Written by: James Foo Torres, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
One of the most intractable challenges of running a business is figuring out how to manage your organization without allowing repetitive, manual tasks from eating up valuable time and bogging you down. To meet this challenge, James Shockley has developed an end-to-end set of customized workflows he calls Marketing Mate.
While many software companies answer these common needs with expensive software platforms such as resource planning and customer relationship management platforms, Shockley has taken a more practical and innovative approach.
“Rather than force my customers to have to hire programmers to create customized workflows, Marketing Mate is built on customized scripts which can be repurposed to meet a virtually infinite variety of processes,” he says. “One of the most difficult projects anyone can take on is setting up a CRM to meet your specific requirements. We do the entire design, set up, and testing of a CRM tailored to our customers’ needs for them. Then it runs flawlessly forever.”
Unlike the approach used by Microsoft, Oracle, Salesforce, and other CRM vendors, Marketing Mate leverages activities already in place in the vast majority of businesses, such as text messaging, calendaring, and back office services.
The breakthrough strategy which makes it work reliably and seamlessly, he says, is thanks to the ubiquitous nature of texting or SMS (Short Messaging Service). The workflows which form the basis for the Marketing Mate solutions are based on the power of texting to communicate marketing messages while capturing and managing prospect data. Even more compelling, Shockley adds, is that due to the “zero-code” nature of the components of his system, pricing of Marketing Mate as a monthly service is extremely affordable and downright cheap in comparison to other CRM, ERP, and marketing automation solutions.
“The super high open rate of text messages, well over 95%, make it the ideal vehicle for reaching out to prospects and interacting with customers,” he says.
Founded just four months ago in early 2022, Marketing Mate is the outgrowth of a digital marketing agency Shockley has operated for over four years. It was while encouraging his clients to add SMS to their marketing programs that Shockley discovered how underserved this need was by technology providers.
“Setting up an internal system such as a sales pipeline, a CRM, or a calendaring application to handle a text messaging campaign is a major software development project,” Shockley states. “What Marketing Mate does is provide lead management and customer communications systems tailored to the exact needs of the marketer. It essentially serves as a marketing assistant to your whole team.”
“For decades there has existed a wide spectrum of solutions for managing telemarketing and email marketing for businesses to select from,” says James Shockley, founder and CEO of Marketing Mate. “Text message marketing is comparatively still in its infancy so there is an absence of tools and platforms for automating the handling of SMS as a communication choice for businesses.”
In explaining how the cloud-based, subscription service works, he likens it to a series of customized workflows which he calls “smart pipelines”. Being that a large percentage of leads today arrive through websites, Marketing Mate automatically captures each one as a database entry and channels them through a pre-selected process depending on the goals of the campaign.
“Let’s say you want to schedule sales calls with your prospects. Marketing Mate automatically serves them up a calendar, and when they book an appointment a Zoom link is sent to both parties,” he adds. “We can also vet each lead by having them answer a series of questions to make sure they’re qualified before you invest any time.”
To streamline the internal management of the Market Mate application, Shockley’s clients have access to a customized dashboard which displays the leads from the time it comes in until they convert to being a customer or for ongoing re-marketing purposes.
An early adopter of Marketing Mate is Joe Beck. A sales consultant and mentor to executive coaches, Beck says it was the flexibility of the platform which made it possible for him to radically expand and more effectively manage his lead generation efforts.
“I’ve been using email marketing and LinkedIn Sales Navigator for years but was unable to unify them so I could see the big picture and maximize their effectiveness,” Beck says. “From my perspective as a sales professional, Marketing Mate is a game-changer that I think will become ubiquitous in the text marketing world.”
With texting now firmly established as the world’s most popular and immediate form of communication, Shockley expects the demand for solutions to automate and manage the torrent of text messages and other forms of digital marketing to grow exponentially.
“It’s abundantly clear that business automation is the future. Within a few years virtually every business owner will automate every aspect of their business before they even launch,” he says. “End-to-end automation can empower businesses of all kinds to have higher productivity, better profit margins, and insanely high-quality customer service.”
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James Foo Torres, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
James Foo Torres is a renowned Public Relations Strategist, a host of a top 1.5% of podcasts in the world, a bestselling author and an international bestselling author. He is best known as Foo, founder of CEO of Imperium Authority. Following his service in the Air Force, Foo launches his company with the mission of amplifying the positive impact of exceptional leaders. Foo always aspired to be an entrepreneur and run his own business. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, his firm is popular in America and gaining international notoriety. In the last few years, Imperium Authority has helped accelerate the growth of a wide spectrum of brands and companies in various markets.
