Zenith Marketing

How this driven soldier-turned-marketing-consultant increased her lead-to-deal conversion rate by almost 100%.

The business

Nicole Miner Whittier has always wanted to enable people to actualize their deepest potential. It’s what drove her to lead soldiers through combat deployments in Iraq, build a marketing unit for the U.S. Army, and coach Olympic and Division I athletes to reach peak performance. She opened her own marketing agency for the same reason: to support business owners to achieve success.

Today, Nicole runs Zenith Marketing & Consulting, specializing in helping small and medium-sized business owners from Black, Brown, and women-minority communities, while serving as the Director of Marketing Execution for the U.S. Army. She believes passionately in empowering clients to reach their zenith: the highest possible achievement. That passion, combined with her leadership experience, sports psychology, and marketing prowess, is the bedrock of her success.

Employees

1

Location

USA

Industry

Consulting

Solution

CRM and client portal

The Challenge

Nicole’s business infrastructure didn’t match the scale of her drive. She managed operations through a hodge-podge of tools that siloed information, forcing her to spend hours managing each appointment. Using an unbranded Gmail account made her appear amateur and undermined her professional expertise.

Nicole kept track of her calendar using her personal digital planner, so scheduling meant a lengthy back-and-forth through texts and emails. Sending reminders, checking for confirmations, handling rescheduling requests, and finding meeting links wasted a lot of time, taking up to two hours just to book one appointment.

Payments were haphazard. Nicole hated requesting payments and didn’t have any formal payment structure. Clients would pay using any method they liked, making it difficult to keep track of cash flow, and they often paid late or not at all.

The Solution

Nicole knew what she needed in a CRM: easy automation, simple onboarding, and smooth integration with her existing tools. Something that could transform her business into a professional brand. vcita’s deep integrations caught her eye and the speedy, personal response team cinched the deal.

Online scheduling & reminders:

Now Zenith clients book and reschedule appointments online without any back-and-forth, choosing their preferred timeslot from Nicole’s preset options. Confirmations and reminders are sent automatically, eliminating no-shows, and appointments sync with Nicole’s personal calendar so her military, Zenith, and non-profit work never clash. Appointment management fell from 1-2 hours each day to just 15 minutes.

Payments & invoicing:

Automated payment requests and reminders save Nicole from sending awkward messages chasing clients. The vcita platform collects payments and tracks cash flow through integrations with QuickBooks and Square, and Zenith clients appreciate the seamless process that lets them pay without having to leave the portal.

Client Portal:

The vcita client portal is the hub of Zenith marketing. This is where Nicole stores and shares meeting summaries, reports, and professional documents, presenting a professional face to clients and reducing the hours she used to spend searching for information or files. Now she can monitor open rates to see how clients interact with her content, and use that data to improve her messaging.

Automation & personalization:

Nicole uses vcita’s strong automations to handle routine communications, freeing her to focus on the work that truly needs her input. She also uses tags to track how clients arrive at her door, which events they attend, and where they are in her pipeline, and segment them into focused audiences. She uses this personalization to send targeted announcements for Zenith and for Ask a Marketer, the free small business marketing community that she co-leads.

The Results

Implementing vcita didn’t just help Nicole organize her business, it allowed her professional expertise to shine. Client trust has skyrocketed and business is running at capacity, with active clients filling up her calendar and a consistently full pipeline of opportunities.

Zenith Marketing & Consulting now achieves a discovery-call-to-client conversion rate of almost 100%, with zero scheduling friction and seamless payment collection. Most importantly, Nicole feels in control and able to give her clients her all.

“vcita is my command center. It brought all these things together and allowed me to centralize everything, reclaim my time, and demonstrate my authority as a business. Starting a business is scary, and being able to do it with vcita has certainly made it less scary.”

Nicole Miner Whittier, Founder, Zenith Marketing & Consulting