How a SaaS Found Competitive Differentiation in CRM

Omer (00:10.000)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan, and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
In this episode, I talk to Jaroon Kortaut, the co founder of Sales Flare, a simple but powerful CRM that automates updating your data so you don't have to.
Yaroon had to use the CRM in his job and hated how much effort it took to keep everything up to date.
And if you didn't do that, your CRM quickly became useless.
He also realized that a lot of salespeople tracked deals outside of the CRM because.
Because they didn't want to be hassled by management until the deal was further along.
And he came up with the idea of a sales tool that could build off the data that was already there, make better use of automation, and rely less on people having to manually update information.
He built it not as a replacement, but as an extension for a CRM application.
But he had a really hard time selling it because his prospective customers couldn't see the value or benefit of having another tool alongside their CRM.
And it took him some time to find the right market for his product.
Eventually, he realized that smaller companies were using his product as a CRM, not as an extension to it.
For the first 18 months, he and his co founder did a lot of things that didn't scale.
He would do all the demos and personally onboard new customers.
People, people couldn't even pay for the product online.
They would send them invoices and wait to get paid.
It was a lot of manual work to sell a product that was all about automation.
But slowly his efforts started to pay off.
Today, Sales Flare is used by over 2,000 companies, and the founders have raised over a million dollars.
We talk about how they acquired their initial customers, how they've scaled their marketing and sales and.
And the lessons they learned from selling their product on appsumo.
So I hope you enjoy it.
Jarun, welcome to the show.

Jeroen Corthout (02:24.530)
Thank you.
Good to be here.

Omer (02:26.370)
So what gets you out of bed?
What drives and motivates you to work on your business every day?

Jeroen Corthout (02:31.010)
What gets me out of bed?
I would say first of all, my alarm clock.
But after that, I think it's the idea of being able to keep building on our business, our product, our team.
Just the idea of always building something bigger and better, that.
That's really what motivates me, I think.

Omer (02:52.890)
So tell us about Sales Flare.
What does the product do?
Who is it for?
And what's the big problem that you're helping to solve?

Jeroen Corthout (03:01.690)
Yeah, what the product does is it helps you to follow up your leads, at least if you're a salesperson.
So Sales Flare is a.
Is a CRM, more specifically, more of a sales CRM.
Who's it for?
It's for small businesses who sell to other businesses.
So they sell B2B.
We mostly have agencies, that means marketing agencies and software development agencies on the software together with a lot of tech companies, of which a big part are SaaS companies.
Actually, it helps salespeople to follow up leads and helps sales managers to get a good idea of what they do, how well they do it, and also helps teams to work together as a team.
Now, why Sales Flare there?
We started it from the understanding that almost every CRM out there fails at some point.
It fails because you just don't feel like filling it out anymore.
You might start with good intentions, but at some point, either because you're selling well, or you just gave up or you stopped filling it out, and that's when the CRM becomes useless.
And why this happens is because there's this big imbalance, I would say, between the amount of work you need to put into the CRM and what you get out of it.
So most CRMs ask you to do a lot of data input and don't help you a ton to follow up your leads.
We try to turn that around.
Actually, our CRM is built on top of existing data, so.
So we figured that all the things we were filling out in a CRM were already somewhere.
They were in your emails.
So all the emails you exchanged, the people you're in contact with, how strong your relationships are, the email signatures, all these things are in your emails, similar in your meetings.
You have meetings with people, you have people there and then in your phone.
There's phone calls and there's company databases, there's social databases.
All these things somehow need to be inputted twice again into a CRM.
And we figured, why don't we automate that?
So our whole system is built from the premise that it's not a CRM that you manually update and then maybe it sinks in some data automatically.
Now it's built on top of existing data and actually inputting data is secondary.
And next to that, we added a whole aspect from the beginning of tracking, like email tracking on opens and clicks and website tracking and all that.
That from the start was very important to us as well, because then it really completes the whole sales and if you want marketing flow in the CRM automatically.

Omer (05:46.010)
So how did you guys come up with the idea?
What were you doing?
How did you come across this problem?

