three intelligently-integrated applications: 1 2 3€¦ · CRM: Vtiger (the Ballistix build) Vtiger...

BALLISTIX SALES TECHNOLOGY STACK 1

An Introduction to the Ballistix Sales

Technology Stack

Our Managed SPE service gives you immediate and ongoing access to our Sales Technology Stack. Our stack is a suite of

three intelligently-integrated applications:

We give you all the technology you need to power your marketing,

sales and customer service teams—all optimized for SPE.

Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation to manage your online promotional activities

CRM to manage promotions, sales and

customer service

A Dashboard to provide team members with real-

time, visual feedback on the value they are generating

CRM Dashboard Document Automation

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Additionally, our stack contains access to third party services like document

automation (including e-signatures), email broadcast and web hosting.

An Introduction to the Ballistix Sales Technology Stack

All three applications in our stack are hosted in the cloud. Our

Marketing Automation and CRM applications are our own builds of

the leading open-source projects in their categories. In both cases,

our build is a soft-fork of the community edition, augmented with

our own enhancements (thousands of them, in the case of CRM).

Marketing Automation and CRM

As is typically the case with open-source projects (think WordPress or Linux) our Marketing Automation and CRM applications compare favorably on a feature-for-feature basis with the leading commercial alternatives (Marketo and Salesforce) but they are significantly more extensible because of their open architecture.

Nsyteful Dashboard

Our Dashboard is the only application we have developed in house. It might resemble a general reporting application (think DOMO) but it’s not a business-intelligence platform. It’s specifically designed to be a dashboard (or status board), and that’s where it excels.

How we price

Our Sales Technology Stack is provided to all organizations that embark on a Managed SPE engagement. Organizations can use any, or all, applications within the stack and pay no additional fee, irrespective of user counts.

Post-engagement, organizations can keep the technology stack, in perpetuity, for a flat fee (determined at the commencement of the engagement)—with a guarantee of:

In other words, if you double (or triple) the size of your business—as some of our clients have done—your fee remains fixed for as long as you maintain your subscription to our technology stack.

No per-user pricing, ever!

No price increase, ever!

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Equivalent features. Less than 50% of the price.

If you wonder how we price our

post-engagement subscriptions,

there’s good news here too.

Post-engagement Subscriptions

Post-engagement, our fees are pegged at just under 50% of what organizations would otherwise spend on comparable applications. (You can see an example of this calculation at the end of this document).

And, because our subscription price is locked in perpetuity, the savings get better over time, as your business grows.

Internal Integrations

Marketing Automation pushes contacts to the Lead module of CRM

Contacts within CRM are replicated back to Marketing Automation

CRM Campaigns can be synchronized with Marketing Automation Segments

The Dashboard can visualize any report in either Marketing Automation or CRM

External Integrations

Organizations and Contacts from ERP (or any other application that contains an address book) can be replicated back to CRM

Forms, dynamic content, assets (and other objects) from within Marketing Automation can be published on your company websites

Marketing Automation and CRM both have extensive APIs, meaning additional integration is easy (no additional charge for API access)

Intelligent integration, internally and externally

If you’ve read The Machine you’ll know that we’re not fans of deep integration of enterprise

applications. In most cases, the requirement for extensive integration of applications is

caused by poor organization design (generally, an absence of division of labor).

That said, applications within our technology stack are integrated with one another intelligently. Furthermore, there is the facility to set up important integrations with external applications.


Meet the Applications


1Marketing Automation: Mautic (the Ballistix build)

Mautic is a marketing automation platform similar to Marketo, Pardot,

Eloqua, Hubspot and the like. Mautic provides non-technical marketers

with an advanced set of tools to automate their organization’s

relationship with contacts. Within Mautic you’ll find a list of contacts.

These contacts have either come from web responses or from CRM.

Mautic tracks the online activity of all contacts. What pages they visit on your websites, which emails they read, what assets they download and so on. Mautic maintains a point count for each contact and points can be added (or subtracted) for different activities.

