IAM980- Co-founder Manages Leads Through an Intelligent CRM

Jeroen is co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, an intelligent CRM built for SMBs selling B2B, mostly popular with agencies and SaaS companies.

Salesflare itself was founded when Jeroen and his co-founder Lieven wanted to manage the leads for their software company in an easier way. They didn't like to keep track of them manually and built Salesflare, which pulls customer data together automatically.

It's now the most popular CRM on Product Hunt and top-rated on review platforms like G2 for its ease of use and automation features.

• CEO Hack: Strict sleeping routine
• CEO Nugget:  Start small with the MVPs
• CEO Defined: Giving direction to the team, often saying no and representing the company in critical moments

Website: https://salesflare.com/

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/jeroencorthout

Full Interview:

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Transcription

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[00:00:17.00] – Intro

Are you ready to hear business stories and learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and level up your business from awesome CEOs, entrepreneurs, and founders without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresh values your time and is ready to share with you the valuable info you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO podcast.

[00:00:44.20] – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I Am CEO podcast, and I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Jeroen Corthout of Salesflare. Jeroen, it's awesome to have you on the show.

[00:00:53.70] – Jeroen Corthout

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

[00:00:55.70] – Gresham Harkless

Super excited to have you on. And before we jump in, I want to read a little bit more about Yaron so you hear about all the awesome things that he's doing. Jeroen is cofounder and CEO of SalesFlare, an intelligent CRM built for small s m SMBs selling b two b, mostly popular with agencies and SaaS companies. Salesflare itself was founded when Jeroen and his cofounder, Leaving, wanted to manage the leads for their software company more easily. They didn't like to keep track of them manually and built Salesflare, which pulls customer data together automatically. It's now the most popular CRM on Product Hunt and top-rated on review platforms like Two for its ease of use and automation feature. Jeroen, are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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[00:01:33.20] – Jeroen Corthout

Yeah. I'm ready.

[00:01:34.40] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Well, let's do it then. So just to kick everything off, I wanted to rewind the clock a little bit and hear a little bit more about how you got started with all the awesome work you and your cofounder are doing.

[00:01:43.29] – Jeroen Corthout

With Salesforce, I think it all started when we went to a conference. There was this big IBM thing going on in Vegas. And we went there. We had a well, my cofounder had a software company. We were selling business intelligence software, so it was basically like, looking at data and companies and making sense out of it. And we had software that was compatible with IBMs. That's why we went to an IBM conference. Now, anyway, we had a booth there. We got a lot of people interested in our products. So we had a lot of leads to follow up because they were interested, but they didn't buy yet. Right?

So, I think about a hundred and thirty or something. And we were super excited, but we had to start managing this. And I have personally worked with, CRM systems, like a customer relationship management system called Salesforce in the past. Those who are a bit familiar with CRMs, probably know it because it's the I think they control, like, twenty percent of the market or something. So the biggest player. It's a great system if you're a corporation and you're trying to, build a system in which all your workflows are embedded and you get an army of consultants who customize it for you and then, you basically get a set of building blocks and then build your system from there. That's what Salesforce does. But it's not practical, or easy to use, for the end users. It doesn't help you sell.

And I knew that because I had been struggling with Salesforce for four years. So we looked around, didn't use that. We actually, the guys were using Zoho before I came in, and that was sort of like Salesforce but cheaper. And then we looked at systems like I remember, Pipedrive and Streak and all that. Now where we failed in all of these systems is that they weren't necessarily, bad systems. Like, they were way better than Salesforce. It's just that they all came with this outsized expectation of us filling them out. So we would get a system, and all we had to do, between brackets, was, fill them out consistently, completely all the time. Like, any moment anything happens, we would say, like, oh, this should go into CRM.

Anytime somebody would send an email that we hadn't been in touch with yet, so we would go, oh, this is their name, this is their email address, this is their phone number, this is their position, whatever, put in the CRM. They've emailed us. We put that in the CRM. That company put that in the CRM. They call us. We put that in the CRM, you know, all the time, like, CRM. And it's something we couldn't keep up with. And we figured that's actually why most people hate CRMs because it's so much work, first. And then often in many systems, even if you put in the work, it doesn't help you sell either. And then we figured that all of that data input is kind of dumb because it's usually information that already exists digitally elsewhere.

