a lot of opportunities for growth there. So doing that, I evolved from selling payroll to helping support a specific division called Added Value Services to help them grow that very entrepreneurial part of ADP, which is really partnering with a lot of third-party accounting systems. Great career there and working in sales enablement, and sales operation, we supported over 250 sales people across the country, and quite a big budget: we had over $100M dollar quota that we had to sell new business with and had to support the team with marketing and lots of operational sales and lead generation things. So it was quite the fun time.

It’s often referred to the entrepreneur arm of ADP because everybody knows ADP as a payroll company but in order to grow, they

Peter: And moving now on to the tradeshow side of things, we’re talking about a fairly significant budget, I believe. You’re also running something like 10 shows a month in the peak month, so that must take quite a lot of organization?

Steve: Absolutely, and it also takes a lot of exposure and interest from our stakeholders. We had well over a $Million plus budget for trade shows across the country and across different channels, and some of them we partner with vendors like SAP and Oracle, some of them were local trade shows that are specific to practitioners around the country - so we had a very diverse event and trade show schedule and it was a big part of our marketing. And that’s not even including the expenses for all the travel and personal expenses... So it was a big commitment for our group from a tradeshow perspective.

Peter: I, certainly over those years, got the sense that, for a budget like that, return on investment was almost the center of everything, which makes a lot of sense, but it’s still unusual, these days. You know, with other businesses who just go and exhibit to wave the flag and get the brand out there.

Would you say that was true within ADP? Steve: Yes, in our organization, absolutely, because there is a management structure that says, “Are we doing the right thing in the right places?” And as everybody wants to do a new tradeshow or a new event, there’s a lot of expense involved with that.

Peter: Would you remember how you found us in the first place? Was it a search through to Zuant.com?

Steve: Yes, we were doing some research, because one of our challenges was finding

a way to manage all of our creatives with the same standards in the collection of data. Then we could measure one tradeshow to the next, so we needed a tool that we could use at every show with both the standardization of questions and standardization of data collection.

Peter: What were you using before?

Scanner pens? I remember a horror story when one got stolen from your booth.

Steve: That’s the hard part of our story right there; every show is different. And that was one of our big dilemmas. Some shows don’t collect any data, it’s all business cards, other shows have barcode scanners, and so forth, and other shows have their own proprietary systems that they collect data with. So we never had an apples and apples comparison and that was our challenge because we could not report back to our managers; we couldn’t say how many leads we got from any given show. Because you have human issues, you had the sales people, you’ve got the Marketing types, everybody has a different priority. Often at the end of the tradeshow we get a stack of business cards; these were the leads! But I always knew the best business cards never made it back to sales operations. We never saw the best leads, they were usually pocketed or we’d get a spreadsheet back with cryptic data two and three months after the show was over, so we never could compare. So that made it quite challenging.

Peter: I remember you were literally one of our first clients at Zuant... It was only a few months even after the iPad was launched so that must have been quite revolutionary.

Did you get any push back within the organization resisting change, that sort of thing?

Steve: Well the first good news for us was that we were looking for something that was on the iPad platform because we had already deployed iPads as a tool to our sales people to enable them to do things remotely. We all like iPads because you can do it up quickly, you can travelwith them and those kind of things. So that was one of things we were looking for. The other thing we were looking for was standardization so that made our search pretty easy. Of course, seeing was believing; both of us knew it was pretty new, new enough that we didn’t know how that was going to happen, so we had to see it to believe it, and I think we had a great first experience with it. Back in the day, nobody thought you could scan business card registrations and there was a lot of pushback, not just from our internal sources, but you will remember from the vendors at the different trade shows, because it was like ‘you

can’t use your tool you’ve got to use our tool’, and it was difficult initially to get adoption from the organization because they didn’t think it was going to be true.

So how the world has changed, and we’ve been part of that, and of course the Zuant platform itself has changed. I mean in the early days, we didn’t have all that content loaded so that you could present materials, share them with customers in the booth, and email right off the bat as they were walking off the booth.

