Marketing as a Catalyst for Business Growth [with Jeroen Corthout]

Join Andrei and our guest on today’s episode, Jeroen Corthout, as they will be discussing how marketing has been a catalyst for business growth in all the ventures that urine has been involved with as both a marketer and an entrepreneur, amongst many other things.

 

Jeroen Corthout is the Co-Founder of Salesflare, the most popular CRM on both ProductHunt and AppSumo.

 

Connect with Jeroen:

Website: https://salesflare.com/

Jeroen on LinkedIn: https://be.linkedin.com/in/jeroencorthout

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/salesflare

Twitter: https://twitter.com/salesflare

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro 

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

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Episode transcript:

Andrei Tiu

Hello, everybody, this is Andrei and you are on The Marketing Innovation podcast show. Our special guest for today is Jeroen Corthout, the Co-Founder of Salesflare, the most popular CRM on both ProductHunt and AppSumo. And today, amongst many other things, we'll discuss how marketing has been a catalyst for business growth in all the ventures that Jeroen has been involved with as both a marketer and an entrepreneur. So without further ado, hi, Jeroen, how are you? How's everything going? How's the day?

 

Jeroen Corthout

I'm doing fine. You. So it's, uh, today, we always work from home. The only thing that changes sort of is the weather today, the weather is good. 

 

Andrei Tiu

So yeah, a bit of sun, bright sky. So really excited for us to get going. It's been a while since we had a sort of software focused episode. And I think, you know, our listeners, I know, some of you guys have been missing this. So I'm really excited because here we have a very nice case study and success story. And also apart from sales flair, I think you're only it's okay to be with you as well, we can dive into some other stories and success stories, case studies, from your experience. Yeah, we can assess, you know, marketing in the context of small and medium sized businesses as well as scale up and then also what's been changing what's new. What are you guys doing? I'm planning for this year mixing, marketing and sales. So let's go, let's go find your background, maybe just so that people can get to know you a bit better.

