Welcome! The Surfe Communications Manager Handbook is where you will find all information relevant to better understand who we are, what we do, and how we do it.
This documentation is open to everyone in the team and in constant evolution. So please feel free to suggest improvements or ask questions.
- 🌏 What is Surfe?
- 👓 Product Vision
- 🧬 Our DNA
- 🏅 Missions
- 💬 Working with the Team
- With the Founders
- With Marketing Team (including Designers)
- With the Product Manager
- With the Development team
- Work responsibility Breakdown
- 🏗️ First week-to-week duty as Communications Manager
- Week 1
- Week 2
- Week 3
- Week 4
- ℹ️ Where to ask for help?
- 🔗 Useful Resources
- 📐 Initial Setup
🌏 What is Surfe?
Surfe (ex-Leadjet) is the n°1 tool salespeople need to use on LinkedIn for their sales activities. It lets them connect your CRM (Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive or Copper) to LinkedIn through a simple browser extension. Surfe (ex-Leadjet) makes it easy to create and enrich contacts, update their status and synchronize LinkedIn conversations - directly from a prospect's LinkedIn profile to the CRM in 1-click. No need to waste time on manual data entry. With Leadjet, salespeople are 4x faster when sourcing and save a minimum of 60 minutes of boring tasks per day.
👓 Product Vision
We want to bring the modern generation of end-users a CRM interface that is connected, customizable, collaborative and present everywhere they work (email, meeting scheduling or communication tools, websites etc.)
CRM gruntwork is a hassle and productivity breaker - we exist because we want to bring peace of mind back to sales and empower people to concentrate on what matters - selling.
- Be the #1 connected revenue workspace for customer-facing teams.
- Power sales through a flexible interface that makes CRM accessible everywhere.
- Design a dead-simple UI / UX which can be used by any revenue team in the world
- Set the standard for simple, safe and healthy prospecting on LinkedIn & the internet
- The ultimate productivity solution, Connecting the dots to build powerful end-to-end integrations
- No human explanation needed for understanding & using the product
- Embedded intelligence to eliminate manual tasks and provide additional sales insights
🧬 Our DNA
Ease of use. We believe that simple things are beautiful, that’s why made Surfe uncomplicated and crystal clear. We tried to build straightforward features to ensure your navigation & activity are as painless and effortless as possible.
Performance. At Surfe, one of our top priorities is your efficiency and productivity that pave the way to increased performance. We’re here to give you the means to catch waves, ride them and execute the most difficult turns and tricks.
Joy and Freedom. We created Surfe with the intention to give you peace of mind while selling. We want to empower you to go after prospects, get and close deal without having to waste time or worry about the little things (like refreshing your CRM, scheduling tasks and manually logging data). We made Surfe as customizable as we could, to ensure you’re at liberty to craft your own workspace that helps you be more productive - completely unconfined.
Enthusiasm, energy and boldness. At Surfe, we’re your biggest fans and supporters. Always by your side, we want to share our passion and energy to help you push the boundaries every day. We’re never afraid of the challenges and like to embrace difficulties, making bold moves! We hope we make you feel encouraged and supported to do so too!
🏅 Missions
The Communications / PR Manager main mission is to refine content strategy specifically to the blog while producing high quality blog content and refining the PR strategy in order to maximize Surfe's exposure all the while working collaboratively with the marketing team to drive successful communications.
First Month
Within your first month, you should be able to lead a first project - make sure you discuss it with your manager to ensure you understand what is expected of you and the output you should be able to deliver.
Projects | Objectives | Expected outputs |
Audit on content strategy and PR activities | Ensure our messaging has a sales-centric and product centric approach.
Measure our reach in PR | Content calendar and plan for the upcoming quarter
PR Strategy and action plan |
Mapping out Tracking system for Content | Measuring success of particular content | Tracker format |
Hubspot Launch for the Marketing Team | Help launch and transition to Hubspot within the Marketing team | Hubspot Launched |
Within Three Month:
Projects | Objectives | Expected output |
Refine PR strategy to bring exposure to Surfe.com | Increase media coverage and mentions of Surfe.com
Enhance brand awareness and reputation
Establish Surfe.com as a leading player in the industry | Increased media coverage and mentions
Improved brand reputation
Higher customer engagement and retention |
Source, network, and build relationships with journalists and media | Develop a strong network of media contacts.
Foster positive relationships with journalists and editors.
Secure media coverage for Surfe.com. | Increased media coverage and mentions.
Enhanced brand reputation.
