Channel The Power of Customer Centricity with Salesflare Co-Founder, Jeroen Corthout #28

After all, all art is experience.

Hello and welcome to The Company Doctor. Today, Gary is joined by Jeroen Kortout, the co-founder of SaaS company Salesflare. He'll be discussing customer centricity, what exactly it means to different people, and why it's crucial when starting a business in a crowded market. Gary, Jeroen, over to you.

Jeroen, thank you so much for joining our episode.

Yeah, happy to be here.

You're a bit of an expert on podcasts. I didn't realize until we recently spoke that you've been on hundreds of podcasts.

It is part of our way to get some visibility. I'm not talking about what we do on every podcast, but just sharing all kinds of stuff that we do. And then if people are interested, they can always check out our software.

Fantastic.

And I have my own podcast as well, by the way. We didn't discuss that.

Ah, okay. Well, we'll have to find out about it.

I interviewed fellow SaaS founders on sort of their daily life, the way they attack things, not on a technical level, but really like a day-to-day life level, let's say. It's called Founder Coffee.

Brilliant. We'll put it in the show notes. So, you know, this episode is about customer centricity. And, you know, probably the best place to start is for you to introduce yourself and, you know, and your company that you founded, Salesflare. So, let's hear about all those things.

Yeah, we actually build software to power customer centricity, you could say. It's a CRM software and now you're thinking, oh my God, this is the kind of thing that I hate and it's not at all about customer centricity, it's about me filling something out and then whatever my manager looks at it or so. We try to change that actually. And the way we do that is we had the same issue. I actually worked in a few companies where CRM was used in very funny ways and where we were using systems where it was so dreadful to keep them up to date and then to organize yourself. And when with my co-founder, we had our own software company, we looked for something better and we found that, that issue that we never thought we could solve, but then we thought, What if we build a system that actually automates all that data input, that keeps track of all the information about customers automatically so that you can focus really on your customers because you have everything about them right there. Everything you ever discussed with them, like emails, meetings, calls, tracking, every little touchpoint gets tracked. Everything about them gets tracked automatically, like things from email signatures, things from social media, things, from company databases on their company, the strength of the relationship you have with them, who you know, all this kind of stuff. That's what Salesforce does for small businesses who sell B2B.

Fantastic. And, you know, just for the, the uninitiated, what does CRM stand for?

So, Customer Relationship Management.

There we go. So, those of you who didn't know that, I'm sure everyone mostly knows that. What's interesting is, before we get into the customer centricity part, it's a pretty crowded market, CRM. You're, you're a brave guy. What made you consider getting into the CRM market out of interest?

Brave or stupid, I don't know. Yeah, no, it's really hard to grow a lot in the customer relationship market. I mean, it's a big market, it's the biggest software market there is, but there's also so many players. I think if you go on g2.com, there's more than 750 players nowadays. But within these players, we did manage to be the in the top 10 on the G2 ranking. It's the biggest B2B software review platform there is. Yeah. So, we're number 10 of all the CRMs in the world, number 2 easiest to use, and number 1 easiest to set up. Now, that doesn't mean that we're a market leader. That just means that people like our service because there's— we are competing with huge companies and the only reason we keep doing that is because we believe we can make a difference. We believe that most of the CRMs still don't deliver on their promises and that a lot of companies can still build much better relationships with their customers. If only the software were better, they would use the software better and all that. There's so much potential to still change things. Right.

Well, yeah, I like it. I mean, we'll come back to it in a minute. I want to get to the topic because— and there's a connection between the two. Now, the topic is customer centricity, and it does mean different things to different people, but what does it mean to you, and what do you think are the key things from your point of view about being customer-centric?

I would commonly refer to it as keeping customers close, if it's from our perspective. And if it's from the perspective of why people use our system, it's trying to build a relationship with every customer on a very personal level, and every customer basically should feel that they are the only customer and not like one of many, because I think that's where it goes wrong. If you call a company and you get connected to customer support and you feel like you're one, one, a number, they have many customers and you're just treated like, okay, other customer. But if you feel that people actually listen to you, what you say is taken into account, they give you the proper attention. Every time you get in touch with them, they still know what was discussed the last time. This kind of things which you think should be normal. I think a company already is doing a good job. We ourselves go a bit further in that. We try to really take in all the information we ever exchanged, let's say, and process it and make sure that we always can— I can give you some examples in a moment, but that we do something with that and actually start doing a better job for our customers. But I think the basics is already that you keep track properly and can build on that.