Mautic also enables marketers to build forms, landing pages, emails and dynamic web content. This content can either be served directly from Mautic or hosted within your websites.

The real power of Mautic, however, is campaigns. Campaigns allow marketers to build complex workflows that run on autopilot. These workflows can send emails (or

sms messages) based on activities that contacts have (or have not) performed and they can even perform edits to contact records.

So, for example, a campaign might email a contact who meets certain criteria and invite them to visit a webpage and make a purchase. It could then respond differently to that

person based upon whether or not they visited the page or, if they did, whether or not they actually made the purchase!

Here at Ballistix, our Mautic instance has about 27 active campaigns, containing a total of 83 emails. Those campaigns result in literally thousands of emails a day being broadcast, all without human intervention. To replicate this, without Mautic, would require a team of people or tens of thousands of dollars worth of custom software.

Most organizations will configure Mautic to push contacts into CRM when a certain point count is reached or when specific activities are performed. Additionally, most organizations replicate

CRM contacts back into Mautic so that Mautic can be used to communicate with contacts that originated outside of Mautic.

The Ballistix build of Mautic has tighter integration with Vtiger (see below) than the community build. Additionally, it contains an address validation plugin that can validate postal addresses prior to form submission.

Ballistix has built a number of custom plugins for Mautic, including an Address Validator that verifies physical addresses before allowing web visitors to post forms. If, like many followers of SPE, you are giving away physical content, this will save you a fortune on careless (or spammy) form submissions.

Mautic tracks the online activity of each contact. Web pages visited, emails read, assets downloaded and so on.

Mautic allows you to create forms, landing pages, emails and dynamic content for your website. You can create content using either a drag-n-drop designer or, if you know what you’re doing, you can use the html editor.

You can use Mautic’s WYSIWYG campaign builder to create workflows whose complexity is limited only by your imagination. These workflows can send emails and text messages they can edit records, and they can even add and remove contacts from other campaigns. Workflows can also respond to actions that are performed (or not performed) by contacts (e.g. visiting a webpage or reading an email).

At the heart of Mautic is a list of contacts. Each contact has a point count reflective of the volume of interaction with your organization.


Vtiger has a powerful workflow engine. Workflows to be triggered either by updates to forms or on a schedule. And workflows can modify field values, create new records and send emails.

Emails can be broadcast directly from Vtiger. This is useful for sending small daily batches of preapproach emails on behalf of salespeople (which is standard practice in SPE).

Vtiger contains a number of useful utilities that can be accessed from any module. These include workflows, a powerful reporting engine, deduplication, and the ability to mass-edit records, mass-generate comments and mass-send emails and sms messages. There’s even a geo-mapping module which is invaluable for scheduling field operators.

The Vtiger campaign module enables the mass-conversion of Leads, as well as the mass-generation of Sales Opportunities. The latter is a critical requirement of SPE and, interestingly, a feature that’s missing on almost every mainstream CRM (including Salesforce).

All modules have a summary view. This enables a mash-up of fields from the primary module (e.g. Opportunities) and fields from related modules (e.g. Comments, Activities and Contacts). Like everything in Vtiger this view is fully configurable.

Vtiger provides administrators with extraordinary control. Fields of all types can be added to forms with a drag-n-drop interface. Administrators can even create cascading picklists—with items that are visible only to users with specific roles.

Mautic pushes contacts into Vtiger’s Lead module. Here they can be cleaned, de-duped and mass-converted to Organizations and Contacts. (In this image, duplicates have a value in the Vtiger Contact ID column.)

2CRM: Vtiger (the Ballistix build)

Vtiger is a CRM application, similar to Salesforce, MS Dynamics (CRM)

and Netsuite (CRM). CRMs tend to fall into two categories: enterprise

grade applications and salespeople’s productivity tools. Vtiger is

definitely in the first category (as are the other applications above),

because of its significant capability set and because of its extensibility.

Vtiger is used by marketing personnel to run campaigns and generate sales opportunities. It’s used by salespeople (and BDCs) to prosecute those sales opportunities and, in many cases, it’s used by customer service representatives to manage customer-service cases. Additionally, many organizations use it to manage simple projects, to manage service contracts or even to maintain databases of products or industry-wide events, sites or similar.

