A Necessary B2B Tool That's Versatile Enough For Any Application
January 17, 2017
A Necessary B2B Tool That's Versatile Enough For Any Application
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
We use SharpSpring both for our new business development to uncover new clients and as a sales pipeline/CRM. For our clients, we use SharpSpring in a number of different ways applicable to their needs—from a full-on CRM to Salesforce supplement to lead nurturing/eBlasts. Every lead generation and eCommerce client we have is on SharpSpring, and every new client gets put on it, as well. SharpSpring allows us to nurture trust with our clients, and also assist their sales teams by making them more efficient.
- Leveraging anonymous browsing data is without question Salesforce's bread and butter. Their Life of Lead feature allows us to see every interaction a user has had with us/our client. One client had a lead convert and then SharpSpring backfilled their data from where they had been browsing their site for over a year! SharpSpring has spurred our new business development to heights we didn't think were possible. Being able to see what businesses are browsing our site has allowed us to reach out to them and not wait until they fill a form out. Every new client we've converted in the past 6 months originated from SharpSpring's Visitor ID report.
- Automated workflows are easy to set up and can be as complex as you need them to be. For lead generation, setting up a workflow so that a new lead gets assigned to a sales person, and then that sales person gets notified, the sales manager gets notified, and then depending on what form/lead score they have assigning them to a list for email drips/follow-ups is priceless.
- Lead Scoring. While time on site does not necessarily indicate whether someone is a good lead or not, it does help our clients' sales teams prioritize who to follow up with and what information to have ready before contacting them. We set up important pages and scoring based on forms filled out, pages visited, etc. and that resulting lead score gives them valuable insight before initial contact. Someone who has been on the site for over a year but just now filled out a form is most likely familiar with your product and will require a different strategy and talking points. Without SharpSpring, a sales team is in the dark.
- The lack of global date filter is irritating. If I'm going between contact manager to see how many new leads were created last week and then hop over to forms to see how many forms were submitted (the difference between those numbers tells me what existing customers we engaged with), I have to change the date range. Then if I want to look at a specific form... I have to change the date range. Then if I go to a different section... well, you get the picture. This may only really apply to someone who would be considered a "power user" and needs to constantly be in the account running reports and gathering analysis.
- New features often feel buggy, like they should still be in beta. SharpSpring's zealousness to constantly improve and bolster their offering is admirable, but I think that rush to release new features comes at the expense of usability.
- Documentation is not great. High-level feature overviews have plenty of coverage but when you get into the nitty-gritty details of something like Salesforce integration and field mapping, there is a gap. Luckily, their customer support is reliable. If they don't have an answer for you right away, they'll get an answer for you quickly.
- The Import Tool has its bugs. There have been several times where I have imported bulk changes that did something completely different than what I needed them to. SharpSpring forces you to add imports to a list, so if you do mess up contacts can easily be deleted or parsed to refine. The CRM Import Tool has the same issue.
- Revolutionized our new business development. In the past 6 months, we've closed more than $1 Million in new business (for a boutique agency that's huge), and every one of those clients we got because of SharpSpring, and specifically its Visitor ID tool. None of that new business filled out a form, we were just able to see that they were browsing our site and reached out.
- SharpSpring has increased trust among our clients. When we report that leads are up 60% YoY, we can verify those numbers because we have the data. We can both see the names, the browsing history and form submissions of those leads. They aren't some nebulous number coming out of Google Analytics. That increased transparency has allowed us to intertwine our business more deeply with our clients.
Lead Forensics does what SharpSpring does with regards to using anonymous visitor data to match to business IPs to uncover new B2B leads. Comparing the two platforms on that criteria alone, Lead Forensics uncovered a few more leads that SharpSpring was not able to uncover. However, we were looking for a more robust tool. SharpSpring not only does IP Matching, but has automated workflows, list management, form tracking, dynamic email content, dynamic landing pages and more. For us, being able to offer a platform (that can be white labeled) with all those features to our clients was more attractive.
Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM Feature Ratings
SharpSpring Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support understands my problem Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
Yes - Yes. They actually were already aware of the issue. Not only did the customer support agent let me know they were working on it, but he also gave me a time frame that it would be fixed by and it was actually fixed by that date!
One time there was an issue where if a custom field was a number, lists weren't populating properly based on that criteria. So I had a number of lists of users who had taken 10-20 rides, 21-50 rides, 50+ rides, etc. The support agent was aware of the issue, and gave me a date by which it would be fixed. As part of his follow-up instead of just emailing me to let me know the bug was fixed, he actually went into the account and rebuilt the lists that were suffering from the bug issue and verified it was working. That saved me at least an hour of work.