Highlights
1. Can you describe your business and who you help?
We’re a marketing agency that essentially focuses on helping entrepreneurs, start-up companies, small to mid-sized businesses launch their brand and provide them with a foundation to move forward. One of the reasons why we started the company was we believed in locking the potential of great ideas. We believe that everyone has great ideas but they don’t have the right process, or creative abilities to test those ideas and launch them. Our entire agency was built around ‘how to create a process’, and wanted to create a solution that allows businesses to do this very fast.
2. What were you doing to generate sales before we started working together with Brainstorm Automate and what were some of your frustrations or challenges?
For most agencies, I think the answer would be the same. Word of mouth and referral is the game. If you have a great product, if you have a great team, if you create the right relationships, you’re able to increase word of mouth, and referral business just comes. Now the challenge with that though is that once the chain stops, you’re left on this kind of island by yourself with all the friends that you’ve made and you have to go out and connect.
As co-founders we have to wear several hats every single day, we have to wear a legal hat, we have to wear an HR, we have to wear a product manager. So, for us to go out and meet clients, it would be maybe only once or twice a week, maybe some events, maybe doing some networking. It was really hard for us to really generate the amount of traction or warm leads that we needed to grow and scale the business so that was our primary challenge. I think everyone’s real challenge is how do we get leads in the door for face-to-face conversations to prove that we’re something excellent.
3. What has been the impact of working with Brainstorm Automate?
I think Brainstorm Automate’s platform has enabled us to do a lot of things that scale very quickly and has allowed us to automate those tasks that we used to spend a lot of time on, to generate those leads, and to basically warm the people that are learning about Shadow while we’re not even there. It’s about being able not only to not be there while still presenting your value but providing the right information at the right customer touchpoints. If they’ve already landed on our site and they’ve seen some information that they like, they put in their email or accept some type of browser push or something like that they’ve accepted communication from us – but we’re not able to hit them with the right information during those stages so that eventually it moves them more towards the decision making side of things where they can go hey you know I want to reach out to someone from Shadow now and then by that time, we’re just on the phone with them and we’re explaining who we are.
There is no real sales involved anymore we’re just talking to them, we’re talking about the problem that they’re facing, the challenge that they’re trying to overcome so that we’re just presenting a solution. What Brainstorm Automate allowed us to do is be more authentic when we meet those leads face to face and it’s allowed us to automate so many tasks to save hours of time. We also haven’t had to hire for sales because we’re able to manage it from this platform now, and even if we do, we will just be hiring one person to manage the platform instead of six or seven people.
4. Where did you first hear about Brainstorm Automate?
We can’t even really pinpoint exactly where it was where we found Brainstorm Automate but it was everywhere. We saw Brainstorm Automate every single time we were searching for information about email marketing. You guys were always providing the right information for us. So, we thought ‘hey you know Brainstorm Automate seems to do everything that we need, so why don’t we just reach out and have a conversation. It wasn’t just one touchpoint and I think that speaks volumes about the platform and the team there – that they’re trying to do their best to make sure that anyone whether it’s for email marketing, social, CRM, or automation that you’re searching for, that the team is going to give the right information at the right time.
5. What was it that set Brainstorm Automate apart from our competitors and made you decide to choose Brainstorm Automate ahead of other software?
For most founders and CEOs, it’s product first – what is it going to do for me so that I get a return on my investment. So the first thing that attracted us was the fact that the product does amazing things and was extremely good value. We decided to check out the demo and then decided we wanted to meet the team to find out whether the transition to Brainstorm Automate would be easy. It was the team that sold us. From the support of setting up the platform to the coaching in those first seven to eight sessions of knowledge transfer and training, to the technical support day-to-day – it was tremendous. Through the on-platform support function, I got answers in less than an hour or even after just a few minutes. You feel like you have your dedicated team working with you side by side. What else do you want if you have a great product and you have a great team behind it supporting you?
6. In what area do you think that you’ve gained the most value from the relationship with Brainstorm Automate?
I think we’ve gained the most from connecting the dots of our own business. It’s a case of mastering the tool instead of letting the tool master you. We mastered the tool’s functionality and we understood what it was capable of and then we translated that to our business. We even found the platform exposing some weaknesses that we never thought about – not necessarily weaknesses in any of our products but weaknesses in the sense of we didn’t have the real content and information that we needed for this tool to serve us well so it kind of allowed us to look inwards in our own business. It allowed us to think a little bit bigger and allowed us to think internally about what we wanted to do with the business and what we wanted to do with the platform. It just allowed us to grow much bigger.
7. Why should someone reading this take action now instead of waiting to look for another solution?
You’ll get all the right answers that you’re looking for. The demo was fantastic, the training was great, the one-on-one concierge service that you provided for our team, they gave you the right information so even if you know I chose to go with a different platform the amount of value that I got from you guys in those sessions before we made the decision was so incremental that I didn’t want to go anywhere else. I believed in that team and I think waiting for another platform to come around and give you the right tools or someone to come and tell you this is what you need to do. It’s just going to waste time in your own business, you’re going to waste time trying to solve something that’s not there. Whereas if you dive into the platform with the right support and the right help – if you are waiting – I would encourage you to kind of look a little bit more inward and think about the business. If you’re passionate about your business, if you really want to move forward with it, make that decision because they’re going to support you.
8. If someone is reading this and wants to learn more about you and your business and what you’re doing, where can they find you?
We’re pretty connected on social media. Our website at shadowcreativestudios.com is a great place to check out what we do. I’m available on LinkedIn with my co-founder as well. You can reach out to me through Instagram, Twitter; you can even email me on [email protected] if you have any questions. I’m always happy to kind of talk with you.