Jeroen Corthout (05:50.890)
Yeah, I actually worked at a marketing consultancy slash agency before.
We worked a lot with Salesforce.
That was because we in life sciences companies, a lot of pharma companies, we would introduce Salesforce in marketing and sales projects.
We also use Salesforce internally and it was the first CRM I got in contact with myself.
I worked in a pharma company before, but I had never seen a CRM there.
It was the first one I had to use and I never really got how it would practically help me.
I tried to work with these tasks they have in there and I tried to log things I did so that I could have an overview.
But it seemed so cumbersome and so useless and actually most of my colleagues weren't doing that.
When I talked to one of my fellow account managers, he told me don't put the opportunities in the system too early because management is going to start to expect things and you don't want that.
I would put some contacts in there just so they would get the newsletter.
But that's, that's just about in the end what I would do in Salesforce, I would manage most of my things at that moment from Outlook.
I would have my emails there, my contacts, my tasks.
I would have some tasks in things like Wunderlist as well.
And it seemed like two very different worlds.
One where I could actually organize myself and the other thing seemed like a thing that management had invented to get some overview somewhere, but not a tool for me.
And then when my current co founder and I were working together on another software company, did business intelligence software and we had a lot of leads and we looked how we could actually organize that in a good way, in a practical way.
We looked at a bunch of things we saw, for instance Zoho, but it looked like just a cheap Salesforce.
It didn't really solve any problem.
Problem.
We started working from a Google sheet, but then we found that even the Google sheet in all its simplicity, we still had to fill it out.
And we would miss filling it out, which meant that the overview we were looking at was not up to date.
And then we figured can't we automate that?
Is there no possibility that the fact that we emailed someone that we don't have to type it in a second time?
And then actually the moment that we decided to work on Salesflare is when I showed my co founder mailchimp we were sending out our first email newsletter with that company and I showed them that you can see who you send it to, who opened, who clicked, and that was super interesting.
So there was this aspect that we were thinking about a bit already, like automating our sort of CRM we had created.
And on the other hand there was this whole tracking aspect and when we saw these things coming together then we figured like, yes, we can do something for salespeople.
Like marketing people have all these fancy things with which they can track everything.
The data just flows in.
We can make something like that for salespeople as well, so they can get a better grasp on their leads and stop having all these deals going, falling through the cracks and all that.

Omer (09:06.410)
So what happened to the other software company that you were working on?

Jeroen Corthout (09:10.010)
It existed still for a while, but then after a while it got closed.
It had a good amount of customers, but it just didn't get a lot of attention anymore.

Omer (09:20.050)
Okay, so you've got this idea.
You can see the problem from your past experience as well as with you and your co founder trying to make sense of all of this data and these leads that you're getting in there.
You probably already know that there isn't a shortage of CRM products out there.
How did you go about finding your initial customers or validating the idea?
So you guys feel that you have this problem that you're experiencing yourself.
How did you go about finding other people who had a similar problem?

Jeroen Corthout (09:57.870)
Yeah, so we actually started with reading getting real by 37 signals.
And we read in there that indeed you had to validate quickly.
So what we did very early on is we made this very rudimentary prototype for the product and we made a presentation and we started showing that to people and see what they thought about it.
At that point, our idea was to make a sales platform that would communicate with CRMs like Salesforce.
So our value proposition was that you could still use Salesforce for your company.
We're aiming at mid sized companies, but your salespeople would get to work with something that they would actually use.
Because we saw a lot of companies that didn't use the CRM properly.
So we thought we're going to fix that by putting a sales platform next to it.

Omer (10:49.840)
So just to be clear, you didn't start out saying we're going to build a replacement for a CRM, but instead we know that salespeople are doing a lot of stuff outside of the CRM like you had been doing, whether it's in Outlook or Wunderlist and there was this opportunity to at least take all of that stuff and put it into a better place for the sales team to be more effective.

Jeroen Corthout (11:22.470)
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
We saw a simple sales platform that would integrate super well with your emails and all these other things I mentioned and that salespeople would use.
And then all the data that it created, it would sync back to Salesforce as well so that the company, if they wanted to do all the other things they want to do.
I'm talking mid sized to big companies now that they could do that.