So, it's already present in your email system. A lot of these things It's already present in your calendar. It's already present in your phone. There's stuff in company databases that you're manually taking over and putting in there, stuff in social media. There's maybe email tracking and website tracking which is even somewhere else. And it's all spread out but not in the CRM. So what we then had in mind coming from our, sort of data background is what if we made a system that would pull this all together for us? We don't have to put it in there anymore because it automatically does that.

And it organizes most of it. It just doesn't do some things. It will offer those as suggestions to us because if the system does everything fully automatically, then we sort of lose control. So the system, works works works this way now. Assurances just say I'm gonna sell to this company, type the name of the company, and find all of the information about it immediately, like, as a search engine. Like, you start typing the name, it says this one. Oh, yeah. That one with that website created pulls the information about that company. It tells you who you know at the company. Like, it sees in your mailbox, your calendar, and all that. It sees all these people. We also got their information, some stuff from social media, and some stuff from email signatures. Which ones do you wanna add? These, not these. They're added.

So you just have to do them a few clicks. Then it pulls in the timelines. Like, we can exactly see, like, these are the emails you exchange with them. These are the meetings you had with them. They opened through your emails, went to the website, and clicked here. You also had a call with them on your phone. Boom. It's all there. Then you can see who your colleagues know because we also know, and you can visualize that. We don't give all the information about that because that's a sort of privacy issue. At least you can see, like, oh, my colleagues also know people well and actually how well they know them. Like, you see this little, Wi-Fi connection signals that say, well, this this guy didn't know well.

And it's that colleague that knows him well and that colleague also kinda knows him. So this is all information that we immediately bring to people without them having to type it all in the system. And then on top of that, we started building way more because as the system can, can track way more than you would ever do manually, we can also build all kinds of smart stuff on top of that. Like it can tell you, it seems that you haven't talked to this customer for x days and you said that if a customer is in this stage, you wanna follow up with them every y days. So it might be good to follow up. You get a little notification about that and stuff. It can tell you, that there are emails you forgot to answer or, notes they haven't put on a meeting yet because the system currently does not make your notes yet, about meetings.

Maybe at some point, when we just, basically record the meetings, take the speech, turn it into text, summarize it, you know, that could happen. But yeah. So a system that automatically tracks stuff for you helps you sell. And, it's used by, small and medium-sized businesses who sell b to b, like you said. Mainly, actually, like, marketing agencies and consultancies and software development houses and tech companies, SaaS companies, and telcos are the main types of, companies on the software, all across the world. Like forty percent of North America, forty percent of Europe, and twenty percent of, the rest of the world.

Currently, over two thousand companies using the software actively. And, we're, like you said, top-rated on on g two. I think we're the number two easiest-to-use system on g two and the number one easiest to implement and that's across six hundred fifty CRMs. But I feel like I'm overselling the thing now.

[00:08:54.10] – Gresham Harkless

I appreciate it because I did wanna hear, you know, more about how it works and how you serve the client. So that was right online with, like, everything that I was gonna ask you about. And so I wanted to ask you, and this could be for yourself or the CRM or a combination of both for what I call your secret sauce. But to me, and correct me if I'm wrong, it sounds like the secret sauce might be that phrase you said that stuck with me about helping people to be able to sell. I think so many times

[00:09:19.79] – Jeroen Corthout

Yeah.

[00:09:20.00] – Gresham Harkless

People build things, they start adding different features and different things, and they forget about, like, why they created the thing in the first place. And that ease in ability to help people be able to sell more is why people want CRM. So it sounds like you're going hand in hand with that. I don't know if that's what you would consider to be like your sales.

[00:09:35.20] – Jeroen Corthout

Exactly. We help people sell, and automate part of it. Now the main bottleneck is the thing I explained. It's the it's the data input. That's where it usually goes wrong because the CRM is supposed to help you sell. Right? And some of them are not exactly built for that purpose, but many are. But the thing is if the data input doesn't happen, the system will not do that for you because it it all depends on that. So that's why we set out to fix that issue first, and are now building from there to offer more and more interesting stuff and make things even easier. Because in the end, as a salesperson, you cannot just rely on your memory. That's very hard. I mean, it's doable if you have five customers.

But as soon as you reach 10:20, and especially if you're trying to to go after, not necessarily customers, but like a hundred leads or something, and becomes hard to do that based on your memory. Yeah. And you'll forget stuff, not just about people, but just to follow up with someone. And and you need to be able to give every single customer, the feeling that you are the only customer they know. They are the only customer you care about. I give them that very personal, feeling. And not the sort of feeling where you are managing chaos and they are somewhere in your chaos. And that's what a CRM system helps you with if it works. So our goal here is mainly to make that work.

