Jeroen Corthout, Making Customer Relationship Management Human – InnovaBuzz 445

Jeroen Corthout, Salesflare

In this episode, I’m really excited to have as my guest, Jeroen Corthout, Co-founder and CEO of Salesflare, an intelligent CRM built for small-medium businesses 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 is now the most popular CRM on Product Hunt and top-rated on review platforms like G2 for its ease of use and automation features.

In our discussion, Jeroen talked to me about:

• Making customer relationship management human
• Using automation at scale and still keep the human element
• How to land guest appearances on podcasts

Listen to the podcast to find out more.

Listen to the Podcast

Show Notes from this episode with Jeroen Corthout of Salesflare

Key points and takeaways from this episode include:

• A podcast is a great personal medium.
• Salesflare is extremely customizable. It dynamically pulls data together and automates data whilst still putting you in control to assist you in following up every opportunity at the right time and in the right way.
• Salesflare gathers publicly available social info, contact details, and email signatures and puts them into your address book. It also connects to your calendar and mobile phone to log your meetings and interactions with customers.
• Understanding what triggers people – their passions, is a nice way to build the personal relationship into a business relationship. It creates a whole new level of human connection that is better than just generic follow-ups. 
• Take the time to meet people and don’t take it as yet just another meeting but something to meet their needs. Take good notes about their passions and add it to the system, because as you grow, it becomes difficult to remember these things. 
• Understanding your customers on a more personal level enables continuity of business conversations.
• Know where your audience hangs out and look for relevant podcasts that are a right fit for you. 
• Map out all the topics that you can talk about. You want to be able to add value to the host and their listeners.
• Remember that search results don’t always give the best results. Manually filter out the list to check if you are a good fit for that podcast as well as for podcasts that are no longer active.
• It’s also important to make sure that the podcast aligns with the process that you are expecting to meet.
• Prepare all the things that you need for being a podcast guest. 
• Automation sometimes lets you lose that empathic connection with your target audience. Knowing how to strike the balance between being more efficient and staying human is key to automating. It’s one of the main skills that you need to have as a marketer.
• Don’t make your podcast pitch all about you. Focus on providing value to the host and to their listeners.

The Buzz – Our Innovation Round

Here are Jeroen’s answers to the questions of our innovation round. Listen to the conversation to get the full scoop.

1. #1 thing to be more innovative – Take time for it; run, meditate, sleep well, read a book.
2. Best thing for new ideas – Reading books outside of your own area of focus.
3. Favourite tool for innovation – Slack, Microsoft Teams, 
4. Keep project/client on track –  Map out the process very clearly.
5. Differentiate – Figure out that paradigm shift that can be made. There is always this one thing that you could change that will flip everything around but everybody thinks it is impossible. Go and find that thing.

To Be a Leader

Take good care of yourself. Sleep well, exercise, and read some good books. Lay the foundation for you to be innovative rather than trying to push it out of yourself.

Reach Out

You can reach out and thank Jeroen through their website and on LinkedIn.

Suggested Guest

Jeroen suggested we have a conversation with David Hansel who helps coaches with software. So David, keep an eye on your inbox for an invitation from us to the InnovaBuzz Podcast, courtesy of Jeroen Corhout.

Links

• Website – Salesflare
• Twitter – @JeroenCorthout
• LinkedIn
• Facebook
• Blog – How to Get on Podcasts & Be a Great Guest

Cool Things About Jeroen

• He’s also the founder of Doctura, a company that works with tech startups and healthcare companies to develop their marketing and sales approach using the latest tech and insights.
• He holds a Masters Degree in Biomedical Technologies and Business Management.
• He speaks Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

Listen to the Podcast