Why You Should Start Using a CRM | With Jeroen Corthout

For CRM, right, you have your sales, you have your customer data that can be used to then just— you can monitor the processes, the sales performance, deal progression, customer relationships. But, you know, like you said, sometimes as older, maybe people in the industry whether in sales, marketing, or even managers who maybe refuse to switch to a CRM, right? Instead, they prefer the old way which you used, which was Excel, Google Sheets. What is the typical reason you're hearing of people not already using CRMs and why should they?

Why should they switch? Yeah. The typical reason is that people are working alone. Then they, They often don't feel a real big need to switch, so they'll start off with something like an Excel or a Google Sheet or something.

Mm-hmm.

Where usually the switch happens is when they hire a first salesperson. Then it's not just the founder of the company anymore that is working out of his homegrown system. Then you need something where you're gonna start working together, and more importantly also, They want to be able to follow up also what that salesperson does because it's a huge leap of faith basically having someone else to start selling your product.

Mm-hmm.

That's when people start looking for a CRM. In ours then they find one where it's very easy to keep track of everything that happens because it gets in there automatically. But additionally just The difference between a sheet, let's say, whether that's in Excel or in Google Sheets or in Airtable or in Notion nowadays or whatever, or Trello, that also happens, is that the communication is also there. Sales is about more than just the customer details.

Yeah.

Or the status of the deal or whatever, which in all these systems you can perfectly track. The link with your emails, with your meetings, with your phone calls, all these kind of things. That's something that misses in such systems, and which is actually the essential part of the sales process, is what you're discussing. So a big reason to switch.

Specifically for in Salesforce, what specific data of the analytic data that you guys provide and your tool collects is most useful for SaaS sales teams for driving decision-making, and what should they be setting up or paying attention to when they first start on your platform?

That's a very good question. Apart from all the things I mentioned already, because all of this information, who a customer is, what their picture is, their social profiles, timeline, all those kind of things, obviously this is who the person is and what you're discussing with them is essential.

Yeah.

But then if you want to start digging deeper, some of the metrics you're, for instance, going to want to look at is how long it takes to get a deal from lead to won. In our insights, it's called the sales cycle.

Mm-hmm.

That's an interesting thing to see where that is and how it evolves. Then you want to keep track of how many new deals you create in a certain period and how many you close and make sure that you keep hitting both always. Not start working all of a sudden on closing deals and forgetting to fill the pipeline or going the other way around. It's important to always work on both so that you have a nice consistent flow through the pipeline and not a sort of— I don't know how to say, off and on situation, like a roller coaster.

Mm-hmm.

Then you can follow on deals where they get stuck. So you can keep track of where deals stay in which stages for how long. So that you have an idea of which deal is basically dying and where deals are dying. You can keep track of slipping deals in that respect as well. So deals on which you didn't have any communication with the customer for a certain amount of days. And you can keep track also of the input-output relationship of your salespeople.

Okay.

If you're seeing that a salesperson is not performing, you'll probably want to go look whether the input is there. And input, I mean, are they actually communicating with customers? Are they doing their emails, their calls, their meetings? And if they're doing that, dig deeper into why not. Like, is it that things get stuck somewhere in the pipeline? Is it that they're doing the wrong things with customers? That's all things you can investigate then.

Got it. And when you guys first launched, can you share what your initial go-to-market strategy was with Salesforce and how you guys acquired your first 100 customers?

You can actually, if you type first 100 customers in Google, I think our blog post is number 1 or number 2.

Cool.

That was a post that we wrote before we got our first 100 customers, but it was sort of a prophetic post. The first, I would say, 20 or so were all from our own network. Plus some press. We tried to get in the press sometimes. And actually our first customer, for instance, came from an article in an online magazine. He had read about us and thought, oh, that's interesting, and then contacted us.

Okay.

And some of the other, of the first 20 as well. But then others, we just, are people we knew or people we got to know. And that we then sold Salesforce to because we sold it with a real fully guided sales process for a long time.

Mm-hmm.

Then I think around 30 or 40 customers, we launched on Product Hunt, which is, for people who don't know, it's the largest product community in the world, probably a bit less active than it used to be, but still the best place to launch your product, I would say. We got a ton of trial signups when we did that. It was really, I think we very quickly doubled our amount of customers from there. Then we did an AppSumo launch also. We did a lifetime deal there. These things are 3 years ago, by the way, these 2 things.

Yeah.

From which we got a lot of people using our software who then also brought other customers.

Would you say you got your 100 from AppSumo itself? Did you hit your—

Oh yeah, yeah, way over it.

Yeah, yeah. What were you guys charging there? I know typically they're like $37, $47, or were you guys a little higher?

Back then it was $39. Now deals start higher. Our deal was one user for free and others at a discount. So we actually also got customers from AppSumo. Customers that pay a bit less, but still also customers. And then from there, it sort of gave us the scale to start growing also based on word of mouth. Start pulling traffic, getting good reviews on review sites. Then we started building up our content marketing, and those are still the main things we drive on today.

So, you know, talking about Product Hunt and AppSumo specifically, you know, there's a lot of mixed feelings from founders I speak to who go that route from offering lifetime deal option because sometimes they just say it's not worth it, right? Even though you can probably, you know, fuel your initial growth and pay for your initial development and cost. But the amount of time, effort, refunds, customer support that you may have to deal with, I guess it depends on the product, but looking back now, would you still do it now again and recommend it?

Yeah, well, if it works for the product I'm launching. For Salesflare, yeah, I would do it again. If I would launch something else, I would wonder, is my product right for this audience? Is there a way that when I spread it, it's not for free, but at a low cost for the end user, is that gonna give me a lot of support? Is that going to increase my reach? For instance, if you have a product that is inherently visible, like you have a video product, for instance, that people use to call with each other or something, Mm-hmm. then it totally makes sense because you You get more people on your product, more people see it, and that sort of gives you a big boost. Additionally, it gives you a lot of clout like we got for word of mouth. That's only— you need to make sure your product is not crappy at the moment you launch it, obviously.

Okay.

Gives you clout for review sites. It gives you a lot of feedback if you're interested in Improving your product. But always keep in mind what the load is gonna be, of course. If the load it's gonna create is gonna get you a ton of costs, whether this is on support or some system you need to pay for every user, then I would say stay away from it. Mm-hmm.