Gilles, as a Growth Strategist at Salesflare, what does your workday look like? (Gilles)
In one way or another, I'm primarily creating content. I want to provide material that really helps our target audience and deliver it to them in a way that allows them to implement and execute quickly.
To get an idea of what to write about, I frequent social media a lot, mainly in groups where our target audience is active, such as BAMF and SaaS Growth Hacks.
It gives you live insights into what your audience is thinking and feeling at any given moment. People will come right out and tell you all their problems, wants, and needs without you even asking. It gives you free, highly relevant content ideas.
You don't always have to be happy. Sometimes the best way to solve problems is to develop a tool like a Chrome extension or come up with a clever tactic. Then you can go back and write content about it. Distribution is also quite time-consuming. I think a lot of marketers don't spend enough time on that, which is a shame. There are some great pieces that hardly anyone reads.
I document a lot. I externalize my mind and internalize mexican phone numbersmarketing processes for Salesflare. If you don’t, you will face the same problems over and over again and have to go through the same kind of thinking. Externalizing knowledge frees up space for new ideas and I can use most of the things for content creation.
Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time chatting one-on-one with people who have questions for me, either following a post they read or just in general because they think I can help them with advice. I try to keep up with this as much as possible, because it creates the kind of human connection I enjoy and think is valuable to Salesflare as a brand. However, it takes a lot of time away from creating and doesn’t help with staying focused throughout the day.
Tell us 2-3 growth challenges you have recently encountered and how you managed to solve them. (Gilles)
The main problem we are currently facing is the inability to properly attribute organic growth. Our strategy of consistently providing value through an ecosystem of channels drove organic growth, but it also made our main traffic source now direct and the second one Google.
It's hard to pinpoint that magic moment when these people decided to visit our website and sign up. We're currently working on a system where we can identify people across different channels to get more insights into how exactly this organic growth is taking off, so that it's easier to scale and predict.
The other thing I’m finding is that we need to start establishing more low-effort but predictable channels that can work without us doing much about it. Until now, our marketing was mostly about building awareness and brand recognition by consistently offering great value and showing people that we’re here to help them. That effect has been saturated – people know who we are now, and creating value all the time is time-consuming.
To really grow, we should have side channels that are predictable, good examples are Facebook ads and Google Adwords, where you more or less know that if you put in x, you will get y. We are currently experimenting with different ads, copy, and landing pages to get this off the ground.
Some of the tasks aren't worth doing in-house. What do you outsource? (Gilles)
Nothing significant really. For a while we outsourced finding emails we couldn't get with our own low-effort methods, but we got rid of that cost by improving our email finding process and making it completely automatic. The same goes for email list cleaning. We developed a tool that does the dirty work for us.
Instead of outsourcing tasks, we look for ways to automate them and let the software handle them for us. The development of this software is something we outsource because we want our in-house developers to focus on making Salesflare better every day, but once the tool is built, we have effectively eliminated the need to outsource the task at hand.
Tell us about the Appsumo deal you had – how it affected the business, cash flow, etc. (Jeroen)
The AppSumo deal was huge for us. For weeks we were bombarded with new signups, customer service, handling data imports, fixing every bug in the system, and accepting feature requests. It was also a good test for the systems. The good thing is that we survived and came out stronger.
We received a really nice one-time cash injection. Upsells have also been pretty good, but not as high as I would have hoped. AppSumo users are mostly solopreneurs, which limits things a bit.
All in all a transformative experience, that's for sure.
What are 3 tools you and your team can't live without? (Jeroen)
We love automating everything with software tools at Salesflare. Hard to pick three.
Zapier is probably number one for us. It's so easy to connect different systems, pull data and trigger something in another system. We even created a Sandwich Bot with Zapier that orders our sandwiches from the nearest sandwich shop without us needing to do anything other than fill out a form, including all the necessary reminders and notifications in Slack.
Intercom is also amazing. It makes it so much easier to manage conversations with customers, but also automate and personalize all the touchpoints we have with them. It's just not comparable to other apps at all.