We’ve spoken about marketing automation on the show before, but today we’re going to highlight it. Marketing automation refers to software platforms and services that are created for marketing professionals to more effectively communicate on multiple channels online and automate repetitive tasks. So, this is things such as setting up email workflows, integrating your CRM with your email marketing system, automating social media online. This is something that the wine business has been slow to adopt, but those that have, have shown some real return on it.
Today we’re going to talk to Morgan Bell, who is one of the principals at SharpSpring, which is one of the leaders in the marketing automation space. We recorded this late last year, but it’s evergreen, so it’s appropriate today as it was back then. And with the advent of Covid and the need for more direct to consumer sales, those that adopt a marketing automation platform will be in much better shape.
On with the show.
Transcript on Marketing Automation in the Wine Biz
Michael Wangbickler:
My next guest drives the product strategy at SharpSpring, which is a complete sales and marketing automation platform. He manages the team of product managers, designers, and other product services roles. In his nearly five years of the company.
He has experience ranging from onboarding to client management to product development. This diverse background gives him unique insights into the needs of his customers, and how the platform and market innovation can help them grow. Welcome to the show Morgan Bell.
Morgan Bell:
Hi, Mike, thanks for having me.
Michael Wangbickler:
Thanks for being with me. Full disclosure, Balzac Communications and Marketing is a Silver Partner at SharpSpring, so if anybody on the podcast is interested in talking a little bit more about this offline, you are welcome to reach out to me.
But I’m really happy to have Morgan on to really talk about the nuts and bolts of the SharpSpring platform, but also just in general what wineries can do and distilleries and breweries can do to implement some marketing automation.
So, before we get started, can you let the listeners know how they can get in contact with you?
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, that’s really easy, you can just go to SharpSpring.com and check us out there.
Michael Wangbickler:
Awesome. So first, let’s do a definition. What is marketing automation?
Morgan Bell:
So there are a lot of different definitions, I think it’s a pretty broad space, but the simplest way to understand it is it’s a set of tools that help you scale one to one conversations for larger customer bases, delivering them personalized communication and helping foster engagement with your content.
Michael Wangbickler:
Great. And how does it work?
Morgan Bell:
Sure, so really, we start with tracking activity on your website and in your emails and then we surface the most important activity that contacts, or leads are having with your business through those channels.
We start off by setting up some kind of simple things like notifications about when somebody clicks through an email for a specific link, or submits a form to contact you, or download some content that you’ve provided them. Then when we really get into the automated part is, you take some of those – maybe more tedious for a marketer – types of conversations: a thank you email, a simple drip campaign delivering the content and on the other side of that form. We build out workflows to do those things for you automatically.
Then kind of the last piece of that, that gets into a bit more personalization, is we take what we know about people from how they’ve interacted with your content and your website and things they’ve told you about themselves, and we segment them and use that segmentation to provide them with personalized content.
Michael Wangbickler:
OK, so can you give me an example of what a workflow might look like?
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, for sure. So, kind of a simple workflow, you always want to start these off with a customer or a lead interacting with you in some way and engaging and showing you [unintelligible]. So someone could fill out a form, just a ‘contact us’ form, for instance, on our site, we’ve got a bunch of forms based on what piece of content you might want or whether you’re a marketing agency or direct user.
You just fill out the form and say, “Hey, I’m Morgan and I want to learn more about your company.” What we’ll do immediately in the workflow is we’ll add you to our main email list. If you’ve told us some things about yourself other than basic information in that form, we’ll kind of record that to a contact record and then maybe we’ll send you a thank you email, or deliver the content you asked for and put a few links in there.
Like A, B, C, and your link B is about IPAs, Link C is sours and Link A is lager’s.
And so I click the IPAs link, and so now we know that you like IPAs and I will deliver you more content about those, and put you in a special list specific to people interested in IPAs.
Michael Wangbickler:
And that all requires a CRM system to get information, right?
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, and that’s why we pitch ourselves as a sales and marketing automation platform. So really, those are two sides of the same coin. Your salespeople need leads to sell to and you’re marketing people need to actually have the sale get made to continue running the business, so we have a fully functional CRM in SharpSpring. Full featured CRM, and the idea is you take all that information that you’ve gathered about people as they’ve interacted with your site and your emails and maybe people earlier on in the sales process.
And you use that to help a salesperson and power the CRM to make it more useful to salespeople or to marketers just trying to learn more about what’s going on inside their business.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right, and so in the in the beverage business, you know, one of the one of the challenges is, is to have that ideal of personalization at scale personalization for those that don’t necessarily know what that means is basically that when somebody receives any kind of correspondence from you that it that it has some sort of a personal connection with the recipient. So that’s the way that marketing overall is moving.
But it can be very time consuming to do that on a on a one on one basis, right? Basically, on a case by case basis, you’re going through emails or trying to send emails to people that’s personalized. You know, that can take very they can take a long time. But using a system like this, you’re able to do that at scale.