The community build of Vtiger compares very favorably on a feature-by-feature basis with Salesforce. However, the Ballistix build contains around 3,000 customizations and enhancements—all designed around the requirements of organizations that are implementing SPE. (Ballistix deploys a new build of Vtiger every weekday.)


3Dashboard: Nsyteful

Nsyteful is a cloud-based dashboard (or status board). It’s designed

to provide a real-time visual display for operators in marketing, sales,

customer service and other departments. Nsyteful features a number

of charts that are custom designed to meet the requirements of SPE.

Additionally, users can build reports using standard charting objects

(bar charts, pie charts, gauges, etc),

Within Nsyteful, charts sit within movable widgets. And widgets sit on pages. Users can add as many pages as they wish and they can configure pages to auto-rotate.

Nsyteful can visualize data from Mautic, Vtiger or from any other enterprise system. Additionally, Ballistix can create custom data sources that blend data from multiple systems.

Custom widgets include:

Sales Activity Widget

This widget visualizes both the volume of sales activity performed over the course of a day and the dollar-value of sales stages completed. Additionally, it displays Protected

Calling Times and personalized tokens that celebrate the achievement of milestones by salespeople.

On-time Case Completion Widget

This widget summarizes the performance of a customer- service team (or similar) on a rolling four-week basis. As well as displaying the week-by-week average OTCC percentage, it also shows the trend and the volumes of cases processed.

Video Feed Widget

This widget enables you to add a video feed from a Nest camera to Nsyteful. It may seem like a strange inclusion but followers of SPE insist that all remote teams are united with a real-time video feed.

The dashboard has two themes (light and dark), with more themes on the way.

You can connect each widget to a variety of data sources (including Google Sheets and Vtiger Reports) and you can have Ballistix build custom data sources for you that blend data from multiple sources. Additionally, the powerful Filter Builder gives you precise control over what data is displayed.

You can add as many pages as you like and configure each page with up to 12 widget containers (on a 4 x 3 grid).

What really sets Nsyteful apart from other reporting solutions is our special-purpose widgets. Three are pictured here. The Sales Activity widget on the left tracks both activity and outcomes for inside sales teams. The On Time Case Completion widget (top right) displays both on-time performance and load over four consecutive periods. And the Video Widget enables organizations with remote teams to share live video feeds.

The Nsyteful dashboard consists of movable widgets, each of which contains a chart, a table or any one of a number of other objects you can use to visualize your critical information.

Pages can be set to auto-rotate at different cadences (and, soon, you’ll have the ability to build custom rotation sequences).


The Ballistix tech stack is augmented with additional applications and services, including:

Other inclusions: PandaDoc, SendGrid and AWS Hosting

PandaDoc

PandaDoc enables you to create beautiful documents (proposals, contracts, quotes, etc) with e-signatures and automated routing of documents between signatories. PandaDoc is integrated with Vtiger, meaning that documents can be auto-generated from Vtiger at the press of a button—with variable data automatically populated with values from Vtiger fields. Ballistix provides a number of PandaDoc licenses at no charge and a discount on additional licenses.

SendGrid

SendGrid is the world’s leading SMTP provider. Ballistix integrates all instances of Mautic and Vtiger with our SendGrid account, meaning that our clients can send (virtually) unlimited emails with no email charges whatsoever.

AWS Hosting

If the Ballistix team has built you a website or two, an ecommerce site or any kind of online property, then we will continue to provide hosting, at no additional charge for as long as you maintain a subscription to our tech stack.

The Maths: How we calculate the pricing of our Sales Technology Stack (post engagement)

As mentioned earlier, we peg the pricing of our

subscription at roughly 50% of what a similar-sized

organization would pay for comparable technology.

The table below illustrates the comparison for organizations ov various sizes.

This table does not incorporate the fees organizations will typically pay for the initial implementation of these new technologies. For example, an organization on our Medium plan would expect to spend $50,000 to $200,000 in implementation costs with traditional vendors.

