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Selligy |
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August 25, 2014 Issue |
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The Most Powerful Name In Corporate News and Information |
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Mobile Solution for Salespeople |
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About Selligy
Selligy’s mobile
solution saves salespeople time -- and gives sales managers dramatically
better visibility into sales activities, sales productivity, and which deals
need attention. Selligy is dedicated to helping sales teams make their
numbers by tracking and analyzing the effectiveness of their sales
activities. Selligy is backed by DFJ and Salesforce.com. Visit us at
www.selligy.com.
Interview conducted by: Lynn Fosse, Senior Editor, CEOCFO Magazine, Published – August 25, 2014
CEOCFO: Mr. Patel, what is the idea behind Selligy? Mr. Patel: Both myself and my co-founder spent a ton of time in our careers in sales and sales management, and the observation that we made was there are not great tools for sales people themselves – tools that bring together all the information they need for their primary activity, which is connecting with the customers, whether in person or on the phone. We built a mobile experience thinking from the sales representatives’ perspective. We took all the contacts that a mobile phone has, the calendar of all appointments you have, the location of where you are and all the contacts that are in your phone, and we use that to create an experience for you as you are going to visit customers. It is an experience that will read your calendar, figure out who you are visiting, reach into your CRM system like Salesforce and grab the opportunity information and contact information, reach out to social media and grab social profiles and social news, and reach out to mapping services to give you an accurate time to finish the meeting to get to your next one on time. Because Selligy is so easy to use and all encompassing, sales reps use it to go place to place but then they also use it report back to their company what happened at all the meetings, what are the outcomes and how are the outcomes driving opportunities forward. The combination of those two things have really driven our business. Customers who deploy our product see something like 150 percent more updates into their CRM system than before. They see 500 percent more activities created in their CRM system, and it just gives them more insight into what their sales reps are doing and how those things are being reported.
CEOCFO: Have sales reps been trying to put together that wealth of information or is this something not even on the radar screen for most people? Mr. Patel: Sales reps do have to put together information when they are getting on the road, so a typical sales call is that you fly into a place that you do not have detailed knowledge of, and you visit three or four customers, so you are really just going from place to place. Unless you are prepared and you actually have everyone’s addresses and a map to get you from place to place as well as a sense for how to reach your customers to let them know if you are early or late, you are just going to be bad at this. Instead of spending a ton of time planning all of this, what we did is by simply reading your calendar; we did all that for you. It is an incredible efficiency play for the sales rep. Sales reps are out looking for tools like this. Ever since the smartphone came out, the tools that are even on the phone just out of the box are very valuable, like email, calendar and maps, but those three things are exactly the same, whether you are a soccer mom at home or a sales rep out in the field. When you install something like Selligy, it knows your contacts and it knows what you are doing. It connects to your enterprises on Salesforce, so it gets you much more information.
CEOCFO: What were some of the challenges in putting the technology together? Mr. Patel: I think one of the challenges is that you have to really simplify the enterprise solution. Salesforce is a vast product, and it can be very sophisticated, but it gets really difficult to boil that down to a four-inch screen that you are carrying around in your hand. It was really about people understanding what sales reps do. Part of that was our experience. We both have been sales reps, so we know what sales reps do, but it was also interviewing many sales reps to understand what their individual processes were, trying to find a commonality and then providing the information you need, when you need it, on the go. If you look at a CRM record in Salesforce for an individual contact, there are all kinds of information. What is your admin’s name, what is your admin’s anniversary, what is your wife’s name? There is just tremendous data there. Some of it is very valuable if you are sitting in front of a computer, and some of it is very valuable when you are on the road. We figure out which goes into which category.
