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Guillaume Moubeche - Co-founder and CEO of Lemlist, a sales automation and cold email service, explains how the company went from $0 to $10 million in revenue in just a few years, with no outside funding. Guillaume talks about using mental availability and building personal brands within the company to grow a reputation as experts in their field, and how they managed to build and capitalize on their user community.
Hear how successful B2B SaaS companies and agencies compete - and win - in highly saturated categories. No fluff. No filler. Just strategies and tactics from founders, executives, and marketers. Learn about building moats, growing audiences, scaling businesses, and differentiating from the competition. New guests every week. Hosted by Peep Laja, founder at Wynter, Speero, CXL.
How mental availability helped Guillaume Moubeche grow Lemlist from $0 to $10 million in revenue
Guillaume Moubeche (00:02):
A lot of people out there are afraid of having their employees with a really strong personal brand. But the truth is the more you help people shine, the more grateful they are.
Peep Laja (00:15):
I'm Peep Laja. I don't do fluff. I don't do filler. I don't do emojis. What I do is study winners in B2B SaaS because I want to know how much is strategy, how much is luck, how do they win? This week Guillaume Moubeche, co-founder and CEO of Lemlist. Lemlist is a sales automation and cold email software. There's so many sales engagement and cold email tools around. However, in just three short years, Lemlist grew to $10 million in revenue without any outside funding. How did they do it? In this episode, we talk about the importance of building a customer community, building up employees personal brands, and we hear about niche-ing down and focusing on select target customers. Let's get into it. So Guillaume, when you started the company, the sales engagement tools were already around and some of them were already pretty big. What was the opening in the market that you saw?
Guillaume Moubeche (01:11):
To be honest, I had my agency back in the days. So I was using a lot of these tools and most tools, their value proposition was put your sales team on autopilot. But the truth is because I was doing sales prospecting for so many clients, I knew that the key was not to put things on autopilot, but was personalization. Because if you look at sales overall, it's all about building relationships and to build relationships, you need to make sure to spend time and doing your research before reaching out to someone in order to build the best relationship possible. So the opening I saw was, okay, all the tools are talking about automation, I'm going to talk about personalization and we're going to build the best personalization assets that you can have within a platform.
Guillaume Moubeche (01:58):
So we started to add directly into our platform videos, personalized images or photos that you could add directly into your emails. And then afterwards creates the entire UX. So the end user interface around the personalization, meaning that instead of being able to just blast to thousands of people like your emails, like most people who fail at sales prospecting are doing, we would allow people to review for each person and add an extra layer of personalization each email that would actually go out. Obviously, they would be able to review it in batch if they have done the personalization before, but they could add this extra layer directly into the platform.
Peep Laja (02:39):
So it was product-based differentiation. You saw some success, your competitors are not sleeping. Did they copy you? How did they respond to your arrival?
Guillaume Moubeche (02:50):
I think that a lot of people, especially competitors thought that we were this really small, teeny tiny, French company. And they had other things, et cetera, to be focused on. So they didn't really take us seriously at first. And when we started to have a lot of traction and because we had built in parallel our community, people started to copy some of our features and it became obvious that the things we did and all those things we developed were actually game changer. So it was quite funny because we actually, by doing this, we attracted a lot of our competitors' clients just because they started to see that they wanted to copy us. And then they were like, "Okay, if they're copying these guys, it must be good." And it's attracted many, many customers.
Peep Laja (03:37):
Most successful companies start with a product based differentiation. They see an unmet need or an opportunity in the market and use their feature based differentiation as a wedge to get a toehold. Relying on features is definitely not a sustainable advantage, but can be great for carving out an opening in the market. The early differentiation can also be about things like simplicity or ease of use. If the market is full of complex legacy tools, then make a simpler product. If the market is made up of upmarket, enterprise tools, then create a cheaper down market product. If the market is full of long form, text blogging tools, then make one that makes it easy to communicate in 140 character bursts like Twitter did. Of course there is always the question. What if a major player in the market copies our single point of differentiation? Here's what Alina Vandenberghe, the co-founder of Chili Piper said about that.
