INNOVATORS VS COVID 19

Craig Klein of SalesNexus Tells Us How the Firm Helps Startups Generate Leads and Manage Sales

Published

3 years ago

10/23/2020

Kokou Adzo

First of all, how are you and your family doing in these COVID-19 times?

Craig Klein: We’re fine and healthy. My mom is in a nursing home so, we haven’t been able to hug her in over 6 months!

Tell us about you, your career, how you founded SalesNexus.

Craig Klein: I was a successful salesperson in the energy business and rose up into management. I tried implementing CRMs and automation technology for my sales teams but couldn’t find a solution that was easy enough for my salespeople and powerful enough to drive results. So, I created SalesNexus! We’re a simple but powerful solution that’s a great fit for startups and small teams that don’t have a lot of IT or marketing staff to babysit the marketing automation and CRM tools.

How does SalesNexus innovate?

Craig Klein: We listen to our customers. They’re always trying to find ways to drive results through technology and a never-ending source of great ideas!

How the coronavirus pandemic affects your business, and how are you coping?

Craig Klein: It has not been a big disruption for us. Thankfully! We had already gone virtual about 4 years ago so, we were all already working from home. We’ve also seen an increase in interest from companies that were forced into working from home and needed cloud solutions all of a sudden. We tried to help out by publishing a couple of blog posts with best practices for working from home.

Did you have to make difficult choices, and what are the lessons learned?

Craig Klein: We’ve worked with a lot of customers having to make cutbacks and need to pivot their marketing strategies overnight. We’ve responded by trying to provide helpful advice –

How do you deal with stress and anxiety? How do you project yourself and SalesNexus in the future?

Craig Klein: I like to think of every problem as an opportunity to learn and improve. Helping customers solve their challenges can be the most rewarding thing in the world. I also like to sail as much as I can!

Who are your competitors? And how do you plan to stay in the game?

Craig Klein: They include Salesforce.com, Microsoft, MailChimp, Constant Contact, etc.

We beat our much larger competitors by engaging with each customer on a much deeper level. Understanding their needs and helping them reach their goals. They won’t get that from Salesforce and Microsoft.

Your final thoughts?

Craig Klein: Our customers stay with us 3.5x as long as they stay with our much larger competitors. That’s the secret to our profitability and something new potential customers love to hear about! They don’t want to have to change wenders every 2 years! We think it’s because we’ve all been salespeople ourselves, and we really understand our customers’ challenges and truly WANT to help them succeed and are willing to go the extra mile to make it a reality.