Flawless Inbound Inc.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

PCM Canada is an IT solutions provider for small, medium, and large-sized enterprises. We partner with world-class manufacturers and resell their products to business customers. I'm the director of marketing and vendor relations, so I'm responsible for the national marketing strategy as well as digital and non-digital efforts of our marketing team.  

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Flawless Inbound?

Combining our services and the manufacturing technology, we created a brand new product. We were looking for a company to help us develop a go-to-market strategy and generate demand for this product.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They worked with our in-house resources to create a go-to-market strategy. When that strategy was complete, they supported our ongoing marketing efforts, helping us build our landing pages, websites, and a new microsite. In addition, they generated email blasts to prospective clients and integrated our tools with HubSpot to automate our marketing. In terms of content creation, they developed some video content and assisted us with blogs and an e-book. They continue to help us generate the leads that our business development team can follow up on.

What is the team composition?

We work directly with their CEO and our account management team.  

How did you come to work with them?

We were introduced by a mutual contact.

How much have you invested with them?

We've spent about $70,000 CAD ($55,000 USD).

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in February 2017 and the relationship is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We've been able to sell our product through the website they helped us build, which is highly important to us. Also, we’ve made good progress in creating a sales pipeline. They helped us close some deals, which generated millions of dollars. Our website has been getting more traffic quarter over quarter and it ranks higher because of the SEO campaigns Flawless Inbound has been implementing.

How did they perform from a project management standpoint?

Initially, we met with them weekly to discuss how we could improve our website and lead generation. Now, we have in-person meetings quarterly to go over the reviews, and we also have video meetings via WebEx. They're very transparent and communicate with us regularly. They use some project management tools, so we're able to track progress very effectively.

What did you find most impressive about them?

Their strategy works perfectly for us. They stay on top of the market trends and market technology, which helps us accelerate our sales. Fully understanding our needs, they focus their work on generating a pipeline for our product. Also, we like their personality.

Are there any areas they could improve?

They're starting to carve out their niche and focus more on what they do exceptionally well, which works for us as a client.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Understand their value proposition and don't expect them to do everything. Your project will be more successful if you have an in-house person who works closely with them and brings ideas to the table.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I'm the president of HPCI, a company that provides software technology to help its clients manage their telecommunications and IT vendors.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Flawless Inbound?

We never really focused on our marketing initiatives. I was managing that, but I didn't have the time or the experience, so we were looking for a vendor to help us with our marketing strategy.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

They helped us narrow down our target audiences and clarify the details of our service and product offerings. By customizing our message, they assisted us with social media marketing and made us look more focused to potential clients. In addition, they distributed that message through targeted email campaigns and created a specific call to action for us. It was a new effort for us, so they guided and supported us throughout the whole process. Before we started working with them, we had to look for opportunities, but now the opportunities are finding us.

What is the team composition?

We mostly deal with our dedicated project manager. The owner of the business has been directly involved in all the meetings. They also use other members of their team when needed.

How did you come to work with them?

They were highly recommended to us by an organization that used them for their digital marketing.

How much have you invested with them?

We spent in the range of $10,000–$50,000.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in September 2017, and it's an ongoing project.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We don't have specific revenue numbers since we've only been working with them for 2.5 months (the full sales cycle is usually longer). The messaging they produced for us and their overall work has laid a foundation for good results moving forward. Having a lot of new opportunities coming our way is a drastic change for us.

How did they perform from a project management standpoint?

They're impeccable. They're responsive, always on time, and deliver what they said they would. We mostly used email for communication and WebEx for meetings.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They seem very knowledgeable and savvy when it comes to latest and greatest technology that can support our strategies.

Do you have any advice for potential customers?

Be prepared to answer questions about your business and don’t assume they know all the answers.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am the president of Two Small Men with Big Hearts. We are a residential moving company operating in most of the major city centers in Canada.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Flawless Inbound?

We were trying to streamline our marketing process. Flawless committed to comprehensive strategic development and assistance in the execution of our marketing plan.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

Flawless is helping us transition everything to come under our control, so if we ever decide that we want to move on, we have all of the passwords to everything that we're building together and we're not held to them. They help with strategy, not just providing a service.

