S3E9 An interview with Jeroen Courthout, Founder at Salesflare

Speaker A: We had I think around 6,000 companies signing up in a span of three weeks, which then gave us some issues because we were at the time, I think we had 40, 50 customers or so.

Speaker B: Hi, welcome to the Founders with Pet podcast where I interview amazing entrepreneurs from diverse backgrounds about their journeys, successes, failures and lessons along the way. Hello everyone and welcome to the Founders with Peck podcast where we interview amazing SaaS founders on their journey of their successes and failures and lessons. It's a selfish way for me to learn, but also share with the audience. You folks. Uh, and on today we have the founder of Sales, uh, Flare, Jeroen Courthout, who is hailing from Belgium. Good morning.

Speaker A: Yeah, good morning to you.

Speaker B: Good evening. Yeah, actually it's afternoon and evening for you. So a little bit about Sales Flare. It's a CRM for B2B, SMB and medium sized businesses with over 2,000 customers. The number one, easiest to implement, uh, CRM in G2 and the number two, easiest to use and best support in G2. Welcome to the show.

Speaker A: Thank you.

Speaker B: We like to get warmed up and uh, so tell us a little bit. You know, this is my pithy description of Sales Flare, but you know, in your own words, what differentiates Sales flare from other CRMs?

Speaker A: I don't know. I know what you're using and I know how well it's working for you. But a lot of people are a bit frustrated about their CRM because it's a ton of work and if they don't put in all the work to keep the CRM fully up to date, it doesn't really help them. And we had that issue eight years ago ourselves. Um, we tried many different systems and we always felt like the sort of expectations that the system had, uh, for us, like the amount of data inputs we were supposed to do to make it work was so huge. And we thought there must be a better way because we never managed to meet those expectations. And we thought we can automate that. We saw that actually most of the data we were inputting into the system was already somewhere. There's a lot of stuff in your emails, a lot of stuff in your calendar, like your phone, social media, complete databases, tracking of all kinds of. And if we would only take all of that, integrate into it, pull it together, organize it, and then offer it, uh, to you, that would make it way easier to follow up your sales. And that's the idea with which you started eight years ago. That was really the essence from where we began. But we've built a lot of things around that nowadays it has essentially become from, uh, a sales CRM. It has absorbed so many different things now it's like a full sales platform.

Speaker B: Got it. And who is your ideal customer?

Speaker A: We mainly have, on the one hand, agencies on the software. So m. Marketing agencies like yourself, lots of those software development consultancies as, uh, well, consultancy of any kind actually. And then on the other hand we have a lot of tech companies. Those are SaaS companies, those are telcos, but also other types of startups and then obviously other other types of companies. They're all, almost all B2B because we really focus on B2B. We build our software in such a way that the company is central. That makes everything also way more easy to use. You don't need to have all these different relationships and different ways to support both B2B and B2C. So that's sort of where we draw the line. Sometimes you have people, uh, selling B2C using us because they love it so much, but they have to jump through a few extra hoops to make that work.

Speaker B: Got it. Thank you. Jiren, maybe outside of sales flare, tell us a little bit about yourself, your background, maybe your family, family life and. Yeah. And personal interests.

