GTM Strategy & Operations (Manager) Handbook
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GTM Strategy & Operations (Manager) Handbook

Welcome! The Surfe GTM Handbook is where you will find all information relevant for a GTM 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?

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 Surfe, 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 deals 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!

Be creative
Be genuine
Be curious
Be proactive
Keep it simple
Try new things
Entrepreneurial spirit
Continuous learning
Test and adapt
Open communication
Collaborate
Take initiative
Positivity over everything
Constant improvement
Task variety creates balance

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🏅 Missions

As a GTM, your mission is the following:

  • Work on the no touch sales process and develop acquisition projects to increase number of signups (e.g. with LinkedIn Influencer)
  • Improve MQL - SQL (- PQL) qualification process
  • Refining and scaling Surfe's Self-Service Model aka no-touch (what do our customers need, how to steer them toward their wins at each stage, and then automate interactions until closed-won), that includes
    • Work on ICPs
    • Work on product adoption points
    • Track (product) success metrics
    • Define customer journeys and conversion goals
    • Improve customer experience / onboarding
    • Refine/Implement Automations to remove friction, achieve goals, and further nudge. Overall decrease manual touch.
    • Segmentation of prospects and hand-over to sales team (e.g. all above 10 licences is low-/ high-touch)
    • Evaluate customers based on:
      • Which features play a role in achieving early value/time to value?
      • Which features require the most support?
      • Which features are being used by our highest-paying customers?
      • Which features clearly correlate with low-/high-touch sales?
    • Price Sensitivity
    • Work together with Marketing (e.g. on ICPs, Content, Campaigns), Product (e.g. onboarding, user flows, automations), Sales Team (e.g. feedback to streamline further self-service and draw the line to low-/high-touch) and Prospects/ Customers
  • Achieve commercial objectives (e.g. turnover, conclusion of sales but will be defined together) for the German-speaking area

💬 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 sales meeting every Wednesday (must) and a Weekly marketing meeting every Tuesday (optional).

We would also have a Monthly “Ring-ring” meetings with the sales team to discuss outstanding challenges, improvements, and overall subjects (optional).

As a GTM, your relation with the rest of the team is outlined below.

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With the Founders

You work alongside the CEO (David), and will have regular meetings with him to touch on:

  1. Understanding and driving customer acquisition for no-touch (and focus on LinkedIn Social selling)
  2. Improving qualification process/customer journey from MQL - SQL (- PQL)
  3. Scale self-service aka no-touch

With the current Sales team

You would be working closely with Matthieu, Alejandro, Guillaume, Andreas and David who have been doing sales for a while in Surfe. Matthieu has been managing sales process the past 6 months & you can go to him whenever you have any question regarding the pipeline, account status, etc.

You will be trained by the sales team but we are open to suggestion if you would like to tweak for a smooth handover.

With Marketing Team

You would most likely be working with @Veronika Belova & @David Chevalier 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 the having the best product. However we want to improve on the way we market it. We want to emphasise 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.

One of your main goal 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 ups (accounts), our goal is to have 40 daily sign up from these channels:

- CRM Marketplaces: Salesforce app exchange, Hubspot Marketpalce, Pipedrive Marketpalce, 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 team

Your mission requires an in-depth understanding of the Product to better guide our users, spot technical caveats and suggest continuous improvements. The Product team (Maged & Andres) is here to help you get the knowledge you need, and iterate with you on the customer on-boarding experience, documentation and support. Generally speaking, you will interact with the product team on the following aspects:

  1. You have feedback from the field (customer requests, suggestions, ...) and want to push the idea for the next releases
  2. You need more information about how a Surfe feature works, or what features are planned on the roadmap
  3. You may need access to customer/product data for your current tasks
  4. You have any personal suggestions about the Surfe product
  5. Better find ways to automatise Questions for support in front
  6. From time to time you would be asked to help with Customer Discovery for a specific feature.

With the Tech team

Tech team will update you on the latest updates that have been done on Surfe.

It is also very important for you to come back with bugs.

A good practice to avoid this is to reinstall Surfe whenever a new version is being pushed.

In order to show the developers the error, you can do a right click → inspect → console & screenshot the error. It can be helpful to state the email & the CRM used as well.

Together with Product, you can also work with the tech team on what features to prioritise & you can submit your request in #feature-request slack channel.

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Our 3 types of customer Journey

No Touch

No touch clients refers to clients who would try on their own, play with the product and convert by keying in their credit card to the platform on their own.

