Don Breckenridge

Don Breckenridge is a lifelong entrepreneur and co-founder of Hatchbuck, an easy-to-use sales and marketing software designed to help small and mid-sized businesses grow.

A passionate innovator, Breckenridge has a track record of launching and building successful software companies. In 1999, he co-founded Sendouts, an on-demand software for third party recruiting professionals. With Sendouts, Breckenridge drove the vision and development, raised both private and venture capital funding, grew the user base and sold the company to a private equity group in 2009.

After exiting Sendouts in 2010, Breckenridge and co-founder, Jonathan Herrick, identified an unmet need in the marketplace for a sales and marketing automation tool that catered to the unique requirements of SMBs. They leveraged their experience in SaaS to launch Hatchbuck, a simple and affordable sales and marketing automation product that helps SMBs easily nurture relationships, increase sales and grow.

Expert session

Tactic that has had the biggest impact on Don’s success

 The use of an all-in-one marketing automation software

Result if you follow the steps in Don’s session

A more efficient marketing strategy by using all-in-one automation that allows you to personalize your marketing message

Full session with video, notes, audio and discussion inside EHQ Club. Learn more

Expert session snapshot

Transcript

So first and foremost, an all in one system, and by the way, obviously, I’m not here to pitch Hatchbuck. I mean, I’m just talking about all in one systems that combine the CRM, email marketing automation into one. And of course, our system is, you know, does that. So I might use our system as example in going through this.

But in general, what small business owners need is, they need a single system that combines those three elements, and obviously they need the CRM so that they can stay completely organized with all their prospects, all their content, I mean, all their customers, any other kind texts that they have.

And then out of that same system, they need to be able to communicate, they need to be able to email out their contacts, and as they’re emailing their contacts, they need to be able to track who’s opening, what email, who’s clicking on what link.

And even if they click on a link back to their website, what pages are they visiting, because that’s all really important information for the small business owner, you know, they need to be able to stay in touch with all their contacts, other prospects on a consistent basis.

And sometimes especially to the sales process, and sales process may take a week, a month a year, and they need to stay in touch and watch for that online behavior, be able to react in the online behavior. So somebody fills out a form on their website, they need to be able to communicate new emails to that person based upon whatever they filled out.

Or if they start to have a lot of online behavior. They start clicking on a lot of links, opening a lot of emails, going to a lot of pages and needs to alert the small business owner as far as, hey, we’ve got a hot lead here. Because it helps to enable the business owner to identify the hot leads versus you know, the cold or just warm leads, right?

So, that all in one system is important for the communication, and also to monitor behavior and to react to that behavior. And also to be able to do this in an automated fashion.

So that if somebody is in the sales process for a year, you’ve got to let marketing in the software communicate with the person throughout the year to, you know, build trust and educate and so forth so that the small business owner doesn’t need to do that themselves. And so it’s really key.

So what I’ll tell you about is a little bit about our process here and when you open this up, you said that we have not made a cold calls and that is completely true. We have a complete inbound marketing engine here that keeps our sales reps fully better. I mean, they are slammed.

And so I’m going to share that process with you because it can be duplicated by just about any business. So why don’t we talk about that next?

And so the first thing in our process I want to take you through is our process of how we attract visitors to our website, how we capture them, how we start to nurture them and how we close them.