E-commerce and the Blue Corona Sintranet by Ben Landers

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1 / CASE STUDY BLUE CORONA Data-savvy marketing company credits imeet Central for dramatic boost in net income; consolidates project management and file sharing in the cloud H I G H L I G H T S THE PROBLEM Blue Corona sought a robust collaboration solution to meet its needs as the company scaled. Specifically, the company needed to leverage project dependencies and find a single solution that could handle both project management and file sharing, while also providing a home for client-facing projects. THE SOLUTION By moving away from Box and Basecamp in favor of imeet Central, Blue Corona consolidated all of its client activity in a single platform. Additionally, the imeet Central-powered intranet serves as a critical communication hub for the company s multiple offices. THE RESULTS With a better handle on workflow, Blue Corona now is able to tackle more clients and client projects simultaneously. Company president Ben Landers credits imeet Central with helping to power an 800 percent increase in net income in 2013, and then a 100 percent year-over-year income gain in imeet CENTRAL VS. BASECAMP The thing that really drives me, as well as our entire team, is helping businesses grow, says Blue Corona president Ben Landers. This commitment has sparked his own company s growth; founded in 2007, Blue Corona has now been on the Inc list three consecutive times and made the Inc. 500 in its first year of eligibility. Every single person on our team lives and breathes in imeet Central throughout each and every day. Ben Landers / president Blue Corona s approach is unique in that it targets primarily local companies. While the term analytics has been seen for years in the pages of Harvard Business Review, not many companies 1 / 8

2 After switching to imeet Central, we quickly realized how Basecamp had limited us. Ben Landers / president offer real analytics services for relatively small, local companies, he says. That s what we do. We collect data most companies have never had access to, and we translate it into action, and, more importantly, tangible business results. With growth comes new complexities, and Blue Corona discovered fresh technical challenges as its success spread. Some of the tools and processes that had worked well in the beginning began to show limitations. After three years of using Basecamp for project management, Landers realized that his team had outgrown its technology. But change couldn t be taken lightly. Basecamp was a great entry-level project management tool, but as our company grew, it became too lightweight for our needs, says Landers. The simplicity of Basecamp and the length of time we d been using it definitely meant that we were going to have to take a careful and deliberate approach to making a change. After considering several collaboration options, Blue Corona switched to imeet Central in July The results were fast and dramatic. After switching to imeet Central, we quickly realized how Basecamp had limited us and how many processes we had developed around its limitations, Landers says. With imeet Central, we found the opposite to be true we are able to come up with processes and procedures that make the most sense for us and then customize imeet Central to follow them. 2 / 8

3 Critical files, tasks and correspondence are all contained within shared, secure workspaces. NO MORE SILOS, NO MORE FRANKENSTEIN SOLUTIONS Blue Corona serves as a virtual online marketing manager for its clients, optimizing advertising campaigns, building websites, running marketing programs, solving SEO woes, and much more. As a forward-thinking, analytics-savvy organization, it s tracking and optimizing a tremendous amount of information for its clients. 3 / 8

4 To help turn data into action, Blue Corona previously leaned on Basecamp for project management while using Box for file sharing. A client contract wasn t necessarily in the same place as client-related spreadsheets. Discussions surrounding those contracts and spreadsheets may have been occurring somewhere else altogether. With imeet Central, Landers and his team were able to consolidate all client project information in a single location in the cloud, eliminating the need to scatter across multiple software platforms. When solutions are stitched together, something typically falls between the cracks. Time gets squandered on searches for a particular document or conversation thread. Critical client information gets locked in silos. As Blue Corona grew, our staff grew with it and we needed [a collaboration solution] that was significantly more robust, says Landers. We needed something that allowed for project dependencies. We needed a solution that married project management with file sharing. We needed a platform that could be customized for both internal and external client-facing projects. Multiple collaboration solutions fused together? What a monstrosity! 4 / 8

5 THE IMPACT ON CLIENT DELIVERY AND COMPANY MANAGEMENT When Blue Corona brings a new client on board, the sales and marketing teams get busy setting up workspaces for those clients within imeet Central. Client agreements are uploaded to the workspace. The account managers create online documents in imeet Central that serve as living client notepads. The client services team creates project plans using tasks and milestones. Blue Corona s intranet keeps company goals constantly top of mind. At the executive level, Blue Corona s leadership team created an intranet in imeet Central to share vital and timely company information, keep employees in multiple offices feeling like they re working on the same team, remind everyone of shared goals, and reinforce the culture of ownership that Landers prizes. Our team truly understands what it means to think and act like an owner, he says. They treat Blue Corona as if it s their business, and they apply the same thinking to each of our clients. From project minutiae to company-wide big pictures, all of the action is happening in imeet Central. Every single person on our team lives and breathes in imeet Central throughout each and every day to get both internal company news and to deliver on client work, says Landers. He adds that he s also considering offering access to imeet Central workspaces to all of Blue Corona s clients. 5 / 8

6 THE ROI OF imeet CENTRAL Calculating the ROI of advertising, marketing and websites is a big part of our business, says Landers. At the same time, I doubt we could put an exact figure on the increased collaboration enabled by implementing imeet Central. I m not sure it even makes sense to try. As Gary Vaynerchuk says, What s the ROI of your mother? No one can answer that question, but I think we d all agree that we owe it all to our mothers! Landers credits imeet Central with improving how his team manages client workflow. Having unlocked greater efficiency, Blue Corona maximizes the number of clients and projects it can tackle simultaneously. That s a significant win for any company but it s not what Landers focuses on when asked about ROI. From my perspective as the leader of the company, the largest return from implementing imeet Central, and what allowed us to increase our net income by 800 percent in 2013 and more than 100 percent in 2014 vs. 2013, is the custom workspace used to host Blue Corona s intranet, says Landers. In my experience, most people who fail to meet their goals do so because they lose sight of them. Blue Corona s intranet powered by imeet Central helps us ensure that what s truly important our mission, core values, short-term/long-term goals, etc. is on the top of everyone s minds daily. imeet Central powers short-term revenue growth while also keeping team members focused on long-term goals. 6 / 8

7 HERE ARE THREE OF MY FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT imeet CENTRAL... 01/ 02/ 03/ The customizable Home tab. No other project management software we evaluated gave us the option to set up a Home tab for each client that we could tailor to our needs. We ve set up different templates for different project types (e.g. client project, marketing project, external shared files, etc.) that all feature unique Home tab setups to best meet that project type s needs. The customization aspect has increased our efficiency tenfold. No more digging to find what you need it s all right in front of you. The ability to house both the internal and external parts of our business in one place. With all the features that imeet Central offers, we re able to house both our client projects and our intranet in the same place which helped tremendously with user adoption. Pretty much anything anyone needs can be found in Central Desktop whether it s a client contract and the deliverables being worked on or it s a company update or a PTO request. The tie-in to systems we already use. Someone can start something in imeet Central, tie in the other team members they need, and then work completely out of their for the rest of the project you can have discussions over that are all recorded in imeet Central and you can important files in. Ben Landers president Blue Corona 7 / 8

8 ABOUT imeet CENTRAL imeet Central helps people work together in ways they never imagined possible. Our collaboration platform connects people and information in the cloud, making it possible to share files, combine knowledge, inspire ideas, manage projects and more. More than 750,000 users worldwide use imeet Central everyday. Key customers include CBS, MLB.com, BBDO, Pizza Hut, Amazon, Sesame Workshop, Pinkberry, the Humane Society of the United States, CareerBuilder, Javelin Marketing Group, Workday and more. imeet Central is a PGi product. / / imeetcentral.com 8 / 8