VipeCloud was founded with a simple goal: make sales & marketing simpler for small businesses, and as a result, better.
Much like how cord-cutting and streaming services started off as a great alternative to the traditional cable package, but have since become cluttered and expensive, a similar story has played out in the world of business software with the sales stack.
There are countless sales and marketing apps in the market, and many businesses have created a patchwork “stack” to create a complete workflow. Some CRMs have leaned heavily into this, either creating a core product that utilizes a marketplace of apps, or building the entire stack themselves and charging for each component.
Our goal is to create the all-in-one VipeCloud small business CRM that handles our customers’ sales and marketing workflow seamlessly.
Below is a Q&A with Adam Peterson, Founder and CEO of VipeCloud:
What problem is VipeCloud solving?
We’re helping our customers save money, simplify their workflow, and receive world-class support. It’s easier to get things done when you don’t have to manage a bunch of apps, and can manage your business instead.
Our customer service is also a key component in what differentiates us from the rest of the industry, and why we have so little churn in our customer-base. Our entire team is US-based and we are extremely responsive with support requests. You could say another problem that VipeCloud is solving is raising the bar for customer service in the SaaS world.
Who is VipeCloud for?
VipeCloud is for small and medium-sized businesses who need a system to streamline their marketing operations and track sales. It’s extremely flexible software that can help businesses track multiple pipelines, accommodate a wide variety of workflows, and reach customers with marketing content in ways they previously could not.
VipeCloud prides itself on having the best support in the market. How is this delivered and how does it compare to the big incumbent CRMs?
VipeCloud is a small, US-based cash flow-positive company. Though we are rapidly growing, we also don’t take on more business than we can service. We make money by taking on customers who are *right* for the platform, focusing our improvements on what will make the software even better for existing customers and keeping our customers for the long haul. Our model isn’t built around heavy amounts of marketing and accepting a certain degree of customer churn.
The incumbent CRMs tend to have a couple different models that don’t result in great service experiences for their customers. They are:
1) Low pricing, little-to-no support, customers have to find support solutions in help forums.
2) Focus is with enterprise solutions. They offer SMB solutions but most support is through knowledge base, tutorial videos, and 3rd party support vendors.
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3) They offer phone support but it’s only available to top subscription tiers. Despite this, bug fixes can still be slow.
We believe small businesses need access to great support more than big businesses, who can just hire specialists, and we aim to level the playing field.
What’s the difference between an all-in-one CRM and a traditional sales stack?
In short, a sales stack is a series of apps that all specialize in a particular process. An all-in-one is a single program that integrates entire workflows.
This is especially helpful for small businesses because this basically reflects how small businesses operate. If you’re a large business, you have departments that specialize in particular aspects of a process.
The classic characterization of a small business is that individuals need to be able to wear many hats. Most small businesses don’t have separate people to design content, plan marketing campaigns, execute campaigns, do lead gen, close new accounts, manage existing accounts and forecast the future. VipeCloud is there for the small business where even a single person might need to wear all those hats.
In what ways is email marketing different in 2020?
A lot has changed in recent years in email marketing! Sadly, the days of “choose email service provider, upload list, and hit send” are long gone. If you do this without authenticating your SPF, DMARC and DKIM records, you are likely to have poor deliverability.
While email marketers are the most affected by this, it’s critical that all businesses take measures to keep their sender authentication in good standing. If you get labeled as a spammer, then your day-to-day emails might stop going to your recipients’ inboxes.
VipeCloud’s “Advanced Mass Emails” go a long way in boosting how many of your emails are delivered to the inbox. This advanced delivery system allows you to deliver one email per minute to help prevent recipient servers from identifying a cluster of nearly identical emails coming their way. When that happens, they will often send the emails to the promotions folder.
That sounds like a lot. What should business owners do that aren’t tech savvy?
This is where VipeCloud comes in. We’re happy to help our customers set up their authentication and train their teams to use the system. Things are also simpler for VipeCloud customers because it’s just one program to learn for marketing and sales. If you need a hand with something, we’re just a phone call away.
Do you have any examples of how VipeCloud has positively impacted its customers?
Certainly, we love to hear when a small business grows with our help. For instance, we’ve been able to help a startup in Southern California that helps businesses with workman’s comp records grow by simplifying how they track their sales. Their sales process is quite complicated, and I don’t believe another CRM on the market could accomplish what we have for them out of the box.
We also have had the privilege of helping marketing agencies multiply their growth by dramatically boosting how efficiently they can create and distribute marketing content for their clients. The effect for one agency has really been a sight to behold. When we first started working with them, they were turning customers away because they were working at capacity. Not even a year later they are roughly 15x bigger.