If you’re in business as an entrepreneur or small business owner, your mailbox is probably full of offers trying to sell you marketing and business intelligence tools. The trouble is, how do you know which services are worth the money, and which ones have a free competitor that will work for you until you start generating revenue? We’re looking at eight marketing and business intelligence tools in four areas — CRM, CMS & inbound, project management and sales intelligence — to give you the scoop on which ones are Harry Kane and which ones are Wayne Rooney.
Customer Relationship Management Tools
Tracking your sales opportunities is vital for timing outreach and knowing how long your sales cycle is, not to mention pipeline volume and velocity. If you’re selling anything you need a customer relationship management (CRM) system to stay on top of your sales efforts.
Consistently rated as a top 10 place to work in the UK, Salesforce is also the leading product in customer relationship management. Salesforce uses a “per user, per month” pricing structure with tiers ranging from £20/user/month for tracking opportunities and some prebuilt dashboards, to £240/user/month for the Unlimited Edition, which offers forecasting, rules based workflows, custom dashboards and a ton of other functions. But with 10 users, that’s £2,400 per month in expenditure.
ZOHO CRM, on the other hand, is free for up to 10 users, and the top tier of pricing (CRM Plus) tops out at €50/agent/month. The free version offers tracking at lead, contact, account and opportunity levels; email templates, lead forms and some limited workflow functionality. Upgrades across a wide array of functions are available at €12, €25 and €50 per user per month.
Winner: ZOHO for free (Salesforce if you decide to pay)
Content Marketing & Marketing Automation Tools
Behavioural triggers have become the norm for nurture campaigns and warming up prospects. From site visitors to asset downloaders, understanding what collateral resonates with your audience – and how to personalise and follow up that engagement with additional targeted content – is an industry best practice for inbound marketers.
HubSpot offers a set of tools to publish your website, track visitors, capture leads, serve landing pages and offer downloadable assets, along with email list management, segmentation and content distribution and measurement. But for a list size of more than 1,000, website and reporting add-ins, you’re looking at a plan priced at just under £25,000 per year, and that’s not including the £3,500 onboarding fee. To call it prohibitively expensive for most startups is an understatement.
Pimcore is open source, and for that reason alone, it’s not going to appeal to everyone: there are technical considerations like the files need to be installed in the document root of your web server and you’ll need to set up the database (talk to your IT professional about that), and when anyone can create code, you need to be extra careful about what you install. On the other hand, it’s completely free.
But what does it do?
At its core (see what I did there?), it offers product information management and master data management tools, content management and digital asset management, along with e-commerce options. As far as content management goes, Pimcore offers website publishing, email marketing automation, content personalisation and analytics, and even publishing options across multiple channels from a single source. If you don’t have £28,000 to spend on those tools this year, and have the technical know-how available to you, Pimcore is a powerful competitor to the high price content systems out there.
Winner: Draw – depends whether you want to spend the money on setup or technical staff
Project Management Tools
Providing a way for interested constituents to maintain and monitor the work of your internal functions, from marketing to creative to account services, is the best way to have accurate information when your boss asks for status updates. Both Basecamp and Bitrix quote prices in $US, but for customers outside the US, the payment processor will charge you whatever the cost in $US is in your local currency.
Basecamp is the gold standard for project management and collaboration, but it runs at $99 per month, which can be enough to dissuade solopreneurs, small shops and startups.
As an alternative, Bitrix24 offers many of the same functions including calendars, document sharing (up to 5GB total storage), versioning, CRM and sales automation, Gantt charts and projects with up to 5 dependencies.
You can add more storage, external users, workflow automation and unlimited dependencies if you subscribe to the Plus ($39/month) or Standard ($99/month) versions. If you want to add in reporting and time tracking, your price jumps to $199. Discounts for paying ahead are available.
Bitrix24 also partner with Intreface in the UK. Intreface offers pricing in $US, £GB and €EU for Bitrix24 implementation and custom development.
Winner: Bitrix24 for free (Basecamp if you decide to pay)
Sales Intelligence Tools
In sales, one of the most frustrating parts of the job is that you rarely get a decision maker on the phone right away. Big companies have gatekeepers, while managers at smaller companies are wearing so many hats they’re often simply unreachable. More than this, knowing when to time your outreach so you’re pitching services when your target might be interested – like when they’re in budget planning – is guess work for most sales professionals.
This is where Winmo and DailyVista succeed. Winmo is packed with information for sales professionals who target national advertisers: planning periods, prior year budgets and spending analysis by channel, filters that allow you to home in on niche markets, verticals or geographies. And at the click of a button subscribers get access to human-verified direct dial phone numbers and emails for decision makers that match their search criteria. DailyVista, Winmo’s daily email newsletter, offers actionable insights from its news gathering team which contextualizes earnings calls, fiscal reporting, movement in the C-suite and startup funding announcements. A subscription to Winmo and Daily Vista will set you back £4,350 per year for 2 users, with each additional seat costing £300 per year.
