Episode 52: Landing Your Dream Customer with David Chevalier

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our.

Amazing planet has to offer.

You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable.

Steps to managing your personal health.

A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is.

Right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop super powered B2B sales teams.

Today's podcast is one I have been.

Looking forward to for quite a while. Our guest all the way from Paris, very early in the morning over there, so thank you for jumping onto early David. But our guest is David Chevalier. He is the co founder and CEO of Surf. So that's Surf spelled with an A on the end. Different but fantastic brand. Really love it. When I did some research around your brand and we've known each other for a little while, really, really powerful. So Surf, it's a B2B SaaS startup based in Paris of course, and it connects LinkedIn with your CRM. So it's been helping eliminate manual CRM related tasks, something we've all been working on quite heavily. It's been doing that for about three years now. So for a B2B SaaS product, it's past some of those nasty tests that happen in year one and year two. And in that journey Surf has been able to secure some clients such as Google, Bolt, Spendesk and more Google and Spendesk, obviously, names we know pretty well here in the southern hemisphere. So David's really passionate about helping sales professionals and teams, which is why he's here today very much around increasing their sales and their sales efficiency on LinkedIn, a platform that many of us don't use enough. So David really does enjoy social selling and productivity tips and I've seen him actually share them himself. So while we love having him in the Stronger Sales Team Teams podcast today. So firstly, David, thank you for jumping on board. Great to have you here.

Thanks for having me, Ben. Really a pleasure. And as we have a lot of customers, surprisingly from Australia, I think it's 5% from our whole customer Base I'm kind of used to be up quite early for Paris times because Paris we normally start at around 9:30 to most of the people. So at the moment it's, it's around eight and yeah we start a bit later but that's totally fine. I know that you in Australia have quite a good like work life balance when it comes to at the end of the day. It's like for you, 5pm or something. Most of the people end the day at 5:00pm Right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sounds pretty fair.

Okay. Yeah, yeah.

Not all of us, those in our.

Own business tend to work a little bit longer. We're 20 past five here when we're recording at the moment so. And we'll go into the night but that's okay. Yeah, you've got it right. We generally have, we work pretty hard but I think we are learning the benefits around work life balance.

Yeah, for me as I never been to Australia and when I can speak to people I have the feeling like, I mean especially as our brand is called Surf, like that some of our customers say okay, 5pm grab my board and go out, especially in the summer.

So yeah, where I live people are regularly up at 4:35am out there surfing. So when you do get here you'll have to come past Noosa. In fact my 4 year old has been busily telling me that the next place she'd like to visit is Paris.

Oh, okay.

Strange request from a four year old who has not left the country yet. But more importantly than travel is the brand Surf. Can you tell me and tell our listeners please a little bit about Surf and why you've been successful in that three year journey.

So basically we started Surf at the end of our study program. So it was 2020 and we didn't plan to kind of start a company. It was just first a pain point we had ourselves. I think we needed to export 100 contacts because we had a customer discovery we need to do for a program manager and we needed to export it from LinkedIn into HubSpot back then. So me as the business guy, I was just going one contact after another. But Omar, my co founder who was looking at things more from an engineering perspective, he said I'm not going to do that. Like 100 contacts one by one, each contact 25 fields where I do the manual data entry. So he programmed a shortcut and at the end the shortcut was the beginning of Surf. We've uploaded this shortcut on Product Hunt and we get quite a massive feedback from the CRMs. Back then quite quickly built the customers from I would say the third months of being of having the product around. And so quickly, thanks to a lot of product like growth and self service things, we implemented a good growth and I think we reached 1st million ARR after 1 1/2 years or something. Yeah, that was thanks to partnerships mainly I would say because the CRMs were reselling us, still reselling us here and there. So I think that's where the major success or growth is coming from.

Fantastic. So hitting 1 million ARR, it's no mean feat. I've been there, I've done it four times in businesses myself. And it is absolutely the hardest, hardest part of growing a business is that first me. So when we talk about surf and LinkedIn, it's interesting how we met. So I've been growing my presence on LinkedIn. Surf is obviously a very prominent brand when it comes to LinkedIn and David actually found me one day posting on LinkedIn with a surfboard in the background and all of a sudden he's looking into what I do and I see this request from David and then we start talking and then within a couple of months I'm part of Surf's 51 social selling tips on HubSpot, which was a terrific publication that was launched really heavily by HubSpot and the surf brand. And I think it's had hell of a lot of views. And by the way, there was a dozen or so really intelligent, let's take me of that, a dozen other really intelligent people that posted on that 51 social selling tips. So fantastic way to meet, right? And shows the power of social selling or social media when you get it right and how it can bring people together. That publication, David, when it went out on HubSpot, what did that mean for the surf brand?

