Note: this is an automated transcription of our podcast interview with Jonnie Cartmill. There will be some typos 🙂
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Welcome. Jonnie Cartmill, Chief Sales Officer of Sendcloud in this session.
Thanks, Jan. It’s good to be here. I’m looking forward to the chat.
Yeah, cool. Thanks for setting this time aside to share your experiences and tell us a little bit about the company and then perhaps about yourself as well.
Yeah, sure. So Sendcloud helps eCommerce to thrive. We really work with automating shipments for all of our customers, which means that we provide a software platform that basically runs a one-stop shop for everything from the checkout to returns all of the stuff that happens in between and from my own sides. I’ve been with the company now for two and a half years. I’ve been in sales now for about 15 years. Before I joined Sendcloud, I was with a company that went all the way through from like the kind of bootstrapped early-stage phase to IPO. That company was called Meltwater.
And what was your experience at Meltwater?
I joined as a young graduate after doing a couple of years of door-to-door sales to pay my rent after I finished university. So I jumped into the wonderful world of SaaS sales. And I really learned the grassroots of selling fuel cell cycle right as an E so prospecting to building value and then of course closing. I started there in Edinburgh. I’m originally Irish, but I started there in in Edinburgh and I really learned, I suppose, the trials and tribulations of holding a quota and, and trying to make business happen in a very entrepreneurial way. Back then the rules didn’t exist or the tech stock didn’t exist. It was really roll up your sleeves outreach to prospects that you felt could fit the profile that was needed and then do business. So I learned that the hard way. I would say that I really took that experience and moved it into management. So I was given an opportunity at an at a young age to run a team in Scotland. And then from there as a sales manager, I was asked to pack up my bags, got on a flight and head on to Africa where I was asked to build up a sales team. So I took a team there from a couple of people all the way up to nearly 50 or 60, which today I believe is scaled up to nearly 150, which is amazing. And I was also asked to move to the Middle East. So I took the experience from Africa and moved to the Middle East and really try to scale across the emerging markets there before deciding to take on this role with Sendcloud.
So that’s quite some international experience. And just for the listeners, what is a brief background on what Meltwater does?
Yeah, sure. So they are a media intelligence company. They help companies to track, analyze and engage with media content, and they do that both in sort of traditional and also social media. And they work all over the world as well as just like Sendcloud.
Yeah, I was, I was a customer of meltwater at Servoy and I was impressed by how deep their software went in terms of what you could analyze and figure out where your media was going to land eventually.
Yeah, it’s fantastic. I think the data insights that that company has created and built with leading technology and partners all over the world is phenomenal. And when I look at what we do in Sendcloud as well today and my more immediate role, I think that opportunity exists so much as well. When you look at eCommerce and shipping, we work with thousands of customers across the e-commerce landscape in many, many markets, and it’s not just helping them to automate their shipping process, it’s then really analyzing all of the data that we pick up and track over time to help them make sense of the landscape and to be more consultative in the way that we go to market, especially when you look at the larger customers that are really interested in digitalizing and moving with the wave that we’ve seen in recent months and years.
Okay. Very cool. All right. Let’s talk about Sendcloud and see what’s happening there. Because if we read in the media, then then we see hypergrowth. We see a large race fairly recently. Any high-level numbers you can share with us?
Yeah. Look, I suppose at the moment the business is growing rapidly. I think COVID, of course, is challenging as it has been in life for everybody. It is accelerated what was already accelerating in the e-commerce space. And of course, then that ties into shipments. Right. So what we saw during that. The COVID period. I suppose the peak is dropping a little bit these days, which is great for everybody in terms of life. But we really saw so many online retailers move or retailers moving into the online space they were forced to digitalize. And I think, you know, for us that’s presented a huge opportunity.
And how many retailers are roughly on the platform now?
Right, about 20,000.
Wow. That’s a huge number.
