Cómo enamorar a sus clientes

Cómo enamorar a sus clientes

Hello everyone! I’m Jeroen of Salesflare. My goal with this talk today is to help you develop a product and a sales process your customers can fall in love with.

I’ll be sharing some simple but fundamental secrets on how to do that. I hope that’s what you came to this talk for. If it is, sit tight!

About me: like I said, I’m Jeroen, co-founder of Salesflare, which is a CRM software company.

Entre más de 600 competidores, Salesflare destaca con un producto CRM fácil de usar y automatizado que suele encantar a las PYMES.

Mi experiencia personal es en una agencia de marketing y en desarrollo de software, como la de la mayoría de ustedes, supongo.

And I come to you and HowToWeb from the country of beer, chocolate and waffles, called Belgium. I’m also a US citizen by birth, as I was born in a little town in upstate New York.

Así pues, si compara Salesflare como empresa con nuestros principales competidores, probablemente le llamará la atención el hecho de que somos cientos o miles de veces más pequeños que ellos en términos de plantilla.

Aun así, servimos a miles de clientes con un producto comparable y recibimos mucho más cariño de nuestros clientes que nuestros competidores, como demuestran nuestras puntuaciones en G2 aquí a la derecha.

Esta charla es para ayudarte a entender cómo puedes recrear el mismo efecto. Y cómo se puede crear un producto mejor y tener ventas más fáciles como una pequeña, próxima empresa.

En Salesflare, hemos construido una máquina de valor para el cliente centrada en la creación de valor para los clientes.

Eso significa que hacemos dos cosas: 1. hablamos con los clientes, y 2. creamos un producto y un contenido valiosos para ellos que les ayuden a ser mejores en lo que hacen.

Y hacemos todo esto a un ritmo muy rápido y muy constante.

Al fin y al cabo, para triunfar como pequeña empresa, la comprensión del cliente, la rapidez y la coherencia son fundamentales.

It’s your weapons against the giants in your space. It’s your well aimed slingshots that can defeat them.

¿Cómo se pueden conseguir estas tres cosas? Bueno, déjame compartir cómo lo hacemos.

And I’m not going to tell you our way is the only way and you need to copy it literally, but at least I hope I can inspire you with our approach.

So let’s start with the very simple but fundamental basics, with rule nr 1 …

… which is to “find a fundamental problem you’re passionate about”.

Ahora, el problema en el que nos centramos en Salesflare son los malos datos de CRM; y ayudamos a las empresas a deleitar a sus clientes a través de mejores datos.

The initial solution we came up with and that we offer is automated collection of data from emails, calendar, phone, … but that’s not really where we stop. We are thinking about integrating new communication channels, we are thinking about adding new ways of combining data, about adding new types of sales intelligence, and even maybe about completely different things that solve the same issue or reinforce our solution.

It is after all really dangerous if you’re just building a feature, like -say- software that automatically imports email signatures and adds them to your contact database.

Este tipo de función puede quedar obsoleta muy fácilmente si, por ejemplo, Google, Microsoft o Apple deciden añadirla a sus soluciones de correo electrónico. En ese caso, estarás casi muerto.

Por el contrario, mientras que las soluciones y características se copian y sustituyen fácilmente, los problemas permanecen y proporcionarán una base mucho más sólida para su negocio.

This is something that my fellow speaker Michael Perry from Shopify will discuss in his talk later on about his 13 year journey in startups, as one of the mistakes he’s made along the way. (Check it out in the Facebook Live video here at the -0:45 mark; this talk made me quite emotional and the message Michael’s bringing is a very important one, so don’t miss out.)

Now, after you’ve found some fundamental problem, you should verify that it’s a problem that a group of people face, that you can actually identify with.

En nuestro caso, nuestros usuarios son en su mayoría agencias (antes trabajaba en una agencia de marketing) y, por otro lado, empresas de software (obviamente, dirijo una empresa de software en la actualidad).

Aunque se trata de un espacio muy concurrido, conocemos muy a fondo cómo trabajan las agencias y las empresas de software, sabemos cuáles son sus problemas y también conocemos a muchas de ellas. Lo que suele ayudarnos enormemente.

Sometimes people tell me that we should focus on another, much easier market. And often it comes up that there’s huge potential in the market for, for instance, a better CRM for real estate. This would indeed be way easier, as the real estate market is rather underdeveloped in terms of software solutions, and especially in terms of CRMs.

The thing however is: I wouldn’t be hanging out with you here and I wouldn’t be having conversations that genuinely interest me. Instead, I would be hanging out at a real estate conference and I would be eating my heart out.

