About Healthier4U Vending

Brian Swain is the CEO of Healthier4U Vending, a leading healthy vendor franchisor brand, with over 500 affiliates owning and operating over 3000 vending machines throughout the United States. It lies at the confluence of two growing industries: automated retail ($21.6B) and health and wellness ($200B). Brian sums up the growth and resilience of this category:

People have to eat. We’re healthy, convenient, sanitary, and cost effective.

—Brian Swain, CEO

A typical affiliate initially invests approximately $50K for a 5-machine launch. The company, in turn, provides a comprehensive package designed to enable the franchisee to build passive income quickly. Healthier4U Vending collaborates with the franchisee to select premium locations, drawing from partners such as Gold’s Gym, Four Seasons Hotels, Gulfstream, and the US Army. After a three-day training course, it delivers and installs the vending machines. The machines themselves have a programmable inventory control system, permitting the affiliate to manage them from afar and visit only to restock.

Healthier4U Vending: The Challenge

As a business with aggressive growth plans, Healthier4U relies on SEO, PPC, and lead aggregator strategies to generate over 18,000 leads annually and invite affiliate prospects to attend a twice weekly live webinar as the first step in their sales qualification process.

TIME KILLS DEALS.

Our main competitor spends all day relentlessly banging phones. We were never the first to call.

We needed to cut them off at the pass.

—Brian Swain

Brian needed to take on the following challenges, given that every lead gets sold to multiple franchisors simultaneously, and lead-to-sale conversion averages only 0.4% in the franchise development industry at large.

• Be the first to engage the lead.
• Improve conversion of leads to webinar attendees.
• Use business insights to help decide which lead sources to spend money with.

Healthier4U Vending: The Solution

Healthier4U deployed Lumin.ai’s Sales Accelerator AI technology to support a new lead-qualification and webinar-registration process. They chose SMS text messaging as the medium.

This industry can be a little old school. We’re shaking things up.

—Brian Swain

Lumin.ai was selected because it contacts each lead immediately, and follows principles of Respectful Communication:

• It doesn’t presume that the prospect is available to engage immediately, as with a voice call.
• It doesn’t make the prospect wait once they do respond, as with manually staffed texting.
• It doesn’t force the prospect to follow a predefined sequence, as with a first-generation chatbot, or “dumb bot”.
• It remembers the prospect’s context instead of asking to start from scratch with each communication.

This is made possible by AI that understands complex sentences, conversational curveballs, and ambiguities of human language.

Lumin.ai also supplied business intelligence, providing Healthier4U Vending with insights into the quality of leads arriving from each source, and therefore ways to better target marketing spend.

Healthier4U Vending: The Results

Lumin.ai boosted webinar-attendee volume by 16% and 22% in year-over-year monthly comparisons.

Sales Accelerator now consistently drives 2/3 of webinar registration, with attendance rates matching human processes.

Half of appointments are made in under three minutes, faster than a voice call can complete. A third are made in over an hour, much longer than a voice call can afford to last.

Sales reps were able to focus on further qualifying prospects after they attended the webinar, instead of cold calling leads to get them to attend the webinar, and manually entering information into the CRM.

This is an icebreaker. And it immediately validates lead quality.

—Brian Swain

Healthier4U Vending: Workflow

Lumin.ai Sales Accelerator followed up on every lead by executing the following steps:

• It sent the lead a text message within a few seconds.
• The text identified itself as an automated scheduler from Healthier4U Vending. It invited the lead to the next scheduled webinar on either Tuesday or Thursday evening.
• Simultaneously, it recorded the lead in the customer relationship management (CRM) system, updating it with information provided by the lead source.
• Once the lead accepted the registration, Sales Accelerator entered the appointment automatically into GoToWebinar and made an informational entry in the CRM.
• The lead also had the ability to text interactively with Sales Accelerator to reschedule or cancel.
• If the lead went silent before agreeing to register for a webinar, Sales Accelerator texted back at either 5pm or 8am (known to be high response-rate times), then at a preconfigured cadence: 1, 2, 3½, 5, and 7 days after the lead had gone quiet.
• Sales Accelerator monitored the CRM. If a registration was completed by the call center or a sales rep, Sales Accelerator acknowledged it and went into hot standby.

The nurturing did not end when the lead registered for a webinar.

• Prior to the webinar start time, Sales Accelerator texted all webinar registrants. In this interaction, it refreshed the brand impression and reminded the prospect of the event.
• After the webinar, Sales Accelerator texted all absentees to reschedule them.
• A lead-to-registration and lead-to-attendee dashboard was updated daily. It highlighted leads, webinar registrations, webinar attendance, and landlines by lead source.

Our competitors in this industry hire people to dial for dollars, and hammer prospects with phone calls and emails. People have stopped answering.

Partnering with Lumin.ai has allowed us to automate our lead qualification process in a way that is materially changing our business.

—Brian Swain, CEO