I recently had the opportunity to engage with Salesforce.com business partner, Tango Card, on a very unique promotion. As a result, I wrote the following blog post that details my experience working with the Tango Card Salesforce app. I detail my thoughts on its usefulness, and how it helped to streamline my existing processes as well as the the possible impact it could have on business as a result.
Enjoy!
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This all seems pretty standard and straightforward, right? Sure, but when you’re part of a small team who’s responsible for several other business critical areas and cannot spare more then a few minutes a day sending out egift cards and the associated correspondence, the process can become a significant hassle both internally and externally. Some of the challenges we face include:
- Keeping track of egift card purchase receipts (commonly filed in the purchaser’s email inbox)
- No way to track if the recipient received the egift card
- Lack of integration between American Express and/or Amazon.com and Salesforce.com (our CRM system)
- No seamless/integrated way to capture the egift card process
- No integration with our Accounting systems
Also, our current process prevents us from automatically and seamlessly capturing the entire process right in our Salesforce.com CRM system. Right now we have no automatic way to capture the email sent to the recipient with the egift card message right in their Salesforce.com Contact record. Also, we have to manually attach the purchase receipt to the record for our accounting records. Finally, the ability to run on demand reports, create dashboards to visually represent who received what, when, and why, and what incentives led to Opportunities and revenue is not available.
As a highly process driven and systems integrated company, we hoped to eventually find something that would allow us to automate and streamline this process. With the immeasurable number of available tools (paid/free), apps (paid/free), and custom solutions available today, it’s not only time consuming, but almost impossible to find a tool or app that suits our specific needs, is cost-effective, and is easy to install and/or integrate into existing systems. In my day-to-day routine, this combination is quite rare, so when I find and app or tool that meets these requirements, I jump at the chance to test it, use it, and launch it to my team and/or users.
This was the particular case when I came across Tango Card for Salesforce. The app description caught my attention immediately:
With the free Tango Card app, you can give and track gift cards right from your Salesforce account. Make rewards, incentives, and gift cards easy … and save tons of time with Tango Card.
After doing a bit more research, I was eager to get the Tango Card Salesforce app installed in my sandbox environment and begin testing. Unlike other apps, the installation took minutes and the set up was elementary. I quickly realized how helpful Tango Card could be and how it could help transform our current manual and time-consuming process into a highly automated and efficient process. After even a bit more research, I found a significant difference between Tango Card and other egift card providers. I discovered that:
- The Tango Card purchase is stored in the Salesforce contact record’s activity history section for easy tracking and follow up
- The Tango Card purchase receipt is emailed directly to the purchaser and is attached in the recipients Salesforce.com contact record
- Tango Card automatically posts that an egift card was sent to the company’s Chatter feed
- Unlike American Express, there are zero purchase or activation fees
To make my experience even better, a few weeks after I installed Tango Card for Salesforce in my production environment, I received an email from Scotty Greenburg, Tango Card Marketing Manager, announcing that because I downloaded and installed the Tango Card for Salesforce app, I was entered into a contest and won $500 to fund our Tango Card account! After my, “I never win anything!” outburst, I decided to divide the $500 prize into three denominations and use it to organize three different promotions.
Since we had the Microsoft Worldwide Partner Conference 2013 (WPC 2013) coming up, I decided that I’d use the $500 to conduct two internal promotions to help our business development managers promote the launch of Binary Tree’s new SMART Partner Community booth demonstrations and our email migration solutions booth presentations. I also planned to use a slice of the winnings to use for one of Binary Tree’s monthly charitable contributions.
So, with my plans approved and in place, I was eager to see just how well Tango Card would perform, and excited to learn about the end user experience. I was also looking forward to purchasing our monthly charitable donation via Tango Card. If the process was as simple as I thought it would be, then I could go to our Executive management and propose using Tango Card for all future charitable donations.
