Right About Now with Ryan Alford - Finally an automated CRM that just works. Meet Salesflare and their CEO.

Episode Date: November 24, 2020

Welcome to another episode on The Radcast! In this episode, host Ryan Alford talks with the Co-Founder and CEO of Salesflare, Jeroen Corthout. Salesflare is the #1 CRM platform on ProductHunt and Capterra. Ryan and Jeroen break down the following:What lead Jeroen and his partner co-founder, Lieven Janssen, to start Salesflare.Why Salesflare is a different software than other SAAS platforms.Jeroen highlights both the immediate effects and long-term results of having Salesflare as your business's CRM.If you enjoyed this episode, share it on Instagram and tag us @the.rad.cast | Do you want to hear more from our host? - Give him a follow @ryanalford on Instagram. | Have a Happy Thanksgiving and we'll talk to you soon! #theradcast  If you enjoyed this episode and want to learn more, join Ryan’s newsletter https://ryanalford.com/newsletter/ to get Ferrari level advice daily for FREE.  Learn how to build a 7 figure business from your personal brand by signing up for a FREE introduction to personal branding https://ryanalford.com/personalbranding.  Learn more by visiting our website at www.ryanisright.comSubscribe to our YouTube channel  www.youtube.com/@RightAboutNowwithRyanAlford. 

It has to start somewhere. It has to start sometime. What better place than here? What better time than now? You're listening to The Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Flare. I had heard of this a little bit and I didn't know where, and then I saw how popular you were on Product Hunt, and that's when it rang a bell. You saw us launching on Product Hunt? I just saw it. I used to really be active on Product Hunt, have been less active the last probably year or two, but I knew I'd heard of your company. And so that's where it rang the bell. So the number one, is it number one most popular CRM ever on Product Hunt?

Yeah, I think so. If you type CRM at the top in Product Hunt, you're the first product you'll find. Cool, man. Well, let's just start where we start with most of our guests. Let's talk about your background. Give everybody a little bit of information about you and then kind of what brought you into SalesFlare. Yeah. To summarize my background very shortly,

I knew when I was 15 or 16 that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. I just started building websites, selling secondhand phones and all that. I decided to study engineering. I started off, well, electrotechnical engineering, ended up in biomedical, doesn't matter. I never really liked the idea of having a pure engineering job. I want to do something with customers, much like the websites I've been building and the phones I've been selling. Really adding value to customers and sort of working with them is much more interesting to me than just purely creating something for the sake of creating something. I really like creating stuff, but only if there's customers involved.

something for the sake of creating something i really like creating stuff but only if there's customers involved um so i ended up doing business school and after that i actually got into marketing a totally different thing uh that was in healthcare initially because i was biomedical engineer so i'm i thought that made sense um i did that for uh 10 months because it was a horribly limited job. I thought I would put a product into the market, but it seemed that I was just basically making a brochure and telling the sales team how to use it. It was not very interesting. And then for four years, I worked in a company that sort of married my experience in pharma marketing with building websites and all my experience in digital where we helped pharma companies to switch from a purely sales driven sales model to

something where where all the digital channels come into play because doctors nowadays they also don't like sales people in their waiting rooms anymore they can read stuff on the internets yeah i love it so uh all that background it led to starting sales flare yeah and a partner yeah I actually do to explain that and very very shortly in that job that I had like helping pharma companies we use Salesforce I was selling projects and partly responsible for their delivery and we use Salesforce it was my very first crm i thought it was going to help me be productive follow up my leads it would be like the system in which i organized myself um it turned out that it was extremely difficult um the only thing i we would

reliably do in in salesforce as a company is management reporting. Like, this is what we're going to sell by then and keep track of these things. And that was very confusing to me, but I didn't really do anything with that experience until I was working together with my co-founder, the partner we were talking about. We were working on a different software company and we went to a big conference and we had a lot of interest for our software and we tried to organize that we tried to set up a system

in which we would always know like okay this is the next lead to contact then what's the last thing we discussed with them what's their details and I knew Salesforce wasn't really a great fit for that. Looked a bit around and looked at different systems. And what we always noticed is that these systems failed, not because the software was not working or so,

or wasn't beautiful, or it was more of a problem with us not being able to fill them out. It was more of a problem with us not being able to fill them out. We didn't have that awesome discipline to always neatly fill out every single thing we did or every little piece of information, new piece of information we got from the customer. So it always turned out to be a mess. And then we figured that actually this information that we were always putting into the CRMs was information that already existed in some system. And if we would just connect all these systems up, we would create an automated CRM that automatically feeds you the information available in emails, meetings, calls, email signatures, social media, email tracking, web tracking, you know, a system that pulls that all together so that as a salesperson, you always know what's the latest thing without you having to keep track of it minutiously yourself. graciously yourself. I love it because I love hearing that I'm not the only person that's dealt with bloated CRM systems, because what I see when I having used, I don't know, maybe not

a dozen, but a half dozen, they become bloated. They try to put too much into the software. And then the user experience is so manual. And it's interesting. I feel like you, and I started to start a trial, admittedly, on SalesFlare yesterday. It's on my list for this afternoon. So we're going to put it to use. I wanted to do it before the episode, but you know what? I'll follow back up post-episode with how it's gone.