Alina Vandenberghe (04:30):
It's a question that I would get a lot, even from journalists and this is, isn't X going to copy you, because it's so easy to copy because it's such a no brainer product. I would say Google can copy everybody's, Salesforce can copy everybody, but you have to understand that in each one of these activities or product build, you have to have a driving force behind it, somebody who really wants to make it happen and has the skills to actually bring it through fruition and execution. That's so personalized that particular persona that the likelihood of that happening is very low. Google had so many fail projects and I'm sure Salesforce has had so many fail projects because of that.
Peep Laja (05:13):
When I looked at your growth chart. So you studied three and a half years ago, first, early years were pretty typical, 250 K year one, but then year three, it was this big jump. So what happened there? Did you do anything differently or was it finally what you had been building towards starting to pay off?
Guillaume Moubeche (05:34):
The data that you're looking at on Latka is always a bit approximate. So for us, it has always been a two digit months over months growth rates. And I feel like when you start if you're at 1K MRR and you grow at 20%, you're going to add 200 bucks. But if you're growing at 20%, when you're at a hundred K, you're adding 20K in MRR and for us, it's really about all this compound effects that over time, help us to keep having this exponential growth. So it's a lot of things that you do, especially the marketing in the early days, all the things that you are creating, whether it's content, whether it's a brand, whether it's a community, it's really pays off down the line. And I always feel that there is this kind of lag in business. So all the actions that you're doing now usually have an impact much later.
Peep Laja (06:25):
I saw in one of the articles, you mentioned that you instantly doubled down on going into a lot of channels now, so you didn't pick one channel, but you started to a community play and then of course a cold outreach and something you call a growth circle of love. Can you tell me more about that?
Guillaume Moubeche (06:46):
Yeah, so, essentially I feel like in every channel you can learn something that will help you and that will nurture another channel. So to give you something very specific, the first step is to eat your own dog food. So we had the tool for sales prospecting. This was my forte, so I focused on it and everything I was doing was to build relationship with people. So trying to do the consultative approach where I tell them like, "Hey, I'd love to know what has been working for you in outbound. I had my agency in the past and now I've built this software. I would love to exchange tips and best practices." It would allow me to get meetings with really like head of growth, head of sales, et cetera, just to discuss and exchange. And based on that, I would spot two type of people.
Guillaume Moubeche (07:30):
The one that are using one of our competitors, and in that case, they're not a good fit, but I'm just going to ask them what are the existing pain points, et cetera. So I could list content ideas and the one that are a good fit who can potentially become customers. And for them, I would organize demo and down the line, close them. So for [Zeus 00:07:49], I will actually write down a lot of articles around their pain points. And once the articles will be live, I would actually send them another message to say, "Hey, by the way, remember our chat. I actually, we wrote the best piece about this specific topic. I think you might enjoy it because it solves most of your pains." And by doing this, it'll be allowing me to build this relationship with people who are actually not a good fit, inviting them to our community.
Guillaume Moubeche (08:15):
And by inviting them to our community, they will actually follow all our growth and journey. And I knew that in the long run, a lot of people know us for years and they've never made the switch until there is that one day where they're like, okay, this is the time. And now I'm going to jump to Lemlist. So it's really about this long term strategy of pushing and educating people. And the more you learn about the pain points people arriving, the more your outreach can actually become better and your copywriting becomes also better. And at the same time, the content that you've created also allow you to attract new clients just because the content is good and people are sharing it.
Peep Laja (08:54):
How to grow your social media audience when you don't have decades of experience to share yet. Start posting summary content on what you read, listen to, and watch. Many out there are building significant audiences by doing Tweet storms on blog posts, podcast episodes, books, and webinars. Yes. You give credit to the original source who often then amplifies the summary post, but you end up taking 80% of the value. You can become the go-to source for TLDR on X, Y, and Z. There's massive value in curation summarization. Posting regular summaries also forces you to learn and extract lessons, distill the knowledge. You will learn better by thinking about the content and teaching others what you learn. Do this daily and you will 10X your audience in a year. Consistency plus excellence equals money.
