In early 2025, the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (LIAA) reached out to us.
They were heading to Japan.
LIAA had teamed up with the Lithuanian government for a joint national presence at Expo 2025 in Osaka, Kansai. Six months on the biggest international trade stage there is.
The goal was simple. Promote the two countries. Show off the businesses. Bring home B2B partnerships that would still pay off years after the expo closed.
The execution was anything but simple.
The Challenge
Two distinct operations. One team. Zero room for error.
Operation one: the prep phase.
Hundreds of Latvian and Lithuanian companies had to be contacted, pitched, signed up for the expo catalog, tracked through their decision (are they in? are they paying?), and then chased for assets: photos, descriptions, listings.
All of that had to happen months before the first flight to Osaka.
Operation two: the live event.
The joint stand would run attractions, engagement points, and interactive experiences. Every one of them would collect leads.
How many leads?
Tens of thousands. Possibly hundreds of thousands. In a six month window.
Some interested in B2B partnerships. Others interested in culture, in catalog purchases, in the experience itself (B2C).
With the number of actual humans staffing the Latvian and Lithuanian booth, manual handling was out of the question.
The Real Issue (Two Funnels, One Team)
The prep work and the on-floor capture were two very different games.
Prep was a classic B2B sales motion. A known list of companies. Long conversations. Every account had a name, a decision status, and a payment trail.
Live capture was a firehose. Thousands of people scanning QR codes, dropping their details, and walking on. Zero time to qualify by hand.
Both flows had to live inside one system, because the same government staff would be working across both. One dashboard. One source of truth. Or the whole operation would crack on day one.
The Build
We went with Salesforce Sales Cloud, Enterprise Edition and ran it in two lanes.
Lane 1. Pre-expo organization.
A dedicated workflow for government staff to run the outreach to domestic companies.
Communication history in one place. Decision stages tracked (participating, non-participating, pending). Payments reconciled. Catalog materials collected and versioned.
Everything visible to both country teams at once.
Lane 2. On-site lead management.
Two fully automated tracks, triggered the moment a lead was captured:
- Corporate (B2B). Company leads were instantly identified, enriched, and routed to trade diplomats for priority follow-up.
- Individual (B2C). Visitors with cultural, catalog, or general interest were segmented and dropped into targeted digital journeys that would run after the expo ended.
Every lead, no matter the volume, ended up in a pipeline. Nobody sorted anything by hand.
The Outcome
The expo ran for six months.
The preparatory phase closed on time. The catalog was finalized. Every participating company was documented, paid, and profiled.
Then the floor opened.
Over a million records captured and processed.
Let that land for a second.
One million plus, funnelled through a single Salesforce org, split cleanly between corporate and individual tracks. Zero downtime. Zero manual triage bottlenecks.
- Real-time visibility into every lead and every participating company, for both governments.
- Massive data spikes absorbed without failure or delay.
- Automated, timely, segmented follow-up after the expo, turning captured interest into real conversion paths.
The Revelation
The real lesson here sits outside the software.
It is about designing around the worst spike.
Most public-sector digital projects size their systems for an average day. Then they buckle on the first busy one.
With Osaka, we flipped that. We built for the peak from day one. Everything slower than the peak fell into place on its own.
The Conclusion
Government work at scale is usually slow, siloed, and reactive.
This one ran differently.
Two countries, one platform, six months on the floor in Japan, and over a million records handled cleanly.
The machine did the heavy lifting. The people in Osaka got to focus on the handshakes.
Thanks for reading this far. If your operation has two very different motions stuck inside one team, and your peak volume gives you nightmares, check out the form below. Let’s talk.
– Jeff.