"The Secret to SMB Sales" Accel Partner Andrei Brasoveanu and Doctolib CDO Agnes Bazin

Hi everyone, so I'm Andrei. I'm a partner at Accel, and I have the pleasure of being on stage with Agnès. She's part of the founding team at Doctolib and the current Chief Development Officer for the company. So a bit about Doctolib for those of you who are not aware of the company, but I'm sure being in Paris here, most of you would have heard of them. So they're the leading booking management platform for doctors. They were started in 2013 here in France and have since grown into France and Germany. They currently work with 80,000 doctors, growing at 3,000 per month, 1,700 hospitals, 35 million strong patient community, 900 employees. As a bit of history, Accel, we've had the pleasure of supporting them from the early beginnings. So we led their Series B of $20 million in 2015. Since then, the company has continued to grow tremendously and have raised a total of $280 million, most recently passing the $1 billion valuation mark, and are fast approaching $100 million in recurring revenue. So I'll give it to Agnieszka to share a bit more about her role, Dr. Lieb, and the topic for the day.

Hello everyone, very happy to be there. It's my first time here at Saastr. So yeah, maybe as an introduction, who of you have already booked an appointment through Doctolib? Okay, it's not bad. I guess other people are not from France, I hope. So yeah, so I think it's pretty straightforward what Doctolib does for patients. We are an online booking solution for patients. And for doctors, what we do is that we have a full software for doctors that does booking management, patient CRM, doctor-to-doctor collaboration, and also recently launched video consultation in France. So this is the doctor side, and our mission overall is really to create the tools for hospitals and practices of the future. And on the patient side, it's to smoothen patient access and the overall experience for patients. I'm very happy to talk about SMB sales today because if you think about it, healthcare is a very nice economic sector. There's loads of things to do there because it's very low digitalized. It's 11% of GDP in France and even more in some other countries, and it's highly fragmented. So doctors basically sit in, you know, single or double or 3 people maximum, 10 practice. So we knew from the beginning that we had to be excellent in SMB sales because basically there's no other way around it. And you know, sometimes when we were working on our sales organization, we always told ourselves we have to be so good in sales that one day we can write a book about it. And so today it's not a book yet, but I think a talk here is already a good start.

That's fantastic. So we're The topic of the day is secret to SMB sales, and we thought we would organize the talk in 4 chapters in terms of the 4 core tenets of their strategy, which is organization, sales processes, sales operations, and people. So I guess to start with, on the organization side, can you tell us a bit about how sales are organized, Dr. Lieb?

Yeah, sure. So maybe it's, it's easier to start with explaining how it works. So we've got, we split our sales organization into 4 different teams. So 2 teams cater to practices. So it's the field sales team and the inside sales team. And 1 team is catering to hospital. So this is not SMB sales, so we will not talk about it today because it's more like enterprise sales. And then we've got of course the sales ops team, which is really global. So this one is catering for both countries. We've got France and Germany today. Whereas the other teams, field sales, are more local-based. So that's about the organization. I guess the most interesting to tell you more today is about the field sales team, because this is how we started. Basically, for the first 2 years, we only had field sales. And yeah, in terms of structure, you know, we went from 5 sales guys that were with the CEO, the founder, at the beginning, to a 300-people sales organization today in 40 different cities in France and Germany. And yeah, so it's, it's a long way and a lot of things. And I think one interesting thing to share about that is, you know, when it's field sales, basically it's local, right? So you've got to make sure that each business developer got like a pipe of prospect that is not too scattered around so that he doesn't spend the whole day in his car. So you've got to split your territory between, you know, pools of 2,000, 3,000 prospects per person. And, you know, the way we did it in France was pretty wild because we started with Paris, we became super strong in Paris, and then Axel came. We raised a very nice Series B, so we wanted to expand. And there we opened probably 10 different cities. And because we had competition there, like, anytime our competitor will open a very small city, like, oh my god, they opened Besançon, we have to open Besançon as well. So we opened Besançon, Pau, Tours, all the, you know, smaller cities in France. And at one point, we've got like 15 guys alone in some small cities. And, you know, very junior in sales, so it was really difficult. And, you know, the sales manager, they would travel every day to a different city, and they had like a round of 10 different cities that they would do just to see the guys every 2 weeks. So it was 1 or 2 years that were pretty tough in terms of management. And so when we started in Germany, we did it a bit more wisely. And I think the German geography helped a lot because Germany is not like France where it's, you know, Paris and the rest of the world. It's more like, you know, 4 or 5 different big centers. So in Germany, we try to stay very focused to make sure that we have people that are not alone but with teams, which is much easier in terms of management and growing people and everything. So I would say that was the main learning from building the Sains organization that we had. Over the last years.

