Doug Cohen, president of Sandler Summit Performance Training in Fort Lauderdale, leads the company as an experienced entrepreneur, sales consultant, professional speaker, and trainer. Before working with Rutkin Marketing, Doug says his firm’s marketing and customer relationship management was erratic.

“We had no strategy, and our marketing efforts were haphazard, at best,” he laughs. Doug was concerned that even though business was good, and revenues were growing, he was relying solely on his sales team to generate leads. As his client base grew, the need for stronger sales and marketing alignment became clear.

My team was spending a lot of time on CRM, entering information in multiple places, and we had no consistent email marketing strategy in place. I knew it cost me in time and lost opportunities. The more my company grew, the more I felt our marketing falling further and further behind the curve.

A top-of-the-line CRM is not enough to operate a business successfully. In addition to running disparate systems for sales and marketing, Doug was struggling with branding and visibility into the effectiveness of their social media and email marketing efforts. Without a defined identity and a strategy for outreach and lead nurturing, he felt the business stumbling. The pain of leads gone cold and the weight of the extra time it was taking to manage prospecting and long conversion times became critical enough to call Rutkin Marketing for help.

Immediately, Rutkin Marketing conducted a comprehensive inbound marketing gap analysis that assessed the company’s ability to attract qualified prospects, convert them into leads and provide better opportunities to the sales team. This assessment evaluated Sandler’s website, search engine optimization (SEO), content marketing, conversion capabilities, lead nurturing and a variety of other best practices correlated to high marketing ROI.

“You really can’t build a good inbound and outbound marketing program without the right foundation in place.” said Maria Rutkin, founder and president of Rutkin Marketing. “We implemented HubSpot, so Sandler would have access to the CRM, lead conversion, social media, and analytics tools we would need to get the highest ROI from their marketing investment.”

Before enlisting Rutkin Marketing, Doug admits that his marketing efforts were unplanned and intermittent, yet they were still taking too much of his time. Since his collaboration with Rutkin Marketing, his customer relationship management has become streamlined, more accessible and more efficient. Also, as a direct result of their strategic email marketing campaigns, Doug has realized a noted increase of sales qualified leads and prospects into his sales funnel that represent significant opportunities.

“We have definitely gotten opportunities and new business from our email campaigns. We are speaking with key corporate decision-makers, including one who recently reached out to us after receiving one of our emails. That is a conversation we would not have otherwise had.”

“We no longer worry about the inbound and outbound marketing efforts. They’re taken care of and planned within the long-term strategy and goals that Rutkin Marketing has established for us,” adds Doug.

“Now we manage all our follow up communications, advertising campaigns, contacts, social media and more in one comprehensive HubSpot portal, and we have access to it wherever we go, on every device. It has made our lives easier and our team’s work more efficient. We spend less time, getting better results utilizing a fully integrated platform and strategic marketing approach.”