The free alternative to Winmo’s sales intelligence platform is Google Alerts and LinkedIn. I know that sounds like a win, because Google is brilliant, but to be effective you’ll need to set alerts for specific things like “earnings call” and “series A funding” and “promoted to CMO” – which means you’ll need to know which alerts you need, then spend time setting those alerts up, and then spend time on a daily or weekly basis reading them to see what insights you can glean from them. If you’re in sales, you’ll understand that every hour you spend on activities that don’t generate revenue, you’re missing out on sales calls that could win you business, and this manual alerts system — while it’s free — will quickly cost you in lost revenue opportunities.
If you choose the Google Alerts path, you’re also going to have to dig up contact information for the decision makers you plan to reach out to. Company About Us pages will just land you in front of a gatekeeper, while LinkedIn profiles are likely to be out of date – and do you really want to cold call your target’s personal mobile?
Winner: Winmo — While most of the free services mentioned here give the paid service a run for its money, when it comes to sales intelligence, there’s no substitute for Winmo.
[FREE EBOOK] How to Get Sponsorship for Your Event
in Sponsorship, UKby Duncan ConnorMost events, from Glastonbury to your local primary school jumble sale, rely on sponsorship to take care of their costs. Sponsorship is the simple exchange of access to your audience for some investment of goods, services or cash — and for event organisers, finding and securing corporate sponsors is the most important work event managers do.
From conferences to music festivals to sports teams, corporate sponsorship by brands is a great two-way-street for promotion and advertising.
If you’re not sure how to find sponsors, or how to get them on board once you know who you want to partner with, our free guide will take you through the process from end-to-end. If you’re more experienced, you can feel free to dip into it and read up on things you may have forgotten.
Either way, we hope you enjoy reading and sharing.
Tools the Masters Use: Business Intelligence, Prospecting and Sales Enablement
in Ad Sales, Agency New Business, Business Development, Salesby Duncan ConnorIf sales was a round of golf, the clubs you have in your bag would be just as important as your skill with them, or your familiarity with the course. Gary Player said, “A good golfer has the determination to win and the patience to wait for the breaks.” He could have been talking about sales. Read more
Is Your Sales Crew Pulling Together?
in Ad Sales, UKby Duncan ConnorOn Sunday, Oxford and Cambridge students will gather at Putney Embankment to contest the 163rd Boat Race. The crews have to work together, synchronizing their sweep speeds, drive, and recovery, to power their team’s boat to Chiswick Bridge finish line, 6.8 km away. If you’re a sales team manager, you can probably relate to the focus and exertion required.
Making sure your sales team are all rowing in the same direction can be the difference between leaving your competitors in your wake or running aground. There are three key areas where managers can influence their team’s performance, and there are more nautical puns ahead, so let’s get to them…
All hands on deck!
Communicating your vision and expectations is one of the most important things you can do as a manager. If your team doesn’t know what you want from them, they can’t possibly deliver it consistently. Your expectations are informed by your department’s sales goals, which hopefully help the company meet revenue numbers. As those expectations trickle down to your team members, it’s imperative that you do a few things:
Take them on a fantastic voyage
Christopher Columbus somehow managed to persuade three boatloads of sailors to embark on a voyage that, by contemporary understanding, would sail them off the edge of the world to certain doom. Think on that for a moment when you’re wondering how you can motivate your team to make a few more calls every day.
If you can visualise a destination your team wants to go to, where untold riches await them (maybe actually untold riches if that’s how you structure their commission), and tell them that you know how to get there, they’ll go along with you. It’s about using every persuasive instinct you possess to paint a picture, more Frederick Milner than William Turner; about drawing a big X on a map and yelling “Seaward ho!”
Fathom out what the numbers mean
What measures are important?
Is it pipeline velocity? Calls per day? Closed deals per month? Allocation of time for sales activities? Lead response time? Win rate? Deal size? There are dozens of possible sales measures you can choose, and if you can’t tell your team which ones are important to you, any assumptions you harbor about them guessing right belong on the poop deck.
Take some time to understand what the instruments are telling you and make sure you know how to use them to navigate your crew to its destination. It can mean the difference between striking land in India or the Caribbean.
Who’s your best mate; who needs to walk the plank?
What is the review process and frequency for each sales person?
Douglas Adams, writer of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, once famously said “I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.” People are motivated by different things. For some it’s stickers on a chart, for others it’s the squeaky bum time of a looming deadline.