You know what's interesting? It's funny, isn't it? Because it does mean different things to different people. What you're talking about is almost inside out, because on some of the B2B customers, they're trying to provide a good service to their end customer by translating their outcomes. They're trying to understand what does that customer want and what can I do as a result of it to give them what they want in the first place, rather than the customer experience, which is what you're talking about. And I think both are important.

No, both, both, definitely. I would never go into a call with a presentation or so. I would always try to understand who is in front of me, what is the issue they're actually trying to solve, and then go from there and say, well, we can help you in that way.

How do you get that information? Because, you know, we've had quite a few episodes on, on those sorts of discussions. It'll be useful to get your point of view because you're clearly you're focused on this stuff. What do you do to get smart and knowledgeable about the customer before you speak to them?

You can do some research upfront, what it is that the company does. And if you, first of all, if you've seen many customers, you already from the site or from the LinkedIn description or whatever else is that you can find to get a good view on what the company does. You can already feel like, okay, it's probably going to go sort of in that direction, but you don't know yet, right? It's just a sort of preconceived image that you're building up. But then when you go into the talk, you also ask people what is it you do? What do you sell? To whom do you sell it? And really try to understand that and try to understand it for that individual customer and then try to understand what problem they're currently having. Why is it actually that they're looking in our case for CRM software? It can have many reasons. Usually it's in a limited set of reasons, but it doesn't have to. And then based on that, our software, for instance, can do a lot of things, but then you can lift out, say, okay, but you're, you're looking more for that. And actually the issue is that this is not happening. We can help you that way. And of course we have all these other things, but that's bonus for you. We're just going to focus and make sure that your main issue is solved and then, and we can go from there.

Okay. And yeah, what do you think, um, the key considerations of being customer-centric are through, but through the lens of the customer? So not through, not through your lens or your user's lens, but going back over to the other side. So if I'm a customer, I don't mean of your product, I'm just a customer of a service from somebody. What are the key considerations of customer-centricity through their lens, do you think?

I think, first of all, you want to feel like you're listened to and that if you say something, something is at least done with it. Not necessarily— depends on the type of service, of course. Maybe the company cannot change everything they do, but at least they hear you and you have the feeling that they also have done something with it, that the information has been captured. And if enough customers ask it or so, that something is done with it. This is in the case of when it's a unified service. If every service is different, then you want to go way deeper in that. The second, the team at the supplier, I would say, they communicate with each other. So it's not each person you're in touch with, you have to restart your whole conversation, but that they know together how to serve you best. And if they hand you over to another person, that first of all, this is for a good reason. And secondly, you don't restart things. And even I think another really key thing, which is very much undervalued, is very often when you're working on something, it's a matter of timing or you have an issue, you want to solve it at a certain moment. And it's very important for the company that's serving you to respect that timing, to feel that timing, and to follow up at the right times. Because what you often have is that either they try to push their timing because, I don't know, they need to make their sales targets, or they totally forget. And then in the other case, you explain your full issue and they say, "We can solve that," and then you never hear them again. Or they just, when you say, "I probably have time for this in March," they don't respect the March timing. And then, like, everybody is working on a lot of stuff, so you need to make sure that at the right times you can do this with your customers.

Yeah, I think the timing was an interesting one, not something I really thought about, but you're right. And I think their priorities may be not the same as our priorities, I guess, is what you're saying.

For sure, yeah.

How annoying is that? If only customers could align to that.

It's not annoying, that's why there are salespeople to make the bridge between the two. Otherwise, it could all be served by computers or whatever.

Well, fair enough. And maybe that's what will happen one day in the future. So let me ask you another question, kind of follow on from that, and then we'll get back to talking about Salesflare in a second. Some of the customers and listeners that we have on our podcast are involved in an environment where they're doing operational things. So they'll sell something, they'll implement it, and they'll operate it. And what tends to happen is that the sales guy is close to the what the customer wants, but by the time it gets further along the chain into operations, there's a misunderstanding, or no one even knows the reason they bought something in the first place. Yeah. So my question to you is, how do you kind of stay connected to what the customer wants all the way through that business lifecycle, from your experience? And because you're, you know, you're CRM, so you're focused on the front end, but how do you kind of make sure it carries on?

Well, a lot of our customers, we serve a lot of agencies, they also have their operational people on the software because what's important, I think there's two levels to it. First, there's all the information basically that you can go back and see everything that's ever been discussed with the customer, which emails were sent, what was discussed in the meetings and everything that you have access to everything. That is an important thing so you can dig into the details. On the other hand, if you're the operational person and the salesperson just says like, here is all the information you have, we ever exchanged, and just dumps it on you. It's also not a nice thing. So I think essential in that process as well is that the salesperson makes some sort of summarized briefing that has all the things you need to know as the person who's going to execute. All of that is in there. Otherwise, it's also sort of a hard job. But I would make sure that you have access to both. You know, the summary. And second, if you want to go deeper, that you have that access.

