An Interview with Liz Fulham, SalesOptimize CEO: ‘Our Mission is to Help Businesses Succeed and Capitalise on the $2 Trillion Global Ecommerce Market’

“Our product is constantly changing and evolving and is solely driven by our users, not by us.”

One size doesn’t fit all, and that’s the case with lead generation strategies, too. Even knowing that, many small business owners still struggle to determine which lead generation strategies work for their company, industry, or for business size.

In view of the above-mentioned scenario, we are thrilled to present SalesOptimize.

The Irish based tech company, incorporated in 2013,offers unprecedented access to the $2 trillion global eCommerce market, by using deep web analytics and their own custom, proprietary algorithms. SalesOptimize data mines the Internet to help companies size their entire eCommerce opportunity; valuable data is captured on millions of online retailers in 20+ countries, and then converted into various service offerings for the company’s global client base, including: lead enrichment, email lists, contact data enrichment, URL matching, and a self-serve lead generation platform.

LizFulham,

SalesOptimize CEO, spoke exclusively to The Silicon Review. Below is an excerpt.

Why was the company set up? And how did you expand your company and its offerings over the years?

SalesOptimize was set up to solve the problem of finding pre-qualified leads; I discovered this while working as European Head of Telesales in PayPal. Salespeople often spend a huge amount of time prospecting and trying to validate the leads they find after hours of trawling the Internet. The inspiration for SalesOptimize came about when I realised that there needed to be a single platform where salespeople could find all of their leads and contact data without having to waste so much time manually searching Google. And as the global eCommerce market is worth $2 trillion and growing, it made sense to focus on this area. Also only 2% of a company’s market comes inbound. This means companies are leaving 98% of their market opportunity on the table which results in a big lost in revenue.

What kind of responses have you received from your consumers over the years? How have they motivated you to shape your offerings/grow the company?

In the two and a half years that we have been alive, we have prided ourselves as being very responsive to customer needs and requests. When we launched initially, we had a different idea of who our target audience was; but as we grew, we realised that we had to adapt our business to suit the needs of companies that we had not foreseen as potential customers.

A small company/business is defined by its core values. What are your company’s core values and how did they help you to succeed?

Love our Customers: We want to help businesses win more customers to their product and services. We love to learn about their sales strategy and personalize our web bots to match their needs. Based on a customer’s specific requirements we will download the perfect list of customers for them.Google is one search engine for all; at SalesOptimize, our web bots are just for you.

Innovation: Using technology to consistently come up with new products or solutions to solve existing pain points for our customers’

Integrity: Our customers trust us with their sales strategy, they provide lists of their existing customers & their competitor strategy. These insights helps us to fine tune the web bot to meet their needs. We never share any cross company information with any of our clients and all our data is encrypted. We maintain a strong sense of morals and ethics – be honest and fair, both internally and externally.

Is your company a leader or a follower?

SalesOptimize is definitely a leader; innovation is central to our existence. Other tech companies that offer lead generation and lead enrichment services within the eCommerce industry are restricted to only the US and English-speaking countries in Europe. No other company is data mining the Internet on a global scale the way that SalesOptimize is. SalesOptimize is also the only data provider to validate email addresses beyond just the server and all the way to a recipient’s inbox.

Our product is constantly changing and evolving and is solely driven by our users, not by us. Every new feature or process that is implemented is put through rigorous testing and the question is regularly asked: how will this change affect the user experience?

About adaptability, how do you stay relevant to the consumer interests and needs in this high volatile market?

We stay relevant by listening to our customers and carrying out extensive needs analysis research to understand what it is that they want. Sometimes they might not even know exactly what they want, so we adopt a very consultative selling-type approach to ensure that we are providing them with the right service.

Moreover, it is all about sales and generating funding. As a founder I do a lot of the sales myself. I love nothing more than closing a deal either with a customer or an investor. The customer is a sweeter deal as they give you money as they respect the value of our products and services. We are under pressure from our clients to localize globally and we already have customers in over 10 countries.

Fostering a culture of feedback is crucial to the success of every organization. How is this true with your company?

Customer feedback is the lifeline of innovation. We constantly listen to our customers based on follow up calls and we also use tools such as Satismeter and Mouseflow to understand user behaviour and engagement. Without the feedback from customers, staff and investors, we could not innovate at the speed of what we do and generate the revenue we make.

Do you have any new products ready to be launched?

Yes, we are in the process of re-launching our website to coincide with a suite of new products that we are releasing to the market in October; Pipeline Cleansing & Lead Enrichment, Email Lists, Contact Data Enrichment, and URL matching. We are also adding more industries to our lead generation platform to supplement the two million existing retail websites in our system. Charities, gambling, travel, digital goods, marketplaces and financial services are just some of the new sectors being added in the coming weeks.

As a question on sustainability, where do you see your company a couple of years from now?

We strive to be a large organization of over 100 people, leading the world of big data and market intelligence and sales lead generation, and a market leader specializing in the European and Asian markets.

Liz Fulham, CEO: A Brief Background

Liz has more than 25 years of experience working in sales, senior management, and consultancy based roles for large companies such as PayPal, Microsoft and IBM; While working at PayPal, she noted the difficulty in sourcing high-quality sales leads, which is what inspired her to set up SalesOptimize – given her wealth of experience in this area, she is well equipped to manage this dynamic and innovativecompany.