The Event Temple team had a battle of the minds in an intense Zapier hackathon. The goal was to test our release of Zapier 2.0 while creating Zaps that could benefit our customer-base. Teams were judged on business value, innovativeness, quality of the exec, ease of use (set-up & execution), ubiquity & the actual presentation.
The winning team would receive a Whistler getaway. So yes, it got competitive (to say the least).
What is Zapier?
Before we jump into the actual hackathon, let’s take a minute to understand the Zapier platform and how users can leverage it to automate parts of their workflow.
Zapier is an automations platform that allows different applications to connect with each other. Event Temple has been on the Zapier platform for years. Users of the platform can sign up for a free (or paid) account and create triggers and zaps between apps to automate workflows. The bonus - no coding is required.
Prior to the release of Zapier 2.0, Event Temple users were able to build zaps that automatically created or updated leads, contacts, accounts and tasks between one application to their Event Temple account (or vice versa). Under our previous version, users were able to leverage lead generation applications like Facebook or Instagram Forms to funnel bookings into Event Temple.
Version 2.0 has increased the robustness of the integration 10-fold. Event Temple users can create automated actions based on the following triggers:
- Booking status change
- Booking date change
- Booking stage change
- Contact created
- Contact updated
- Task created
- Task updated
- Task completed
- Account created
- Account updated
The Hack-a-thon
Each Event Temple team was chomping at the bit to deliver the most innovative integration that solved a customer need. Business cases were presented - some with large production budgets and others on the indie side - and teams were judged.
It was a light-hearted event where our core value “Happiness Here Now” shone through. It also resulted in some impressive work.
Unfortunately, there can only be one winning team - our CTO Pouyan Taghipour and our Customer Success Associate Katie Knight were named “Champions of the Zaps” and won the coveted stay in the mountains.
The Winning Zaps
Pouyan and Katie took home the prize with their sophisticated Zaps. They built their integrations around 3 key hotel roles - Sales Manager, VP of Sales, and Event Coordinator.
Role: Sales ManagerZap: Automate lead scoring and follow up with Zapier paths and Gmail.Purpose of Zap: Enrich new leads that are received through an intake form using the Zapier Lead Score database. Depending on the lead score, you can either notify a sales rep through text message or send a follow up email sequence to the lead. Role: VP of SalesZap: Send reports from Event Temple to an organization's VPs.Purpose of Zap: Stay informed by receiving a daily list of new leads. By setting up this Zap, a daily email of “New” and “Definite” leads from the previous day will be sent.
Role: Event Coordinator Role
Zap: Automate the customer journey
Purpose of Zap: Leverage Event Temple’s change stage trigger to perform multiple useful actions.
All of these actions are handled in a single Zap to avoid needing to manage many Zaps for the change stage trigger:
- Automatically change the status of a booking to Lost when a booking is dropped into Lost stage
- Automatically create a follow up task when a booking is dropped into the Follow Up stage
- Automatically send a google survey when a booking is dropped in the Send Intake Survey stage
- Automatically send a review link when a lead is dropped in the Request for Review stage
- Automatically send a postcard when booking is dropped in Send Postcard stage
Honourable Mentions
Some of the automations our teams created with the new 2.0 Zapier Integration included:
EMAIL PROVIDER (GMAIL&OUTLOOK) → EVENT TEMPLE
Custom labelling an email (Outlook or Gmail) creates a new contact (Event Temple)
EVENT TEMPLE → EMAIL PROVIDER (GMAIL & OUTLOOK) Automate an email sequence (Outlook or Gmail) when a new booking comes into from lead form (Event Temple)
MAILCHIMP → EVENT TEMPLEAutomate a survey email (MailChimp) when a booking is at a specific pipeline stage (Event Temple)
Learn more about connecting Event Temple with Zapier here.
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