But I really love the automation side side of it that makes a ton of sense yeah and you you mentioned the other issue it's it's that we we need to focus on two issues one is the automation issue i mean a lot of work and then the other thing is that often it becomes bloated and you don't know where things are anymore and it's a lot of clips here and there and there's so much in there that you completely lose like i want to change this little thing how does that work yeah that's the other thing we very much focus on is is keeping it it's it's super easy uh because otherwise people also stop using the serum yeah oh like me after about five days with everyone I've ever tried. But Salesforce is the example of trying to be more than a CRM.

It's like, how many things can we jam into this thing without getting CRM figured out? But that's been my thing. So talk, talk to me about some of the highs and lows of, you know, being an entrepreneur, developing a SAS system in a very

competitive space give us some people give everyone some perspective on on what that's been like oh the highs is always i think uh every uh big product release we do is a high because it means we're uh we've listened to customers we've created value and we bring it to them and we've we've we you can see it also that's that's so nice about it you see oh this is a new thing and um we always communicate back to customers so then they we ask feedback but very often they're like oh awesome no that's that's really nice um another type of high i would say is often closing a new deal, convincing a customer to get on the software. It happens more often obviously, so it becomes more of a habit than the big product releases. um on the on the low sides um i'd say i mean there's there's there's a lot of little things as an entrepreneur that i have to deal with um but if the things that stand out is when you

i think usually when you hire the wrong person for a job uh because it's an extremely draining process. First you at first you see that you sort of made a mistake probably somehow in the hiring process you didn't see this sort of thing and then you try for a while to make it work which is stressful by itself then you start thinking that probably you're not going to be able to make work and um then is the question like when am i gonna fire them uh which is uh stressful yeah how am i gonna communicate it how do i make sure that uh i i do give them a second chance before that happens now all this kind of things it starts weighing on you quite a lot. And the firing itself is even not too bad compared to everything that comes before it. So that's probably some of the lows. But it's not just about firing.

Anytime there's a big misunderstanding or disappointment or whatever, those are probably the lows when it comes to people. People management is the most difficult part of company ownership. Yeah. I mean, it's certainly finances too and certain things. There's the pressure of all that. too and certain things there's there's the pressure of all that but you know it's just the the dynamics of humanity and dealing with different personalities and having the right people in the right places and like you said you know making those tough decisions and managing it properly yeah and in a way that that everybody understands it and that emotions are carefully managed.

That's the most difficult part. How has technology changed? I mean, we talked about it being a crowded space. Have you seen impacts from this year with obviously being in a strange year with covid and and the health situation i mean you know i know it's a kind of a double part question but um how's the technology changed in the crm business and any impacts covid's had um no huge impacts on us um because we were sort of already uh a very digital system focusing on digital channels, like things that are integrated or things like email and calendars and stuff, but like the digital versions of that.

We're now focused on field sales. I know some colleague companies that have systems for field sales. They had huge issues. Obviously, they have to pivot a lot of stuff lost customers a lot of customers having issues not so much the case for us um the biggest changes we've seen i think over the past year uh is that a lot of things have accelerated when it comes to video uh conversations, plugging in more digital channels. And I think also in the AI space,

I think somehow I've gone quicker and quicker, which is partly the direction that CRMs will go in the future, is that as more things become digitalized and more and more data gets gets incorporated you can start doing a lot of intelligent things with that data to make sure that the the computer detects certain things triggers, or it collects more information from places, or it can start automating some of the communication. So all these things are going faster and faster. Yeah, interesting. I know you talked a little bit about this for why you started SalesFlare. What do you think, you know, maybe maybe beyond the automation but what are the differentiators

you know for sales flare versus the others i mean you know give me give two or three of the very specific integrations or things that they kind of go in that decision making process and do you mean functionality? Yeah, functionality. Yeah. Okay. Because our differentiators, to a certain extent, are on how easy it is to implement, how easy it is to use,

and how easy it is to fill it out and all that. But if you go beyond that, pure functionality, things that most others don't offer is one we have this built in email workflows functionality if you have your trial you'll see it under workflows what you can do there is

you can basically build triggers on top of your salesflare data or filter an audience out of your salesflare data or filter an audience out of your salesflare data it can be a one-off workflow or one that keeps running and it can send emails

from your mailbox automatically to people in a personalized way it can be one email per person or it can be a sequence of emails or even not necessarily a linear sequence but one that branches out with different possibilities so that you can automate part of your repetitive communication that you're having. Let's say, for instance, when you get people on the podcast, guests on the podcast, that you can start emailing certain things to them before they get on or something.