Omer (11:49.090)
Okay, so tell me about the kinds of conversations that you had and what you learned from that when you went out and talked to these companies.

Jeroen Corthout (11:56.450)
Yeah.
So first we started doing some conversations in a slightly disorganized way, I would say.
But after a while we started doing customer interviews.
And this was with different sizes of companies, from really enterprise to small ones, with people in different positions.
And we learned that what we were talking about was actually true.
And we got some good interest for our idea.
We refined some of the things we thought based on what we heard.
A small issue was that we got so much feedback that it just started blowing up.
Our idea in terms of scope.
At some point we had to cut that all away again and go back to the essence.
But what we found then also was that when we tried to sell this sales platform, that companies weren't really trusting that it would make their life easier.
They just saw two databases.
They saw the sales platform database with a whole lot in there.
And then the problem of syncing that all back to Salesforce.
And we couldn't convince anyone of the idea that that would work.
So what happened after a while was that we were in between a lot of smaller companies and they actually saw our platform.
And as a smaller company, they're much more interested in a practical CRM, in something that works for the end user.
And they started being interested.
And then we figured, like, why don't we then go after smaller companies?
Why don't we just build a CRM then something that works better for them than what's on the market now and then that's what we're still doing.

Omer (13:36.250)
So when you identified these smaller companies as being the potential market to focus on, did you already have a product at the time or was this just as part of the doing the customer interviews you started talking to.

Jeroen Corthout (13:52.270)
By then we sort of had a product.
I mean, it did stuff.
Nobody really loved it yet, but there was something.
Yeah, I would use it very actively.
And then I think the first guy that also started using it actively.
Must have been already at that point it was a guy from a student organization who really used it for his sales.
And at that point other companies started being interested.
They were a bit confused by our first version because what we actually did was we believed that everything should still happen from the inbox.
So we made a plugin for both Outlook and Gmail.
And next to your emails you would get all the information and you didn't have to go into any other system or tab, it was all just there.
But companies started asking us like, why don't you have this thing I'm used to, like this full screen thing.
And that's actually then something we built after we had the whole plugin and mobile experience.
And it's sort of, let's say we started mobile and then we turned that into a desktop experience as well.
And still today that means that all functionalities we offer on desktop you will also find on mobile and in the plugin.
And I mean 100% and the whole app is fully resizable on all screens.
It's the same experience.

Omer (15:16.990)
Okay, so let's talk about how you went from zero to your first hundred customers.
Because in the last couple of years you've been doing a lot of different growth marketing and we can talk about some of those things, but usually getting from 0 to 100 is a very different journey.
So tell me about what you did to get to, let's say, the first 20 customers.

Jeroen Corthout (15:51.420)
The first 20 or even 30 was largely based on sales.
We tried to do some PR efforts as well and actually our very first customer was due to an effort like that.
And I think some from these first 30 as well.
The very first customer was because we got in a Dutch tech magazine for marketers and he had read that we had built something that basically was a CRM that would fill out itself.
He called it the living CRM, I think.
And he had issues with his salespeople not using Microsoft Dynamics, so he was very interested to learn more about this.
But then all the next customers we actually got through our network and through selling.
It was a lot of work, I would say, but rewarding work.
I also remember a few coming through.
We got in, let's say the Financial Times of Belgium and that brought us a few of those as well.
But largely it was through our network.
Like people in the startup community, people they knew, people we knew from somewhere else.
And the whole process was very manual.
We didn't have a sign up process on the website or anything like that.
It was really, us convincing people, getting them on annual plans.
We didn't even have a monthly plan back then and paying invoices, all these kind of things.

Omer (17:18.500)
How much were you charging back then?

Jeroen Corthout (17:20.740)
We are charging what we're charging today.
Actually.
We were charging 30 per user per month on the annual plan.

Omer (17:27.710)
Got it.
And then so what could people do on the website at the time?

