Managed Services & Retainers
Marketing Automation & CRM platform consulting, optimization, administration, support
Unlock your tech stack’s full potential with monthly management tailored for the unique needs of your business.
Get proactive CRM, Marketing Automation, and Website management designed to drive consistent results and support your growth goals. Make your tech stack work harder and smarter with our monthly managed services so you can focus on scaling your business.
Dedicated Consultant
As a monthly managed client you get a dedicated certified HubSpot consultant to advise, strategize, and execute on best practices tailored to your business. We work against the hours allocated towards the Managed Services plan you select.
No Long Term Commitment
Our Managed Service plans & Retainers only require a three month commitment. No long term contracts required! Cancel or renew after any three month period. Most clients choose to continue for six to twelve months as they continue to see value in our services and the trusted relationship with have with our clients.
Flexible Tasks
We'll meet weekly to discuss what was worked on last week, and what should be next as we collaborate with you and your team to prioritize initiatives and tasks. We'll work on practically any type of agreed upon task. Hours are fixed each month but tasks are not!
OBC checked all the boxes for us. The flexibility of their pricing plans was also a big plus for our needs. I couldn’t be happier with the results. We got everything I’d hoped for done in about half that time, which allowed us to really dive into some more advanced Pardot work. I’m just absolutely thrilled with what we accomplished in such a short time.”
~Bobby Palmer, Marketing Manager
Byte Software
Packages for Managed Services
Providing OUTCOMES and VALUE
Managed Service plans & Retainers provide the most value by including the perfect balance of strategic advice and planning plus DFY (Done For You) hands-on tactical elements to optimize platforms and processes for driving more ROI from your tech stack including marketing, CRM, and web platforms.
No annual contracts or expensive retainers required.
With Managed Services & Retainers we don’t use a static SOW
For us Managed Services and Retainers are essentially the same thing, an agreement for a set number of months of consulting service at an established level of hours per month.
In contrast to a static punch list of items from an SOW that quickly gets outdated, with Managed Services & Retainers we reconvene every month to review task status, work out current priorities and milestones, and then execute on agreed tasks as a ‘monthly sprint’. This provides a sort of Agile project management method of addressing current priorities so you are always getting what you need over the course of our engagement.
Systems & Process Development
Managed Services & Retainers allow time to go deeper into setting up and fixing systems and processes than traditional project-based consulting.
I assess your current state (often including a platform audit), then make recommendations for creating a project plan as a roadmap to the desired future state.
I’ll try to hit some quick wins that will make a near-term significant impact, then we’ll work towards optimizing and systematizing and aligning people and technology to get the best result.
Additional Features of Service Retainers
- Fixed hours, flexible tasks. Hours are fixed but tasks are not!
- Consulting on-demand!
- Select the number of fixed hours for entire engagement ranging from 10 to 30 hours per month.
- Provisions for ongoing consulting relationship for deeper strategy and execution.
- Simple agreement process, just contact us to get started!
— Improve Business Outcomes —
Improve ICP targeting
Establish MQL/SQL triggers
Lifecycle marketing
Refined contact segmentation
Consolidate forms & autoresponders
Revenue attribution
Marketing & Sales alignment
Improve campaign effectiveness
Reduce legacy technical debt
Improve data capture
Well trained marketing staff
Marketing engagement attribution
Managed Services Retainer
Our Managed Services Retainer works best for organizations wanting an ongoing consulting relationship for more significant impact with strategy and execution to address initiatives to achieve their goals.
Our Managed Services Retainer provides the most valuable type of consulting service by including the perfect balance of strategic advice and planning plus DFY (Done For You) hands-on tactical execution to achieve short term and long term gains.
With a Managed Services Retainer we’ll optimize platforms and processes for driving more ROI from your tech stack including marketing, CRM, and web platforms. Plus we’ll work to help align your marketing and sales efforts for maximum lead-to-cash efficiency.
Managed Services Retainers addresses your ongoing priorities over the course of our engagement by adjusting to your needs monthly so you are always getting what you need when you need it, while driving toward long term improvements and success.
We’re so confident that you’ll love the value you’ll receive that we don’t require long term commitments, but there are some advantages of setting up a retainer that extends for several months. Some of the advantages of a longer consulting engagement include a lower rate, and the ability to dive deeper into your current processes, while driving toward an improved future state.
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Compare our services to other vendors
Managed Services: Other vendors, if they even offer Managed Services, will require expensive annual contracts and typically don’t go into strategic advisory PLUS execute with hands-on tasks. Many may not even offer DFY (Done For You service), and many vendors will not provide a dedicated certified consultant. Most vendor’s Managed Services will only provide a select set of tasks and will not adapt to your situation or needs.