Peter: How important was sharing content because that’s one of the big problems within an organization isn’t it, getting it out there to the sales guys, not only in the booth, but when they’re on the road. Was that an issue for ADP? Absolutely, we’ve all gone to trade shows, we all collect data. And I know there’s many a time that I’ve come back and found literature, and trade show information in my suitcase a couple weeks after I get back or a couple months after I get back. So making sure you can deploy things, in a way, both to your end user clients and to your sales people is critical. And that was the beautiful thing about Zuant, it really solved two problems. One, allowing sales people to have a tool to collect leads and get those leads back quickly to the office as well as provide data and information to your prospective clients that you’re scanning in the booth.

So, the beautiful thing about Zuant was that we standardized the types of questions we’d ask at every show, and the other thing to talk about is being Cloud based. I managed a lot of these shows, and I didn’t go to all these shows, I couldn’t be at them all. Sometimes we’d be at five or six shows in the same week during the busy timeframe... But from my desk in Atlanta, I could see the trade show opened on Tuesday. We’d already collected 10 leads or the trade show opened on Friday we’ve collected 100 leads. I can see real-time how we’re collecting leads and other times I could also see that...

Hey, the show started on Monday here it is, Thursday, and I don’t see any leads in the system… are the people actually doing stuff in the booth, which we could manage from a distance, which was fabulous.

The other thing, too, is that we could use Zuant in the booth to send them an email with a brochure or an email with some documentation from the system.

Because a lot of people walk around the show and you’ve got to hand them a brochure, they don’t want to carry a thousand brochures having seen 2,000 booths!

Peter: And if I recall correctly, ADP is a Salesforce user in a world where every web inquiry, every lead coming from any marketing communications almost has to be followed up before you’ve received it, so time is everything... And I think that’s quite important to your guys in the ADP environment?

Steve: Absolutely, we’re one of the largest users of Salesforce so the speed to lead is critical. You have a warm person, who invests a lot of time to go to your booth to see you, and that’s why we’re there. And of course, we’ve expended a lot of energy, and time, to be there to meet these people. And so to make sure... earlier we talked about ROI; these are significant investments, so we want to make sure that if we’re going to do this repeatedly, we get a return on that investment.

So, being able to follow-up on channels leads and know which leads had value and get to them as ‘importants’

through Zuant, and be able to feed these leads directly into Salesforce qualified with all the notes captured at the show is brilliant productivity.

The other thing too is we found that we used Zuant not just for lead capture - we might actually be collecting data at three or four different points in the tradeshow. We all think about the old days where everybody comes up and wants to get a free prizes and drop their business card in the fish bowl. But we also often have a speaker speaking in one of the rooms talking about a very important topic about say, tax compliance and the affordable care act. We have 200 people in a room to see our presenter where we can take the iPad and collect leads in each of these specialist locations. We don’t have to take a hand scanner around anymore; we just take our iPad or have somebody there capturing leads whilst we’re having someone speak in the auditorium.

Or we might have a reception or cocktail party where we registered 20 or 30 people to come to a special event, and we can quickly check registrations there and then, and even register the walk-ins as well.

We also conduct what we call instantaneous surveys; maybe we have a question about the Affordable Care Act or about a tax or compliance issue, we then create a quick survey to suit particular events. So, it’s not always leads we’re after, sometimes it’s truly a marketing survey, other times it may be marketing impressions - all with the same tool and, in many cases, at the same show.

Peter: Fascinating. The breadth, and comprehensive nature of what you can do with digital platforms like Zuant these days!

Steve: Well, in marketing today, it’s a multi-touch environment. There’s email, there’s picking up the ‘phone, there’s putting something in hand, reaching people in different ways is important. We can get the visual, the auditory, and the kinesthetic learner all get something!

Peter: It’s certainly all about productivity, and if you were going to do it with a smile on your face, Steve, then we’ll buy that! Fantastic, good to talk to you as usual.

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