Marketing agency and consultancy switches to Google Workspace to adopt VOGSY and drive growth and profitability
THE GROW CORPORATION STORY
GROWCorporation is a full-service B2B marketing agency and consultancy based in Jerusalem, Israel. It offers business planning and a continuous mode of marketing services including digital marketing, branding and marketing and sales strategy. Primarily serving the technology sector, GROWCorp deploys established marketing experts to serve clients like Cisco, Elbit Systems and TechSee.
Founded in 1999 by Jacob Greenblatt, a veteran of financial services and consulting industries, GROWCorp is fully remote with operations around the world. As such, it is imperative that the agency easily serve clients in multiple locations and collaborate with its global workforce.
THE CHALLENGE: EFFECTING SCALABILITY AND PREDICTABILITY
GROWCorp had always worked with a system based on a host of project management, time tracking and task management tools on top of its Microsoft Office apps. But these neither integrated smoothly nor offered a granular view of project progress and company data. And now the business was suffering.
With team members reporting hours and work in separate systems and serious gaps in financial tracking, the marketing agency was struggling to understand whether it was meeting targets.
Describing the plight of services businesses everywhere, Greenblatt said, “You want to meet your deadlines to your clients, but how do you meet your profitability goals? How are we doing not just a creative agency, but also as a business? These are the things we needed to understand in order to gauge our success.”
Seeing growth at a rate of 25 percent year over year and preparing to expand into new international markets, the agency was continually outpacing its various software solutions. Scalability and predictability were painfully lacking.
It was clear: In order to sustain the current phase of the agency’s growth and guarantee its continued success, GROWCorp would need a different kind of tool altogether. One that could scale with the agency and tie all the pieces of the financial puzzle together.
WHY VOGSY? THE GOOGLE WORKSPACE ADVANTAGE
A longtime user of Microsoft Office, Greenblatt hadn’t been in the market for a tool that runs on Google’s Google Workspace.
But when Greenblatt demoed VOGSY, it was obvious that GROWCorp had its answer. VOGSY’s suite of features including time tracking, financial tracking, project management, task management and invoicing captured all the moving parts of the business.
“VOGSY is the only tool on the market that addresses the entire flow of business from CRM to invoice collection,” Greenblatt said. “That is a huge deal.”
Collaboration opportunities with Google Workspace Add-ons
Two features that caught Greenblatt’s attention were VOGSY’s dynamic email and Google Workspace Add-on for Gmail. Spread out across continents and time zones, GROWCorp’s remote teams needed a solution that promoted better coordination to work at the pace of business.
Still, Greenblatt was hesitant to move the entire workforce from the Office tools they’d always known to Google Workspace. On the other hand, Greenblatt could not deny the value of these features to his teams. Notifying them of project and opportunity developments, enabling them to communicate in context and sending their workflows via Gmail were critical efficiency and business growth elements currently missing from the agency’s tool set.
“As a distributed agency, our primary form of communication is email,” Greenblatt explained. “Being able to deal with an incoming email from a client in Gmail and schedule follow up tasks inside your inbox immediately is very powerful.”
For a business totally reliant on the perfect orchestration of its teams coming together to collaborate on client projects, the choice was swift. The agency would adopt both Google Workspace and VOGSY as its new work hub.
THE RESULTS: REAL-TIME FINANCIAL INSIGHTS, BETTER COLLABORATION, TIGHTER CONTROL
The Google Workspace + VOGSY transformation has been every bit as pivotal in GROWCorp’s growth plans as Greenblatt had anticipated.
Critically, VOGSY is giving GROWCorp the data to assess projects and the agency overall within a profitability context. Accessing estimated versus actual budget spend and project margins, real-time utilization charts and revenue forecasts comparing this year’s to last year’s revenue in VOGSY’s dashboards is the “game changer” GROWCorp was looking for, Greenblatt said.
“The ability to log into VOGSY for thirty seconds and know our full cost and financial updates automatically gives us tight control of operations and profitability,” Greenblatt continued. “With VOGSY, we know exactly where we stand as a business.”
Growing customer bases in new international markets
For the first time, GROWCorp has a complete picture of every stage of the business flow from proposal to automated reporting. Built on the Google Cloud, VOGSY has the infrastructure to support Grow Corp’s expansion initiatives overseas.
Greenblatt explained, “VOGSY scales rapidly, inexpensively and with easy deployment. We can access the system from anywhere, work in multiple currencies and write notes in the software in multiple languages out of the box.”
As an all-in-one tool, VOGSY is reducing the agency’s tooling overheads to boot. Greenblatt is particularly pleased with the software’s CRM capabilities, centralizing client profiles and sales opportunities and generating KPIs for opportunities in real-time dashboards. Distributed teams can easily collaborate with all documents, client portfolios and client conversations recorded in VOGSY.
Unprecedented efficiency and agility with Google Workspace + VOGSY
As Greenblatt had envisioned, VOGSY’s Gmail features are saving GROWCorp a ton of time.
“In two or three clicks, I can see my client’s organization and project details and assign tasks to contractors,” Greenblatt said. “I can attend to client emails and emailed notifications right at the source, even from my mobile device. I can work anywhere.”
For Greenblatt, making the switch to Google Workspace was no small decision. But it was a decision that transformed the way GROWCorp operates and is aiding its future development.
“I think most people feel that it would be nice to stay in their comfort zones and not make any changes. But at the end of the day, VOGSY was the scalable solution we needed. Everything is streamlined and synced. Getting these benefits with Google Workspace and VOGSY is simple—they are meaningful and easy to quantify nonetheless. We’re very happy with our decision.”
