Simply the best value marketing automation solution on the market
August 15, 2017
Simply the best value marketing automation solution on the market
Score 9 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with SharpSpring
We are relatively new to SharpSpring and we are a small agency. That said, it offers us a whole raft of capabilities that were previously lacking in what we were able to offer clients. As a B2B PR & marketing agency, it's crucial to help clients establish strong thought leadership which we were doing through content creation. The problem was always that clients lacked the ability to promote the content effectively and we were reluctant to start introducing ESPs like MailChimp and trying to design landing pages. We were also unable to offer clear value in helping disseminate the content properly. SharpSpring now gives us an incredibly affordable way to give clients an end-to-end B2B service offering including much greater insight, tracking, and accountability as well as non-invasive capabilities such as building landing pages, forms, and email campaigns.
- Comprehensive set of tools - landing page builder, email campaigns, site visitor ID, sales insight, funnel builder, form builder, CRM and more.
- Amazing value - it's such good value that when you first look at it, it seems too good to be true! Compared to Pardot and Hubspot it is a fraction of what they charge and you get free licenses included to use with clients. It's incredibly generous and also removes all the barriers to entry which are financially very high for companies like Hubspot that I was evaluating for over a year before I discovered SharpSpring.
- Superb onboarding - I was assigned Matthew for a period of around 6 weeks and he could not have been more helpful. The onboarding is unlimited and very comprehensive and a credit to the company.
- Great support - the technical and general support is brilliant. Although I am based in the UK and the company is in Florida, I always get a reply the same day from a technical person and am kept informed until it is resolved. SharpSpring have really invested in their support infrastructure after you sign on and it really shows. I have also suggested a few product features and receive a comprehensive reply back from the product team as to whether they see value in my suggestion and if it is going to be added to the work stack or not.
- Onboarding prep - onboarding is great but you need to be aware that after about 3-4 weeks you will have explored all the features and then are expected to begin running campaigns. if you have not built a database or created good content for yourself then you could be naval gazing. This is not a criticism of SharpSpring but generally a warning they new users need to have the materials in place to start their own campaigns about 3 weeks in.
- The landing page builder can be maddeningly frustrating to use and the email builder has a few glitches. These tools are not as WYSIWYG as they aspire to be but once you get the hang of them then you can create nice-looking emails and landing pages. Just be prepared to want to throw your laptop against the wall at times.
- The actual materials that are there to help us as an agency to sell the SharpSpring/marketing automation proposition to clients could definitely be improved. This is in terms of volume and quality of design. That said, I have fed this back to them and they have been very receptive and acknowledged it is a core area that they are working on.
- SharpSpring has given us new capabilities far beyond what we were able to offer before.
- We've not on-boarded new clients yet as we are still relatively early in the process but we are sure that it will pay for itself pretty soon.
I evaluated Hubspot but it is just too expensive. You have to pay a lot of money to do your own training and onboarding for a few months before they allow you to resell it to clients and even then, it is a really really tough sell to persuade clients and prospects to commit to more than £500 a month + our time to run campaigns. I cannot attest to Hubspot functions versus SharpSpring (although SharpSpring does have comprehensive comparison studies and documents versus the other platforms) but on price alone, SharpSpring is a complete no brainer for any B2B agency that wants to have a marketing automation capability.