So this clearly has worked very well for you. How did you decide on this model and go-to-market strategy?

Yeah, I mean, it's pretty straightforward. I mean, if you think about the healthcare industry, what you have to take into account is that there is a huge sales pressure on doctors. I mean, the pharma industry got millions to pour to try to, you know, convince doctors to change their prescriptions. So basically they tried everything and it went as far as, you know, paying them some design furnitures or inviting them for a congress in French Polynesia. So it was pretty wild. So we wouldn't see how it was possible to convince a doctor with something less, you know, intense than at least a face-to-face meeting. So that's why we started with Failsafes. And then after we started and we started to onboard the first customers, What came out is that if you want the customer to be happy, which is of course very key because we are a free-of-engagement service, so the success factor of sale is not signing the contract but is getting usage and having a happy customer. And when you— we did that at the beginning, we really had to remove any physical barrier from having a happy doctor. So it means sometimes, you know, fixing his internet connection or reorganizing something in the practice or sometimes help training each assistant one by one so that they're happy using the product. So it was really hardcore change management within each single practice. And for example, I remember when I started in Germany, we were installing our first, I mean, maybe 10th doctor in Germany. And unluckily enough, he had a paper calendar. So when you have a paper calendar, it means you need to copy manually each single appointment in the Doctolib software. And he had around 3,000. So what happened is that we started and we were like, okay, maybe we should show the assistant how to do it. And then we realized they will not do it. So if we wouldn't do it, they will not adopt Doctolib. So they just left us the key of the practice and we were the whole Saturday in their practice alone. Copying appointments, and this is how it happens. So of course, no, we try to get the assistants doing it, but sometimes, and very often, we have, you know, some sales guys who do it. And in the end, I think like this, you know, very strong service mindset that the field sales team had and this very strong proximity to customer is really what made the success of Doctolib in the early days.

Those are amazing stories. And beyond the fast growth, How have you seen the organization develop over time and the strategy?

Yeah, so of course growth is a very spectacular thing on how the organization changed, but if I think about changing in structure, I think the main point was when we started inside sales. So as I explained, we came from a very field model, and then at one point we decided to launch inside sales because the most challenging part for us at the beginning was to get meetings. Because doctors wouldn't meet you, so you got like 30 nos, 40 nos in a way. So getting meetings was the most difficult activity. So we said, okay, let's launch inside sales, and they would just do calling all day and get meetings for the field sales team. So we did that, but to do that, we just got a very good sales guy from Paris, Laurent. And then after like 1 or 2 weeks, Laurent came to us and said, okay, but why can't I sign a doctor? I want to sign the doctor. I don't want to just take the appointment for the other guy. He was super frustrated. And then they started to sign doctor's success fully over the phone with distance. And then what we realized is that it works, but only for certain segments. So it works for simple organization with single doctors, mostly for, you know, non-medical specialties like physio, psychologist, and everything where it's easier to change things in the practice. And right now we've got 70 people inside Sales Team. So it's a big deal.

So let's zoom in a bit on the, on the sales process. In a few words, how would you summarize the secret sauce of your, of your sales playbook?

