Now that small business SaaS is becoming mainstream, powerful marketing tools can be utilized to build a productive, cost effective marketing strategy for your small business. Five years ago when I worked for a big company we used multi-million dollar tools to track and manage our pipeline. Today, there are plenty of SaaS applications to oil your sales and marketing machine – a lot of them cheap if not free. Here are some of the best SaaS apps we have found for running sales and marketing:
Google Analytics is the free web analytics tool we use to track site usage to our website. Of course it does the basics like showing us how many visitors we’ve had recently, but it also provides deeper intelligence into the sources of our traffic (from search, links and paid advertising). In addition, it shows us which of our traffic sources, landing pages and blog posts are resulting in actual closed sales and real leads. This is one of the first things I check when I get into the office in the morning.
We recently switched from Salesforce to Zoho CRM because Zoho allows for the creation of more online forms at a lower price point. Since we are an online-based business, and have a number of white papers and domains that we run, we need many different ways for potential customers to communicate their needs with us online. Zoho also does the basic blocking and tackling you’d expect in a CRM, allowing note-taking on leads, status updating, report generation, etc. Again, cheap and it’s working well for us. Zoho CRM is free for the first three users.
Of course we use our own cloud based service! OfficeDrop helps paper intensive small businesses manage their paper and digital files by scanning and hosting the scanned documents in an online management system. I use OfficeDrop for two major purposes: one, to store + share all of our press, and two, to manage our marketing expenses. Every time I get an invoice or receipt I upload, scan, or email it into the “Marketing” folder in our OfficeDrop account. For example, if I have a bill from Vistaprint for brochures we printed I’ll email it into the 2009/expenses/marketing/December folder. Then, our accountant logs in at the end of the month and can easily see all of our expenses from a single place, making book keeping simple, and making it easier to calculate the ROI from our different marketing campaigns. OfficeDrop is also inexpensive. Pricing for digital plans starts at $4.95/mo and for paper plans starts at $14.95/mo.
We run multiple blogs (blogs are the greatest, easiest way to communicate with our customers), and having a simple blog publishing solution like WordPress is important. Since there is no limit to the number of writers we can have in the system, our product people and our marketing people can all create and edit each other’s content, and we can set up a simple publishing schedule. Since our main OfficeDrop blog drives about 15% of our sales conversions, it’s well worth the effort. Oh yeah, and the price – in addition to the software being free, the hosted version is also free.
Yes, we are on twitter, and we’ve recently started using CoTweet. It’s an application that allows multiple users to share the same twitter user name (in our case @pixily). Cotweet allows us to see what our last few tweets were easily, so that the marketing team doesn’t send out an overlapping message that the CEO just tweeted from the @pixily account.
Grasshopper is a VoIP service that we have used to put our sales team in contact with customers. We’ve got our toll- free number on the top of our home page because it’s important for our potential customers to know they can easily contact us. Grasshopper enables us to project that big, solid company feel with dedicated extensions for each salesperson and custom recorded greetings and department forwarding. Above all, it’s a professional and cost effective way to put customers in contact with your sales team. Pricing starts at $9.95/mo.
Provide Support is the application we use for customer service, but it is equally utilized for sales and marketing. Provide Support is a great way to install a ‘chat with me’ button. On our website there is a ‘chat with me’ button that puts users in contact with a human being in the case they have any questions about the service prior to signing up. This is a cheap and easy way to engage customers via your website and we highly recommend it. Pricing starts at $15/mo.
We aspire to the “touchless” sales model, which requires some pretty sophisticated email management. ConstantContact has been great for us, both in terms of functionality and price, although I imagine it would also be great for a company running basic email campaigns. For me, the best part about this service is that I was able to login and within a few minutes started sending emails – it was that easy to use. Pricing starts at $15/mo.
With the advent of low priced SaaS marketing solutions, small businesses can now manage their sales and marketing pipeline just as well as large competitors. The best part of these tools is that you usually don’t have to install or maintain any software or equipment. While large companies have legacy tools, into which they invested hundreds of thousands (or millions) of dollars, small businesses can nimbly shift to the best solution. I’d encourage you to take advantage of the free trials offered by most of the SaaS solutions mentioned above. I think you’ll find that many of them will make you more productive and enhance your customers’ sales experiences.
What SaaS tools do you use to run your business? Let us know by leaving a comment.
OfficeDrop’s co-founder, Anand Rajaram, has recently written a post on tests we used here at OfficeDrop during our recent site redesign to optimize our conversion rate. The post is found on Performable’s blog here: Optimizing Conversion Rates with Simple Tests.
Special thanks to the folks over at Performable for giving us the opportunity to post on their blog. They are a local, Cambridge MA company focused on helping startups turn website visitors into customers, and are a great contributor to the startup scene here in the Boston area.
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