Exactly. In terms of other numbers, I suppose, you know, during peak periods, we’re shipping hundreds and hundreds of thousands of shipments a day through the platform. Yeah. With zero downtime in terms of the product, which is great. But if you extrapolate that across a year, then of course you can get a feel for the size of the business we’re currently operating in over eight markets. So the company has really scaled into new markets internationally and that’s been an aggressive growth tactic that we’ve taken, especially for the European marketplace to begin. And then of course we have broader growth ambitions internationally outside of Europe as well.
Does it mean roughly the growth as we start in the Benelux, then we take that knowledge to Europe, then to the US and Asia? Is it roughly how it’s going?
Sure. I think time will tell where we get to outside of Europe. But I think, of course, starting off in Benelux, which is where the company has been born and bred through Eindhoven in the Netherlands, that’s where our founders first realized the problem that eCommerce stores have when it comes to shipping. They actually own their own online webshop and they realize that when the webshop was selling a lot, one of the biggest bottlenecks to the growth of that webshop was actually the shipping components. They struggled to negotiate the types of rates that the larger retailers would have for shipping, and their margins were completely smashed. So it didn’t really make much sense. Nobody was fixing the problem. So our founders decided to go off and fix that. And I think they found very quickly that there was a really strong market, especially in the Netherlands. And of course, then the natural progression is to expand that across to neighboring countries. So Belgium of course, was right there and in Germany, we opened up an office and we saw that the value proposition, it fitted the market. Of course, the product needed to develop slightly for that market, but the core value proposition remained. And after that then it was a matter of opening up into France and Italy, to Spain and then most recently into the UK. So yeah, you take that core playbook I suppose in terms of going to market, but then you need to customize the product and the go-to-market approach for that local market context and culture that you’ve got as well. You know, buying behaviors, for example, in Italy are very different from what you see in the Netherlands. You know, perhaps somebody in Italy wants to pay with cash, whereas in the Netherlands payments through electronic processing are a lot more common as an example.
Right. Okay. And if you look at your approach to the market, is that mainly product-led growth, sales-led growth, marketing-led growth or very much a combination of all of that?
Yeah, sure. I think early days marketing product leads and still is, it will still remain. We’re scaling up on top of that, but we’ve built quite a strong sales organization as well that hasn’t opened methodology and motion. I think most recently we’ve really been targeting that kind of market segment where of course it’s a combination of all of those different leads and flows that you would expect. But in the early days, when you move into larger customers, yes, you get those in bonds leads that come through and there are requests. But you really need to go out to target the right accounts that you feel you could add immediate value to so that you can build up the credentials and showcase the capability. So I would say, you know, product-market lead, but definitely a large component of our sales organization as well.
So once you go to the bigger e-commerce stores, then then you need a sales team. Is that what I’m hearing?
Yeah, yeah, for sure. The sales team has always existed. We built that in from the early days when I joined in 2020. In January, we had around about 20 people in the sales organization globally. And today, if you include customer success and partner management alongside the new business team, we’re almost up at around about 150 people across Europe. So there’s quite a large sales organization there, both from a new business standpoint, but then also to look after our customers and make sure that they receive the experience that they are promised in those early days so that they stay with us and that they grow.
Yeah. Okay. Well, so, so growing a team from 20 to 150 must be a tough process in terms of onboarding, culture, training and keeping them happy or not.
