Episode 85: Growing an Inbound Video Call and Customer Engagement Platform with Aleks Gollu, Founder and CEO of 11Sight
In this week’s episode, we spoke with Aleks Gollu, Founder and CEO of 11Sight.
11Sight is an inbound video call and customer engagement platform. The platform connects customers to businesses using video, audio or chat from anywhere on the web with just a click.
In the episode, we discuss various topics, including Aleks’s previous career history and how the concept of 11Sight came about. We also talk about sales video engagement, marketing and the lessons Aleks has learned from his experience.
Keep reading to find out more about Aleks and the episode.
11Sight
Aleks is a serial entrepreneur, having run three startups.
Aleks and his team started the third startup, 11Sight, before the pandemic because they agreed that they could conduct a lot more business online with video conversations. They looked at the market and researched companies like Zoom, Skype and WhatsApp. They realized businesses need to bring themselves closer to their customers to make themselves more accessible.
The team decided to build a solution that initially helps with sales lead acceleration but eventually helps at all stages of customer engagement. Because if you’re building a subscription business, every renewal is a new booking; Every month, you keep a customer happy in the lifecycle and grow your business.
11Sight has a distributed team across the world, with people in India, Turkey, Germany and the US.
Staff members are available online in each of these locations for prospective or current customers to speak to. It may be a five-minute conversation that needs to be escalated to Aleks because it may be a prominent potential investor or a large customer.
The person answering the call will understand the prospect's product, why customers buy the solution and what types of questions come in.
Once a prospect is brought in, it’s essential to keep them happy for customer success.
The effects of the pandemic
Aleks and his team were discussing 11Sight and the benefits of the company before the pandemic started. Before they started the brand, the technology wasn’t quite available yet.
There was a time when a company’s website was the primary source of truth about them. However, that’s now no longer the case.
Today’s customers are well informed. They do their homework on YouTube, LinkedIn and other platforms to research information about a company or product. There’s information everywhere, so it should be easy for anyone to contact a company they’re interested in.
The idea of 11Sight was to reduce the digital communication identity of an individual in a sales department by providing a location to a URL. This would allow the customer to initiate the call by clicking on the URL or scanning a QR code.
When 11Sight first started, there weren’t enough standard features on every device. Most people had a device with a camera and internet access but more software still needed to be available on every phone in early 2020.
Around the time the pandemic started, the team at 11Sight wanted to slow things down as they didn’t want to get too ahead of themselves. But then the pandemic hit and by May 2020, the team felt they were behind.
Aleks and his team wished they’d built everything before the pandemic. They'd have been way better off if they’d had another six months of prep.
Essentially 11Sight launched with the pandemic, and they’ve been expanding ever since.
The lifecycle of an 11Sight subscription
11Sight has customers in all types of industries, from B2C in automotive, construction and retail, to B2B in SaaS.
The commonality in all these verticals is usually the deal size, with the customer being worth somewhere between $1,000 and $100,000.
The company needs to be worth at least $1,000 to warrant a call on a $17 t-shirt purchase, for example. In these cases, the customer doesn’t want to talk to the vendor, and they don’t want to speak to them. If a company is worth a lot, there will be RFPs, and it will take months for anything to happen.
For the companies in-between, where processes take 30 days or less, speed matters. So that’s when you want to speak to your prospect on time and nail that meeting.
Every month is revenue. Maybe as a business you’re on platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram. Maybe there’s a lot of money spent on product presence and the leads are coming in.
The cost of closing that customer in a 10 to 15-minute video conversation will be a tiny fraction of the customer acquisition cost. Businesses will want to retain that customer and minimize the churn.
The best way of doing that is by having eye contact with your customers when they have questions on a video call.
If they don’t renew, you’re losing them. So acquiring a new customer is going to be a high cost.
The whole point of 11Sight is understanding the value of the customer. If the value is right, give them the right service.
Marketing 11Sight
Initially, 11Sight was quite successful in B2C because of the pandemic. Essentially, the biggest marketing for 11Sight was the pandemic.
In early 2020, before Covid, the team believed people weren’t adapting to video fast enough.
Today, the team at 11Sight also speaks to thought leaders who advise people who are building subscription businesses. They participate in these types of podcasts, and this helps a lot.
The team at 11Sight found that the old-fashioned methods of spamming people with emails or even using LinkedIn don’t quite work. Aleks shares that he doesn’t read LinkedIn messages that are trying to sell him a product.
But if someone wants to ask a specific question or somebody he knows reaches out, then of course he’ll interact with them.
It sounds like the pandemic and 11Sight’s continued marketing efforts have more than led the team to great success.
To hear the episode for yourself, tune in here. And to reach out to Aleks and his team, visit the 11Sight website or the 11Sight LinkedIn page.
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