Tell us about yourself and your company.

I am the Director of Marketing at TSV, an audio/visual rental and event production company with locations in Austin, St. Louis and Los Angeles. TSV Sound & Vision was founded in 2010 and has quickly grown into a national service provider, working with some of the world’s top brands.

What were your sales and marketing challenges before you used BenchmarkONE?

The majority of our employees are freelance because we need staff on a case-by-case basis. Because our core team is so small, it’s our two co-founders who manage all of our inbound leads and work with clients to create quotes. Our two biggest challenges were:

1) We were missing an opportunity to nurture and to create recurring relationships with clients we’ve had the chance to do business with in the past.

2) We were working reactively instead of proactively. For instance, we would be busy creating quotes for clients, but some of the follow-up would fall through the cracks. We weren’t fully taking advantage of all of the business in our pipeline.

How has BenchmarkONE specifically addressed your challenges?

The first thing we implemented was a company newsletter. That has done a few things: it helps us stay top-of-mind with customers, showcases our services so they’re able to see what we’re doing from a creative standpoint and presents our whole range of capabilities.

What was the big “Ah-Ha!” moment that reinforced your decision to try BenchmarkONE?

I came to TSV from a tech company in the Bay that used Salesforce. We also looked into Hubspot, Zoho and one or two others during our search.

Two things really stood out to us when choosing BenchmarkONE. The first is the lack of noise. There are other great products but they’re just so robust that we’d be paying for a product and using maybe 1/5th of what it can provide.

The majority of the CRM users on my team are going to be folks who are out in the field. I wanted it to be very user-friendly and easy for them to pick up on a new process. I saw problems with our users being overwhelmed by other systems.

The second ah-ha moment was service. Even though I’ve worked with a CRM in the past, I’ve never adopted one and gone through the implementation process. I have just really enjoyed working with the BenchmarkONE team, and I felt really comfortable with the onboarding process. I liked how structured it was while giving me the flexibility to go at my own pace. As an added bonus, I also love supporting a local, home-grown St. Louis company that’s making an impact on small businesses like ours around the world.

What’s one BenchmarkONE feature that can be super helpful to other event-based companies?

The tag feature is something that anyone in the event industry can benefit from. We have a wide range of clients,  so with tagging, we can tag different types of organizations, different sizes and so on. That’s really beneficial because personalization when prospecting is so important. It makes it easy for us to send targeted campaigns to a specific list of contacts we’ve tagged.

What measurable results have you seen since you started using BenchmarkONE?

Our first newsletter went out to 1,323 people. We had 23% open rate and one new business opportunity who reached out to us for a quote. That’s a potential client who otherwise wouldn’t have had our name in their inbox.

What’s the single biggest reason you would recommend BenchmarkONE to another business?

I have two. BenchmarkONE is so user-friendly. It accomplishes a lot, but it’s just so simple without getting caught up in the noise. And the employees.The support team is so quick to respond. I know Katie’s (BenchmarkONE onboarding consultant) day is filled with other meetings, but she’s really great about getting back to me and setting the stage for next steps. When your business runs on a software product like BenchmarkONE, just hearing from someone quickly makes all of the difference and lends peace of mind.