The Future of Franchise Marketing – Local Marketing; Global Oversight

Franchisees are looking for new ways to market their local stores/offices while their corporate offices want brand oversight to ensure adherence to branding strategy and compliance. It’s the tug-of-war that brands and their local operators have been playing since franchising began. And it’s only gotten worse with the recent and increased prevalence of online and social media marketing. Today there are dozens of marketing channels that these franchisees can use to grow their business, and hundreds of online tools to help them do so – usually not approved by the franchise brand.

It’s becoming harder for brands to keep up with it all, but it’s also not going away (and I’d argue that it’s probably going to become a lot worse).

So what’s a brand to do? Do you continue to try to limit and restrict the channels your franchisees can use (with likely very limited success), or do you buy in and find ways to give your franchisees access to these tools – but in a way where you can monitor, manage, and control on what’s happening online at the local level?

Centralization to the rescue!

This is where centralization of online tools and applications can be a game changer for franchise businesses. Centralized platforms allow you to offer tools like social media management, email marketing, directory listings and review management, website builders, appointment schedulers, and more in a single platform. Moreover, this centralized network can provide corporate a master account to monitor, measure, and manage when needed the local online marketing efforts of all of their locations. It gives your franchisees access to the tools that they want to implement, while also giving you the oversight you need.

Centralization can help you optimize your local marketing

But more than being able to make sure your local operations are staying on brand, centralized technology can help you actually drive better marketing performance and growth at the local level. There will always be those owners that are better at using social media, creating new content, or coming up with new creative offers. What if this platform, which allows you the marketing oversight you’re looking for, could also present local marketing insights that you can use to help other locations grow? You can get a real look at how locations that are using social media to driving meaningful business are doing it. See what type of content they are creating/sharing, what tags they may be using, what content gets the best engagement, etc. You can take those learnings and work with those top locations to create training sessions and templates that other locations can use to drive the same level of success! It’s like crowdsourcing the best tactics and strategies using real data, and helping your entire organization be the best it can be.

Getting started

If your franchise has been searching and brainstorming new ways to drive better oversight into how your brand is being used at the local level, or looking to expand your local marketing efforts, check out Qebot.com. Request a demo to see how we’re helping brands – from a few locations to thousands of local operations – drive better local marketing success and brand protection.

The agency world is wild. Expectations are sky-high, there are constant budget constraints, marketing channels are ever evolving, and one small mistake could be the end of any agency/client relationship. This is why every little advantage and cost savings can be so important to an agency’s continued growth and performance.

Centralization of the apps and software that are necessary to manage client work can be become one of the greatest assets for any agency looking to save time and money. Having a single platform to access and manage all of your marketing tools can drive down the cost of software, save account managers hours per week on their workload, expand agency offerings to increase retention, drive higher per client revenues, and can even become a valuable lead generation tool.

Driving down cost

Many centralized platforms have the unique ability to spread margins across a number of their different offerings. This allows the technology provider to take a lower margin on each individual tool, enabling the platform to have a lower price than you would get by going to a company that just offers a single tool for example. Moreover, by centralizing all of these tools, platforms also consolidate operational costs such as marketing, sales, PR, support, executive management, office space, equipment, etc. Instead of paying the salaries for the executive team of seven different, a centralized platform has one executive team, marketing team, sales team, etc. – allowing overhead to be lower, and making it possible to again drive deep discounts into their offerings. Don’t believe me? Check out the prices of systems like Qebot vs. the pricing of individual technology providers.

Save account managers hours per week

This one is a testimony directly from the many agencies already using centralized platforms. Here at Qebot, we’ve received feedback from countless agencies telling us that centralization is saving their account managers between two and five hours per week – which makes total sense. Through a centralized system, account managers no longer need to log into multiple applications per day to manage their accounts. They can log into a single system where they can quickly and easily jump between accounts and tools. It helps centralize reporting capabilities, enables easier data sharing between tools or teams, has better support where a user can ask questions about multiple tools at one time, and creates better task management – leading to better time management. Some of these agencies have said they’ve been able to set up two or even as many as three  more accounts per agent on their team, which at scale, allows them to run a leaner account management team, and save quite a bit of money.