Peep Laja (09:44):
You've talked about how community has played a big role in your marketing strategy. And some of the things you already mentioned here were you bring people into a community so they can be exposed to your journey and you build mental availability. Well, tell me more how you've built the community and how exactly is it driving a business outcomes for you?
Guillaume Moubeche (10:05):
In full transparency I see a lot of people out there talking about communities saying how great it is for business, et cetera, et cetera. At first, for me, the community was simply because we started the company with a thousand dollars with my two co-founders and they were handling tech. So I was handling support. And at some point I was receiving too many tickets and I was like, okay, I'm just going to put everyone into a Facebook group. And this is the place where I will answer most questions just so I don't have to repeat the same thing on the chat over and over again. And after that, I realized that people were asking more questions. Sometimes it gave me content ideas. So I was using the community to actually share the content, share the journey, and step by step, I started to say, okay, if you look at what people were doing back in the day, so like when we started, no one would ever share their cold email templates and the result they had because for every sales rep, it was the secret sauce.
Guillaume Moubeche (11:01):
And in any company, whether it's our competitors like Salesloft or Outreach, it would never be the case to share this type of things. What I decided to do is do the opposite. So every week I would share the cold email campaigns that I would write, I would share the results that we would get, so how many meetings I booked, what was my open rate, reply rate, et cetera, and teaching people how they could replicate this with their own sales prospecting campaign. And by doing this for six months in a row where I was posting every single day, answering all question, et cetera, I started to see people helping each other and answering before I actually had the time to answer.
Guillaume Moubeche (11:39):
And from that point on, I knew that the community was starting to get this real fuel of people helping each other, and they were doing it the same way that I did it. So for us very quickly, it became a competitive advantage because when you have a community, you actually start building a brand, you become likable. So people really want to help you succeed. And the biggest thing is to ask yourself how can you really have them with you on the journey? So for me, the communication was the most important part where I said, okay, all the feedback you give us is to make the product the best product ever created. And we care about what you say. And by doing all these simple things and by sharing our milestone, like the revenue publicly and all this type of things, people were able to see we're all growing together, we're all becoming together better, which is really this kind of vibe that we wanted to create.
Peep Laja (12:32):
Strong opinion is strong marketing. Have a point of view, a store you believe in, and tell. It should ruffle some feathers. Somebody should disagree. The alternative is to be safe and boring, that says safe and boring things. It's inoffensive, but nobody cares. So much of whether your marketing and PR works is whether you have something interesting to say consistently, most don't, it's hard. But being someone's favorite media for a niche is huge. Invest in having things to say, read, listen, hire full-time analysts and researchers. Most brilliance happens through synthesis. You piece it together like a puzzle, your own experience plus something you heard of while ago, plus something you read just now. Solid messaging, storytelling, and community building efforts, all come from this. So get clear on your point of view. To change you help people navigate. And you're already closer to a winning brand.
Guillaume Moubeche (13:29):
That's along the way helped us build this really competitive advantage, which down the line, we actually turned into a product competitive advantage because from that community, we were getting a lot of features ID. And whenever you are sending cold email or sales prospecting emails, what matters the most is whether or not your emails end up in the inbox. So it's called the deliverability essentially. And whenever you buy your new domain, your domain can't send a lot of messages at the same time, et cetera, because otherwise it end up in spam. So the idea of what you need to do is warm up your domain, meaning you need to send messages to other people and they need to reply to you, so it looks like a normal inbox. And what we did is because I was seeing people in the community saying, "Hey guys, let's put our name in a spreadsheet so we can email each other, et cetera, and warm each other account and boost our deliverability."
Guillaume Moubeche (14:23):
And then I was like, I could do that automatically. So we decided to build it internally. And then because of the variety of users, because we have basically users in more than 85 countries, we were able to really build this strong sending algorithm where everyone is sending messages to each other. And when a message end up in spam, will put it back in the inbox, put it as important. So it boosts the entire deliverability. And this is unique because the more we do these things, the more data we have. So we have companies, for example, like Zendesk, SAP, et cetera, which are more enterprise and their domain has been around for, let's say tens of years. And then we have the very small business who just started. So the idea is by having this wide range of domains variety and type of customers, we're really able to boost everyone's deliverability, which is quite unique. So we use that community as a differentiator directly in the product.
