Lawrence Baker, co-founder and director of Saleboat, a new South African IT start-up that develops cloud-based subscription sales management software, said many of the company’s founders bear an uncanny resemblance to the cast of Silicon Valley, the hit television show about fictional US technology start-up Pied Piper.
Baker’s brother, Craig Baker, for example, is “very much like” Pied Piper founder Richard Hendricks, while technical director and lead developer Michael Barnett is not dissimilar to the show’s Bertram Gilfoyle.
Fortunately, further similarities between the Johannesburg-based company and the Mike Judge series are limited — for one thing, there’s no Gavin Belson or Hooli.
There are no eccentric billionaire investors either. In fact, the founders — the Baker brothers, Barnett and the fourth director, Daryl Bartkunsky, each of whom owns 25% of the business — have boot-strapped it without any external funding.
The business, in its current form, got its start about a year ago. It emerged out of a discussion with a courier services company called Globeflight, which is today Saleboat’s biggest client.
Saleboat is a sales management platform that helps companies oversee all of their sales activities and make their field salesforce more efficient.
“It deals with the whole engine that drives the sales team, from reps scheduling meetings in their diaries to managers being able to see exactly what the reps are doing every day,” explained Lawrence Baker, who looks after sales and operations for the start-up.
When a salesperson goes into a meeting, they check into the system and immediately have access to all information about the client along with notes about previous meetings, which may have involved another sales rep.
“Managers know where reps are, when they’ve checked into a meeting, whether they are onsite or offsite, and so on,” said Baker.
The interface is built using Google’s “material design”, with cue cards to make it simple to use, he said. All information is stored in the cloud via Web interface. An offline app for Android tablets is also being released soon to cater for areas where connectivity is lacking.
Each sales rep gets a weekly report, which is copied to their manager. It provides detail about how they’ve performed, including which meetings or tasks they have and haven’t completed. Manual reports can also be generated on demand.
The system prompts both reps and managers about clients that are being neglected — for example, if they haven’t been visited in a 30-day period. “That’s something salespeople miss doing a lot. You don’t only make contact with clients when you want to sell something, you have to have them keep thinking of you if you want to generate repeat business.”
The system includes more advanced features, such as geo-location tools. If a sales rep is in a particular area with time to spare, they can check client prospects overlaid on a map of their vicinity. Many reps have taken to using this to plan their days, Baker said.
Managers can drill down into detail about how salespeople are performing. For example, analytics will show how many meetings it takes for a particular rep to close a sale on average. This allows managers to intervene when it becomes clear there are problem areas that require a targeted intervention such as additional training.
Saleboat sells its software on a subscription basis per user. Baker said the company is priced well below competitors’ offerings, especially those from international rivals, in large part because it’s new to the market and wants to get noticed. “As a relative unknown, you have to be better and do it cheaper,” he said. (The company’s main local competitor is Stellenbosch-based Honeybee.)
“The business is making money, though not as much as we’d like, of course. But we have big dreams,” Baker said. “We want a thousand users on Saleboat by the middle of next year. We have already doubled our user base in the past two or three months, and we are getting there fast.”
He said the company hasn’t considered venture capital funding yet, though it has had a number of approaches. “We said we should first build something worth buying into.” — © 2016 NewsCentral Media