SOW Statement of Work: Most vendors will not even offer Managed Services but will require a strict project-based SOW that is based off of your initial expression of needs, but an SOW is a snapshot of items based on the current known needs and does not flex over time to accommodate your ongoing needs, which will inevitably change over time. Also SOWs are very limited since they typically are framed based on an organization telling a vendor what they want, but frankly most organizations don’t know what they don’t know, they likely don’t know what the platform is capable of, and they probably aren’t experts and haven’t seen or tackled as many diverse issues as the vendor who specializes in certain platforms, so they can’t include in their initial list of requirements that the SOW is derived from any items that may come up later during discovery meetings with a qualified consultant, and items that become evident over time. This results in either jumping through hoops and negotiating a Change Order as thing arise (which takes time), or simply not adjusting to current needs but instead deferring any additional items that are considered ‘out of scope’ from the SOW. Frankly we consider SOWs an old-school method of doing business and far prefer Managed Services which can adapt month-by-month to any needs and provides much more value to our clients.
Level of Work: Most vendors will not provide a deep level of complex types of work, they typically will do more advisory or limit to very tactical tasks, and even those may not include best practices or take into consideration how the work they are doing affects other systems or areas within your organization. An example of this is setting up lead management systems; most vendors will do some level of lead scoring and maybe MQL triggering, but they most likely won’t do discovery meetings between your marketing and sales teams and departments to get alignment on what multiple levels of criteria should constitute an MQL, and what triggers and timing should cause a prospect be sent to SDR or sales teams. We not only align marketing and sales for better outcomes, but we also layer in multiple criteria to be sure that the only leads sent to sales are fully qualified leads that closely match your ICP (Ideal Customer Profile) AND that have shown intent by recent engagement with high value marketing assets, thus sending only the right prospects to sales at the right time.
About Managed Services
Managed Services is the practice of outsourcing business administration, operations and management to a third party, often whose sole or primary focus is the services being outsourced. While the term managed services most commonly refers specifically to managed IT services, our Pardot, HubSpot, Salesforce, and WordPress Managed Services go beyond the standard IT aspect to include other areas, such as process and systems development, marketing, and product training.
I'm a certified consultant with several years of Pardot, Salesforce, and HubSpot experience along with many years of marketing and web experience. I can even help you with campaign set up or management, or troubleshoot ones that aren’t performing as you’d like. I’ll work alongside your team, however big or small, to enable you to get the most out of your technology stack.
How do Managed Services work?
Managed Services from Optimal Business Consulting are designed for organizations interested in maintaining an ongoing competitive advantage through month-to-month access to award-winning consulting expertise, strategy and best practice guidance, plus hands-on administration and optimization, support and training.
There are no annual contracts required!
We get together via web conference towards the start of each month to work out priorities and milestones. Throughout the month, as your expert consultant I will execute on agreed upon tasks and appraise you of the status. We also typically review task status and agree upon priorities throughout the month for the upcoming month as a ‘monthly sprint’. This provides a sort of Agile project management method of addressing current priorities so you are always getting what you need.
- Submit tasks via email, task tool (ClickUp), or our task web form to get them in the queue and on the roadmap for your project.
- I'm highly collaborative so I encourage you to follow up and collaborate via our task tool, Slack, or email.
- Work directly with ME as your assigned Salesforce Pardot certified or HubSpot Expert Client Success Manager throughout your engagement.
- Schedule a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly web conference meeting or one-on-one working session with ME as your Client Success Manager.
- I can work on practically any type of tasks you need, almost anything.
- I'll even pay you a referral fee as a reward for sending me clients!
Strategic & Tactical
All Managed Services plans include both Strategic & Tactical elements (actual work items determined each month).
What kind of tasks and services are included in your Managed Services?
Strategic & Tactical
All Managed Services plans include both Strategic & Tactical elements. The list below is just an example, but your work tasks can be almost anything needed for any given month (actual work items determined each month):
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Many of the above items apply regardless of platform, but can be adjusted to the tasks that fit your platforms and specific needs.
For more details on what Service plans contain please contact me to learn more!
What platforms do you support?
Managed Services help you to keep getting the most out of your tech stack—Pardot, Salesforce, HubSpot, WordPress, ActiveCampaign and more. Pardot and HubSpot Managed Services are core offerings, but I can also extend that to provide Salesforce CRM Sales Cloud Managed Services, and even WordPress Managed Services or other platforms by request. Combine management of more than one platform, i.e. Pardot AND Salesforce (an upcharge may apply).
If you wish to add Salesforce Managed Services to your plan, we’ll ascertain together how much effort should go towards Pardot and/or HubSpot, and how much effort towards Salesforce. You determine the allocation; we agree together on the tasks.
Just get in touch and request additional platform support to start the discussion.
Why do I need Managed Services?
With Managed Services you have as much expert help as you need, when you need it, with no long term contracts.
With Service Retainers your marketing expenses are more predictable because you select the number of hours needed each month, and you still get to choose what tasks and issues are tackled each month as your needs change.
Relying on in-house staff to learn and/or maintain technology systems can be a costly and time-consuming. Marketing’s workload is frequently heavy and often deadline driven, leaving them with little bandwidth to go beyond applying the basics to complex marketing automation systems such as Pardot.
Systems that are hurriedly set up can often result in common mistakes and more administrative time later on, often compounding problems and issues such as poorly constructed automation rules and processes, forms, and email templates. Managed Services take the pressure off your employees and keep them focused on their daily work.