Interview with Patrick McAvoy, Vice President at ASI Displays
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TL;DR
After adopting a CRM for event management, ASI Displays successfully manages 4 departments in different states.
Background
ASI Displays was founded in 1997 in Miami, Florida when Michael Thompson noticed that the trade show industry was seriously lacking a cost-competitive option for the exhibit industry.
Today, ASI Displays helps businesses build brand awareness at every event space. “We are a builder of innovative exhibits, museums, retail and office environments, and special events,” says the company’s Vice President Patrick McAvoy.
ASI now boasts facilities in Orlando, Las Vegas, and Atlanta and a network of partners worldwide. The company has also expanded to offer full-service exhibit production — from graphics to custom fabrication to shipping and installation.
ASI Displays has been trusted by large and small companies to be their trade show and event marketing partner. It offers a variety of exhibit systems and custom fabrication. Find out more about ASI Displays >
The goal
According to McAvoy, the goal has always been to provide a great user experience. “As we were growing rapidly from a single location to a multiple operation organization, our goal has always been to provide amazing exhibits with outstanding service at affordable prices. That has not changed.”
The challenge
Scaling isn’t easy. ASI Displays has worked hard to control growth while juggling the many factors influencing customer experience.
“With multiple locations with multiple sales account executives, account coordinators, and production teams, keeping all our teams focused in the same direction was becoming a challenge,” McAvoy explains, “to remain profitable, we have to eliminate redundant management and remain streamlined. It was and continues to be increasingly difficult to do as we expand.”
“With multiple locations with multiple sales account executives, account coordinators, and production teams, keeping all our teams focused in the same direction was becoming a challenge.”
Another challenge has been managing an enormous amount of information, a task they tried to tackle with spreadsheets. After all, ASI needs to drive information from sales to production to operations in the field and ensure that accounts receivable and sales are on the same page.
“We know that to remain profitable, we have to eliminate redundant layers of management and to remain streamlined. It was and continues to be increasingly difficult to do as we expand.”
In search of a CRM for event management
The ASI team knew a CRM would help tackle the challenges they were facing. Patrick explains, “We found that information was the key. Suppose we could maintain information flowing from all levels of our organization on a platform that was easy to use and effective in funneling our required information to our team members. In that case, we have eliminated a large hurdle.”
Patrick says that before utilizing Kommo, the company looked at other CRMs for event management, such as Pivotal and Salesforce. However, either solution would have required so much programming and customization that the team would need to hire additional personnel simply to maintain it.
As the company grew and opened up other locations, Patrick explains that it became increasingly difficult to keep the information centralized without a solution. He adds, “With Kommo, I can observe what the whole team is doing at any time. I can open up my computer and see what’s happening in Las Vegas or in Atlanta.”
“With Kommo, I can observe what the whole team is doing at any time. I can open up my computer and see what’s happening in Las Vegas or in Atlanta.”
Patrick explains that he ran across a recommendation about Kommo, and as a team, they’ve even nicknamed it “AMMO.”
“Kommo put bullets in our gun,” he explains, “it gave us the firepower to handle many and multiple situational aspects of our business. We could adapt the program to be everything we needed in the short term and easily scale it and control it to fit our needs.”
“Kommo put bullets in our gun; it gave us the firepower to handle many and multiple situational aspects of our business.”
How ASI Displays manages 4 departments with Kommo
Patrick lays out how Kommo helps the ASI Displays manage various teams, including the sales, production, accounting, and marketing teams.
Kommo for the sales team:
“‘AMMO’ helps me manage a sales team in multiple cities and locations,” Patrick explains.
“It allows me to see a wide-view picture of the company from a sales operations and forecasting perspective. It allows our sales team to organize client data and stay on top of the needs of our clients. It prods our account executives to keep their sales pipeline active and helps them move the prospective client through the process.”
In a nutshell, Kommo allows the sales team to:
- Manage a distributed team in multiple cities and locations.
- Get the bigger sales picture.
- Organize client data to keep their needs in mind.
- Stay motivated about keeping a healthy, active pipeline.
- Keep potential clients moving through the pipeline.
- Kommo for the production team.
Kommo helps the production team in various ways, says Patrick. “It even drives our weekly production meetings,” adding:
Using AMMO, our production team can see potential projects as they develop. They will not be blindsided by a large-scale project that will take up our production resources. Now, they can see and plan accordingly. They can see the type of project the salesperson is working on – what product or service lines. They can see installation dates and times.
In a nutshell, Kommo allows the production team to:
- See potential projects as they develop
- Get a view of what sales will soon pass to them
- Organize installation dates and times
“Kommo is very simple, it's very user-friendly, and it's scalable. It adapts to what we need.”
Kommo for the accounting team
The accounting team has also found Kommo useful. “Accounting can see projects as they move into the confirmed stage and a contract is developed,” says Patrick. “It becomes accounting’s check and balance to ensure clients are invoiced and collected so that nobody falls through the cracks.”
Kommo allows the accounting team to:
- Instantly see which stage a project is in
- Never forget to send invoices and collect payments
- Kommo for the marketing team
According to Patrick, the marketing team uses the CRM. “Kommo is an excellent database for clients that we already have and for clients that we’re going to work with in the future,” he says, describing that the marketing team uses the CRM to:
- Promote ASI’s services to existing and potential clients in the CRM
- Subscribe leads and customers to MailChimp campaigns
- Send personalized direct emails and manage postcard campaigns
“Kommo is an excellent database for clients that we already have and for clients that we’re going to work with in the future.”
The result
Successfully juggling 4 departments across offices in 3 different states is no joke, but Patrick says Kommo is essential for it. He sums it up nicely: “As a manager running multi-unit operations, keeping our finger on the pulse of the company through just one program has been an amazing thing.”
“As a manager running multi-unit operations, keeping our finger on the pulse of the company through just one program has been an amazing thing.”
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