Matthew Bellows
One of the biggest problems in business development, partnerships, and sales is managing your pipeline. A close second is managing, tracking, and keep up to date with your email inbox. I’ve tried many tools to help both issues but each has had its shortcomings. About a week ago a friend tipped me off to a company called Yesware. With his endorsement I immediately added it to my business and personal Gmail accounts.
My inbox was transformed into a hyper-aware entity. As my day commenced I started to realize that I was getting smarter by the minute. That really important email I sent in the morning to a team member was still sitting in their inbox, unopened. I decided to head over to their desk to talk about the important matter I had emailed them about. Efficient, smart, and useful. I’ve only been a user for a week, but I’ve already upgraded to a paid account.
Yesware was founded in 2010 by Matthew Bellows (CEO and photo above), Cashman Andrus (CTO) and serial entrepreneur Rajat Bhargava, who sits on their board. In April 2012, Yesware raised a Series A of $4M from IDG Ventures and Golden Venture Partners (alongside Google Google Ventures and Foundry Group that participated in their $1M seed round in 2011). During this time, the Yesware staff has grown to 17 employees, and users have increased from 5,000 to more than 120,000+. There are also a few high quality customers using Yesware, including: Groupon Groupon, GoodData, Xactly, HubSpot, Brightcove Brightcove, Adroll, Demandforce, and Cloud Sherpas.
After playing around with the tool, I sent my praise to the Twitter-sphere and connected with the CEO, Matthew Bellows. I had a chance to ask Bellows a few questions about his business, the future of sales, and other tools to help you become awesome at business development/sales/partnerships.
Alex Taub (AT): Where do you think the future of sales is going?
Matthew Bellows (MB): Sales is at the start of a quiet revolution. It’s being driven by several factors: the broader availability of information, a more aggressive lean-forward approach to purchasing, higher expectations for enterprise quality software experiences, and more process-driven tactics to running sales teams. When customer behavior, customer expectation, and internal management processes are all in flux, it’s a very interesting time to be in sales. As a meditation teacher once said, ”Chaos should be regarded as extremely good news.”
AT: What is the most interesting thing you’ve learned since starting Yesware?
MB: As a salesperson, I started Yesware thinking that my ability to sell was going to be a defining factor in our success. In fact, our board members really had to hold me back from selling in the early days. They knew, and taught me, that before the product was actually ready, it’s counter-productive to sell. I wrote a blog post about the experience here). Overall, the role of the product, especially in the enterprise world, has gotten more and more important. In the old days, a great sales and marketing organization could make up for a mediocre product. That’s changing now, and traditional enterprise companies are struggling because of it. I think that’s one thing plaguing Microsoft Microsoft. So I’ve learned that product is central to marketing and central to selling, as well as central to the customer experience. That’s a big shift from how B2B companies traditionally operate.
AT: Where does mobile fit into your roadmap?
MB: We get asked this question every day, and it’s always on my mind. In the long term, Yesware will be everywhere a salesperson is. If you are working on email, Yesware is there for you now. If you are making phone calls, Yesware should be there for you. If you are on the road, Yesware should be there to help you close more deals.
The thing is, we’re a small team delivering an enterprise-grade product to almost 150,000 salespeople all over the world. We’ve bitten off a lot by integrating Gmail and Salesforce, helping salespeople close while exposing customer response data to their teams. So we haven’t gotten to mobile yet. But we will. I promise.
AT: What other tools do you recommend for sales/bd/partnership people to use to be more successful?
MB: I’m a big fan of Mobile Day which makes conference calls so much better. I love PrepWork which emails you primers on the people you are meeting with later in the day. I’m fascinated about sales compensation (I interviewed Dan Pink about it here. Xactly has a great product for mapping innovative approaches to that thorny topic.
Speaking of Dan Pink, his book is great for everyone interested in sales. It’s called “To Sell is Human.” He takes modern social science and applies it to sales in a refreshing, human, and motivating way.
AT: What are you focused on in 2013? What is important for you guys?