Yeah, there are a lot of things that go into it. Fortunately, I still have some hair. It’s got better it’s got a bit grayer over the last couple of years, but maybe that’s also my kids as well. Like, yeah, of course it takes time to figure out how to do that and to do it really well. I think it’s one thing hiring a lot of people, it’s another thing making these. People successful. Of course, every time you hire somebody, it’s it’s an investment that the company needs to make. And it’s also an investment from the person’s side. There’s the human element. So you’ve got to get it right. Yeah, I think spending so much time in in meltwater for those years, it allowed me to see how a company can’t really scale from, you know, 100 all the way up to two and a half, 3000 people. And along with that I suppose, comes the benefit of time. You see some things going really well, you make a few mistakes along the way and then of course you try not to replicate the mistakes, you try to double down on the things that work, and then you try to add your own spin as you as you move forward. Right. So for us, in terms of building a winning team, I think it comprises of three core ingredients. And I’ve said this for many, many years with the guys and girls that work with me and those that will do in the future. But that really boils down to people, you know, are you bringing in the right people? Are you hiring? Are you attracting, hiring, training and then retaining the right people? Does the business allow for the opportunity to do that? So is the addressable market there? You know, can you service that? Have you got traction with a business that proves that you’ve got the product-market fit needed, that you can create the demand generation needed to fill up these pipelines and to make them fully productive? And that I think the most important ingredient that comes on top of that really, Jan, is is culture as a business grows, the culture grows. Anybody that you bring in, they have an opportunity to kind of develop or amplify that. And I think that’s something that’s really, really important when you’re scaling. If you’ve got the right business opportunity on the right people and you haven’t got the right culture, it won’t work if you got the right business opportunity and a great culture, but you haven’t got the right people. It’s not going to work as well. So for me, they need to come all together and we’ve got sort of playbooks that work across all three of those key pillars, I suppose.
So you have several playbooks when people on board that they go through with the team that is already in place to get them up to speed?
For sure. Funnily enough, this week we actually kind of launched a reboot of our global onboarding program across the company. So we just brought in 18 new Sendcloud All-Stars to the organization on Monday, which is great. We went out for a dinner with them on Wednesday, actually, and one of the things that we spoke about was that initial experience during onboarding. So our onboarding program consists of a few key phases, the first phase in the first week. The first three or four days specifically is a combined global onboarding, where each of those people, irrespective of what department, they will be joining the experience the same thing. They come together, they understand the history of the business, the vision, the founders, the grassroots. They know where we’re going to go to. They get a feel for all of the business departments so they understand what role they’re going to play within that, and they just get to meet great people. So they spend that quality time that’s really important as the initial stages, especially now that we’ve got more of a hybrid working format than perhaps we did beforehand. Again, this accelerated through what we’ve experienced with COVID. After that initial week, then our departments break off into their own specialized onboarding programs for sales specifically, which of course is what I oversee. We’ve got a very dedicated onboarding program that actually lasts around about six months. So it’s like a six-month success plan. And our ambition within those first six months for the sales department and also for the full company is to make sure that at least 90% of all of the new hires that join are successful in their roles. Right. And then, of course, you’ve got to measure success, right? So we’ve got metrics that are there on our KPIs and knowledge and then the culture that are guided the whole way through that six-month program. So you’ve got a month, one goal a month, two goals, three, four, five, six. And the ambition then is that that person, of course, should be fully and fully onboarded into the company and that they have the best chance of them being successful.
There’s most of that one-on-one training or most group-led training to make sure that they can have the knowledge to meet the goals that you set for them.
Sure. It’s a combination again. So we’ll have group sessions where I suppose it demands it. I think that can be great from a time efficiency standpoint. Maybe there’s an introduction to our initial sales methodology, for example, outreach and then qualification and then closing. But of course, to have that on a global level where you have multiple people that could be coming through from different cultures and different markets, you need to break away and have that more custom-designed look at how to outreach in Spain versus in Germany or versus the UK. So we kind of have a global guideline where we’ll have group sessions and that will have individual breakouts, where a localized team leader or head of sales already coach that individual to make sure that they know what the best practices are and not market so that they can achieve the goals that they have there.
There must be quite some cultural changes because if you take the Dutch way of sales, which is maybe the most direct on the planet.
Which isn’t a bad thing. It’s quite a good thing, especially when you’re selling. One of my very first sales deals with a Dutch decision-maker, actually, and it was the shortest sales cycle that I ever had. Anyway, sorry to interrupt.
Great comment. Well, I remember myself, you know, I lived in Spain for four years when I was young. And obviously my professional career started in the Netherlands. So then we got a great Spanish prospect. And I said to my colleagues, I will handle this one because I grew up in Spain. So I know everything about Spanish culture. Obviously, I left out that I was there between 12 and 16 years old. So what do you know as a 16-year-old about doing business in the country?
