Here at CommissionCrowd we bring independent sales reps only the very best B2B commission-only sales opportunities, and today is no exception!
Smartfinds Marketing are an award winning full-service Digital Marketing Agency with a Stellar 35-Year Track Record.
This amazing company are offering 10% commission + lifetime residuals for independent sales reps who can take the sale from prospect to paying client.
They are also happy to pay a referral commission of 5% + residual commisions for 12 months for an introduction, and will take the sales process on themselves.
Smartfinds anticipate commission earnings of around $117000 within the first 12 months for high performing sales agents.
SmartFinds is a 35-year-old award-winning marketing agency from the Detroit Metro area, whos clients range coast to coast.
Their clients are typically mid-sized companies who recognize their internal teams will never keep up with the speed of change when dealing with digital marketing.
They are offering commissions of 10% + lifetime residuals on repeat business for their independent sales partners.
*Please note, this is a commission-only sales opportunity and no fees or salary will be paid ahead of new closed business
Connect with Smartfinds here: View the independent sales opportunity
Where did the inspiration for SmartFinds Marketing come from?
SmartFinds Marketing is a brand of our parent corporation, Armstrong Communications, which was started in 1987 as a sales arm for magazine publications. The largest client at the time was AAA and lasted until 2004.
In 1994, as the Internet was beginning to become competition to AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy and the like. As an early adopter, it was not difficult to see that the open Internet was a much bigger opportunity for business, and we started our ISP division with the brand name SpeedLink Internet. SpeedLink was an ISP geared towards highspeed Internet connections (ISDN, T1), website hosting, and email services.
As the wild wild west of the 1990’s continued, website development and then website marketing became important to the world of business. At this point web marketing was not mature enough, rather website marketing was more prevalent that included SEO and search engine submissions.
We sold the brand SpeedLink and the ISP in 2002 as AT&T and Comcast were undercutting their resellers and making the high-speed connection world difficult to continue.
Marketing budgets continued to move to the Internet and our traditional media group for publication sales came to a point that it no longer made sense to continue keeping this group. Rather moving 100% to the Internet as a digital marketing agency made the most sense in 2004.
In 2004, Google went public and changed the world of website and web marketing. It is based on these developments that we decided to create the brand name “SmartFinds”. In simple terms, how can you be found and use smart strategies to be found.
The inspiration of our corporations brands evolved over 17 years based on our experiences, knowledge, and ability to pivot based on market conditions.
Tell us a little about your expertise in the marketing arena
Beginning with the IBM PC in 1980 and the subsequent developments in the world of technology, it is safe to say that “change” is continual in both personal and business lives. To that extent, we have learned over our 35 years that it is not possible to be an “expert”.
Rather, it is reasonable to accept that you develop knowledge and experience to help build strategies and marketing activities to benefit a client’s project in any industry.
Marketing a continual cycle of activities. This cycle starts with research, strategy, and planning. This then continues with the development of the necessary creative and non-creative assets for the project.
This is then followed by executing the activities of the strategy. Lastly, you have to measure, analyze, and interpret the results with the client. Based on the joint assessment of the results, changes are made to improve the project and the cycle begins again.
Working through this lens, we have worked with large global companies like BASF, Delphi, and Guardian Industries. Our experiences continue through B2C and B2B companies that include financial institutions, franchises, manufacturers, and automotive dealerships.
It is through the experiences from this wide range of business types in various industries that we have been able to gain knowledge that makes us ideally suited for businesses to hire our marketing agency.
The Internet and the marketing world continue to change frequently over the years. Adjusting our strategies based on Google’s algorithms, technologies, (e.g., Internet connections, website technologies, mobile devices), and target audience behaviors, we gained more knowledge and experience that over 35 years gives us a perspective how to apply the world of digital marketing to a client’s project.
Lastly, we have weathered through two significant crises that affected our business at a global level. The first was the financial crisis of 2009, where the Detroit Metropolitan area, where we are located, became ground zero for the financial crisis.
The second was the Covid-19 pandemic that started in 2020 and lasted two years. In both cases we were able to keep our business going by making the necessary sacrifices and changes required to keep moving forward.
Both crises required us to pivot based on market conditions, while at the same time developing an easy service that would allow businesses to ease back into spending marketing budgets.
Can you tell us about some of the work you have carried out to date?
Brand Development
CigarFox was an original concept brand and successfully doubled the click through rate of the advertising campaign. In addition, Google recognized the brand in the top rankings within 4 months.
New Brand Launch
American Community Mutual Insurance Company’s Precedent Insurance
8 million banner ad impressions in the state of Texas generated 20,000 visitors in 4 weeks and a 20% application response.
Conception Kit
Increased website visitors to a new website through a omni-channel marketing strategy generating close to 825,000 visitors in 4-months. A new 3-point social media strategy was included into the multi-channel campaign.
Advertising Program
We increased the average online bank account balance from $800 to $2000 per new account opened.
Digital Marketing
Checker Sedan, a Division of Soave Enterprises, in Detroit, Michigan
Needed more online reservations. We were able to increase their online reservations from 500/month to over 1500/month.
Ferrous Processing, a Division of Soave Enterprises, across multiple states
Required an increase in mobile traffic and organic keyword rankings in Google. Over a 12-month program we increased the keywords being ranked from 200 to over 800 keywords. Of these, we increased the keywords in the Top 10 from 200 to 600 keywords. Mobile traffic was increased from 400 monthly mobile visitors to 800 monthly mobile visitors.
