Please tell us something about yourself and Sleeknote?
Emil Kristensen is CMO and co-founder of Sleeknote. Sleeknote helps medium and enterprise companies such as JYSK, Berlingske, Matas; Hummel, Aller, Gyldendal, Bauhaus, Coop, and 800 others, collect email leads for their business.
Emil is also a lead generation blogger, and he is passionate about teaching, speaking, and advising about email marketing and lead generation both nationally and internationally.
Building a brand can be tough. What was the most important part of building yours?
First of all – patience. You don’t always see results right away. Also we treat all customers equally. We don’t favor large or small customers. They all matter to us, and they’re the reason we exist.
Furthermore, you can’t cut corners when you’re trying to build your brand. You need to build small ambassadors for your brand and your product. You should also use influencers. Just don’t use too many. You need to focus on a handful that will recommend your product. The key word here is quality over quantity.
Maintaing good relations with an audience is important. What’s your secret?
All the co-founders conduct interviews with randomly selected customers each quarter. Thus, we talk to more than 100 of our customers each quarter. The purpose of the interviews is to get feedback from our customers where they tell us what works, and what doesn’t, and what they would like to see from us in the future.
We also do free onboarding, which is a 45 min. meeting all our new customers get where we introduce them to the product and the system to help them get started as smooth as possible.
In addition, we offer free best practice meetings for customers as well as non-customers. The meeting lasts approximately 15 minutes, and we share all our best tips and tricks to lead generation through lead capture forms.
Lastly, we want to establish a personal relationship with everyone we communicate with. Thus, we never send an email you can’t respond to. When you communicate with us, you know that there’s a real person at the other end of the line and we read and respond to all emails.
What would be by your opinion the top three reasons for Sleeknote success?
- Our team has been crucial. We’ve been very fortunate and good at acquiring the right people.
- We haven’t taken an investment from day one. Thus, we’ve had to learn how to build a business that could survive on it’s own.
Monetization can be tricky, what was the first step?
We saw a gap in the market that we needed to act on. First, we made an array of prototypes, after which we tested whether or not someone would actually pay for our product.
Fortunately, companies were willing to pay for our product and we chose to develop a service for it (SaaS).
So, what’s the next big thing for Sleeknote?
The next step for us, is to ensure that we support mobile first.
Would you say that there’s a secret formula for success on the internet?
Help others first – then you can ask for help.
There’s no shortcut to online success. Not through paid or organic growth. You try thousands of things, and if you’re lucky, one or two of those things work.
Any tips for web newbies on mistakes to avoid?
In the SaaS business you can get a lot of help from others, as long as you return the favor. Don’t spend too many resources on developing a huge product. Test an MVP product first to see if your target group is willing to pay for it.
Don’t ever give up when it comes to online marketing. It requires patience and an incredible amount of attempts and experiments on various channels and strategies.
If you could get a guest post from anyone, living or dead, who would you chase?
I would love to get a guest post from Steve Jobs about the hustle early days of Apple.
Photos ©: www.sleeknote.com
