Alexander Ferguson
Developing your 2021 marketing and sales strategies is a special challenge for CMOs, marketers, and sales teams. Our way of life has turned upside down, and so has our way of business. But innovation and opportunity churns onward, and entrepreneurship continues strong. If there was ever a time to look for new tools and approaches, it’s now. Here at UpTech Report, we’ve assembled some of the most interesting modern technologies to help you reach people in new ways and convert them to revenue.
Spendgo
Who It’s For:
Retail and restaurants
What They Say:
Use Spendgo with online ordering and e-commerce platforms. Get more direct orders, reduce your 3rd party delivery app commissions, and decrease couponing.
The Rundown:
For in-store, online, and mobile retailers and restaurants, offering a loyalty program can generate 12–20 more customer signups. But if you’re not Starbucks or Walmart, that can be tricky. Enter Spendgo. They offer a loyalty program platform that can be fully branded and integrated with existing POS, e-commerce, and other 3rd-party systems. And unlike competitors, the money you’d normally put into commissions can go to better rewards for your customers.
“We don’t charge you more because you’re more successful. We want to align the incentive for you to actually grow your business and maximize the value of the platform.”
-CEO Ivan Matkovic
Listen to our interview with Ivan Matkovic, the founder and CEO of Spendgo.
Surefire Local
Who It’s For:
Small to medium-sized businesses who wish they had a more powerful marketing team.
What They Say:
Transform your marketing team into local marketing superheroes with the industry’s most powerful platform, custom-built to help small and medium-sized businesses engage new and current customers, grow revenue and broaden reach in their local markets.
The Rundown:
If you’re running a small to medium size business, chances are you don’t have a dedicated marketing team devoted to growing your customer base. And chances are, you could really use one. You might make amazing pastries, but your tweets could use some work. This is why Christopher Marentis started Surefire Local. They provide the marketing platform for the non-marketer. The Surefire local platform helps businesses develop a consistent, multi-channel online presence, gain ROI insights, and create unique content for improved customer engagement.
“Now is the time when local businesses really need to have control and own the metrics and know the metrics themselves to be able to make more educated decisions.”
-CEO Christopher Marentis
Listen to our interview with Christopher Marentis, the founder and CEO of Surefire Local.
Troops
Who It’s For:
Companies of all sizes, from small startups to fortune 500s, looking for innovative ways to modernize sales.
What They Say:
Get the right data to the right people, when and where they need it, and empower them to perform.
The Rundown:
Wouldn’t it be great if you had an assistant who could monitor Salesforce and let you know when an actionable item required your attention? Well Toops can give you one, and it’s powered by AI. Their product can plug into your favorite communications platform, like Slack or Teams and serve as natural-language liaison between your sales team and Salesforce. Communications are customized per team member according to their role so that you only receive the information most relevant to you. Never miss an update or opportunity, and stay on top of your next steps.
“We felt like messaging would invade the work environment in a very different way than we’ve seen before. The question we asked is what if we could solve that problem by building what felt like an intelligent assistant that helped you with your job? Instead of having to log into this painful database, you would get a message, a series of messages that alerted you and provided you with the right signals on important actions to take.”
-CEO Dan Reich
Listen to our interview with Dan Reich, the founder and CEO of Troops.
ReplyBuy (Acquired by Airship)
Who It’s For:
Organizations looking to streamline conversions with instant messaging or SMS. (They currently serve mostly sports entertainment and higher ed, but are expanding.)
What They Say:
ReplyBuy now an Airship company, makes it easy for consumers to instantly message and purchase from brands over SMS. Companies of all sizes leverage ReplyBuy’s solutions to unlock the potential of personalized text messaging for 1:1 conversations and friction-free transactions at scale.
The Rundown:
Let’s face it, email is a dinosaur. Who still uses it? Unfortunately, many sales teams. Mostly because they have to. Or do they? ReplyBuy is a platform that interfaces with your current CRM to allow the use of SMS to engage with your contacts. It includes a beautiful web interface where you can easily manage all your conversations and gain important insights. It brings the communication power of a messaging system like Slack or Microsoft Teams to your sales management.
“Ninety-seven percent of texts are open and read…. Everybody reads their text message. For us it’s really about response and engagement. We’re seeing on average about thirty-percent, which has been just eye opening compared to what people see through other channels.”
-CEO, Brandon O’Halloran
Listen to our interview with Brandon O’Halloran, CEO of ReplyBuy.
Pipeliner
Who It’s For:
Sales teams looking for an alternative to Salesforce.
What They Say:
Pipeliner CRM adopts a unique approach to features by leveraging instant, dynamic visualization that drives rapid adoption rates and supreme user experiences. Its multiple product lines and both online and offline apps address the largest audience possible with the best IOS and Android mobile Apps in the market.
The Rundown:
Salesforce may be the industry-standard CRM but it’s certainly not the only game in town. Anyone seeking out an alternative should take a serious look at Pipeliner. With easy, intuitive administration, advanced automation, dynamic reporting, and an AI-powered mobile app, Pipeliner poses some heavy competition. Founder and CEO Nikolaus Kimla would even argue there’s no competition.
“We are the only effective CRM system for salespeople in the world.”
-CEO Nikolaus Kimla
Listen to our interview with Nikolaus Kimla, the founder and CEO of Pipeliner.
Lately
Who It’s For:
Small and medium-sized businesses looking to automate marketing plans.
What They Say:
Automatically turn blogs, online articles, newsletters, videos and podcasts into dozens of amazing social media posts.
The Rundown:
Creating compelling web content is hard enough—promoting it can be even harder. Sometimes it takes longer to figure out the tweet for your latest video than it did to make the video. And then coordinating all your social media campaigns into a cohesive plan is literally a full-time job. But with Lately, it doesn’t have to be. Lately automatically drafts social media posts from your long-form content, auto-populates them into a master marketing calendar, and delivers analytical insights. It’s your personal full-time social media manager.
“What Lately sells is artificial intelligence that instantly transforms blogs, videos, or podcasts into dozens and dozens and dozens of amazing social posts in one click.”
-CEO Kate Chernis
Listen to our interview with Kate Chernis, the founder and CEO of Lately.
Ceralytics
Who It’s For:
Organizations looking for sophisticated analysis of customer behavior.
What They Say:
Our content intelligence platform gives you data-driven insights on what content you should create.
The Rundown:
One of the greatest challenges for any content marketer is determining what works and what doesn’t. Everyone has a theory on what people will respond to, but anyone who’s been in the business for more than a month knows that people’s responses often defy prediction. This is why we conduct A/B tests on campaigns and let the data overrule our gut. But even then, the landscape is complicated and difficult to navigate. This is where Ceralytics can be a big help. Instead of merely analyzing what links drive clicks, Ceralytics analyzes what topics people actually respond to, which enables a deeper insight into how to drive traffic to your site. But it doesn’t stop there—Ceralytics also analyzes how your marketing strategies measure up against the competition.
“We’re identifying what topics actually work on your site, what topics your clients and your prospects actually hear about, and what topics your competitors are having success with that you need to use on your own website to get the success that they are and even surpass them.”
-CEO Brandon Anderson
Listen to our interview with Brandon Andersen, the founder and CEO of Ceralytics.
Do you know of any interesting new marketing and sales tools? Let us know!
