CPA Global

CPA Global is a leading software management and technology provider for Intellectual Property and patents. Sharon Summers, Director of Global Events at CPA Global, manages dozens of trade shows and conferences annually. As part of a small team, she supports sales enablement and reinforces CPA Global’s position as an innovative thought leader within the industry.

Suffering in Silos

At CPA Global, the marketing, sales, and events team originally operated in silos. Each team leveraged different solutions within their tech stack, and the data didn’t flow easily between them. Amongst her many responsibilities, Sharon was tasked with importing sales leads from trade shows into Salesforce. The problem? Closing the loop between the end of the show and manually importing the leads into Salesforce took up to seven full days of her time, resulting in a stretched bandwidth and cold leads.

Sharon explains, “We do more than thirty trade shows every year and my team is spread out all over North America. If you’ve done these trade shows, you know just getting the business cards back is the number one pain point. Normally I have six other shows going on, and so finding the balance between looking at the tiny font on the business card and doing manual data entry would take me days.” She also spent hours manually transcribing onsite conversations between sales reps and customers for lead generation. 

This extensive process often resulted in nights and weekends spent squinting over business cards for each of the many trade shows. “My sales director saw me at my desk at night doing data entry and said there’s got to be an easier way,” notes Sharon. “The sales team was unhappy by that point.” Leads would go cold by the time they were imported and data was incomplete or inaccurate. There was clear pressure on Sharon to help transform the archaic manual system with modern event technology. 

Adopting Universal LeadCapture

In 2018, Sharon and her team integrated Universal LeadCapture with their other Cvent solutions. “After adopting Cvent for our registration process, I explained that we could be using Cvent for so much more than just our annual user conference,” she notes. Luckily, her executive stakeholders already had a first-hand view of the tool from Cvent. “My VP had just gone to a big conference in our industry called Cloc. Thank God Cvent was there offering Lead Retrieval because he thought it was great. Selling him first was instrumental in selling this to the rest of our VP’s,” she notes.

Sharon knew the inherent value of incorporating Universal LeadCapture into CPA Global’s tech stack but needed to ensure executive buy-in. “I explained the value of time and cost savings,” she adds. “It was taking me about seven hours per show just to do the data entry, which was almost $8,000 on the company just for my time.” She also noted how qualifying questions could help with both the quality and speed of leads. She adds that her Cvent team ultimately helped secure the needed executive support. “In meeting with my Cvent team last year at Cvent CONNECT, they helped me find a way to make sure ULC would work within my budget and determine which key points to highlight. One was that I could monitor usage by logging into my portal to see if the sales team was utilizing the tool,” she explains.

The efforts were ultimately successful and Sharon was able to secure Universal LeadCapture for her sales team. They loved that they could qualify leads onsite and route them directly to the correct rep. They could also monitor sales activities and follow up while the team was still onsite. Most importantly, it would eliminate days of manual labor in waiting for leads to be active.

"My leads were imported into Salesforce within twenty-four hours of the end of the conference. Everybody was so happy, and Cvent made me look like a superhero.”

Sharon Summers, Director of Global Events

Importantly, this cutting-edge technology helped reinforce CPA Global’s position as a thought leader. Sharon explains, “Our industry doesn’t offer lead retrieval for most conferences. When they do, it’s a bad scanner. You don’t even know if you scanned it, and there are no qualifying questions. When we signed our contract last year with Cvent, I saw this as an opportunity to reinforce our position at the forefront of the industry.”