Get an insight into the way Springest develops sales tools

1. Leveraging your data
by building your
own sales tools
NewCo Amsterdam
Ewout Meijer
Director of Business Partnerships

2. Springest, the public version of the site
3.000.000 unique visitors per year

3. When you want to sell trainings,
you find out that large companies are the main customers:
The person taking the course, is not the one paying for it

4. We built a white-label version of Springest
That way, the company could pay for the courses easily,
and have more control over which courses are booked.
!
This also meant we had to sell B2B

5. Challenge:
How to effectively target
this new group of
potential customers?

6. We solved this by sticking to three guidelines
What will have the
most impact?

7. Proving 2 it live, even
over Doing it live
AKA: Prove that it can Scale or let it Fail

8. 3 Focus on small, lasting,
scalable improvements,
even over creating a big &
bold project, and especially
over growth hacking.

9. And we use our developers to create sales tools too, rather than just the product

10. We approach all new tools, products, services and features in the same way:
the build-measure-learn feedback loop
If you want to learn more about this, make sure to read “the Lean Startup” by Eric Ries

11. By using ASQ, an open source application,
we can quickly and cheaply build sales tools

12. We’ve sold lots of trainings, and gathered data
on the email domains of the companies the customers work at

13. How could we leverage the data
we already have to create new
leads for our new product line?

14. First we filtered the data, to take out any public email service

15. Then we built the corporate tracker:
Tracking the usage of our public site by large companies

16. Then we looked at the biggest users, and approached them first
they clearly had a need for our product

17. To find the right person at these organisation, we used Salesloft

18. It allowed us to find the ideal customers quickly

19. Salesloft also helped us in finding the contact details easily

20. Cold-calling the leads would not be effective, but providing them with valuable insight
would prove our value to them right away. Again, we got to leverage our data, by
showing which providers were used by their employees

21. We measured the effectiveness of this strategy,
by using Streak, a free tool, we got insight into opening rates
and kept track of responses

22. So we first built the tool, then measured the effect, and based on what we learned, we
improved our approach

23. We built a Call-to-Action that would be shown to the corporate users, to tell them about our
new product, and made it show the companies name to increase click rates

24. We measured everything we could, to gain insight into the effect it had

25. When we noticed how effective it was, we set out to automate the way we added new
companies to the tracker. This had previously been done manually.

26. And again we measured the effect,
including which companies used us most during a certain time frame

27. Because showing potential customers the data we had worked,
we decided to dig deeper.
We added data about the number of members, reviews and more

28. Providing insight into this data works, but it was always based on us reaching out.
So we built a way for users to find this themselves.
This shifts the way we do sales from outbound to inbound

29. But we also built a tool to use the data in our outbound efforts

30. A crucial part of the process of developing new tools is to share what you learn with the
team, so together you can improve the processes and tools even more.

31. Ewout Meijer
ewout@springest.com