All of this integration work would be performed as part of a Ballistix engagement. Consequently, you could argue either that you get the tech implementation free when you pay for new sales process—or that you get a new sales process for free when you pay for the tech implementation!


Ballistix Tech Stack Pricing

M I C R OS M A L L M E D I U M L A R G E E N T E R P R I S E

$350/mo $1,000/mo $2,000/mo $4,000/mo $9,000/mo

<$5m <$10m <$30m <$100m $100m-$300m

See how our pricing compares





M I C R O P L A N C O M P A R I S O N

COMPARABLE SERVICE PROVIDER BALLISTIX TECH STACK

APPLICATION SUBSCRIPTION PRICING

TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

CRM: Zoho $45 per user (Enterprise)

$225 (5 users)

Marketing Automation: Constant Contact

$195 (<15k contacts)

$195

Document Automation: Nil

N/A N/A N/A

Hosted Dashboard N/A N/A N/A

Website / Application Hosting

$40 $40

Broadcast Email $40 $40

Monthly Total $500 per month $350 per month

The Ballistix Tech Stack is included in the Managed SPE fee.Pay a flat monthly fee post engagement for the Tech Stack according to the selected plan.

Prices in USD, ex taxes and correct at time of publishing.



M I C R OS M A L L

M E D I U M L A R G E E N T E R P R I S E

$350/mo $1,000/mo $2,000/mo $4,000/mo $9,000/mo

<$5m <$10m <$30m <$100m $100m-$300m






S M A L L P L A N C O M P A R I S O N



TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

CRM: Zoho $45 per user (Enterprise)

$450 (10 users)

Marketing Automation: Hubspot

$1,500 (Professional: <15k contacts)

$1,500

Document Automation: DocuSign

$25 per user (Standard)

$75 (3 users)

Hosted Dashboard: Geckoboard

$50 (Starter)

$50 (2 dashboards: 2 users)


$40 $40


Monthly Total $2,155 per month $1,000 per month





M I C R O S M A L LM E D I U M

L A R G E E N T E R P R I S E

$350/mo $1,000/mo $2,000/mo $4,000/mo $9,000/mo

<$5m <$10m <$30m <$100m $100m-$300m






M E D I U M P L A N C O M P A R I S O N



TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

CRM: Salesforce $75 per user (Lightning Professional)

$1,500 (20 users)

Marketing Automation: Hubspot

$2,400 (Enterprise: <20k contacts)

$2,400


$40 per user (Business Pro)

$200 (5 users)


$149 (Growth)

$149 (5 dashboards;

unlimited users)


$40 $40






M I C R O S M A L L M E D I U ML A R G E

E N T E R P R I S E

$350/mo $1,000/mo $2,000/mo $4,000/mo $9,000/mo

<$5m <$10m <$30m <$100m $100m-$300m






L A R G E P L A N C O M P A R I S O N



TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

CRM: Salesforce $150 per user (Lightning Enterprise)

$6,000 (40 users)

Marketing Automation: Pardot

$2,500 (Plus: <10,00 contacts)

$2,500



$320 (8 users)


$599 (Company)

$599 (Unlimited dashboards:

unlimited users)


$80 $80







M I C R O S M A L L M E D I U M L A R G EE N T E R P R I S E

$350/mo $1,000/mo $2,000/mo $4,000/mo $9,000/mo

<$5m <$10m <$30m <$100m $100m-$300m






E N T E R P R I S E P L A N C O M P A R I S O N



TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

TOTAL MONTHLY SPEND

CRM: Salesforce $150 per user (Lightning Enterprise)

$15,000 (100 users)

Marketing Automation: Pardot

$4,000 (Advanced)

$4,000



$600 (15 users)


$599 per user (Company)

$599 (unlimited dashboads:

unlimited users)


$120 $120


Monthly Total $20,359 per month$9,000

(>$300m by request)



three intelligently-integrated applications: 1 2 3€¦ · CRM: Vtiger (the Ballistix build) Vtiger...

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