Technology continues to play a more immersive role in today's business environment. As a result, organizations must expand and diversify their digital capabilities in order to keep up with the competition. Doing good business is no longer enough. The customer experience trumps all, and you need to need to make it as easy as possible for consumers to engage with, and buy from you in order to win their business.
While marketing automation and CRM platforms are foundational to any technology ecosystem, they can't account for every nuance or unique process that exists within your business model. Gaps in workflows are inevitable and system deficiencies are unavoidable. Lucky for you, there are tons of tech companies out there that have built their businesses on the basis of solving for those unique gaps and deficiencies within the various stages of the customer lifecycle -- attract, engage, and delight.
Now, not all tech is created equal, so I've taken the liberty of sifting through the good, the bad, and the ugly so that you don't have to. Let's take a look at 20 of our favorite marketing, sales enablement, and eCommerce tech partners, shall we?
-
Drift
Conversational Marketing enables companies to shorten their sales cycle, understand their customers, and create a more human buying experience. The old way of driving buyers through the funnel can take weeks, with endless emails causing major friction and frustration for both the buyers and the sales team. Drift helps remove Friction from the buying process.
Conversational marketing allows buyers to connect with you in real-time when the intent is highest through Live Chat. However, for many companies, the idea of responding to Live Chat on their website is not realistic or scalable. Drift combines targeted, real-time messaging and intelligence to optimize conversion.
4 Benefits of using Drift for conversational marketing:
1. Instantly respond 24x7x365
2. Convert more leads
3. Book more qualified leads
4. Provide a White Glove treatment for strategic accounts
-
SEMrush
We use SEMrush at Revenue River as our SEO tool for our daily tasks. SEMrush is by far one of the most powerful SEO tools on the market. It helps us with our keyword analysis and tracking, it tracks the keyword strategy used by our competition, runs an SEO audit of our client’s website, looks for backlinking opportunities and lots more. If you are looking for a comprehensive SEO tool, from content marketing to SEM, then we'd would highly recommend SEMrush to boost your organic rankings.
-
Seventh Sense
Seventh Sense is a platform that automates email send time and frequency optimization for HubSpot and Marketo users. Essentially, it allows you to deliver every email at the optimal time and frequency for each individual person based on historical engagement and interaction data.
Seventh Sense is awesome because as marketers, we spend a lot of time and energy crafting and sending emails. Email is also becoming one of the most overused and over-abused promotion mediums in our industry, making it extremely difficult to land in inboxes and be successful. Seventh Sense makes sure you’re able to capitalize on and get the most out of your email marketing by catering to each individual and giving you the best possible chance for them to open and click your email, as long as you did your job properly on the content and targeting portions.
You should consider using Seventh Sense to optimize email blasts and automated nurturing workflow emails because it has been proven to re-engage dormant contacts, boost engagement metrics, and ultimately drive bottom-line results by keeping people engaged throughout the buyer’s journey until they hit critical conversion points and enter into the sales cycle.
-
LeadGnome
LeadGnome mines and manages B2B email replies to improve database health, eliminate customer database decay, generate sales leads, and find direct dials, mobile phones and titles. We use LeadGnome to enrich and cleanse our client's database and identify sales triggers. -
Vidyard
Vidyard is an online video platform for business which allows you to increase leads, accelerate your pipeline and delight your customers. Essentially, it’s a video platform that integrates with major CMS tools to showcase data points, allowing you to actually utilize video as a piece in your lead generation funnels. Features aside, Vidyard is the best platform to use for companies that have videos that showcase their products and services, allowing you to see when, what, and for how long prospects are engaging with your video content. The age of relying on YouTube and Vimeo are over, you need to get serious about how your videos are actually being “received” by your prospects. It’s not about production value and how great your video looks, it’s about if your video is actually working to make you money, and Vidyard helps you do that. Aside from that, their toolsets and features allow you to easily build brand guidelines, forms and events to drive new lead generation, and so much more. If you think this is strictly for the marketer, then you are wrong; sales teams can take advantage of their GoVideo tool to build customized/personal, 1-to-1 videos that allow your leads to digest content faster, easier, and accurately leading you to more sales.