Typically when they sign up, they would have an in-product tutorial & if they have any questions, they can consult intercom.

This is often the case for smaller clients (1-3 users) or medium-sized company (5-10 users) who are tech savvy.

Intercom/Email via Front

An Intercom chat is available on our main website https://www.surfe.com/ and the user’s admin dashboard https://account.surfe.com/ to provide them with an easy access to our team. Our users typically reach out regarding high level questions about our services (pricing, features, use-cases, suggestions, ...) but also technical issues (bug, settings, CRM configuration, ...) which are more technical.

Email sequences after onboarding

Surfe has programmed some email sequences once a new user signs up, to help them onboard, keep them in the loop for future product updates, and propose a demo if needed.

The email that is being sent is based on their actions & to understand better, you can see the flow here (please ask Maged) to be invited in it.

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Low Touch

Similar as no touch client, low touch client also has in-product guide & video tutorial.

However they would need either a socio guide or a specific question about Surfe.

Typically a client who needs more than 5 licenses.

Hence they would book a demo. Typically the demo demands come through 4 sources:

  • Direct on the website
  • From onboarding email (AE Campaign)
  • In-product prompt
  • Through intercom

From here they would be redirected into 2 types of demo

  • Collective demo, for 1-5 users. In this demo there would be up to 10 companies (on a normal collective demo day there are typically only 2-5 companies).
    • Collective demo is held on 3 different timings to cater the time in Asia, Europe & the US.
      • Tuesday 2 pm
      • Wednesday 9:30 am
      • Thursday 5:30 pm
  • One-to-One demo: This is a demo for anyone who has more than 5 licenses.
    • Alejandro:
      • Monday & Wed all day until 10pm
      • Tuesday all day until 6pm
      • Thursday from 7 to 10pm
      • Friday from 1 to 5pm
    • Matthieu:
      • Monday to Thurs all day until 7pm
      • Friday from 9 to 1pm
    • Guillaume:
      • No days for now

Subsequently, we would send them an email follow-up containing video, trial link (if they have not tried Surfe), and optionally depending on the need 1 pager argument & other materials necessary (DPA, Intro deck, case study, etc).

After the call, the contact enters a “manual” sequence of 4 follow-up emails (need to be sent by hand for control, but this could/should change the more volume we handle).

Competitor analysis list (first two tabs).

High Touch

This is for a client with more than 10 licenses or comes from a big company (SMEs > 250 employees or above).

The leads are often inbound (signed up for trial) or brought in by 1 of us in the company through network.

Client would book a demo & we would spend extra time to do social selling and do a discovery.

Subsequently, we will show them the product and typically they would have a feature request that you would have to discuss with Romain, Maged & David.

We send a follow up with them, send Quotes & close the deal! 💰

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Previous outbound attempts & templates

We used linked Helper to set up an automated process.

We use sales navigator to get prospects & this is our ICP filter & you can use our CDP to find new ICP.

This is an example of our previous sales copywriting (in french).

Note — you can take inspiration from it but don’t copy it as the Reply rate was quite bad. 2-4%

We have also experimented with growth hacking using lempod but it was not very successful. You can read it here.

Outbound ABM listing that you can send with screenshot.

Small Pipe (mid-sized SMEs or under)

Prospecting: Typically Inbound & can be outbound (in auto mass approach)

Demo: Mostly lands on collective demo or one-to-one. Once they signed up for a demo, they would automatically added into Pipedrive as “contact” and a “deal” will be created. They would also be added to “demo booked” pipeline right away & after

For outbound process: Add them as contact → once we talk to them, convert them into deal.

Closing time: It takes around 2-4 weeks (18 days on average). Don’t forget to close the deal into win/lost on PD.

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Big Pipe (larger SMEs and above)

Prospecting: Typically Inbound or through personal network.

Inbound Lead: Request for 1-to-1 demo & added as deal, then we have to switch the deal manually to “big pipeline”.

If they have not tried the product, add them manually as a contact & get them to book a demo.

After they talked to us, move them to “qualified” & follow up the process with them, especially if there is a specific tech request.

Sent a quote and we can do volume discount for 10 licences or above. This is the discount grid.

For outbound process: Similar to above where you can add them as contact & the process will take longer where you would have to do several follow up to get them to book a demo.

Closing time: Typically 2-6 months (2.5 on average)

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Payment

- stripe

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Demo, Follow ups & materials.

