4 Resolutions You Can Stick to with Marketing Automation Posted on January 9, 2015June 18, 2018 by Jessica Lunk We’re just over a week into the new year…have you broken your new year’s resolutions yet? Each year, small business owners strive to get more organized, build better relationships with their customers and prospects, create a sales and marketing process and drive sustainable growth. Marketing automation tools built for small businesses can help you achieve and stick to these four resolutions in 2015. Get More Organized Fresh year, fresh start. If you’re like a lot of small businesses, you probably have one homogenous bucket of contacts that you would love to clean up and organized. Maybe you have two lists – one of customers, and one of prospects – but you can’t get much more detailed than that. Marketing automation helps you automatically and dynamically segment your contacts by their unique interests, their stage in the buying journey and their readiness to buy. It’s a bit like going from grayscale to a rainbow of contacts that each fit in their own ribbon of color. Contacts fit nicely into their own compartments. With an easier way of keeping your contacts organized, you can deliver more strategic, organized communication, increasing engagement. Build Better Relationships with Customers and Prospects This new year, many of us are striving to put away distractions – like our smart phones and tablets – and put more time into building better relationships with the people who really matter. While you may think that marketing automation is just one more technology that separates us from the people we should get to know better, it actually helps to cultivate more meaningful conversations. Marketing automation automatically tracks the online history of each contact automatically, so you can see what pages on your site they’ve visited, what emails they’ve received, and what types of content they read. With more information, you come to conversations with your customers and prospects prepared to have a productive, meaningful dialogue. In addition, marketing automation takes those ho-hum administrative tasks off of your plate, and triggers notifications to let you know which contacts are highly interested in your product or service. This makes it simple to connect with prospects that are really interested in learning more about your business. With marketing automation, you can focus more time on building strong relationships with ripe opportunities and loyal customers, rather than chasing cold leads. Create a Sales and Marketing Process You’d like to see your business grow this year, and you know you can’t do it without building better processes. When your database is more organized and everyday tasks can be automated, you can put a much smoother sales and marketing process in place. Without marketing automation, many businesses build up a large sales team that chases after cold leads. However, with a scalable marketing automation system in place, marketing nurtures prospects with personalized content, heating them up for the sales team. Then, the sales team is automatically alerted when hot prospects are ready to buy. The result is, individual sales and marketing leaders can be much more productive and process-driven because they are actively pulling in the right prospects to have meaningful conversations with. Drive Sustainable Growth We could all be a little less wasteful, whether we’re trying to recycle more or striving to get the most out of the talents of our small business team. With marketing automation in place, you can build high-quality relationships with many more prospects and customers – without adding supplementary team members. In addition, since marketing automation provides insights into which marketing channels are performing the best, and which sales leaders are closing the most business, you can make smart, sustainable investments in growth. Finally, marketing automation continually nurtures new leads you acquire. So if a new contact is not ready to make a purchase today, they aren’t tossed away. Instead, marketing automation continues to educate and nurture them, recycling them into a hot prospect. Get more organized, build better relationships, be more process-driven, and drive sustainable growth – imagine if you could stick to each of these resolutions in the new year. With the right tools for your small business, you can make 2015 the year of marketing automation, and the year of growth.
Leadership, Customer Service, Small Business and Scalability Posted on August 15, 2014August 5, 2022 by Jessica Lunk Today, Jonathan, our CMO & CSO, was helping out a team member and made a follow-up call to an opportunity in our pipeline. It struck me that we are fortunate at BenchmarkONE to work with leaders who drive home the idea that true leaders don’t just lead, they serve. At BenchmarkONE, we know that our leaders are always willing to roll up their sleeves and pitch in so we can achieve the important objective we’re passionate about solving every day – helping small businesses to grow. It also brought up another truth: Scalability is everything if you want to grow. Jonathan is phenomenally passionate and knowledgeable about our product and our space. If he could speak to each and every small business that raised their hand to learn more about BenchmarkONE, he would. But that’s not realistic, and if that were our business model, we could never grow. Scalable Process As soon as he hung up, Jonathan put notes into BenchmarkONE and assigns the opportunity to one of our sales reps. They’ll follow up to walk the prospect through BenchmarkONE to make sure it’s the right fit and close the deal. Everyone, from the tippy-top of our company to each marketer, BDR and sales rep knows our process. So as we continue to add new team members and grow, the small businesses we touch can continue to get the same great customer service experience that they’ve come to expect. The beauty of small business is that we’re close to our customers. In early growth stages, we know each customer by name, and can memorize the details of their account. But if we want to grow, we have to let go, develop a process, train our employees, and let technology automate tasks so we can free up our time and use our brains and hearts to solve problems that matter. Scalable Culture Just the other day we grabbed lunch at one of our frequent lunch stops. The regular potato chips were out, so we asked the hourly paid employee behind the counter if there were any more plain chips. “No.” Well, that left us feeling disappointed. What are the odds of a sandwich shop running completely out of plain potato chips? Not very good. So when we spotted the owner we asked him if there were any more plain chips in the back. “Of course, here you go. They’re in your hand,” he said as he handed us the plain potato chips. There was a big disconnect between the level of service and the culture. The owner’s enthusiasm and passion for his deli were not being translated to his employees. It’s this breakdown in process and culture that inhibits growth. If you talk to anyone at BenchmarkONE, we are all on the same page. If you ask anyone here what our mission is, they’ll tell you in their own way that it’s to provide small businesses accessible sales and marketing tools so they can grow. That way, no matter who a customer or prospect speaks to, they get the same enthusiasm and the same message. With a scalable process and a scalable culture, your small business doesn’t have to worry if a customer gets a hold of the CEO or the newest employee. Everyone delivers, so you can maintain the level of service your customers love you for, while expanding your reach and growing your customer base.