Peep Laja (15:22):
Yeah. So there's a lot of talk about product led content, where you you write blog articles, where you use your product as an example about how you solve a problem. So in your case, it's like product led community where in the community, you are showing people how you get a job done using your product and then EA to get people, help them achieve their goals. So it's pretty smart play there.
Guillaume Moubeche (15:46):
Absolutely. Yeah, it was really something we wanted to achieve and make sure that people really understand how to better leverage your product and also see the results that we were actually doing. A lot of people show you tutorials on how to use a tool, et cetera, but in the end, if you don't have the results, it's almost impossible for people to actually think about a better future, think about what they could get.
Peep Laja (16:10):
Going back to the fact that you guys were a postop company starting in space that was already pretty crowded and seeing consistent month over month growth, in addition to you guys doing outbound sales for yourself, getting the community going, what else contributed to that rapid growth?
Guillaume Moubeche (16:30):
We are really good at distributing content across many channels. Whenever you want to build a presence overall, you need to also be present on social media. And back in the days on LinkedIn in 2018, there were mainly content from LinkedIn pages. So the content was really poor. It was usually banks or whatever, saying like, hey, look at this article that's ones ever going to read. And I was like, okay. So I started posting contents directly from my profile. And the reach was huge because LinkedIn at that time wanted content creators to be on the platform. So they were really boosting their content and it was easy to get a lot of views. So my idea at that time was like, okay, how can I position myself as a leader and build native content directly on LinkedIn so people see me as an expert on cold email, on sales, et cetera.
Guillaume Moubeche (17:22):
So I started to post a series of posts called the cold email tips where I would give tips each day about cold emailing. So for example, tips number one, how to write a good subject line. And then I would say a few things like make it casual. Here are a few example that you can use, make it very specific, so it can't be much longer because of X, Y, Z. And I would give a very detailed post. And by doing this, people would keep engaging with my content, keep following me. And with this social presence that would get step by step, stronger and stronger, I would also link it to a multi-channel outreach. So what I've realized is that whenever you're reaching out to someone and that person doesn't know you, the reply rates depends really on the personalization, on the relevance, et cetera, but what you can do to really increase and boost that is to add the person first on LinkedIn, write content on a daily basis, or let's say three to five times per week.
Guillaume Moubeche (18:20):
After that, reach out to that person via email, but maybe after three weeks so you are sure that they've been exposed to your content and by doing this, you will see that your reply rate is actually being tripled from time to time. And for me, it was huge because it's actually it's not a cold email or cold outreach anymore, it's something a bit warm because they have senior content and they see you as a sort leader. So they are much more inclined and interested in reaching out to you. It's because it's the same, whenever you're on LinkedIn and you see someone posts and you see the engagement that there is around the post, you feel like that person is important. So if you have that person after that, coming directly into your inbox, you're like, "Holy crap." You are like, "I want to have a chat with that person." And for me, it was a really, really huge booster.
Peep Laja (19:10):
The challenge for all brands is to get a potential customer to think of you at all. Optimize your marketing for higher mental availability, being easily noticed and thought of in buying situations. 95% of your target customers are out of market. Invest in getting into the very limited consideration set of those buyers. So when they do have the need and the budget one day, they think of you. Five key things to achieve this one, avoid silence. Continuously try to reach all buyers of the category. Two, grab attention, avoid sameness. Three, consistently use distinct brand assets. Many leading marketing effectiveness thinkers make the case that differentiation is increasingly hard. So focus on distinctiveness first. Four, be consistent about your brand. Five, repeat yourself a lot. Out of all the ads you run, around 60% should be brand ads. People rarely buy brands they don't know.
Peep Laja (20:17):
The communications job here is relatively simple. A, what is this thing? B, what is it called? C, when should you use it? And do this in a way that makes them think of you the moment they have the problem you solve. A brand's mental available refers to the probability that a buyer will notice, recognize, and or think of a brand in buying situations. Here's how Byron Sharp a leading marketing research render and the creator of this concept explains it.
