Today in Digital Marketing - The Journey to Digital Transformation (Jacqueline Cook, COO of Vendasta.com)

Episode Date: March 20, 2022

In this paid partnership with Vendasta.com, Tod speaks with Jacqueline Cook, COO of Vendasta, about how their platform helps agencies provide more complete service to their customers.Here's a link to the report that Jacqueline spoke about in this episode: https://www.vendasta.com/content-library/insights/lessons-from-digital-chasm-report/---Vendasta is the secret identity behind more than 60,000 agencies serving millions of small businesses globally. We provide a one-stop-shop of curated solutions to help businesses move to digital and ecommerce. From a Marketplace of 250+ products designed to meet the needs of your clients as they arise to sales intelligence software, outsourced fulfillment, and an all-in-one platform that handles selling and billing, we’ve your back covered so you can focus on being a superhero for your business community.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Often one of the first decisions you've got to make as you scale your company is which platforms you'll rely on for your CRM, your email marketing, your invoicing, project management, and so on. You could use individual apps, maybe try to string them together with middleware, but then you're dealing with API problems, multiple billings, and so on. Or you could opt for an all-in-one solution. And today, as part of a paid partnership, we are exploring the Vendasta platform, an end-to-end e-commerce system used by more than 60,000 marketing agencies, together selling services to more than 5.5 million small and medium-sized businesses around the world. Jacqueline Cook is the COO at Vendasta. She's also a mom, a world traveler, and most importantly, a fellow Canadian. So I want to talk about the platform, of course, in a moment. But while I've got you, let me pick your brains a little bit.

What do you think are the greatest barriers for small and medium-sized businesses in terms of their adoption of technology? Well, what we've witnessed and really where Vendasta focuses on is our whole thesis is small businesses rely on trusted experts to implement these technologies. Unlike large companies who have the internal expertise or who can afford to invest and see a longer term payback, small businesses are core to what they do. And digital adoption isn't necessarily their core. It's not really what they do on a day-to-day. They're cutting hair or they're running a restaurant or they're operating an auto dealership. And so our whole thesis is for a number of these small businesses, really for the long tail of the market, SMEs make up a huge proportion of GDP, they look outside to make these decisions. They look at trusted experts to make these decisions. And so what we've really seen is an increased dependency, not just for making those purchasing decisions, but also implementing and seeing value and tying

a lot of those systems together. Our belief is that there's a trusted expert. We call these folks channel partners, or there's a number of shapes and forms of them. But this is really where small your agency, you might start off with, I don't know, like FreshBooks or something as your invoicing software and Asana or some other free tool for task management. And you grow and it works really well for a while. And then you hit, like, I don't know whether it's a headcount or whether it's, you know, just sort of amount of time running as an agency where these systems begin to almost compete against each other. You know what I mean? Like, it's difficult for people to onboard and to learn the tools and so on. And that's one of the things

that Vendasta really sort of excels in is pulling pretty much everything together into one platform. That's exactly it, Todd. Oftentimes when our customers come to us, they said like, I didn't know you guys existed. I've been using Asana or Trello or QuickBooks

or, you know, Zoho, CX, and I've been using Asana or Trello or QuickBooks or Zoho and I've been patching it together and I've either had to invest in technically Frankensteining this thing together or just dealing with the multiple logins and the complete fragmentation from both my experience and my team's experience in operating this, but also my client's experience as I build together a solution and what our partners do is they solve problems. They don't necessarily just sell solutions, right? They're using a number of tool sets to really solve problems for their customers. But to bridge the gap in trust that often these businesses require of their agencies, that proof of performance or that layer of, no, I want to see, I want to be able to understand what you're doing. I want to get logins to things. That provides a really

increasingly complex and fragmented experience for the end client as well. And so what Vendasta does is we kind of bring together two different cohesive experiences. One is for our channel partners who serve these small businesses. We bring together their ability to market, sell, bill, fulfill, and deliver these solutions at scale with their internal teams by tying everything together. But for the end clients themselves, we also provide a cohesive experience, one place to log in, one bill to pay, one place to see performance of how these solutions are driving, whether it's marketing performance or some of the other things that they're doing for their clients. That's all a cohesive experience for both those two types of users. The other thing I think

that is probably pretty important here is that as you sort of add more people and you've got different platforms running, and you mentioned this, a typical small to medium-sized agency where you're using fragmented tools might, for every employee, they might have 10 different logins, one for the project management site, one for the email

marketing, one for this and that. And that actually becomes a bit of a security risk to manage all that. A hundred percent. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and we have horror stories of either our partners or their clients who, you know, employees have gone rogue and taken over their social media accounts, or even just the time it takes to update all of the logins when they change staff, or if they change a new service provider, that is exactly what we provide. It's a security risk, and it's also just a continuity of business risk. Every time you're having to do that, it poses just extra toil in the system. Yeah, I will say that we, this is a little embarrassing, but we use a number of fragmented systems. We're a small agency. We're only five people. So, but whenever I have this