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, in very short. My first experience in entrepreneurship was when I was 15 - 16, building websites, that was amazing. I felt like I was creating stuff for people and I would get some stuff in return. Not much. I was young. And for me, it seemed like a lot. But it was almost nothing. I then spent some time also selling cell phones, doing basically some arbitrage. I would buy them either in the UK or in Germany and then and then resolve at a higher price in, in, in Belgium, which is where I'm based. That was while I was a student, it was a nice hobby. And I made a little bit of money, it seemed like a lot of money to me at the time. Again, it's almost nothing. I studied engineering. Because my, my dad is an engineer and this guy was completely raised like that. I considered Computer Engineering. But I didn't do that then because it just seemed a bit nerdy. I ended up doing electronic engineering together with business and then moved into biomedical, which was a whole new thing to explore. Like, way beyond all the stuff I learned or medical courses, it also felt like I could actually make an impact go into healthcare instead of telecom or energy. And then not that these things don't have impact. Don't understand me well, but it just felt like this extra thing. You know, health care, helping other people be healthy. It's something that I'm still quite passionate about, even though I'm not working in healthcare now. I studied business school, because I didn't really want to take an engineering job, I wanted to do something more with customers. I ended up in a marketing role after Business School, which is funny, I mean, studying engineering and my first job was in marketing. I was basically like a junior Product Manager, you could say, and they call it marketing specialist. I was responsible for vaccines. That was my junior product management position. And I was supporting to order product managers with their more shitty tasks. Really, I thought what I was going to do was put products in the markets. What it ended up to be was me making brochures and teaching the sales team how to use them. It was not at all like those kinds of expectations, reality kind of things. It was very much that. I did that for I think about six months I was about to give up. I think I've found that our job at eight months and at 10 months I was gone. I joined a company which was way more exciting. Basically what I found out when I started in pharma was nobody knew anything about websites. I did and I sort of felt like I knew follow marketing also after some months. I thought it's not too complex. So I figured I'm going to start my own agency For pharma companies, and then I had dinner with a guy, which I knew stuff about that, but I didn't know that he basically took my idea to a whole other level, and included things like market research and strategy and impact measurement and much bigger than just building websites. And he offered to join them, because he said, Well, you're too young, nobody's gonna believe you are. And we'll teach you everything. So I accepted that offer. ended up working there for four years. And I learned a lot of narrow way more than I learned anywhere else, I think. I was basically listening to what most big pharma companies, but also some bigger biotech companies wanted to do in their marketing. And then I would come up with solutions, usually, sort of digital, starting with very simple websites and a little campaign around it to actually, I think the biggest project I sold was around half a million that was replacing a Salesforce on two products for a year with a full scale, multi-channel marketing campaign, really targeting the doctors in all kinds of different ways, so that the products will just stay top of mind. So it's getting quite old products, that if the doctor just keeps the product, Top of Mind, they keep prescribing it, you know. But then I always knew I wanted to start my own company, at a bunch of trials, I can go into all of them in detail, but it probably will take us too far. And the most important thing to take away from there is like, if you're listening and you feel the same, this just get started. I failed a bunch of times. But each time I learned, and I took something away from it, and it helped me towards the next time. And I also met people along the way. And, for instance, my co-founder, I met along that way. And at some points, we ended up working together on his company, basically, I was helping you with the marketing and sales and make a long story short, we had a lot of leads that we got at a conference, we wanted to follow those all up. We didn't find any tool that works, we looked at lots of CRMs. But what we saw is that none of them really stuck with us, we always gave up. And we figured that it was because it was just the expectations that these serums were were imposing on us on. On the amount of work we had to do before they became useful was so high that we just couldn't keep up. And we figured that actually what we were doing was avoidable. We were taking information from one digital system, like our emails, our calendar, phone, email, signatures, whatever, there's all kinds of things. And then you take that and just start copy-pasting it into a CRM, and every time you something happens, you have that reflex of putting it into CRM, we figured that that was sort of dumb. And that we could automate that, that we could build a system that that does that for us. That gives us an insight into all the information we have in all the different systems around the customer, like not just their address book levels stuff, but like, did we exchanged emails, what are these emails, meetings, calls, email opens, email clicks, website visits, files we exchanged, but they say on social media, all this kind of stuff. And we built a system that does that, which is elsewhere today, which after a small roads of trying out stuff, we found out that it fits best for small and medium-sized businesses be focused on B2B to keep it simple. Because if you try to serve too many types of clients, your software becomes sort of fuzzy. And this was a very long story very short.

 

Andrei Tiu

So basically, you started and you met your co founder during your time at Dr Dre when you were there a founder right now let's explore plus

 

Jeroen Corthout

So Dr. Dre is one of my companies that failed. The entity is still there. And I use it for sort of consulting purposes. Like it's my personal where I organize my finances. Let's: But that company failed due to a lack of proper business model.

 

Andrei Tiu

Okay, cool. So anyway, since there is where I want to get to, mostly because this, this actually was a success. So, you know, it would be very interesting to, to dive a bit into your journey when you were starting out when you had to launch the business. Obviously, this goes a bit back. So looking at the way that marketing was done at that time, and the way that you know, your competition was looking like, and you know, the market overall, how did you think about launching it when you implemented your first campaigns like your first lead generation campaigns or your sales activity to get customers?