Expand agency offerings

This one is all about acquisition cost and return on investment. Being able to offer clients more services allows an agency to become more integrated into their organization. If you are only running social media campaigns for a client, leaving your service to either run it themselves, or try a new agency is rather easy. But if you are hosting their website, managing their reviews, driving their social strategy, sending their email newsletters, helping them with content creation and SEO, and aiding them in their sales funnel management, that makes it a whole lot harder to try to move on. Plus, there is the added benefit of increasing your per client revenues. A higher long term value and increased per client revenue allows you to stretch and maximize your current marketing budget even further to gain more customers.  

Lead generation

Finally, a centralized platform can actually aid your business in both lead generation and revenue growth. This is because centralized platforms like Qebot allow for you to take a fully white labeled version of the platform, and resell it at your own price point. Agencies that use this process drive new clients into a DIY offering of marketing software on the platform. From there, they actually have access real data about their DIY clients marketing efforts that they can report on. This can be used to create custom sales conversations about how adding your managed services could help. Additionally, for those clients that may just never purchase managed services, you can still sell them on the tools they need to manage their marketing, and create a recurring revenue source that requires zero management. A nice way to create a secondary revenue stream for your agency.

If you’d like to learn more about how a centralized platform can help your marketing agency thrive, set up a demo with a partner success manager here. We’ll show you how agencies across the world are using the Qebot platform to stay ahead of the competition, and drive more money to the bottom line!

Qebot offers free white labeling, no account minimums, and is completely month-to-month for all partnerships.

First off, let’s get to what we mean by “centralizing software.” By centralizing, we are talking about having a single platform that houses all of the software you may need for your business. Imagine logging into one system to make edits to your website, then follow up on your social engagement, run reports from your CRM, check your email and manage your calendar, send invoices, manage suppliers, etc. A single sign-on to manage your entire business.

Now that we know what we’re discussing, let’s talk about how this type of centralization of business software could completely revolutionize the way small and medium size businesses operate, optimize, and grow. Mainly, centralization of these tools will help businesses in three ways – employee management and productivity, cost savings, and automation and optimization of your business operations.

Employee Management and Productivity

This benefit is pretty simple and should be seen right off the bat – especially when it comes to on and off boarding employees. A couple clicks, a single point of data entry, and you can get all of the tools your employee needs to do their job set up and ready to go, fast and easy. What if someone is to leave the organization? Instead of having to go through and deactivate each application and user profile, with centralization you can shut off access to the platform and immediately the user no longer has access to important and confidential information. Moreover, Qebot clients report that because all of the necessary software an employee might need is now in a centralized system, they find it much easier and quicker to jump from one task to another, and with the tools automatically connected in the backend, data sharing between these tools makes automating repetitive operations much more efficient. Plus, with all of our employee’s tools in one place, they are much more likely to adopt and engage with the software you are purchasing.

Cost Savings

Cost savings that comes from a centralized platform mostly stems from two areas – discounted software and a lessor need to engage 3^rd party connectors or outside developers.

Discounted software – The platform company partners with top software providers on the market and integrates those tools into the platform. Because the platform takes on a lot of the cost of doing business such as sales, marketing, support, etc., and can offer the tool provider a large scale of new users, platforms can negotiate incredible rates. From these discounted rates, the platform can then turn around and sell it to its customers with a small markup, keeping prices under what you’d pay outside of the platform since the platform can spread its profit margin amongst its long line of offerings. It’s like buying from Costco – they buy in bulk, and can sell many different products to its end user at a discount because it can spread its smaller margins across a larger group of products.

Already connected – The best part of a centralized platform is that all of your tools are in a single system, allowing for the provider to connect the tools and services together in the backend from the start. Software is a powerful ally in helping you achieve your goals – especially when your tools can talk to each other and share data. But for the most part, to get these applications to work together you need to either hire a developer to create the connections for you, while possibly having to set up your own database to manage the connections, or pay for a 3^rd party tools like a Zapier to make the connections. This can get quite expensive if you are trying to maximize your tool operations. With a centralized platform these connections are already made since the tools live in the same system. So you can get up and running fast and cheap.

