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Company Spotlight: SALESmanago

Founder: Greg Blazewicz
Founding Date: 2012
Employees: 350
Locations: Amsterdam, London, Krakow
Website: www.salesmanago.com

Greg Blazewicz, chief executive officer & founder of SALESmanago:

“Customer Engagement for impact-hungry ecommerce marketing teams that want to maximize revenue growth the lean way and become trusted partners for their CEOs.”

What does your company do and what is your USP?

SALESmanago is a Customer Engagement Platform which has been designed specifically for impact hungry marketing teams and mid-size ecommerce businesses. 

Our Customer Data Platform has been natively integrated with all omnichannel tools such as email marketing, website personalization, social media and more to deliver complete smoothness in execution.

In the G2 rankings we have always been #1 in ease of setup and admin. 

It’s really plugin and play with a lot of ready to use workflows to target specific ecommerce KPIs. 

You can seamlessly activate your customer data across all channels within the Platform and the set up only takes a couple of days.

Our other key speciality is Zero Party Data. This enables you to own your relationships and become fully relevant to your customer whilst using AI-Driven Marketing Intelligence to help you take faster, better decisions on where to allocate your resources to maximize the impact.

We work with over 2000 midsize ecommerce brands worldwide and with a selection of larger brands including Victoria’s Secret, New Balance and Starbucks.

Since 2012, we’ve bootstrapped the business to 25 mln ARR, growing at around 50% annually. By the end of 2021, we partnered with two great UK based PEs, SilverTree and Perwyn for a 9 digit euro sum and I believe with this setup, and with our customers, we can shape part of the future of the ecommerce world.

What retailer needs do you fulfill?

Before the founding of SALESmanago in 2012, I had been a Marketer for over 10 years. Starting as an intern and growing to be the CMO at a large 5000 person company.

Over those years I noticed that marketing teams were often omitted in the understanding of the value creation chain. It’s clearly visible, even today, where 95% of businesses fear recession and the official research says that half of them will look to cut their marketing spend. 

Perhaps the search for being lean and cost effective should happen in other areas of business, but that would require much more energy and brave decision making. 

If you focus on being lean rather than cutting marketing spend then you open up the chance to accelerate your business and the chance to blow your competition out of the water.

As Ayrton Senna once said –  “You cannot overtake 15 cars in sunny weather… but you can when it’s raining.”

So our main idea is quite simple. Let’s make the marketing team be the serious and trusted partner of their CEO.

We start this by understanding just how challenging the ecommerce space has become. 

A swirling combination of Hyper-aggressive competition strategies, skyrocketing customer acquisition costs, the complexities of delivering the omnichannel experience and a growing customer demand for individualized relationships and superior relevancy make it harder than ever to achieve acceptable conversion rates and a meaningful returns on marketing investment. 

Ecommerce marketers are simultaneously confronted by the increasing cost of marketing technology, which then, of course, relies on IT and other difficult-to-find expertises to execute effectively.

The result? The implementation of strategies is slow, the impact is less, and meeting revenue expectations becomes an ever-greater challenge. 

In their quest for growth, marketing teams face a never-ending demand for more resources – resulting in shortsighted “spray and pray” tactics to try to hit their target and a constant search for the ideal Martech set-up – instead of using their long-term vision which focuses on building value and focusing on the customer.

How do you deliver on this?

We address the above challenges by enabling ecommerce marketing teams to achieve three core-principles. 

First is Customer Intimacy: By implementing self-learning solutions that leverage zero- and first-party data, this principle enables the marketing team to know their customers better than their best friends. The result is an increase loyalty and authentic customer relationships.

Second, Precision Execution: Combining the hyper-personalization of the omnichannel experience with clearly pre-defined processes. The effects are straightforward: Higher CR, AOV, CLV and lower customer churn.

Third, Growth Intelligence: Merging human and AI-based guidance to maximize the impact of your time, budget, and strategy – without a dependency on IT. It enables full control of revenue growth and outcomes.

How would you describe your vision?

Our vision is a world where marketing teams are the #1 revenue partner for their CEO’s. When the fear of a recession strikes, those CEO’s think of cutting costs in other areas instead of slicing into the marketing budget. This is approach will make companies grow faster and be more resilient to dynamic market changes.

We want to see a world where every ecommerce company can deliver maximum revenue growth, whilst at the sametime remaining lean. This has always been our philosophy and has also been the strategy we’ve used to grow SALESmanago, leading to the point we’re at today. 

Which retailers do you work with?

We work with ecommerce businesses, and offline/online retailers. Our focus is on Europe with a lot of established customers in Spain, Italy, Poland, Sweden with heavy growth coming from the UK, German and Dutch market. 