Real estate people are not really “my people”. I don’t enjoy talking about selling real estate that much. And how badly actually would our company do if I didn’t enjoy talking to our customers.

Hypothetically, it could also be that you’ve seen a once in a lifetime opportunity in building an online platform for second hand car sales.

Maybe you’d think: “I’m building it for people like you and me, I will like this”; but in the end, you will be a used car salesman, meeting and competing with other used car salesmen, and you might start feeling miserable after a little while if this doesn’t fit you.

De hecho, cuando sigues esta línea de pensamiento y esta regla incluso más allá, la situación ideal es que primero construyas un público afín al que le gustes y confíe en ti, y viceversa. Sólo entonces vas a averiguar sus problemas, y sólo entonces creas una solución.

Now, we don’t all have that luxury, but if you can at least create something for people you like and understand, it will move you a big step forward yet again.

If you’ve seen April Dunford’s talk this morning, you also understand that selecting your audience will define your positioning and product to a large extent, so don’t mess it up. (Mira su charla en el vídeo de Facebook Live aquí en la marca -6:26:00. Podría marcar la diferencia entre el éxito y el fracaso de tu empresa.)

Third, it’s very important as a small company to play out your advantage as a small company. And not to start acting like a big company.

Will the CEOs of our competitors get on onboarding calls with their customers, connect with them on LinkedIn or Facebook, help them to solve their issues personally, … ? I think, with the exception of some key customers, no, they definitely won’t.

We have thousands of customers using our software and as we work very closely with them, I still know personally who many of them are, what they care about, how they think, …

All in all, I think being in touch with customers takes about 10-20% of my time, but it’s my best spent time. And it’s worth it. It gives me energy, it helps us to understand our customers, to build stronger relationships, … It’s really the best spent time of all.

Still, I see many companies trying to act like a big company, because they believe it’s the only way to get credibility and to be trusted; I tell you: there’s a much better way to gain their trust and it’s investing in a strong relationship; this will pay off big time.

Back to the G2 chart I showed earlier, you can see there that “ease of doing business with” Salesflare is our highest score by far. That’s not a coincidence. It’s a direct result of our focus on close relationships with our customers.

The fourth important rule is not to skip any steps along the way. You’ll often be tempted to do it, but just don’t.

Teniendo en cuenta que mucha gente aprecia nuestro enfoque de marketing en Salesflare, a menudo los fundadores de startups en fase inicial me preguntan cómo deberían hacer su marketing.

And when they do and we meet up, I’ll first start with listening to what they sell, to whom they sell it, and then I will ask: “So how many people have you sold this to already?”

Almost invariably, the answer will be between 0 and 5 people, which means they haven’t even figured out a way to get repeated sales – so why on earth would they even care to start marketing?

Y esto no es más que un síntoma de un problema mayor, porque las pequeñas empresas en general quieren ser grandes demasiado rápido y se saltan pasos esenciales en el camino en todos los frentes.

When my co-founder and I started Salesflare, the first thing we did is reading the book “Getting Real” by 37signals (which I can very much recommend – and it’s free) and we rigorously applied the principles from that book; we first made a presentation, and we made a mockup, and we started doing lots of interviews to understand what people needed and why they’d see us fail at building Salesflare.

Ever since then, everything we have done at Salesflare we have first tried manually and at its most basic level, and then we have repeated this until we nailed it, and only then we’ve scaled it.

As an example, for 1 to 2 years I’ve personally gone on Skype calls with screen sharing to onboard customers on our software, connect their emails, do their imports, see what they didn’t understand or lacked. And I could experience everything firsthand. It gave me very direct pain.

If, instead, we would have made a fully self-service onboarding from the start, I’m certain we would have missed so many learnings and we would have spent so much more time perfecting Salesflare, if by then we wouldn’t have run out of money already.

Of course, we have made many mistakes too, like hiring people before we nailed the job ourselves, which made iterating to find the right solution ten times slower. That’s why I recommend to you: do the job first yourself, and only then get someone else to do it better than you. But figure out the basic strategy before you hire that person, otherwise you might easily get stuck in the very same place.

Actually, a great example of the “nail it before you scale it” way of thinking is how the guys at Sympl, the company with whom we share an office, built out their full recruitment solution first using 1. Zapier, 2. a simple database solution and 3. Slack.

They didn’t start coding at all. Instead, they first made sure they knew exactly what they wanted to code, and they saved months -if not years- doing so.

