Transcript
Intro
Hi, everyone. I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Teams podcast, where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate, and keep together highly effective sales teamsâŚteams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits.
Along the journey, we also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive you is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious Sales Leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, Stronger Sales Teams is right where you need to be.
Ben Wright:
Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop superpowered B2B sales teams. Today's podcast is one I have been looking forward to for quite a while. Our guest, all the way from Paris very early in the morning over there. So thank you for jumping on so early, David. But our guest is David Chevalier. He is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe. So that's Surfe spelt with an e on the end. Different but fantastic brand. Really love it. When I did some research around your brand and we've known each other for a little while, really, really powerful. So Surfe,. It's a B2B SaaS startup based in Paris, of course, and it connects LinkedIn with your CRM. So it's been helping eliminate manual CRM-related tasks, something we've all been working on quite heavily. It's been doing that for about three years now. So for a B2B SaaS product, it's passed some of those nasty little tests that happen in year one and year two. And in that journey, Surfe has been able to secure some clients, such as Google, Bolt, spend desk and more. Google and Spendesk, obviously, names we know pretty well here in the southern hemisphere. So David's really passionate about helping sales professionals and teams, which is why he's here today very much around increasing their sales and their sales efficiency on LinkedIn, a platform that many of us don't use enough. So David really does enjoy social selling and productivity tips, and I've seen him actually share them himself. So while we love having him in the Stronger Sales Teams podcast today. So firstly, David, thank you for jumping on board. Great to have you here.
David Chevalier:
Thanks for having me, Ben, really a pleasure. And as we have a lot of customers, surprisingly, from Australia, I think it's 5% from our whole customer base. I'm kind of used to be up quite early for Paris times because Paris, we normally start at around 9:30 to most of the people. So at the moment it's around eight. And yeah, we start a bit later, but that's totally fine. I know that you in Australia have quite a good work life balance when it comes to at the end of the day, it's like for you, 05:00 p.m. Or something. Most of the people end the day at 05:00 p.m.? Right?
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Sounds pretty fair.
David Chevalier:
Okay. Yeah.
Ben Wright:
Not all of us, those in our own business tend to work a little bit longer. We're 05:20pm here when we're recording at the moment, and we'll go into the night. But that's. You've got it right. We generally have. We work pretty hard, but I think we are learning the benefits around work life balance.
David Chevalier:
For me, as I never been to Australia and when I kind of speak to people, I have the feeling like, I mean, especially as our brand is called Surfe like that. Some of our customers say, okay, 5:00 p.m. grab my board and go out. Especially in the summer.
Ben Wright:
Yeah. Where I live, people are regularly up at 04:35 a.m. out there surfing. So when you do get here, you'll have to come past no surf. In fact, my four year old has been busily telling me that the next place she'd like to visit is Paris. Okay, strange request from a four year old who has not left the country yet. But more importantly than travel, is the brand Surfe? Can you tell me and tell our listeners please, a little bit about Surfe and why you've been successful in that three year journey?
David Chevalier:
So basically, we started Surfe at the end of our study program. So it was 2020, and we didn't plan to kind of start a company. It was just first a pain point we had ourselves. I think we needed to export 100 contacts because we had a customer discovery we need to do for a program manager. And we needed to export it from LinkedIn into HubSpot back then. So me as the business guy, I was just going one contact after another. But my co-founder, who was looking at things more from an engineering perspective, he said, I'm not going to do that. Like 100 contacts, one by one, each contact 25 fields where I do the manual data entry. So he programmed a shortcut. And at the end, the shortcut was the beginning of Surfe. We've uploaded this shortcut on product hunt and we get quite a massive feedback from the CRMs back then. Quite quickly built the customers from, I would say the third month of having the product around. And so quickly, thanks to a lot of product growth and self service things, we implemented a good growth and I think we reached first million ARR after one and a half years or something. Yeah, that was thanks to partnerships mainly, I would say, because the CRMs were reselling us, still reselling us here and there. So I think that's where the major success or growth was coming from.
