What was your greatest business or sales & marketing challenge(s) before using BenchmarkONE?

My biggest sales and marketing challenge was creating a systematic approach to capturing leads, nurturing those leads in an automated, but personal way and creating systematic follow-ups for deals in the pipeline that tended to go cold.

What solutions/tactics did you try before you started using BenchmarkONE? What were the results?

I hired additional Inside Sales Reps to test putting more boots on the ground to expand my business. I also tried Infusionsoft. We got okay results with the inside sales reps, but they were too expensive to justify the ROI. Results with Infusionsoft were also good, but the platform is way too complex to establish any sequences I could reasonably hand off to my employees and expect it to go flawlessly.

How has the one-two-punch of email marketing and CRM specifically addressed your challenges?

BenchmarkONE’s integrated CRM and email marketing increased our efficiency 2-fold. Now, we always place a follow-up call after sending an email, or vice versa. It’s the only way to efficiently create as many touches as needed to engage new prospects.

What measurable results have you seen since you began using BenchmarkONE?

The greatest impact we’ve seen since using BenchmarkONE has been a pipeline increase of over 40% year over year.

What specific problems has integrating email marketing with your CRM addressed that other small businesses might be able to relate to?

Using CRM only is at best, a singular approach to engagement and follow-up – but when you couple it with automated email marketing, you expand your coverage and capabilities exponentially.

What is the single biggest reason you would recommend/why you love pairing email marketing and CRM together with a product like BenchmarkONE?

I recommend BenchmarkONE because it truly is a marketing system – and that is what EVERY business needs to effectively grow and scale. Most small businesses only market when they desperately need to, then when they have some business coming in, they tend to stop marketing. Why? Because their marketing is manual – not automated. This, in my opinion, is one of the biggest downfalls of small businesses in this country.