How is this appointment scheduling SaaS company set the stage for growth?

There are a lot of exciting companies that work out of the CIC — the coworking space our agency calls home — and being around them every day made us curious: What were these companies doing to spur such impressive growth?

Sometimes the best growth tactic is simply getting the right infrastructure in place to attract and convert leads. Of course, this is easier said than done, which is why we asked Shayna Wilczynski, senior marketing specialist at BookingBug, how she and her team did it.

This is part 5 of 5 of our CIC Growth Series, featuring Shayna Wilczynski, senior marketing specialist at BookingBug. Check out part 1, part 2, part 3, and part 4 of the series.

Give us the elevator pitch for BookingBug.

BookingBug is an appointment scheduling platform. We create white-label scheduling software for enterprises — particularly in the finance and retail industries — and government agencies.

Our biggest differentiator is the expertise and experience we bring to each implementation. We don’t just sell software. We offer strategic consulting and solutions customized for each client to help them get the most out of our software.

What did you do in 2016 to drive growth?

BookingBug is nine years old, but we really just started investing heavily into marketing last year. So 2016 was about laying a solid foundation for future efforts. We hired a four-person team, including me. My background is in Marketo and Salesforce, so a big part of my role here was making sure we had both platforms integrated. Lead nurturing was previously a big pain point for us, so having these systems in place sets us up to better align marketing and sales.

Another big change we made is how we approach events and tradeshows. We were previously attending 10–15 events a year, but we had no consistent strategy for choosing which events to attend. We also had no way to keep track of the leads we got. This led to us losing potential clients since sometimes sales could never follow up with the leads marketing was getting.

To solve this problem, we strengthened our events strategy, making sure that in the future we’re attending the right events and going into each one with specific goals. We’ve also revamped our internal communications to make sure sales and marketing are on the same page so we aren’t missing opportunities we get at these events. Again, making sure we had Salesforce in place was key to ensuring we don’t lose track of the opportunities we get.

Lastly, we put a lot of effort into getting the positioning of our products and company right. We used to be focused on small-to-medium sized businesses. Now we’re serving enterprise clients, so the way we created our messaging had to change to reflect our new direction.

What will you do in 2017 to continue growing?

We’re going to keep building on the groundwork we laid last year. Inbound marketing is going to be a major focus for us this year. We’re finalizing some major projects which should be launched this quarter that really speak to the enterprise audience we’re interested in reaching.

We’ve got a lot of content in the works to help us attract new visitors and move them down the funnel. And now that we have Marketo and Salesforce working together, we can expect a much stronger lead nurturing system than we’ve ever had before.

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Want to learn how other CIC members are growing their businesses? Check out the rest of our CIC Growth Series here:

• Part 1: Emily Leinbach, Head of Marketing at Progress Partners
• Part 2: Lauren Abda, Founder at Branchfood
• Part 3: Richard Fries, Executive Director at MassBike
• Part 4: Haowei Zhang, CEO and Cofounder at Waylens

Ideometry is a full-service marketing agency located in Boston helping awesome companies and organizations amplify their growth strategies.