Stephen Landry chats to Pete Gillett about ADP and Zuant.

PG: What were you using before? Scanner pens? I remember a horror story when one got stolen from your booth. 

SL: 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. 

PG: 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?

SL: 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 travel 3 with 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.

PG: 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? 

SL: 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!

PG: 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?

SL: 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. 

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

SL: 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!

PG: 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.

Find the first half of this interview in ISSUE ONE

It’s always interesting to look at new ways of creating an impact at shows.

This is one of ADEX International’s clients at CES in January: Simplehuman who make a whole range of home products to make life just that little bit easier.

By featuring an ‘outer box’ design, you not only get maximum branding but also your own controlled design environment inside which creates more intrigue for passers by. In this case, the Scandinavian clean design features a full size LED video wall and demo area for their talking trash container!

_{Background: ADEX designs and produces exhibits, branded environments, and events; They’re headquartered in Cincinnati, OH with office locations in Chicago, Salt Lake City, Limerick Ireland, and Hong Kong.}

Improved Business Card Scanning

Watch the magic happen in real-time!

You'll need to ensure you're running iOS 11 or above in order to update Zuant from January 2nd 2020 and here's why...We have been developing our High Speed OCR Business Card Scanning to improve the quality of the information pulled from the card into your form. This is a unique Zuant feature which avoids all the time delays in a remote Call Centre team doing this for you overnight!

The feature now utilizes video technology to capture the information from the business card which greatly improves the scan result. 

You'll be able to see the contact data being recognised in real-time and a traffic light system will prompt you to take the picture at the right time.  The status will go from saffron to aqua. (so now you know!)

Aqua lets you know it’s time to go ahead and capture the image. Attending an event with visitors from across the globe? No problem: The new OCR tool boasts a user controlled language filter, so you can choose there and then which language you need to scan providing more flexibility and accurate results. 

The following languages are available:

^{Chinese Simplified & Traditional, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian Bokmal & Nynorsk, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, Ukrainian} 

Search Filter on Lookup Widgets

Quickly narrow down your answer list on a lookup widget

It's tiresome scrolling through a long answer list, trying to find a specific product or country value.  Easily find the answer you are looking for with our improved lookup widget!

We've added a search filter on the lookup widget which will save your team valuable time, and ensures you're still capturing the correct data at events.