To say SharpSpring has had a big year is an understatement. Our service officially launched to the public just 10 months ago, and we merged with SMTP (NASDAQ: SMTP) in August so that we could offer world-class email delivery. Our revolutionary call tracking feature was released in September, making SharpSpring the first marketing automation company to include native call tracking right inside the platform. Now we’ve hit our newest milestone – over 250 agencies have chosen SharpSpring’s marketing automation platform for themselves and their clients.

Far more often than not, these agencies are leaving great competitors like Hubspot, Pardot, Act-On and Marketo. It is humbling to have the leaders of so many great companies choose our relatively new but growing company over companies that have raised literally hundreds of millions of dollars, and have hundreds, or even thousands of employees.

Having crossed this milestone while in the middle of our best month ever (again), and recognizing that this is just the beginning, we want to sincerely thank the earlier adopters who have chosen us. Without this rare breed of business owner that sees a team working as hard as they do, and takes a chance on an unknown but rising brand, we would not be writing this blog today. Put simply, we love and appreciate all of our agency partners, and are forever grateful for their support.

But what is it that made all of these agencies choose SharpSpring? 

Like most good answers, this one is simple. Rather than competing with agencies, we built our business around them.SharpSpring is completely focused on marketing agencies, and that focus affects everything that we do.

Think it’s all talk?  Here are five proof points:

ONE – Our agency-pricing model. SharpSpring costs agencies as little as 1/10 the cost of our competition – but that is just the beginning. Agencies are not resellers of SharpSpring, and an agency’s customer is just that, the agency’s customer – not ours.

TWO – Our agency-focused platform. SharpSpring’s single sign-on platform enables agencies to manage all their clients in one spot. Of course, SharpSpring is completely rebrandable, including a white label login widget, so clients can even login to SharpSpring directly from an agency partner’s site – reinforcing the agency’s brand on a daily basis.

THREE – Flexible Architecture. Because we work with marketing agencies, SharpSpring is designed to be the most flexible marketing automation platform on the market. We like to say that we simply “work with what your clients are already using.” SharpSpring works with nearly any CMS. Agencies have better things to do than ask their clients to convert their entire website to the CMS system of the marketing automation tool of the day.

SharpSpring was the first marketing automation platform to include a fully-integrated CRM while also working with all the top CRMs including Salesforce.com and Sugar CRM. Again, we simply work with what companies are already using.

SharpSpring has a built-in Dynamic Form Builder, but works with all the top form-building companies like WooFoo, FormStack, and Gravity forms, and even works with native forms that a company has built themselves.

A full-featured API and Zapier integration ensures that we seamlessly integrate with hundreds of apps, passing data back and forth with ease.

FOUR – Unlimited Support. Agency partners receive a dedicated agency account manager to help implement SharpSpring, answer any strategy questions, and even help sell SharpSpring to clients. Partner support is always on hand to answer any questions, troubleshoot, and help navigate technical implementations.

FIVE. Our incredibly agile, customer-focused development team. SharpSpring was built on the ideas and feedback of our partners. Our developers “get it” and love to build features knowing they’ll be used by real people to solve real problems the moment they are released. We roll-out new features and updates each week, to create the best marketing automation software available, and our development team lives for it.

We remain humble with our success – knowing we are still just a small start-up company in the scheme of things. But that said, we really think we are on to something, and having 250 agencies tell us the same thing is both gratifying and emboldening. This is an exciting milestone for us, and we are excited about the future.

We’d like to end this post the way we started it, with a “BIG THANK YOU!” to all of our agency partners who made this blog possible.

Not a partner yet? Come join us.

AUTHOR
Rick-Carlson CEO SharpSpring
Rick Carlson