Byron Sharp (20:45):
Mental availability, I do not mean just top of mind awareness or something. I mean the probability that when a buyer goes into a buying situation, they're going to buy from the category, they could buy your brand, mental availability is the probability that they do actually notice you, pay you some attention, and we have a chance of purchase. And physical availability is the physical accessing of the brand, whether that's online or offline, if it's difficult for people to buy you, then you're less likely to be bought. So big brands have more mental and physical availability. And this explains why big brands get a bigger customer base. And that customer base is a little bit more loyal. These patents don't mean that it's only about mental, physical availability, but what they do is they really point out. They suggest that in the long run, that's what branding's about. If you go what is brand equity? It's mental and physical availability, two extremely important assets. There are other things, of course like pricing, product quality, things like that, but in the long run, these are surprisingly less important.
Guillaume Moubeche (21:41):
We started to hire people and I was like, okay, it works because I'm the CEO, but now let's see how we could replicate this. And we really scaled that process with my head of growth. So I really trained him to talk more to a different type of target. So at first I was focusing on salespeople. My head of growth would focus for example, on the marketers and head of growth as well. And then we hired the head of sales. And then at that point, I was like, "Okay, Nadia, you're going to be in charge of the sales part. So I'm going to let you become the expert you are in sales and showcase it." And for me, I would maybe be much more oriented towards entrepreneurs. So I switched the type of content that I was writing towards giving tips and better tips to entrepreneurs, sharing stories, et cetera, while Nadia would focus on sales.
Guillaume Moubeche (22:28):
And then step by step, as the team grew, we do what we call the LinkedIn bodies, which is one person in marketing and one person in sales work together, so they can create the best post and everyone in our team is posting, or at least most people in our team are posting at least three to five times per week, which creates overall, a really, really strong brand, a really great way to share a message, share a way of being different also in the message you want to bring to your audience. And overall it resonates with the brand. And I know that a lot of people out there are afraid of having their employees with a really strong personal brand, but the truth is the more you help people shine, the more grateful they are. And if they live, it's also part of the life, you can't keep people forever. When people live usually it's because you didn't do a good enough job to keep them, but it's not because they built their personal brand.
Peep Laja (23:24):
Okay. So you have Nadia or whoever, you help her build a personal brand, you become the expert for this group of target customers and she creates content and has the followers, and then she leaves, and now you don't have a resident expert, a resident in-house brand for that segment, that that kind of leaves a hole. So...
Guillaume Moubeche (23:43):
The idea is to always double or triple or quadruple the expert that you have. So for example, in our sales team right now, we have at least four people who are seen as experts on the sales topic. For marketing, it's the same. Everyone has their own way of communicating, has their own touch whenever they're writing, but overall it's work. And if they leave, on their resume, it would say, or on their LinkedIn profile that they were at Lemlist, and their role will be there. So everyone knows that we're in the sales space. So whenever you look at the profile, you would understand that, and for us, it is always a good and very beneficial I would say image to reflect on the company.
Peep Laja (24:27):
Brands should double down on building personal brands inside their companies, not just encourage their people to be visible, but to be personal brands first. People want to hear from people more than brands and brands benefit from being associated with known people. Most companies would get 10 extra results by promoting their personal brands rather than the company. People want to hear from experts. In a way that's a lot like professional sports, there's the team brand and the athlete. Pro teams can build a brand of athletes, cash in on merchandising their brand and top athletes prefer to build their brands off the teams. How has your company's strategy evolved and changed? What was it like three years ago versus what is it now? What has changed?
Guillaume Moubeche (25:13):
At first, we were just not a hundred percent confident in who we were, because I feel like whenever you're launching a company, you really look at the competitors around, you try to understand the market even better, even if you know it at first, you always get better. And the more you look at others, the more it can impact what you're doing. So at first I felt like we were looking at the content from HubSpot, all the top performers. And we're like, oh, okay, trying to reverse engineer of why it works. And the truth is as we grew, we really stopped looking at the competitors and we focused on one thing, which was we have this question that we ask ourselves every time we want to operate a new accusation channel or a new thing that we want to test is, is it going to make our users more successful?