That’s an interesting point, though. You know, maybe you don’t know so much about doing business, but you do understand the way of life. And if you think about let’s think about what business is in the end, you know, people buy people you do business with people. You do business with people more often than you like than perhaps you don’t like. And I think if you can understand those cultural nuances, it’s really important. And the business part is there to learn. And you normally figure that out by asking a lot of questions, right? So I think all of those experiences, no matter how much time you’ve spent in the country, can actually be really useful. I can certainly say that from my own experience.
And well, in your case, you’ve done business in a lot of countries. I guess also Africa and Middle East is going to be very different than Europe.
But yeah, it’s completely different. I mean, speaking to somebody in the U.K. and a cold call versus, you know, calling a prospect and in Kenya or Nigeria or South Africa, they’re all so different. And then the same thing, doing business in the UAE or Saudi Arabia. I mean, you really need to understand how they interact and what the culture is like in that local market. And I think that’s an amazing thing as well. You know you get a chance to learn the world as you go. That’s what a career in sales gives people.
In those international teams that you built both here and at Meltwater, would you then mainly address that by hiring local people and then training them, you know, the core of your product and having them adapt it to their culture?
That’s a good question. The natural answer would be to say, yes, you do. Of course, you know, you’re going to France. You hire somebody from France and you expect that it will work out really well that way? I think it’s a combination. So what I have seen working really well over time is of course, you want to have local people that can sell into a local market. Why? Because they speak the language. They’re from there. They can interact really well. They understand those cultural nuances that we were just speaking about. But I’ve also seen real benefit when you’re selling internationally to take somebody with high potential who’s got those language capabilities, of course, if it’s needed, and to take them from one market and land them in another market and to build the team around up, especially if the culture is good. So I’ll use myself as an example, right when I was selling back in the day and in our Edinburgh office with meltwater across the UK market, we have a top-performing office globally. I think we had 50 offices around the world, a strong culture, consistent results and I was developing quite nicely. I’d spent time in Africa before I moved to Edinburgh actually, so one of my ambitions was always to move over there and I got a call from my VP one day saying, Hey Johnny, how do you like the idea of finishing up a day’s work and then going for a nice run? Along comes a space trip. There’s this appeal to you and you know, instantly I was excited, right? So I had a chance to transfer across to an office in Cape Town, a completely different way of doing business in Africa. I was brought in there to transfer the culture from the Edinburgh office, and the sales methodologies that we had in the UK because we felt they could probably apply across to Africa. But then also I suppose the, the belief in my leadership team that I would be able to be agile enough to figure out how to do business in that market as well with the local team members. So I think there’s a really nice way of being able to fit those groups together. And more recently in Saint Claude, we’ve actually taken one of our top-performing team leads in our Netherlands office, the Benelux market, and we’ve actually promoted him into the head of sales role in the UK for the UK team. And why have we done that? Because Tim has had such deep-rooted experience in the product. He’s been part of a great team scaling up talent that now is able to transfer across other markets. And we really feel that he can transfer that knowledge to a lot of the girls and guys that we’re hiring directly from the UK market to help us to take that leading market position there as well. And we see that it’s working immediately, which is really nice.
So, your advice to other SAS Scaleups would be to take some of the great people from your headquarters, transplant them to your upcoming territories, and then let them grow new teams over there.
I really believe it can work. I think if you can transfer that knowledge in that culture, it can go a long way.
I had the same experience at Servoy when we moved to the US initially without transplanting anybody from the Netherlands and it wasn’t working very well. And until you started moving one or two. People across, and eventually I made the move across. That’s when we started seeing real growth because it’s, you know, if it’s only remote or new people, then there’s such a great lack of information about the product, about the culture, about how you do business that it’s very hard to make local people successful, for sure.