They’ve revamped our SEO, launched multiple avenues of social media, integrated CRM software into our website to better track our inbound leads, and integrated HubSpot with Salesforce. The SEO process was collaborative. They took our previous vendor’s information and applied it to their more recent and modern understanding of SEO.

They're building our website very thoroughly. We've looked at logos, color schemes, the functionality, and how to streamline the inbound lead process for customers to make it as efficient as possible. We've looked at other key features like tracks featured. We've also integrated our claims process into the backend of the website.

We moved our paid search from our first provider. On October 1st, we launched our campaign with Flawless so it's still in its early stages. Flawless moved our email hosting to Outlook so we have control of our emails as opposed to being hosted with a vendor. They also did email nurturing.

What is the team dynamic?

We have a project manager named Patricia. She's very thorough. She manages an SEO specialist, a website creator, and a content creator. She is also closely managed by the owner who I first began communications with. He's very accessible.

How did you come to work with Flawless Inbound?

I'm in a business networking group called TEC Canada. They did a talk about marketing to our group, so I had a couple of meetings with them before we decided to go with them.

How much have you invested with them?

We spend $60,000 a year just on their services. In addition, we pay for HubSpot, email, paid search, and other paid marketing.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with them in June 2017, and the engagement is ongoing.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

We're now able to track statistics which help us decide what types of marketing to pursue because we now know better the costs per click and the costs per lead generation in different marketing avenues. Also, the knowledge of how each customer found us is accurately and easily accessible for our salespeople and helps in conversions.

How did Flawless Inbound perform from a project management standpoint?

So far, so great. We mainly communicate over emails and WebEx meetings. We've taken the time to meet each other in person. We have biweekly meetings.

What did you find most impressive about them?

They seem to care. Our business is important to them. It's not just about the revenue and keeping me as a client. They really want to deliver a better service.

They were fully willing to take on knowledge from other vendors and apply it to what they know as well. They're a living, breathing, learning organization that doesn't have an ego.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It's too early to say. Everything has been really good so far.

BACKGROUND

Introduce your business and what you do there.

I am one of the partners of Alternative Converged Solutions (known as ACSI), and my role is director of business development and sales. We are a value-added reseller, providing IT security and networking solutions for government, education and mid-to-enterprise companies. We’re based in Calgary, Alberta, and are what would be deemed as a boutique company, with approximately 7 employees.

OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE

What challenge were you trying to address with Flawless Inbound?

As a small organization, one of our challenges is how we can get our work out into the marketplace. We’ve built out a pretty good reputation in the market, as well as a client base, but we recognized the fact that we have to grow and expand our reach to really get out there and talk about the solutions we’ve built in the marketplace. Our techs are extremely intelligent and well-regarded in the marketplace. We have some great value to offer, but we were not the best at communicating it. 

Since we're a small organization, we have to be strategic and careful with our dollars—to make sure we’re hitting the right people and getting the right story across. We also didn’t want to come across as aggressive sales people, we wanted to solve a problem, and we wanted to educate the marketplace, but in a way which would make clients come to us to seek information. 

We were looking for a marketing organization which could help our brand, create messaging, and more-or-less reach a larger audience. For us, the challenge is that many of the marketing firms out there today are great at selling consumer products, but, when getting into the IT space, it becomes much more difficult. It’s a complex space, and we do a lot of things for clients, so articulating that and getting it down to a simple message is not as easy as we all recognize.

SOLUTION

What was the scope of their involvement?

We’re a small company, so we lean on Flawless Inbound as our entire department, working with our vendors, and taking on all of these aspects. They even help build proposals for our vendors. The other thing that Flawless Inbound brought to the table was the ability to tell a story, to take the client down that journey, and to first determine who are our key markets, the personas of whom we want to target, and what their pain points are. They helped us identify how we could solve our customer's problem and what the best way to tell that story was.