So for us, I mean we invested quite early into branding. We got a big branding agency, Focus Lab from the US working on our brand. We came up with the name but basically they created the first kind of brand identity. And for us a lot of people said, hey, why do you invest so heavily? Like after two years, first of all, we had a rebranding also we were named Gleechat back then and now serve. So why did you invest so much money? And I said first of all, we're here for the long term. And I recently already said that in a podcast as a small software brand out there, there's so many software brands and when you look at their colors, it's often purple or this kind of blue color. They're pretty Similar. We had that identity at the beginning as well and it fitted us, it was okay, but it was not really expressing who we are in terms of culture here at Surf. So we came up with that name. And for us after that rebranding, we landed a lot of big clients and a lot of bigger partnerships. So for instance, as you said with HubSpot, I would say we wouldn't have gone to that kind of intense partnership with HubSpot. We have a partnership on the marketing side, we have a partnership on the sales side as well. Different things we plan also in terms of conferences. So I wouldn't say if we wouldn't have that brand, I don't believe that we would have that intense partnership because as I said, I compare it to. Because we are from Paris, right. So when you look at brands and you look at lvmh, that's a big conglomerate of brands, you see that old brands often kind of collaborating with young and fresh brands. So you have this supreme, whatever, exclusive collaboration. So I kind of compare it a bit like this. Meaning that we try to be this fresh, fresh brand in the market of all these old players like CRMs, for instance, Salesforce, HubSpot and try to give a new perspective so that these brands want to collaborate with us. And I think this is what we did quite good, especially in the early days. And as you know, relationships and partnerships take time. And I would say thanks to our rebranding, we definitely fostered that relationships and where we see now, good amount of growth coming from.

Wow. Really powerful when you can articulate what a brand means to a business. I think Surf has been very successful in acquiring some big customers. So today what we want to talk about today is that just that customer acquisition. Right. So not just acquiring any customer, but we want to talk about acquiring aspirational dream type of customer. Right. That every business sets a target, sets its targets on achieving. So can you talk me through what's a dream customer look like for Surf? Let's start there.

I mean dream customer is a customer that doesn't churn. So I would say that's the dream of every founder having a long term customer, especially as we are more self service. So who doesn't churn? So keep churn low of course. But then I mean I just got new into the software industry so I was before actually coming from finance, I didn't know that many different software products or the industry itself. Of course I'm a consumer, so I'm a consumer of Apple good products, whatever. So of course you have One of these names on your list if you are doing a software. But as we were so young, we would never, never, never thought about landing a big client like Google or Amazon or AWS now. So I think I didn't have that list, Hey, I need these 10 names. And then yay, we made it. Or I don't know, these lists, they came naturally. And also the first clients, how do you get them? Often you get them out of your network. So I think Google Story was quite funny because I remember the first year I was working from Berlin and it was Covid. So a few friends of mine came here and there in for a week working from Berlin together with us. So we had a little kind of co working space there. And one friend of mine, he was an SDR at Google Cloud and it was the first year of Surf and I worked on the product and he worked next to me selling Google Cloud solutions. And then I saw him typing in the data in Salesforce manually and I told him like, hey Christian, you know that you can automate that, right? With our software, that's what we're doing. And then he was like, really? Okay, maybe talk about it and maybe let's see if there's an angle. So he was then a major driver for us to give the right introductions in his team and to his managers. Then it took of course, I don't know, like nine to 12 months until we officially signed and had the first year with Google. But it was coming from there, it was coming from network, it was coming from the early days out of co working in Berlin. And sometimes it happens like this. The same was aws. It was also based on a warm intro at the end. So I would say the biggest clients or how can you get into them, it's creative ways for us. We do a lot of different. Like when we do outreach, combination of automated outreach, that means of course sequences you can personalize at scale, we have a specific target in mind or icp. So for instance, we target the end user first and then we try to find out the pain point of this end user and then try to target the decision makers. But the decision makers we don't target with an automated sequence. We try to look in our networks if we can identify a common connection or something that we can also automate with the software. And then we reach out, hopefully get a warm intro to this decision maker. Because then first of all you have like maybe from the warm intro, social proof, okay, service legit, because it gets referred to me. Second, we already know the pain point because we checked in with the end user before. So we can then come up with our first message. Hey, actually we know you guys looking for efficiencies for your SDR team. I know you have a problem of connecting LinkedIn with the CRM or whatever, so that's where we can help. And then directly the outreach message is warm intro, social proof, plus already checked in with the team knowing the pain point. Addressing the pain point. I think that was for us working at scale. I mean it's big clients, but working for us. Very good.