Morgan Bell:
Exactly, yeah, I mean, I think it’s every marketer’s dream to be able to just go out and speak to people one on one and persuade them and convince them to go get involved with their company and their product, but that doesn’t work at scale. It doesn’t help you grow a business.
And so really you want to be able to focus on – so the higher level, more important things like strategy, competitive analysis, your brand, your message, and then take those tasks that are kind of starting those conversations with customers and automate that part of it.
Michael Wangbickler:
Right. So, here’s so give me an example. The one that one of the functions of software such as SharpSpring is that you can build out – we talked about segmentation, you call them buyer personas – and so you can segment your list into different buyer personas, and then if you are sending out an email blast, for instance, to everybody on your list, you can include sections within that email that pulls from the buyer personas in a way that basically says that if it’s this buyer persona, then we deliver this message, if it’s this, we deliver this message.
And in that way, you tailor your correspondence to the recipient.
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, exactly, and that works for both emails and for your website.
Michael Wangbickler:
That’s right, yeah.
Morgan Bell:
Yeah. We’re all consumers, I mean we see a lot of marketing every day and we all do, and for me personally, I stop and take a look at something when it actually speaks to what I’m interested in.
And so just getting a generic email with 50 different products in it versus an email with the five products that I happen to like, one of those is going to make me want to engage quite a bit more.
And the same thing goes for your website, too. Instead of just a billboard that everybody sees as they pass by, we can turn that website into a conversation where you’re seeing something new and something specific to you based on what we know that you are interested in.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, Amazon is kind of the model for this, aren’t they? They deliver you to get information based on who you are and your buying habits.
Morgan Bell:
Exactly.
Michael Wangbickler:
Now, we can’t necessarily get as sophisticated as that, but there are certain things that we can do based on what information we have. So, I know that that often-enough users of SharpSpring use it for business to business and to get lead generation trying to get leads so that your people can call on them.
But for the beverage producer who is business to consumer and, you know, the whole in the in the beverage business, there’s this whole direct to consumer push.
Michael Wangbickler:
You know, how what are some applications for market marketing automation that that you can use in those situations?
Morgan Bell:
We try our best to make a platform that works for both B2B and B2C companies, sometimes that’s a lot easier for B2B because they have a much more specific buyer persona a lot of the time, but with B2C the same core principles are important, right? And often with an even larger audience, so you want to make sure that – again personalization is key, content is key, delivering the right message at the right time to folks.
And so especially in a B2C business where you might have a lot of initial interest or a lot of visitors to your site and you need to know how best do I spend my time, how best do I spend my money, too, on those folks? That’s where marketing automation, I think, can really come in handy. So once a customer or lead has expressed a certain level of interest, you can start really amping up the message to those folks without hopefully bothering them.
So, the difference there would be if I come to your site and you’ve gated some content as a consumer, maybe a coupon or something that I wanted to see, and I had one interaction with you. You want to keep your brand top of mind with me, put me on to a drip campaign, send me an email every week or a couple of months just to kind of keep that around, maybe retarget me with social media, so I’m seeing you on Instagram, I’m seeing you on Facebook.
But then maybe I keep coming back to the site and I actually purchase from you and maybe I visit the distillery or your winery. And at that point, you know, not only am I just a customer, I’m starting to become an advocate, maybe an evangelist for the brand even, and then you can kind of reposition your message, you can start hitting them with communication a little more frequently, giving them opportunities to talk about and share the brand.
And so I think really this is the same core principles which are “I want to adjust my message to who you are, and what your interest is in my business and my specific products” – that still applies, although sometimes in a different way for those B2C companies.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah. And, you know, one of the powerful things about this is that you can do like most of this work up front, right? Because, you know, like setting up these workflows and setting up these drip campaigns, you kind of basically set it up ahead of time and then then you can trigger those workflows at any point and it will automatically deliver whatever it is that you want to deliver to your… this this potential buyer at any time.
And another cool thing is like as you say, like if you start to see more activity from them and they start, you know, they start to purchase more and visit more, etc., but then they become an advocate, you can also, you know, include like in that workflow that it’s flagged for follow up by like a sales rep or by your direct to consumer manager, who you say “reach out to this person personally” and give them that personal touch.
And all that is done through this process of software.
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, exactly. And one of the really cool things about front loading that effort is you’re going to have more time to make your marketing deeper and more personal and reach a broader audience instead of being stuck on the hamster wheel, doing the same three or five things every day to just keep up with what’s going on in the business.
You can invest early in setting up a series of automation’s to just handle that stuff for you. And then the rest of your time is spent going, OK, well, I have my core message down, I have my basic communication and nurture flows and even reporting on my marketing spend all set up.
