Solving complexity with agency automation and integrations

In the early stages as a solopreneur, work is hard, but it’s not complex.

You’re really only selling one product or a niche product group, like websites. There’s only one person doing all the work, so nothing gets lost in translation. You typically only work with a small group of clients or a specific type of client.

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As you grow your agency, however, things change:

• As you start to add on more clients, important client information can get lost.
• When you expand your product offering, you expand the complexity of sales, fulfillment, invoicing, billing, and more.
• When you add more employees to take on the additional client work, you suddenly end up with more activities than you can monitor.
• Your processes can stifle your sales teams.

This is the point where you need to find ways for your ever-growing team to work together efficiently.

The answer to this growing challenge of complexity and coordination?

Integration and agency automation.

The importance of an effective agency ecosystem

You shouldn’t just cobble together platforms, tools, and technologies to try to solve all of these challenges on a piece-meal basis. You need an effective ecosystem to power your agency and ensure you can scale profitably and efficiently.

If your ecosystem is broken, you likely:

• Won’t be able to continue meeting your clients’ needs
• Will fail to deliver more than one solution
• Will fall short on delivering a great client experience

Scaling is difficult with a complex and expensive tech stack. It increases the risks that you’ll lose information and duplicate your efforts. More importantly, though, it will ultimately lead to a fragmented and frustrating experience for clients with multiple logins, alerts, and reports.

The capabilities required to drive great customer experiences

Your ability to drive great customer experiences comes down to three buckets of capabilities.

1. The tools that you use to operate and scale: You need a powerful, integrated tech stack in order to effectively market, sell, bill, and fulfill.
2. The actual products that you sell: You need new products and services to sell to constantly keep up with growing client demands and reach new markets. Not to mention, a Vendasta study shows that selling a local business four products (as opposed to just one or two) increases your retention rate to 80 percent.
3. The business delivery model: You need a way to deliver a seamless client experience, so your business customers can easily see value.

Without these three capabilities, you risk:

• A loss of revenue
• Higher client churn
• Potentially going out of business altogether

The question is, how do you ensure your three capability buckets are filled as you (and your business clients) scale in complexity—without any messy leaks or spills?

By incorporating deeply integrated products, services, and productivity enhancers into your tools with agency automations.

This way, your solutions not only create efficiencies and drive better customer experiences; but they also promote trust and build longevity for long-lasting relationships.

Agency automation is the key to delivering personalized value

A common misconception when it comes to agency automation is that it will transform meaningful business opportunities into robotic, repetitive, and one-size-fits-all interactions with your customers (Business News Daily).

Luckily, that couldn’t be farther from the truth.

In reality, agency automation can facilitate the unique approach you must adopt to deliver personalized, high-value experiences in sales and marketing.

You can accomplish this by leveraging:

1. Deep customer data. Having the right integrated stack of tech tools to operate and scale will always include a centralized, easily accessible wealth of insights to draw from.
2. Artificial intelligence. Go low touch but high intelligence with Vendasta’s AI-driven marketing automation, sales tools, and an integrated CRM to ensure that all processes are simple, efficient, and smart.
3. Machine learning. Collecting data is one thing, but machine learning can help crunch the numbers so you can actually use them to make better data-driven business decisions.

In effect, automation solves the problem of complexity and coordination so you can focus on your core efforts. However, consider the fact that the same problem exists for your clients as well. Their business operations are getting more complex, too.

For example, research shows that businesses are way behind when it comes to technology adoption.

Technology adoption is lagging in nearly every area, including:

• Ecommerce
• Cloud computing
• Ordering
• Social media

They need someone to show them what tools are required and how to best use them. Operating with increased efficiency yourself, you are now poised to offer clients a personalized human touch where it’s most valued—by positioning yourself as a trusted expert.

Your clients will buy from you over the competition precisely because of this expertise, paired with your increased capacity for excellent customer service and support and a fast and simple buying process.

The growth and scaling benefits for your agency and your clients

The real power behind agency automation is the ability to grow your clients’ business and scale your agency at the same time. It’s a true partnership.

When growth happens, these are the tangible benefits you can expect:

1. Boost client retention to over 80% over two years

Solving more problems builds trust and longevity.

Selling a single product or service has a retention rate of only 30 percent over two years. Without automation, this might be all you can manage to deliver at your current size and capacity. Now consider selling products from Vendasta’s Marketplace. Packaging four customized solutions together will boost retention to an incredible 80 percent over two years.

Plus, those solutions are entirely integrated into one platform (CRM) for you, and one dashboard (Business App) for your clients.

2. Ensure your agency is 7X more profitable per client on average

Speaking of client retention, studies show that it is easier, more cost effective, and more profitable to sell to repeat business than to convert new prospects. In fact, the more often repeat business converts, the higher their average order value compared to new clients (LinkedIn).

Of course, scaling also includes bringing on new clients. Qualifying leads and guiding prospects down the sales funnel is an efficiently tailored process with automation.

But once you seamlessly onboard a new business, you can ensure that account will stick with you, grow with you, and generate, on average, 7X more revenue.

Publishing email campaigns, creating proposals connected to ordering workflows, project management, and more are simple and streamlined when you scale your operations with our CRM Platform.

3. Save at least $10,000 each year by consolidating your tech stack

You want your agency to be a trusted expert, and trusted experts need an integrated ecosystem to power their businesses with a consolidated tech stack.

Think about the time, labor, and expense incurred by comparing rates, testing tools, navigating different interfaces and platforms, remembering several login passwords, training team members, managing multiple bills, and more.

It’s not a great experience. And if that is true for you, it is true for your clients.

By using a single white-labled platform with Vendasta, you can deliver an exceptional client experience all under your own brand, while saving money.

Scaling doesn’t have to be complex. With agency automation and integrations, you can solve several of the challenges that weigh down even the best agencies in the industry.