Yeah, I knew that he was going to ask me that question. So yeah, I thought about it, and I think the 3 ingredients of our SMB sales secret sauce are first, very strong entrepreneurial mindset. Second, a consistently high volume of meetings. And third, constant continuous improvement. These are really the 3 points that made a success. And you know, I think everyone is talking about it, but people could be first, people could be last, and nothing is going to be magic within the organization if you don't have great people and a great team spirit and mindset. And for example, for me, it took me some time to realize that. And I'm from Lyon, basically. And when I got back home, I talked to my parents' doctor's friend. And I asked them, OK, so do you know about Dr. Lee? What do you think? And they tell me, yeah, I've met Jean-Baptiste. He's such a great guy. He did that. He knows some of my friends. And basically, I think it's only thanks to having thousands and thousands of meetings every week with super nice, super entrepreneurial guys that doctors love that we build such a huge trust on the French market that allows us today to have a majority of our sales coming through inbound.

So the sales have been clearly very effective. Can you talk a bit more about the funnel and how you develop these leads through the various stages?

Yeah, so about the funnel, there's no like big— it's, yeah, it's pretty simple. Basically, it's a very simple process like hunting, so pretty straightforward. This is done by the sales to generate meetings, and as I told you, it was the most difficult thing at the beginning because doctors are so much asked for that they would not meet any, you know, commercial person. So this is really the most difficult part. And then there is closing. So this is the meeting, so either by distance or face-to-face, and the sales guy is taking care of it. And then we've got a training part. So this is something specific, was I told you that a success factor for sales for us is not just signing the contract, it's really having happy customer that has usage of our product. So this is why the salesperson himself is doing the training. 'Cause if you've got someone who sells you a product and say, "Yeah, thank you, I sell you the product, but then, okay, just talk to this guy for implementation," it's very tough in terms of trust. So that's why we always had the model where the salesperson was guaranteeing the success of the product, and this allows us to have a very good word-of-mouth effect. And they were supported also by an onboarding team on the training part. And then the last part is farming, what we call. So hunting, closing, training, and farming. And farming is done by customer success. And of course, the goal is to remove as much as possible the contact from the sales team so that they can focus on more hunting. So this is the overall sales process. And there, you know, recently I think about that again, and I think what is very important is that when you start a company, there is one point where you need the CRM. So actually, we did it straight away. And when you do that, you need to define very accurately the steps. So okay, hunting, there's like maybe 5 or 10 sub-steps and process that you have to define in the CRM. And this is super, super important. And we invested a huge amount of time to do it right. Because as you grow, if you don't put it right, you don't have the right data to understand what you're doing. And it's, when we were like 10, 15, 30 people, we could, you know, take good decisions out of gut feeling and field observation. But as we grew a 300-people sales organization in France and 100 people in Germany, now we really need good data. And what's actually funny is that we had to rebuild our Salesforce from scratch 3 times. And I can tell you it's quite painful because last year we were so proud because we had like 2 great Salesforce developers and we got the best customized Salesforce in Paris. So every time a new sales guy would join, they would say, wow, that's such a cool Salesforce. You have the best dashboard. It's, you know, fully customized. So people just loved it. And at one point, because of this process that was not designed the right way so that we couldn't understand really our business, we had to— we decided to just dump the whole thing and rebuild the whole thing from scratch. So I think this describes pretty well a lot of, you know, stages through which we've been in the last few years where we, you know, we didn't hesitate to really, you know, dump everything and start again from scratch, to always challenge ourselves on what's the best sales process and everything.

And it's really good to hear some of the areas you've had stumbles in and potentially things didn't work out as expected. What steps have you taken to improve in those cases?