Now I can turn my focus to how do I yeah, like you said, create advocates out of folks, so I work with my direct to consumer manager or sales person to reach out to people or just get more and more targeted and more and more specific with different pieces of your message over time.
Michael Wangbickler:
And one of the ways that SharpSpring in particular does this is – to measure this – is through lead scoring, which you can set up so that basically the more people to visit or take action or purchase or what have you, the higher the lead score is, for instance, so you can always see like who are the most active people in your CRM based on that lead score.
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, lead score is one of the things that really gets me excited because there’s just so much you can do with it every single way that somebody could interact with your site, or your emails, or your content, any piece of information you collect about somebody that they tell you through a form or through any other means, all of that can contribute to this top level score.
That makes it really easy to know who to focus on. And there is even you can get into some of the fancy things that lead scoring does that I think are really cool, which are you can detract points from people, too, for a lead score.
So if you’re really targeting as a brewery, right, and you’re really trying to target people who are interested in buying beer, but maybe you specifically are working on distribution deals, and so you want to find a distributor.
Well, you can set something up where you detract points from people that are just buying for personal use or identifying, as “Well I’m just passing through as a consumer and I and I don’t intend to distribute”, well, you can detract points there and pull that score down.
So even if they’re really engaged, then maybe they’re not your target customer. And then we get into like decay – so maybe they were really interested six months ago, but over time, that really high lead scoring doesn’t mean as much because that interest has waned over time.
So, it’s just it’s very customizable and very powerful, and you can just kind of target anything that matters to you about a specific lead, which I think is really cool.
Michael Wangbickler:
Yeah, it’s super powerful and it’s very creative, and people can do whatever they want. For instance, like you say, in breweries there’s decay, so like if somebody’s score, you know, who has a high score, decays past a certain point and someone notices, your DTC manager or what have you, and say, “hey, this this person hasn’t interacted with us in a while, you might want to follow up with that.”
So basically, what it does is it gives you additional revenue out of a customer that potentially would have gone away otherwise.
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, and if that DTC Manager is looking at a list of hundreds of leads and saying, who do I call, you could just go sort them by lead score. Oh, great. I know who the most interested person is right off the bat and who is probably going to be the best use of my time. So, it’s really useful for prioritization as well.
Michael Wangbickler:
Absolutely.
Michael Wangbickler:
So, give me a brief overview of SharpSpring and how your partner program or partner model works, because we’re as I mentioned earlier, we’re a silver partner for SharpSpring.
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, yeah. So SharpSpring works on an agency model, and by that, I mean about 90 percent of our business comes from marketing agencies. And the reason that we do that is because a lot of the small to medium sized businesses are not going to have a marketing team of the size or sophistication that is able to invest up front effort to learn a platform and build out automations and everything to reap what are huge benefits in the near term.
But we do require some upfront work. And so, we found that people are far more successful when they end up going through marketing agencies. And you can focus on the core of your business and let somebody else that knows how to use the platform as an expert is running it for a bunch of other clients in your vertical employ some tactic that they know work and are proven and that they can do quickly for you in a platform like SharpSpring.
So really, we found that agency focus is just kind of a win for clients and for us because agencies make great partners and hopefully have a great experience on SharpSpring and become advocates for us.
But yes, especially an agency that focuses in a given vertical we found find a whole lot of success because you probably have tried and true things that you know are going to work there that you set up before, that you can go and deploy for new clients pretty easily.
Michael Wangbickler:
Absolutely. Because we know the business and know what opportunities and challenges there are. And trust me, there’s plenty of challenges in the beverage business because it is a regulated industry that this stuff isn’t as straightforward as one might think and you might not necessarily have the same kind of churn that you would get in something else.
But so, do you have any case studies that you can give us an example of a successful implementation?
Morgan Bell:
So that’s tough. We definitely do, as a company, I personally am not sure what I have off the top of my head, though, or. Yeah, yeah, I can think back though. I can think back, so I kind of alluded to this in my bio, but I started as an account manager and on boarder at SharpSpring before I got into product development.
Which meant, you know, when a new agency joins, they’ve got me for the first few days to tell them how to use SharpSpring and how to deploy it. And without specific examples, that was a really a powerful experience for me.
That kind of is what made me believe in SharpSpring, because you could see people come in and see how just adopting the platform and buying into inbound marketing concepts and front loading some of this work could really change their business and help them get a lot more clients and help those clients be much more successful across industries.
So it’s not a specific case study, but I have seen people come in new to the space and just adopt marketing automation and see what was initially, “hey, we’ll try this out for a couple of months and see how it goes” turn into, “oh, we’re running our business in a totally new way now and finding a whole lot more success that way.”
Michael Wangbickler:
Great. So, we’ve covered we’ve covered a lot of things the SharpSpring does throughout this podcast, but is there anything else you want to give a summary of what SharpSpring is and how it works for its clients?