Ben Wright:
Fantastic. So hitting 1 million ARR, it's no mean feat. I've been there, I've done it four times in businesses myself. And it is absolutely the hardest. The hardest part of growing a business is that first million. So when we talk about Surfe and LinkedIn, it's interesting how we met. So I've been growing my presence on LinkedIn. Surfe is obviously a very prominent brand when it comes to LinkedIn. And David actually found me one day posting on LinkedIn with a surfboard in the background. And all of a sudden he's looking into what I do and I see this request from David and we start talking. And then within a couple of months I'm part of Surfe's 51 Social Selling Tips on HubSpot, which was a terrific publication that was launched really heavily by HubSpot and the Surfe brand, and I think has had hell of a lot of views. And by the way, there was a dozen or so really intelligent, let's take me out of that, a dozen other really intelligent people that posted on that 51 social selling tips. So a fantastic way to meet, right? And shows the power of social selling or social media when you get it right, and how it can bring people together. That publication, David, when it went out on HubSpot, what did that mean for the Surfe brand.
David Chevalier:
For us, I mean, we invested quite early into branding. We got a big branding agency, Focus Lab from the US working on our brand. We came up with the name, but basically they created the first kind of brand identity. And for us a lot of people said, hey, why do you invest so heavily? Like after two years, first of all, we had a rebranding also we were named featured back then and now serve. So why did you invest so much money? And I said, first of all, we're here for the long term. And I recently already said that in a podcast as a small software brand out there, there's so many software brands, and when you look at their colors, it's often purple or this kind of blue color. They're pretty similar. We had that identity at the beginning as well. And it fitted us. It was okay, but it was not really expressing who we are in terms of culture here at Surfe. So we came up with that name. And for us, after that rebranding, we landed a lot of big clients and a lot of bigger partnerships. So for instance, as you said with HubSpot, I would say we wouldn't have gone to that kind of intense partnership with HubSpot. We have a partnership on the marketing side, we have a partnership on the sales side as well. Different things we plan also in terms of conferences. So I wouldn't say if we wouldn't have that brand, I don't believe that we would have that intense partnership because as I said, I compare it to, because we are from Paris, right? So when you look at brands and you look at Vmage, that's a big conglomerate of brands, you see that old brands often kind of collaborating with young and fresh brands. So you have this supreme whatever, Louis Vuitton collaboration. So I kind of compare it a bit like this, meaning that we try to be this fresh, fresh brand in the market of all these old players like the CRMs friends and Salesforce HubSpot, and try to give a new perspective so that these brands want to collaborate with us. And I think this is what we did quite good, especially in the early days. And as you know, relationships and partnerships take time. And I would say thanks to our rebranding, we definitely fostered that relationships and where we see now, good amount of growth coming from.
Ben Wright:
Wow, really powerful when you can articulate what a brand means to a business. I think Surfe has been very successful in acquiring some big customers. So today what we want to talk about today is just that customer acquisition, right? So not just acquiring any customer, but we want to talk about acquiring the aspirational dream type of customer that every business sets a target, sets its targets on achieving. So can you talk me through what's a dream customer look like for Surf? Let's start there.