Positive feedback from journalists and editors. |
Assist Marketing and Sales team on copywriting | Ensure consistency and quality of content across all channels
Improve brand voice and messaging
Drive engagement and conversion rates | Increased customer engagement across all channels
Improve brand voice and messaging
Drive engagement and conversion rates |
💬 Working with the Team
Our Team has been remote from day-1. To keep the communication open and create synergies with the team and allow the teammates to report on their progress, we have put in place 🕐 Weekly team meeting every Monday and a Weekly marketing meeting every Tuesday.
The team has grown from 4 people in 2020, to 11 in 2021 and we are now a team of 32 from 16 different countries.
Most of the developers are remote & on the contrary most of the marketeers and sales are in the office.
Your working hours is flexible but it is preferred if you are available during French working hours to avoid any bottle neck issue.
With the Founders
The company is founded by @David Chevalier & @Romain Ginestou so they are the person who understand the company needs best. You can talk to them to understand the company’s business & product vision better and how you can improve the overall product and how we can market them.
With Marketing Team (including Designers)
You would most likely be working with Veronika, Cristina, Marta, Marie-Lou, and David who would be giving you direction on where we want to take the marketing side of the business.
Since day 1 we have put a massive emphasis on having the best product. However we want to improve on the way we market it. We want to emphasize the value of using our tool instead of describing what it does.
We also want to make sure that the audience understand the purpose of each features, old & new, that we are offering. You would also be working with the designers in order to create marketing materials for our audience.
One of your main goals is to improve the web traffic on our website & thus increasing the daily sign up rate count every midnight on slack’s #customer channel.
Currently we have around 20 Daily sign up (accounts) at the end of 2022, our goal is to have 40 daily sign up from these channels:
- CRM Marketplace: Salesforce app exchange, Hubspot Marketplace, Pipedrive Marketplace, Copper Integration & OEM deal (we are available for free on Copper’s highest paid plan) — Links below.
- SEA (Paid ads on google)
- SEO
- PR
And in 2023, we would like to double it (80) with these channels:
- Community-led: Social Selling with LinkedIn Influencers
- CRM Partnerships / Resellers / Affiliates / Content Partners
- Paid campaigns (Meta, Linkedin, etc)
- Groundswell to identify PQAs
- GetScalability (Could OutboundCampaigns, Website Visitor Campaigns..)
- Educational platform
- Natural 20-30% increase from previous channel
With the Product Manager
Up until last year we are a product that connects linkedin to the CRM. In order to scale, @David Chevalier’s vision is to be a revenue workspace that can be connected to several other platform such as zoom, slack, google calendar, etc. @Maged Talaat has worked on the product since 2021 & recently he is joined by Andres. You may approach Maged to understand the product and roadmap better, so that we can plan product marketing activity accordingly.
With the Development team
You would be mainly working with @Romain Ginestou to understand how the product works.
There are also several chance for you to work with other developers and @Pierre Portejoie & @Gökhan Arkan helps out in the marketing team from time to time.
Work responsibility Breakdown
As written above for building the content strategy for our blog (+ Social Media) we need to ensure our messaging has a sales-centric and product centric approach. That’s why I’d love if you can also focus a bit more on product-marketing in your communications role.
- Create a go to market strategy for Surfe’s features.
- For every new feature, we typically feature a product highlight here
- Strategise on how would you want to distribute & market old+new features
- Analyse our customer - breakdown of persona: industry, position, country (here)
- Communicate the vision and value of new products/features publicly (PR, social media, Paid Advertisement, newsletter) in English.
- Do an audit check of all the copywriting for the features that we have so far + change it’s name if necessary
- Understand what is the value metric behind each feature (get data from @Romain Ginestou or you can see it in the cs.surfe.com)
- Currently for every new features, we would market it on social media, newsletter & sometimes in-product. You may think of more channels, such as PR or paid ads etc.
- Collaborate with the Design team to produce marketing visuals.
- You would be working with @Marie-Lou Drappeau to create design for marketing materials and @Albina Ranniaia has the product mockup.
- Strategise placement & appropriate design for each features
- We have a freelance motion graphist to make product mockup video
- We also have a videographer to shoot out first video
- Help in copywriting for support materials along with the CSM
- Audit the copywriting in our helpcentre & point out some instructions which are not clear
- From time to time help CSM (@Marta Szeflińska) to write troubleshooting document for new features
- Create educational material as part of Surfe’s academy to help out client/prospect how to use our tool better & its best practice.
- One of our content SEO & community building goal is to create a Surfe school — an academic platform to educate sales people on how to sell better.