CEOCFO: What have you learned over the past few months as the product has been deployed that might have caused some changes, tweaks or ideas going forward? Mr. Patel: We have learned that there are different classes of sales people that are doing different types of activities, and we knew this from the beginning from our experience. We have really understood exactly what those activities are. For example, one of our customers that we have recently signed up is an auto parts manufacturer. They have hundreds of sales reps that literally go door to door to every mechanic shop and body shop and get a sense for how many of their products they have on their shelves, and what products need re-ordering. That is a completely different type of sales person for example, than from one selling an enterprise software product, who spent some time on the phone with their customer and spent some time in person, and is selling $100,000 software. What we are doing is learning how to create an experience for each type of sales person that meets the objective of our company, which is to give information that you need in your hand, or on your tablet. That is really what in the last couple of months especially; that we have been learning what those differences are and create products that address these needs.
CEOCFO: The pricing on your site seems quite reasonable! Mr. Patel: The customers do not feel like it is too expensive.
CEOCFO: How do you reach out to potential customers? Mr. Patel: By taking an industry-focused approach. Like an example I was telling you, we are determining that the different types of roles within a sales organization, trying to bucket those by industry, and then going and targeting that particular industry. When we first started off, we were targeting an enterprise software company. That is what our careers have been. We know that the product is used better by software companies. Most enterprise software companies are more forward leaning in their use of technology, so we really targeted them. As we started to acquire customers in other spaces, for example, manufacturing, insurance services and medical equipment companies, we started then doing special promotions as well as targeted efforts to reach those audiences.
CEOCFO: How might Selligy be different a year from
now?
CEOCFO: How have you been gaining attention from the industry? Mr. Patel: Sales Velocity was a terrific way of doing that. We did it with other vendors that are all selling into sales, and that of course gets you noticed. We attend events, and we have analysts that are covering our space and talking about what we are doing. It is a very unique solution, but we do not really have competitors. There is no one else in the market doing anything like this, so that also is getting attention.
CEOCFO: Gartner has taken notice! Mr. Patel: Gartner has taken notice. They named us a Cool Vendor in CRM Sales for 2014. Which is very exciting. And they do interviews, webinars, and other such activity and mention Selligy. The reason I know this is because people come up to me and say they just heard from Gartner that they really should look into us. It is a great feeling.
CEOCFO: What is the geographic range? Are you primarily US today and do you see a change? Mr. Patel: We are primarily US today. I think that we will definitely be expanding into other territories soon. The market is so large here, and we are just getting started.
CEOCFO: Are you funded for the efforts you would
like to make or will you be seeing another round?
CEOCFO: How did you come up with the name Selligy?
CEOCFO: Put it all together for our readers. Why is Selligy a company to watch? Mr. Patel: What we hear from CEOs, VPs of sales and VPs of marketing is that getting information from the field as to what is happening in the sale is like the black box. It is like the black hole. If you look at the whole customer development lifecycle from the minute that the customer shows some level of interest and becomes a lead in your system all the way through to close, the part that everyone knows everything about is marketing. Every time you send an email to a customer, you know when they opened it, you know when they clicked on it, you know if they forward it to a colleague, and you just have tremendous information. Once you pass it off to your sales rep, there is nothing. You do not know if the sales rep ever called the customer even once. All you know is if the customer has bought and if the opportunity was closed. Then you know there was success there. That black box is the most expensive part of your customer development site. It is where you hire field sales people to get on airplanes and visit customers, and it is kind of unacceptable that there is so little information available. It is not the sales person’s fault. If the sales person is out in the field visiting four or five customers a day, the last thing you want them to do is in between every meeting open up a laptop, connect to Wi-Fi, and put in notes. That is taking away from their selling time. With Selligy, that solves a problem that has been out there for a very long time, which is lack of visibility as to what is actually happening in the field. This message resonates and CEOs definitely will say yes. Once a week on the Monday morning sales call with my sales reps, I get to find out what everyone was doing and in between then I have absolutely no visibility. |
"Customers who deploy our product see something like 150 percent more updates into their CRM system than before. They see 500 percent more activities created in their CRM system, and it just gives them more insight into what their sales reps are doing and how those things are being reported."- Nilay Patel
Selligy 1335 San Carlos Ave Ste. B San Carlos, CA 94070 650.394.5401
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Nilay
Patel