-
SnapApp
SnapApp takes the guesswork out of generating great leads. By asking prospects qualifying questions while they consume content, marketers can increase lead conversion rates, guide the buyer’s journey, and improve lead quality. It works with your high-traffic digital content like PDFs, website pages, and blogs. When you move the lead gate, you can start converting prospects who are more engaged. SnapApp gives prospects a voice instead of just observing their behavior. It helps marketers provide a better prospect experience, uncover buying intent, and increases the odds of conversion—as well as the quality of lead you ultimately send to sales.
Here's an example of how we use SnapApp in our content: -
Verblio
Verblio is an on-demand content creation platform that powers digital marketing and SEO. Verblio has high-quality, specialized writers across the country that you can partner with to create blog posts, newsletters, press releases, website content, white papers, videos, eBooks, pillar content, and more for your business.
Verblio is awesome because they’re affordable, they’re great to work with, they provide high quality content, and most of all they act as an extension of your own digital marketing team to allow you to pick up time and focus on other important priorities.
Marketers should consider utilizing Verblio to keep up and compete in this crazy digital marketplace. By now, it’s a known fact that you need content to succeed – and you need good content to really succeed. Instead of you either a) not publishing any content or rarely publishing because you just don’t have the bandwidth to do it or b) publishing crappy content that was half-baked frequently because you have competing priorities and time constraints, you can outsource to a reliable and trustworthy partner like Verblio to get the best of both worlds. -
ReviewTrackers
ReviewTrackers is a premier online review management solution and the best way for enterprises to measure the customer experience. ReviewTrackers gives organizations the ability to collect, organize, and respond to reviews from top review websites like Google, Yelp, Facebook, and TripAdvisor under one roof. We implement ReviewTrackers for clients that want to improve their reputation by tracking and responding to reviews all over the internet.
-
Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange is an awesome tool that helps us get to the heart of our clients website performance. As one of the most affordable options in the space, Lucky Orange doesn’t sacrifice on quality and functionality. They provide detailed heat maps that allow us to see clicks, moves and scrolls from the user to identify opportunity areas throughout the site. Their user recordings also provide valuable insight into real human interactions, and allow us to continuously improve the website over time. From custom dashboards, form analytics, conversion funnels and live chat, Lucky Orange truly is (as they brand it) an all in one conversion optimization suite. Whether you have an informational site, or an ecommerce store, Lucky Orange provides a ton of value when evaluating the effectiveness of your website visitor conversions.
-
Google AdWords
Google Ads is advertising service that allows businesses to promote on Google networks and partner networks. It is a scalable, measurable, and flexible platform for a variety of business objectives. The best thing about Google Ads is that it doesn’t require five times the effort to get five times the results. Its expansive reach and hyper-targeting capabilities make Google an effective platform for those who need a lot of leads but are short on time and heads. We also use Google Ads to accelerate Search Engine Optimization efforts and to complement other marketing channels. -
Referral Rock
Referral Rock provides online referral marketing automation software to help any business get more customers using the power of their own network. Online and offline businesses can design incentive-based programs, enroll existing customers and partners, capture the new leads and sales, then issue rewards automatically.
Referral Rock software automates every step of the process. So a business can scale and consistently measure the success of referral marketing programs and get more customers.
-
PandaDoc
PandaDoc is a document automation software as a service with built-in electronic signatures, workflow management, a document builder, and CPQ functionality. It streamlines the way organizations create, send, and tracks sales documents. We leverage PandaDoc to build quotes, proposals, and contracts for our clients to help them close more deals, faster. -
Databox
In this day and age when revenue systems are comprised of dozens of tools, logging into multiple platforms to see how your company is performing is a real pain in the ass. With over 70 integrations in place, Databox makes it easy to aggregate data from the most popular technologies in a mix-and-match fashion. You get to decide what metrics you want to focus on and how you want to organize them for analysis. And you don't have to be a data scientist to use this tool - it's easy to get started and simple to maintain!
