1. Please explain and introduce the company in detail.
SalesCandy® is a mobile app that solves the two biggest problems that sales & marketing operations face. After a potential buyer submits an enquiry, 70% of the time, he does not receive a response from the sales team. For those that receive a response, it averagely takes 5.5 days. We enforce a contact strategy, trace every sale, and pinpoint the ads that give you the best return without manual intervention. Our algorithm distributes the lead to the right salesperson as it comes in and auto re-routes it to the next available salesperson in 25 seconds if it is not attended, without intervention from the manager. All phone calls & SMS interactions will be logged & reflected in real-time reports. One of our clients saw 58% higher conversion rate after using SalesCandy upon optimising their contact policy from 4.4 days to just 4 minutes .
2. Tell me about the background of your start-up.
Our co-founders, Stanley Chee and Jeffry Chan, saw that there is a lack of visibility in the status of the leads that digital marketing agencies generate for their Lead-to-Sale (L2S) clients. They have decided to take on the problem and SalesCandy was born.
3. Please introduce your differentiation and strengths from other companies.
Our routing algorithm and our solution is specifically made to fit for large companies with large salesforce. Hence, the need for a specialized algorithm. We help promote transparency of the lead-to-sale cycle, incentivize salespeople to update leads, & routing algorithm of leads that is optimised for sales closing, helping large lead-to-sale organisations to enforce a contact policy.
4. Please tell me if you have any memorable events while running this business.
In the early days of SalesCandy inception, Stanley Chee & I were keen on solving the lead-to-sale pain points of our existing clients from our digital advertising agencies, so we create a simple powerpoint presentation slide addressing the pain points that our clients had and the solution that we’re bringing to the table. Despite not having built any minimum viable product (MVP) yet, we had 4 early adopters who signed up with us and made full payments as we requested even though we didn’t have any demo product to show our clients yet. Then, we had our first few early adopter clients paid for their packages, the process of building the first SalesCandy MVP was kickstarted, and the rest was history.
5. Please let me know if you have any business results so far.
We have scaled 8 countries in a matter of 3 years, with a belt of 4 fortune global 500 clients so far. Some of our clients have rolled out SalesCandy in 3 countries. Our tech is built in-house from the ground up using the latest technology from AWS, with the ability to scale to any country in the world.
6. Tell me what inspires you as you run this business.
Since September 2020, we have started doing big data analysis on over 2 million leads and over 6 million salesperson action data points that we have gathered since day one. We kept finding more and more interesting insights related to the sales process and sales closing predictability. It is very likely that we are one of the first companies in the region, if not globally, that analyzes these data or gains these insights. This has inspired us to continue to develop the product and to expand the business regionally.
7. Please give us a word of advice for those who are preparing to start a startup in the future.
Those embarking on a startup path are on a mission to solve a problem, and it can feel like every moment not spent on that mission is time wasted on a low impact outcome. That sense of drive and urgency, as well as creating a company from nothing, comes with a burden of high expectation – most often, from ourselves. It’s also a path outside the norm, which means the founder forgoes a regular salary and the peace of mind that a “steady job” can bring. It can feel like everything is on the line, all the time, which is a heavy weight to hold. Hence as founders, it’s important that we learn to fail. Be nimble, fail fast, learn fast.
8. Please tell us about your future business plan and vision, and how you feel about being with ZER01NE.
We feel extremely privileged to be selected in ZER01NE accelerator and to have Hyundai on-boarded to run a POC with us. Being in the lead-to-sale tech space, we see value moving up the sales funnel and helping our clients to manage their lead generation initiatives through their various sources down to optimising the routing algorithm so we can route their salespeople the hottest leads using machine learning & AI.
9. What’s the last thing you want to say?
Through the ZER01NE platform, we hope to get more large enterprise clients from Korea and get the global recognition as a preferred tech solution provider for large lead-to-sale enterprises in the world.
