Lead generation services agency grows revenue 120% since 2020 with Vendasta

The approach

Increasing retention with a client dashboard

Blyth is candid about his initial resistance when it came to partnering with Vendasta—until he got a demo.

“At first I was like, ‘There’s no way we need this.’ But to be fair, the whole white-label outsourcing methodology was uncommon back then… but after actually getting a demo, I was sold. I loved the software and still do.”

A big differentiator for Blyth was Vendasta’s client portal Business App: “The first thing that sold me was the ability for clients to have a dashboard to house all of their digital marketing assets. And the fact that things like KPIs and notifications could plug into their portal, along with all their digital assets? That impressed me.”

In Blyth’s view, the white-labeled client dashboard allowed clients to easily manage their digital strategy in one place, leading them to deepen their relationship with DMC Local. This ultimately reduced client churn.

Additionally, Blyth calls out Vendasta’s client reporting software Executive Reports, integrated in Business App’s client portal, for increasing retention with strong proof-of-performance.

“Executive Reports are a great way to benchmark client success,” Blyth says. “It shows clients where they’re starting from and how it matches up with industry standards. Then they can clearly see growth indicators as you add value.”

Maintaining expertise while solving more problems for clients

DMC Local’s mandate is to help local business owners achieve their goals through lead generation services with a focus on digital ads and SEO. But there are many ways to help businesses increase revenue through digital marketing.

Before tapping into services that are now DMC Local staples, such as website development, content creation, reputation management, and social media, Blyth needed to wear fewer hats to free up time to be strategic. Part of that included fulfilling more value by outsourcing to experts.

Blyth admits his gut reaction to using white-label outsourcing was “No, we’re going to do it in house. We have more control.” 

But obviously that mentality did not last. “There’s a reason we’ve been with Vendasta so long,” Blyth says. 

Asked what exactly the reason is, Blyth doesn’t hesitate: “Innovation. Vendasta is always innovating, adding, and improving on what they do,” Blyth says. “There’s comfort in knowing that if I resell products from the Marketplace, you guys are always going to support and improve them—especially [Vendasta owned and operated] products.”

Trust is also another big one for Blyth, especially due to his initial reservations about letting go of the control of doing everything in house: “DMC Local is the one with the client relationships, so if Vendasta fulfilled something subpar, we’d take responsibility for it. And so there has to be trust—and there definitely is.”

Execution

A winning campaign for supporting local

The geographical area where DMC Local is based poses some unique challenges, according to Blyth. Namely, businesses can be slower to embrace a more digital presence. 

“Alberta’s always been the wild west in terms of adopting technologies and the way people do business… it’s not rare to find business owners who have been running newspaper ads for 20 years,” he says. Though these businesses realized they needed to adapt to the digital world, Blyth felt they were still biding their time.

Then 2020 changed everything. With the pandemic, the sense of urgency for local businesses helped DMC Local propel them into the future—to ensure they had a future.

“Vendasta helped quite a bit by being on the ball with a whole campaign for supporting local. They put together packages that we could resell to give businesses free tools to keep their business running.” 

It was the introduction of freemium products that helped many businesses that were “biding their time” jump into a whole new world of opportunity, and DMC Local was there to be the expert guide along the way.

Adopting more of the Vendasta platform’s capabilities to streamline

Another win for DMC was streamlining more of their operations through the Vendasta platform for increased efficiency. 

“We’ve kind of married everything into it,” Blyth says. “We’ve started moving even our billing over the Vendasta’s [merchant services], just because we like how that’s functioning too.”

“We’ve now started using the proposal system in Vendasta, too,” Blyth continues. “It’s helped close more deals.”

Closing more deals with Vendasta’s sales enablement training

On the topic of closing more deals, Blyth also goes out of his way to show his appreciation for Gracen, his account manager from Vendasta. She acts as an extension of his sales team—without being on DMC Local’s payroll.

“Gracen has been training some of our sales staff, and one in particular has now booked back-to-back meetings,” he says. “Our salespeople wouldn’t have had the confidence to sell these products if it wasn’t for Gracen’s training.”

Blyth credits this sales training with DMC Local’s ability to close at a quicker pace. Additionally, with a dedicated account manager to offer expert guidance, his sales team feels empowered to sell packages of bundled products instead of a la carte.

 “[Vendasta] is constantly contributing to our success every day… Now, we’ve got systems in place due to how we’re selling our packages, and even bringing on more quality sales people.”