If you haven’t seen yesterday’s talk by fellow speaker Paolo Ertreo from Dropbox, check it out online. It’s full of great insights in how to do iteration right, and it’s applicable to both your product and your sales. (Check out his talk in the Facebook Live video here at the -0:36:30 mark. You’ll always remember the pebbles and boulders analogy.)

Fifth, once you’ve nailed some of the tasks, start automating them.

When I’m saying “nail it before you scale it”, that obviously doesn’t mean you should keep yourself busy with groundwork for the rest of time.

Again, if you’re in a software company or you’re in an agency, you have two jobs: 1 is talking to customers and 2 is building valuable stuff for them. Everything else is secondary and should be as automated as possible, as soon as you have nailed it.

Salesflare itself, the product, was created to scratch an automation itch we had ourselves, which was having to document our every interaction with customers, plus their details. This is of course essential to be able to talk to customers, but it’s not the talking to customers itself. It only has a supporting role, it’s robotic work, and we believed it should be automated. In fact, we’ve already proven that computers do a much better job at this than we do.

Next to using Salesflare, and at Salesflare, we have tens of other software products running for us that automate the little things in our workflow and we all connect them together with Zapier, so it kinda all runs like a clockwork and we don’t need to spend our time moving data from here to there. It just runs by itself for us.

Es importante tener en cuenta que, a menudo, una gran parte de la automatización del trabajo consiste primero en crear un proceso sencillo para organizarlo mejor. Esto evita un montón de comunicación inútil si estás de acuerdo en cómo trabajar juntos, además de que a menudo permite una automatización más fácil después.

Si haces algo por décima o vigésima vez y sabes cómo funciona mejor, por supuesto, empieza a documentarlo y luego automatiza o delega.

So imagine again being 6 people and competing with companies that are hundreds to thousands of times bigger… and you want to do better. In this case, you need to be very focused at doing the exact right things better.

Today, and thanks to the internet and everyone contributing to it, it’s easier than ever before for small companies to build your software and reach your audience, without needing to take care of all the secondary things.

Even if you obsess about UX like we do, you don’t need to build your own UI components. You can just use a framework.

Even if your main premise is to pull data from everywhere, you don’t need to build your own connectors; at least certainly not at first.

Por ejemplo, empezamos con una plataforma externa para sincronizar correos electrónicos, que sustituimos sólo dos años después por nuestra propia integración, ya que entendimos que tenía sentido trasladar esta tecnología a nuestro núcleo.

This makes that our CRM now has the fastest, most stable and most powerful email integration around with Google Workspace and Office 365, which is now a competitive advantage vs the rest. So it was an important thing to do, but it wasn’t important to do this from the very beginning.

Para todas las cosas que ahora no forman parte de tu valor principal, busca formas creativas de construir lo que necesitas más rápido. Y hay muchas, muchas formas de hacerlo.

Por último, pero no por ello menos importante, tómate tu tiempo para mejorar.

For those who haven’t read Stephen Covey’s “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People”, coincidentally their 7th habit is the same as the 7th habit of highly effective small companies: never be too busy sawing, to stop and sharpen the saw.

Your main goal should remain to beat the status quo and to become a better company than yesterday. Even if it’s just with 1% increments every day, it will all add up in the end.

What we have done for five years straight now is sit together with the whole team every two weeks for two or three hours and discuss what’s going well and especially what’s not going well.

Lo anotamos en una pizarra y reservamos espacio suficiente para las soluciones de los puntos negativos y para los aprendizajes de los puntos positivos. Y luego trabajamos en las soluciones y aprovechamos los aprendizajes.

Animamos a cada uno de nosotros a identificar los problemas, no a ignorarlos, para salir de nuestro statu quo o zona de confort y solucionarlos.

Y lo mismo se aplica a nuestra forma de trabajar con los clientes. Les animamos activamente a que nos den su opinión y les recompensamos con mensajes personales cuando más adelante actuamos en función de sus comentarios.

It’s only because we care deeply about becoming better, that we can actually outperform our competitors and get these amazing customer review scores I showed you at the beginning.

And that’s it. Those are our 7 simple secrets. I hope you’ll be able to take at least one of them home and use it to improve your business.

Ahora ve y enamora a tus clientes.

¡Gracias! ¡Y que la Llamarada te acompañe!

P.D. Esta presentación se realizó utilizando la versión beta privada de Pitch. De ahí las pegatinas de Otto The Dog. También puedes disfrutar de la presentación en este enlace público.

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“Salesflare is smart and turns CRM from something “I have to do” into a tool that helps me focus on why I started my business.”

Michael Clingan, Grupo Claymore

 

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