Leveraging Digital People™ to Grow Revenue and Win More Clients
Lime Media is a Dallas-based experiential marketing organization building personalized branded environments, mobile units, and vehicles for some of the largest brands in the United States. Their clientele includes major international brands. If you’ve seen a branded truck, a custom-built activation vehicle, or a mobile LED unit parked outside an NFL stadium on a Sunday, there’s a good chance Lime Media built it.
Their mobile LED truck business has grown fast. With a fleet of over 200 mobile LED trucks, they help these brands be in the right place at the right time. They also provide them with amazing data to show the impact of their brand building efforts. Global brrands, marketing agencies and media buyers invest in this mobile branding in activations and other major events. The demand for this experiential brand building service is growing fast, which is the reason they needed to leverage Digital People™ to operate with their sales and marketing teams to accommodate this client demand and scale the operation.
Personalization and Automation Challenges
Due to this amazing growth in building their own brand, Lime Media receives over 100 inbound bid requests monthly for LED mobile trucks. While this is a great problem to have, responding quickly and efficiently to this large volume of requests was overwhelming for their sales team. In fact, their human sales talent spent most of their time on strategic relationship-building, which was highly valuable to the organization.
Imagine 100+ inbound requests for bids from marketing agencies or media buyers to determine if they could cover multiple geographies, i.e. one in Dallas, another in San Francisco, and another in New York City. The sales team would have to check pricing and availability after reading through emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, Word documents, and more. This process was taking more than an hour each time, which also distracted them from the relationship-building they were providing to their current clients.
With a fleet of over 200 LED mobile trucks, they had to check availability across the fleet, figure out the logistics of getting a truck to the right city, determine pricing, and respond quickly and thoroughly. This process had to be completed all while the requests kept coming from different sources in different formats.
In addition, customer expectations were growing as well. People requesting these bids were expecting responses within minutes or at least hours; not days. The sales team worked hard to convert around 10% to wins, and yet customers continued to ask for faster responses.
Lime Media’s leadership team knew revenue growth was at risk, along with the customer experience. They knew the volume of inbound requests was expected to keep growing and hiring more people to manually process them wasn’t a scalable solution. In fact, it wasn’t a profitable one either.
Growing the Sales Team with Digital Employees™
Upon connecting with Cooperative Computing, the Lime Media leadership team was aware of the Digital Workforce™ offering with trained digital knowledge workers potentially capable of handling the repetitive, time-consuming parts of the inbound lead process currently requiring human effort.
They engaged the team to personalize and launch a Digital Person™ to perform these tasks the way a human team member would, yet quicker. Today, this Digital Person monitors inboxes reading inbound bid requests regardless of format (email, PDF, spreadsheet), extracts the relevant details, checks fleet availability, and prepares a response. They were able to move an inbound request from marketing-qualified lead to sales-qualified lead without a human involved.
Before, the inbound lead process was handled 100% by people. Human sales representatives were monitoring inboxes, manually opening and reviewing attachments, printing bid documents, checking with the operations team on truck availability, and then drafting responses. Today, their Digital Employee™ handles all of this and more.
This Digital Person™ handles the intake, extraction, and initial response work, and involves humans only when a bid is accepted and the client would like to move forward with an agreement. Soon, this Digital Workforce Employee will handle the entire process through contract signing.
What Lime Media Gained
By engaging this Digital Person™ for this first of many roles at Lime Media, they are now able to achieve the following.
Faster Lead Response: The 1-2 hour response is now replaced with automated intake, extraction and response within 3-4 minutes. Prospective clients now receive quicker responses giving them confidence in their choice with Lime Media.
Higher Conversion Rates: With the slower response rate, they were winning around 10% of the inbound leads converting to clients. With this faster, more consistent response, they are seeing 15%+ win rates. This represents millions of dollars in return while also paying significantly less for a quicker response (minutes versus hours).
Sales Team Focus: Their human talent is back to focusing on managing multi-million-dollar enterprise accounts versus triaging inbound bid requests. This single Digital Employee is handling the workflow required of multiple people in the past. And more importantly, they are also growing their enterprise clients with more valuable product and service offerings.
Scalable Operations: This Digital Workforce model scales without requiring Lime Media to hire, train, and manage additional human headcount allowing them to control their costs and scale with higher profitability.
Begin Hiring Your Digital Workforce Today
In summary, Lime Media is scaling with a controlled cost model while responding faster than ever with more consistency in their bidding by using Digital People by Cooperative Computing. If you would like to begin building your Digital Workforce to compliment your human talent, contact one of our Digital Workforce consultants today.
