Episode 65: The Growth Story of CRM Marketing Software with Lars Helgeson, Founder at GreenRope

Apr 5

In the latest episode of Subscriptions Scaled, we speak with Lars Helgeson, Founder of GreenRope.

GreenRope is an all-in-one CRM with marketing automation that increases growth by boosting awareness, generating leads, and driving conversions.

In the episode, we discover the growth story of GreenRope and so much more. Keep reading to learn more about the episode.

GreenRope

The episode begins with Lars introducing himself and sharing how he came to start GreenRope. We learn about GreenRope and how it works, as well as how Lars has evolved the product.

Lars’s first business idea was in email marketing back in the late 90s, which was how GreenRope began. In the early 2000s, email marketing platforms were some of the first to perform mass communication.

Even back then, Lars and his team had to make sure that their users were marketing responsibly. Over the years, the company expanded and grew with its technology and user base. The team learned a lot from its clients and what they wanted.

In 2008, the company started to change direction more towards a CRM. The team came up with the idea of what it calls a complete CRM. This is the vision that different channels should be unified together.

Back in 2009–2010, this kind of business model wasn’t around but today it’s fairly common.

The idea was that if you connect many platforms and make it easy for businesses to do so, you remove a lot of the complexity in running a company. People don’t need to spend their time figuring out how to connect different pieces of software, who’s got access to data, and so on.

The more you can simplify your business and the way you manage the data in the company, the more effective you’ll function.

GreenRope provides email marketing and mobile marketing with text messaging. It provides push notifications and other features like web analytics and a support ticketing system. There’s also an event management platform, a project management platform, and a knowledge management platform.

All these parts are integrated and built directly into the GreenRope system. Clients come on board and begin integrating the pieces together. GreenRope offers a subscription model based on access to those components.

The Pricing Model

Lars talks about the pricing model and billing of GreenRope’s product in detail. The product is typically paid for monthly, but discounts are given to customers who commit to an annual subscription. We also learn how customers typically pay GreenRope for its products.

We discover that the pricing model comes from Lars’s philosophy about relationships in general. He tells us that he doesn’t want anyone to be in a relationship with him if they don’t want to be there, and that’s how he feels in business.

Lars believes that it’s very difficult to dehumanize a relationship between a customer and a business completely. While companies do this, the more successful ones try to humanize that relationship.

For Lars, it’s essential to feel like his clients are with GreenRope because they want to be there and not because they’re trapped into a long-term subscription.

Lars explains that this business model may give the company a higher churn rate but he accepts this. When Covid hit, GreenRope’s churn rates skyrocketed, which is to be expected given the circumstances.

This was back in 2020 when the lockdowns affected what people were doing with their businesses. Many of GreenRope’s clients were going out of business or having to be very strict with their spending.

There were some clients that GreenRope gave a few months’ break to—they wouldn’t charge them and they could make it up later. Most of those clients eventually ended up coming back to GreenRope.

The Effects of Covid-19

We learn more about how the pandemic affected the business and how Lars had to prepare himself for the changes it brought to the company. Lars also discusses the churn in the labor market and if it affected his team.

It was challenging during the pandemic as GreenRope isn’t a huge company. When they could see their customer base reducing, it was frightening.

GreenRope’s approach was to focus on something positive in what was a very challenging situation for a lot of people. GreenRope created a give-back CRM program in honor of Tom, one of the company’s engineers who passed away from kidney cancer. Tom had worked at GreenRope for ten years.

The idea was that GreenRope’s technology would be free to nonprofits so they could use the system for their CRM, marketing, and automation up to a specific size. All the nonprofits had to do was go through GreenRope’s certification program, which uses their embedded learning management system. Then nonprofit companies could access and use the platform for free.

Rather than reacting to the pandemic with fear, Lars wanted to create something that would build more value for the world around us. Not only does it benefit nonprofits but the program created more awareness of GreenRope, too.

Lars explains that as a small privately held business, GreenRope can’t compete with the likes of HubSpot or Salesforce that have publicly traded or have hundreds of millions of dollars of private equity money.

By creating a way to demonstrate GreenRope’s value to organizations that could leverage and benefit from its technology, the brand benefits from some PR.

The Growth of GreenRope

Toward the end of the episode, Lars talks about how he’s grown GreenRope and how he’s decided to make certain investments. He explains his thought process around these growth options.

Lars explains that one of the team’s main discussions is what they want to build in-house versus what they want to outsource. Through partnerships, a lot of what GreenRope creates is driven by customer demand. When GreenRope speaks to its customers, it asks them how it can add more value for them.

One of GreenRope’s customers is a very large web hosting company based in Europe. They come to the company with some pretty heavy requests. Sometimes if they need something immediately, they require Lars to pull a developer off something else they’re working on, which GreenRope will charge for.

Some customers need a solution so quickly that they’re willing to pay extra for the development team to help out. Lars would like to get to a point where they can build a particular feature to address this so customers can easily upgrade for a quicker service.