Yeah, I mean, I think I've been for 5 years at Doctolib, but it feels pretty much like 15 years or something like that, because we've gone through so many things. But there are, you know, most of the time in sales, there are 3 options where it doesn't work. So the first option is that the wrong person is selling your product. It's a people problem. Second option is that you're not selling your product in the right way, so it's basically a sales script problem. And the third option is maybe that the product is wrong. But if you challenge always the product first, then it's not working because you end up having every single sales explaining you why they didn't sell because the product is not right. So you have to trust the product basically. And there, yeah, I've got loads of examples. So for people, I think everyone in the room who already tried to build a sales team would know what I'm talking about. But obviously, you know, you've got loads of, you know, wrong hires or people going wrong or things like this. And there it's very important to react fast and to have, you know, a good load of strong managers that can take back a region if somewhere is going wrong. If you don't have enough good people in your overall organization, every time you've got a problem or a hole then you're basically, you cannot do anything. And what helped us is that we got a lot of really good and strong guys that whenever a region was going wrong, they would take it back in terms of management, or they will do some kind of mentorship or things like this. So this was really helpful for solving people problem. Then when it comes to, yeah, the way you sell like script problem, this is also something where you need to always learn. That's what I said, like continuous improvement. Every time you do a sales meeting, you have to get out of the sales meeting thinking, okay, what can I improve in my script? And there, there are many examples. For example, like if you've got a young guy that's coming to a GP in France and telling him how many like new patients he will get, the GP would just go like, oh my God, I already have like so many new patients. I don't want any additional. And he would just, you know, kick you away. And of course, this kind of thing, the more we got thinner and thinner to have a different script by specialty, the more we trained the team. And this allowed us to really get back on conversion on certain specialty where we had really low conversion. And this was made possible by one thing is that every Monday morning, we've got a sales meeting every Monday morning, 8:30. So it's really quite a tradition in the company. And there we share— it's basically sharing about results and then training. And every time we've got a new adjustment in the script, we would share it there. So if there is a problem in the script that we spot, the next Monday it's solved and 150 or 300 people in the organization are aware about it. So that's one point. And the last kind of challenge that you can run through is product. And there, for example, like, I don't know, psychologists, they were not so happy with Dr. Lieb, and we couldn't sell it pretty well. And what we realized is that they always give series of appointments. So if you go into a therapy, you will have like 12 appointments in a row. And so for them, they had to, you know, click 10 times on Dr. Lieb and create the appointment 12 times. So they were, you know, they thought it was not so much time-saving as we sold them. And so this is something we realized, and then of course we, you know, released a new serial appointment feature. And I must say that in the early days, especially when we started in Germany and you're pretty new, it's very important to have a quick reactivity of product. And of course, now we grow bigger, we don't do this anymore, else our product roadmap will be not so good. But in the early days, it's when you're building the trust in the market, it's very, very important as well. So I mean, overall, I think we did a lot of mistakes, but we, we have a very open culture about it. And anytime something goes wrong, what really matters is that you don't wait to solve the problem and you have the right mechanism to be able to solve the problem straight away.

It's very interesting. I keep thinking of the sales team at Doctolib as a very well-oiled machine. You keep fine-tuning over and over while still driving very fast. It's quite impressive. Let's spend a bit more time on sales operations. So in, in 3 years, you've built a sales team of 120 people, I believe, in 35 cities. So it's a very impressive organization. And how do you manage to make sure you onboard all these folks, set them up for success, and build a homogeneous and repeatable process? Going forward?

Yeah, so this is a big deal because of course some months we onboarded like 30% of the company. So when it's like this, if you want to make sure, yeah, you don't get your ways of working and knowledge diluted, it's very tough. So what we had from the beginning was what we call a Doctolib Academy, where we basically onboard every new joiner. Every month there's a Doctolib Academy where we onboard everyone and we train everyone on all the possible best practices. So we have, you know, like anything you can think of, we train people on. So that after 2 weeks out of the Doctolib Academy, first they are highly motivated, they share our vision, they know how to work with other teams because we do a lot of like live my life, go to customer success or go to tech and things like this. And, you know, most important of all is that they have everything that they need to succeed as soon as possible. And this is very important. And to give you like some pretty extreme example, I think what is super, super important for SalesUp is to take nothing that is part of your success for granted. And when I say nothing, it's really nothing, like even the smallest detail. And you know, some cool stories that we have is that we have this what we call Sales Bible where we put all the, you know, great insights and script and everything, like every knowledge is basically structured and transferable. And in the Sales Bible, we put crazy tips such as, yeah, for example, when you do a training with assistants, usually the assistants, it's normal, it's their daily job, and they are the ones where it's the biggest change for them to adopt Doctolib. So that's the one you have to convince the most once you sign and during the training. And so what we realized, that one thing that worked well was bringing croissant to the assistants when you do the training. So we wrote this in the Bible, and then we had, it's funny because when we started in Germany, it was in the Bible, and the Germans, you know, when you write something, they really do it. So we ended up with all the Germans buying loads of croissant. It was pretty cool. So yeah.