sort of onboarding checklist and an offboarding checklist and the offboarding checklist, most of it, and you know, there's probably about 15 things that we have to do. Easily 10 of those things is delete their account on this, delete their account on that, delete their account over here, delete their account. you know what I mean? So it becomes sort of a big process. So what do you replace? Like what are the things I know you've got email marketing in there,

you've got CRM. Tell me about kind of the full layout of Vendasta. Yeah, great question. So I'll give you kind of an overview of what our customers experience. And so when I referred to the word channel partner before, that's really our primary audience is digital agencies, primarily digital marketing agencies as well. That's sort of where we came from. And so an agency would sign up to Vendasta. They would sort of select which

industry tools they want to offer their clients, sort of the tool set they want to use to service or provide digital marketing or whatever they offer their clients. So they go in and they set that up, configure that in the Vendasta platform, perhaps create a few, you know, go-to-market offerings, packages, and set up what effectively is their store offering. That's all integrated with the sales CRM as well. And so as I'm tracking opportunities, that connects directly back to what I've procured. I can bundle that in or convert that into a proposal to send that to a client. Once these packages are configured, we have a marketing automation system as well.

And so if I've got a prospect list or a list of existing accounts, I can send them targeted campaigns with dynamic content about their business. Vendasta has what is pretty much our crown jewel, which is what's called a snapshot report. Using just a business's email, or if I type it into Google,

I can pull a whole bunch of really rich information about what their website looks like, whether it's mobile optimized, the traffic. I can see what their review score, reputation score is, check out their social media profiles, their listing presence. So it's like a mini audit. It's a mini audit.

It's created in seconds for our partner. You can create it in seconds. It's sent to you. And it really provides the intelligence on what this small and medium-sized business needs and where they can target their marketing efforts as well. And so that content and those data and insights provide really rich marketing out-of-the-box content campaigns to send to these small businesses to really say, hey, this is, you know, where I can help and provide more insights. Included in the Vendasta platform is a project management. So if you do sell them, you know, an SEM campaign, you can manage how they're performing on those and use Vendasta as sort of like a monday.com project to track that

and keep your client up to date. And the last piece is really billing and sending an invoice and payment acceptance. That is all then presented and wrapped up into a really nice executive report for that small business to see how they're performing across a number of areas of their business. And so that's really that client facing view. So they feel like they're in the know and that you show them that proof of performance as you grow with the partnership. That's interesting. See, I had thought that it was just sort of like a Zoho kind of thing

where you've got, you know, you can do the email, you can do like the kind of the tracking of the agency side stuff. But you're saying that Vendasta's platform comes with sort of industry comparable tool sets of getting the actual work, the actual work of SEO, tracking keywords and so on, or the work of social media community management, replying to messages and comments.

So all of that stuff, in addition to kind of back office things, you're also replacing those tool sets out in the kind of outside world. Yeah, a big piece and a big strategy that we invested in early on. things, you're also replacing those tool sets out in the kind of outside world. Yeah, a big piece and a big strategy that we invested in early on, we call it the ability to do it with me. I think we even trademark that. But often tools will either provide a DIY, do-it-yourself interface for the small business

to manage their social media on their own or respond to reviews on their own, or it'll be the responsibility of the agency. But we have this interface, this layer that says, hey, if you want to do some of those things and I want to do these other services, it combines that communication and those workflows in one cohesive view. So as an agency, if you want to provide some services,

but you want your client to be able to take advantage of other services and tools, there's this layer on top that sort of bridge those workflows together. So it's a very collaborative workflow for the agency interacting with that client. How much do your engineers, do you folks work on keeping those systems up to date? Because I'll be honest, when you describe this to me, I think, how could a platform which is trying to do all of these things be as good at SEO as Moz.com, as good at content publishing as Buffer, as good as at community management at Sprout Social? Do you know what I mean? Like, how are you guaranteeing that you are on par with the organizations, the SaaS platforms, where that's all they do?

Yeah, great question. So a lot of the services for the small and medium-sized businesses are from best-in-class providers. So we bring in, you know, Yext for listings management, and we have even, you know, best-in-class third-party tools as well.

