Every day we help our clients automate their businesses.
There are certain activities that are pointless for you to be doing and once you automate them, you’ll wonder why you ever did them manually in the first place.
We’re able to help our clients because we’ve been there ourselves. Instead of reciting the reasons and benefits for automation, that you’ve surely heard already, we thought we’d share our story…
Back when Gary and Pam started this business in 2005, it was a small team with a few big clients. As with most start-ups, there was a lot of multitasking. Fast-forward to a few years later and DemGen’s team and client roster had increased 100%. It just wasn’t possible for key team members to multitask as they had when the company first started out.
The first problem we faced when scaling our virtual team internationally was our phone system. We needed a unified presence, even though we weren’t in the same physical offices. Grasshopper was a lifesaver! Even though our experts are spread across the world, we can be reached through one toll free Grasshopper number. Our team can access their messages online or even on mobile – instantly.
The next hurdle was accounting. When we only had a few clients, it was possible for us to keep track of invoices, payments, expenses and time. (Though no one enjoyed doing it.) When business started taking off it became much harder to stay on track with our accounting. Enter Freshbooks. Revenue is the lifeblood for every business. Simply put, Freshbooks helped us to keep track of our invoices and get paid – automatically. No more having to remember to invoice or who paid what when!
Recently we reached our most daunting task – managing and communicating with all of our new found friends/clients. We had outgrown the ability to create our own systems in Outlook or Mail. We scaled up to a basic CRM/email marketing program, but soon found maintaining it tedious. Our list began growing quickly and we started nurturing our leads accordingly, which required a lot of manpower. We looked into Infusionsoft. It was substantially more expensive than the program we had been using but when we looked at the numbers, Infusionsoft paid for itself and freed up our team to focus on more strategic, revenue focused, and fun initiatives.
This addition saved us a lot of time and money, but as our database and communications expanded, scheduling Discovery Calls became a bit of a nightmare. With multiple team members scheduling meetings for the same key people it was difficult to ensure availability and avoid duplicate meetings being scheduled. TimeTrade automated it all! Now any member of our team can provide links for prospects to schedule meetings with Pam directly. Prospects can find a time that works for them and book it immediately, avoiding any back and forth to find a time that works for everyone.
So that’s our story, so far. We’re all about continuous improvement and are constantly evaluating how efficient our systems are to ensure our team and clients are able to perform to the best of their abilities. It’s a never-ending story.
We’ll be sure to keep you posted as we add more tools and systems that help us to streamline and automate our business!
© Tamara Smith, DemGen Inc. 2013
image courtesy of juliaburman.com
