At the very least, you need:
- A website or landing pages to share your business with the world online
- A system for capturing leads and sending marketing emails
- A contact management system to keep track of your clients and prospects
- A payment processing tool to collect orders and charge credit cards
And that’s just for starters. When your needs get a bit more sophisticated, you may need full-on marketing automation, response tracking and lead-source metrics, split testing, sales force automation, lead scoring and who knows what else.
Plus, it seems as though every day there’s another “must-have” piece of software or new tricky feature that you’re told is required to be successful in today’s business world. Each vendor will tell you that they alone have cracked the code to some cutting-edge tactic which will make all the difference for you.
Because you’re committed to your business’s success and are a persevering entrepreneur, you painstakingly research, purchase, learn, string together, launch and manage one after another after another, only to find out — after days or weeks or months of tech-battle — that this one tool you bought doesn’t do that one thing you really need, so you’ve got to tear it all apart and start again.
But, you keep at it, and pretty soon you’ve collected five or 10 different tools and get it all working well enough. Then your business grows or your needs change a little, and suddenly the technology isn’t a fit anymore, and you’re right back in it.
Frustrating, to say the very least.
You’d think that by now, with the thousands of providers of software out there for businesses that this crazy-making situation would have been solved once and for all.
Read that article here.
There’s also a lot more to consider when selecting a software vendor than most people imagine, and quick decisions often lead to regrettable (read: expensive, time-consuming) mistakes.
To help you make decisions about the tools you choose for your business, we put together a marketing automation Buyer’s Guide that’s yours for the clicking. Check it out here, and you’ll be on the right track to choosing the best possible tools for your business (even if it’s not Ontraport).