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, so I’ll move quickly through some of the cool things that we do, because really what I think is special about marketing automation companies these days is we’re so broad. We do a whole lot of different things.
The reason we do that is a basic philosophy that by having all of your data in one place connected, it amplifies its power and it makes the effort that you put into your marketing more powerful and more clear into what’s working and what’s not.
So, when we direct the product strategy there at SharpSpring and we don’t build anything that we don’t think will be better because it’s in SharpSpring connected with everything else that we do. So, to run through that real quick, we have a fully featured CRM customer relationship manager.
And so, we are collecting information about contacts and we have built that in a way that it works well for salespeople and sales managers, and this will talk about how our sales automation as well as marketing automation platform. You can set up tasks to complete as a salesperson, as a manager, you can report on how they’re completing those tasks, take opportunities and move them through a pipeline.
All basic CRM stuff, right? But what makes it better is we have the entire history of engagement that happened with a given lead before they got into your sales process. So we know when they came and visited your site, we know which emails they clicked on, what products they were interested in, and that’s all right at a salesperson’s fingertips to have a better conversation and to help move that sale. On the marketing side…
Michael Wangbickler:
Which could be super creepy if you’re not careful…
Morgan Bell:
It definitely can. And that is that is something that it can take some experience to get right, and put on your kind of consumer empathy hat for sure. But I think if you talk about it in the right way, people tend to be appreciative of it as long as you’re not spamming anybody, but you’re saying, “hey, I sent you an email that had content you cared about” instead of content you didn’t.
And as a salesperson, I’m not going to waste your time talking about products B, C and D when really, I know product A is what you care about. So, I think if you use it in the right way, hopefully it’s not too creepy. So, on the marketing side all things I’ve kind of alluded to before, like lead scoring and segmentation.
But we also go further, and we have form builders and designers, landing page designers and where you can have the same dynamic content and landing pages in your website that’s in your emails for consistent, personalized experience.
We also do blogs and social media. You can do social posts through SharpSpring, track them as campaigns related back to your email – content related – back to the specific forms on your website, all to generate an ROI at the end of the day that lets you see what of your marketing efforts is working and what isn’t.
And then on the sales side, we do a lot of those the same principles, but focus on showing you which of your sales efforts are working and which aren’t, and where you’re having problems in your pipeline, in your sales process and what’s working really well and even flagging deals that we think might be problematic or stale or need a follow up or a high touch situation.
But across everything that SharpSpring does, really what we’re going for is taking what in many cases could be 10 or 15 different software platforms that are all disconnected or have hobbled together with a variety of APIs and connections and putting them all in one place so you can have a singular view of what’s going on, both in your marketing funnel and in your sales funnel to connect all of those efforts together and hopefully amplify it.
Michael Wangbickler:
And then on top of that, you actually recently introduced a digital ad platform as well, correct?
Morgan Bell:
That we did, that is very fresh news for us. We recently made a small acquisition of a company called Perfect Audience with the goal of creating a really deep integration of display ads as well as what SharpSpring is already great at, which is website behavior and email and all of that.
Michael Wangbickler:
So, it can extend to programmatic buying?
Morgan Bell:
Yeah, exactly. Our vision for that which we’re going to be working on very soon here and releasing a bunch of this stuff in the first half of next year is taking like let’s say you’ve got a workflow where somebody fills out a form on your site.
When somebody fills out a form, they’re already expressing a really high level of interest. And so, sending them an email and then reaching out as a salesperson is a pretty normal thing to do there.
But ninety eight percent of site visitors are not filling out that form. And so, all that money that you’ve spent to try to get them to your site in the first-place kind of goes out the door as soon as they leave. But by connecting SharpSpring to this digital ad platform, just because they visited your site, you can retarget them and they’re going to see your brand again on other websites, on Instagram, on Facebook, all over the place to the extent that you want.
And that helps get more value out of the money you already spent and brought them to the site, bring them to the site. And this is especially powerful for small businesses. It can really help you appear as a much bigger brand than maybe you really are, and that can help persuade people to buy it for sure.
Michael Wangbickler:
Excellent. So, any final thoughts before we wrap up here?
Morgan Bell:
Nothing specific. It’s been a pleasure to be here with you today, Mike, I was excited to do the podcast because you’re in an industry that means a lot to me and my recreational activities.
And so, an opportunity to extend what I know about SharpSpring and marketing, automation to that audience is really exciting. And I think there is a lot of opportunity for growth in the industry and hopefully SharpSpring can help out with it.
Michael Wangbickler:
I couldn’t agree more. So, hey, thanks a bunch, Morgan, for being on the show today. Really appreciate it. This has been a nice little primer on marketing innovation and how it all works, and I’m hoping that my listeners get some value out of it. So thanks a bunch.
Morgan Bell:
Well, thanks for having me, it’s been a pleasure.