It’s really nice how that overrides. So I think a goal that I always had in any of the times that I’ve built teams internationally was to if we planted a leader from an external market into that local market, we really wanted to make sure that we would develop local market leadership over time. So I see that being something that we will continue to do and Sendcloud just like I did it and meltwater.
And would you say even with remote work becoming very second nature nowadays that it’s still important to have feet on the ground?
Yes, I heard we actually had this topic in our old hands globally across the company yesterday. We were talking about what does the future look like for flexible work in Sendcloud? Look, I think there are a lot of companies that were purely they were fully remote before COVID happens. They were already designed to be able to deal with that way of working and are really strong with a really strong methodology for Sendcloud. We’ve actually been the other way around. We were very, very focused on centralizing our team in Eindhoven and benefiting from the culture and the energy that can create. And so when COVID happened and we were forced to work remotely, we didn’t necessarily have all the systems in place or the ways of working. I think the best teams are the ones that are the most agile during those moments where together you can figure out how to do it. And so I would say that two and a half years on or two years on, however long it’s been, we’ve got it. We’ve tried a lot of new things. We’ve got certain ways of working right then. I think what we’ve figured out is that you’ve really just got to you’ve got to have you’ve got to be multifaceted in the approach, right? So, yes, we want to have people on the ground, but we also want to make sure that that flexibility still exists and that the systems are in place either with new technologies or training up our team with the right playbooks on the leadership side, to be sure that they can combine both on the ground training and then also remote training, which is very challenging. You know, you’ve got to have two different ways, two different sorts of leadership methodologies there to learn. But I do feel personally that having a combination is really important. It’s great to be around people, especially when you’re scaling through hyper-scale, why you want to look in front of you, behind you, to the left, or to the right at any moment in time and know that you’ve got support. And I think if you can have that support, that immediate feedback and that energy, those quick conversations that you can have, of course, knowledge transfers quicker, the fun component is there. And just that human interaction that I think human beings needs. It really stimulates things that, again, having the balance with being able to work internationally or remotely is important. Right. And I think you feel that for parents, you feel that for international hires, we open up the talent pool further than we ever would have beforehand. And it also allows people to be focused or maybe they don’t have the distraction of a lot of things happening in the office. So I think there are benefits on both sides, but we definitely need to be prepared for a hybrid format going forward.
And zooming into sales teams, would you say that if you let’s say you want to sign up a large eCommerce store, you still have to go on-site to this client? Or is it all done remotely now?
Yeah, I think that’s really interesting. I was very keen to see what was going to happen in the Enterprise Sales Enterprise segment in general, right globally whenever COVID hit, because there’s always been that focus of traveling face to face meetups, dinners and all that sort of stuff. And I did enterprise sales for three years, so I’m aware of it. What do I think needs to be done? No, no, I don’t think it needs to happen. I think all companies are ready, willing and able to buy and to sell remotely. I think the benefit will always be there to have human interaction. I think especially now that things are opening up more in Europe, at least the people want to go out and see each other again. But I definitely feel like the confidence around buying procuring services in the enterprise level. There’s no problem with decision-makers picking up a zoom call rather than having to meet face to face. Maybe they’ll lose face to face. Meetings happen at more at a later stage in the deal about sort of and sign-off stage or qualification maybe even during the implementation. But I think it’s definitely benefited sell cycles for sure on the enterprise side with quicker decision making, quicker qualification.
Yes, that’s good to hear.
It’s it’s challenging. It’s challenging, though, starting just on that. It’s challenging when you run it when you run an enterprise process and you have a boardroom full of people and you have maybe a workshop for two or 3 hours, very, very different than having to redesign the way that you run that sales process as a salesperson on Zoom runs and break out. Games and all these sorts of things. So I still think there’s a lot that we can learn without.
Yeah, because doing sales in person and the personal aspect is much more important than if you’re doing it over Zoom. I think the content is going to take a lead quickly over because I think there are some sales gurus that have sort of figured out that 70% is is posture and 20% is words and 5% is something else. And then if you take that online, then so much of the live interaction goes away that you have to compensate somewhere else.
