Hey everyone! We are back again with another spectacular week of the Startup Junkies Podcast! This week, Caleb Talley, Jeff Amerine, and Matthew Ward talk with Jeroen Corthout, co-founder and CEO of Salesflare. Salesflare is a simply powerful CRM that automates data to build better relationships and make more sales. It’s a fast, visual, and easy-to-use sales machine that is built by humans for humans. In this episode,  you will get to hear about the evolution of Salesflare, the amount of time employees spend on SaaS platforms, the flexibility of raising various funds to run a startup, and the impact of COVID on Salesflare. We are happy you are tuning in with us!

Shownotes

(1:13) How Jeroen started Salesflare

(9:04) Salesflare’s target customers

(13:26) Growing Salesflare

(16:26) COVID-19’s effects on Salesflare

(18:37) Jeroen’s experience with accelerators and incubators

(21:24) Jeroen’s 5-year vision

(24:26) Jeroen give advice to his younger self

Links

Caleb Talley

Jeff Amerine

Matthew Ward

Jeroen Corthout

Salesflare  

Quotes

“When we started Salesflare, it was to help salespeople focus on their customers with a very easy and automated system.  So they can…perfectly follow up with their customers without spending any time on robotic tasks.  And that’s still our biggest mission today.” (4:21) 

Belgium Does More Than Just Beer

On this episode, the Startup Junkies podcast was able to sit down and talk with Jeroen Corthout, co-founder and CEO of Salesflare. Salesflare is a customer relationship management software (CRM) for small businesses that sell B2B.

Previously, Jeroen worked in a marketing consulting agency, using a CRM for the first time. Other people told him that this CRM would be quite helpful for organizing sales and follow-ups. Despite his effort to make the CRM work for him, he struggled with its usability. Jeroen also noticed that his colleagues struggled with the software as well. While his boss was able to utilize the CRM for reporting, the salespeople found their efforts to be futile.  

At his next job, Jeroen scoured the market for a CRM that would be more useful and intuitive for him and his coworkers, but he found that the market was saturated with CRM’s that were mostly ineffective. The problem with the CRM’s that were available was that they relied on the salesperson to input tedious data that the software could likely find for itself. Jeroen went on to co-found Salesflare with the hopes of creating and selling a CRM software that does not rely on salespeople to be data entry robots.

“When we started Salesflare, it was to help salespeople focus on their customers with a very easy and automated system. So they can…perfectly follow up with their customers without spending any time on robotic tasks. And that’s still our biggest mission today.” (4:21) 

Salesflare’s system sits on top of a cumulation of data from emails, calendars, phone calls, email signatures, web tracking, and more. It takes all of this information and curates it to make it available to its clients in a matter of a few clicks. This method has turned the CRM world upside down. Salespeople used to exchange a few emails with clients and then have to input all of that information into their CRM for tracking purposes. With Salesflare, the information exchanged through those emails is automatically imported, freeing up time and resources for the salespeople.  

Unlike many startups, Jeroen has been reluctant to take Salesflare down the VC path. The VC structure is built on companies going through exponential growth in a short period of time, and Jeroen does not see that for Salesflare. A slower growth period has allowed Salesflare to avoid raising VC money and instead focus on creating a methodical, practical approach to the market.  

In the future, Jeroen wants to help innovators create systems that solve pressing issues that the world faces. Right now, he does this through Salesflare, freeing up salespeople’s time to think, create, innovate, and sell new, progressive products instead of entering data.