Jeroen Corthout (17:31.470)
On the website?
The website would show what salesflare was and all that.
And then there was a form where you could request a trial if you wanted one.
That way we could.
Any trial we request, we got in, we could fully guide and we would, could close a maximum of the deals we got in.
But also we could really help people through the different steps because we didn't really feel comfortable yet with having them do it alone.
Just the first step of the process, which was connecting your emails was super difficult at the time, so we really needed to be there.

Omer (18:04.900)
Yeah, you know, we've heard this, this thing over and over again.
You know, the program thing about do things that don't scale in the early days, but it's still so tempting to build a website that's going to automate everything and people will get there and sign up and, and know how to use the product and on board and be happy.
And the reality is that when you're starting out, you know, the product isn't usually that great and there's still a lot of work to do.
But also I think there's this.
Once we are working on the product, you sort of get familiar with it.
You stop seeing some of the flaws because you're seeing this day in, day out, you know that you need to improve it.
But when you see a customer and you sit down with them and when the next step seems obvious to you and they can't figure out what to do, that's when I think it really

Jeroen Corthout (19:04.040)
hits home that, no, that's exactly what happens.
So we would get people through the signup process and then the first steps of getting on the software as well.
Basically, basically the calls would go like this.
I would demo them the software, show them all the cool things it did.
Then they said, I'd like to try this.
And I'm like, shall we schedule another call or do it right now?
I still have time if you want.
No, you can do it.
I mean, one of the two.
If it would be at that moment, we would basically share their screen and I would follow and I would say, let's do this now, let's do this now, let's do this now.
And then every time they hesitated or something went wrong or I saw something that really was off, I noted it down and I took a whole lot of notes.
These calls were often super embarrassing, but still exciting because I mean, I was putting people on the software who were excited to get on there even despite all the flaws.
And by the time you would get through the call, they would be on the software, they would have an account, they would have learned the basic ways of using it.
I would maybe have helped them with creating some things in the software already and all that.
So they would get it.
And then maybe we would do a follow up call a bit later to go through some other problems.
We didn't have anything like chatters on the software.
They would personally be in contact with me either over Skype or WhatsApp or email or it didn't matter.
And there would be this very, very close, intimate contact where we would help them through all the steps, which made that our close rate was actually pretty good.
And it also made that with the very small amount of people we got on the software, we could still get a maximum of feedback.
Because as soon as you let the process become self service, then immediately that it's not only the close rate that falls, but it's also the amount of feedback that just becomes almost, almost nothing compared to what you had before, I would say.

Omer (21:12.530)
So apart from the pr, what else did you do to help you get to that first 100 customer milestone?

Jeroen Corthout (21:22.690)
Yeah, so we did PR, we did sales, and then we started thinking of taking it to another level.
The first launch we did, marketing wise, was the moment that we started our blog also.
And I think we were about two years into development at that moment, which is about two years and a bit after two years and four months or so after we had the idea for salesflare, we did an online launch where we actually made that people could sign up to the software online and we started building like the stripe integration and all that.

Omer (21:59.770)
How long had you been selling the product before you added that feature?

Jeroen Corthout (22:05.050)
Let's say we sold from the start, two years and more than two years actually.

Omer (22:09.450)
So for two years there was no.
People couldn't pay online.
There was no stripe integration.
You were just signing people up and sending them an invoice.

Jeroen Corthout (22:17.050)
Yeah, like from the moment we had an actual product, I would say more than a year and a half.
We did it like that.
Yeah.

Omer (22:24.710)
You know, it's amazing how sometimes we just kind of put things in our own way and say, well, I can do this when this is there and this is there, and I've got this capability and I think it's just, it's a very useful reminder that, you know, you don't have to have everything perfect if you can figure out and find a problem that people care enough about.

Jeroen Corthout (22:48.560)
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah.
Well, if you don't have that, of course you're not going to convince people and probably you should make the barriers lower from the start.
But if you, if you can, I would, I would hold off as long as possible on letting the whole process go.
And you can get away with a lot of things.
As long as you take the sales approach, the whole guided approach, and you solve every problem that comes along, you can get away with a lot of things.
And, and it makes that.
You can make the whole experience much more perfect than if you would just let it go from the start.

