SalesWise Aggregates Your Customer Relationships

Keeping track of client relationships within different teams in your company can get overwhelming — fast. Contacts are constantly being passed from sales to marketing to legal and things can easily fall through the cracks. SalesWise is solving this problem by creating a dashboard that gives you “unprecedented visibility,” as CEO Gregg Freishtat calls it.

Their platform aggregates your calendars, email, document management and everything in between, all in one place. According to Freishtat, clients that use SalesWise receive 30 percent less email. Yes, that means Inbox Zero is not an impossible dream.

SalesWise raised $1.3 million to scale their sales and marketing initiatives last December and plans to add 20 more jobs this year. The productivity software company has raised $3.5 million to date.

Hypepotamus spoke with Freishtat about their plans for 2017, how they hope to break into the business relationship intelligence space, and why having a solid product is essential.

How do you hope to leverage those funds at SalesWise?

Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. Sales. A little bit of marketing. We are at the point in the growth of the company where we have a really solid product market. We got happy customers who are loving the product. It’s a brand new space.

Our number one challenge/opportunity is scaling our sales operations. Figuring out what the best way to go to market is. We are still experimenting with outbound on account-based marketing, paid marketing, contract marketing, social media marketing — all of the usual suspects. Then, we are looking to find the most scalable way to introduce business relationship intelligence to the market.

Why do you think is important to have that solid product first before introducing more things into the company?

There are so many fast companies out there that I think one of the biggest reasons folks don’t succeed is what I call premature acceleration.

The idea that you have built some technology that people like or think is cool doesn’t mean that you’ve built a foundation for a business. You really — I shouldn’t say cannot because you can — you shouldn’t scale your customer acquisition initiative until you believe that you have a foundation for a real company. It means that customers are willing to pay. They are willing to pay enough to build a viable business and most importantly, that you are delivering real value to your customers, particularly as a venture-backed company.

What’s your revenue model?

The idea of buying software and then charging for every single seat or every person to use it, we think it’s tired and not a very productive business model. When you make an investment in technology, you want to give it to everyone that you can, who can use it productively.

We are retro on our business model and we look more like an enterprise pricing model — where based on the size of the company we give you a single price. Then, we encourage as many people in the company to use the platform and do so productively.

What kind of benefits can a mid-size enterprise see while using SalesWise?

What SalesWise does for sales leaders is provide a comprehensive view of every person, every message, every CRM record, every document, every meeting that’s ever transpired all with no data entry and its a 100% accurate. There are at least 10 people in your organization that have a hand in a relationship. SalesWise provides instant visibility into everything — all of it — every person that has ever touched the account.

We transcend the silos of data that lives in CRM, lives in calendars, lives in emails, lives in Dropbox, and we provide a single pane of glass. It shows sales leadership everything that’s going on with the relationship in real-time.

How do you stand out against your competitors?

There are very few people that look at the world the way we do. This is a brand new space. We are trying to create a space called business relationship intelligence. There are groups of companies that are very close. There are all of the CRM players who are trying to be at the center of all of this data. For a number of reasons, we don’t think that they are well situated. Mainly because of their business model.

We are providing something that everybody needs access to. People cannot afford to give everyone in their company Salesforce seats, and then, there’s people in the BI space. What they do is they look at all of the relationships and give you the health of your business and macro-trends. Whereas, we are one of the only companies that we know of that go really deep and detailed into the exact specifics of any given relationship.

Do you have any advice for other entrepreneurs?

Having the patience to learn about your customers, to learn about the market space that you are trying to tackle is not something that can be cheated with capital. You actually have to invest the time as an entrepreneur to understand where the best place is to deliver value and do your best for both your product and go-to market.