Vendasta Makes ‘MSP of the Year’ and ‘CIX Top 10 Growth Companies’ Lists

…online. As we all know, the best place to hide a dead body is the second page of the Google search results. The value of digital presence quickly became critical for SMBs, and once they are found, they need a good reputation and customers to advocate for them. It turns out listings, reputation and social are a foundational set of required products, especially for traditional media selling advertising.

As our partners sold these solutions, we learned that they don’t really have a “product” problem, what they have is a sales and marketing problem. They’re going from selling high price point products in traditional ads, to much lower margin, smaller gross dollar products, like digital. They need to reduce their cost of acquisition, and this is why we built out our sales and marketing automation. It’s become the engine of how we produce success.

At the push of a button, we can get the name of the business or the phone number of the business. We’re able to get information about where they’re listed, where they’re not, where they have wrong phone numbers, how their reviews look, how they compare to their competitors, if their website’s mobile-friendly, if it’s fast enough, if they have the right information on it, how their SEM is doing, how their search engine marketing is doing, how their SEO is doing, how they’re advertising compared to their competitors. When we send that information to them, and as they interact with it, our AI watches and delivers hot leads to the salespeople. This way, the salespeople don’t have to boil the ocean. They get to have fantastic conversations with customers that are looking for solutions to problems they previously did not know they had.

As we built the marketing automation and CRM — selfishly, to sell our own products — we realized that we could use this base data to sell any product or service in the martech stack and our next evolution was born. We built out a marketplace, where we could bring in the best-of-breed products across the entire martech stack. That’s what we did from 2016 to 2018.

Now, we’re becoming an end-to-end platform and bringing in all the products and services across all things an SMB needs. This is where we’re actually becoming more of an MSP. We’re bringing in products that traditionally MSPs would sell. We’ve added G Suite, we’ve added Microsoft’s Office 365, Constant Contact, MyCorporation. Some of these are productivity tools, and now we’re moving into the other stacks: HR, infrastructure, things that typical MSPs would sell, but also things that banks, accountants, any other vertical might provide to the local business. Our goal is to become a single source of truth for that local business.

When a small business has a problem, they turn to somebody that they trust. If they have an accounting problem, they turn to an accountant. If they have a marketing or an advertising problem, they turn to a media company or an agency. If they have…