Render Podcast: How Goodshuffle Pro Empowers Event Sales
We recently partnered with Cam Petty, Founder & CEO of Render Events, on a 3-part series for her podcast about the event business industry.
In addition to leading her own, thriving event rental company, Cam runs one of the top education platforms for event professionals. She’s also a longtime Goodshuffle Pro user who recommends our software to event professionals at all stages of growth.
In Episode One, she speaks with Karen Gordon, EVP & Founding Team Member at Goodshuffle, about how our software increases event sales. Listen to the podcast below, or read on for five of the most important takeaways.
1. How Goodshuffle Pro improves the sales experience for event clients
Cam: What I really love is the way that clients can do their booking from anywhere, on any device.
It’s incredible that they can open their email, click ‘view quote,’ sign it with their fingertip on their phone…then pay from their phone and call it done.
With quotes, I can make changes that a client wants, then they can pull it up on their phone real quick and sign off on it. The fact that there’s a live link is so, so cool. We get to tell our clients, “Click on this link right now, you can see me making these changes as I make them. You can see what your price is going to be in real-time as I make these changes.”
Goodshuffle Pro not only is super robust, but it makes your company look like a billion bucks, which is so important and makes your clients’ lives and jobs so much easier.
2. How Goodshuffle Pro improves the sales experience for salespeople
Karen: We’re removing friction from the sales process, and of course that’s great for the client, but it’s also great for the salesperson. Salespeople don’t want to spend all day calling people and chasing people down. They want to be closing deals.
Cam: One tool we use in Goodshuffle Pro is Custom Email Templates. Instead of typing the same email over and over again, you can create it as a template — and then it auto-fills based on the information your invoice is showing (event name, price, etc.).
Quote Expiration is also important when you’re trying to close a sale and you don’t want it to just sit as an open invoice or quote for six months. Quote Expiration gives urgency to our clients, and urgency helps close sales.
3. How Goodshuffle Pro’s Website Integration streamlines the event sales process
Cam: The Website Integration is the number one tool that has helped our business.
It cuts down our time building quotes because customers literally build their own quotes on our website, and then it shows up in Goodshuffle Pro.
If inventory is overbooked, we get alerts that say your client wants this but it’s either set aside or already on someone else’s quote. That process has been so much easier, and depending on how big the order is, it can take hours out of our sales process.
4. Why accepting online quote submissions is vital for growing event sales
Karen: Your client is planning a fun event, and if your website gives them a difficult experience, you’re taking the fun out of it. That’s not a good first impression.
With the Website Integration, you’re not removing a phone number from your website. You’re not removing the process of working directly with your clients. You’re giving them options for how they work with you.
Cam: Right. If calling is the only way to contact you, you’re never gonna work with certain people. Clients can access our website any time of the day, build a quote any time of the day — even times where we can’t jump on a phone call. That’s huge.
5. How Goodshuffle Pro’s reporting enables smarter business decisions
Cam: We make decisions based on data, so we have numbers that keep track of how many events we’re doing, what our product counts are, our pending orders and the revenue for them, etc.
The dashboard in Goodshuffle Pro is great for showing numbers by salespeople and by types of events. We can filter and answer, “How many corporate events are we doing? How many weddings are we doing? What makes sense for us to push marketing-wise?”
The dashboard is also an incredible bird’s eye view into different aspects of our business, and the fact that we can filter it based on day or time period (past or future) is really, really cool.
This has been incredible, and is one of the first things that we train our new employees on. On Monday mornings, we go to the dashboard and we’re looking at the next 14 days to see any conflicts that need to be talked about so a solution can be created for those.
Click here to learn more about the Render Podcast, including recaps of all past episodes from Cam and the Render team.
