Turning event engagement into rep-ready next actions for Advanced Bionics

Situation

Advanced Bionics is a global leader in cochlear implant technology, with more than 25 years of work on solutions for severe-to-profound hearing loss. Its commercial teams run a heavy event program - roughly 20 events a month, in person and virtual - built around bringing clinicians, patients, and candidates together.

The events worked. The data did not. Attendance and engagement were captured in spreadsheets, reconciled by hand, and loaded into the CRM days or weeks later, by which time the follow-up window had closed.

By connecting Onomi to Salesforce through the Salesforce Onomi Sync App, Advanced Bionics moved event engagement data into the CRM automatically, so reps see who attended and how they engaged while the conversation is still fresh.

Challenge

• Manual data entry - event data lived in spreadsheets and required significant work from both sales and admin teams after every event
• Delayed follow-up - with no automated CRM sync, reps waited days or weeks to learn who attended and what happened, missing the post-event window
• Fragmented visibility - data sat in different formats across different teams, making HCP behavior hard to track and harder to share between sales, marketing, and medical
• Unproven impact - without centralized reporting, the commercial and educational value of the event program could not be shown to leadership

The benefit is we can show leadership, ‘this is the impact of our events.’

Before we were just guessing or trying to follow up on all those spreadsheets. Now it is a much more complete story that we’re able to bring to leadership.

• Helen Tinsman, Senior Manager, Sales Enablement, Advanced Bionics

Solution

Advanced Bionics used Onomi’s event platform with the Salesforce Onomi Sync App to remove the manual step between an event and the CRM:

• Automated engagement sync - attendance, session participation, feedback, poll results, and booth scans post to Salesforce without a manual upload
• Consistent data across formats - in-person, virtual, and hybrid events write the same structured records, so events can be compared and reported together
• Rep-ready insight in the CRM - reps see which HCPs engaged and with what, inside the system they already work in
• Fast deployment - the sync app was installed and rolled out in weeks, with minimal IT effort and no change to internal systems

Implementation

• Salesforce Onomi Sync App - event engagement data flows into standard Salesforce objects, removing the post-event admin work across 20+ events a month
• Attendee-level detail, not headcounts - which sessions an HCP joined, what they engaged with, and what feedback they left, rather than a single attendance number
• Cross-event standardization - one data structure across geographies and event formats, giving leadership a single view of engagement
• Automated post-event workflows - structured CRM records make it possible to trigger follow-up journeys in Salesforce off real behavior instead of guesswork
• Leadership reporting - attendance, engagement, and impact metrics centralized in the CRM, available without a reporting request

Results

1. Real-time visibility into HCP engagement

Spreadsheet-based workflows are gone. Engagement data is available directly in Salesforce, so sales teams can see which HCPs engaged with which events and follow up on what actually happened.

2. Time returned to sales and admin teams

Preparing and reconciling event data used to consume hours after each event. At more than 20 events a month, automating that work freed both field and admin teams to spend the time on running events instead.

The integration has significantly decreased the amount of time that we’re spending on all of the prep and the admin piece of it.

We host a lot of events, we host on general about 20 events a month, that can range from in-person to virtual.

• Helen Tinsman, Senior Manager, Sales Enablement, Advanced Bionics

3. Rep enablement through better insight

At Advanced Bionics the field team often runs the events themselves. Engagement metrics, attendance detail, and feedback now sync to the CRM, so reps get what they need for follow-up without waiting on a manual report.

Our sales team, for the most part, they’re the ones actually executing the events. And our sales teams love that event execution and getting together with the event attendees, so that’s what they want to focus on. They don’t wanna spend their time doing the admin piece of it or looking different places to get the information on.

• Helen Tinsman, Senior Manager, Sales Enablement, Advanced Bionics

4. Evidence for leadership decisions

With engagement centralized in Salesforce, leadership can assess which events worked, understand customer behavior across the program, and plan on evidence rather than anecdote.

5. Adoption driven by visible value

Internal buy-in followed the time savings. Teams took up the new workflow quickly because it removed work they disliked and gave them information they had been chasing.

Our staff love just getting people together to share their stories. […] They don’t enjoy filling out spreadsheets, or entering data manually into Salesforce, or trying to look all different places to find the information that they need.

This integration has really helped our teams, and I am regularly getting feedback from our teams on how much they enjoy using this Onomi platform because it has given them back so much of the ability just to focus on the execution of the live event that they’re doing and really engaging in that.

• Helen Tinsman, Senior Manager, Sales Enablement, Advanced Bionics

Conclusion

Advanced Bionics did not change how it runs events. It changed what happens to the data afterwards - and that was enough to turn a 20-event-a-month program from an operational burden into a source of rep-ready engagement insight and a defensible account of event impact.

Deployment: Salesforce integration - engagement capture across in-person and virtual events, automated CRM sync, cross-event reporting. Advanced Bionics, global commercial and education program, 20+ events a month.