Automation and Optimization

This is where the platform becomes really powerful. When you are using a centralized platform to run all of your business software and applications, all of your data is running through the central system. This not only allows for the connections and data sharing capabilities we spoke of before to help your team be much more productive, but by layering in machine learning and artificial intelligence, the platform can start to help you automate menial tasks, and optimize your business operations. Take this scenario as a possibility through centralization:

You have product A, B, and C – you are spending your ad dollars pretty much evenly across all three products. Now, let’s say you’re using a centralized system that can consume and analyze the data for your entire business. It takes a look at not only the price and market viability of your products, but since you’re using the platform for all of your software needs, it has access to and can evaluate your production costs, average sales cycle, cost of support, and let’s say repurchase or upgrade opportunities for each tool. As it runs models to see what would be the optimal product mix, it shows that product A actually has an overall cheaper production and a shorter sales cycle. It could then assess the market need and potentially give you a recommendation that if you were to divert 10% of ad spend from products B and C into product A, then you could achieve a 6% bottom line profit margin increase (obviously just an example, but based off modeling systems that fortune 500 companies use to optimize their marketing performance). This is just one scenario – could be used to optimize employee management, resource allocation, production, etc. These are things you just can’t get outside of having your data all in one platform, or by paying someone a lot of money to analyze.

Centralization is the future of how SMB’s will be able to continue to compete in the market, and we’re just scratching the surface of what can and will be done with these centralized and integrated systems.

Check out Qebot.com to see how a centralized platform could help your business.

Media publishers – I’m talking newspapers, magazines, and online publications – have built some of the most successful sales organizations on the planet. Especially those selling to local markets. Calling on SMB’s to purchase local advertising in publications can be very lucrative, but also a grind for a sales team needing to prospect quality leads, engage them to gain interest, and retain the business month over month – particularly with a large chunk of the advertising spend moving over to search and social media over the past decade. But the fact still stands that you media publishers out there have built the organization, developed the resources and gained the know-how to sell into mass local markets while the market shrinks. Maybe it’s just time to expand your offerings.

This is where business software offerings could drastically change your business – driving new recurring revenues for your business, and filling your sales funnel with qualified advertising prospects:

Driving new revenues:

First off, offering software as a service to your customers is a great way for media publications to dramatically increase revenues very quickly and easily. Likely your organization is engaged with a large group of business owners, brands, and media buyers. These are businesses that you’ve built a relationship with you and are likely open to purchasing new tools they need from a trusted source. Getting a large bulk of clients on to a new offering for many publications could be as easy as sending out an email with an overview of your new offer and driving them to a landing page where they can DIY purchase and set up these tools on their own – easy money.

Fill your sales funnel with qualified leads:

Moreover, this gives you a new way to fill your pipeline with qualified leads for your advertising products. Say you start marketing a bundle of tools like a social dashboard, email marketing, review management, and directory listings. Business owners that are searching for and purchasing these types of tools are serious about marketing and growing their company. They are in a current mindset of driving more business and customers. These are the exact type of people you want your sales people talking to. Now, not only are you driving recurring revenue for your organization through these new products, you are branding yourself to these businesses as a trusted technology provider, and filling your sales funnel with warm leads that are much more likely to be interested in advertising services.

This is where Qebot can help. Our white labeled, out of the box suite of products allows media publications to build a bundle of tools, or sell software a-la-carte. We’ll manage all of your support and provide you with sales collateral and training. We can even help you set up your entire billing and paywall system, letting you set your own pricing and collect your revenue up front, so all you have to do is start marketing and selling your new suite of tools.

Schedule a demo of the platform and our publisher partnership program today.

The marketing agency world can be a tough place these days. New agencies spring up on a daily basis with a lack of barriers to entry, and the market is becoming crowded. So how do agencies, old and new, stay ahead of the game and differentiate themselves from the pack? How can you drive qualified prospects into your pipeline and increase your revenues at the same time.