David Chevalier:
I mean, dream customer is a customer that doesn't churn. I would say that's the dream of every founder having a long term customer, especially as we are more self service. So who doesn't churn? So keep churn low, of course. But then, I mean, I just got new into the software industry, so I was, before actually coming from finance, I didn't know that many different software products or the industry itself. Of course. I'm a consumer, so I'm a consumer of Apple good products, whatever. So of course you have one of these names on your list. If you are doing a software. But as we were so young, we would never thought about landing a big client like Google or Amazon or AWS now. So, I think I didn't have that list, hey, I need these ten names. And then yay, we made it. Or I don't know, these lists, they came naturally. And also the first clients, how do you get them? Often you get them out of your network. So I think Google story was quite funny because I remember the first year I was working from Berlin and it was Covid. So a few friends of mine came here and theyâre in for a week working from Berlin together with us. So we had a little kind of co-working space there. And one friend of mine, he was an SDR at Google Cloud and it was the first year of Surfe and I worked on the product and he worked next to me selling Google Cloud solutions. And then I saw him typing in the data in Salesforce manually and I told him like, âhey Christian, you know that you can automate that, right? With our software, that's what we're doing.â And then he was like, âreally? Okay, maybe talk about it and maybe let's see if there's angleâ. So he was then a major driver for us to give the right introductions in his team and to his managers. Then it took of course, I don't know, like nine to twelve months until we officially signed and had the first year with Google. But it was coming from there. It was coming from network, it was coming from the early days out of coworking in Berlin. And sometimes it happens like this. The same was AWS. It was also based on a warm intro at the end. So I would say the biggest clients or how can you get into them? It's creative ways for us. We do a lot of different, like when we do outreach, combination of automated outreach. That means of course, sequences you can personalise at scale. We have a specific target in mind, or ICP. So for instance, we target the end user first and then we try to find out the pain point of this end user and then try to target the decision makers. But the decision makers we don't target with an automated sequence. We try to look in our networks, if we can identify a common connection or something that we can also automate with the software. And then we reach out to hopefully get a warm intro to this decision maker. Because then first of all, you have like maybe from the warm Intro, social proof, okay, service legit, because it gets referred to me. Second, we already know the pain point because we checked in with the end user before so we can then come up with our first message. Hey, actually, we know you guys looking for efficiencies for your SDR team. I know you have a problem of connecting LinkedIn with the CRM or whatever, so that's where we can help. And then directly, the outreach message is warm intro, social proof. Plus, already checked in with the team, knowing the pain point, addressing the pain point. And I think that was for us, working at scale. I mean, it's big clients, but we were working for us. Very good.
Ben Wright:
Okay. So for me, David, fortune favors those who are in the right place and at the right time. And it certainly sounds like you had a little bit of that with Google and AWS or Amazon. The piece that I really like, that I've just heard you say, is, for us, it's all about trying to determine what the pain or the need is. And we do that through a level of automation in our outreach to the end user. Right. So that's often going to be SDRs or BDMs or so forth that are within sales teams. We then take that pain and scope that we've identified with the end user to get into our targeted decision makers, where we will try and aim for a warm lead, or we'll try and aim through some form of social proof to get in front of them. Right. Love that. Can you talk me through what happens from that point? So we've had our contact with our targeted decision maker. Right. What's the next steps in your process? Because so far, this is, for me, a very powerful way to be targeting out our ideal customers.
David Chevalier:
Yeah. And I mean also for the end user, you can also, of course, look into our existing database. So people who switch jobs, often SDRs, BDRs, account executives, switch jobs every two to three years. So what you can also do is we run analysis. Okay. He's a former customer who has been at Spendesk. Now he's at another fintech where we could sell to. So let's run the sequence. We automate that sequence then as well with the different placeholders and personalisation, and then we have even a higher reply rate because it's based on different triggers. But yeah, once we got the decision maker. To get back to your question, of course we want to land a meeting. And ideally, what we need in the meeting as well is if it's a bigger go to market team, we need kind of the other decision makers, if there is, from other countries. So we try to get them all in one call as well. Plus, at not at this stage, but the later stage, we also need to have a budget holder, which is for us mostly rev ops. So they're holding the budget. And decision makers is more Head of SDRs and BDRs in the call. What we do is sometimes we take the end user with us in the first call, but more down the line in the second or third. Why do we take the end user with us? Because he functions for us as an internal seller. So hey, listen Ben, let's say you are the end user, you're with us in the call, and we can say, hey, Ben already used Surfe at his past company. They've seen this. In this success, he found out. Now to do his job the best way, he needs Surfe, Surfe again, because he has currently no process for getting contacts from LinkedIn into CRM. So then the decision makers have directly someone internally who can roll it out or drive it, let's say. So what we often see is that the end user then says, okay, can you maybe plant that into your teams and try to get more end users for PoC or for test? And then of course we check in with the end user and say, hey, can you please add your other SDR colleagues to that PoC? And then he basically starts selling internally for us. And that's what we've seen is the best way. We get quite a high participation of the end users in this PoC. We check in with them, then again individually. Also you can also automate some stuff here. Just the first message, for instance, we send on LinkedIn. Hey, hope you like the overall experience so far. Let us know if you have questions. And then we have a mid trial check in, of course, again with the managers. We also have some data, also in an automated process which we will give to them. And then at the end of the trial, as you know, the process - check in, check for budget, see discounts, see terms and agreements, compliance, hopefully shorten that process because this can take a long time. And yeah, then at that time we also have mostly rev ops in as well in the discussion, then hopefully get to order form sign and that's our process.
