I can’t hold it together
We essentially heard this cry from one of our recent clients. They had a website that was barely being held together with spit & bailing wire and was prone to crashing if looked at sideways. They had at least three different eCommerce solutions that didn’t talk to their website. Add to that two different membership management solutions and as if that was not enough, a completely separate email solution to send out their newsletter and other communications. I’m probably missing something on the list but you get the point.
They were spending hours per month trying to keep everything in sync and by their own admission not doing a very good job of it. People who weren’t paying still had membership access. People who were paying were not getting access. Some people had access to the wrong things on the membership site. The list goes on and on.
Does this sound even a little familiar to your own situation?
Look, I am NOT putting this client down! They have created a successful business and as often happens as you grow, you need to grow your systems. But what happens more often than not is that you plop something on one side to solve one problem, then plop something on the other side to solve a different problem. Rinse and repeat…..Before you know it, you end up with a blivet….look it up in the Urban Dictionary if you don’t know what a blivet is. This happens a lot!
Where this client got really smart (which puts them in the minority) is that they recognized that what they had was not sustainable or scalable, and that it was getting rapidly out of control. So what did they do? They did the smart thing….instead of plopping yet another app onto this mess, they did some research on what was available and made the decision to start over with a whole new system.
You can’t necessarily reduce everything to only one system, but you can greatly reduce the number of moving parts and you can make sure that they mesh together like gears in a transmission.
They decided to get Infusionsoft to handle all their emailing, CRM and eCommerce solutions.
That alone is a reduction of about 4 to 1. Then they are having a completely new website designed and built (everyone should do that every once in a while…get a fresh look).
They are integrating that new Joomla website using our JoomFuse integration app so that the site and the CRM are tightly geared together to manage their memberships. Plus as a bonus, they are using our JF Portal app to add in member self-management…..a REALLY big timesaver.
So, while everything is now tightly integrated, let’s be generous and count it as 3 platforms….down from 8-9 chaotic systems that don’t really interact to 3 that talk all the time.
And there is more to come as soon as this is all working….but now always with the tightly geared-together philosophy.
While we think that the products this client chose are the best available, there are many other ways to accomplish similar things….You just have to think geared-together!
Do you think that they’ll save time and money? I know they will…It will be a painful transition, and cost them some money, but when it is done, they’ll recoup that in no time and have hours per month to direct on business growth…..that is what I call a win - win - win!