DIY offerings can do just that. As an agency, offering a set of DIY tools and applications to the market allows you to drive new revenue. This might only be a couple hundred dollars per client in your pocket, but through smart marketing and advertising, it should be fairly easy to drive a lot of these to your business (I mean, you are a marketing agency, right?).  Many agencies we work with are seeing a typical cost of acquisition for these types of products sitting around the $30-40 mark – of which they are seeing payback on in under a months’ time.

Let’s say you create a bundle of tools (social platform, directory listings, review manager, email marketing) that closely relate to the services you offer. From here, you are now branding your agency to these businesses as a provider of necessary technology they can use to help market and grow their business. The best part is, if they are in the market to start buying marketing tools, they are serious about growing their business and are likely also ready to invest in higher level services to achieve their goals.

At this point, you’ve gained a paying customer with minimal overhead, driven some monthly recurring revenue, and have created a brand for yourself in the mind of this customer.

THIS IS WHERE THIS GETS INTERESTING!

With customers purchasing tools from your platform, you now have access to their marketing data – allowing you to see how they are doing on social, reputation management, local SEO, etc.. This information allows your sales team to approach businesses that are trying to find new ways of growing with real data and strategy points they can bring to a call – and since they are already buying products from you, they will be more likely to invest in the other tools you offer! A free consultation on how their marketing is performing could easily turn this customer, whom you are already making money on, into a full service client. Then you can simply use the tools that you are selling them to manage their account.

THIS IS WHERE QEBOT CAN HELP!

Let us be your partner in creating a white labeled solution that is tailored to your brand, business and agency that will increase revenue and drive quality prospects over the finish line.

Want to see a demo? Click here to speak with one of our partner success managers and get started.

We get a lot of strange looks from clients and partners when they ask what our minimum commitment is, or what our contract length is, and we say “we don’t have any.” Especially in today’s SaaS market, this is almost unheard of. “How do you hedge against churn?” “What bundle of tools do I need to purchase then?” “How do you stay in business?” – all of these are the common follow up questions.

Our answer is simple – we believe we have the best product on the market, the best support to help you be successful, and we are here to prove it. If you aren’t happy with your product from Qebot, then we want you to find something that is going to better fit your needs. We don’t need to bundle or package our tools, or create tiers of offerings because data shows us that once a client starts using one or two tools on our platform, they love the experience and upsell themselves on other tools on the system. Or, if for some reason they don’t like or need a specific tool, they have the flexibility to cancel at any time.

We also put in the work to make sure that our clients and partners get the very best. Our business model is built on partnering with the very best software for each product we offer, and working closely with them to integrate that full functionality of their tool into our centralized system. Through Qebot, you can confidently buy knowing you are getting some of the most top rated software on the market – at or below market price.

Then, we diligently listen to our customers and continue to build and iterate based on the feedback we get from you – the daily users. Our support team, engineering team and partners are all in constant communication getting our client requests and questions into the hands of the people building the systems. We are always getting better.

And that’s why we don’t have contract periods, we don’t bundle, package, or tier our products, or have minimum commitments. We don’t even charge our agency and media partners for white labeling our platform. We don’t want your business to stay with us because you invested all of this money upfront – we want to truly partner with you – and for you to keep using Qebot because you love it. We believe in proving what we can do for our customers, and we’ve gotten pretty damn good at it.

Want to learn more about having the best software on the market in a single, centralized platform? Or about partnering with Qebot to offer tools and services to your clients? Check us out at Qebot.com or schedule a demo here.

How Centralizing Marketing Software Drives Better Active Usage

Adoption of software can be a challenge for most businesses. Today’s online tools to run, manage, and market a company can do some pretty amazing things. But it also means that with each tool you activate for your business, there is one more task you now have to take care of on a daily basis. Admit it – how many times have you been sold on a technology you thought was the thing to change your whole company (and with active usage, regular monitoring, and continued education, it might well have), but 3 months later, you realize you haven’t logged into the system in the last 3 weeks. Or worse, you forget you even bought into the software, and now you have a recurring charge for something you’re team is not even using… It’s happened to all of us at some point. It’s also ultimately why the SaaS industry has a commonly high churn rate for its products.

This is where centralization can help. By having all of your software in one platform, you get a host of benefits, including saving time on daily tasks, paying a single itemized bill for your software, having a single support channel for all of your tools, and arguably most important – driving active usage!