Most of our customers are mid-size ecommerce companies. Most of them work in intense and competitive markets and are demanding, expecting more from their tools than most large Enterprise companies. They know they can grow fast, they understand there’s a chance to stand out, they know that for them it’s a once in a lifetime opportunity. 

We as a company are growing because we make sure we cater to these ambitious teams and deliver them Enterprise Class solutions to help them challenge the ecommerce Giants of their industries.

We make sure that there is a perfect alignment of our values and the values of our customers which results in them being lean, pragmatic, staying ahead of competition and delivering perfect execution to their clients. 

How would you describe your growth, what have been the main points in your expansion and what has been key to your success?

We are growing at a tremendous pace and with the Silver Tree and Perwyn investment we plan to grow even faster, we are currently hiring senior level execs to support our teams, setting up new offices, and supporting our community.

The key to our success has always been delivering ecommerce tools that actually make a difference and help companies build a competitive advantage over their competition. 

Additionally, a huge part of our success has been our exciting partnership program.

I think that we are excellent at Customer Success. This is something that our customers really love and appreciate. I’ve never thought of SALESmanago purely in SaaS terms, I think that best SaaS needs that human touch so our customers feel we’re not just a vendor but we work as part of their team. 

How are you using the emerging technology to support retail growth?

The dynamics of the Martech market and the constant change in consumer behavior creates a perfect environment for companies with drive to deliver technological innovation. 

If you are a SaaS business and you’re not delivering new solutions to help your customer capitalize new opportunities you are gone.

Marketers are the most creative and innovative group of people in any organization, and are typically very open to experimentation. 

The winners in this industry are the ones which can mix a perfect grasp of the basics whilst leveraging the new possibilities offered by technology.

We make sure we cover both areas.

However, in terms of emerging tech we have a lot of focus on the pragmatic use of AI not just in the fields of recommendations and personalization but to utlise it to deliver automatic guidance for marketers to help them properly allocate their resources. 

We believe in the long term this will be the future.

In terms of new solutions we always make sure we have features no other Engagement Platform or Customer Data Platform provides such as a Customer Preference Center for Zero Party Data Management, a Personal Shopping Inbox – a widget for any Online Store to serve their 1-to-1 communication and offers, a dedicated Live Chat for ecommerce with automatic product recommendations, Deep Behavioral Profiling – a solution to capture the complex of behavior of Consumer on the Store, a Visual Search Engine, Voice Commerce and many others.

There’s a lot of exciting new stuff on our roadmap too.

What do you see as challenges for the retailers and suppliers over the coming years? How are you prepared to meet those challenges?

First and foremost, we see a crisis of consumer loyalty in the face of persistent inflation around the world. As McKinsey observes, already more US consumers are reporting that they switched brands and retailers more often in 2022 than at any time since the pandemic began. With inflation at a record high, more people are looking for value.

In this reality, growth will be difficult, but incredibly rewarding. After all, growth leaders generate 80% more shareholder value than their peers over a ten-year period. But driving sustainable, inclusive growth requires the right mindset, strategy, and capabilities.

We are dealing with a very dynamic situation. Sticking tightly to marketing strategies or plans without frequently checking outcomes is a recipe for doom.

Ecommerce and retailers need to stay agile, act in small steps, immediately check the results and be ready to change if needed. They have to act leaner, and we’ve wrapped all our product around this concept. 

We create tools for lean, agile teams, to deliver the value that the customers seek, lightning-fast, and correct course on which they fly. Sticking to the three core principles I mentioned earlier will provide marketing teams with the agility needed for success. 

What targets are you aiming to achieve in the next five years?

With practically all our competition being acquired by strategic investors and going upmarket, we as the only independent vendor in the space, see an incredible opportunity for being a partner of marketing teams within mid-size companies, excelling at flexibility, agility, innovation, best TCO and delivering first-in-class conversion rates.

We want to democratize the access to a Customer Data Platform among smaller organizations. We believe they have a great chance to utilize Customer Data and we want to help them do that whilst taking a lean approach to their marketing.  

Our data and market research suggest that more and more companies will be switching to an end-to-end approach to focus more on customers instead of being in the constant battle of integrating new tools and struggling with IT. 

We want to be a pioneer for this change, and relieve the stress and uncertainty of implementing new ideas.

One sentence elevator pitch to be used as a direct quote on how your company/system benefits retailers.

Customer Engagement for impact-hungry ecommerce marketing teams that want to maximize revenue growth the lean way and become trusted partners for their CEOs. 

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