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“Success usually comes to those who are too busy to be looking for it.”
Henry David Thoreau, an American essayist
Hi, this is Marcin Zaborowski—a serial startupper, marketer, project manager, salesperson, an entrepreneur…—you name it. Throughout my career, I have occupied numerous positions. However, all of them concerned the Internet industry.
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Everyday Hardships…
Several years ago, our marketing team began to generate more and more leads (it would be up to 400 monthly). Consequently, each of them was scored by a salesperson — we would call a customer and conduct a briefing to check up on their:
- needs,
- budget,
- time,
- importance.
Approximately 20% of leads were scored as warm and thus handed over to create a particular offer.
Preparing each of them would take, let’s say, 15 hours, even though every offer was to be made ASAP. We used to work in the evenings and have then some pizza, sending out our propositions to the most interested clients and…
Problem…
… most of the customers did not respond to our emails (approximately 70%).
A salesperson was doing his best as far as follow-ups were concerned: he would search for data in CRM and contact clients. Needless to say, successes were interwoven with failures. After all, it is a standard as, on average, there need to be 5 follow-ups to close a deal.
That is when I had an epiphany: WHAT to do in order to stop asking this dumb question, “Hello, have you find our offer interesting?” and wasting our precious time on follow-ups?
Solution…
- Devise an original tool enabling to set a follow-up which automatically takes care of a client who de facto wants to buy an offer.
- The tool is additionally supposed to notify a salesperson once the offer has been opened and indicates which pages have been viewed.
- What is more, the mechanism should generate performance reports informing about progress of every member of the team (it would significantly help improve performance of those salespersons whose offers are not being open in an ongoing manner).
That is how the idea for Sellizer was born—in 3 steps!
Decision…
In 2017, I decided to leave a cushy managerial post at a fast-growing marketing agency FEB. One year later, I became unemployed. Finally, I selected the team with which I invented MVP as well as strived to retain some clients, and… we decided to build an app.
As of now, over 300 customers from Poland are actively using the app, and we are looking forward to entering foreign markets!
Admittedly, those years were tough for me. Tough, however, with a plethora of many lessons, enormous growth, as well as great people who I encountered along the way.
I am certain: were I to go through all over it again, I would have not made any of my decisions otherwise.
