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Greenfield
Services is proud to announce that its co-founder Doreen Ashton Wagner has been
named to the M&IT Magazine’s Hall of Fame in the Industry Innovator
category. This award recognizes an individual planner or supplier who has
implemented a service or product that has increased productivity and/or
modernized our industry.
Below
is the text of her nomination:
Doreen Ashton Wagner has been an
innovator since she founded her company in 1998.
At first she saw a niche in offering
outsourced, project-based, data cleansing and lead generation services to
meetings industry suppliers. One of the
firm's earliest clients was Rogers Media, then-owners of M&IT Magazine,
after the company purchased the Executive Travel Show series in 2001. Greenfield was hired by the show producer to
update a list of over 22,000 meeting and event professionals across
Canada. The firm then employed just five
people, and it took three months for the list to be cleansed according to a
strict research protocol, supported by a proprietary database platform. This approach has since been formalized as The Greenfield Data Cleansing System™.
From those humble beginnings the firm
gained more meetings industry clients, especially Hotels and
Destination Marketing Organizations (DMOs) looking for online and phone
research to help identify new meetings and conventions business. The Greenfield LEAD Process™ was born of these efforts to produce timely, valuable
meetings information on a consistent basis.
In 2008, Ashton Wagner started
observing a shift in the nature of the business-to-business sales process. The recession, the increasing role of the
internet in the purchasing cycle, and the commoditization of the site selection
process was eroding the traditional relationships that existed between meeting
venues and planners.
In 2009 she devised the Greenfield Funnel Activator™, a marketing system that helps meetings industry
suppliers initiate and nurture new business relationships through a combination
of personal outreach, data management, and permission-based email
communication, supported by marketing automation software. This system has been further enhanced with the
integration of social media management and content marketing, which help users
attract more inbound leads.
Since 2010 Ashton Wagner has written
extensively about these market shifts, starting with this blog and monthly e-newsletter (still
published today), and her landmark webinar series in 2012.
Clients who have benefitted from
Greenfield Services’ dedicated, proprietary approach include Fairmont, Hilton,
Marriott, IHG, Cineplex Entertainment, AV Canada, and every major DMO in
Canada.
Last but not least, this candidate was
a key participant in the team that executed the landmark study of the economic
impact of the meetings industry in Canada (CEIS). Her in-depth knowledge of the venue side of
the meetings industry helped the research team navigate the complicated data
gathering process which led to the successful completion of the study according
to UNWTO guidelines. This study was the
first of its kind in 2007 and it has since been duplicated in Mexico, the USA
and the UK.
According to the then-CEIS Project Manager, Mitchell
Beer, “When the project ran into serious difficulties with primary data
gathering, Greenfield Services was just about heroic in deploying key expertise
and staff hours to solve the problem. To this day, I believe that MPI
Canada—and anyone else in the global meetings community who has since conducted
a WTO‑based EIS—owes
Greenfield a lifetime debt of gratitude for shepherding this first economic
impact study to success at a critical point in its execution.”
The
third iteration of the study is now taking place in Canada, with the candidate
and her company’s involvement once again.
Doreen joins fellow inductees:
- Ralph Strachan, President & CEO, The Stronco Group of Companies (Industry Veteran);
- Bettyanne Sherrer, CMP, CMM, Principal, ProPlan Conference & Events (Planner);
- Trevor Lui, Director of Operations and Sustainability, The International Centre (Industry Builder);
- Sheila Wong, CEM, Partner and Vice-President, Business Development, BBW International Inc. (Industry Volunteer);
- Judy Healy, Hospitality and Tourism Management Department, Ted Rogers School of Management, Ryerson University (Industry Mentor);
- Danyelle MacCulloch, Base Consulting Inc. (Industry Rising Star)
Congratulations to all we’re so proud of you!