 

Jeroen Corthout

What we focused on a lot initially, was one PR, this just because, you know, you see all this kind of PR going on, like, companies coming in the press and coming big mean, that's the impression you have. So we thought, Oh, that's the way I must say that we did get actually our first customers and a few after that, we got through PR, because they read about what we were trying to do somewhere. And they approached us and said, this is interesting, this is what we need. Most of our customers after that come through more, more of a sales approach, very heavy sales approach, starting from our own network, but then diverging from there. And we tried all kinds of stuff in the beginning, like, we started off with just going around to everyone who wanted to hear just having meetings just was very random. Then I went back and started doing customer interviews, which was way more systematic, where I would also ask, at the end of each interview, who else they knew that I could interview which was a good way of expanding the network. Then, yeah, we were in a startup community. And we did a whole lot of networking there. So we would pick up contacts here and there and then to them go to orders. We did that for a long while. While we were still sort of searching, who sells rare bit appeal to first of all, and we're still also developing our products to a level that people wanted to pay for it. And it was a quite a long and painful journey, but one that I do believe you have to go through. And then you can't just start marketing to the masses, and just throwing a trial online and see what happens. I think when you really go with customers through this kind of journeys and a very hands on way, that's when you really learn how things work, what these people care about why it is they choose you why they go over from the other thing, what's going wrong in your onboarding, all this kind of things on which you can then later build your marketing. Which then basically means that your, you’re making the whole thing, not necessarily more effective, but more efficient. So you don't have to spend that much energy anymore to make it all run.

 

Andrei Tiu

So basically was a freemium in the beginning. And you were offering it to as many people as possible in order to get, you know, reviews and feedback right.

 

Jeroen Corthout

Now, we did offer freemium at some moments, but that was not very public. So chances are that you have never seen that. We tested that. Just in the initial stages, we were trying to sell it at a price on the site and all. But we would often get people on prolonged trials, or we would have student organizations using it for free or else kind of stuff. We probably should have made it free first. I don't know. It's something I'd wonder if I if I'd start again. But because the first step is trying to see how you can get people to use it. And that's really an essential first step after which you can get to Okay, how do we now get the thing that is used to a level that people are willing to pay for it as well. And I think the fact that we didn't give so much free access to it in the beginning sort of made that we had to take a little bit more time to get people to use it. It took quite a bit before the first enthusiastic user apart from me a beard I think was probably about six months after we started developing, or maybe seven or so. And it's, it's about a year and a month or so after we started developing that we actually got the first person also wanted to pay for it. Gotcha.

 

Andrei Tiu

Okay, so basically, going back to your journey with a company, so you guys made the product first. And then you understood where to position it and how to basically sell it best. What was important to the people that were your ideal customers? And then what was, I mean, what did he take in terms of marketing, and also the way that you are promoting the product and the adoption, so that you guys could get to, you know, the most popular product on Product Hunt, or on appsumo. And all getting all this increase in the number of users as well as retention and expansion in terms of geographies as well.

 

Jeroen Corthout

You could say that is the one thing sort of building up into our, and we didn't really, we didn't really like to go all out or something. So like I said, for a long time, I was doing sales, sales and customer support, and really trying to try to nail that before we even started even thinking about blogging, I think we didn't blog until end of 2016, which is two years in. But for us, I think we didn't start marketing. Like really like putting diamond that until we were like 20 or 30 customers. And now we started with, we did some blogging and all but that's that builds up slowly, we tried to get some quicker things going. I remember at the time, for instance, Cora was still working well like writing a lot of stuff on Quora. That's it's not really super effective anymore. And then we build towards that big product launch, at which point we had sort of build the community already, from customers and from people that we started to get involved with our content marketing. And we were also involved in Facebook groups, which also helped us a lot. And then from that Product Hunt lounge, this showed that there was interest, which made that appsumo then also got interested because they honestly didn't believe that they could launch a CRM successfully, they are staying away from that or like, try to at some point, but you know, it's not really something that we see succeeding, we convinced them by being successful product on that it was a possibility. And then from there, that became successful. And actually, from both of those, we sort of upped our scale quickly. Especially from the appsumo lounge, which made that very quickly, we had a much bigger community or army of fans, that could push us to the next level. Because when you think about what made us successful, it's it's the word of mouth. It's how well we score on review sites, it's being perceived as one of them, the, the more interesting players out there and appearing of lists and all that. It's not because we spend a ton on paid advertising, we don't have the money. And if we did, we wouldn't be able to outbid some of the others out there. So we all grow on based on more organic things on the channel, I would add after the ones I already mentioned, is probably content marketing. But that's a way slower thing to build up. There isn't often an article that I write that, that already properly ranks within six months, the ones that ranked in six months, or that are really the top ones. It's more like nine months, that that is usually start performing. So it's very, very small sort of process, especially when you when you when you do this on a on a continuous basis.

 

Andrei Tiu

I was actually about to ask you, because in your niche, you guys have like massive giants with massive giant budgets that are investing and I mean, I'm trying to recall the cost per click, but for example, I know that in the UK was over, I think it was over 20 pounds per click or you know, CRM software and these types of keyword searches. So it's a very big, big and obviously you need big, big amounts to get competitive there. Okay, so yeah, content marketing. SEO is actually one thing that is recurring in many discussions that we had on the podcast as well. When looking at it Ways to gain visibility online without having to be x exert enormous amount of money to get there. So basically, if we were to look at your growth, and the marketing things that were really, really impactful for you, or marketing activities, it was first successfully launching Product Hunt. And then off the back of that, starting to build a community and spreading this word of mouth more and more, right.

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, you could say so but then you're, you're, of course, ignoring all the work that happened before that, and in between.

 

Andrei Tiu

And then some point, some some, you know, some key stages in the journey. Yeah, you know, so so our listeners can identify themselves with one of these stages, and then maybe get a bit of inspiration in terms of what might…

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, definitely no, no, I just want to avoid that people think like, they launched on TechCrunch and lived happily ever after sort of story. And then they were big and no, it all happens. That's that's almost never how it happens. So but we are, we are led to believe that how it happens, and actually that that affected our thinking in the beginning very much as well. So it's really dangerous when you go in with wrong expectations. But those were definitely some of the pivotal moments. Yeah, from there, it's it's been a lot of hard work growing. That's not without any major major inflection points. Okay. month by month, just adding, adding, adding, adding.

 

Andrei Tiu

So how's the marketing, planning looking for this year? What are you guys focusing on? And where do you expect most results to come from?

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, so we keep focusing on SEO optimisation, we are going to be actively looking for backlinks. Now something is something we have never done was more reactive. We are going to keep focusing on something we started last year is really being visible outside our own audience. By being in lots of different places on this podcast, for instance, speaking engagements, all kinds of different partnership possibilities, something we focus on a lot. What else, I mean, let me pop it up, perhaps, because we've actually just decided on it. And we finalized it last week. So presented it to the team are probably going to revamp the websites, we see a lot of possibility there. It's starting to become a bit outdated that we can do way better. Like our website is probably most behind everything we have definitely behind on our application. We're also getting in in more and more CRM listings. It's another way of being visible outside your network, but more of the Google traffic-wise, it's a, it's a good thing to focus on. And then it's in general, we try to do growth improvements, we call it on a consistent basis. So we have our funnel, and we look at where we could improve things. And it's really then identifying these places and thinking, Okay, how can we tweak this, make it better, increase the conversion, make people stick longer, convince people better? And then do these experiments and see how they turn out?

 

Andrei Tiu

Yeah, I think experimenting is a very good tactic when you when you tackle these kinds of situations. So looking at, for example, the paid ads type of, you know, like this, this aspect, are you planning any paid experiments or just focusing solely on organic?

 

Jeroen Corthout

We have in our plans to look at it again. But I doubt that we'll find anything, at least, let's say bait outbound, if that makes sense, like ads that attract people that are not necessarily searching. I see very little possibility there personally, but we keep looking right. You're not going to close our eyes, but it's mainly attracting more of the people that are searching, there are still potentially possibilities but you need to look a bit further than just Google AdWords because as you mentioned, the pay per click rates there are just way too high. Some of our competitors charge way more. While it may not seem at first. In the end, they earn 10 times more on a customer than we do so they can easily outbid us, which then means that in this there, there isn't really a place for us in these places.

 

Andrei Tiu

Yet, soon enough. Cool. Okay, so now because I know you, you need to get into a very important meeting soon. So just to be able to sum up and also show some actionable insights for our listeners, what would you say is, or are of three very important lessons or things that our listeners being on the same kind of journey should be looking at, in order to ensure the biggest chances of success. And these can be practical things or more things within your organization, things to do to do with marketing?

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah, I would say, first one, something that we mentioned a few times is taking it step by step, seeing where you are in the journey and then taking the next step, rather than trying to nail it all from the start, like have a marketing plan, and then roll it all out and then see it fail, I mean, rotter, try to learn and learn and go further. experimenting, there is, is important, but it's, it's equally important to just have a clear understanding of where you are in that journey. Secondly, I think thinking from the perspective of your audience, like, how does your audience look for you? How would they like to get in touch with you? What is it that they are would be triggered by what is it that they are, are needing? If you think from that direction, it makes it so much easier to find the right marketing channels and approaches, rather than to try to push something through or you are used a huge bazooka or you know, and you're asking for three learnings, right? I think, and it's something I didn't mention yet. Our marketing is also only successful because of what we do afterwards. It goes beyond just attracting these people. We tried to build very close relationships with customers in an in a number of different ways. deliver great service to deliver a great product, and that's a whole other episode. But it's only by doing these things, that you can make marketing actually work without having tons of VC money. If you have tons of VC money, you can have a crappy product, crappy service, launch a million of ads, which are not necessarily profitable, and show growth and then raise the next round. If you're not in that scenario, then you need to take things the more sustainable way, the more holistic way. So just to say it's your success in marketing is in that case, also going to be defined by your, your, your full growth approach rather than just customer acquisition.

 

Andrei Tiu

Got you. Okay, super insightful. So now, just the wrapping up. Finally, I know we have some people here that are using CRM, and they would find discovering you very useful for them. So just as an invitation to you know, try the software or to maybe link up to you get in touch with you for partnerships, as well as many other like may be other opportunities, where can people best link up with you? And also who would be the people that would benefit most from your software?

 

Jeroen Corthout

Yeah. People who benefit most from our software is small and medium sized B2B companies that are looking to organize their sales in a better way. Either they're using a sheet, or absolutely nothing, or they have a CRM, but nobody uses it. Or at least it's not properly used to function as a full system that supports their sales follow up. In any of these situations, sales rep might be a good solution for you because we basically make sure that that's going to work by automating a lot of the data inputs and then making that useful by giving you a good overview, notifications, reminders, all that kind of stuff. Sales flare is mainly used by agencies, which means marketing agencies, software development companies, consultancies and this like service service type companies and buy more like tech companies, both in in startup stage and a bit bigger like we have, for instance, a rather large telco company also on our software. That's that that all works. And actually why we see these target groups most is because those are the ones that look slightly further than just typing CRM into Google. And then they actually look for something that works for them. If you want to find out more about sales, where you can go to our site is salesflare.com. You can check out the software. I mean, you can read about it. But you can also see it. If you just click to sign up for a trial, you don't even have to connect your emails to see it. It will give you a walkthrough, if you like. And at the end, you can connect your emails, you get a whole onboarding and we're there to help. But if you want to get in touch with me personally, you can do that through LinkedIn, probably the best place Do not forget to add a personal message. Otherwise, I will not know where you're coming from, you will disappear in a sea of spam. I probably have another thing LinkedIn connections and lunch, which are all spam. So if you include a personal message, I assure you, I will see it, I'll add you and we can have a conversation.

 

Andrei Tiu

Thanks so much for your time today was very insightful and very nice to meet you. I'm looking forward to catching up a bit later as well as and following your journey as well. And yeah, until next time, wishing you an amazing day. All the success and looking forward to meeting soon.

 

Jeroen Corthout

Thank you. This was fun.

 

Andrei Tiu

Same here. Cheers.