Speaker A: Yeah. My dad is an engineer, my mom is an architect. They both like to build stuff, but in different ways, I guess. For my dad it's more about the technology. He's really, he's really nerdy. Um, at the moment he's on the verge of retiring and he's found this new passion already. He's building a sort of automated microscope thing. So he has like these step motors that like guide the microscope. And then he made this Google Maps like interface to, to. To go through samples so you can like, like scroll through it and move and that microscope follows. It's really cool. He showed me first time. And then my mom is more at buildings and houses and stuff. It's more about sort of organizing things in a practical and still beautiful way. And I think I got a little bit of both actually. When I was young, I started building websites. I was 15, 16 or so. Flash was all the rage back then. I don't know. What do you remember? Well, I remember, yeah, it was a really cool time. And like, it could do so many, uh, nice visual things and you could go so far in the interactivity. It was so cool. But then it started dying because it was also heavy. And nowadays HTML5 can do a lot of the things that Flash used to do, but still Flash was. It was so easy to do it all. I Made a bunch of these websites and I actually dreamt of uh, making that my career at the time I didn't even go to university yet. But then when I went to university I figured engineering. Well my dad has always pushed me in that direction first of all. But secondly also I thought if I do software engineering or something like that then I can follow that path and start making websites and all that for people. I went to the open day and I figured software engineering was a little nerdy. I saw what people were displaying in terms of projects and I saw people and I was like maybe not software engineering. I ended up doing biomedical engineering in the end. Then when I went applying for jobs I figured that I actually didn't really want to be an engineer. I loved studying it but I wanted to build stuff with customers and not per se being that person in the back room building stuff. I wanted to, I wanted that interaction. So I studied business school for a year and that enabled me to make a switch to market. I figured that uh, being a product manager was the way to go for me to, to learn how that all worked. That ah was uh, it was a mistake. I became a product marketing manager. It was super boring in a big pharma company. I did that for 10 months. Then I uh, switched to a consultancy where actually I was building websites again at the start. Over time we evolved to. We helped pharma companies who are notoriously bad at digital stuff but becoming more digital and beginning a of websites. But in the end um, we were doing this full campaigns where we'd basically replace the salesforce with digital touch points. But from there I always knew I wanted to start my own company. So I went part time. I tried a bunch of different projects of which all of them failed and actually Sales Flare is my, my first successful company now.

Speaker B: Oh, congrats. Yeah. Tell me about uh Doctora. You know you, you founded like you say that that's the Salesflare is your first successful company but Dr. Was something you, you had for nine years.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's, that's actually it turned into my management company. So formal. It started off as a. So so doctors like physicians are a huge group of people that want to follow research. But the way to ah follow research is really built for researchers and it's really hard for doctors to step to date in a nice way. Uh if they want to read relevant uh studies in the areas that they're exactly interested in. It's really not adapted for that. So I had a system in mind that would make that all work. Imagine a sort of, I don't know what, you know, flipboards, uh, that's sort of what I had in mind. But then for doctors with studies and it would like surface the relevant things, if they follow this and that, then they would get the interesting stuff. I tried to get that off the grounds. The biggest issue I had was I didn't know really how I was going to make money. I thought ads, but you know, um, it's a sort of chicken or the egg problem in the beginning. You really need to get the thing going and otherwise if you don't have any audience, you cannot sell ads. And convincing. Uh, so I didn't have a technical co founder. Convincing someone to then build it with me was really hard because they had to leave something behind and there was no money. And so in the end, and that was probably where it started going wrong. I started developing it myself and after a while I just had to give up.

Speaker B: And then what gave you kind of the, the, the insight to start Sales Flare?

Speaker A: Yeah, I've done a bunch of things in between. But when I was on Dr. Actually I was in a startup, uh, incubator called the Founder Institute and my current co founder was there as well. He had another idea, a company that he was starting and we were in the same group, we had to help each other. So we became friends. And at some point he calls me. So that's like about a year later and he says, I'm going to Vegas in a few weeks, I'm going to a conference, I'm going to sell my products there as a software company and we still need someone to help us in sales. Uh, do you want to join? Perhaps I'll pay everything and go to Vegas and you know, it's going to be fun. So we did that and it was a big success. Like we managed to get a lot of leads and that's, that's where Sales Flare started because we had all these leads, they were all interested but we still had to close the deals. And it was, it was so hard to follow them up correctly. Especially hard because it was, they were business intelligence professionals. And I don't know what you've ever dealt with business intelligence professionals but they're, the uh, sales cycles are extremely long. So they, they tell you I'm really interested in this but I'm now on a project so can you call me back in six months or so?

Speaker B: You know, this kind of attitude.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. So we had to follow up very precisely over long periods of time. So it required really good follow up.

Speaker B: Yeah. And the reason you had this idea for saleslayer was it because nothing at the time you found really helped you with these follow up nothing.