MB: We’ve done a decent job of making Yesware helpful for salespeople, and we need to do more of that, but in 2013 we really need to improve how we help sales managers. Teams are more collaborative, and sales management has changed a great deal from the old carrot-and-stick methods. This year you’ll see Yesware help managers help their teams be more successful.
AT: You talked about how a B2B product has to really be ready before you start to sell. Isn’t that counter to the “Lean Startup” method that’s so popular now? How do you know if your product is ready?”
MB: Great question. No, seriously, there is a big emphasis in the startup literature about “ship early and often” and “if you aren’t embarrassed by your product, you waited too long to ship” I agree with both of those sentiments actually, but they pertain more to product development than they do to sales. Ship early, and be embarrassed, but before you build a sales function, make sure your product supports a scalable sales effort. I wrote about this in an article called “You’re Not Ready for a Sales Hire.”
The way to know that your B2B product is ready for a dedicated sales effort is by inbound interest. Seriously. You should have customers emailing you, calling you, sending you meeting invites, because they want to talk about how to buy your product. Before that happens, don’t spend a dime on marketing or selling. Focus exclusively on improving the product experience. Once you start getting inbound interest, then you can start to sell.
Update: If you are looking for a solution for Outlook, check out Toutapp.
Also on Forbes:
Great thoughts here Alex.
If you’re looking for email tracking awesomeness and templates for Outlook (80% of the Sales world still uses Outlook actually), be sure to also check out ToutApp: http://toutapp.com/video.
Oh – and in addition to email open and click tracking which is pretty cool, wait till you try Attachment tracking. That’ll really make your Inbox come alive. And don’t worry, if you really want Attachment tracking, ToutApp works inside of Gmail as well. Salesforce too. Also the iPhone.
I just got paid $6784 working off my laptop this month. I was shocked when my neighbor told me she was averaging $95 p/h, and she convinced me to try. I can’t believe how easy it was once I tried it out. The potential with this is endless. This is what I do, Rich4.COM_
This is a great article!
Did you know that CIOsynergy Announced ADCom Solutions, as the Official Sponsor for its January 31, Dallas Event.
We use gmail business applications. We want SLA and email escalation features, can this help ??/
sounds interesting my company HeyBubble live chat software should look into this.
____________________________________
Timothy Cocores
www.heybubble.com
Live Chat Software
It’s probably worth noting that this software isn’t going to work with all recipients. For someone like me that uses a text-mode mail client on my own home server, there’s simply no way. Even for less contrarian/eccentric folks, things like NoScript and the like will inhibit many mechanisms that might be used. In a situation like offline delivery, this completely breaks down.
Frankly, this kind of software *ought not* work — my MUA (mail user agent) ought not be be leaking this kind of information to a sender. Aside from basic semantic concerns (are you notified as to whether I open a letter from you? at best, you can get some kind of delivery confirmation), I certainly don’t want spammers to know which mails happened to get through my electronic and organic filtering.
I wish Yesware the best, and am glad you’re finding it useful, but realize that it’s not going to be completely accurate.
WHAT THE HELL DOES IT DO???
@superabound – That was my exact question. Poorly written article tells everything you don’t need to know about this program, and nothing you do need to know. Hey, writer, how’s about telling your readers what the program does instead of just hyping it? Novel concept, I know.
Exactly! What does it do? This article doesn’t contain any useful or interesting information about the product!
This is a terrible review with bad writing and a non-sequitir interview. Really, Forbes?
Another email tracking tool is ContactMonkey (contactmonkey.com), which provides real-time information about if, when, how often and where an email was opened, as well as the device or Web browser used.
In terms of how ContactMonkey is different from its rivals, there are two key features: an always-on sidebar that displays in real-time who opens your emails, and an in-email information box that shows recent activity around a particular email.
The seemingly obvious flaw in this approach would seem to be that most email clients these days, especially mobile, provide multi-line previews of emails, and many systems/apps give “toast” or “alerts” that preview email… so very often you read and digest an email without ever technically opening it. I haven’t tried the service, as I can’t see a way around this. There also is the issue of text based email viewers that won’t pull an embedded data.
