Consolidated Concepts Intern- Torey Gostek

Diving into the professional work environment, you must start somewhere. Although I’ve had previous exposure to the marketing industry working for another company independently, I’ve never worked in a professional office setting on a team, as a Sales and Marketing Analyst Intern.  The company I’m interning for is called Consolidated Concepts. It is part of a family of companies, under the name “Emerging,” that elevate restaurant and entertainment concepts to be among the top in the industry. Although I help all four companies under Emerging, I spend most of my time working for Consolidated Concepts, which optimizes supply chain for restaurants across the nation. The company employs around 100 people altogether but the office in Chicago, being very small, has only 20.

5A lot of my time involves researching new restaurant chains in which our supply chain optimization can be implemented. While searching for leads, I can be creative. Aside from looking in our data bases, there are numerous news sites or blogs that mention chains that align with our lead qualification criteria. We also discovered that we can get leads through alert messages which warns us of restaurant chains that are emerging, growing, merging, etc. Utilizing these alerts, has allowed us to place the ones that meet our criteria into a trigger-event campaign. This essentially means placing the customer into a specific email workflow, depending on whether they are a client or potential client. We use Marketo as the marketing automation software which helps send these email-triggered-events and it creates the workflows to engage customers and prospects. The process is efficient because it reaches over 200 leads every couple of weeks with one click of a button, while rest of the process is automated until a lead becomes qualified. Then, it’s up to the Sales Representative to take that qualified lead.

I’m working on another major project directly with the President of Emerging. We are putting together a blog that educates and inspires restaurant operators and C-Level Executives in areas such as real estate, data intelligence, cost reduction, and beverage education. The goal of this blog is not only to become the leader in educating emerging restaurants, but to gain more leads and obviously boost business. Along with writing white papers for the blog and interviewing c-level executives, I am learning about the marketing automation process for blogs as well. We are using HubSpot as our blogging platform. HubSpot is an inbound marketing and sales software that helps companies attract visitors, convert leads, and close business. I can’t wait to see what new business our blog brings in.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *