Today’s interview is with Jeroen Corthout who is the co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, an intelligent CRM that has been built specifically for smaller businesses selling B2B. It is most popular with agencies and fast growing startup companies. Jeroen joins me today to talk about the problems that sales people have with CRM systems and what he is seeing in the service and experience market and what sales people should be doing to develop better relationships with their customers.

This interview follows on from my recent interview – What if customers want more than excellent service? – Interview with Steven Van Belleghem – and is number 365 in the series of interviews with authors and business leaders that are doing great things, providing valuable insights, helping businesses innovate and delivering great service and experience to both their customers and their employees.

Here’s the highlights of my chat with Jeroen:

• Sales people don’t really use CRM systems beyond what is required for management reporting.
• Often that comes down to the fact that these systems are not designed with sales people in mind and they require a lot of data input. This is not the core skill-set of sales people.
• Management reporting is not something that sales people really identify with apart from getting their commission right.
• What many systems don’t do is connect and automatically collect data from many different systems to make things easier for sales people. This is what Salesflare does. It automatically fills out things like your address book so you can keep track of all the interactions you have with the people you’re in contact with.
• Ultimately, a system should be easy to use and help keep sales people organised so that they can give every customer the sort of the attention they need but also do it at scale.
• If done properly that allows information capture and sharing which benefits others in the organisation.
• How much learning has been done is the biggest lesson that has come out of the last few months.
• The thing that many companies are doing now is sharpening their target markets to make sure that they are talking to the right people.
• The way in which you get in touch with people has shifted.
• The big challenge for the future: recreating the sort of customer relationship that we used to have offline in an online and remote environment.
• How can you keep track of and relate to customers when they are slightly more ‘hidden’ from you than before?
• That’s a challenge for many companies because they basically need to rethink the whole customer experience to see how they can better manage expectations.
• The thing that companies need to be thinking about is mapping out their new buying process as soon as possible because if you’re not selling in the way that people expected to buy then you will be in trouble.
• Don’t make any fixed assumptions and get stuck in the past.
• Jeroen’s Punk CX word: Punk
• Jeroen’s Punk CX brand: Duolingo

About Jeroen

Jeroen is co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, an intelligent CRM built for SMBs selling B2B, mostly popular with agencies and fast growing startup companies.

Salesflare itself was founded when Jeroen and his co-founder Lieven wanted to follow up the leads for their software company in an easier way. They didn’t like to keep track of their leads manually and built Salesflare, which pulls customer data together automatically and then actively helps you to follow up.

It’s now the most popular CRM on Product Hunt and top rated on review platforms like G2 for its ease of use and automation features.

Check out Salesflare, connect with Jeroen on LinkedIn and include a message here and check out some of his writings on managing a remote team here and on remote selling here.

Image by Shutterbug75 from Pixabay