Okay. So for me, David Fortune favors those who are in the right place and at the right time. And it certainly sounds like you had a little bit of that with Google and AWS or Amazon. The piece that I really like that I've just heard you say is for us it's all about trying to determine what the pain or the need is. And we do that through a level of automation in our outreach to the end user. Right. So that's often going to be STRs or BDMs or so forth that are within sales teams. We then take that pain and scope that we've identified with the end user to get into our targeted decision makers where we will try and aim for a warm lead or we'll try and aim through some form of social proof to get in front of them. Right, Love that. Can you talk me through what happens from that point? So we've had our contact with our targeted decision maker. Right. What's the next steps in your process? Because so far this is for me a very powerful way to be targeting out our ideal customers.

Yeah, and I mean you also for the end user, you can also of course look into our existing database. So people who switch jobs, often SDRs, BDRs, account executives, switch jobs all two to three years. So what you can also do is we run analysis. Okay. He's a former customer who has been at Spendesk, now he's at another Fintech where we could sell to. So let's run a sequence. We automate that sequence then as well with the different placeholders and personalization and then we have even a higher reply rate because it's based on a different triggers. But yeah, once we got the decision maker to get back to your question, of course we want to land a meeting and ideally what we need in the meeting as well is if it's a bigger go to market team, we need kind of the other decision makers, if there is from other countries.

Yeah.

So we try to get them all in one call as well. Plus at not at this stage but the later stage we also need to have a budget holder which is for us mostly revops. So they holding the budget and decision makers is more ahead of SDRs and BDRs in the call. What we do is sometimes we take the end user with us in the first call, but more down the line in the second or third. Why do we take the end user with us? Because he functions for us as an internal seller. So hey listen Ben, let's say you are the end user, you're with us in the call and we can say hey Ben already used surf at his past company. They've seen this in the success he found out now to do his job the best way he needs to have serve again because yeah, he has currently no process for getting contacts from LinkedIn into CRM. So then the decision makers have directly someone internally who can roll it out or thrive it, let's say. So what we often see is that the end user then says okay, can you maybe plant that into your teams and try to get more end users for POC or for test? And then of course we check in with the end user and say hey can you please add your other SDR colleagues to that poc? And then he basically starts selling internally for us. And that's what we've seen is the best way we get an quiet high participation of the end users in this PoC. We check in with them then again individually also you can also automate some stuff here. Just the first message for instance we send on LinkedIn, hey, hope you like the overall experience so far. Let us know if you have questions and then we have a mid trial check in. Of course again with the managers, we also have some data also in an automated process which we will give to them. And then at the end of the trial, as you know the process, check in, check for budget, see discounts, see terms and agreements, compliance, hopefully shorten that process because this can take a long time. And yeah, then at that time we also have mostly rev ups in as well in the discussion then hopefully get to order form assignment and that's our process.

Yeah, there is a huge amount of information in what we've just gone through. I'm going to try and disseminate this right for everyone listening and you can let me know if I've got it right. So we are talking about landing your aspirational or your dream client, right? The bigger customers typically that are not easy to win through a one to one connection. So there is a level of automation that Surf used to get out to the end user with the primary aim of finding out the pain or the opportunity. Right? So the scope of what you need to talk to the decision makers about, you're then taking that information that needs analysis and using it to target the decision makers either through your internal network where you already know those decision makers, or through a level of social proof or something similar, or even using one of the internal users to get to those decision makers once you're there. And now I'm not a huge fan of internal selling personally, but I really like how you spoke about internal selling, which is your aim is to get all the decision makers in the room together, even if it means cross borders. So sales leaders and salespeople, that's something to really hook into. If Surf can get decision makers in cross borders, then we can do it too, Right? So also by having that end user in that meeting as a form of social proof, you're actually able to have a very powerful internal seller that's helping you win that deal. So have I got it right so far?

You got it right and you know how it is. So when there's a decision maker in the room, follow up with a decision maker is not always given. So that's why at the end of the call, often decision maker says, okay, Ben, let's say you're the SDR bdr Sounds good. Can you then follow up with your team and colleagues to ensure that we kind of start the trial and everyone is onboarded. So they always need someone to kind of give the next step or fulfill the next step because he himself or herself, he won't do it. So I think when we have that end user in the meeting, and often the end user doesn't say anything for the whole meeting besides that at the end, when it's the action, it's towards the end user. So that's why we like to have them in the call as well, and these decision makers to find them also. So what we do is kind of an influence map. So that means often what I saw in the past as well also with our sales team at the beginning was, hey, you're trying to strike a deal but you forgot this and this person you need for budget or whatever. So then you're kind of going into a sales cycle was not the right people and you waste basically time because the discovery was not done well. And then you struggle in the negotiation phase because of course this guy has no budget where to go all the way with that person. So that's why we do kind of an influence map as well. And there's also nowadays tools how you can do it to identify who's the budget holder, who's the different decision makers. Also cross countries and then have a structured way of approaching them. Either we are warm intro for instance, either via level of influence. So there's different ways to do that. But it's always a connection for us between an influence map and we try to have a warm intro coming with it.