Omer (23:24.000)
You also did a Product Hunt launch and a promotion on Appsumo.
How did they go?
What did you learn from that experience?

Jeroen Corthout (23:34.480)
They both went really well.
Super happy with both of them.
What we could have done better, especially for the appsumo launch, is preparing for it, I would say.
But the Product Hunt launch was about, I think, seven months or six months after we did that online launch.
We had built an extra onboarding experience and we really prepared super well for the Product Hunt launch.
Got a ton of upvotes, got a ton of trials.
I looked at it earlier today and it was somewhere between 200 and 300 trials that we got from this Product Hunt launch.
And that was just at the beginning because we still get trials from there every week.
Right now we got upvoted to the number one CRM on Product Hunt and we still are getting upvotes because if you type CRM at the top of Product Hunt, we're the first CRM you find.
And that was the moment that really quite a big amount of people started knowing about us because we launch also in a few communities where we were active.
I don't know whether we doubled, but we got a good extra amount of customers through that product and launched just about immediately.
The churn was higher, I must say, on Product Hunts signups, it's more early adopter audience that really likes new products, which is what we needed, of course, but they also tend to then if they see something else also go away again or, or they're on projects that don't last super long or.

Omer (25:10.130)
Yeah, the shiny object syndrome, right?

Jeroen Corthout (25:13.010)
Shiny object, yeah, but that's, that's, that's okay.
In the beginning when you're starting off, you need Some.
Some people that go for new stuff.
And then the appsumo launch was about two, three months later.
That was huge.
And that's.
We so underestimated the impact of that.
Where we had, I think about.
I don't know whether it was 300 trials, but somewhere in that order, we had about 6,000 people signing up for our software in a matter of three weeks.

Omer (25:46.490)
Wow.

Jeroen Corthout (25:49.049)
We were not at all prepared for that.
Let's say that the morning that we launched, I was still writing saved replies.
We prepared a few sheets in which we would start inputting all the things we heard, because the system in which we were inputting things, we just couldn't do it fast enough in there.
So we would just type it all in one huge sheet, which we migrated.
Then afterwards, we're told that we were soft launching that day and that it would just go on the website and some people would sign up.
But immediately, the first day, we had more than 400 signups, which was more than we could handle.
The lounge day, when they send out the email itself, was over a thousand people in one day, I remember.
But it was heavy for really three straight weeks in which we worked around the clock.
We did support around the clock, literally.
So we would work in shifts.
I would take the early morning shift, waking up at 4 and immediately going into support until our fingers hurt.
And we actually, three of us got sick at the end of the three weeks because it just put so much stress on our body.
But it was a really fun experience at that moment.
It was really exhilarating.

Omer (27:10.260)
So now people are thinking, listening to this, and they're thinking, great, I'm going to go out and try to do an appsumo launch.
What are also the downsides of doing something like that?

Jeroen Corthout (27:19.940)
Oh, the downsides are I'll tell you when to do it and when not to do it.
Some of the downsides are that there's a lot of people coming on your software and you need to support them and they only pay once.
That's probably the major downside.
Some of the people in the appsumo community also expect a lot, even if they don't pay you much.
They have huge expectations.
And there's some in there that are a bit more difficult to handle.
With appsumo people, Sumo Links, they call themselves, you will get a way more intense interaction than you get with paid customers, which has pros and cons.
The con is that you have to handle that, but the pro is that you get a ton of feedback.
They really care about your software and they will give you feedback on just about everything that doesn't work that they would like to see another way that you know all kinds of stuff.
So it really brought us so much more feedback than before.
What it also brought us is a lot of visibility.
All these people using it also recommended to other people.
They're there to write reviews.
We also got quite some good upsells because the deal.
We didn't do a deal where everything was free forever and unlimited.
The limit for us was on the amount of users.
So it was one user for free and the others at 50% off.
And I think we're one of the appsumo deals that got the best upsells from that.
When I would do it is when your software is actually targeted to the community that is on appsumo, which is a lot of.
I imagine it has a lot of.
And there's obviously a lot of types on there, but largely marketing agency solopreneurs.
So if that's what you're aiming at, then there might be a good match.
Your product cannot be too hard to support, so not too many extra costs when you bring on more people, preferably if possible, a product that is visible to other people so that if people use it, other people see it and also want it.
And then from an appsumo launch with people that don't necessarily pay you a subscription, you can then get customers that actually pay your subscription.
Yeah, I think I covered the main points.

