Remember that blog about Connecting the Dots and how you never know where your relationships will take you? This is a great example!
Tell us about your company and what you do.
The Marketing Squad is a digital marketing agency here in Louisville, KY that utilizes inbound marketing methodologies to help our partner clients achieve their business development goals. In the simplest terms, we tell your story to grow your business. For nearly 10 years now, we’ve built a lot of websites and created a lot of videos, but what sets us apart is that we strategically work with our clients on an ongoing basis. We spin the plates of strategy, content marketing, social media, digital advertising, blogging, email marketing, marketing automation, and much more month in and month out. Some of our clients have been with us 7, 8, to 9 years. Others are coming up on 2nd, 3rd or 4th anniversaries. We love partnering for the long term and we share that attitude with the team at Unified Technologies.
Right now we operate with about 90% retention and that wouldn’t happen unless we added value month after month or drove the results in leads, traffic, or brand awareness that our clients desired. We have a lot of room to get better and that’s what drives us.
One thing we learned from working with and for Unified Technologies was how important Core Values are for your business. Helping design the Unified graphics for their Core Values inspired us to create our own.
We are:
- Truth Tellers
- Trusted Allies
- Faithful Stewards
- Creative Problem Solvers
- Strategic Doers
- Disciplined Learners
- Passionate Story Tellers
- Servant Leaders
What drew your company to make a connection with Unified Technologies?
The owners of The Marketing Squad had a long-standing relationship with Brian Borgman, COO at Unified Technologies. We had also met Scott Diamond, CEO in years past, and we had a couple other relationships with Unified team members. One of our owners, Bryce Raley, played high school baseball against and AAU/ Babe Ruth baseball with Michael Gabhart, VP of Sales and Marketing. See all things go back to high school sports. #polkhigh #gloryyearsWhen we decided our business and our team had grown up/and out of using our cell phones and a couple cordless phones to run our business, we knew who to call. What surprised us and would surprise you as a potential customer today was how scalable and affordable a managed services phone system was for a small 15 employee business.
Our first quote came from a local phone provider and they quoted us big dollars to buy all the equipment. I believe our price was around $16,000 all in. Then we’d need to have an IT person handle the service and maintenance. As a nimble agency, we have a full-time project manager who also doubles as our IT work. The idea of dedicating him or having someone else handle this type of IT need didn’t make sense for us.
Once Gabby (Mike Gabhart) got back to us with his quote it was really a no-brainer. He laid out our pricing options for a managed services plan with ShoreTel phones and the rest was history. The upfront cost was about 1/8 of the investment compared to the other quote and the monthly payment of around $500 made sense to us. So we lease our phones and Unified has our back with ongoing service and maintenance.
Dan and Glenn have been very helpful with the installation and maintenance and the project managers like Kailey and Kerry gave us great customer service. Gabby, Brian Goul, and Jason Becker have all assisted us on the sales front as well.
If you could describe Unified in one word, what would that be?
Pros
How has using Unified benefited you and your company?
We really needed to grow up and put our big boy/girl pants on. Operating with cell phones wasn’t fair to our team and it was difficult to have professional conversations and conference calls with our partner and project clients. As one of our owners and partners Jay Stewart always says, we needed to shore up the bottom of our funnel.
As we’ve grown as an agency the need to communicate quickly with clients all over the US, from San Fran to Boston to Indy, made phones a big key. The efficiency to page one another, have DID’s for each team member, and to have directory options took us to a new level of professionalism. Yes, it was fun all those years doing the bootstrap thing, but real phones made us legitimate a few years back.
The ShoreTel system allows our team to keep their cell phones private if they choose. They can give out their DID numbers and have them forwarded to their cell phones. All our team members can control their own phone settings from their own Macbook Pro with the ShoreTel software. Our master controls still rest with our office manager.
We’ve just finished a move recently and had to switch carriers. Unified has worked with us to get all phones back online after the switch.
If you’re in the market for a new phone system, or other services like cabling, door access or teleconferencing needs, then Unified Technologies is your go to.
