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The decision to seek out a marketing automation tool was a simple one for Monica Seely, marketing manager of Laguna Hills, Calif.-based mass notification services provider Rapid Notify.
"Well, I am a one-woman marketing department," she says. "It's just me. So my challenge is time."
She had been manually manipulating software to avoid sending batch-and-blast email campaigns to Rapid Notify's 10 customer segments. She was over it.
Seely reviewed all of the tools compatible with her company's customer relationship management (CRM) software, Salesforce, and in September 2011, she hired Beaverton, Ore.-based Act-On Software. Within a week, she sent an email campaign to 4,000 of Rapid Notify's customers. The Act-On solution she chose also automated follow-up emails, newsletters and Web reporting.
"It freed me up to focus on other things which were very necessary, such as advertising and public relations," Seely says. The time savings equal an entire day each workweek, which she had devoted to iterative analytics and email marketing processes.
"But I think the best benefit that we have seen is the ability for our salespeople to now see the lead scoring," Seely says of the ability to model, which is new to Rapid Notify. Now the sales team can "see the activity, the email activity, see everything from within Salesforce. They don't have to go to multiple places anymore to see that data. And now it's actionable. Now there are workflows associated with it to alert them when they have hot leads, when there's a lead inquiry from the website or from a form. … Everything's integrated, they can see the website analytics. The visibility for them has been the biggest benefit. It makes them more effective."
Seely says the past year's resulted in a 20 percent increase in lead closure from the sales team. Rapid Notify defines closure as a "conversion to opportunity," which means the lead has a business proposal, a price quote and is in active negotiations. Since September 2011, she says the ability to reach closure has increased 50 percent.
Rapid Notify works to close deals with municipalities, police and fire departments, healthcare organizations, financial institutions, school systems and shopping centers, among others. Within those entities, her company contacts decision-makers such as emergency managers, police chiefs, fire chiefs, risk managers and directors of operations. These prospects may need the same system, but they need it to do different things.
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