Omer (29:47.370)
So what's been the main growth driver over the last couple of years?
So getting to first hundred customers was one thing, and then last year or two, what's the main thing that's been working for you?

Jeroen Corthout (30:02.170)
Yeah, so the main things that are working for us is all sorts of organic.
It's very hard for us in the CRM space to really break through with outbound kind of things or I mean beta ads or outreaching or.
A lot of channels are saturated is one thing.
And the second thing is that there's also.
People don't just jump onto a new CRM, which is good for Churn, but it's sad for acquisition.
What has mostly been working for us is different versions of Organic.
Like I said, a big part of that is word of mouth.
Word of mouth in the sense that people tell other people which CRM they use and recommend it.
It's people writing reviews and finding us in review sites, lists and all those kind of things.
And then the last part of Organic is the whole content marketing we do around Salesforce, which is sort of targeted at the Personas we mostly have on the software and is lately more and more around things where salesflare might be useful so that when we write about a certain topic, they can actually see how they could use the software for that purpose as well, in a certain way.

Omer (31:25.520)
Yeah, I've come across that approach a little bit more recently, and I think Ahrefs is a good example of that.
Where they create content and the content is basically telling you how to use their product.

Jeroen Corthout (31:40.400)
Yeah, yeah.
It doesn't all need to be about using your product, but at some point you show some parts of.
So, okay, so you're trying to build a sales pipeline.
First you talk about what is the definition of a sales pipeline, how is it definitely a sales funnel, all those kind of things.
Then how do you set the stages?
Then you show like, okay, so this is how it would then look in Sales Flare.
And then how do you manage your sales pipeline?
And then now.
And then you just show how that would work in an easy way in Sales Flare better than in other systems.
And then people, they have what they came for, they learned all about the topic they were researching, but at the same time, they also saw in their minds how it would be if they would use Sales Flare for this particular purpose.

Omer (32:26.330)
Yeah, I think that's a smart approach.
All right.
One of the things that you told me earlier was you didn't really believe in processes and kind of setting up those kinds of things to organize and run the company.
And that's something that you guys have been doing a lot of lately.

Jeroen Corthout (32:49.050)
Yeah.

Omer (32:50.010)
So tell me about what kind of problems you started getting into as you grew.
What kind of problems did you start to experience without having processes in place and you having a resistance to putting any in place?

Jeroen Corthout (33:04.550)
Yeah, like.
Like my co founder and I, we mostly feel that processes are limiting and they make us less nimble.
So it makes us more difficult to go certain directions if we put all these things in place that seem to be sort of ingrained.
But that's only what's with certain processes.
And when I was referring to processes that we've lately been working on, this was mostly around communication.
Because like before, on the communication level, we would all be sitting together in a room.
So everything we do with customers is remote because we have customers all over the world.
But as a team, we prefer to be in the same room because we felt that the sort of, let's call it, accidental communication we would be having there would be good for us because the closer we are, the better we communicate and the less things don't get said and everybody knows everything.
That's what we thought at least.
But then we started working remote with the whole lockdown and all that.
And actually until today, we're still working from home.
We started seeing that that was not actually something that worked, and we started rethinking these things.
And that's on many levels.
It's on how we organize meetings.
It is around how we communicate in between meetings, and also a bit on the setup we have there with the different platforms and all that.
But if you want me to go in a bit more detail.
We, for instance, started limiting maybe a bit more about the issue first, the efficiency of meetings.
We have quite some of them because we are very focused on building value for Salesforce as a team.
And that requires communicating a lot.
And a good part of that is in meetings.
But we started really feeling that it was dragging us down.
So meetings started to go over time and we needed to book new meetings.
People started losing focus in meetings.
Discussions would get stuck on some points.
We would forget what we decided before and then had to come back on it with loose touch of each other's feelings during discussions, all these kind of things.
And what we started doing is putting a few things in place.
Like now we limit most meetings to just three people.
Because what we found is that if we have more than three people in a meeting, then the others are mostly not participating.
They're just sitting there losing focus.
You cannot have a discussion with more than three people.
Often in the three people meetings, it's even two people discussing and the third person sort of zoning out.
But three is good because then you.
If it's just two people, then the discussion is a bit harder.
We started limiting meetings to two hours where half an hour before, we sort of give a sign that it's going to end in 30 minutes so that we can start wrapping up.
So that at 15 minutes we can actually wrap up, where we then write announcements for the meetings and also book the next one if needed.
And this announcement thing is also a big thing we've been doing lately.
It's always summarizing the results of meetings for the whole team so that everybody is always up to date on every important thing that was said in meetings.
Because otherwise we would find that some things were discussed in a meeting and we had notes and all that, but nobody reads them.
That people would not be up to date on these things.
And that just makes communicating as a team much more difficult.

