Spokal vs. Sugar Market

For current Wordpress users Spokal is outstanding and highly recommended. For clients who don't already have a Wordpress blog it's a bit tricky as I need to first sell the benefits of using Wordpress in order to get them on board, but in all honestly I would recommend Wordpress anyway, it just slows the process down having to design and install Wordpress before we can get started.

Salesfusion is a marketing automation platform more appropriate for small companies considering the limited functionalities are limited. The email builder tool is easy to use and ideal for someone with no coding knowledge

Incentivized

• Content calendar - the ability to visually see blog posts in draft and scheduled to publish over the coming weeks and months was a key benefit. Tracking this in spreadsheets is too hard. we can even post blogs as topic idea, pre draft, draft and final and schedule in advance so we can visualise the messages we want to communicate. Creation of tweets and Linkedin posts is done for you automatically. Simply drag the blog post to the time slot, day, week or month. This is a lot quicker than Hootsuite
• Additional tweets can be composed and also dragged to the calendar, plus the feedly link allows curation of tweet content. This just scales up our creation and curation process.
• Easy simple overview dashboard - showing key website stats, new visitors, new twitter followers. New blog posts. Social enagement per blog post, linkedin shares etc. simple lead scoring based on pages visited etc. Simple realtime SEO analysis on the blog post builder
• twitter builder. very simple autopilot of increasing your twitter following using key words (it easy has a simple key word tool) to find relevant people to 'like' and hence follow
• Dynamic, responsive team. I have asked a few questions about futures and always received a prompt helpful reply. Chris and his team are clearly commited to developing a great product.
• Once linked to your wordpress site I really like the fact I can log into a dashboard on the web and on my ipad and manage my content delivery and monitor visititors and interaction. I use and know hubspot and the biggest issue for me is the learning curve. Anyone can learn and use Spokal. It provides and integrates a number of tools I currently use today at a far lower cost. It does need to integrate into a third party email provider but frankly the integration is simple. A lot of effort has gone into the design for non techies

• It was easy to navigate.
• I liked that I could click on a link to email a potential client and that it would track/link that email back to the Salesfusion profile.
• I liked the reporting features so that I could see exactly how many cold calls resulted in appointments, with whom I last left voicemail or need to follow up with.

Incentivized

• I personally would love to see more direct integrations into CRM and more powerful Marketing Automation tools, but the current Zapier integration is a general approach and works in most cases very well.

• The user interface is somewhat cumbersome and not intuitive at times.
• Additional user education available through downloads for existing customers rather than scheduled webinars would be helpful.
• Custom reporting is complicated to set up.

Incentivized

Spokal delivers everything I need to serve my clients in one place. It's so easy to use and their customer service is always available and responsive, there's no need for me to look elsewhere.

We've been very happy with SalesFusion since day 1. We've also created a new website during the time period that we've had SF and everything carried over great to our new website!

Spokal takes away some of the complexity and noise that Wordpress has. Offering a separate login and dashboard to allow a user to create blog posts, check on backlinks, see ranking keywords, social engagement and tracks visitors/ contacts. Spokal provides a lot of functionality that would typically require the purchase of several products e.g. Hootsuite, SEO Moz, SEO pressor, Hubspot. What I really like is the content calendar. I simply drag and drop of my blog posts into my calendar to post to twitter, linkedin and facebook. This is an easy way to repost evergreen content and build my following on twitter. The twitter builder is constantly looking for relevant profiles and conversations based on my defined criteria. The tool automatically likes the twitter user which drives traffic to my sight and actually helps me find followers and potential influencers. This product is ideal for people new to internet marketing or small business owners who don't want to be overwhelmed by the effort to learn, manage and run several tools or wordpress plugins. I have been with Spokal since the start and I continue to be impressed by the support and raft of new functionality being added.

They worked with Bluehost to make sure our blog connected properly. This was done without anyone from Strategic Revolution asking for this help.

The support team has always been helpful, friendly, prompt and knowledgeable. They follow-up on all my tickets promptly and when needed are available for screen sharing to illustrate solutions for more complex problems. The support department at Salesfusion is one of my favorite things about the platform.

Incentivized

I haven't really tried other products at this point. I would say I tried to cobble together a bunch of options to make the right inbound marketing "tool suite". Nothing quite worked well enough. Again, Spokal serves as a very cost-effective option. Particularly relative to Hubspot.

I was using Net-Results and it seemed more geared for an experienced marketer who was familiar with HTML and didn't need as much training. I found the system frustrating and didn't have much success when I called in for training. I was brand new to automation marketing and needed more hand-holding than Net-Results was able to provide

• It's still early for us, but we can definitively say that we've cut our content creation / curation time down by about 40% while INCREASING the volume of quality relevant content that our audience expects.

• Increased employee efficiency
• Better customer service
• The ability to send email campaigns from a specific user and not "from" the organization title. We use this funcationality a lot and it was not available with other software so this is huge.