Ben Wright:
There is a huge amount of information in what we've just gone through. I'm going to try and disseminate this right for everyone listening and you can let me know if I've got it right. So we are talking about landing your aspirational or your dream client. The bigger customers typically that are not easy to win through a one to one connection. So there is a level of automation that Surfe used to get out to the end user with the primary aim of finding out the pain or the opportunity, right? So the scope of what you need to talk to the decision makers about, you're then taking that information that needs analysis and using it to target the decision makers, either through your internal network where you already know those decision makers, or through a level of social proof or something similar, or even using one of the internal users to get to those decision makers. Once you're there. And now I'm not a huge fan of internal selling personally, but I really like how you spoke about internal selling, which is your aim is to get all the decision makers in the room together, even if it means cross borders. So Sales Leaders and salespeople, that's something to really hook into. If Surfe can get decision makers in cross borders, then we can do it too, right? So also by having that end user in that meeting as a form of social proof, you're actually able to have a very powerful internal seller that's helping you win that deal. So have I got it right so far?
David Chevalier:
You got it right, and you know how it is. So when there's a decision maker in the room, a follow up with a decision maker is not always given. So that's why at the end of the call, often the decision maker says, okay Ben, let's say you're the SDR, BDR. Sounds good. Can you then follow up with your team and colleagues to ensure that we kind of start a trial and everyone is on boarded. So they always need someone to kind of give the next step or fulfill the next step because he himself or herself, he won't do it. So I think when we have that end user in the meeting, and often the end user doesn't say anything for the whole meeting besides that at the end, when it's the action, it's towards the end user. So that's why we like to have them in the call as well and these decision makers to find them also. So what we do is kind of an influence web. So that means often what I saw in the past as well, also with our sales team at the beginning was, hey, you're trying to strike a deal, but you forget this and this person you need for budget or whatever. So then you're kind of going into a sales cycle with not the right people and you waste basically time because the discovery was not done well. And then you struggle in the negotiation phase because of course this guy has no budget. So where to go all the way with that person. So that's why we do kind of an influence map as well. And there's also nowadays tools how you can do it to identify who's the budget holder, who's the different decision makers also cross countries and then have a structured way of approaching them. Either we are warm intro, for instance, either we are level of influence, so there's different ways to do that, but it's always a connection for us between an influence map and we try to have a warm intro coming with it.
Ben Wright:
Great. So there's some real power there in doing your homework. But also what you mentioned is having that internal champion, that product champion, really helping not only roll the product out, but getting you those meetings is really important. Okay, so heaps of information there, those that are listening, there's going to be some show notes at the end of this. So this is one you might want to download if you're looking to see how you can apply it to your business or your sales team. But David, you're a sales leader in a business and you're wanting to growâŚto the last question for me today, if you're wanting to grow fast within your sales team and you just have too much to do automation, it should be something we're looking at as sales leaders anyway. But some of us are taking a little bit longer to come to the party and that's absolutely fine because we all move at different paces. If you were recommending a Sales Leader start looking at automation, where would you start?