Here’s how:

You’re reminded the tool is there. Most of us pretty religiously use a few key tools to run our business. Some examples could be your CRM, your appointment scheduler, review manager, or your point of sale system. You log into these systems on a regular basis to do the work important running and growing your company. Through centralization, all of the tools that you use are in one platform, so when you log in to manage a new lead in your CRM, you see your social media tool, or your email marketing tool, or your content marketing tool right there alongside your daily used software. If you see it or are alerted to it, you’re going to be much more apt to use it.

You get better education. Every software company has a newsletter that goes out on a monthly basis outlining the updates, case studies, and tips for using their technology. It’s a smart strategy to keep people engaged with their product, and hence, not give up on the tool. But when you are buying nine different tools from nine different vendors, those newsletters just become a burden. Through centralizing your tools, you’re also centralizing your education material. Imagine being able to get one newsletter per month that you could run through for all of your software updates and tips in a single pass. You’re much more likely to engage with that content and learn something new. Which leads to the next point –

A single support channel. One of the most challenging processes of using software is trying to get support when needed. Every company’s support system is different and unique. What’s the best way to get a hold of support for each tool – submit a ticket? Use chat? Send an email? Make a call? – What does this tool support vs. that other tool I have? You get to know the support documentation of one tool, but it’s completely different from these three other tools you use. Wouldn’t it be nice to learn one support process and have it be the same across all of your technology? What if you could send in one ticket relating to questions on three different tools? Support is the most important part of any software company, and making an easy to use and seamless process helps the user become much more comfortable using their tools.

Easily see what you are paying for. You have debits hitting your credit card multiple times per month from multiple companies. From an accounting perspective, this can become a nightmare. What are you even paying for? What does this company do again? Have I used this tool lately? – There are literally whole businesses built around giving you software to see what your recurring payments are per month to help you clean it up.  –  What if you had a single monthly bill, itemized and outlining what you are paying for. You can take a quick run through, see all of your licenses and payment for all of your software, and keep better tabs on tools you do or don’t need. Single billing helps you more easily realize and get rid of software that you truly are not actively using, and don’t foresee yourself continuing with.

Automation. When your tools are in a single platform, they are more easily connected in the background. With better connectivity, you get better automation. Better automation helps drive down your actual daily tasks, allowing the software to run and do what you need without your help – let the software work on autopilot and remove mundane tasks from your day, and I guarantee you will see the benefits, and love the tools you are purchasing all that much more.

Centralization is the future of software. It just makes sense from a usage, billing, support, and automation perspective. When looking for your next software, look for centralized systems like the Qebot platform, and drive better usage and results by having all your tools in one place.

Want to see a demo? Request a one-on-one here.

4 Reasons Marketing Agencies Should Offer DIY Tools

DIY and marketing agency services don’t typically go hand-in-hand. The two concepts are literally antithetical to each other. But the following four points will show you how offering DIY tools through your agency can actually make your sales team more productive, help you more effectively brand your business, create more check in opportunities, and drive more leads to your business.

1. Make your sales team more productive – Let’s face it, not all businesses your sales team calls upon are going to want or be able to afford full marketing services. Not matter how much qualifying you do, a large portion of your sales calls are just not going to buy services. What if you could turn those non-sales over to a DIY set of tools you offer, and make a couple hundred dollars per month, recurring revenue, with no account management or support overhead? Seems like a good way to turn those “no’s” into a recurring revenue stream.

2. Branding – By offering clients that aren’t quite ready to purchase full services a set of branded tools to help them do some of the work themselves, you’re keeping your agency bran in front of them. As they grow, they may eventually want to pass some of that work off to someone else to help manage it. Guess who they are going to go with? Most likely the company they’ve come to trust and are used to seeing on a daily basis. Play the long game without having to do anything.

3. Creates regular check in opportunities – By offering their DIY tools, you can run check up’s of your DIY customer’s marketing success. This gives your team reasons to touch base with them on a regular basis with insights and ideas on how they could be using social, reviews, email marketing, SEO, etc. more productively. Just another opportunity to offer your services – but this time with real data!