Speaker A: Well, I mean things were built for it, but they just. So you had systems. I remember we tried even pipedrive I think back in the day. But it was really easy to put things in there, really easy to set up. And it was really built for sales follow up. But the issue we had is that it still required us to input a lot of stuff. So imagine you're in touch with a company. First you input that company, your name and website and everything you know about it. Everything you find, you all put in the system. You're constantly typing and then you uh, you're in touch with the first person, you add that person, name, email address, all that up till there it's fine. I mean it's your first step into the system and that's okay. But then you, you, you're in touch with people you're selling and there's emails, there's calls, there's meetings. And every time back in the day there wasn't even email sync so everything had to be input. And then you, all of a sudden you meet the new person and you need to have that reflex that you add that person and if you forget it's not in the system and you can forget that you actually know that extra person and then, you know, things start building up that way. And we thought we cannot manage that. So we, we uh, our system nowadays for instance, if you look at a company, it already pulls a lot of stuff from a company database. So it pre fills that. Then it tells you these are the people you know based on your email communication and your calendar and all that. These are the people you know. And we also found extra information about on social media. But also they sent you emails with email signatures. And we got these email signatures and we put that information there. And these are the people your colleagues know because we also connect to their email and calendar and all that. And then if you add people, just one click, then it tells you, okay, these were the emails you exchanged, these are the meetings you had, these are, these are the calls you placed. They opened your emails, they click them into your website that long, the whole thing is immediately visible. And that just changes the dependency on you as a salesperson, right?

Speaker B: It does so much for you, kind of out of the box and it tries to anticipate what you need. I liked, I was watching a video of Sales Flare and I liked the sort of suggested tasks that you had by Pulling it from things.

Speaker A: Yeah, those are things you can then start doing based on the data. When you have the data and the system knows this is when you were last in touch and stuff, then it can do things based on that. But it requires that information first. So that's why we really focused on making sure that the data input is not the blocking factor anymore.

Speaker B: Great, great. Now how did you start it? So you found your co founder at Founders Institute. So tell me more kind about the beginning and like what were some of the, you know, like at what point did you say oh this, this is the idea?

Speaker A: I think we go back almost exactly eight years ago. We were sitting together in an office, we were trying to organize a sales follow uh up and we were super frustrated and then we had that idea. Actually I think I sent out a first email newsletter that we had and I showed my co founder mailchimp and he had never seen it before and I show him like oh look, you can see when people open stuff, you can see when they click and all that and it's like wow, can do that. And then you know from there everything started expanding. We thought like oh, but if, you know when the emails are sent and you know when the meetings happen and then, and then you can get information here and then you know this uh, the system started developing and we immediately thought like one of the first things I did, you know that Salesforce thing, that's a software and then there's a big red thing to it. I made, I made something like that with CRM and then a big red thing to it. We had that on our stand up like our roll up banners for a long time. What we, what we figured is uh, if we want to focus on this, it's going to be a lot of work. So we need money and we saw this thing. I don't know whether you know Kyma Ventures, I don't know whether it's still, I, I think they're still around but back in the day they had a thing called KYMA 15 and for 15% of your company, very early stage they would give you 150k so you're immediately valued at a million. You could say well post money at least and they would make the decision in 15 days. So that was really uh, appealing to us.

Speaker B: Yeah, 15%, 15 days. It's a good marketing uh, uh, branding.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And they were really serious about it. Now they also said read this book was uh, getting real by the guys at the time. 37 signals now basecamp. And if you read that book and follow this and send us a pitch deck and you have a prototype or whatever apply. So we did all these things, we read that book. I think it's the only book I ever convinced my co founder to read. And then, uh, I made the presentation, he made a prototype and we sent that to Kima. And their response pretty quickly was, I think you guys are a bit too early stage. But at least we had put in that first work, you know, and we used what we had to apply to a local, uh, incubator and a local um, accelerator and another accelerator. And we got, in the end we got accepted to all. And that's when the ball sort of started rolling.

Speaker B: Amazing. So tell us what, what worked? You know, what's been working? You know, any lessons learned there? What didn't work? What went. What? Yeah, what went well? What didn't go well?

Speaker A: There's a lot of things to unpack. You want to go any specific direction or.

Speaker B: Well, I think maybe like uh, in terms of, you know, kind of early customers, how did you get your first early customers?

Speaker A: Our first customers, I think so part of the. More through our personal network and part through extended network because we did customer interviews. So at the end of each customer interview we would ask. It was first with people we knew and then we asked who else that you know, we should also interview. And then, and then they brought us in touch with other people. We got some first customers from there, but our very first ones, I think including the first and the second customer, they came from pr. At first, when you're starting up, you can still get in the press because it's new, it's new thing. And then I think the next time you can get in the press as uh, a, as a startup is when you raise money.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: But when you really knew, you can, you can grab that chance as well. And we got a few times in like in the local. Imagine the financial Times of Belgium. We got in there four or five times, I think a few times in the, in the tech publication, the national. Well, yeah, the leading network.

