
Monitorbook – From side project to profitable company, a journey into sales - hkissinger
https://medium.com/@johnaveri/monitorbook-from-side-project-to-profitable-company-a-journey-into-sales-3bed8a4b759c#.oqddfggoz
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shadeless
To me this looks like a submarine article for Amplemarket. Reading between the
lines, John had trouble with sales on Monitorbook, so he created Amplemarket
and used it to increase growth.

If that's the case it's doubly remarkable, but keeping that information secret
seems sleazy. Am I crazy for thinking that?

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freakz
Not even a good shill. On the amplemarket front page "John from Monitorbook"
says he has a team of 15 sales reps. On the marketing post he says he has a
team of 6.

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IAmGarrett
"a journey into sales [products]"

At the end, John says he's "100 times better" at sales now than when he
started. I didn't read much about things he did to improve his personal
selling skills, just how certain products have grown sales at Monitorbook. I
don't doubt that he's improved, just would've liked to read more about his
sales skill improvement than the products he discovered. Or maybe his point is
anyone can be a good salesman because these tools are out there for anyone to
use?

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orclev
I was really disappointed that there was no mention of what they changed in
their product or message to increase sales.

The fact that they were struggling so much suggests either that the product
was missing key features that the market was looking for, or else their
marketing either wasn't conveying the features people cared about or was being
targeted at the wrong market.

As someone else pointed out, this looks like a shill for Ample Market, the
entire article could be summarized as "We sucked at marketing, so we
outsourced it".

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palidanx
Thanks for the article hkissinger! I'm going through some of the same growing
pains on cold e-mailing. For amplemarket, did you have any concerns of leads
acting on behalf of your company in a negative way?

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bonestamp2
The use case example on their site can be done for free with 3 camels, so I
wonder what their customers are actually tracking with monitorbook?

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marcusgarvey
Who else has used Ample Market? Pros? Cons?

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aabelha
I've actually started using amplemarket 4 months ago. We are a small team
based in San Francisco and we wanted to ramp up our outbound sales without
having to hire a lot of people. Amplemarket is working really well so far and
each of us has its own virtual sales assistant now. I was able to double the
number of weekly calls with potential customers since we started using
amplemarket. The main pro is that I really don't have to worry about the
initial part of the sales funnel: from the first touch point to the first
call. Since they have my target customer profile, they do lead generation for
me, answer any potential questions the prospects might have and finally calls
just magically pop up in my calendar.

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palidanx
Are there any downsides to Amplemarket with your experience with them so far?

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aabelha
I would say one of the biggest cons in the beginning was that they didn’t have
too much data regarding my sales process so they were having trouble
generating responses to my prospects. They used to forward some emails to us
saying that they were not able to generate a response to a certain question.
Not so much now though.

~~~
marcusgarvey
What's their pricing model, if you don't mind my asking? They provide very
little info on their website.

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ssijak
I wanted to register to try the product but you do not allow me to try it or
even register without Credit card, and now I am stuck on
[https://monitorbook.com/plan_type_form](https://monitorbook.com/plan_type_form)
(page to enter credit card detils) even when I go to monitorbook.com it
redirects me there. Gross.

