As a small business, it's more advantageous to spend money on solutions that will allow you to be more efficient with your time, leaving you with plenty of opportunities to figure out the strategy of who receives the swag and how to build excitement, meaning, and motivation around it.

We sat down with Tristan Lombard, a long-time fan of SwagUp, and Director of Community at Provar, a Salesforce test automation solution, to see how SwagUp has benefited Provar's Global Community.

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When Tristan joined Provar, he discovered he could leverage swag shipments more efficiently. In short, it was challenging to manage, scale, and distribution company swag. With the help of SwagUp, Provar's cross-functional teams could think of use cases strategically, and swag became an integral and valuable asset for Provar and its online Community.

No More Hoarding

Tristan's journey with SwagUp began while working at Testim, where he discovered, like many organizations dealing with swag distribution, the challenges at the start of the global pandemic; swag was stored at an executive's home and the now vacant office. 

Tristan had to retrieve, assemble, and send out all swag manually. Not an ideal situation.

Tristan took the initiative to break up with his previous swag vendor in search of a better solution and found SwagUp! Tristan worked with his Swag Expert, Hank, to eliminate the hoarding problem and streamline the swag process through automation. 

With Hank's help, Tristan became his own "internal sales leader". Tristan worked with his Swag Expert, Hank, to eliminate the archaic and manual swag process distributed through the executive's home and vacant office. With Hank's help, Tristan was about to streamline a new swag process for Testim through utilizing SwagUp's automation service and in turn become his own "internal sales leader". 

Automated swag 

Provar is a code-free automated testing tool for Salesforce which is both scalable and maintainable. 

When it comes to Provar's offerings:

"If you want to stay competitive and up-to-date with how you're delivering quality salesforce projects, you need to automate it."

Sound familiar? You can almost replace 'salesforce projects' with 'swag'!

Upon joining Provar, Tristan faced another familiar swag situation: hoarding, inefficiencies, and this time: waste. So, Tristan pushed for the switch to SwagUp again. In this instance, switching to SwagUp fit perfectly with Provar's automation, scalability and sustainability applications.

A Community Backed By Meaningful Swag

While automation is essential to saving time and preserving sanity - and Tristan's support for such accomplished that, now comes the community aspect. 

"We just launched our technical Community forum [...] for developers, QA, product owners- anyone who is a part of the software delivery lifecycle. When we started our Community, we did a challenge, and I always do this, you give a little carrot."

When Tristan talks about giving a carrot, he means asking Community members to share something or answer a question for a chance to win a box of swag in return.

"The amount of engagement that we got was insane. [...] In our Community forum, we now have approximately 50% of account organizations represented in our first three months. I know a huge part of that is because of SwagUp because I think people want to feel seen."

And see they are- but not in a simple logo slapped on a t-shirt way…

Our favorite example is the 'Equality is Everyone's Responsibility' shirt below! It gets lots of attention at conventions and on social media, and everyone wants to know WHERE the sweater came from- but Tristan loves to maintain a level of exclusivity.

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