Como fazer com que seus clientes se apaixonem por você

Como fazer com que seus clientes se apaixonem por você

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 mais de 600 concorrentes, o Salesflare se destaca com um produto de CRM fácil de usar e automatizado que as PMEs tendem a adorar.

Minha experiência pessoal é em uma agência de marketing e no desenvolvimento de software, assim como a maioria de vocês, presumo.

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.

Portanto, se você comparar a Salesflare como uma empresa com nossos principais concorrentes, provavelmente ficará impressionado com o fato de que somos centenas ou milhares de vezes menores do que eles em termos de número de funcionários.

Ainda assim, atendemos a milhares de clientes com um produto comparável e recebemos muito mais atenção de nossos clientes do que de nossos concorrentes, conforme evidenciado por nossas pontuações no G2 aqui à direita.

Esta palestra é para ajudá-lo a entender como você pode recriar o mesmo efeito. E como você pode criar um produto melhor e ter vendas mais fáceis como uma empresa pequena e emergente.

Na Salesflare, basicamente construímos uma máquina de valor para o cliente que se concentra na criação de valor para os clientes.

Isso significa que fazemos duas coisas: 1. conversamos com os clientes e 2. criamos um produto e um conteúdo valiosos para eles, que os ajudam a ser melhores no que fazem.

E fazemos tudo isso em um ritmo muito rápido e constante.

Afinal, para vencer como uma pequena empresa, a compreensão do cliente, a velocidade e a consistência são fundamentais.

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

Como você pode alcançar essas três coisas? Bem, deixe-me compartilhar como fazemos isso.

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”.

Agora, o problema em que a Salesflare se concentra são os dados ruins de CRM, e ajudamos as empresas a encantar seus clientes com dados melhores.

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.

Esse tipo de recurso pode se tornar obsoleto muito facilmente se, por exemplo, o Google, a Microsoft ou a Apple decidirem adicioná-lo às suas soluções de e-mail. Nesse caso, você estará quase morto.

Ao contrário, enquanto as soluções e os recursos são facilmente copiados e substituídos, os problemas permanecem e fornecerão uma base muito mais sólida para seus negócios.

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.

No nosso caso, nossos usuários são, em sua maioria, agências (eu trabalhava em uma agência de marketing antes) e, por outro lado, empresas de software (obviamente, eu dirijo uma empresa de software no momento).

Embora esse seja um espaço concorrido, sabemos como as agências e as empresas de software trabalham profundamente, conhecemos seus problemas e também conhecemos muitos deles. Isso tende a nos ajudar 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.

Na verdade, quando você segue essa linha de raciocínio e essa regra ainda mais a fundo, a situação ideal é criar primeiro um público com a mesma mentalidade, que goste e confie em você, e vice-versa. Só então você descobrirá os problemas deles e só então criará uma solução.

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. (Veja a palestra dela no vídeo do Facebook Live aqui na marca de -6:26:00. Isso pode fazer a diferença entre o sucesso e o fracasso de sua 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.

Considerando que muitas pessoas apreciam nossa abordagem de marketing no Salesflare, muitas vezes os fundadores de startups em estágio inicial me perguntam como eles devem fazer seu 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?

E isso é apenas um sintoma de um problema maior, porque as pequenas empresas em geral querem se tornar grandes rápido demais e pulam etapas essenciais no caminho em todas as 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.

É importante observar que uma grande parte da automação de seu trabalho costuma ser a criação de um processo simples para organizá-lo melhor. Isso evita muita comunicação inútil se vocês concordarem em como trabalhar juntos, além de permitir uma automação mais fácil posteriormente.

Se você faz algo pela décima ou vigésima vez e sabe como funciona melhor, comece a documentá-lo e, em seguida, automatize-o ou delegue-o.

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.

Começamos, por exemplo, com uma plataforma externa para sincronizar e-mails, que substituímos apenas dois anos depois por nossa própria integração, pois entendemos que fazia sentido transferir essa tecnologia para o nosso 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 as coisas que não fazem parte de seu valor principal agora, procure maneiras criativas de criar o que você precisa mais rapidamente. E há muitas, muitas maneiras de fazer isso.

Por último, mas não menos importante, dedique seu tempo para melhorar.

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.

Escrevemos isso em um quadro branco e reservamos espaço suficiente para soluções para os pontos negativos e para aprendizados para os pontos positivos. Em seguida, trabalhamos nas soluções e aproveitamos os aprendizados.

Incentivamos cada um de nós a identificar problemas, não a ignorá-los, para que possamos sair de nosso status quo ou zona de conforto e corrigi-los.

E o mesmo se aplica à forma como trabalhamos com os clientes. Nós os incentivamos ativamente a nos dar feedback e os recompensamos com mensagens pessoais quando, mais tarde, agimos de acordo com seu feedback.

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.

Agora, faça com que seus clientes se apaixonem por você!

Obrigado! E que o Flare esteja com você!

P.S. Esta apresentação foi feita usando a versão beta privada do Pitch. Por isso, os adesivos do Otto The Dog. Você também pode apreciar a apresentação neste link 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, The Claymore Group

 

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