- From time to time we will show our product and market it.
- Strategize on how we are going to distribute this
- Lead this into a community
- Set-up HubSpot and put in place tracking for MQLs / customer lifetime cycles
- Understand where MQLs comes from and how they move to SQL
- Get acquitted to tools such as Google analytics, GetScalability WebsiteVisitors..
- Help marketing & product department in our day-to-day operation
- Manage our freelance copywriters
- Refine our PR strategy to bring the most exposure to Surfe
- Source, network and build relationship with journalists and media
🏗️ First week-to-week duty as Communications Manager
Week 1
- Get to know the core team
- Finish up all the initial set up for your toolstack & get organised for reporting
- Learn the tool by hard, understand the new vision & you can watch more videos here.
- Internalise & observe the current marketing activity
- Attend vision meeting with David
- Start audit on content strategy and PR activities
Week 2
- Get to know the rest of the marketing team & PMs
- Follow our customer journey and product aha-moments.
- Tentatively help in SEO & web optimisation
- Get familiarised with the technicality of blog + social media post (graphic, format, caption) - Shadow @Veronika Belova for a blog + social media post
- Come up with a few copywriting ideas (product focused), you may read our KeyWords strategy here
- Help to Improve on “what’s new”.
- Have a quick audit on LinkedIn social media and check-in with @Veronika + @Andreas for strategizing LinkedIn Community-led strategy
Week 3
- Get to know the rest of the team (Developers, HR, UI designers, etc)
- Post a social media or blog post with Veronika’s help
- Put more content ideas for social media, blog & implementation timeline
- Deploy the LinkedIn Community-led strategy with @Veronika + @Andreas
Week 4
- Start developing own content
- Start setting up HubSpot
- Generally check up with David & Veronika to see if any improvement is needed
ℹ️ Where to ask for help?
The team and founders are reachable on Slack.
Prefer direct messages to target the person you want.
The founders would be happy to assist you with whatever you need.
Anything regarding marketing you may ask David or Veronika.
Finally, for HR matter ask @Regina & regarding welfare or (e)office issue, ask @Katarina Mellyna.
You can also jump in a quick meeting if needed (see shared agenda for availabilities).
🔗 Useful Resources
Surfe website: https://www.surfe.com/
Surfe documentation: https://intercom.help/surfe/en/
Surfe extension Web Store page: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/leadjet/kojhcdejfimplnokhhhekhiapceggamn
Surfe Pipedrive Marketplace: https://marketplace.pipedrive.com/app/leadjet/97c68091c72b436b
Surfe HubSpot Marketplace: https://app.hubspot.com/ecosystem/7359138/marketplace/apps/productivity/workflow-automation/leadjet-217949
Surfe Salesforce Marketplace:https://appexchange.salesforce.com/appxListingDetail?listingId=a0N3u00000OMb1KEAT
Surfe Copper Integration: https://support.copper.com/hc/en-us/articles/360055416393-LinkedIn-Integration-via-Leadjet New Copy for the listing pages: https://www.notion.so/surfe/Content-for-Listings-7c3ad033eb6043379cf37673f567458a
The best method to understand the people & culture of Surfe is to talk to every individuals through “doughnut” meeting.
For information about the team, hiring, perks, culture, and more!
📐 Initial Setup
- Make sure you have received an invitation to all following services that we rely on
- Create test accounts for every CRM we support (Hubspot, Pipedrive, Copper, Salesforce)
- Connect to Bitwarden to access our pre-existing demo accounts
- Learn how to connect Surfe, especially for Copper
- Read our case studies to get familiar with the Product and Read our ICP and Persona pages to get familiar to whom we are selling
- Learn the tool inside out on all 4 CRMs. Try out the followings on Linkedin:
- Read through our help centre (https://intercom.help/surfe/en/) to familiarise with various objections
- Watch tutorials on youtube
- Watch video demos on Modjo. 10 commented videos are available, search with the tag “Demo”, and change the filter to “last year” if needed: https://app.modjo.ai/explore?period=three_months&tagIds[]=1
- Browse through our different (CRM) Listings, Blog Content, and Content on Social Media (Linkedin, Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, etc) to get familiarised with our content post. Read through all the previous social media & community strategy here:
- Get used to the recurring task & talk to the team
- Get to know everyone and improve+scale Communications (esp. about Product) in Surfe as a whole
Find a Demo Script here (just as a guidance): https://www.notion.so/surfe/Script-for-product-demo-90d03a744c4d4c3ebd6f956ec19d2be9