You really do. But then you’ve also got a lot of these, like a lot of the sales training academies these days, whether it’s Pavilion or a sales impact academy or whatever it may be. You know, they’re bringing in guest speakers and gurus that are working with body language. They are actually coaching leaders and sales reps and how to custom design the backgrounds so that it creates the right ambiance, you know, whether it’s the right lighting or whatever it may be. You have no idea what’s sitting around me right now, and you don’t need to, which is why my screen is angled this way. But of course, you want to design out the right way. And I think also zoom in. These companies are creating virtual backgrounds and everything to create that type of environment. So we’ve just gone through a fundamental shift in the way that that sells, is done in business, is done in general. But I do agree that nothing really beats a face to face interaction. So let’s say let’s see what happens in an upcoming couple of years.
And looking at further growth of Sendcloud, what would you say? What do you expect as your biggest challenges ahead?
Yeah, I think the biggest challenge is to begin most likely at this stage, just recruitment. You know, we’re looking for a lot of the right talent to join the team. It’s not just a matter of bringing in headcounts. You want to have the right talent that can really, I suppose, take the business to the next level. That’s challenging. There are a lot of SaaS companies that have received a lot of funding and going through a lot of scaling at the moment. And often you find that that’s a very competitive talent pool to go after. So that’s one thing, but that is making these people successful. So that will always be something that will be at the forefront of what we are focusing on. Beyond that, you know, we work in e-commerce and shipping. I think there has been a very unnatural impact on the market with COVID. What the COVID impact is going to look like as it kind of filters off a little bit, will be really interesting for us to see. We’ve seen shifts in it over time when you’ve had lockdowns and then opening back up. So I expect that people will shop a lot more, of course, in person again, they’ll want to do that. So we’ll have to keep a close eye on that. And then I think culture, right? Like, as I mentioned at the beginning, when you’re growing a team from 10 to 100 and then from 100 to 500, which is where we are today, and then we go through to close to 1000. I think you cannot take anything for granted. I think you know this as well on an international level and also during scaling, you’ve simply got to make sure that you’re constantly looking at the core company values, that you’re really embodying and developing that and amplifying it through the team. So that’s something that will keep a really close eye on just to make sure that the DNA stays really strong and that we keep the way of working that we have today all the way through.
And in terms of recruitment, do you outsource that, or do you have that all in-house?
We do a combination, but I think our focus is in-house. So we have a talent team or kind of our own internal recruitment agency. We call them talent magicians, which is quite cool. And Sendcloud, and we built that across all of our departments. So we really have our own internal agency, but of course, we do partner with externals as well where it’s needed. So maybe, you know, top-level executive hiring or in markets where we could be struggling a little bit.
And if you look at the long-term future of Sendcloud, I’m guessing that to some degree you’re also going to start competing more against the traditional large stores. Not if you look at Amazon, for example. Here in the US at least it really has become sort of a competitor to you because they, they also, you know, fix your logistics issues. But with the downside that you are facing much stronger pricing competition because you’re one of 1000 retailers now selling the same product on Amazon. Or would you say that’s not going to become much of competition or threat to send out?
Yeah, I think it’s it’s a really good point you bring up. I think a lot of people ask us that, right. I don’t really think it’s so much of a competitive challenge that we’ve got an actual fact we partner with these large marketplaces. Right. So the sellers that we work with who sell on multiple platforms such as Amazon, they can actually integrate all of these platforms into our shipping software so that they can create a kind of one-stop-shop and a seamless environment to create the labels and create the returns that they need. So that’s not so much of an issue. And I also think that the market is just so vast. It’s massive, right? We’re growing with the e-commerce landscape. And I think there’s plenty of room across Europe and globally for us to to all thrive, actually.
Because there are over a million e-commerce stores nowadays. It’s it’s a very impressive amount.