Yeah, because I think sometimes it's about the outcomes. A good example for me is I was working with one of my customers, and they'd sold something which was, I know, migrating servers. But the main business objective of the end customer was to save money on maintenance, for an example. And, but by the time it got to the people that were implementing that migration, They didn't really know why the customer was doing it. So, I'm trying to work out how do you connect that, the compelling event, the reason the customer wants to do something to the person that's actually doing it through that whole life cycle. That was really where I was going. Any further thoughts about that?

I think that's, first of all, it starts with having a discussion as a team throughout the whole process, how you want to organize it. I can give you all kinds of software tips, but by experience, I can tell you, Software can do a lot of things, but if people don't discuss with each other how they're going to use the software and for what reasons, it's always going to go wrong. So as a team, from the salesperson to the person who's going to deliver, you sit together and you're like, okay, what, what, what information do we need at which stage in the process and how can we make sure it gets there? And then you can go in the software and say, well, we're going to make a field for that, or it's always going to be here in the notes, or you organize yourself around that. But it starts with just sitting around the same table, making some notes in a document, say this is a process we're going to follow, this is the way we're going to work together. And that's overlooked in so many companies. So what happens in a lot of companies is that, for instance, they know they need a CRM to organize themselves, right? Yeah. So they just jump on that and they're like, yeah, check, we have a CRM. Yeah. Everybody has an account. Okay, cool. And then now you all put your stuff in there, but they never discuss basic stuff like if you have a pipeline with a sales process, What do the different stages in the sales process, what do they mean? It's not because it's in there, it has names that everybody thinks about the same thing. Or when you make fields, why do we have these fields? How does that make sense? When do we need to fill them out? What happens with that? If you just take a little bit of time to discuss these things as a team, it makes a huge difference because then actually if you put something in software, then it becomes a communication tool because you know what it's gonna be used for, you know why you're putting it there. And if you put it like that, you know that the other person is gonna get it. If you don't discuss this kind of things and you, for instance, have 5 salespeople and they all input the same fields in the same stages, but for them, they all have different ideas when they think about a stage or when they think about a certain thing that they fill in, Then at the end, when you look at all that, you don't know what it means, and it cannot be a communication tool anymore.

Well, you know, this is something I want to ask you. We have a lot of sales leaders that listen to this podcast, amongst others. And one of the conundrums of salespeople, and I want to ask you this question because I think it would help them, and you all have the answer to it, is a lot of salespeople don't like filling in these CRMs. It's their worst nightmare doing an account plan. They haven't got time for all this. So, what's your advice to people in that situation where they don't necessarily see the value in the return on investment of keeping a system up to date, and therefore, when it's out of date, it's not much use? What's your thoughts about that?

Oof, there's many different levels to that. I think it starts with introducing something in a way that it doesn't feel imposed on people, and they also have a say in what they're going to use. I think that's a very nice thing to do. But before that, it even starts with figuring out what sort of system you need and then going to look in that direction. What most companies do is they just type, for instance, best CRM into Google, and then they just take the first thing that pops up while there is a CRM for just about every use case. So picking the right one, it takes some research, but it's a really good thing to do. Just what are you going to do? Are you going to create repeat sales? Is it an internal communication tool? Is it to follow up B2B sales? Is it to— all kinds of possibilities. Then maybe look with your team. These are things I found, which ones do you like? Make them sort of use it and then make them say, I like this one, can we use this one? This is going to go a long way because first of all, you know that your team is going to use it, which is essential.

It's always hopeful, that's what you want.

And secondly, you get their buy-in as well. So you you're more sure that they're going to use it. And then on the third level from there, if you actually have these discussions that we just talked about, about how are we going to use it, for what reasons, how is communication going to flow here from person to person, then also everybody, they don't only align on things, but they also understand why they're doing stuff. It's not just 'Oh, we just put data in a system and then whatever,' but you understand why you're inputting that data because this data is put in so that the CFO knows what kind of revenue is coming. This data is put in so that the marketing people don't target our new leads with discounts when they're actually already going to buy. And this information is put in so when I'm sick, my colleagues can take over. And this, you know, when you see all these things, then you're actually going to value that more. And put, do more of an effort. And now what we do on our end is making sure that the data input is not really needed. We also believe the software can do a better job next to all these things.