The advantage with Saher Ghattas [Sales and Marketing Strategist, Flawless Inbound Inc], for us in particular, is that he comes from an IT background. It was unheard of to have someone who understands that space. We needed a technical person who can convert it down to the most basic level. This is where Flawless Inbound can come in and articulate it effectively. It’s an art in itself, and very few can get that story. Flawless Inbound helped us rework our blog and website, created content for the website itself and gave us direction on what the best avenues are. They’re helping us focus on the messaging on our blog and Facebook, bringing it together in one aspect. I had started to lose faith in that space, but, after sitting down with Flawless Inbound, I was reassured that there are people who get it. They created call-to-actions for us and other pieces that had never been addressed by our previous partners.

We’d always wanted to do an e-book, but we didn’t really have the writers and resources to put one together. Flawless Inbound sat down with us, asked us all the right questions and extracted the information they needed. From there, they talked to some of our clients. My engineers were worried that this would be a time-consuming and arduous process, but, at the end of the day, it wasn’t as bad as expected.

How did you come to work with Flawless Inbound?

It is almost an art in itself to deliver this message to the marketplace, and we’ve tried 4-5 firms over the years, each one good at particular pieces, small aspects of the overall marketing piece, but unable to help us reach our audience. They relied on our existing customer base and didn’t really understand the digital marketing aspect of it, but I’ve always recognized that this is the area where we needed to create a story. The previous company we worked with was a bit more aggressive in how it approached LinkedIn and channels like that, which didn’t fit our culture.

One of my engineers had worked with Saher directly when he was a large US vendor and spoke quite highly of his skill set on the technical side. He told me to talk to him, after I expressed my frustration with my existing firm. He told me that Saher had started Flawless Inbound and that he could offer what I was looking for. I sat down with him and was very impressed by his whole strategy. It was well in-line with the other marketing initiatives I’d been reading up on and wanted to tackle. Flawless Inbound was a perfect fit for what we needed—an agency which understood our business, who could spend the time giving us the special attention we needed, who wanted to learn our business and who could cover the aspects I was looking for, from Facebook to LinkedIn, e-books, creating CTAs, and all other aspects of the social media piece. Many others could perhaps do one little piece, but they couldn’t tell the story properly, along with that.

How much have you invested with them?

The cost has been around $72,000 so far.

What is the status of this engagement?

We started working with Flawless Inbound around March 2017.

RESULTS & FEEDBACK

What evidence can you share that demonstrates the impact of the engagement?

The initiative is new, and it’s obviously a journey, so all the pieces will take time, but we definitely didn’t have the traffic we’re now seeing on the website. These are not conversions, though, and I can understand that. From this perspective, the results have been strong in terms of conversion and website hits. We’re also seeing good numbers on the blog.

I’m already seeing a good amount of end-users starting to download our e-book, even though it was just released. We’re seeing results from it. It’s a phenomenal e-book which lends us credibility in the marketplace. It’s a perfect example of Flawless Inbound understanding our story, helping to document it, and creating a CTA from it, which will ultimately help us drive business and build credibility in the market.

We are looking at this as a long-term strategy, and I’ve received comments from people on LinkedIn about the great brand we’re creating for ourselves. They have given us honest feedback on the job we’re doing, and the investment to our company.

How did Flawless Inbound perform from a project management standpoint?

They’ve been phenomenal. I can call Saher anytime I need him, even weekends. They’ve put a dedicated account representative on our account, so if I need to reach out to them with a question or to run a scenario by someone, I can. Flawless Inbound is always there to answer questions and work with us. They’re not perfect, and there are always things which need to be tweaked, but we’re all learning together, and trying new things.

What did you find most impressive about them?

In our 15-year history working with multiple firms, no one really spent that kind of time with us to understand who our client is, what their driving force is, what makes them tick, and what problem we’re trying to solve. This is the pivotal point which convinced me that Flawless Inbound was the perfect fit for us.

Are there any areas they could improve?

It’s too early for me to say at this point. Nothing jumps out as needing to be fixed or improved. I’m very satisfied with how things are progressing. We’re in the summer months, which is when everything slows down, but Flawless Inbound is still on top of it, working with my team and making sure that blogs are still going out.