SalesSeek is a marketing, sales and customer relationship management tool. Virgin StartUp funded Fudge Animation Studios use it to track email campaigns and manage clients, we asked co-founder James Hill if he would recommend SalesSeek to other startups. See his review below:
Firstly, tell us what Fudge Animation Studios does?
We’re a UK based character animation studio and produce broadcast commercials, business communications and animated video and film for some of the world’s largest brands. We’re proud to call organisations like Samsung, HP, Unilever and Disney happy clients!
Did you try any sales and marketing tools prior to SalesSeek?
I’ve spent the vast majority of my career in sales, marketing and advertising in management positions to board level. In that time, I’ve been tasked with evaluating numerous sales and marketing tools including SalesForce, MS Dynamics CRM, Insightly, Zoho, Sugar CRM and Nimble.
What was your experience with other tools?
Bar none, all of the tools I’ve come across have some really great features. However, I’ve always found it really difficult to find a solution that is flexible enough to meet our requirements and one which comprises all of the cool elements I’ve seen and liked. Some of the more powerful solutions (e.g. Sales Force) are amazing but I’ve always found them a bit cumbersome and confusing – a bit of a ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’ for a small business like Fudge. Heavy and often complex tools like this are frustrating because you feel like you’re paying for functionality that you know you will simply never need. At the other end of the spectrum, the more basic tools are a lot simpler to use but often seem to be ‘locked down’ to the extent that they don’t fit some of the unique requirements that most businesses have – advice from support typically sounds like “the best practise approach would be to” or “a kind of work-around might be to”.
How did you come across SalesSeek and what drew you to it?
I was introduced to SalesSeek at an exhibition at London Olympia where we were shown a highly visual live demonstration from one of the team. The first thing that drew our attention was how sensible and effortless everything seemed – you need only look at the pipeline function to understand what I mean by this. After a few questions and within minutes, the demonstrator built a bespoke pipeline funnel and walked us through the entire sales process within the tool. We were blown away with how well thought out the entire system seemed and how beautiful the platform is – something which is especially important to creatives like us with an eye for detail.
What was your initial experience in implementing SalesSeek?
Extraordinary. The tool is excellent but if there’s one thing that really stands out about SalesSeek, it’s their customer service – I’ve genuinely never experienced an on-boarding like it. Being a creative company that works with numerous software solutions, we go through system implementations regularly and often have to work with consultants and ‘customer success’ managers. More often than not, we feel like we’re being rushed through the implementation process and miss important elements. So often we spend months getting our head around a system before giving up and begging for additional help (which we normally have to pay for). Our experience of working with SalesSeek was the complete opposite. Not only is the setup incredibly simple and intuitive but Anna, our implementation manager, walked us through step by step. In our first few weeks and months, Anna scheduled catch-up calls and checked in on us before we even got the chance to struggle and has always been on hand to answer questions or make adjustments to the system so that it fits our business. When it comes to implementation, SalesSeek really excel.
How does it assist your Sales and Marketing process at Fudge?
SalesSeek is our sales and marketing process. As well as helping to manage activity with our existing contacts and prospective clients, it allows us to track email campaigns and all of our other sales and marketing activities in one place. It’s truly amazing to be able to build an email campaign, track activity and responses and then feed all subsequent leads into a beautiful pipeline management system all within one system.
What feature(s) of SalesSeek do you find most useful?
I haven’t seen a more beautiful or intuitive sales pipeline feature and the way SalesSeek is able to help visualise the deals me and my team are working on is incredible. Integrated email campaigns mean that we don’t have various different systems that we need to access to manage our marketing efforts (and also means that we don’t have to pay for them). The daily activity feed keeps me up to date with my daily tasks and gives the management team transparency over the entire teams’ activity.
Would you recommend SalesSeek to others and what sort of business would benefit most from SalesSeek?
I would (and actively do) recommend SalesSeek to any organisation that aspires to having a more organised, transparent, sales function. I’ve worked for major multinational organisations right down to micro SME businesses and I would advocate its use at either end of this scale.
Virgin StartUp has agreed an exclusive discounted deal for Virgin StartUp funded businesses to use SalesSeek, to help them grow their business. Details of which will be sent out to all Virgin StartUp funded businesses very soon. Any queries, please e-mailstartupopportunities@virginstartup.org.