Okay, so say more about that because I think that would be interesting to people listening, you know, because data input is a problem. No one likes putting data in. So how, what do you do?

Well, we started 8 years ago seeing that most CRMs have these really huge expectations about the amount of data you're going to put into the system. Like every time you meet someone, you need to remember like, oh, I met a new person, put them in there. When they share their phone number, for instance, in an email signature, you need to be like, oh, phone number, cool, put it in. Every time you email someone or call or have a meeting or so, you always put it in. And if you do that correctly, it's a great system on which you can fall back and say, when was I last in touch with that person? What was the last thing discussed? Who am I in touch with? All these things. But because it's so much work, like an inhumane amount of work, it usually doesn't happen. And we had that issue and then we figured like, okay, most of the things we're inputting into a system here, they are already digital somewhere. Why don't we build a system that just connects in all these places and pulls it together so that you as a salesperson can see, okay, these are the emails actually, these are the meetings. 'Based on their email signature, the system extracted this information. It also got this information from a company database about the company. These are the people it knows that I'm in touch with at the company.' All of these things are tracked automatically. All you have to do is saying, 'Yes, I have a sales opportunity here,' and maybe put in a note about a meeting, but the rest happens for you. So you can actually rely on the system.

Very smart. So listen, you're a bit of an entrepreneur. You've gone on a journey, you know, you've done things that most people wouldn't even do, right? Looking back at that experience and knowing what you know now, would you have done anything differently if you had the chance again?

Oh, for sure. Some steps I would have taken less quickly within the journey. You often want to go faster than— you want to skip steps, basically. It's a common mistake. We've done that a bunch of times. Like hiring someone too quickly for a certain role or thinking you need to hire someone really quickly and then hiring the wrong person or starting to work on something that is actually not something you should be doing yet, like starting to blog when you actually still should focus all in on sales, things like that. But on the other hand, also, I wish we had been more systematic with a lot of things from the start. Nowadays we have a lot of systems in place and we really work more on a habit-based system where we work on continuous improvements. And when we started off, we always had new ideas and then we jumped on those and it was, it was much more haphazard.

Yes, you're a bit more focused.

Yeah, now we, we, we know what we want to work on. We sometimes change that focus, but we, we actually keep keep going and keep improving instead of always picking a new thing to work on, a new fight.

Okay, well, that's good advice. I think, you know, a lot of people that are entrepreneurs that listen. And, you know, through the pandemic, you know, don't want to keep talking about pandemics, but did you have to pivot? You know, what was it, a good pandemic for you business-wise? I appreciate it's not good to have been a pandemic, but how did it affect your business?

For us, it was, uh I'm very lucky that we don't have a restaurant or a travel business or something like that. Yeah. No, we were doing quite well. We lost some customers that were in a, I want to say the wrong business, not in all the wrong business, but like were less lucky than we were. But then we also gained customers that all of a sudden their pipelines were slashed and they were like, okay, maybe we need a system to organize ourselves. So, we did pretty well. Of course, we had to make changes internally, the way we work together, but—

But do you find, you know, again, looking back at it, was there some useful aspects of that because you had to pivot a little bit? Was there some things that, you know, that acted as a catalyst, if you like, to drive your business?

Yeah, definitely. I think we started communicating way better internally. Many small things that we were still relying on, ad hoc communication or like water cooler moments or so. Yeah, we started being more systematic about that. So even though everybody was in their own homes, we would still know everything. As in the small things, like I mentioned a thing earlier, I said you need to have access to everything but also get a summary. We do that, for instance, with meetings. So when we have a meeting, we type out all the minutes So, first of all, we still remember which decisions we made and why we made the decisions and all those kind of things. But then also at the end of the meeting, after building that really long document, we also take 10 minutes to think, okay, but for the people who were not in the meeting, because it hardly ever happens that the whole company is in a meeting, right? That would be wasteful. For everyone that was not in the meeting, what should they know about this meeting? What did we discuss? Why? Big lines, and then another link to the full document if they want to read everything.

Okay, I like that. Whose idea was that? That's a great idea.

I do not remember.

Okay, but translating context is massively important, so it's fantastic. And can I sort of take you out of yourself for a minute? So think outside of CRM for a minute. It's kind of connected, but I'd just like to go outside of it. Who does customer centricity well? Any companies come to mind, or, you know, that you've come across outside of CRM or even within CRM, but that are very good at being customer-centric? Can you think of anyone that springs to mind that does it well?

The ones that I have the best experience with lately, it's a funny example, but it's Gorillas. I don't know whether you know the service.

Yeah, yeah, the supermarket delivery kind of guys.