Did you replace the croissant with something else or?

I think we boost the sale of croissant in Berlin pretty much during the first year. So yeah, this kind of crazy tips, or I don't know, I've got many examples, but for example, another thing is that, you know, when you're talking to the doctor, you took so much time to meet him that when you meet him actually, you really need to get his personal phone number because else you've got the assistant's gatekeeping. And there we've got some techniques to get the personal number of the doctor, which was like you take your business card out and then you circle your name, your cell phone on it, so your personal cell phone, and you say, 'Hey doctor, this is my personal cell phone, so yeah, please reach out to me directly on this one.' And then you leave a blank, and normally if like the doctor is not too cold, he will answer with his cell phone as well. So we've got some tips like this, you know, that we shared and trained each new biz dev on it so that we make sure that none of them has a chance to get out of a meeting without a personal number. So these are only some small examples, but I think that overall what really matters is that nothing that makes it work should be taken for granted. Everything should be scaled, documented, and everything, and, and only focus on things that work, of course.

So you spoke about the sales Bible and you mentioned best practices a lot. How do you strike the balance between standardizing these best practices and and still allowing for that individual outperformance?

Yeah, so that's a good question. So of course everything is documented and everything, so it doesn't say that there's no room at all for any type of creativity. On the contrary, I think that there are different creativity or things that you can have. There's the first kind that is something when it happens, the sales ops team should be highly observing and being able to pinpoint those sales or best practices that work to scale it to the whole organization. And there we've got a very good example about Vincent. He's a sales guy in the east of— sales manager in the east of France. And one day he told us, okay, I'm not doing my Monday meeting myself anymore. It's actually one of the guys in my team leading it. And so at first we're like, okay Vincent, but you know you're the manager, you know better, so maybe you should lead your meeting yourself, right? And then he told us, "No, no, look, all my guys are hardcore motivated because I'm investing into training them to become managers, and they are actually rolling captain of the team." And so every week he will have an interim captain of the team, and he was rolling. So he made sure that all his team were really trained to become managers. And yeah, actually it worked really well. So we scaled it to the entire sales organization afterwards. So this was an example of best practice where our sales ops team has a very strong link to the sales team and is always like— I think most of the best practice we get is actually from guys that are hardcore motivated and find some really cool ideas that we just pick and extend. And then there are some other, you know, type of, you know, things that people could do which are not replicable. So I've got there another quite cool example which is a Steve, so he's one of the founders of Doctolib, sales director in Paris, and he's the only guy that can sell to a doctor without doing a demo of the calendar. So basically it's pretty impressive. He just walks in the practice, you know, sweet-talking the doctor like, hey, I've seen your cousin last week, I like your new furniture, and you know, a lot of really cool things. And then after 15 minutes, the doctor would say, okay, so when should we install Doctolib? It's like magic. He doesn't even need to talk about the product. And then we've got a new joiner who was with Steve on the meeting and said, yeah, I saw Steve, he didn't do a demo. Should we really do the demo? And then we were like, okay, either you perform like him and you don't do the demo, but else, if you cannot perform like him, you just stick to the script and what everyone does. So there, basically, there's a rule that if you overperform, you can do whatever you want. But if you cannot prove, you know, superior performance, then you have to, you know, stick to the best practices that we've set up and shared and everything. And I think having this mindset really leaves a lot of room for, you know, emulation, creativity, and yeah, and we always have a lot of cool surprises.

