All-in-one sales readiness platform for startups and SMBs
About Salestable
Suresh: Salestable is a sales readiness platform for startups and SMBs, and what we really do is help founders go from founder-led sales to sales-led sales. That’s simply put. What’s really happening in the industry, especially in the startups and the SMBs is that founders start selling a lot of it. And then once founders get to a stage of being able to get traction, they try to bring in a salesperson. Once they bring the person in and the founder is like – you go and figure out what to do for sales, and then the sales leaders are like – I can definitely go figure out what to do.
After that, the founder will say – I put you through two calls three calls, now you go figure it out. After a couple of months, the salespeople are frustrated. The founder is frustrated because they thought they were going to get more sales, and the salespeople know they didn’t have the real context of what you’re doing. I think the space between the founders and the salespeople kind of keeps increasing to a point where founders say that probably bringing in salespeople is not for them.
They just keep selling their own, which means from the growth point of view, it is flat, they don’t see any growth. That’s exactly the problem that we are trying to solve here. Because on an industry average, there is a five-month ramp time for every salesperson out there, and that’s exactly what we are trying to focus on, saying that you don’t have to spend five months to bring up a salesperson and then be productive in your company. We can absolutely decrease it, but you have to make sure that you are planning for it, right? Things won’t happen just magically like they say, but that’s exactly where Salestable actually helps you, to change the behavior, help you have the right behavior so that you can be successful, you can make your salespeople successful.
What is your solution?
Suresh: With Salestable we are really building a SaaS solution. Our customers typically like startups and small businesses, they can just go in, and they can get a 14-day trial. We are super proud of what we provide over there as we tackle two specific problems. The first problem is really to say once a salesperson comes in, what are they supposed to do? What are their first five days going to look like? What is there let’s say the next two weeks going to look like from the training aspect of it, from the contextual setting point of view? That’s the first part of the problem that we solve.
The second part of the problem is to say, especially with the startups and the small segment business that you are not really going to have a huge CRM out there like Salesforce or HubSpot. Many startups and SMBs use a CRM for deal management really out there and contact management which is fine. The second part of the problem that we solve is really about what we call activity management. We have actually seen a lot of customers coming back to us and saying that behavior is not working. And then what we definitely help them to do is to say it’s not just enough to define the high-level goals. But you also have to define the activity that helps them to achieve these goals, right? That’s super important.
That’s really what even in our normal personal life we do, right? We set a goal, but just because we set a goal doesn’t necessarily mean that that’ll happen. We need to have a set of activities and tasks to achieve that goal. And that’s exactly true with even sales as well. For example things as simple as how many leads are you getting every day? How many demos are you doing? How many contracts have you sent? How many follow-ups have you done? All these are super important, right? This also helps the sales leaders as a great one-on-one intervention tool. We want to make sure that whenever sales leaders or CEOs are sitting together for a discussion with the salespeople, we want it to be a win-win conversation rather than everybody defending what they’re doing. And that’s exactly what Salestable provides, that behavioral change in both sales reps as well as the leaders there.
Salestable pricing plans
Suresh: We want to be super viable for startups and SMBs because, at the end of the day, we understand sometimes you don’t really need all the thousand features. That’s exactly where we are super strategic in terms of the features and the value that we provide to the small and medium segment customers, and that’s exactly where our standard pricing is $25 per user per month. During the 14 days free trial, we definitely encourage our customers to come in there put in their data, and see how the platform is giving the feel and look, the user experience side of it. I’m sure they have their own set of use cases that you want to solve and definitely talk to us. Being part of the journey together is what we are definitely looking forward to.
Top 3 Salestable features
Suresh: We are bringing in artificial intelligence in a much more pragmatic way which basically means we want to provide the analytics first. And then from analytics, we want to bring in the insights. For example, as a sales leader or a CEO, when I get into the Salestable, I get the insights like how many of my sales reps are getting onboarded, how many have finished, and then what is the average onboarding time. Based on the list of all the sales reps that we have we actually calculate all those insights for you so that you don’t have to be thinking about them. All these features that are coming in are what we call the initial analytics. On top of it, we provide insights so that we bring in all those experiences to the sales leaders from that point of view.
What’s your favorite software apart from Salestable?
Suresh: I would say Zoom for sure. For the last couple of years, I have been spending countless hours on a weekly and monthly basis and it just works. For example, this morning before this call, we started a call on Google Meet and we quickly realized that it’s all getting pixelated and everything. We used Google Meet to send the Zoom link and then we joined the Zoom link. Even with the bad network connections and everything, Zoom has done a fantastic job in how they’re able to have the audio and the video quality, and then that just works. I think that is the simplicity of product led growth.
