Tech in Asia is a leading media, events and jobs platform serving Asia’s tech and startup community. Known for its eponymous annual business conventions, they have been backed by the likes of Y Combinator, Softbank, and Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin. We spoke to COO Andrew Wang and Head of Business Development, Jacob Chee, to see how Sansan is helping them.

Please tell us a little about Tech in Asia

We started our business with the aim to help grow this business ecosystem. We started off writing news about startups and realised that we could do so much more. We started our events business, basically with the aim to bring connections from online to offline, and realised that we can do much more for this ecosystem.

Why did you start using Sansan?

We started using Sansan because we needed a central database to store our connections. We have 3 offices across the region, and have over 5000 name cards, but we had no central database we could actually use to make connecting people much more effective. The entire business team at Tech in Asia uses Sansan. We have an average of 50-80 meetings a week, so having a technology like Sansan will definitely help the team to focus on other core sales activities, like proposal writing, following up, closing deals, and client servicing. It has really helped to increase the efficiency of our team. As a sales manager, it has also helped me to monitor the activities of each member of the sales team. I can see if they are not meeting enough clients, and can proactively think of ways to help them. Tech in Asia runs events across the region; in Tokyo, Jakarta and Singapore, and Sansan allows our staff in one city tous to quickly and easily follow up with clients in different cities. So, if there is a guest or client that comes to our Singapore event and we need to follow up with them in Tokyo, Sansan makes it easier to introduce them to our team overseas.

How did things change after you began using Sansan?

It was a huge pain point for us because we were contacting the same people multiple times. We realised that Sansan would be a very good solution for us. Sansan is very easy to use; we scan the name card, it gets uploaded to our database, and it’s fully accessible by mobile. It really helps our company to connect with people more effectively.
 
For example, if we have person A in our database, our editorial team could be contacting this person for a story, our events team could be contacting this person to speak at a conference, or our business team could be contacting this person while looking for a business deal… with Sansan it’s much easier because we have person A’s contact information on a centralised database, making communication much more effective.

What do you want from Sansan in the future?

At Tech in Asia, referral business is very important to us. Ideally we’d like Sansan to be a predictive tool to help us meet other prospective clients, based on the information that we have input into the system… basically to let us know what kind of contacts or clients we should reach out to. I think that would be really really useful.Of course, it helps us that Sansan is integrated with our Sales CRM, Salesforce, so if going forward, based on the deals that we have and the sales that we have closed, Sansan can refer us to prospective clients, I think that will help us a lot as well.

As we run more events and do more jobs, and as we write more news, we are constantly collecting a lot of data. This data could be very useful for us in the future, when we do more machine learning and data mining. It’s very exciting for us, as this data represents a lot of prospects for Tech in Asia.