To break this cycle, I wanted to know what traits those who are good at sales.
An opportunity window opened for me. A local user acquisition, sales agency NJ Media was looking for someone who could create a simplified version of the Pipedrive CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform. I raised my hand, and after two short meetings, I was in!
Although the agency is young (2 years as of the writing of this post), they have reached the majority of Latvian small to mid-level companies. During office hours you can witness the enormous amount of business they reach.
So what is the “being good at sales” secret?
They have systemized their sales funnels, and the whole sales process is monitored using the Pipedrive platform. The platform is well built, with many features and integrations, which are great for users who understand the process. But it might get overwhelming for inexperienced ones. And this is where I came into the play - to develop a simplified, easy-to-understand version of a modern CRM platform.
The “Sharpify” was born - A Simple And Powerful Sales Tool With Automation.
Here is the link to the Sharpify.io landing page.
At the core, all you need is a sales funnel - pipeline, where you put each potential deal as an individual card. And the game is simple, while the deal card moves through the pipeline stages, it has to lead into a Won or Lost state (both states are good, at least you know the outcome - no imaginary assumptions that are killing businesses).
For each deal, you’ll have to assign activities. The activities are an invisible force that drives you to get in touch with your potential (or existing) clients till you win or lose the deal. Repeat!
It might sound easy from the development perspective, but this is one of the projects where I can honestly say that creating something, simple is hard. And it takes more time than you expected. The current UI has its 3rd iteration, and still, there are a lot of UX issues that need to be solved.
My tech stack: AWS, Stripe API, Python, Django Rest Framework, Postgres, React.js / Redux, Styled Components, and Webflow. And Sketch for the UI design.
Lessons learned.
Please add a re-captcha from day one. Especially if you are the projects team you have a powerful sales team. The app had some kind of Script Kiddie email spammer attack within two weeks of its launch. It resulted in 250’000 registered fake users.
Again, creating simple is hard. With UI/UX is the same as it is with a joke. If you have to explain, you are doing it wrong.
