Ben is the co-founder of TRANE, a boutique executive education service provider. TRANE partners with a global  IT accrediting body to bring top IT certification classes to the Asia Pacific region. As the one charged with growing their revenue, Ben has been interested in and focused on lead generation in countries like Malaysia, Singapore,  Hong Kong and Australia.

In the early 2000’s, Ben’s activities were primarily done through telesales ie cold calls. He supplemented this with a few targeted marketing activities such as publishing the classes on their company website and mailing out print brochures. This involved astronomical phone bills and printing costs. It was not sustainable.

Then the internet arrived, and with it, growth in bandwidth as well as cloud services. Ben noticed that he could achieve a lot more with marketing, especially digital marketing. He then switched over from tele-sales to a marketing-led approach. He focused on email marketing and social media advertising.

Ben became increasingly convinced of the importance of email marketing. Connecting with new people through business emails, he found his outreach effective.

It is a more personalised way of reaching his target customer.  It can be tailored to customer actions. It is measurable. Ben can track who opens his email, who clicks on the links provided and who has unsubscribed. All of this is easy enough to set up and inexpensive.

But Ben was facing a few problems.

Ben’s core focus was to go out there and drive more sales. He needed a seamless way to manage all of his sales pipeline which he was currently doing with a variety of tools. He had appointments carved out in his diary. He made notes in his journal that he took on appointments.