Guillaume Moubeche (26:05):
If the answer is maybe or no, we do it, and it's not a priority. If the answer is yes, we can go full focus on it. And then on top of it, the more we grow, the more confident we are about the brand, meaning that our life is all about making B2B a bit more fun, a bit more human, because a lot of people think that just because it's B2B, you have to wear suit and tie and be super serious when actually a lot of the customers that I've closed and that I've met, I've met them on Facebook and then we're chatting on messenger. And that's because there was this friendly tone that we became close and we built a relationship and I can help them in their business. They can help in mine, and this is a win-win relationships.
Guillaume Moubeche (26:46):
And to me, what I love is being serious, but not taking yourself seriously. And the truth is we are doing as much things that are for a lot of people really crazy when it comes to videos, when it comes to the branding, when it comes to all the things we do, and it's things that never been done in the past, but the more we do that, the more creative the teams become. So for us, I would say that what has changed is really the limit to our creativity. The more we grow, the more crazy things we are going to do. So for example, we just cross the 10 million, so we're going to publish a rap that is quite funny about 10 million in bootstrap. We have a lot of branded videos that will go out about how we reacted to the 10 million that are a bit funny. We're going to have a lot of videos about the branding, et cetera, et cetera.
Guillaume Moubeche (27:34):
And all of these things makes you 10 times more likable. It's not just about the brand. It's also about the people because when you build a likable brand, when people are talking to you, because they've watched all the videos or some videos, and they know about it, everyone is more chilled. Everyone is more relaxed and they know you're going to bring value, but they also know that it's in a cool environment and that it's okay to just be you.
Charlotte Schefe (27:59):
Hey Lemlisters, what's up in local email hood. I'm so not going to say that. Hey everyone, this is Charlotte, digital marketing manager here at Lemlist. The tool that lets you create personalized outreach campaigns, build relationships with your prospects, and get more replies in the process. All right, let's get this party started.
Peep Laja (28:23):
The counter arguments here so I'm all for user research. And I'm a huge believer, spent my last 10 years in user research. However, if you only focus on your user and you talk to the user, "Oh, what do they want? What's the value." Every single competitor is doing the same thing and the sales engagement tool customer, they're not that different. So they all have the same needs, so you solve for the same problems, you end up with very similar products. And so if you don't look at what your competitors are doing, you might be building yourself into sameness. Now I understand you have your community plays. Maybe you do more crazy rap videos than your bigger competitors that are more conservative. But how do you think about being differentiated on a product level to carve out a different space?
Guillaume Moubeche (29:09):
It's super important. I, a hundred percent agree with you. I don't think that you should listen to your users all the time. I think it's important to talk to your users, but I think it's important to know what you want to do. And for me, something we really worked on along the years was defining who at exactly is our ideal customers, because the truth is whenever you're building a brand and your company is growing, you attract everyone. So for example, we have clients and customers that are, I would say enterprise level and this enterprise level, they are here and they're using the product, but under our condition. So you see, for example, Outreach, Salesloft, et cetera, as they grew, they wanted to go out market. So their strategy was to go enterprise and they build their software around this specific use case.
Guillaume Moubeche (29:57):
For us, our goal is really to be focused on SMBs, startup and scale up. And we don't want really enterprise. So the truth is if enterprise come we have this huge opportunity of closing deals that are maybe a hundred times bigger and with our normal customers, but for us, if there are not parts of our ID customer profile, we just don't do any effort in a sense that we're happy to we serve them, but we will serve them exactly as the same as if they were small customers, not enterprise level. So we're not going to build all this different type of access, all this different type of custom development that enterprise need. We know we have the best product for a specific use case, here it is.
Guillaume Moubeche (30:39):
And we're going to continue to work on that to make it even better over time. We need to know our targets and we need to be super focused on that. And yeah, of course, you can check out competitors, et cetera, but you need to understand that in the long term, you need to know where you want your product to go and you need to leave some rules that you set to yourself.