Omer (36:46.220)
So how do you do that?
Do you use some sort of tool or is it just Having a process and making sure that somebody's responsible for doing that.

Jeroen Corthout (36:53.820)
It's this specifically.
We discuss responsibilities, and then at the end we just type it up.
One person is responsible for that, and we put it in Slack in a specific channel and everybody can read it and maybe have a further discussion on that in a Slack thread.

Omer (37:15.190)
I had a guy on the podcast, a guy called Darren Chait who runs a startup called Hugo.

Jeroen Corthout (37:23.030)
Yeah, I also had him on my podcast.

Omer (37:25.909)
I think that's a great tool.
I don't know if you had any luck with that.

Jeroen Corthout (37:30.710)
Yeah, I know.
No, I know of the tool and I've been thinking about using it, but it's just that currently things run quite well with our combination of Google Docs and Slack that I haven't really taken the leap yet.
There's so many other things that we're working on that I don't feel this, you know, the usual company speak, that it doesn't have priority right now.
Yeah, of course.

Omer (37:57.250)
So for people who aren't familiar with that, the nice thing about it is that it will automatically send reminders to everyone who attended a meeting to.
To summarize their notes, and then it sort of puts it together and shares that with everybody, which is, I think, is pretty cool.
Okay, so looking back at the last.
I mean, you founded the company in 2014, I think.
Right.
So looking back at the last six years, what's.
And I know this is a tough question, but, you know, what's one thing you wish you had done differently?

Jeroen Corthout (38:27.500)
One thing I would say taking a more systematic approach to some things.
And I already spoke taking things slower and about the necessity for processes.
But I think on the topic of trying to improve things, we've often been very haphazard, I think is the right word, quite ad hoc.
And then trying something here and then trying something there, but not super systematically.
I would definitely improve that if I ever start over again.
Another thing we've introduced this year to sort of start making that better is we've introduced a system of habits.
So there's a bunch of habits we define that we do every month, for instance, we develop two features that people love.
We make one, onboarding improvements, three, growth improvements.
We're two times visible outside of our own audience.
We improve our support approach once a month, and we actually do that on a schedule so we never forget to do these things.
And then when you start doing that, you also start needing to build out processes around that to make sure that you actually have a good pipeline of all these initiatives.
And that's what's been helping us lately quite a lot in making all that more systematic.
There's some of the prioritization that we're still working on there to improve, because then you start feeling the pain there when you start organizing things a bit better.
If I would go back, I'd probably focus more on that because it's easy to say, okay, our numeric goal for this year is that we're going to reach this.
But if you don't put the whole system behind that, it's just very hard to get there.

Omer (40:15.760)
Yeah, okay, great.
We should wrap up.
We're going to go to the lightning round.
I'm going to ask you seven quick fire questions.
So you know the drill, you've heard the podcast.
So, yeah, let's go.
So what's the best piece of business advice you've ever received?