So at Accel, we're big believers in automation, and many software companies we see incorporate automation to deliver a better service. What are some ways Doctolib has incorporated automation, if at all?

Yeah, so I mean automation, basically the sales ops team, what we said is we told them, okay, you will go with like Daphne, who is Biz Dev in Paris, and you will spend the whole day with her from when she wakes up to when she goes to bed. And think about all ways where you can save her time. Because when you've got 200 people in your sales team, it's really, you know, worth doing it. And so we came up with a lot of cool innovations, like, you know, maps that are automatically drawing the tour that you need to do to check your hot customers with Salesforce. Or we also, you know, made the expense process easier. We got cards for all those who need. So we got a lot of things like this, like small tasks that take time in the day of the sales team to be automated or at least rationalized as much as possible. And then, but this was a bit later on, we started to do automated, you know, reach out and callback of doctors and everything, but this again asks for a lot of maturity in your CRM and everything because it has to be done the right way. Because doctors are quite demanding targets. So if you, you know, send them an unpersonalized email with the wrong timing, it would, you know, destroy more value than it adds.

So we still have a few minutes of our talk, so I think it'd be great to spend a bit more time on people, as they seem to be a key ingredient of the Dr.lyve magic. You have spent the first year at Dr.lyve, I believe, interviewing 20 candidates a week. And you single-handedly and individually interviewed the first 100 hires. So what do you see as the secret of hiring great salespeople?

Yeah, so for me, there are really two things in the secrets of hiring sales. First thing is that sales recruitment is sales. And the second thing would be that when there's a doubt, there's no doubt. So about sales recruitment is sales. For me, it's so straightforward. Like, recruitment organization is the same as the sales organization. So basically, you've got the same thing. You've got inbound and outbound leads, and then you've got to, you know, meet and assess the candidate, which is the same actually as a sales meeting. And then, yeah, and then you've got closing. So it's really straightforward. So we build I built a 25-people recruitment team that works exactly like a sales organization. And then of course, you know, candidate experience, you have to make it magic for people. So our sales, our recruitment person, they are the biggest salesperson in the company. So like if you meet Elise, our head of recruitment for France, she's so salesy. And we even hired quite some people from the sales team to work in the recruitment team. So this is, I think, one thing that is pretty key. And also, the last thing that matters a lot is speed. So if you've got applications in sales, you wait for 10 days to answer them, you can be sure that the only ones that would be left would be the bad ones. Because the other guys, they can get, you know, offers within 10 days. Especially in quite tense markets like Germany. In France, it's also the case. And so what we really insisted in the recruitment team is that they are super, super reactive because good people find a lot of opportunities very fast. And especially in sales because trial termination periods are much shorter for sales because basically if you're in sales and you know that you will work for another company, usually they don't ask you to stay for the last 3 months. So that's what allowed us to hire like 10 to 15 or almost 20 in some months. New salespeople every month, that we had a highly structured, very sales-oriented recruitment organization. So that was about the first part, about sales recruitment is sales. It's really a very, very similar job. And then about, yeah, assessment. So I'm saying when there's a doubt, there's no doubt. So of course it's true for any type of recruitment. And there I think what's super important is that of course recruitment is a soft science. It's impossible to have like a zero failure rate in recruitment. But it's not because you cannot reach perfection that you shouldn't structure it. So we put a lot of effort into making it as rational as possible. So when you have a doubt, you don't have a doubt about, okay, maybe this is not the right guy, I don't know, blah, blah, blah. This is not possible. You have to say, okay, this is not the right guy because I have the doubt that he can be excellent into hunting a doctor that tell him no 2 times already. So we got really structured criteria like hunting capacity, like empathy, and you know, we've got like maybe 5, 6 criteria with very accurate assessment methods, and we would stick to that. And I think in sales, more than for any other type of population, what matters is to— it's that, you know, the track record doesn't count at all. One of our best sales guys, he used to be a researcher. So there is really like no link between the background of the person. And what matters is only the behavior and soft skills. So what we would do is role plays for each step of the recruitment process. So for phone screen, it's like 15 minutes where we do a role play on going like trying to talk to a doctor, avoiding the gatekeeping assistant. So small roleplay like this, you can directly see if the person is available to sweet-talk an assistant or to try to go around it or not. And then of course we did the sales roleplays. So that was the thing. And then every time you've got a doubt there, you should just stop the recruitment process.