But where Vendasta started was in that space. Our core product was reputation management. And we spun out into social media management. And then we built a listing project. And we've since launched a WordPress hosting solution. We've recently acquired Matchcraft, which is a really robust enterprise SCM management platform. So while we invest a significant portion of our business in the scalable platform for our agencies or for our channel partners, we also have these sort of homegrown solutions in addition to some of the best-in-class third-party solutions that we bring in through our marketplace for

those end small businesses to use. So it's sort of a dual where we came from and where we're growing. And the reason I bring that up is our strategy early on when we had these tools for small businesses was to work through channel partners. We partnered with a number of large YP agencies and newspapers and independent service providers. And we worked and the insight we gathered was, hey, all of these agencies are effectively trying to knit everything together. They all want to monetize their customer base and solve more problems for their customers, but they're investing heavily in effectively what we've now turned into our platform and tying it all together and and tying it all together and bridging it all together. So that was the unique insight we had early on and said, hey,

rather than building the solutions themselves, let's be the pipes and roads and make it really easy and less fragmented for both an agency and more importantly for the end client to see these and deliver these solutions at scale. And how sort of precise can we get the user roles? And because, you know, I'm thinking that if you've got a small agency, someone's listening to this, maybe they've got an agency of, I don't know, 30 people, but the people who are in finance only need access to the invoicing stuff. You don't want them touching the SEO stuff. The content management people shouldn't have access to any of the other, you know, the email marketing or whatever. Can you get that granular in terms of the user roles? Yes, and we're building more granularity as well.

You know, of course, the most granular and probably the sharpest wall is what your client can see at the end of it. So that is a completely different ecosystem, completely different area altogether. But even internally, what a salesperson can see versus what an admin can see, there's a different hierarchy. So yes, granularity is definitely built into it. And Todd, for yourself, like, maybe I can set you up with a demo after this, you can check it out. I was thinking you may have to. You may have to, exactly. How white labelable is this? So the platform itself, that's really even something that I learn every day is just where our clients see value in the platform.

A lot of, I would say, the smaller to mid-tier agencies, the feedback, we just did this really robust survey within our customer base. And a lot of what came back was, you make me look like a massive agency, a very technologically advanced massive agency, because we've been investing in this for the last 14 years, but our customers get to sign up, put their logo on it effectively, and it looks like they've built this machine. Some of the solutions in the marketplace for the small and medium-sized businesses are white-labeled. All of the ones we developed, as well as some of our vendors that we brought in, allow the ability to white-label. All of the ones we developed, as well as some of our vendors that we've brought in, allow the ability to white label. Some of the best in class, you know, third party solutions like Microsoft and Google's work and, you know, GoDaddy, you're not going to want to white label those. Like you're going to want to use those brands and sell them for what they are. But a

number of the solutions you can actually put your logo on. The entire platform though is white labelable. So that means all the notifications that are delivered to your clients, any login, anything that they actually experience, that's all under your brand, all the marketing automations campaign. Vendasta doesn't exist. And that's a large part of the reason why people have never heard of Vendasta, quite frankly, is that a white label promise to our customer base, we take it very seriously. They choose us because we don't compete against them in going after their clients. We don't run up against them in pitches and boardrooms.

We are the guy behind the gal behind the guy in doing a lot of this stuff. We're the technology provider, and it allows our customers to be the best in the world at servicing and understanding the needs of what their customers need. What is the ideal size of agency, maybe in terms of headcount or annual revenues, that you have found gets the most value from Vendasta? Where we started was enterprise when we were selling these individual solutions. But more and more, we've seen our fit in the mid-market. Agencies who don't have a ton of resources to invest in, you know, a technical team to tie all this together. They don't want to build their own client-facing dashboard. So, you know, our core agency is really that anyone from, I would say, five to

50 employees internally. They've got anywhere between 20 and, I mean it could go up to 2 000 customers but really that 20 to 200 sweet spot they've just they've been growing they they have um you know proved themselves as a successful agency they've been in business for a few years but they're reaching this cap of i can go out and get new business but i don't think I can do it in a scalable way delivering on some of the solutions. So it's really that scalability cap. So where Vendasta really fits is let's start automating some of your systems. Let's create a more scalable way for you to deliver solutions at scale to your customer base so that you can keep continuing to grow your business. If someone wants to kick the tires, do you have like a human being that can walk them through it on a demo?

We have many human beings and they're always looking to... If not talk about the Vendasta platform, we've got a lot of learning and knowledge sharing in our community as well. Vendasta.com is the place to go. You can sign up for a demo if you want to take a look through the showroom. I invite people to just take a look at the show home or showroom rather but um you know i invite people to just take a look at our community as well join a webinar learn from others what they're doing it's it's not just about learning the vendasta platform it's it's learning how to to serve clients at scale and be their trusted advisor for their digital needs and a lot of that

is coming out through our community jacqueline cook is COO at Vendasta. Vendasta.com is their URL. That's V-E-N-D-A-S-T-A.com. Jacqueline, thank you for this. Thank you, Todd.