Alex, thanks for the informative article, we’re trying it now in-house at Roofing Leads Online. We’ll report with feedback.
I had to read the words “another email tracking tool is… which provides real-time information” by Mark Evans before I understood that “yesware” is “spyware” that YOU put in OTHER people’s inboxes! Yay! This article was badly written, and wasted my time as a result. Down. Vote.
I am a customer of Yesware and I need it to tell me when someone only reads my email using the preview pane and then deletes it. Other than that I really enjoy it.
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WOW, if it was such an important email, why didn’t you walk over to your team member to begin with???
Classic tech junkie…spends 15 minutes “piddling” with technology but is afraid to walk 10 seconds to tell someone something important.
The best part about your article is the fact you didn’t really even describe what it does, which clearly eviscerates your argument by destroying your credibility.
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noo idea
I’ve used yesware, however the company was never able to get the analytics to be accurate. Sometimes e-mails sent to non-existent address would appear to be opened all over the world and multiple times for months.
I’ve been looking at bananatag and it looks like they have a more mature product.
This is a poorly written article. It neither fully describes the add-on it’s touting, nor does it flesh out the business behind it. I couldn’t tell if this was a piece of the folks behind the software, or the actual Yesware product. Basically my main take away from this article was that this tool lets you spy on e-mail recipients and provides canned sales text.
1. A Good salesperson shouldn’t need, and in fact would be hindered by canned sales text.
2. There isn’t much value to spying on your email recipients. Realistically if you find someone who has read a mail and hasn’t replied you can either act like you are making a routine follow up or cop to the fact that you sent them spyware. If you find someone hasn’t read your e-mail yet, again you are faced with following up with an excuse, or admitting you’re spying on them.
As a former hiring agent for a well known tech company I had lots of contact with contract firms seeking to provide contractors. I can tell you that the #1 thing that would make me seek a new sales contact: deceptive behavior by their sales people. This includes, but is not limited to: Sending E-mail w/ misleading subject lines, sending e-mail from different accounts, reaching out via contact means I haven’t provided (e.g. finding my cell phone from a resume and calling it, when I’d only provided an office number for contact).
Honesty sells these days. Tricky sales tactics haven’t been worthwhile in some time. Build repeat business by demonstrating integrity, not by spying.
Yesware looks interesting but it doesn’t work with Safari yet.
This “article” is a joke. This guy was so excited to shill for Yesware that he forgot to tell what it does. Maybe he should tell us how much Yesware paid him to publish this empty piece of trash. Articles like this exist ONLY to improve search engine results for Yesware.
oh neat, another tool for stalking your co-workers. I bet they all really appreciate it.
Poorly written…what the heck is Yesware? …sounded cool from the headline. Most of us have little time to read nonsense and I didn’t make it past the first few paragraphs…train or retrain this writer. I would have read the whole thing and dealt with the garbage adverts if the writer had caught my interest.
Help! I’m being attacked by Awesome Email!
This article told me NOTHING about the software other than how the writer “feels” about it. No cost/benefit analysis…nothing! Feel free to stop reading after the second paragraph!
Great post Alex. i have been using this in my website http://www.Kuwaitatoz.com for quite some time , i am getting good results,
This is very easy to block for anyone who is tech savvy. I use Outlook and my default is not to download images. If the image from yesware is not downloaded, then there will be no way to tell if it has been read.
This is another form of spyware, and many mail admins are creating mail scanning rules to block anything containing yesware links.
Please find another way to reach your contacts. This borders on spyware.
Sending an email, to someone on the desk next to you when you could have spoken to him in the first place seems a bit odd…afraid of human contact….you should see a therapist before it gets too bad.
This is spencer peter golden a social entrepreneur. after reading this, I think I am going to add Yesware to my business email. does it support business email ?
Thanks for the info.
It would be nice if, in this article, you actually described what this seemingly miraculous software actually does, besides cluttering up the hard drive of my computer!
I might want to be effective at writing email.
I might even want to be “awesome” at authoring email, were I nineteen.