Letting your team know what their review process is going to be, and how often they can look forward to accounting for their numbers, will allow them to manage their time in a way that makes sense to them and their methods. It’s “quay” to effective management. (Sorry.)
Land ho!
So you’ve made it. Your team all know what’s expected of them. They know what criteria they’re being judged against and how those benchmarks affect the company’s broader goals. They even know what the consequences are for them – and for the company – if they should fail; and the bounty that awaits them when you reach your destination.
Find a New World of prospecting with a free trial of Winmo.
Now…bring me that horizon…
Why Size Matters for Corporate Sponsorship Sales
in Business Development, Sponsorshipby Duncan ConnorIf you want to be successful pitching your event to corporate sponsorship executives, the first thing you have to understand is that the size of their organization really does matter, because it affects their motivation for working with you. Read more
The CMO Will Be the First to Go – Opportunity Knocks
in Agency New Businessby Dave CurrieCEO’s are increasingly seeking disruptive growth. Yet, accountability within the C-suite for disruptive growth is fragmented, creating opportunity for the willing CMO and their agencies.
Read more
UK Sales and Marketing Conferences in Q2
in Marketing Tech, UKby Duncan ConnorAs Q1 comes to a close, budget priorities are beginning to take shape, and your colleagues are starting to put their summer holidays on the holiday calendar. But before the first cucumber sandwich is served at Wimbledon, there are a few sales and marketing conferences you might want to take a look at. Click the event banner to go to the conference or expo website.
Agency Acceleration Day serves marketing and communications agencies and professionals. In it’s fifth year, attendees can expect to hear from some of the UK’s fastest growing agencies and best-known brands. Industry experts will host workshops and speak on topics like:
If you’re obsessed with SEO and SEM, the search marketing expo is where you should be (especially if you have FA Cup tickets and feel like staying in London through the weekend). This 2-day expo has a few foundation tracks on day one for attendees who want to focus on SEO, Paid Search, Analytics, Conversion & Reporting; and an SMX Advanced track for day two. Workshops and speaker topics will include:
The UK’s leading content marketing, social media and business growth conference comes to the beautiful, historic, Highland Tolbooth in central Edinburgh. TCMA began in 2014 as a small event, but has plans to create a platform big enough to invite well-known experts from around the world. This year, attendees can expect to hear keynotes from authors, entrepreneurs and experts like:
Ungagged London will feature 3 tracks across 2 days of presentations and workshops. If you’re interested in SEO, content marketing, mobile, link building, social, targeting or graphic design, Ungagged will show you internet marketing trends that have driven success for experts like:
Why Pay Special Attention to Strategic Decision Makers?
in Ad Sales, Marketing, Salesby Duncan ConnorIn all this talk about reaching decision makers, it’s easy to think that everyone in a decision making position is alike. While most decisions have some element of risk management or process efficiency involved, they’re not necessarily strategic decisions.
Read more
How to Craft the Perfect Prospecting Sales Email
in Ad Sales, Agency New Business, Business Development, Marketing Tech, Sales, Sponsorshipby Jeff HaleyWriting a great cold call email for sales prospecting is a hard craft to master. And like any craft, if you look at the results you’re getting, think about how to improve and then hone your skills, you’ll get better. Prospecting outreach that fills your pipeline doesn’t happen by accident, but with a few evaluation tips, you can make it happen more consistently. Read more
Free vs. Paid: Marketing and Business Intelligence Tools
in Business Development, UKby Duncan ConnorIf you’re in business as an entrepreneur or small business owner, your mailbox is probably full of offers trying to sell you marketing and business intelligence tools. The trouble is, how do you know which services are worth the money, and which ones have a free competitor that will work for you until you start generating revenue? We’re looking at eight marketing and business intelligence tools in four areas — CRM, CMS & inbound, project management and sales intelligence — to give you the scoop on which ones are Harry Kane and which ones are Wayne Rooney.
Customer Relationship Management Tools
Consistently rated as a top 10 place to work in the UK, Salesforce is also the leading product in customer relationship management. Salesforce uses a “per user, per month” pricing structure with tiers ranging from £20/user/month for tracking opportunities and some prebuilt dashboards, to £240/user/month for the Unlimited Edition, which offers forecasting, rules based workflows, custom dashboards and a ton of other functions. But with 10 users, that’s £2,400 per month in expenditure.
ZOHO CRM, on the other hand, is free for up to 10 users, and the top tier of pricing (CRM Plus) tops out at €50/agent/month. The free version offers tracking at lead, contact, account and opportunity levels; email templates, lead forms and some limited workflow functionality. Upgrades across a wide array of functions are available at €12, €25 and €50 per user per month.