Yeah, they're really nice. So, I put in a delivery, there's a certain thing they don't have anymore, they call me, they're like, "So, we don't have this thing anymore, what do you think about that thing, is that better?" And I'm like, "Sure," and then they say, well, We'll also credit your account with this amount of money.

And they called you on the phone and asked you?

Yeah, they do that every time. Every time they don't have something, they call me and they go through it. And I don't think they have any unhappy moments. Of course, they have a lot of money to burn to do this kind of things right now, but—

Well, that's good though, because I had the reverse experience. I ordered something, so I wanted to make my own pizza. Yeah. And they didn't deliver the key things I needed, like yeast and tomato topping. So I had all the other bits, which was great, but I couldn't make the pizza. So, and they didn't call me either, and they just sent me— when the delivery came, it just said, these things are missing and we've deducted it from the cost.

Oh, maybe the people here in Antwerp are nicer than they are.

Yeah, I think so. I need to move. I need to move. So listen, I've got a couple of questions for you, and then we're going to get to your musical taste. I want you to think about, again, with customer centricity in mind, for people that are listening, What 3 tips would you give? You know, if you could only give 3 things, what would you tell people to think about to give a better experience? If you could only give 3 things, what would they be?

Consider every customer different. Like, every time you get, uh, whatever, on a Zoom call or so, don't think like this customer is, is like all these others. You can think that, so you already have a direction, but still keep a, keep an open mind and listen. Take some time for that. Don't pretend like you have the solution for them already because you don't even fully know what the problem is. And even if you know what the problem is, maybe you don't know the context around the problem.

So that's good. So yeah, don't assume and presume everyone's the same.

That's really good. Second, think about the things they find really important. Make sure that you're organized around them. One thing we do, for instance, I— we are software business, right? So people often have things they want to see extra in the software, or there are small things that are not going well, or there's a bug somewhere or so. We keep track of everything on a— so we have the issues, everything is an issue. And then linked to that, we have the conversations and we know like this person and this person and this person asked this and this is why they asked it. And here's a link to the full conversation so we can check it out. And then at the moment that we solve things or we add things or so, we also, we communicate back at that moment. We will go to every single person that asked it and said, well, this is here now, what do you think about it? About it, so to close that loop. It is relatively simple, but you just need to organize yourself around it. And if you don't, then, well, too bad, you miss a whole part of your experience. If you do, it really stands out.

Yeah, it sounds like you do that in your own meetings as well, so it seems like it's part of your DNA, you do that. I kind of like that idea.

Yeah, yeah, we try to do that in general. It requires discipline though sometimes, but—

Yeah, sure. And number 3?

Number 3, I'm just going to be repetitive. Discuss these kind of things internally. Make sure that you align with your colleagues. Take some time to see how you're going to organize yourself, how you're going to communicate, and then take some time sometimes to also revise it. It makes a big difference. I mean, working, uh, and, and building stuff and talking with customers is all great, but there's so much potential for improvement if you just also aligned with the rest of your company on this kind of things. It's super essential.

Fantastic. Thank you so much, Jeroen. That's really helpful. Good insight. Good to meet someone that's kind of been on that journey and taken big steps, you know, against a crowded market. So it's fantastic. So my last thing is just to talk to you about your musical taste. For those listening, we have a playlist, the Company Doctor playlist on Spotify. It's customary for us to ask all of our guests to give us either 1 or 2 tunes and we add it to the playlist. So what's yours?

I'm gonna add something funny to it. I've recently been to London with my wife and we went to a musical. It's called Hamilton.

Oh God, you got tickets?

Well done. Yeah, and I really like the moment that the British king came on the scene and sang 'You'll Be Back.' So you can add that to the list. It's 'You'll Be Back' by Jonathan Groff in the original Broadway cast.

Brilliant. What a great choice. Love Hamilton. Great, great musical soundtrack and a good one, a good addition to the podcast. So listen, Jeroen, thank you so much for taking the time, giving us your insight. I noticed you've got a bike behind you. I was going to ask you about that. There's a nice white bicycle behind you. You're obviously a bit of a fan.

Typical Flemish thing to have.

Yeah, fantastic. Very true.

I'm more running lately, but I I really love biking as well.

Yeah, it looks great, it looks great. So thanks again, and we'll hopefully see you again soon.

See you soon, it was fun.

Thanks for listening to this episode of The Company Doctor, and a special thanks once again to Jeroen for being our expert guest. To have a listen to previous episodes on everything from strategy to side hustles, visit thecompanydoctor.com, and be sure to sign up for bonus content and new episode Notifications. notifications. See you next time.