Item: Constant Contact Lead Gen & CRM
Rating: 10
Author: Lindsey Pickles

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

I help clients understand what marketing tools they need for their business and I work with a number of different suppliers including Sharpspring. It is currently being used both for my business Bright Dials as well as my clients. Sharpspring addresses a number of areas for my clients; seeing ROI from the first click through to sale, understanding customer behaviour and being able to automate relevant and timely communications based on that behaviour. It also enables clients to know when their leads are ready to buy rather than the traditional cold calling, scattergun approach.

Pros and Cons

Tracking ROI from first click through to sale - this is a key issue for clients and Sharpspring resolves this in a simple interface.
Dynamic Lists - removing manual segmentation and enabling on the fly dynamic segmentation is very powerful and saves a lot of time.
Life of the Lead - this is a brilliant visual feature which gives clients the ability to see every way their lead has engaged with their business over time is a fantastic sales tool.

The Landing Page generator has always been a bit glitchy and although designed to not need code, I've ended up learning more code since I started using it (no bad thing!) but a recent update has fixed a lot of the issues, just changing the publishing button onto the main page is a big time saver. I would like to see this feature improve though to be able to control the placement of headers, images etc through the editing function rather than the code.
At the moment the workflow structure is enabled with drop down functionality, once a criteria is added, it can't be edited. Having a more visual 'tree' structure would be more helpful and I believe is in the features pipeline.
The Visitor ID tool is fairly periphery to my clients needs, but it could be improved if it were possible to remove the site visiters which aren't leads that visit your site; spiders and such like.

Return on Investment

We've been using Sharpspring for a relatively short period of time but are already seeing results even at quite a basic level for clients who have no understanding of their customers to having a decent sized CRM over over 10K being populated automatically from their site and regular communication taking place.
For our own agency perspective, Sharpspring has given us a better pipeline management tool.

Alternatives Considered

I have used Hubspot and various CRM/ESPs like Salesforce, Mailchimp, Groupmail, Pipedrive etc but the beauty of Sharpspring compared to Hubspot is obviously the price but also the ease of integration, you can synch whichever CRM you like and you can do it pretty quickly (depending on client requirements obviously). It just makes the decision making for smaller clients that much easier than if they were buying Hubspot.

Other Software Used

Audiense, Google Analytics Premium, Buffer

Likelihood to Recommend

Sharpspring suits smaller businesses brilliantly when compared to the more enterprise solutions like Hubspot, Marketo etc. I am a big believer in a serviced agency model; most smaller businesses need a lot of help understanding what the tool can do and support ongoing to maximise its use and this is Sharpspring's philosophy too. To max out the benefit of using Sharpspring, your business needs to be lead driven and I would say generating minimum of 5-10 leads per day. You probably have a longer sales cycle too.

In the 20% of situations where I perhaps wouldn't use Sharpspring would be a where a business has a strong customer service requirement with multiple internal teams involved, particularly those converting from free to paid trial as I've seen other solutions which can handle this in a better way.

The Marketing Automation tool for SMEs and Agencies

Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring