Tampere Trade Fairs transforms its business performance with Sofigate and Salesforce
When your business is accelerating rapidly, an out-of-date CRM platform can be an accidental brake on your momentum. Together with Sofigate, Tampere Trade Fairs was able to completely transform their idea of well-functioning customer relations management.
The Challenge
How to modernize an out-of-date customer relations management system to meet today’s needs and to serve over 4,000 yearly exhibitors?
The Solution
Together with Sofigate, Tampere Trade Fairs made Salesforce their new tool for cloud-based customer relations management, while simultaneously tying up the loose ends of their business needs.
The Outcome
The project has brought great results in a short time: Salesforce is now used across departments to manage all of Tampere Trade Fairs’ marketing and sales, supporting the daily work of the whole company. With Sofigate as partner, Tampere Trade Fairs adopted an entirely new system with all customer, target group, campaign, offer and contract data gathered in one place.
Tampere Trade Fairs, a leading organizer of targeted, high-quality trade fairs and consumer events, was moving forward fast, but their 30-year-old CRM system wasn’t keeping up the pace. Thus, the need that sparked a massive transformation was fairly simple: To upgrade to a modern, continuously evolving CRM platform.
”Our old system had been in use for thirty years. We really needed a modern solution that could be connected to our other existing systems easily. We process contracts and service orders for approximately 4,000 exhibit participants every year, so this was no easy problem to solve,” explains Mikko Savolainen, Tampere Trade Fairs’ IT Manager.
Salesforce was chosen as the new CRM platform because of its many features that make modern-day customer management easier and more digitalized. A cloud-based solution was a must for Tampere Trade Fairs.
”I guess one could say our system wasn’t all that integrated before – there was a lot of Excel work going on. When we were first presented with a demo of Salesforce, we didn’t understand just how many capabilities it had to offer. But I immediately knew this was the right solution for us,” Mikko says.
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Don’t be afraid to dream a little bigger
The partnership started with Sofigate providing Tampere Trade Fairs with the Salesforce platform and training on how to use it.
However, it quickly became clear that Sofigate and Salesforce could help Tampere Trade Fairs not only as a CRM provider, but also as a business developer.
”We discovered that our operating model was flexible enough to allow bigger dreams for Tampere Trade Fairs. It may have started as a CRM platform project, but it quickly expanded to tying up all the loose ends they had within the organization − with the help of our very skilled software architects,” says Timo Suonperä, Sofigate’s Salesforce Sales Executive.
With Sofigate as partner, Tampere Trade Fairs adopted an entirely new system with all customer, target group, campaign, offer and contract data gathered in one place.
”Our sales people wouldn’t be able to manage without it anymore. Neither could I. Sofigate provided us with an entirely new perspective on what successful customer management can and should look like,” says Savolainen.
Software architects as future designers
Sofigate’s approach is to be a business partner for the customer first, a system provider second. An important part of being a helpful partner is to think about what is going to happen in the long run.
”Our way of working matched perfectly with Tampere Trade Fairs’ goal. Our architects’ most important job is to envision a future that the customer is not even aware of yet”, Suonperä says.
Tampere Trade Fairs and Sofigate plan to develop the system and cooperation further – with a focus on meeting the challenges of the current, demanding business environment.
”I think the most important outcome of our cooperation so far has been to question ourselves and to dream new dreams together, dreams that then become reality. It is indeed an important skill in this life, and especially in creating a successful trade fair business,” Savolainen says.
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“Sofigate provided us with an entirely new view of what successful customer management can and should look like.”
Mikko Savolainen
IT Manager, Tampere Trade Fairs
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