Peep Laja (30:59):
Yeah, absolutely. Where to play and how to win.
Peep Laja (31:04):
It's best to start out in a box, be known for one thing, you can branch out later, but all too many companies have unclear and productive positioning because they elected discipline to say no to attractive looking revenues that don't fit. If you go after the dollars in a market, that's not your core focus, in the end, you will lose to highly focused competitors. Go further. You could niche down to serve a specific industry, but could focus on a specific use case as well. You need to focus your research on constantly improving your customer value and refining your customer targeting. Choose your customers and build the best for them. It's something Guy Yalif from Intellimize put well in episode five of how to win.
Guy Yalif (31:46):
There is time to continue rapidly iterating on the product to create better experiences for our customers so they go tell more customers to enable us to stand out in this crowded market that can enable us to even better serve our customers down the road. What you don't hear us saying is there are a lot of shiny objects around us. Our customers have asked us to apply this approach in a bunch of different places. We haven't, we have focused on whom are we great for? Why are we going to be great for them? And doing that thing extremely well, rather than let's go open up five fronts in our battle, five fronts in our war.
Peep Laja (32:27):
Talking about how to win. So you've zoned in on where you play, what kind of customers you're getting. You have your channels dialed down. What's the plan going forward? How do you think you're going to win and gain more market share in this SMB segment?
Guillaume Moubeche (32:42):
So the idea for us was, okay, how can we create all these resources that are going to make our users successful? And the more we focus on that rather than just closing the deals, upselling, or whatever, the bigger the customers we get are. And for us, it's just a matter for the of years to come to keep having this focus of making our users more successful and doing everything we can to achieve that goal, basically. So it's like investing in the master classes, invest heavily in customer support so people don't wait too much whenever they have a question, et cetera, have the best article in there. And at the same time, use our product. So the more we use our products, the more we going to understand the existing paint in the ecosystem because you have several strategy, you have the strategy of going through very verticalization, where you focus on something and that's it.
Guillaume Moubeche (33:35):
Or you are more like a platform business like HubSpot did. Our goal in the next year is to add additional products in that same relationship trend. So we want to rebuild a new type of CRM that we will launch basically in 2022. And the idea is to build products that are easily cross-sell, that can be cross-sell with our existing product in order to grow on a different levels and with different product. And that each product from lempire can be an entry door to a whole ecosystem that would be easy for us to upsell afterwards.
Peep Laja (34:12):
Awesome. Thank you so much. So how is Lemlist winning? One, they are focused on building mental availability among leads across all the platforms.
Guillaume Moubeche (34:24):
By inviting them to our community, they would actually follow all our growth and journey. And I knew that in the long run, a lot of people know us for years and they've never made the switch until there is that one day where they're like, okay, this is the time, and now I'm going to jump to Lemlist.
Peep Laja (34:40):
Two, they focus on building up personal brands inside their company and have built a culture of expertise in their sales and marketing teams, which offer a consultative approach to it.
Guillaume Moubeche (34:51):
The idea is to always double or triple or quadruple the expert that you have. So for example, in our sales team, right now, we have at least four people who are seen as experts on the sales topic, for marketing it's the same. Everyone has their own way of communicating, has their own touch. It is always a good and very beneficial image to reflect on the company.
Peep Laja (35:14):
Three, they're clearly focused on a specific target audience and concentrate all their resources on being the best tool for them.
Guillaume Moubeche (35:22):
Our goal is really to be focused on SMB, startup and scale up. So the truth is if enterprise come, we have this huge opportunity of closing deals that are maybe a hundred times bigger than with our normal customers. We just don't do any effort in a sense that we're happy to serve them, but we will serve them exactly as the same as if they were small customers, not enterprise level.
Peep Laja (35:45):
A final takeaway from Guillaume.
Guillaume Moubeche (35:47):
I think it's important to talk to your users, but I think it's important to know what you want to do. We know we have the best product for a specific use case, and we're going to continue to work on that to make it even better over time.
Peep Laja (35:59):
And that's how you win. I'm Peep Laja. For more tips. Follow me on LinkedIn or Twitter. Thanks for listening.