[00:11:19.29] – Gresham Harkless

Appreciate that. So I wanted to switch gears a little bit. I want to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. So this could be like an Apple book or a habit that you have, but what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

[00:11:30.00] – Jeroen Corthout

It all starts with sleeping better. If you don't sleep well, you immediately feel it. Your day is sort of, and you completely sound fucked. So that's super essential. I have very strict, sleeping rules for myself and rituals and all that. It all changed when I read the book, Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker.

[00:11:52.00] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah.

[00:11:52.70] – Jeroen Corthout

And that's kind of ironic because my master's thesis was actually on sleep.

[00:11:57.70] – Gresham Harkless

And, I wanted to ask you now for what I call a CEO nugget. So that could be a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. It might be something you would tell a client or if you hop into a time machine, you might tell your younger business self.

[00:12:08.00] – Jeroen Corthout

So many small things. It all depends on the but actually, I was sort of late for recording this because I was talking to someone who wants to start a business now. And there are so many things, that you have to transfer instead of in terms of the wisdom of what to do. Like, we, for instance, discussed the importance of, starting with whatever you wanna build, very small. It's very obvious and very well known, like, building a minimum viable product or MVP offering, like, the the minimal thing you can, so that you don't, overwork yourself before you can offer something and take a great amount of risk.

[00:12:54.10] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So now I wanna ask you my absolute favorite question, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different, quote-unquote, CEOs on the show. So, Yaron, what does being a CEO mean to you?

[00:13:04.29] – Jeroen Corthout

I think it means giving direction, to the company, at least towards towards internally, I mean, to the team. It's, setting out that direction together with them, being like the guiding force in that. It's, it's often saying no, like they're saying because there are so many things you can do, but there's only, one way you will take in the ends, obviously, or you might try a few in parallel, but then still there's so many more that you're not trying for a reason. So a CEO is about giving guidance internally. It's about saying no.

And I think externally, it's also partly about giving a similar amount of guidance that they can give internally but then towards externally. But it's also representing the company, when necessary, at critical moments, towards key customers. You need to be there as sort of the face of the company.

[00:14:08.50] – Gresham Harkless

Yeah. I appreciate that definition, that holistic look and understanding of the different, people that we're serving, I guess, within the roles as well because, of course, we think about our clients, but we also have to think about our teams and team members and everything that goes into a building a company and an organization. And then we have to have that holistic look at all of those things to make sure that we are, you know, fulfilling that gap and providing that support.

So, everyone truly appreciates that definition. I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do is just pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional you can let our readers and listeners know, and, of course, how best they can get a hold of you and find about all the awesome things you and your team are doing.

[00:14:45.89] – Jeroen Corthout

Nothing to add that I can think of right now. If you wanna get in touch with me, or you wanna learn more about Salesflare, Salesflare is on Salesflare dot com. And, sales are easy to spell, but the flare. And you can read about our software there. We have a blog you can check out for any advice about start-ups and sales and all that. And you can also try our software. The trial is somewhere between seven and thirty days. It just depends on how well you set it up. Because, the further you set it up, the more days we give you on the trial just to, incentivize people, to set it up further because we've seen that people who actually, get serious about it are way more successful.

And if you were to get in touch with me, the best place is LinkedIn. Just take my name, type it in Google or LinkedIn, and you'll find me. There's only one person with my name, so you can't miss it. But, please, when you send the connection request, include a personal message. Otherwise, I have no idea why you're contacting me, and there are so many spammers out there right now. I will just assume you're one of them. But if you include a personal message, I'll certainly connect with you, and, we can have a chat.

[00:15:57.89] – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. I truly appreciate that, Jeroen. And that's a nugget as well too to remind everybody because there are loads of people that are looking to try to connect, but just take that little extra step and put your, reason for connecting or why you wanna connect or where you heard, your room from as well too in that comment. But we will have the links and information in the show notes as well too to make it even easier for everybody to follow up with you, and get a hold of and see all the awesome things that you're doing. But truly appreciate your time today. Appreciate all the awesome work you're doing, and I hope you have a great rest of the day.

[00:16:23.89] – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.co I AM CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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