David Chevalier:
Yeah, of course we always look at top of the funnel, right? So at leads nowadays, account executives need to be full cycle reps, so they need to do outreach. Everyone needs to do outreach. Meaning at these tools, we look, of course, first and we look what we can automate here, personalise here at the scale. Because to be honest, the cold, cold emails, we all get them and they don't really work. You don't have high reply rates, so you really need an intent and you really need to personalise if you do emails. For us, emails is actually from the ranking where we get the most booked meetings from on rank three. On rank two, we now have socials, where we have kind of a strategy, working with different influencers, our field experts in our field, we run campaigns, they do postings. Then you can, for instance, scrap the likers and comments of these postings, put them then into an automated sequence. So here we use of course tools like outreach and the classics. And then number one is for us, if the reps want to do it and do it consistently, is still cold calling because of course have 50 dials per day from these 50 of ten connects from these ten connects you have four booked meetings. So of course it's an exhausting way. And by our generation, so I mean now the 20 to 30 years old, we didn't grow up with speech, with speak, so we grew up with text. So of course for younger reps, it's harder to do cold calling. There's nowadays a lot of tools also out there who help you there, AI coaching to kind of test your cold calling strategies. So that helps. But for us, at the beginning, we first didn't want to invest heavy into tools because we just first want to test does our approach work? Instead of getting tens of tools and then paying thousands of euros for it, we took a shortcut by working with an outbound agency as a service. So they basically find these different events on socials. Like I said, when someone is mentioning us, for instance, and then we take the comments and likers, check if they're in our ICP, come up with a messaging, just personalised, and then they send out an email. Same when we go to events, kind of. I often got the message, how did you send me an outreach email one day after the event, which was very specific, mentioning you were meeting at the event? My colleague, because the colleague was working in marketing and we need to target course revenue leaders. So how did you come up with that outreach and automate it? So we use the outbound agency as a service. Their name is get scalability, or scalability. They're working in France also with a lot of scale ups, and they were giving us the initial push because we didn't have our sequences set up the right way with the right personalisation in the first months. We also needed to find with the reps who's targeting whom. And also we need to warm up, of course, their emails and all that stuff, which takes time, and especially if you have younger reps who maybe have no experience in doing a lot of outreach. For us, the shortcut was really outbound as a service, and we get from them per month, 40 to 50 leads, book meetings, which is working very well, I must admit. It took also six months to find really that recipe. But now we have plenty of data. We know whom to target with kind of what message. Where can we find these intent and trigger events on socials, for instance, on past customers who switch jobs on events as well. And also these warm intros combined with the influence maps. So yeah, I think that was the short route for building up a sales team and using automations.
Ben Wright:
Some tried and tested ways in there, some modern ways, with a little bit of automation outreach and some of those classic tools you mentioned, and some good old fashioned rolling up the sleeves cold calling, which I love. Yeah, excellent. Well, thank you. Thank you very much for your time today, David. So please everyone, check out Surfe. It's a great brand, had a great involvement with them so far through my business. And also check out David Chevellier. David, where can people find you if they're looking to connect?
David Chevalier:
Yeah, just on LinkedIn. David Chevalier, as you said. You can also, of course, send me an email. I will drop it now here [email protected] and yeah, also, thanks for having me. Thanks for your contribution, by the way, for HubSpot ebook. So if you want to know what Ben contributed, a little contribution from your side, check it out. It's a social selling ebook where you find kind of different tactics around, also video selling. For instance, recently talked about another friend of ours, and you know him as well, Jan Mundor, who's kind of now big, I would say, on LinkedIn as well. So yeah, a lot of stuff to read and yeah, thanks for having me, Ben.
Ben Wright:
My pleasure. We'll drop that HubSpot link into wherever we're promoting this podcast.
That's it for today, everyone. For now, please keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve.
E52 Landing Your Dream Customer with David Chevalier
