Access Intelligence Success Story
The Access Intelligence team needed a way to streamline the entire process to put more time and energy back into managing seamless events for their clients. Cvent was a win-win for their team.
Sourcing Struggles
Access Intelligence is a worldwide information and marketing company, specializing in business intelligence and integrated marketing solutions in nearly a dozen market segments including aerospace, marketing, energy, engineering, and healthcare. Their event operations are run of out the Rockville, Maryland office where they support over 100 events annually. These events range from small awards breakfasts to one day summits, all the way to large city-wide events hosting thousands of attendees every year.
Shortly after Liz Johnson, Senior Operations Coordinator, joined the Access Intelligence team, they started evaluating Cvent as a partner for strategic venue sourcing. The team was looking for a more efficient way to source venues, as they became frustrated by lengthy and disconnected processes. With a team of 10 planners, they quickly realized there was no easy way to efficiently share key information across the group. As the organization began taking on more events, Liz and her co-workers became overwhelmed by the venue sourcing process, which prohibited them from effectively handling other aspects of their events. The entire sourcing process from start to finish took them up to 20 hours per-event. wanted to be the best we had to go with the best software provider.
With such a wide range of events, researching, creating and sending RFPs grew more and more tedious for the team. "You can copy and tweak RFPs and you never have to reinvent the wheel. The ease of being able to create RFPs is very popular with our team," Liz says.
One of the most time-consuming pieces of the puzzle was the search and send process. When searching for new venues they felt overwhelmed, and because of this were fully aware that they were missing out on properties that could be perfect for their events. "You don't know what you don't know. Shared knowledge is very limited. We felt like we were missing out on venues," Liz states. They didn't have one central place to store all sourcing data and things would get lost in the abundance of events they were planning. The team needed a way to streamline the entire process to put more time and energy back into managing seamless events for their clients.
Finding the Right Partner
Once they started evaluating eRFP technology solutions, Cvent immediately became a frontrunner. "It wasn't a hard sell," Liz starts. Initially showing the capabilities that Cvent offers and demonstrating how easily you can search and send RFPs was huge. Showing how all-encompassing Cvent's information is, was what initially drew us in." The Access Intelligence team saw how powerful this solution could be to their sourcing processes. "The team could immediately see the time and energy savings Cvent could provide, as well as the access to information that we didn't have before."
Not only was the eRFP creation process a huge draw, but the amount of time they could save in the bid comparison process really solidified their interest in Cvent. Comparing all the bids they received alone could take up to 4 hours per RFP. Before using Cvent Liz states, "The bids would all come back in different formats, often with different information missing from each one. Some were extremely vague and others had complete detail. This required a lot of follow up to determine if proposals were even advantageous for us to pursue." With Cvent they can require responses to certain questions on their RFP, eliminating a lot of the back and forth in the initial bidding process.
Following up with venues, shortlisting and finalizing the venue took them over 8 hours per event. The team knew that Cvent would streamline their processes and help them become more efficient.
Time Savings and Sourcing Success
"With Cvent we've been able to save up to 16 hours per event," Liz notes. This equates to an 81% time savings. The entire process has been streamlined for Access Intelligence—everything from searching for venues, communicating with existing supplier contacts, compiling rates, to reporting. Cvent is a win-win for their team and the properties they work with. "Cvent connects our team with exactly the properties we are looking for, enabling us to make high-impact relationships," Liz adds. The technology has helped them maintain existing supplier relationships and grow new relationships in the industry. "We can go through the bidding process a lot faster and crank out more contracts. We love that we can always keep our NSOs copied on everything."
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