I started working with Sapper about eight months ago and there’s a lot of things I like about it.
First of all, it’s a turnkey solution when you’re a growing business like ours. Your biggest consideration is time, and often prospecting is the thing that you always mean to spend more time on and never quite are able to.
I really appreciated that working with Sapper allows us to offload the heavy lifting of that, where appointments just appear magically on your calendar and you’re able to focus on other
business elements and then tack in at the time when you can speak directly to those prospects and allow Sapper to do all the work upstream.
It takes a little bit of time, the partnership with Sapper, in developing your approach to market and how these email sequences are going to work takes a little bit of time, but once you find the attraction you know there’s really pretty quickly a regular flow of deals or at least prospective clients every week.
For us, that’s landed a couple of medium and a couple of large deals as well that are clients to this day, months later, and it manifests as recurring revenue.
Everybody in the marketing space can understand sort of project work versus ongoing engagements, and Sapper has been a really good resource for us to drive some of those ongoing engagements that help us grow.
One of the problems that we’ve had with other providers in the past, marketing providers of one sort or another, is they either can’t deliver, or they can deliver on a lot of quantity, but not a lot of quality. Sapper seems to do a very good job of dialing in both hitting our goals for quantity but making sure that they’re spending enough time in the back and forth with these prospects that the quality is there. People are coming to these calls knowing that we’re having a discussion about marketing, it’s framed correctly, so I’ve been really happy with the intersection of quality and quantity as far as leads go.
A real key in email marketing is pattern interrupts, finding ways to get attention in an otherwise very noisy channel. Our account manager brings both a lot of originality in her thinking and innovation I’d say, as far as how to do email sequences in a way that cuts through that noise. Like every business owner, we get pitched marketing services of one sort or another a lot. We often joke it can be hard to market marketing services since that’s what we do.
Sapper is also a client. They used their own sequences, their own approach, to get the meeting with me. From there, it was a description of how their process is different that got us to take a shot at it. I think our Sapper team was committed to taking more than one approach, that understanding that shifts in market dynamics mean that the same messaging doesn’t always resonate and that you have to speak to people’s pain and people’s problems if you want them to pay attention. This is part of that innovative iteration. They are constantly trying new things bringing new ideas, until we were able to find the combination of messaging and value propositions that resonated enough to pique interest, again, in a very noisy channel of email.
I thought that their approach showed real potential because it wasn’t the same old marketing emails that you can spot a mile away.
It seemed more personal; it seemed to emphasize a classic sales concept, which is creating a buying atmosphere if a prospect feels it’s okay to say no. So I felt that the conversational tone of the email sequences and the directness of it, doesn’t waste anybody’s time and cuts right to “hey is this the right time? Should we have a discussion?” that yielded more responses, more opens, basically all the KPIs we would care about, and I think that was material to success in initially finding what our formula was.