Salesbox - the story behind, an interview with Andreas Lalangas

Salesbox, the markets best CRM for small businesses, with the goal to make CRM truly available for small businesses by delivering a platform that is easy to use, fast to get going with to a really attractive price. This makes it finally possible for small businesses to be as digital as large companies without paying the prices of an enterprise solution.

In order to learn mora about Salesbox and get the insights on the story behind the company as well where they are going in the future, we have meet-up with Andreas Lalangas, Salesbox founder and CEO.

What is the story behind Salesbox? Why did you start it? 

"I started Salesbox because I noticed that most CRMs were designed for management and not the users. I also noticed that a digitalisation gap had started to emerge between large and small companies. Since many small businesses believe, with all rights, that CRM is something cumbersome, time consuming and expensive to get going with and run over time I wanted Salesbox to challenge that and decided its time to bring an offer to the market that gives even the smallest company the same possibilities to be truly digital but to a fraction of the cost for an enterprise solution at the same time as its fits the needs of the different stages when small companies grow."

What was your own experience using CRM system before you started Salesbox?

"I have worked with sales in many different positions, as a hunter, KAM, Sales director Management group member, shareholder etc. and my experience as a user that the available CRM softwares were not providing any value to me as an individual. As a manager and shareholder I experienced CRM from the other end and how difficult it is to get the users to add adequate data for all the fancy report dashboards to make any sense. "

There are quite a few CRM systems on the market, how would you describe it and in what way would you say Salesbox is different?

"It is true, there are plenty of CRM options on the market. However, when you start digging you realise that very few, if any, truly focus on small businesses and their needs and conditions. Our competitors either have an expressed reluctance towards small businesses or have in reality shut the door to this segment by the way they deliver and price their softwares.

What really makes Salesbox disruptive is a combination of things. When you combine the functionality and design of the platform Salesbox delivers with the business and price models you get something unique.

We usually say we deliver a better performing platform or a platform on par with the competition from a functionality perspective but to a fraction of the cost and in most cases also a much superior user friendliness."

What is the user experience or feeling that you would like your users to feel when working with Salesbox CRM?

"My personal experiences were important drivers behind my idea of bringing a new type of CRM offer to the market, i.e. to get away from the feeling that CRM is only control tool for management. I want the users to get a tool in their hands that is easy to use and at the same time make them more focused and efficient. I want them to deeply feel that Salesbox is their primary support to know what to focus on every day, week etc. and at the same time streamline the users' most common workflows so they can focus on the important parts, i.e. relevant communication with the right potential or existing customers."

What have been the response from your customers on Salesbox?

"Every week we get incoming positive feedback from our user community and the most common feedback is actually that its the most easy to use platform they've used, how much more efficient they become, how easy and fast it was to get going. I personally believe we have the most user friendly and best platform on the market but it is extra satisfying when the user community also confirms this with all the nice feedback we receive."

Salesbox is targeting towards SME:s, is there any of the functions that you know from your customers that need to be there or is a key function for them, that you know you are good at?

"I would say that the needs for different businesses varies a lot. The common thing would be the overall need to have a platform that makes prospecting easy and efficient. Most small businesses, regardless of industry, struggle with how to improve their prospecting. Over the past 12 months they are also facing much more fierce competition for each customer and they have to much more structured and smart in the way they approach their potential customers and also what and who they spend time on. Based on this I would say that our connections to tools like LinkedIm, Office 365, Google Workspace, Wordpress etc. and how we automise and streamline the every day work with prospecting is key for many small businesses. A tool like Salesbox really makes it possible to deliver more with less people, which makes us extra attractive for small businesses with limited resources."

Your solution is used by many companies in many different markets, which languages is the solution in today, and are you planning for more in the future?

"Currently we support Swedish, English, German and Spanish. The next language to support is Vietnamese since we through partners will grow rapidly in Vietnam during 2021. What other languages we will support moving forward is highly dependant on what markets we get growth from. It is very easy for us to add more languages when needed."

Functionality wise, what are your working on, what will be the next step in Salesbox future? As well are there any particular functionality you would like to develop further

"We usually have a plan for the next 3-6 months and the coming things are our lead generation forms for Wordpress. This means our users who use WP can add multiple customisable lead generation forms to their web to auto generate leads into Salesbox. The next thing after that is our upcoming document template engine with our own e-signatures later during Q2 2021. With that release we will close the final gap in the digital chain for small businesses.

We are also planning for an update of our connection to Fortnox to make it even more seamless and support synchronisation of also offers and orders in Fortnox to Salesbox. We will also begin supporting Contracts in Fortnox so we better can support all customers who sell subscriptions.

Beyond these things we have not decided on any fixed order for our product roadmap. However, we will most likely add support for single sign on via Active Directory from Microsoft and also support to track communication from more platforms."

Based on your experience and knowledge what do you see are the upcoming trends within the CRM industry?

"We have seen very clearly that CRM is getting a wider use case than only to support sales and prospecting. We see and strongly believe that CRM is becoming the primary tool to keep track of all communication with any relevant relations a company have. This trend will only strengthen and also make CRM more relevant for many more people and companies. Since keeping track of all important relations are vital for any type of company and a relation in its most basic form is nothing but communication. By tracking all communication a CRM makes it possible for users to work more customer centric instead of being forced to check information in many platforms or ask colleagues to get the overall communication history for a specific customer, if it even is available."

Anything you would like to add in order for us to get a better understanding of Salesbox and your functionality?

"I think we have covered most things but I would like to remind about the fact that getting a CRM does not need to be cumbersome, time consuming and expensive. With Salesbox you can get going with a CRM in less than an hour to a monthly cost lower than what most pay for a cup of coffee."

So, if you are in the search for a new CRM or are not happy with the CRM you are using today, we would highly recommend Salesbox, you will be able to test Salesbox for free in 14days. Then at the amazing low price of 2.90 Euro per months. And if you feel that is too much you can use the promotion code JOHOC2021 and you will get 10 percent of the price for the first 12 months. We are sure that you will not be disappointed.

Thank you so much for meeting with us and telling us more about Salesbox and your CRM solution.

For more information on Salesbox or JOHOC send an email to info@johoc.com