Not yeah, there are many I don’t know what the exact figure is because there are so many numbers that come out all the time, but for sure across Europe and at least over a million and globally and many, many more. And that’s just growing year on year. So I think we’re in a very, very interesting space at the moment. And let’s just see how it develops. I think when you look at the way that e-commerce and buying behaviors are over in markets like China, and then you compare that to Europe and to the U.K., you see some really interesting trend lines you see by buyer behaviors. Just changing rapidly, I think, these days, you know, going green. Being energy conscious and efficient is something that a lot of people want to be part of. And that doesn’t mean just end buyers. That also means the large corporates or the businesses that we partner with, even the, you know, the carriers themselves, DHL, DPD, all of these large international carriers. That becomes then something that we’ve all kind of got to customize our way of working to. And I think we’re just going to see a huge amount of change in the upcoming years. We’ve already seen it in the payment space and there whether people pay and payment processing and I think shipping is actually the next huge thing that is coming along.
And last but not least, I’m wondering how do you looking at I’m a bit of a technology guy myself, so I’m always curious about what tech is being used, what is high level of your technology stack in terms of CRM system, in terms of how you distribute playbooks and how you monitor how the playbooks are being implemented.
Yeah, yeah, sure. Good question. Look, we use many, many tools across the sales organization underneath myself. I’ve got the new business team, I got customer success and partner management, and we actually have a different CRM for each one of those pillars of those focus areas. On the new business side, we actually use HubSpot. We work very well with them. On the CSA side, we use a tool called Insights, and then we have a partner stock tool on the partner management side, which we’re implementing at the moment. I think tech stock is only as good, of course, as how you implement it and really get in there the true benefit from it. So each time we bring a new tool in, Jan, we’ve got a very clear game plan for the rollout, the implementation of that, and then making sure that we’re achieving the ROI that we expect and that we need. When it comes to executing on the playbooks, it’s become really interesting again because of that hybrid way of working. Like I mentioned before, you know, you’ve got to be designed to run remote management, remote onboarding, remote leadership development as much as having an in-house. So we also adopted a tool for the sales organization called Gemini, which is a call recording software. It’s kind of like a gong or a chorus or something like that, but it’s a bit stronger for us in the European markets because of its scripting and natural language processing. So we find that quite useful for multi-language and I think that’s really nice because when a newbie comes on board before they even join, they can actually have a playlist of different calls from top-performing APIs that show them how to deal with that initial value proposition or objection handling or closing. And then we can even use that as part of our sales methodology playbook. So you can have scorecards that are set up in the platform for a leader to then analyze how well that sales rep has performed in terms of executing the sales methodology that maybe one other on an HR level, we use a tool that we’ve implemented globally called Bob. We did that last year and we’ve actually taken all of our old school Google sheets and PowerPoint presentations for reviews weekly, monthly, quarterly, and we’ve brought that all into Bob even annually as well. And that’s a fantastic place is to be able to, I suppose, set track and then measure the effectiveness of the goal setting and the playbooks that we’re expecting our teams to execute on. And it works quite well. It’s really nice.
All right.
What do you use? Do you have anything? Any tips for me? Do you have any tools that you think Senddloud should be using?
Well, I don’t want this to turn into a pitch for the business that I run. But the reason that Johann and I, my co-founder, started this company was that he saw a serious lack of automation of playbooks. Because if you look at playbooks, then, on the one hand, they contain a lot of knowledge. How do I do something that can be pages and pages often in wikis, in Google Docs, etc.? But on the other hand, you have what you know, what should I be doing today, to follow this playbook. And in today’s reality, those are two separate worlds. So you have your house, which is usually a static tool. It may be a wiki page or something. And then your watch, which is usually done in some kind of project management tools like Asana or something like that. But there, they’re separate worlds. And that’s really what we are building now. And it’s not finished yet, but in Playbook before we joined those two together.
Good. Well, we should discuss that and take a look at it as well.
Well, it was great talking to you. And I’ve learned a few things, especially about internationalizing and culture and how to take knowledge from one country to another. So thanks very much for this conversation.
And you’re welcome. Thank you for having me on. I wish you all the best.