4. Drive more leads to your business – By marketing your DIY offerings you can drive prospects that are looking for new marketing and management software. When business owners sign up for your DIY offerings, your pipeline of qualified prospects for service-based add-ons grows. This strategy creates more channels for you to market yourself and fill the top of your funnel.

DIY might seem counter intuitive to the way a marketing agency operates, but as you can see from the above four points, it can actually open doors to more sales, increase marketshare, and drive higher revenues. If you’d like to learn more about how to get started offering these types of tools, check out how Qebot’s white labeled, centralized platform of marketing software can be your turnkey DIY platform. Schedule a demo of the system today.

Most small businesses that we talk to and work with believe that a CRM is something reserved for large enterprise organizations with thousands of clients to manage. As a small business, they’re thinking smaller picture and just need a way to keep it all organized. They have in their minds that a CRM would provide little to no benefit for their small company while costing an arm and a leg to both buy and implement.

This couldn’t be further from the truth! With the functionality built into most current CRM’s, paired with cost savings that have been driven from cloud based computing, CRM systems can operate in some facet for every business, at an affordable price for all. Today’s CRM’s can enable businesses to be more organized, glean insights into sales and marketing to drive more business, and even help with marketing campaigns, inventory management, supplier management, invoicing, sales enablement, and so much more.

Let’s take a look at 5 ways a CRM can help your small business be more successful.

1. Sales Productivity

If your business is running a sales organization, a CRM should be on the very top of your list for implementation. CRM software can help automate the mundane aspects of your sales cycle such as follow up emails and call scheduling, call tracking, prospect priority grading, sales projections, and more to help your team close more business. Through most of today’s CRM’s your sales person can walk the client right through the process from initial outreach, to close, contracts signed, invoices sent, and payment received – all in one place to help them be more efficient with their time – so they can prospect more business! Plus, it gives management clear insight into sales activity, allowing you to track and gauge important KPI’s that drive sales success.

2. Marketing Automation

Most quality CRM’s have great ways of helping create and automate marketing campaigns to drive more business. Walking your potential customers through a channel of proven steps that can create more conversion opportunities is what every marketer is tasked with doing. Automating those processes so that your marketing people can work on optimizing campaigns is the Holy Grail. From drip marketing based on specific attributes of the contact, to creating and tracking promotions, and driving leads into your CRM through advertising and then automatically messaging them pertinent information based on what ad they clicked. All ways to help you and your team drive better results at the end of your sales cycle.

3. Supplier Management

Let’s say for the purpose of this example that you are an ice cream shop that doesn’t have a need for the functionality of items one and two in this list. You don’t have sales reps and your business thrives on walk-by customers. Great! I bet your successful ice cream shop has suppliers that it needs to manage delivering your product. This is where CRM’s have really come into their own in the past few years – being able to help with so much more than just customer management. Many current CRM’s come with great tools to help you manage your suppliers, gauge your inventory, track receipts of products from vendors, prioritize preferred providers, and even pay your vendors. No more tracking supplies and suppliers on spreadsheets. Plus, you can automate a lot of process such as sending orders for more product once supplies get to a certain thresholds. Many systems can even integrate right into your POS systems and help you keep track of your inventory outflow right through the purchase process in real-time!

4. Loyalty Management

The beauty of a CRM is the ability to track what your customers are doing. Through each purchase you can see who your best customers are, and provide them with incentives to keep coming back. You can start to create a database of customers that seem to buy the most often, or purchase the most expensive products. This allows you to create profiles of potential customers that you tend to make the most money from. Take that information to your sales and marketing strategy to understand what types of customers to focus more time and resources on.

5. Project Management

One of the most important aspects of a CRM is helping your manage and align your businesses projects. Assign projects, cases, work orders, etc. to your team, and associate it right with the customer that the work is for. Keep track of time spent on projects so you can run your hourly billing right through the built in invoicing of your CRM. Moreover, if your team works in the field, get them situated with the mobile application of your CRM so that they can report, complete, and bill for projects or work orders for your customers right there on site so you don’t miss a thing.