So many fast-growing software companies, when they scale, they tend to have certain executives for certain stages. So let's say You would have a VP sales for the $0 to $50 million ARR stage and another VP sales for the $50 to $100 million ARR stage. And oftentimes it's hard to see folks rescaling from one stage to the next. It's more rare to see companies that promote from within and manage to build this executive layer from within the ranks. And you've taken the latter approach, so can you talk a bit about that?

Yeah, so I mean, as surprising as it can be, I think that in France we built a 300-people sales organization with zero executive hire. Hundreds of people were hired as individual business developers. So it's pretty amazing, but it's true actually. We didn't do it in Germany because we wanted to go a bit faster, but it's, I would say, 50/50. And yeah, in France what we did was quite amazing. So basically at the beginning there was the founder, Stan, with, you know, 10 guys that were, you know, I mean, our managing director today, Arthur, he did 2 years of audit and then he got really bored. And then he started, he was, you know, connection from Stan. So then he started to be a sales guy with Stan and, you know, going door to door, meeting doctors. And today he's managing director of 300, managing 300 people in France. So we've got only career tracks like this, and we promoted hundreds of people. And basically the whole entire sales organization is based on promotion. And their promotion is not easy, right? Because we— you want to promote that many people, but there's always a right timing when you have to do this. And I think there are two criteria that matter. The first one is performance, and the second one is mindset. Sometimes you promote someone that has a great performance but a bad mindset, so you can be sure it doesn't work. And then sometimes you promote someone with a great mindset, very senior approach, but who doesn't perform. And then again, it doesn't work because he doesn't get the respect and exemplarity of being a better, you know, salesperson than his team. So if you've got both right, there's no reason why it doesn't work. And I think it's quite a miracle. I'm not sure we would be able to reproduce it in other countries as we did in France, but we really built this organization with only hiring from bottom and promoting people. And I think that the chance that we have to be able to offer very nice career opportunities to each people joining the team allows us to have first a more motivated and better performing team, but also to have a turnover that is probably half of what it is in a classical sales organization.

Wow. Being so deliberate about promoting people internally must have a very big impact on the culture. How do you make culture an asset for sales?

For us, it's a bit like cheating because our culture was really born for sales. I'm thinking about other companies that have a tech culture and then you have to do a switch. We have 5 values which are service, so it's customer-focused. Called SPA, and we have Service, Passion, Attack, Ambition, and Humility. So yeah, of course it's pretty crazy. So attack is the sports attack and not the military attack. And of course it works because it's combined to a very strong service mindset, as I told you. And for us, I think what's, you know, it's great to have a culture and values, but what matters is to make it, you know, real and shared within the company. And I think there one thing was really key to the success is that Our CEO and founder, Stan, he's really leading by example. And so, for example, at the beginning I explained you that we open like 15 cities, so he would spend one day alone with the guy. And so when he goes there, there are two options. Either the guy had enough meetings, so they would do meetings, meetings all day with no lunch break, like 15 meetings in the day. Or if they had no meeting, they will go door to door for the whole day. So the guys knew that they had to be prepared and wear sneakers because they would walk like 20 kilometers during the day within the city. And this is, you know, how he taught by example. And so of course then everyone knew that no one likes to get meetings, no one likes to get no, but this is the thing you have to do and the leadership always led by example. So yeah, this helped a lot.

That's great. So I believe we're at time. I guess my key takeaways would be very much the magic around Dr. Lieb, which is around the entrepreneurial mindset, the consistency, and the culture on continuous improvement, and the fact that the magic is all in the people you've hired and continue to nurture. That's great. So thanks so much, Agnès.

Yes, thank you everyone. For sharing this.