But I would never desire to be awesome at emails, any more than I would want to spend a fortune on stamps for snail mails.
Sheesh.
I am involved so much as I have always like to share all the good and even nice things that I have used, developed faith in and let my readers get something special.
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I am involved so much as I have always like to share all the good and even nice things that I have used, developed faith in and let my readers get something special.
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I am involved so much as I have always like to share all the good and even nice things that I have used, developed faith in and let my readers get something special.
Where is the Moderator to check out and most likely remove at least 2 of the repeated 3 posts above mine?
“a more aggressive lean-forward approach to purchasing…when customer behavior, customer expectation, and internal management processes are all in flux, it’s a very interesting time to be in sales. ”
I switched off at that point and decided I would not even try this product evidently sold by a bunch of BS merchants and apparent friends of Mr Taub, according to this most glowing product placement, sorry, I meant “
article”.
There are plenty of other alternatives out there that do a similar job AND also work on Outlook which is the de facto business email system whether we like it or not.
I don’t get it. If the email was so important, why didn’t you call or visit your colleague in the first place to give him/her a heads up and reinforce its importance to you, or to both of you? This is normal practice.
This is creepy, I’d be pissed to learn that someone I do business with spies on me that way and request that they stop.
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your article content is at most extremely modest. it goes more towards advertisement and then presenting the company itself and how they work/what they want to work on next, rather than going towards useful information for potential users. the title is misleading.
When can some develop NOware to fend off the countless “pharmacy” spams I get daily!! THAT I would be interested in…
Speaking as an IT guy who works for a marketing company, I have to say this article is entirely unsurprising, yet totally frustrating. Why do sales and marketing folks think that it is sufficient to say “This will revolutionize the way you do business” without saying anything about what it actually does?
Let me be clear to all the sales and marketing folks out there. Products and services DO something and that something isn’t “make your job more efficient” or “streamline your workflow”. They, in the case of yesware, track who is and isn’t reading your emails. They automate and schedule your IT processes. They offer targeted web and print marketing campaigns tailored to a specific patient’s medical needs. The preceeding three statements are what their respective products and services “do”. But their marketing suggests they do “magic business-y stuff that will make your life better”.
And for the record, I only now know what Yesware does because of the comments section here full of comments saying “this article is wholly non-descriptive. Here’s what Yesware does”.
Mr. Taub, I don’t doubt your writing abilities. Stylistically it is a well-written article. But you’d do well to read the comments section. From a content standpoint, they are better articles than yours.
Can’t Forbes put a giant red banner box across the top of a page when it’s clearly an ad disguised as an article? It would make it so much easier to determine if I need to skip it.
Jason, you may give this some thoght as you are in sales.
Lost me at: …. email I sent in the morning to a team member (singular) was still sitting in their (plural) inbox, unopened. I decided to head over to their (plural) desk to talk about the important matter I had emailed them (plural) ….
What is it about the feminazis’ attack on the English Language that’s so efficacious it has “professional” writers falling over one another to appease?
And while it works in this instance and in that there are no more firemen, policemen and/or fishermen there seems no shortage of GUN MEN!
Sure ain’t just seMANtics.
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interesting article but does it really say what yesware does ?
how much it is ? where to find it ? how to install it ?
if you going to talk about something would be useful to get the full low down
We use a Gmail compatible Outlook addin called eFiler to file and search our emails in network folders.
Basically eFiler turns network folders into extensions of your Mailboxes so you can all see each other’s emails and you can delete them from PSTs so that your Legal and IT departments aren’t always on your back getting you to delete email you still need.
It’s great – you win because you can still use your saved emails as if they are in Outlook, the IT department wins because Mailboxes don’t keep filling up and Legal are happy because emails are no longer emails in PSTs and Exchange databases, they’re just documents with all your other files.
Just sad this “app” is only an add-on for Chrome and Firefox web browsers. Since 90% of enterprises use Internet explorer, this tool is useless for anyone that is a medium to large corp.
Ah, the killer extension that turns your data over to the FBI?