This really is just a sample of what a CRM can do for small and medium sized businesses. The functionality of the CRM these days can help across your entire company – keeping you more efficient and effective, and allowing you to spend more time on what it is you and your team do best. And with systems like the CRM available on the Qebot platform costing only $25 per user per month, it’s really affordable enough for any business type.

Want to learn more about how a CRM might be effective for your business? Schedule a free consultation with our team here.

Having the right tools is an obvious must for any quality digital agency. Being able to maximize productivity AND offer unique services, all while keeping overhead low, makes the difference between an agency that drives to the top, and those that stagnate.

Getting the most out of your resources is key to building and growing a marketing agency that not only delivers for your clients, but also allows you do so in an efficient and profitable way.

We ran a survey of our white label agency partners to see what using a centralized platform to manage their marketing software helped them accomplish, and here were the overwhelming four highlights that continued to come up:

1. Standing apart with differentiated services and more offerings
   
2. Increased team productivity
   
3. Decreased overhead
   
4. Increased sales activity through automation
   

Let’s break each one down just a bit…

1. Standing apart with differentiated services and more offerings:

With a quality, consolidated platform of tools, you are more likely to find and discover new technologies that could help you offer new services to your clients that your competitors are not. For example, many agencies look to the top of funnel as the area where they provide the most value to their clients. But if you are filling the funnel, and your client can’t close, they probably won’t be relying on your services for very long (whether it’s your fault or not).

Picture this instead: what if you offered sales consulting services, paired with automation that you can set up for your client through a CRM that you also offer, bundle all of it together, and generate increased revenue? With the CRM in the same platform as the rest of your client’s tools, you can help show them how you drive leads from top of funnel, then into their CRM, and finally, help walk them through a productive sales cycle process to close more leads. Good for them; more revenue opportunity for you.

2. Increased team productivity:

This one should be pretty obvious. With all of the marketing tools your account managers need to effectively manage their client’s workload (social, email marketing, review management, SEO, site building/landing pages, funnel creation, etc.) in a single platform, your AM team can save valuable time easily jumping from client to client, tool to tool, all with a single sign on. Moreover, since these tools already connect on the backend, your team won’t have to worry about running arduous, manual processes to get information from one place to another. Even your accounting team can reap the benefits of the platform. You can make their lives MUCH easier by having all of your marketing software purchases run through a single monthly invoice that can be itemized by agency units, brands, and specific clients.

3. Decreased overhead:

By having all of your digital tools in one platform, there are a few significant ways you reduce your agency’s overhead. First off, the tools themselves are typically cheaper – having your tools in a single platform means your provider has a single marketing and sales team that helped onboard you for a suite of tools, and their support and operational costs become more streamlined. This enables your platform provider to save a lot of overhead and pass those savings on to you.

Furthermore, you save money because your team is more productive. If your account managers can save a few hours a week, this translates into potentially managing more accounts - equating to  less human overhead for you, and potentially, more commission for them as they manage more accounts and thus more budget.

Lastly, with an aggregated system of marketing and sales tools that automatically connect in the backend, you don’t need to hire expensive developers to enable cross tool communication, or purchase third party systems like Zapier to get your tools talking. With tools that are already connected you can get right down to work from the start.

4. Increased sales productivity through automation:

Finally, get back to what you do best – marketing for your clients. Let automation take care of nurturing your leads through your sales cycle, bringing you in only for specific communication points, or to close the sale. This allows you to not only ensure you are making the right touch points with your prospects to nudge them towards a close, but also gives you back the valuable time that you’d be wasting drafting all those emails AND scheduling follow up. Now you can maximize your time doing the best work possible for your clients, and closing more accounts. Use these systems to help you market and drive sales at your agency alongside driving results for your clients!

The value in having a single platform for all of your marketing applications can have far reaching benefits for you and your business. But it’s important to find the right platform that works for you. If you’re looking for a system that can be white labeled (for free), is modular with all tools purchased a-la-carte so you can customize the platform to your clients and your needs, and offers a wide array of software to help you get the job done, check out the Qebot platform’s agency program here. Or email us at success@qebot.com to schedule a demo of the platform.