A Review of 2020 Updates (and a Preview of 2021)

We tried our best to keep you up-to-date each month with all the newest features, improvements, and tests that launched over the last year. In case you missed any, we wanted to do a quick recap of a few of the biggest things and share a brief preview of what we’ll be focusing on in 2021.

In 2020, we…

• Added more lead management features
• Improved the control panel
• Expanded the calendar functionality

In 2021, we want to…

• Improve lead quality
• Add lead insights
• Educate clients about pricing

Lead management

There are several improvements within your inbox that we hope are helping you manage your leads a bit more effectively.

Travel distance per category. To get leads that are more applicable to your services, you can customize your travel distance for each category on your profile.

Sent/Seen statuses. When responding to leads, the inbox status will show that the message or quote was sent, and then change to seen once the client has opened it. We are also sending email notifications when your quotes have been read.

Mark as unread. You can mark leads as unread from your inbox, or from within the thread. This can help you remember which leads you’ve already looked at, but need to come back and respond to.

View unread leads. When on the main page of your inbox, you can select Unread from the menu to see only the items that you have marked as unread or not looked at yet.

Inbox sorted by recent activity. Rather than going strictly by date, the inbox is instead sorted by who sent the most recent message. So if you reply to a lead from 2 weeks ago, it will jump to the top of your inbox.

Control panel changes

We made several smaller updates around the control panel over the last year to improve the user experience.

Calendar and Reviews pages. To make them easier to access, we moved your GigSalad calendar and your reviews to their own pages in the control panel, each with their own menu of additional tools and settings.

Design updates. We are using new icons throughout the control panel to make the inbox and menus easier to use. We also improved alert boxes, selection elements, and text alignment. All on top of a new overall cleaner look and feel.

Calendar updates

Making large updates to the GigSalad calendar was a big initiative in 2019, and we kept adding to it last year with a couple of new features.

General availability. If you have a 9-5 job or other regular unavailability that doesn’t change, you can adjust your general availability settings so you won’t get leads for events happening on days & times you aren’t free.

Weekly/recurring events. When adding new events to your calendar, you can choose to make it repeat on specific days of the week, indefinitely or until a date you specify.

👉 Pro tip: Utilizing your calendar features and making sure your availability is accurate is one of the best ways to ensure you get more viable leads. Learn about all the features available to you in our Calendar help articles.

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So, what’s next?

We haven’t fully mapped out 2021 yet, but we do have a general idea of what our priorities will be. Overall our biggest focus going forward is improving your GigSalad experience through better, more qualified leads.

Lead quality

Our focus in the past has been on collecting as many leads as possible. But what we’re hearing from our members is that more isn’t always better. As is the case with many things, quality is better than quantity. We have a couple of initiatives in mind for improving lead quality.

Improved lead collection. We want to build upon our quote request process to include more useful category-specific questions and avoid a one-size-fits-all approach. This will allow us to add effective lead filtering options to better match planners with the right vendors.

More meaningful travel preferences. Our per-category travel distances were just the first step toward improving location-based lead quality issues. We want to find more ways to get you accurate event locations and leads within your true travel range.

Competitive lead insights

Sometimes the quality of a lead could be determined more easily if you just knew a bit more about it. We’ve had several requests from our users about showing lead insights and competitive data. We’re going to explore that a bit more this year. Through a combination of user feedback, surveys, and testing, we’ll determine what information our users desire most and which details make sense to share.

Pricing & budgets

One of the biggest factors in low-quality leads is simply a lack of education on the client’s part. They often have no idea what it reasonably costs to hire entertainment or services. We’ve tested various approaches in the past and we will continue testing new ways of sharing pricing insights as well as asking for general budgets to see if we can find a solution that’s beneficial to all parties involved.

While 2020 was stressful for the event industry as a whole, we didn’t let that slow us down. We’re looking forward to the future and continuing to bring you a better GigSalad in 2021 and beyond!

Have any ideas or suggestions for us? We’d love to hear from you.