Today we asked Mr. Tanaka, the product manager, about the secret story behind the birth of BowNow.

 

 

 

Share the knowledge of transformation of lead generation from cold calling to the automation

 

We, Mtame Co., Ltd., belonged to Startia Holdings and were spun off from Startia Lab Co., Ltd. in 2018.
The business content is a web promotion business centered on website production, and I have been engaged for more than 10 years before the spin-off.

Nowadays, we are the vendor of marketing automation tool, however, we were one of the traditional sales-driven company till a few years ago.

In order to acquire new customers, we use made approx. 100 cold callings a day.
Initially, the results were steadily increasing, but gradually the new pioneering method that relied on the telephone appointment reached its limit, and the sales team was exhausted.

From around that time, I became aware of the need for business transformation utilizing marketing and began to strengthen web marketing for owned media and websites

Currently, we are no longer make cold callings as we have made it possible to streamline operations with the power of marketing.
This experience is one of the origins of our mission, "Making the world fun through the power of marketing!"

This does not only apply to us.
There are many companies facing similar challenges as ours in Japan.

"Inefficient sales that make money with your feet" "Profit sources that rely on existing customers" "Sales that do not have the know-how to cultivate new business" are the examples of challenges, especially SMBs, are facing and they are urgently in need of change by utilizing the power of technology.

The marketing automation tool we provide (hereafter MA tool) is a tool that can streamline this "increase the number of business negotiations with the power of web marketing".

Per our own experience, we started to consider developing MA tool to support SMBs like us to solve the challenges we faced to.

 

 

 

Develop a marketing automation tool that can be used in Japan

 

Selling MA tools in Japan has never been easier.

From around 2014, which is said to be the first year of MA tools in Japan, we started proposing MA tools to website creation clients.

At that time, we sold overseas tools as agents, but the popularity of MA tools itself is low, and the cost is at least 100,000 yen per month at least. In addition, the management screen was complicated, and it was difficult for Japanese companies whose marketing level was not so high to start implementing. In fact, even in our annual survey, the top reasons for not introducing the MA tool are “unusable” and “price is high”.

And as a result, overseas tools could not be easily introduced by our main target small-to-medium-sized B2B companies.

As a result of this incident, we decided to develop our own MA tool that even Japanese companies could use.

The concept of MA tool must be necessary for Japanese companies.
However, we thought we should improve the situation where we have decided whether the marketing level is high or low, whether the marketing budget is high or low, and whether or not we can enjoy the technology benefits by such things.


Then, BowNow was born as a MA tool that Japanese SMEs can use well, with the concept of "simple", "low cost" and "useful".