As the CEO of a technology company, I appreciate your frustration. I have engaged several companies over the past decade that promised to build brand recognition, generate more inquiries, and deliver new business opportunities.  Sound familiar?   Unfortunately, they failed to deliver. It was quite frustrating and for good reason.

Our industry sector has been growing in leaps and bounds and we have a very good competitive product that is delivering a lot of value to our customers so we could not understand why these companies fell short until we dug deeper into their process. What we learned was more about what these companies were not delivering compared to what they were.  We discovered that we did not engage a marketing company, but instead an e-mail distribution company that sent out a few thousand e-mails every month and informed us if anyone indicated an interest.  We did not get many inquiries and the ones we did get were often fake names with bad contact information. I do not blame the companies we worked with and take ownership for having expectations that could not be met by sending out a few thousand e-mails every month.

We discovered that to be successful we needed a marketing mix which consisted of bulk e-mail marketing, content development and distribution, postings on social sites and a consistent plan to get our company, our product, and our services in front of our target market over and over and over again through different channels.  As a company that sells CRM software, we had the tools and expertise to do this, so we created a marketing program that we have successfully offered as a service for the past few years.

Why it Works!

The marketing plan we build and execute for our customers starts by taking the time to understand why customers buy. What does your business do better than your competitors and how can we take that message and create a marketing plan around it? Next, we look at what is the most effective way to communicate the above to your market. Perhaps it is banner ads, content creation and distribution, educational white papers, postings on social sites or bulk e-mail campaigns. It is clearly a mix of the above.

Once we identify how we will communicate the message, we acquire a list of targeted prospects for our customer, build a series of marketing campaigns and gather marketing collateral for distribution. The e-mail campaigns are sent out on a pre-determined schedule.  Commence will also build a landing page where interested prospects can quickly submit their contact information. This is immediately sent to our customer’s sales management or the sales team.

The Commence program is also unique in the following way. Each new prospect receives a score based on their behavior.  If they opened the mailer, they get assigned 2 points; if they clicked on a call to action (such as, download a free white paper, get a free sample or a product trial) they are assigned 3 points; and if they filled out a form on the landing page to engage in a discussion, they get 5 points. All verified leads are then integrated into your CRM system if you have one, or with Commence CRM if you are new to CRM. This enables your sales team and sales management to watch the progression of the leads from 2 points to 4 points to 6 or more and manage the lead by adding notes, scheduling a follow-up activity or at some point contacting them directly.

The comprehensive nature of the Commence program is impressive and is delivering substantial value to our customers. Best of all, you can get started for just a few dollars a day and there are no term contracts. We work month-to-month.

The brief video below provides additional information about our program.