-
Costello
The modern-day playbook toolset for the modern-day seller, Costello serves as a real-time co-pilot during calls to make sure your reps ask every important question throughout the sales process. This puts all of the content support they need to confidently handle objections and tell relevant customer stories right at their fingertips. The powerful integration capabilities with other core sales tools saves reps upwards of 15 minutes per call by eliminating duplicative manual notes entry with the click of a button.
-
Insycle
Insycle is a data cleansing platform that integrates with some of the top CRM & customer service platforms such as HubSpot & Zendesk. Using task-oriented modules you can clean your data faster, increase productivity by manipulating data at scale, and improve business performance by getting more accurate data.
Insycle has allowed us, as an agency, to provide accurate data for our clients that assists us in making more strategic marketing decisions. It has also played a key role in pre and post data migration by allowing us to associate records, de-duplicate data by email, phone number or address, and bulk update contact & company records. By running weekly tasks we can keep our clients portals clean so sales & marketing have accurate data to do their job effectively. Here’s a quick tutorial on how to merge records.
-
Aircall
Aircall is a phone system that integrations with your CRM or Customer Service platform to provide a seamless user experience. Aircall can route incoming calls, create a calling queue, log engagements, record calls, and click to dial right from your CRM.
Implementing Aircall for our clients has increased speed to lead follow up times and saved time on eliminating data entry. Integrating Aircall with HubSpot creates or merges contact records, track their first contact source to improve attribution and routes the incoming calls. Having everything in one place allows the sales reps to leave notes on the calling engagements, have direct access to the recorded call for later reference, and have a more effective sales call with access to data and insights about the prospect they are speaking with. Call whispering assists Management with quick rep ramp up time by listening in on calls and providing real time feedback. -
Zapier
Zapier has an infinite amount of applications that it can connect in ways that help you solve where the native integrations cannot. Connect Slack and Asana to create Asana tasks from a new slack message. Or, connect Stripe and Quickbooks to create new customers with sales receipts for new Stripe charges.
Outside of connecting two, or three, applications together, we have used some of Zapier’s tools to solve for our clients. By enrolling a contact in a HubSpot workflow, sending it to Zapier via a webhook, have can timestamp and calculate down to the second lead follow up time. Additionally, we have used Zapier’s Email Parser to take 3rd party lead generated emails and parse the data to HubSpot contact properties eliminate time spent on data entry and more time selling! Due to Zapier’s flexibility and support from their customer service team, we implement Zapier with majority of our clients in some way shape or form to solve complex issues in creative ways. Here’s a quick snippet of how to parse emails.
-
DiscoverOrg
Especially helpful for our clients' ABM strategies, we can create hyper-targeted lists by job function, tech stack, industry, size, physical location, keywords, etc. We can also arm our sales teams with the intelligence they need for strategic outreach by setting up automatic alerts for companies aggressively researching their products. That allows them to connect to targets earlier in the buying cycle — and guide the purchasing process. We also love the access to org charts that include complete reporting structures of the movers, shakers, and decision-makers, so we can build multi-threaded relationships and get buy-in from multiple stakeholders.
-
Outreach
A powerful sales engagement tool with tons of capabilities, we like to use this within our tech stacks specifically for warming up ice cold leads. We can build high touch sequences that empower our sales reps to personalize and engage at scale. And by centralizing our prospecting efforts, we can stay organized and focused on the right targets.
-
BigCommerce
BigCommerce is a best in class SAAS eCommerce shopping cart platform. As a product, it really shines when it’s implemented for medium to enterprise size organizations. It’s second to none in terms of its ability to be combined with other technologies, whether that integrating it with an ERP and providing a customized shopping experience for your customers. As certified partners we’re more than familiar with BigCommerce under the hood and recommend you strongly include it in your consideration set if you’re evaluating a new platform
Interested in learning more about the tech listed above, or ready to schedule a demo? We offer complimentary technology assessments, and will review your existing technology, identify opportunities for improvement, and build you a connected technology plan. Check out our software partner page and use our Drift bot to schedule a meeting!