Winner: ZOHO for free (Salesforce if you decide to pay)
Content Marketing & Marketing Automation Tools
HubSpot offers a set of tools to publish your website, track visitors, capture leads, serve landing pages and offer downloadable assets, along with email list management, segmentation and content distribution and measurement. But for a list size of more than 1,000, website and reporting add-ins, you’re looking at a plan priced at just under £25,000 per year, and that’s not including the £3,500 onboarding fee. To call it prohibitively expensive for most startups is an understatement.
Pimcore is open source, and for that reason alone, it’s not going to appeal to everyone: there are technical considerations like the files need to be installed in the document root of your web server and you’ll need to set up the database (talk to your IT professional about that), and when anyone can create code, you need to be extra careful about what you install. On the other hand, it’s completely free.
But what does it do?
At its core (see what I did there?), it offers product information management and master data management tools, content management and digital asset management, along with e-commerce options. As far as content management goes, Pimcore offers website publishing, email marketing automation, content personalisation and analytics, and even publishing options across multiple channels from a single source. If you don’t have £28,000 to spend on those tools this year, and have the technical know-how available to you, Pimcore is a powerful competitor to the high price content systems out there.
Winner: Draw – depends whether you want to spend the money on setup or technical staff
Project Management Tools
Providing a way for interested constituents to maintain and monitor the work of your internal functions, from marketing to creative to account services, is the best way to have accurate information when your boss asks for status updates. Both Basecamp and Bitrix quote prices in $US, but for customers outside the US, the payment processor will charge you whatever the cost in $US is in your local currency.
Basecamp is the gold standard for project management and collaboration, but it runs at $99 per month, which can be enough to dissuade solopreneurs, small shops and startups.
As an alternative, Bitrix24 offers many of the same functions including calendars, document sharing (up to 5GB total storage), versioning, CRM and sales automation, Gantt charts and projects with up to 5 dependencies.
You can add more storage, external users, workflow automation and unlimited dependencies if you subscribe to the Plus ($39/month) or Standard ($99/month) versions. If you want to add in reporting and time tracking, your price jumps to $199. Discounts for paying ahead are available.
Bitrix24 also partner with Intreface in the UK. Intreface offers pricing in $US, £GB and €EU for Bitrix24 implementation and custom development.
Winner: Bitrix24 for free (Basecamp if you decide to pay)
Sales Intelligence Tools
In sales, one of the most frustrating parts of the job is that you rarely get a decision maker on the phone right away. Big companies have gatekeepers, while managers at smaller companies are wearing so many hats they’re often simply unreachable. More than this, knowing when to time your outreach so you’re pitching services when your target might be interested – like when they’re in budget planning – is guess work for most sales professionals.
This is where Winmo and DailyVista succeed. Winmo is packed with information for sales professionals who target national advertisers: planning periods, prior year budgets and spending analysis by channel, filters that allow you to home in on niche markets, verticals or geographies. And at the click of a button subscribers get access to human-verified direct dial phone numbers and emails for decision makers that match their search criteria. DailyVista, Winmo’s daily email newsletter, offers actionable insights from its news gathering team which contextualizes earnings calls, fiscal reporting, movement in the C-suite and startup funding announcements. A subscription to Winmo and Daily Vista will set you back £4,350 per year for 2 users, with each additional seat costing £300 per year.
The free alternative to Winmo’s sales intelligence platform is Google Alerts and LinkedIn. I know that sounds like a win, because Google is brilliant, but to be effective you’ll need to set alerts for specific things like “earnings call” and “series A funding” and “promoted to CMO” – which means you’ll need to know which alerts you need, then spend time setting those alerts up, and then spend time on a daily or weekly basis reading them to see what insights you can glean from them. If you’re in sales, you’ll understand that every hour you spend on activities that don’t generate revenue, you’re missing out on sales calls that could win you business, and this manual alerts system — while it’s free — will quickly cost you in lost revenue opportunities.
If you choose the Google Alerts path, you’re also going to have to dig up contact information for the decision makers you plan to reach out to. Company About Us pages will just land you in front of a gatekeeper, while LinkedIn profiles are likely to be out of date – and do you really want to cold call your target’s personal mobile?
Winner: Winmo — While most of the free services mentioned here give the paid service a run for its money, when it comes to sales intelligence, there’s no substitute for Winmo.
Get a no-strings trial of Winmo today!
Software That Helps you Generate Sale Leads
in Ad Sales, Marketing, Salesby Duncan ConnorIn business it’s easy to find software to spend money on – everything from accounting software to applications that help you create business plans. But for the sales and marketing teams, software costs can run into five or six figures, so what software will help you generate sales leads and still offer good return on investment? Read more