IT Solutions

Having the right resources, tools, and processes in place are an absolute must to build a robust business development environment.

Creating, developing, optimizing, managing, and tracking your sales and marketing efforts require effective toolsets. There are a myriad of services out there to help manage your business.  At ChannelBound, we are constantly reviewing and testing out these new tools as they evolve.  Always, with the question – How will this help my business?  Are there any catches?  Is there a ramp time involved?  Am I going to be “locked in” to the service?  Is it intuitive is it easy to use?

Custom Development

Off-the-shelf software packages can help with some aspects of your business, but many times custom application development is the answer to your business needs. Our experienced team designs custom solutions to meet unique business goals and has delivered to Fortune 1000 clients.

Marketing Automation

ChannelBound’s Platform of choice for integrated inbound marketing is Hubspot. After serious evaluation of many competing marketing automation solutions, we decided Hubspot was the most natural fit.

MIT did a study you can access here MIT STUDY on HUBSPOT.  The results were impressive, here are some highlights:

  • 3.51x more visitors per month within one year
  • 6.12x more leads per month within one year
  • 74% of customers saw an increase in sales revenue within 7 months

Hubspot basically invented / popularized inbound marketing. We like there ethos …..  and they just went public.  The company has a market valuation around $1B (http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=HUBS&ql=1) .  They are basically the industry gold standard for Inbound Marketing.

That said, I (Brett here) have been around enterprise software for around 20 years. I understand an integrated ERP vs a best-of-breed (or stand alone) solution.  After our analysis, if Hubspot is not the best fit for your company, we have easy to use options based upon the channels / content / frequency / reporting that you require.  These are easy to ramp up.

ChannelBound helps you select the right set of tools based upon how you plan to initiate, grow, and build your channel marketing practice. We can help you build a unified platform of tools or standardize on something like Hubspot.  Understanding the Total Cost of Ownership and how your business process will function is key.

CRM

CRM for the SMB market is basically commoditized. Hubspot integrates with all the leading CRM software packages.  Most companies we talk to are already using some sort of CRM.  Often times, Salesforce.com can be overkill.  Most packages are good as long as your process is efficient and easily manages all of your communications.  Email integration is a must.

CRM packages we have integrated:

  • Salesforce.com
  • Sugar CRM
  • Insight.ly
  • Zoho CRM
  • NetSuite
  • Oracle Sales Cloud

 

Social Media

Hubspot’s integrated process for managing social media engagement is our recommended choice. However, stand alone tools can be cost effective and easy to use.

Until A.I. can create content, we are stuck with having smart people do it. Here are some sources to automate this task.

Campaign Management

  • MailChimp
  • Constant Contact

 

Content Management System

Most content management systems are fairly similar. If you’re website is using WordPress, Drupal, or Weebly you already have a content management system.

Hubspot is its own unified content management system.

20% of the web runs on wordpress. (http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/27/19-percent-of-the-web-runs-on-wordpress/)  Channelbound and its related web properties use WordPress.

Analytics

Hubspot is all about Analytics. The platform reports on everything and shows you what is working and what is not.

Google Analytics is free and can be leveraged to get basic reporting on your website’s statistics.

Social Media Analytics come integrated with Hubspot as well as many of the social media platforms such as Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Bit.ly, and Buffer.   For more information click here:  http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/20/top-10-social-media-analytics-tools-the-venturebeat-index/.

 

Content Development

When it comes to Logo and Graphic Design there are crowdsourcing options available at a good price. Most high end branding agencies frown upon use of the crowd for graphic design, I think they have a good point.

99designs.com

https://infogr.am/  – can be used for creating compelling infographics.

Adding video to your website and other controlled properties can add a great deal of value to your user engagement.  There are several Saas video tools available.  According to Socialable, http://www.socialable.co.uk/21-of-the-best-video-marketing-tools-for-2014/ there are at least 21 good options for creating and editing videos.

Our team at ChannelBound is familiar with:

  • Prezi
  • Powtoon
  • Vidyard

Sales Tools

Chat clients for your website. Zopim & Olark are two good freemium tools to incorporate to your website so you are alerted when someone comes to your website and you chat directly with them (and hopefully get a lead!).  We use Zopim on the ChannelBound website and it has been great.

For proposal, contract, and other sales collateral content management, organization, and workflow you can try www.tinderbox.com.

General Tools

  • Zapier.com
  • IFFFT
  • Zoho
  • Google Apps
  • Filament

Mobile App Development

Mashable did a great review of various cloud based services for developing mobile apps for both iOS and Android.  You can view them here:

http://mashable.com/2013/12/03/build-mobile-apps/