As it turns out, purchasing our charitable donation for June was even easier then I thought. All I had to do was go to the Tango Card website, log in, select a charity, and submit my donation. There was no need to make any phone calls or fill out any paperwork. All it took was a few mouse clicks and the donation was sent. I immediately received my receipt via email and the process was complete. Since this initial experience was so positive, I was even more excited to get started on the two promotions that I was launching for the Binary Tree Business Development team at WPC.
Since Tango Card provides egift cards and the event concluded while we were all at WPC, I created award vouchers to hand to the two winners at the conclusion of the promotion. With vouchers in hand and the promotion announced internally to all of the business development managers attending WPC, the action began.
Creating an incentive for the Business Development team for essentially “doing their job” may not seem like an ideal way to utilize the $500 (now $400 due to the charity donation) prize money. Inviting partners to presentations/demonstrations is not an action we typically reward. However, in this case, since WPC acted as the launch platform for our new SMART Partner Community and our new SMART Active Directory Migrator migration product, we needed our Business Development team to exceed and outdo their usual tactics and drive a significant number of partners to our booth. My goal was to leverage our business development team’s competitive nature to drive demonstration/presentation attendance. In my experience, incentives and recognition are ideal ways to encourage employees to step outside of their comfort zones and drive results.
In the end, attendance was high and we were able to generate a significant amount of interest (and potential subsequent revenue) in both our new SMART Partner Community and our new SMART Active Directory Migrator migration product.
When I returned back to the office the following Monday, I logged into Salesforce and from within the Binary Tree employees ‘contact records, I was able to send the winners their Tango Cards. An automatic email went out to each of the winners with instructions on how to redeem their Tango Cards. The entire process literally took me seconds and I was able to do it all right within the Salesforce contact record. Even better, the purchases were stored in the Salesforce contact record activity history for easy tracking and follow up. I also received copies of the receipts emailed right to me. Since we use Chatter, I was able to automatically post winner announcements directly to our Chatter feed. Even better, there were no purchase or activation fees like there are with other gift cards. Tango Card saved me time and money. It was easy, simple, and cost effective.
The final step in all of this is to now see if we can tie revenue back to the Tango Card promotions. In the months to come, I’ll be keeping a close watch on Leads that we gathered from the demonstrations/presentations at the Binary Tree booth at WPC 2013 and following them to see if any result in revenue.
About Binary Tree:
Binary Tree is the provider of SMART Migration software and solutions for Microsoft Exchange, Active Directory and Windows Server environments. Since 1993, Binary Tree and its business partners have helped over 6,000 customers around the world to migrate more than 25 million email users including powering many of the largest messaging migrations in the world. Binary Tree’s suite of software provides solutions for migrating from Exchange 2003/2007/2010/2013 and Lotus Notes to on-premises and online versions of Microsoft Exchange as well as for performing migrations of Active Directory and Windows Server environments. Binary Tree is represented by business partners worldwide who apply the SMART migration methodology to provide specialized services for guiding customers through complex transitions. Binary Tree is a Microsoft Silver Partner, an IBM Advanced Business Partner, and is one of Microsoft’s preferred vendors for migrating to Microsoft Office 365. Binary Tree is headquartered in the New York metropolitan area with international offices in London, Paris, Stockholm and Sydney.
About the Author:
Rennie Filler, Social Marketing & Enterprise Systems Manager at Binary Tree, focuses on developing and managing the company’s digital marketing, social media, and inbound marketing strategies. Through her unique skill set, Rennie is also responsible for the management and development of the company’s CRM and marketing automation systems, as well as the content management platform and partner enablement and training community.
Rennie received her Bachelor’s degree in Communications with a Marketing and Public Relations emphasis from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, and currently resides in Madison, NJ. Connect with Rennie here:
Twitter: @RennieFiller
LinkedIn: in/renniefiller
Blog: SwellCrowd
>” href=”http://blog.tangocard.com/2013/08/06/binary-tree-uses-tango-card-and-salesforce-com-to-drive-results/” target=”_blank”>Originally Posted on the Tango Card Blog >>
SwellCrowd 