Speaker B: So that helped getting the early customers.

Speaker A: Yeah, that really helped. Uh, because it enabled us to put our vision out there for a lot of people. And if only a few of those were really triggered by it, that was a win.

Speaker B: Great. And then I guess the other thing is, uh, how did you scale that? Because obviously press is not sustainable. Sounds as a strategy.

Speaker A: No, I think from there we got customers from our own network, extended network from the incubator and accelerator. We were in accelerator, we knew people and uh, we could sell. In the beginning it was very sales driven, which was good in a way because it enabled us to learn a lot as opposed to just putting a website live with a sign up for free trial kind of thing and then not know who's signing up and for what reason and what's going wrong and all that. Everything was super, um, guided, not self guided, guided by us.

Speaker B: So having customer success to really help them be successful on onboarding.

Speaker A: Yeah, always me. I mean I would do everything from the business development to the sales, the demos, this customer success, everything. And we did that until we were like we had 20, 30 customers or so. Then we discovered that, uh, we could get some leads through, uh, Quora. Yeah, Quora was ranking well in Google. Google search results back in the day. So, so we started writing answers there and then there was UPV and downvoting going on and then we were on top of these listings and then people would get to our site and request trials because we didn't have like you could, you couldn't sign up for a trial. You had to talk to me. And. But that, that worked for a while, but that Quora nowadays is not so present in search results anymore. And also it has really turned into, um, a weird place. Well, at least in the categories we were in. And then we sort of started replacing that with our first big new stream of leads was a Product Hunt.

Speaker B: Yeah, I saw you were on Product Hunt.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. We've launched quite a, uh, few things on Product Hunt since then, but our very first launch was Salesforce itself. We prepped that for a while. We really did our best to have a big impact. I think the first day we already reached like 700 upvotes or so. And I think by now we're sort of at the double of that. That was for us the start of really getting attention, getting the word out there. Back then, I think Product Hunt was also still a bit more grassroots. Were still, it was smaller in terms of community, but the community was stronger. And then from there our success on Product Hunt convinced the people at Appsumo. Appsumo is a sort of. For people who don't know Appsumo, for people who don't know Product Hunt, it's like a product community. Always the latest products@producthunt.com where if you

Speaker B: want to typically SaaS products or tech products. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: Or designing things or content or um, and then Appsumo is like a Groupon, um, for software, you could say, still no Groupon.

Speaker B: They take a lot. Right. Percentage Wise. And then you have to. Do you still have to offer like a lifetime deal or uh. What is that?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. Well, we, we made our lifetime deal in such a way that was only one user, was, was free for life, and then additional users you could, you could buy at a discount. But yeah, I don't know whether it's still the same. And back in the day it was 70%.

Speaker B: Wow.

Speaker A: So basically you have people pay a small sum to use your software for life and you only get 30% of it. Now if you look at it like that, it's a horrible deal. But if you look at it the other way and you say somebody is going to send an email to a million people saying use this and these people will get so attached to you because they bought your software that they're going to help you with reviews, with telling other people, giving you feedback, feedback and all those kind of things. They're going to do free marketing. The whole thing is actually. You get paid to do marketing, then it is actually a good deal.

Speaker B: Right, right. You have to kind of look at it, uh, from a different lens of this is not a, like a, it's not a customer acquisition, but more, more of a marketing play. Right? Yeah.

Speaker A: It's not a, it's not a direct way to make money. It's uh. But it's going to pay off in the long run at least if, if you're aligned with the customer base that uh, AppSumo represents and if you also have a product that people are going to talk about and if your product is even a product that is. Becomes more visible when it's used, that's not so much our product, but if you have a product like that, that even makes more sense.

Speaker B: Right, right. With usage, then you just want more people to use it and then they'll see more of it. Yeah, yeah. So was that successful in terms of the Appsumo deal? In terms of like what you envisioned in people signing up and having the lifetime deal? Like, did enough people sign up, whether they were the right customers?

Speaker A: Yeah, I would say generally relatively well aligned. We mostly appeal to, um, a lot of agencies. Like I said, uh, appsumo audience. There's a lot of agencies on there as well. They are slightly smaller than our general target audience. Many of those are solopreneurs, maybe with a va, maybe there are a few people, usually not bigger than that, but still pretty good. We had I think, think around 6,000 companies signing up in a span of three weeks, which then gave us some issues because we were at the time, um, we, I think we had 40, 50 customers or so. Now all of a sudden you add 6,000 companies.