Another thing we offer that most others don't is integrated website tracking. So things like these emails that you send to the workflows, but actually every single email you send, either through Salesforce or through your Gmail with the sidebar next to it or Outmail with the sidebar next to it or outlook with the sidebar next to it all these emails are tracked with a little pixel to see whether people open it and also the links are extra tracked so when people click you can see it but linked up to

that as well there is website tracking and when anyone clicks on the link in an email, it will identify that person as being the one who received that email. And then when that person before or after went to the website, that will be visualized in your Salesforce timeline. And you can follow their whole history of website page visits and how long and all that, and when in the timeline automatically. And then maybe a third one, which sounds a bit more abstract perhaps, but is very handy,

is that in Salesforce you can filter in a very easy way across entities. And what that means in more simple terms is that when you're, for instance, filtering companies, as the things you filter on, it's not just the things that are on company level. You can also say, show me all the companies that are linked to opportunities in a specific pipeline and that have contacts that have a phone number for instance so it's a the filtering goes across all the data instead of just that little silo of data i love it a lot of key features there. I was kind of like mentally paying attention to things that we need.

Making a few notes. What's it like? You know, I know you talked about highs and lows specifically, but are you are you do you enjoy being an entrepreneur? I mean, is it like, you know, do you see yourself building other software or other doing other things? I don't see myself doing anything else, honestly. I remember my wife telling me at some point, she said like, well, you're so much happier now. And that doesn't mean that every day is an extremely happy one. that doesn't mean that every day is a is an extremely happy one but at least there's this if you compare in general like when I when I was just doing a job quote-unquote for someone else I would have a completely different outlook on things much less of a feeling of, first of all, responsibility. Secondly, personal growth, impact.

Yeah, it just feels completely different to be an entrepreneur versus being an employee. I'm sometimes wondering whether I will do this forever or at some point I might switch more to teaching, although teaching is such a weird place nowadays with all the coaches and stuff that I don't know how i would make it work in such a way that it feels uh good to be i don't know how to say it but yeah they're uh everyone's a coach nowadays yeah it's like there but in the U.S., suddenly everyone's coaching something.

Yeah, so I'm wondering whether I want to be in that space or not. Maybe that whole coach thing is a fad, and at some point teaching will become a more normal thing. Is SalesFlare your proudest accomplishment? I mean, is it that? I mean, what is your proudest accomplishment? I mean, is it that? I mean, what is your proudest accomplishment? Oh, that's a very good question. Professionally, I guess, yeah.

Beyond that, it's harder. What's the makeup? We talked a little bit pre-episode, your customer base across the world. What's the percentages in countries? It's a worldwide platform, right? Yeah. It's probably 40% in North America, 40% in Europe, of which one-fourth or so or even more is the UK and after that it's Belgium where we're based

actually specifically Flanders the part that speaks Dutch and the Netherlands are very popular as well as Germany Poland and some other countries and then 20% is rest of the world, of which a big part is Australia again.

It's mainly because our marketing is in English, our software is in English, and all that. So it appeals more to English-speaking countries than to other language-speaking countries. So as we kind of close out here, what's the future hold for for you and salesforce we talked about where you might go but but where for salesflare where where do you see the platform going in the next five ten years i mean it seems like you're just growing and leaning into the ai

aspect and everything that's happening but yeah that's that's that that's that's uh definitely sort of where it's going we'll we'll start pulling in more data and make sure that things become more and more automated um the the email workflows that i'll talk about that i talked about yeah um we call it workflows and not sequences or anything because we think it's going to be more than just than emails and it's not only purely sequential uh so that's something we'll develop uh but then it's it's very hard to imagine every single thing uh sort of where we will add things what it will always be about is trying to make the sales process as automated as possible especially when it comes to things that that don't need humans per se

if you know what i mean so adding all this data collection, suggestions, automations that help salespeople do a better job so they can build relationships at scale, which is what CRM in the end is for. You can build a few relationships without using a system. But as soon as you have, let's say, a few tens of relationships going, you need to organize it somehow. And we're building a system that enables that. I love it, man. Well, really appreciate your time here on the Radcast, Jeroen. And wish you all the best of success.

And I'll shoot you some feedback when we get into our trial. Please do. You can shoot it to me on LinkedIn or you can send it on the support chat or an email, whatever. Awesome. Thanks so much, man. We'll talk again soon. Thank you. Have a good day.

See you. Yo, guys. What's up? Ryan Alford here. Thanks so much for listening. Really appreciate it. But do us a favor. If you've been enjoying the Radcast, you need to share the word with a friend or anyone else.

We'd really appreciate it and go leave us a review at apple or spotify do us a solid tell more people leave us some reviews and hey here's the best news of all if you want to work with me directly you want to get your business kicking ass and you want radical or myself involved you can text me directly at 864-729-3680. Don't wait another minute. Let's get your business going. 864-729-3680. We'll see you next time.