Seamless workflows free-up time to win more clients

Based in Broomfield, Colorado, Digital Marketing Dude (DMD) has been a trusted digital marketing agency since 2009. The company specializes in website development, hosting, and maintenance, along with an array of other monthly services such as search engine optimization (SEO), reviews management, and ads management. Its offerings don't stop there. DMD also delves into website redesign, content creation, social media, email marketing, reputation management, and more. What sets the DMD team apart is its commitment to results. The company generally operates on a month-to-month basis, avoiding long-term contracts, ensuring that the business is always accountable to its clients. DMD’s aim is clear – to provide support to business owners, helping them grow and simplifying their journey by being a dependable partner.

For professional services providers, growth, while desirable, often comes with its own set of challenges. Peter Brissette, CEO of Digital Marketing Dude (DMD), was feeling the heat. His agency was expanding, and though that signaled success, operational bottlenecks were beginning to show.

With a significant chunk of his business relying on monthly recurring revenue, the administrative overhead of tracking and managing payments was becoming cumbersome.

“And as we keep growing and getting more clients, it's a lot of transactions to chase,” he says. This was not only a cash flow problem, but also an enormous drain on time and effort. Peter really needed to automate and streamline this process.

Next on the list of DMD’s challenges was the repetitive and tedious task of data entry. Imagine entering a client's name, address, and contact information half a dozen times, a circumstance Peter admits was ridiculous – but that’s what he and his team found themselves doing. This was extremely inefficient and seriously increased the risk of human error.

Sorting out the technology puzzle was the DMD team’s third hurdle. Like many modern businesses, Peter’s agency was using a suite of software applications to manage its operations.

“I was using a Docusign-type document to send to clients to get them to put their credit card information in, which I knew wasn't really the right way to do it,” says Peter. “But I didn't know what else to do, because I didn't want to be calling people all the time and taking credit cards over the phone.”

DMD’s tools were not well-integrated with each other and were not living up to their potential. The result? Fragmented data, inconsistent communication between platforms, and substantial workflow inefficiency.

So although DMD was growing, its internal operations were not keeping pace. As transactions increased, these challenges threatened to become even more difficult, making existing processes untenable in the long run.

Peter first came to know about Ignition through his certified public accountant (CPA), who was using the all-in-one proposal, client agreement, billing, payment and workflow automation platform to streamline her own processes.

With custom proposal templates and automated proposals, Ignition immediately addressed a significant chunk of Peter's pain points. "I do the proposal in Ignition, [the clients] accept their proposal, they pay for it, we collect the payment," Peter says.

But Ignition isn’t just a one-trick pony. Thanks to its integration capabilities with workflow automation software Zapier, the platform seamlessly connects with more than 4,000 apps. This proved to be another key benefit for the DMD team. Ignition integrated with DMD’s own suite of tools, including QuickBooks Online, ActiveCampaign customer relationship management (CRM), and Teamwork.com project management software (though the team has since shifted to SmartSuite for project management). “Just having that in one system was a big deal,” Peter says.

This integration's practicality quickly became evident in everyday tasks. "Once [clients] accept the proposal, it kicks over and creates a project in SmartSuite," Peter says.

Another standout feature was Ignition's automated client payments and billing. No more chasing clients for missed payments. The system would automatically notify them if their credit card was about to expire or if a payment failed.

The tangible benefits for Peter and his team were major. "Now that I've got a couple of proposal templates, I've got all my services in there," says Peter.

Just how much time has Peter and his team saved?

"I'd say I’ve saved at least an hour just right off the top for every single proposal – probably a little bit more," he says. "Then, just chasing stuff, [I've saved] probably a couple hours a month alone. So, if we're doing five or six deals a month, that's six to 10 hours a month."

He emphasized that this newfound efficiency lets him and his team zero in on more value-based tasks, such as selling. "I know I can turn around a deal – get it done and out to somebody, get it signed – and can move right to the next one in a matter of minutes."

The results, however, have not just been in saved time but also in realized goals. "Last year, our goal was four websites a month. We got to about two websites a month last year. But this year, we've already done four in January. We did four in February, and we might do seven this month," Peter says.

Streamlining your workflow is all about smart decisions and effective tools. Peter has two essential pro tips for businesses grappling with operational inefficiencies:

• Eliminate redundancy: "There's no reason you should enter a client's name more than once," Peter says. If you find yourself inputting the same data repeatedly, it's time to reconsider. "It should happen one time. If you're trying to use software that doesn't have that option, then why use it?"

• Leverage Ignition: For those businesses larger than DMD, consider Ignition as an indispensable asset. The platform's potential for time savings is substantial. "Ignition is easily saving us 10 to 12 hours a month, and we're not very big," Peter says. "For a bigger company? It would be much more."