Speaker B: That's exactly like the Groupon effect, Right? Like a small business. Like you used to have maybe 20 tables, right. And then they do a Groupon and then all of a sudden it's like thousands of people sign up and they all want to show up at the restaurant at once. Yeah.

Speaker A: Totally overwhelmed. Yeah, that was, that was a feeling we did support. Uh, 24, not 7, but 5.

Speaker B: Um, how big were you was the team then?

Speaker A: The team was about the size we were today. I would say in the beginning we hired a little too quickly. Right now we have the same size of team. But back then we were hemorrhaging money and now we are making money, so it's different. But we were.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Also seven people. I think we were seven, yeah.

Speaker B: Oh, so you've been seven for a while?

Speaker A: Yeah, we've been seven now for five years. We are big, uh, believers of automation. So we don't spend a lot of time on routine things, actually. For instance, uh, you said we have the second best support on G2. Just let's say, um, two thirds of my colleague Taylor's time goes to customers. All the rest of the time we spend is all building products. It's building marketing channels, it's building content. We don't waste a lot of time.

Speaker B: Yeah. So double, uh, click into that. You're big believers of automation. Obviously you're accomplishing a lot with seven people. Maybe give us some examples of what you are automating and like what, what is providing high leverage to you? Like what, what sort of automation tasks did you automate that, that giving you high leverage?

Speaker A: I need to pick a few. Now we use where our main automation tools are, obviously Salesforce, but the, uh, Zapier is huge, uh, for us. It's this tool for people who don't know with which you can, uh, say if this happens here in this software, then make this happen. And then maybe that and then in

Speaker B: another piece of software. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: And you can make whole flows like that. I think we have 120 zaps or so running at all times to automate lots, uh, of things in our company. Intercom is also really important to us. Intercom helps us with automating a lot of the customer interactions we have. So obviously when you ask us a question or so, we are going to respond. We're not big fans of the sort of chatbots or so a chatbot that, that says when, when you ask a Question that suggests articles, that's, that's okay. But the chatbot that is going to have a whole conversation with you that usually doesn't end too well, not yet at least. So. But we have a lot of automated uh, follow up messages, very personalized, based on a lot of triggers offering our help. When you do your first connecting with people automatically when they sign up, uh, for a trial on LinkedIn, we have follow ups like if they reach a certain activation level to say, are you finding everything? We always try to be there at the right times but we don't have to do a lot of efforts to do that. And actually even like when we we spent some extra time on following up larger companies, our whole pipeline. In Salesforce we fully automated that with a combination of like triggers on our database, things happening in intercom, things happening in sales flare to make sure that we don't have to click through everything and find out what's going on here and then drag things and then contact people. It's only the exceptions or the, the personal attention, uh, that we spend time on.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, you're, you're using your human cycles to spend time with customers and then the other stuff you can try to automate.

Speaker A: Um, that's what we believe in as well. Like, like there's so many things that robots are better at than we are. Like robots are better at managing data, robots are better at uh, doing certain things consistently. If something, if something feels routine after a while then you think, well, this may be something for a robot, but there's other things that, where, where a human being is, is so good at having a conversation with someone, trying to understand their problems, the context, empathizing. I think.

Speaker B: Yeah. A robot can never do that for, not for a while. Yeah.

Speaker A: Yeah, not yet.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. So you started, you said you, you touched on that uh, briefly that you, you started with. You were bleeding money for a while and you, you had a pretty big team very early. Uh, what was the funding situation? And you know, maybe give us a little bit of background on that.

Speaker A: Yeah, this is slightly different than in the US So we are based in. Your funding is different here. I'm sure that within the US it's also different whether you're in San, uh, Francisco or Chicago like you are.

Speaker B: Oh, I think there's ah, funding is like very unique. You know, like funding that most people think of is very unique in San Francisco Bay. But then the rest of the US is its own different.

Speaker A: Yeah. And Europe is even different. So the way we fund things, we started off with some money from an accelerator. Then we added uh, a subsidy to that immediately. That was one of the first.

