Last week we held the launch webinar for our ExchangeDefender partners and existing Shockey Monkey clients. If you’d like to take a look at it the recording is here. If I had to sum it up, SM3 is above and beyond what you need to manage an SMB company. Not just an IT business but any business – which is a huge area of opportunity for our IT partners – you can now sell the entire business system complete with the cloud services, management platform and your IT solution management under your brand, your price, your model and deliver a true end-to-end experience. I think that is something that will separate IT businesses that will survive from those that do not as they chase one fad after another and eventually get consumerized. But enough of my babbling, let me introduce you to some features. First up, Marketing.
Shockey Monkey Marketing
Shockey Monkey Marketing is actually a subset of the new Sales section of Shockey Monkey. With this specific feature set we looked more at an organizational investment area that needed to be managed, specifically:
Where is my new business going to come from?
If you need to answer that question you need a process and a backend that can keep everyone in check. Sales do not happen without a marketing effort, marketing effort isn’t sustained unless sales doesn’t properly credit the campaign that triggered the lead and nothing happens consistently unless it’s properly linked and related to each other.
As you will hear me say a lot – we didn’t sit down to try and automate an IT guy or a sales guy or a marketing guy – we looked at the entire business and we designed the system that would keep everyone in it accountable. Simply.
That may sound like it was ripped right out of Dilbert but here is what it means in English:
To document a new marketing campaign it needs to be quick and easy – in the modern social media world where a marketing campaign might consist out of a simple $7 promoted posting on Facebook, tracking it should be as simple as creating it. When we talk to our business partners and our employees (when they fail) about why something didn’t get done the answer is always the same: I was too busy. What they really meant to say is: It takes too long to do it and requires my undivided attention that I pushed it off until I forgot about it and I’m sorry you caught me. Ouch!
To start a new campaign all you need is a name, type, when it starts, ends, description and a group of leads that were targeted. Done.
From there it will show up under every new opportunity as a way to attribute a lead to a particular campaign. It’s simple, it’s easy, it’s inexcusable to avoid.
But is it a lightweight? Quite the opposite. One of the benefits of designing this from the ground up is that you get a lightning fast interface that isn’t cluttered with tabs or an experience that makes you feel like you just walked into an airplane cockpit. For example, do you want to track financial terms of the campaign like Design costs, Collateral costs, Postal fees or other user defined fields that you configure for your own campaigns? Just click on the Financial bar and the new section slides into view to document your costs. It’s that simple because if it wasn’t it wouldn’t get done.
Email and HTML Campaigns & Tracking
But what about email campaigns, do I need to document it here after I start something with Constant Contact or MailChimp? You could.
Or you could just use Shockey Monkey to send the email in the first place. If you select the email campaign you can just type up the email to send right then and there. Here is how simple it is:
Sending email campaigns out of Shockey Monkey isn’t any more difficult than sending them out of Outlook – in fact, you can import existing HTML into a campaign and with preconfigured Marketing Groups you don’t have to deal with mail merges or anything else.
It’s not simply about reducing excuses for something not getting done – it’s about making it more convenient for employees to get their jobs done!
Reoccuring Messages
Not all marketing is the same. Not all customer outreach activity is spamming or marketing. Yet, every customer interaction is a marketing opportunity.
In the many, many, many, many, many, many failures we’ve had at ExchangeDefender in the 15 years of doing business we’ve only been commended and punished for one thing completely unrelated to the services we provide: communication. How well do we work with our customers and how well informed we keep them is what keeps them our customers.
Throughout the month there are many events that we are responsible for that we need to keep our customers informed about… but sometimes it’s hard to find the time and it’s hard to be disciplined. This is something that Shockey Monkey will fix for a small business through reoccuring messages:
Instead of focusing on time intensive campaigns, automate a part of your communication. If you know that your clients PCs will blow up every 2nd Tuesday of the month, why not schedule a notification to go out a day before to give them a heads up. Or if you have a deadline for orders that need to be shipped and delivered in time for Christmas, why not send a reminder a few days ahead of time?
Now you have no excuse. This form takes seconds to complete and the actual message is typed in the same way it is in Outlook so just do it!!
Marketing Summary
Every customer interaction is an opportunity to show how well you can take care of your customers.
It’s not an “IT Company” thing, it’s a business thing. People like to talk about how it’s easier to keep existing clients than get new ones but everything takes effort – and with Shockey Monkey we’re going to help you minimize that effort.
We wanted to design the most powerful business management platform out there… but not in a typical way of taking every crackheaded idea, giving it a tab and making the user figure it all out through hours of wasted training and failed efforts. We wanted to take everyday tasks that we are all responsible for and make it more convenient and easy to do. Instead of forcing people to do something we are making it faster. Instead of requiring, we’re making it easier.
We don’t want you to be more successful by putting in more effort, we want you to be more effective at managing your business by simply enjoying your job.
Note: Shockey Monkey 3 will be automatically rolled out to all existing Shockey Monkey portals on Thursday, December 20th, 2012.
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