EP #409 - Flavio Rump: Lessons in Sales & Marketing from a DeinDeal Founder

This episode was co-produced with ⁠UBS⁠ and ⁠ETH Zurich⁠, as part of the ⁠Entrepreneurial Backpack Series⁠.

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About Flavio Rump:

⁠Flavio Rump⁠ is one of the co-founders of ⁠DeinDeal⁠, the famous Swiss eCommerce scaleup acquired by DeinDeal in 2011. He’s also a startup investor, board member and growth expert. He holds a BSc in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from ETH and has co-founded companies like Pigeon Apps Inc, Blue Chocolate Inc, and Bio2040.com, and the Student Biolab Zurich.

He credits DeinDeal’s success and quick growth to their early realization that sales do not equal profits, and to the fact that their team possessed a large number of extremely competent “specialists”. Here is a summary of some of the sales and marketing tips that he shared with our host Silvan:

• The difference between sales and marketing is that marketing is a long-term endeavor to build trust and credibility, whereas sales is a shorter-term process where you understand customer needs and fit your product to them.
• The sales channels that worked best for DeinDeal were Google Search, Facebook and Hyperlocalized Advertising. For this last one they created individual landing pages for certain queries (e.g., hairdressers in Zurich, restaurants in Zurich), in order to reduce the number of clicks a customer has to go through to get from query to conversion. Their conversion rates increased 50%.
• A great way to start getting closer to customers and better understanding their needs is to create a live chat on your homepage.
• Customer development should start as soon as research and product development start. Talking to customers while building your product helps you know which product to build in the first place, as well as which markets to go into.
• Don’t be afraid to get candid with prospects during sales calls. Phrases like “Help me out here” are effective in getting people to open up and to explain how your product falls short. 
• Don’t be afraid to ask your prospect to close the deal if your sales call is going really well. And if your sales call went well but you haven’t heard from your prospect since, don’t assume this means disinterest — often people are just quite busy. Follow up continuously unless they clearly state that they no longer intend to buy your product.

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Resources Mentioned:

• ⁠The Four Steps to the Epiphany, Steve Blank⁠
• ⁠The Mom Test, Rob Fitzpatrick⁠

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