Speaker B: Is that like a government subsidy or

Speaker A: what is a government subsidy? So the European government has all kinds of money for innovation and it goes through the local government. So the Flemish government is the, uh, Dutch speaking part of Belgium has these kind of programs and we did a feasibility study. So they basically, basically help us to see whether what we have in mind is feasible. And we got 50k for that. And then when we had these two, then we went to the bank and then we said we'd like some money to bridge the gaps here. We got 100k from them. And then, um.

Speaker B: That was a loan.

Speaker A: That was a loan. It was a sort of investment loan that you pay back over X months

Speaker B: in a good way. Right. You got a grant subsidy, you got a loan. So you didn't dilute yourself in a way that, you know, instead of kind of just having bridge rounds and yeah,

Speaker A: we did raise some angel money and. But that's, that's about it. Yeah, we didn't dilute much.

Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. Ah. And so how many co founders or business partners? Is it the one or do you have more?

Speaker A: No, it's just the two of us.

Speaker B: Um, okay, great. Awesome. Uh, so. So those things went well. What, what are some hard lessons learned and what would you do different? What are some of the things that you would impart on folks that you do different?

Speaker A: I think that the two most stressful things are probably, um, running out of money and people problems. Running out of money. I would say the simple advice is get more money earlier. I used to have a tendency to always scramble for money at the last moment, which is very bad. And uh, it always worked out somehow when I'm under pressure at some point, uh, start looking in lots of different ways. But still I wouldn't recommend. Brings a lot of stress. And another big thing is people problems. And I would say if you focus anywhere, it starts with hiring first. Don't hire too early, especially not for roles that you haven't figured out yourself yet. This is something you might want to do because you feel like there's probably people better at figuring it out. There's more qualified people. Why don't we just bring them in and they're going to solve it for us? But it doesn't work that way. These people are, uh, let's take what happens a lot of companies, especially if you're a technical co founder, is you think if I just bring in someone who's really Great at sales, it's going to solve all my issues. Well, it's not the case because first of all, that person doesn't know as much about your, uh, customers and your solution as you do. They don't have the same passion. So that already puts them at a disadvantage, even if they're a better salesperson. But also it's, it creates a sort of distance between you and the customer which you cannot afford at these early stages. Actually, at any stage, I think you should try to stay as close as possible. And it makes it very hard to iterate because that person is part of that iteration. And the more people are part of an iteration, the longer it takes and the more difficult it is. Changing alone is easy. Changing with a, um, bunch of people together is way harder. I would say don't hire that first salesperson. Really do it yourself. It may feel scary, but actually sales is not really that hard. It's just about listening very well to people and taking that time to listen. Don't just tell your story and it's never going to close a sale. Listen to what it is that they have issues with, why they haven't solved it, what the parameters are around that, who else may be in the company may need to decide on it, what these people find important. And try doing that with a lot of people. Try organizing yourself well around that so you respect these people, timelines and next steps and all those kind of things, and that's all there is to it. If you then just display your passion for what you're doing in the meantime, I don't think you need much more. And then at some point, obviously you can bring in someone that is a better salesperson, but at least then, uh, you can teach them all the things you've learned throughout that process.

Speaker B: Yeah. When you haven't figured out what message is resonating, who, the ideal typical customer profile yet and all that stuff, as a founder, I think, yeah, this is way too early to bring in, you know, because a lot of salespeople, they, they expect some of that, right. To be, to be ready like that for you to have figured that out. And you're right if it's, if you haven't figured it out, the messaging, who the ideal customer are, what the playbooks are, having case studies ready like that's are the tools, I think, you know, you have to set people up for success. Yeah.

Speaker A: And they can definitely perfect it once you, once you understood it all. Uh, but in this very early stages, they're not going to figure it out for you, uh, they also don't care as much as you do, so.

Speaker B: Right, exactly. Yeah, that's exactly. So it's going to be a while. When did you start bringing your uh, sales person in then?

Speaker A: Oh, uh, way too early. That's. I'm saying this, I think. When was it. I think we, it was still 2016 even. We had like. Did we have customers? I think a few. Yeah. We must have had three or so.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: And it was going really slow and we were really frustrated and we were like, somebody can help us. And you know, it was dumb.