Yeah, great, great. So there's some real power there in doing your homework. But also what you mentioned is having that internal champion, that product champion, really helping not only roll the product out, but getting you those meetings is really important. Okay, so heaps of information there, those that are listening, there's going to be some show notes at the end of this. So. So this is one you might want to download if you're looking to see how you can apply it to your business or your sales team. But David, if you're a sales leader in a business and you're wanting to grow to the last question for me today, if you're wanting to grow fast within your sales team and you just have too much to do automation, it should be something we're looking at as sales leaders anyway. But some of us are taking a little bit longer to come to the part and that's absolutely fine because we all move at different paces. If you were recommending a sales leader start looking at automation, where would you start?

Yeah, of course we always look at top of the funnel. Right. So athletes and nowadays account executives need to be full cycle reps. So they need to do outreach. Everyone needs to do outreach. Meaning at these tools we look of course first and we look what we can automate here, personalize here at the scale because to be honest, the cold, cold emails, we all get them and they don't really work. You don't have high reply rates, so you really need an intent and you really need to personalize if you do emails. For us, emails is actually from the ranking where we get the most booked meetings from on rank three. On rank two, we now have socials where we have a kind of strategy working with different influencers. Our field experts in our fields, we run campaigns, they do postings. Then you can for instance scrap the likers and comments of these postings, put them then in an automated sequence. So here we use of course tools like outreach and the classics. And then number one is for us, if the reps want to do it and do it consistently is still cold calling because of course have 50 dials per day from these 50 of 10 connects. From these 10 connects you have four book meetings. So of course it's an exhausting way. And by our generation, so I mean now the 20 to 30 years old, we didn't grow up with speech, with speak, so we grew up with text. So of course for younger reps it's harder to do cold calling. There's nowadays a lot of tools also out there who help you there, AI coaching, you know, to kind of test your cold calling strategies. So that helps. But for us at the beginning we first didn't want to invest heavy into tools because we just first want to test does our approach work instead of getting tens of tools and then paying thousands of euros for it. We took a shortcut by working with an outbound agency as a service. So they basically find these different events on socials, like I said, when someone is mentioning us for instance, and then we take the comments and likers, check if they are in our icp, come up with a messaging, just personalized and then they send out an email. Same when we go to events kind of. I often got the message. How did you send me an outreach email one day after the event, which was very specific mentioning you were meeting at the event? My colleague, because the colleague was working in marketing and we need to target course revenue leaders. So how did you come up with that outreach and automated. So we use the outbound agency as a service. The name is Get Scalability or Scalability. They're working in France also with a lot of scale ups and they were giving us the initial push because we didn't have our sequences set up the right way with the right personalization in the first months. We also needed to find with the reps who's targeting whom and also we need to warm up of course their emails and all that stuff, which takes time and especially if you have younger reps who maybe have no experience in doing a lot of outreach. For us the shortcut was really outbound as a service and we get from them per month 40 to 50 leads, book meetings, which is working very well, I must admit. It took also six months to find really that recipe. But now we have plenty of data, we know whom to target with kind of what message, where can we find these intent and trigger events on socials, for instance on past customers who switch jobs on events as well. And also these warm intros combined with the influence maps. So yeah, I think that was my the short route for building up a sales team and using automations.

Some tried and tested ways in there, some modern ways with a little bit of automation, outreach and some of those classic tools you mentioned and some good old fashioned rolling up the sleeves cold calling which I love. Excellent. Well, thank you, thank you very much for your time today, David. So please everyone check out Surf. It's a great brand. Had a great involvement with them so far through my business. And also check out David Chevalier. David, where can people find you if they're looking to connect?

Yeah, just on LinkedIn. David Chevalier, as you said, you can also of course send me an email. I will drop it now here. David.chevalierf.com and yeah, also thanks for having me. Thanks for your contribution by the way for HubSpot ebook. So if you want to know what Ben contributed, a little contribution from your side, check it out. It's a social selling ebook where you find kind of different tactics around. Also video selling for instance. Recently talked about another friend of ours and you know him as well, Jan Mundor, who's kind of now big I would say on LinkedIn as well. So yeah, a lot of stuff to read and yeah, thanks for, for having me Ben.

My pleasure. We'll drop that that HubSpot to link into wherever we're promoting this podcast. That's it for today everyone. For now, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.

Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales teams.