The challenge
For years, A&R Educational managed sponsorship operations for the Congress of Clinical Rheumatology using a collection of spreadsheets. Internally, the team called them their “rainbow sheets.” They were color-coded, constantly updated, and full of important sponsor details, but over time they became harder and harder to manage.
The spreadsheets tracked everything: sponsor packages, booth selections, payments, contacts, deliverables, fulfillment notes, and internal status updates. But as the events grew, the process became messy.
- ✕Information was easy to miss
- ✕Files were hard to pass around
- ✕Team members often worked from different versions
- ✕Sponsor details lived in too many places
- ✕Booth contacts, billing contacts, and fulfillment notes were scattered across sheets
The system worked because the team made it work, but it was not scalable.
The “upgrade” that wasn’t enough
Eventually, the team thought they were making a big upgrade by moving into HubSpot. The appeal was obvious at first: the CRM was marketed as “free,” and it seemed like a more professional way to organize contacts and deals.
HubSpot helped with contacts and deals, but it did not understand the operational side of sponsorship. It was not built around event packages, booth selection, exhibitor fulfillment, sponsor deliverables, or the many details that happen after a sponsorship is sold.
On top of that, the hidden costs showed up fast. Once sponsor contacts passed HubSpot’s free-tier limits (around 100 contacts), the team was automatically pushed into paid plans. What was marketed as a “free” CRM quickly became hundreds of dollars a month for CRM and marketing tools alone.
When sponsors paid invoices through HubSpot, A&R Educational owed thousands in CRM processing charges on top of what their payment processor already took. Every paid sponsorship invoice carried a percentage cut the team had not budgeted for: stacked fees on every transaction, with no clear warning at signup.
They had upgraded the contact database, but they had not fixed the actual event operations problem, and they were paying for it twice.
The switch to TierBook
When A&R Educational moved to TierBook, the difference was immediate. It was the first system that felt like it was built around how sponsorships actually work for events like the Congress of Clinical Rheumatology.
Instead of forcing their process into a generic CRM, TierBook gave them workflows that matched what they were already trying to do:
- ✓Manage sponsors by package and tier
- ✓Run booth selection automatically by sponsorship level
- ✓Track outstanding payments and AR status
- ✓Identify the right contacts for billing, booth selection, fulfillment, and onsite needs
- ✓Keep sponsor deliverables organized in one place
- ✓Reduce scattered spreadsheets and manual follow-up
- ✓Pay only payment processor fees, with no CRM invoice processing cut
- ✓Export sponsor data anytime on a flat subscription, with no hidden upsells
The more they used TierBook, the more valuable it became. Features that seemed helpful at first quickly became essential. They could see which sponsors still owed payment, which contacts needed to be involved, what assets were still outstanding, and where each sponsor stood in the fulfillment process.
It gave the team a single place to manage the work that used to live across spreadsheets, emails, notes, and disconnected systems.
On pricing, the difference was just as clear. TierBook runs on a flat subscription through WooCommerce and the team’s own merchant account (Stripe, PayPal, or whatever they already use). When sponsors pay, A&R Educational pays processor fees only. There are no HubSpot-style invoice processing cuts, no automatic charges when contact counts grow, and no surprise upsells. Their sponsor data lives in their WordPress stack and can be exported anytime.
The result
For A&R Educational, TierBook became more than a sponsor tracker. It became an operational system for managing one of the most important parts of their events.
The switch helped them move from a process that depended on memory, color-coded spreadsheets, and manual coordination to one that was structured, visible, and much easier to manage as their events grew.
Today, TierBook is an invaluable resource for their event operations.
In their words
“We started with a bunch of spreadsheets that I called my rainbow sheets. They were a mess, hard to pass around, and information was getting lost. Then we thought we were upgrading by moving to HubSpot because the CRM was ‘free,’ but we quickly realized it was only handling contacts and deals. It was not built for the actual sponsorship workflow of our events.
With TierBook, it was a night and day difference. We could manage booth selection by tier, identify outstanding payments, assign the right contacts for billing or booth selection, and keep track of sponsor fulfillment in one place. The more we grew into the platform, the more we realized we could not imagine going back. TierBook is now an invaluable resource to our event operations.”
A&R Educational · Congress of Clinical Rheumatology