Speaker B: And uh, in terms of sales cycles, how long does it typically take to sell, uh, salesware, you know, to kind

Speaker A: of go from 20, 30 days on average. Our trial is also around that. Uh, so it starts with seven days and then we give you extra days on the trial as you set the software up better. If you set the software up perfectly, you get 30 days, which is a great motivator for people to, to get set up well, which makes that, um, well, it doesn't only convert better. Also we have lower churn, um, because people actually do their best.

Speaker B: That's an interesting sort of game mechanic. Right. Like, usually, like, I've never thought of that. But attaching a success like onboarding success metric to extending a trial could be a good gamification mechanic. Yeah.

Speaker A: Because it's a bit weird perhaps, because we make software, uh, and we really focus on making things really easy to use, really easy to understand. With a few clicks you can set it up. But this also has a dark side in the sense that, uh, it's so easy for people that they think they don't have to think it through anymore and they don't have to do everything immediately. And, and they don't really get set up correctly. Which then makes that at some point they're like, this doesn't work for me. But that's just because they didn't put in any effort. Uh, so sometimes, uh, you need to add that little extra friction or you need to motivate people to go a bit further or. And that, that can really make a big difference because a lot of people just figure like, oh, I need a CRM, it's gonna, it's gonna improve my sales. And maybe you're like, imagine you're a team of five and you're like, we don't have a CRM, we should get one. We're gonna be more organized. Just one guy researches the CRM, M invites the others, they all get on, um, and they're like, we're gonna use it now. This is not a great situation. First of all, the person doesn't know whether the others like the CRM, which is bad. They got no buy in. They didn't discuss how to use it together. They have no idea how they're going to fill it out. They have no idea, uh, what the sales process looks like. Maybe one guy has programmed it, but they haven't discussed what the stages mean in the sales process. For instance, you don't know what a field means and why you're filling out the field and what you're going to do with it so that you sort of have that in mind when you do it. So that. Because in the end when everybody looks at the data, everything means the same thing. There's a lot of uh, issues that arise from not taking this very small amount of time, um, to discuss things with each other, to get set up. So we try to motivate people to do that, we try to help people to do that. But at a time where software is so easy and we're really doing our best to make it super easy, it is extra hard to do that.

Speaker B: Yeah. How do you solve that? Is it just through pure software? Are you using kind of like basically labor of like, hey, it sounds like a, almost like a setup or onboarding project or process from the way you're describing it. Right?

Speaker A: It is. It is partly, uh, perfecting, onboarding and building in mechanisms in there. And it's still work in progress. We're currently thinking about integrating into that whole thing, integrating some sort of academy. But that's also really hard because people, I mean they don't necessarily want to follow an academy. So most of the time we spend on how we're going to motivate people, it's almost like we're building a game or so. But partly it's, it's just by trying to get involved, trying to get the permission of people and the trust to be able to help them.

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right now. Jeroen, thank you so much. As we get up on the hour for all the wisdom. I got some few nuggets that help inform our users and myself as well as we go on our own independent SaaS journeys. Is there, uh, love to share with our audience any offers and special deals through this podcast, if you will.

Speaker A: Yeah, definitely. If you, if you're interested in trying Sales floor. If you're looking for something to follow up your leads in a better way and you're tired of the stuff you've tried like, so you obviously get the 30 days, uh, trial like I just said. But we can offer you when you sign up after that, uh, a 25, uh, discount for three months. Uh, you can just use PEC 25.

Speaker B: Okay. Yeah, so, so the PEC 25 code for 25% off for three months. Oh, thank you so much. You're really appreciate it. How do people who, you know, who want to follow your journey stay in touch with you, get in touch with you? What's the best way?

Speaker A: I think best way to. Well, if you know, want to know more about Salesforce salesflare.com that's pretty easy as the flare F L A R E. And if you want to follow me, uh, LinkedIn is the best place. There's only one person with my exact name, so not too hard if you want to send a connection request. I'm up for that. But do include a personal message. Otherwise I don't know where you're coming from. I have to assume spam. But if you include a personal message, then also they get in touch with you and we can chat.

Speaker B: Great, great. Thank you so much, Jeroen. And yeah, it's great to have you on the show.

Speaker A: Yeah, this was fun. Um,

Speaker B: Thanks for joining us on this episode of, uh, Founders with Peck. If you like this episode, be sure to subscribe on your favorite podcast platform or our YouTube channel. If you leave us a review, I'll be sure to shout it out. And ah, if you have any questions, you can tweet me on Twitter.