From Analog to Automation: Streamline Your CRM for Business Growth

If you are in the business of creating online communities, you have faced the hurdle of finding the right CRM to help manage that community. From coordinating events to sending timely emails and segmenting your audience, it feels easier to use analog manual processes. The idea of switching to automation can seem daunting, but it does not have to be. 

MESA came to Assemble with an antiquated MarTech stack that relied heavily on manual processes. As a platform, they serve a huge audience, sending out daily emails to a variety of communities and hosting large industry events. They wanted to automate their back office, give time back to their staff through that automation, and improve their overall customer experience.

Challenge: analog systems prevented growth

Assemble helped our team transition from a set of manual processes to an automated tech stack. With their guidance, our sales and operations teams can focus on serving our clients, instead of manually maintaining data across multiple systems and platforms. 

- Guy Finley, President  

Approach: a technical roadmap from analog to automation

The Assemble Success Model is our four-phased approach to delivering consistent excellence to our clients. The Advise phase helps us clearly define our client’s vision. Next, the Architect phase turns that vision into functional requirements and wireframes for development. From there, we enter the Build phase, where our team uses the agile process to develop, test, and deploy the product or service in multiple sprints until the project is delivered. Finally, during the Maintenance phase of our success model, we work with our clients to maintain their technology for as long as needed. 

We began with an Advise Phase and performed a Technical Assessment. Through a series of interviews with MESA staff, we uncovered the pain points in how they were using existing systems. During the Architect phase, we created a technical roadmap, showing them how to move from their current state to a more automated, integrated future. In the Build phase, we worked alongside the MESA team to make these technical integrations and ensure that their team could use and maintain their new technology. And we continue to provide ongoing maintenance, ensuring that their technology works for them. 

Solution: an integrated CRM

We were able to consolidate their disparate systems into a modern CRM that integrated with their other core platforms, including both their financial and event management systems.  This enabled MESA to build custom forms, segment emails, see their engaged audience, and find better ways to serve that audience.

MESA’s team was frustrated with their broken, manually intensive processes. Their marketing lived between various manual and semi-automated systems, creating a lot of redundant data and, ultimately, preventing the team from serving their audience.