Jeroen Corthout (40:28.490)
Yeah, I don't know whether it's the best piece of business advice I've ever received, but it's something that's.
That has stuck with me at least.
It was my first boss who I was leaning against the post of a door, very nonchalant.
I don't know whether that's also a word in English that's French.
And she was saying, like, you want to become a product manager?
I was.
I was still in that pharma company back then.
She said, you need to look like a product manager, you need to behave like a product manager, because people need to think of you that way.
If you're not gonna do that, then you're never gonna get that position.
And it's sort of the.
It's applicable to a lot of things you do.
Some people might call it fake it till you make it.
I don't like to think of it that way because then you get into this, let's say, fire festival situations or whatever, but still, you know.

Omer (41:17.100)
Yeah, good.
Okay.
What book would you recommend to our audience and why, if it's for life?

Jeroen Corthout (41:21.740)
The one book I would recommend that I've read in the last year was why We Sleep.
I forgot the name of the author, but that one had a big impact on my life.
At least it explains you all the things that go wrong if you don't sleep, all the advantages that sleep has, how to go about sleeping well.
And it's just so important.
Since I've read this book, I sleep much better.
And that makes that my day is spent in a much better way.
I'm less tired, I eat less crap.
I'm just more concentrated.
There's less weird impulses all these kind of things and it's actually I did my master's thesis on topic of sleep, so I should have known.
But this book was still really mind blowing.

Omer (42:12.700)
Yeah, we'll include a link to that in the show.
Notes what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful founder?

Jeroen Corthout (42:19.900)
A lot of listening combined with persistence.
I would say you have to figure out what's best for everyone and persist that you're going to find it.

Omer (42:28.780)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit difficult one?

Jeroen Corthout (42:33.780)
What I would usually recommend the super easy one to start with is just getting a calendar booking link because it saves you so much time emailing back and forth.
Everybody accepts the thing Nowadays you don't have to be afraid of sending someone your calendar link and it saves you so much time and hassle.

Omer (42:50.930)
What's a new or crazy business idea you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

Jeroen Corthout (42:55.090)
That's a difficult one.
I've been thinking about what I do after Sales Flare.
Sometimes I don't really know.
The one thing that grabs my attention right now is somehow trying to make more startups succeed and doing something around that because there's so many problems you can get into trying to prevent those.
That would be would be cool.

Omer (43:20.070)
What's an interesting little fun fact about you that most people don't know?

Jeroen Corthout (43:23.190)
I don't know whether it's interesting nor fun, but the first thing I can think about is that I'm a US citizen, both Belgian and American.
I was.
I was born in upstate New York in a small town called Mont Kischool.
Cool.

Omer (43:39.420)
Well that is interesting because I didn't know about that.
And finally, what's one of your most important passions outside of your work?

Jeroen Corthout (43:46.580)
Outside of my work, it varies a bit.
Until the beginning of the lockdown, I was actually taking singing classes.
But then it appeared that it's the best way to spread Corona Singing.
So I haven't been having classes since.
But I really enjoy that and I've been enjoying it for a very long time.
It was only last year that I said I should maybe take classes and that was amazing.
I really love it.

Omer (44:14.790)
Awesome.
Yeah, Rune, thanks for joining me.
It's been a pleasure to chat and share the story of Sales Flare.
If people want to find out more about Sales Flare, they can go to salesflare.com and if people want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

Jeroen Corthout (44:30.170)
Best way would be LinkedIn I think.
But please include a personal message because otherwise I mean, I have no way of making a difference between all the people that sent me connection requests out of nowhere every day and someone that generally listened to this podcast and liked it.

Omer (44:48.090)
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, if someone listens to the podcast or mentions the podcast, you know, that that makes it much easier to connect and you know, people can send you so called personal messages which say that, you know, the one I love is like, you know, I came across your impressive profile.
It's like, come on, it's like, you know, hasn't that been overused enough?

Jeroen Corthout (45:10.580)
But yeah, or I see we have so many things in common.
Yeah.
Why don't we connect?

Omer (45:16.780)
Sure.

Jeroen Corthout (45:17.180)
Yeah.
Yes.

Omer (45:17.980)
Don't do, don't do either of those two things.
All right, great.
Well, thank you and I wish you all the best.
Thank you.
Yes.

Jeroen Corthout (45:26.790)
Same to you.