Website Performance
Bounce Rate is a key performance indicator of a website’s ability to engage the visitors Google is sending the website. Santa Barbara Auto Group (SBAG) group website bounced rate was kept at 3% compared to the OEM branded dealership websites ranging from 30% and above.
CRO Performance
Houghton College
A consultation project to assist in the website’s performance for new admissions results in a year over year increase of 25% of admission requests. There was a 43% increase for a single month during our CRO engagement project.
Clarity Voice
Using current AI marketing tools we were able to increase website leads by 34% and reduce the buying cycle by 80%.
How do you currently bring in new business or win contracts?
For 33 years of our company’s history, we had a network of customers, partners, and vendors that referred business to us. During this time, we never had to market ourselves or have a group of salespeople to sell for us.
The leads we received were not only warm leads, but they were also nearly closed leads.
When the Covid-19 pandemic hit the market, the referral network failed because of everyone is home bound. Our referral network was used to in-person meetings, business networking events, conferences, and the like.
When this network failed, we needed to not only assess our situation, we, also, needed to pivot based on market conditions.
Securing independent sales agents certainly has become an ideal option for us to pursue under the circumstances.
Why would sales agents have an edge selling your products/services?
I believe the answer to this question lies in the writings on Pages 1 and 2; however, if we’re mis-understanding this question, please let us know.
What makes your products/services unique, innovative and sets you apart from the competition?
Most companies providing digital marketing services are technology companies that do not understand marketing. Anyone can put up a shingle to say they provide marketing services; however, they are not marketers. They do not follow a marketing process or a marketing process. They are focused on services and tasks.
At what point in history was a printer your ad agency? This is a question I tend to ask prospective clients that not quite clear about our agency vs. a tech company. The answer to the question, is that a printer (e.g., the tech company of today’s world) would never be your ad agency.
To that end, a tech company providing marketing services, cannot be your marketing agency.
Everyone has their competencies, and these competencies need to be used accordingly. The marketing agency provides the knowledge, expertise, and experience to guide the strategies to success. During this process, the marketing agency may select the necessary resources to aid in achieving this success. These resources may include tech companies. This process is no different than the ad agency of yesteryear using the TV channels, radio stations, printers, and magazines as resources.
What sets us apart is that we are a marketing agency with a team of marketers that are able to follow the marketing process to generate a ROI and revenue success for our client projects.
What is our innovative philosophy? (This is a question we are adding to the list of questions as it seems to pertain to the question about what sets us apart).
Over the years, we have used our knowledge and experience to develop the 4 A’s of Digital Marketing. These include:
This seems to be the hardest for most businesses as it means any investment prior to these changes may have been lost of are not of value. This step requires businesses to pass on the emotional element related to the changes and continue to move on. The alternative to fretting, fuming, and doing nothing is their competition moves ahead of them. Catching up becomes harder.
Understanding this philosophy gives us a upper hand to our competition in that we are able to guide the client through changes that will happen. We can put our consultation hat on and support the client to work through the inevitable.
What are you plans for the future of SmartFinds Marketing?
During the pandemic, because we are an award-winning marketing agency with the State of Michigan, we were able to tap into consults provided at no charge by the State. We assessed our situation and decided to pivot for future planning.
The starting point of this process was a new brand, identity, and a new website. These were all soft launched in March 2022. https://smartfindsmarketing.com/
Our future is to develop new solutions that include:
What are your best-selling products/services and why?
As a marketing agency there is no specific service or solution that clients are seeking. Their needs change from one client to the next as is their industry.
Most clients are seeking website development, management, and marketing. This is then followed by some combination of marketing activities, and, as needed, advertising campaigns. Our other solutions tend to be added to this base of activities and services. This includes our lead service conversion rate optimization, to increase the number of leads and sales from the existing website traffic.
Have you received any recognition or awards for your products/services?
SmartFinds Marketing is a 2009 Michigan Companies to Watch award winner.
Michigan Celebrates Small Business (MCSB) is the most prestigious small business awards program in the state of Michigan. The mission of the program is to honor and recognize Michigan’s small business people as well as the champions and advocates that support them.
In 2004, Six statewide leaders (now identified as Founders) met to discuss how to recognize, celebrate and cultivate Michigan’s small businesses. The six organizations and their original respective leaders at that time include:
This award can be confirmed amongst the 50 companies that received the award in 2009 at https://michigancelebrates.org/mcsb-awardees/#1568148426504-5075a146-9b93
More information about this award can be found at https://michigancelebrates.org/
Please describe the typical sales cycle and process to sales agents.
Once a prospect is open to having a discovery meeting, we can present our agency and learn about the client’s pain point relative to lead, sales, and revenue generation.
Our next step is to ask the client for access to their Google Analytics so we can do a deep dive into their website traffic, sources, and website visitor behavior. This research and proposal development can take about two weeks.
This is then followed with a proposal presentation meeting to the prospect.
Depending on the budget of the proposal, the client will decide in 30 to 90 days. During that time with the sales follow ups, some questions to arise before the client signs the work order for the proposed program.
We generally ask clients for a one-year agreement. Although, our conversion rate optimization program is specifically designed as a 4-month program after which we are hoping to increase our engagement with the client to a one-year program.
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