Demo: For Demo I’ve set up a call with Maged and you can also shadow Matthieu for the first few days/weeks, or you can watch videos on Modjo.

If you have any questions, you can ask on slack channel: #sales-sharks Read further on, if you should conduct a demo on your own (not necessary for the first weeks):

In case of no show we suggest you to send a reminder email after 5minutes.

After 10-15mins of waiting if he/she is:

  • Small client: send video tutorial + redirect them to website to rebook it (high chance that people who missed the demo once would missed it again, especially if they did not respond or apologise).
  • Big client: send a personalised email + calendly link in the email

Follow up: You can use the following copywriting as inspiration for your own, this needs to be updated regularly when it does not yield good results: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VdcJPo-ZFLcYCNW5RnOGHk7IaH26H678La51PljFSVk/edit

This is the completed version of demo call kit & follow up (in French, Spanish & German).

All our asset to be sent post sales call: Sales Data Room

Where to get prospect list?

Inbound

  • Daily sign ups: Everyday we have daily sign up at 12am in the #customer channel. Those with 500 employee & above, list them out & send them a personal message. It would be good to see their actions in the backend (cs.surfe).
  • Past trial users on cs.surfe: Filter users who comes from bigger company (more than 500 employee) on cs.surfe, CDP or Pipedrive contacts & recontact them. Make sure that they have not converted into premium when you contact them. FYI, we also have a newsletter campaign going on.
  • Given by marketing: It can be a list from webinar, ebook/white paper downloads, social media, events, etc.
  • visitors on https://cs.surfe.com/ - we have people who signed up but did not proceed to install the product

What do we consider as inbound?

  • Anyone who is on our trial, visitor list, came through ad source (detected directly by Pipedrive) & brought in by any employee in Surfe.
  • If this lead already belongs to some1, AE can ask if he can take over & the owner have the veto to say “yes” or “no”. This is to either keep good relationship like Spendesk or if they are a hard client like Sastrify.

Outbound

  • Sales Navigator
    • CRM Checker (Built With): @Maged Talaat has a list of companies with the CRM that they are using.
  • GetScalability: Third-party partner contract for a 6-month period running from Dec 2022 to May 2023. Is in charge of reaching out to 800 curated leads (low/high-touch based on our ICPs) per month via Generic and Intent-based email campaigns. Aiming for a 5 to 10% rate of meetings generated per month.
  • Leadfeeder/clearbit: They will show you a list of companies who visited Surfe website.
  • Past ABM list : We planned to send them a screenshot with customer social proof
  • Other Lead-gen machine of your choice

ℹ️ Where to ask for help?

The team and founders are reachable on Slack.

Prefer direct messages to target the person you want.

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

💡
🌴 Welcome to the Jungle 🌴

For information about the team, hiring, perks, culture, and more!

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📐 Initial Setup

Starting Week

  1. Make sure you have received an invitation to all following services that we rely on

Email: Gsuite, ask romain
Slack: where all our team communication take place
Notion: where we create & organize all out knowledge and roadmap
Pipedrive: our internal CRM, ask Matthieu
https://cs.surfe.com/?page=1 key: bFyD9y9WHuqJ4Jkx
Our CDP here
Drata: ISO certification - Ask Regina
LeedFeeder, ask Maged
Modjo account, ask Guillaume joined account (to watch past Sales Demos)
Sales Navigator & change LinkedIn status (purchase a new license via Spendesk)
Spendesk (ask David)
Calendly (ask Dylane)
Stripe (ask Romain)
Chart Mogul (ask David)
Linear (ask Romain)
Figma access (ask Romain)
Linkedin Company account (ask Maged)
SalesNavigator & change LinkedIn status (purchase a new license via Spendesk)
Bitwarden for Passwords (ask Romain)
Google analytics (ask Cristina)
Google tag Manager (ask Romain)
Goggle Search Console (ask Gokhan)
  1. 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
  2. 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
  3. Learn the tool inside out on all 4 CRMs. Try out the followings on Linkedin:
  4. Add someone to the CRM
    Find emails of a prospect
    Edit or Add Unique Fields from CRM
    Sync Conversation
    Add people in Bulk on Sales Navigator
    Update contact
    Create deals
  5. Read through our help centre (https://intercom.help/surfe/en/) to familiarise with various objections
  6. Watch all tutorials on youtube
  7. Watch all video demo 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
  8. 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.