Making sales easy

Salesnudge combines sales team management, coaching, reporting and actionable sales data into one refreshingly easy-to-use solution that boosts your sales performance.

ML2Grow provided a fully operational data infrastructure for  Salesnudge that will strengthen their MVP and make their product future-proof.

We interviewed Tom Pennings, the founder & CEO of Salesnudge, about their mission and why they chose to work with ML2Grow.

What makes the life of a sales manager difficult?

If you lead a small sales team, you’ll find yourself asking the same questions. Am I applying the right strategy? Do I have to adjust? Am I making the correct assumptions on how to accelerate sales?

It’s not always easy to find the correct answers. For example, to answer the question of whether your actions are improving the conversation rate of deals, you need to know your conversation rate at all times. These are typical struggles that a sales manager has within a small organization. But also in larger teams, it’s typical that the same questions keep popping up:

“Steve, that big account you were working on, has it been closed yet?”

Sounds familiar, right? Salesnudge believes such information should be readily available in the CRM and visible to investors and the board. Or other stakeholders.
It’s a game-changer to extract how well your sales are performing at any given time.

How do you know if your actions are having the desired impact as a sales manager?

Well, there are many metrics that sales managers use to develop and evaluate their strategies.

For example: how many meetings do we need on average to hit our goals? What are the best lead sources, and how well do they convert? How much money comes from a signed deal on average? And if we want to double our turnover next year, what do we need?

Many companies do not have those insights. That is why we designed salesnudge to be able to digitize these things entirely. The question of ‘Hey, fill in the CRM correctly by the next meeting’ should be one of the past with our platform. Decision-makers can see in a blink of an eye that their sales managers are on track to hit their targets.

That’s what Salesnudge is all about. Our platform fully integrates with Teamleader, a top-rated CRM platform in Belgium.

How is Salesnudge becoming the platform companies need?

To create value, we ask ourselves important questions such as: when you implement a sales strategy, what KPIs do you define for that? What kind of objectives do you use? Will we focus on new enterprise accounts or try to sell more to existing clients? Or are we going to focus on SaaS companies?

This way, we keep identifying questions critical to a business but challenging to answer because the insights you get from Teamleader will only get you so far.

We also get inspiration from clients. For example, a client said to us: we firmly believe that our salespeople who have filled out their schedule on Friday for the coming week are more successful. But is that a gut feeling or reality? It’s good to have a theory about something, but you need to be able to prove it. That’s what we want to achieve—creating the possibility to track many of such KPIs at all times.

Tom Pennings, CEO Salesnudge

How is ML2Grow helping to achieve this?

First, you have to be able to see the schedules; you also have to encourage those people to fill in their schedules and check whether this has happened or not. Now about the KPIs, we already have a dataset of everything the CRM uses, such as transactions per person and deals that we put in our Salesnudge database.

With the Salesnudge integration into Teamleader, we know that, for example, Tom Pennings filled in 70% of his schedule for the next week. To conclude, a fair amount of smart data manipulation is needed to combine all these different elements.
As there are many metrics you want to support and knowing a lot of them are pretty complex to calculate: it’s key to implement these data transformations in a robust and scalable way.

That’s what ML2Grow is doing right now.

Our goal is to gather all that knowledge and be able to go to our customers with a menu. Just like you would cater to guests in a restaurant. When we go to the sales manager of a company, we want to show that this KPI is important to them and explain why.

Why did you choose ML2Grow?

Today, you need to be able to plant the idea in the prospect’s head; that is the ultimate goal. But you have to deliver first. You need an MVP (minimum viable product) to display those analyses and KPIs first. Therefore we need front-end applications, a data lake and scalable queries. Everything needs to be connected to the data lake to give the customers critical insights. For the front-end, we have an external partner; for the data and queries, we work together with ML2Grow.

For a non-technical person, there is the concept of a data scientist. But what is a data scientist? If you need a programmer, you have a front-end, back-end, one specialized in mobile etc. It is the same with data scientists, and you have many different specializations. You have people that are also data engineers and are very good at building pipelines, others who can efficiently design queries, while some others specialize in creating machine learning models or visualizations. ML2Grow has an extensive range in all those domains and expertise so that they could quickly offer us the total package without having to go to different partners and keep the coordination efficient.

Before building the MVP, you also have to think about the future in which we want to implement more advanced algorithms. Algorithms are no longer just queries but are the result of predictive models. As this is the core expertise of ML2Grow, this transition can be realized seamlessly.

Salesnudge is now officially available on the Teamleader Marketplace