Client Tales: Rand Marketing on How to Grow Your Business by Helping Others Grow Theirs

Keith O’Brien: Hi Jennifer, thanks for the time today.  I’ve been in marketing and personal development pretty much my entire life.  At 42, I’ve had a few great careers over the years…mostly in businesses of my own, but they have all been in those two niches.  I’ve always loved helping people and businesses grow.

As the Director of Business Development at Rand Marketing, I oversee the sales team, the internal marketing strategies and partner development.  Rand Marketing is a busy and growing Web Design, Development and Marketing firm in Fort Lauderdale, FL.

Keith: The Founder is Seth Rand who grew up in a family of entrepreneurs.  In the early 2000’s, he helped put his family business online and started learning Search Engine Optimization.  It took him 6 months to get their company to the top of Yahoo and MSN (pre-Google).  It generated the company $73,000 in wholesale orders the very next month.  A few years later, Seth started his first agency.

What makes Rand unique is a few things.  First, we’ve worked with clients in virtually all industries, so we have lead generation and marketing history on tons of different business niches.  Second, we have clients at every phase from start ups to over $70M a year in revenue.  I think the most unique aspect of our business is our focus on results based marketing.  We take spending clients money very seriously and are experts at Search Engine Marketing – SEO, PPC and Social.

Keith: Even though I am now functioning as an employee (first actual job in 20 years), I am and always will be an entrepreneur.  Within Rand, I have a ton of flexibility and autonomy to be creative and our CEO really looks to his senior team members as partners.  Mostly, I love to build things.  I love to build ideas, campaigns, people and companies.

Keith: For me, success is about being passionate, enjoying what I do and helping all those I work with get better.  That includes co-workers and clients.  Success for me is about making a positive impact…are people better for having known you?

Keith: I originally heard about Quote Roller from a copywriter friend of mine who is one of your users.  As we build our company, especially the business development team, I wanted a unified process for proposals for my team that was simple, easy to manage and track.

Keith: We were using an internal process customized through Google Apps before I brought on Quote Roller.  It worked, but we often got bottle necked.  We are in serious growth mode and I needed to put the proposal process in my team’s hands, so Directors could spend time approving them before they went out as opposed to creating them.  It’s cut our proposal time in half.

Keith: It’s simple.  It saves time.  It helps you make more money and the Quote Roller internal team rocks.

Keith: We are a little too early to showcase any real numbers in terms of win rate, but like I said, we have cut the time it takes us to get a proposal to the client in half…if not 70%.  That’s huge.