We recently connected with Erik Mintz and have shared our conversation below.
Erik, appreciate you joining us today. We’d love to start by getting your thoughts on what you are seeing as some the biggest trends emerging in your industry
Within the Sales Tech space, I see two big trends emerging;
- The baby boomers are transitioning (e.g. retiring) from sales leadership positions, while Gen-X and Millennials are filling those roles. This is a driving force for many companies starting to re-evaluate their Sales Tech stack with more progressive tooling. We see this trend with smaller to mid-size companies as well as in the Enterprise.
- Sales Organizations are the last group within the company to undergo the digital transformation. 20-years ago, Product/ Engineering transitioned from Waterfall to Agile. 15-years ago, Marketing embraced social media. Over the last 10-years, HR, Finance and Service & Support have seen a variety of SaaS tools to choose from. Now it’s Sales Organizations undergoing this transition.
The “Story of the Three Bears” is an old nursery Tale but still provides a simple solution to a complex problem. Too little sales technology and you leave money on the table. Too much sales technology, you waste money on SaaS licenses and contribute to sellers being less productive. The ‘just right’ approach is to combine CRM with software that directly impacts revenue, such as Deal Coaching software. The one area where CRM falls flat is in helping sales teams drive healthy conversations on deal strategy and execution. Deal Coaching software sends clear signals about deal health while providing a manager with a better way to effectuate coaching on real deals. Deal Coaching software offers a light-weight way to introduce structure into a sales org while focusing sellers on deal strategy and execution to improve win rates.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
With 25+ years of experience, I’ve led software development and product management teams at IBM and Constant Contact. I founded two software companies: e2M Systems which was acquired by Constant Contact and DealCoachPro. DealCoachPro is my current startup. I have an MBA from MIT and Masters in Civil Engineering from Florida Atlantic University.
DealCoachPro is data-driven deal coaching software that empowers Enterprise sales teams to continuously assess buyer intent, identify deal vulnerabilities, and collaborate on winning game plans.
In 2021, the company was granted three software patents which is unprecedented for a software startup. Receiving our third software patent within one calendar year for DealCoachPro was an exciting accomplishment. We believe Enterprise sales teams need to step away from paper-based methodologies and off-line tools like spreadsheets to leverage purpose-built technology to win their most valuable deals.
In Q1 2022, the company was also honored to be part of the 101 best computer companies and startups in Florida!
Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?
To start the business, we took a pre-Seed round. This provided enough money to develop the product and get it into the market as an MVP. Our original thesis was to target the SMB space. Of the first 10-customers that used the product, all but one was having success. The one company seeing success was a mid-tier manufacturing company.
At this juncture, we had to decide to either pivot the product so it worked for the SMB space, or stay with the existing product and pivot the audience. We chose the latter. We stayed with the underlying product and decided to target mid-tier to enterprise companies. This was clearly the right decision and is just now starting to pay off!
Erik Mintz, Lindes Roets, Ira Sigman, Lisa Crowell, Chriss Whyatt
We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.
This is my favorite story, and I often tell it to startups.
With my previous company (the one that was acquired), around the fourth year, we pivoted from targeting enterprise companies to the SMB space. We were really struggling with conversion. We were using a very traditional GTM strategy by attending industry events and showing our wares. We had attended this one industry event in Miami and Ft. Lauderdale three previous times. From each of those previous events, maybe we acquired one new customer per event at best. It was a lot of effort for very little return.
Once the event came back around to Miami in late 2005, I remember thinking to myself; “do I really want to get up at 6am, slept the booth and equipment down to the event, setup the booth and equipment, then break it all down to return home for the chance at maybe one new customer.” Deciding to go down to that event changed the course of my entire life, SERIOUSLY!
I remember getting up very early that morning. It was oddly cold out for South Florida. I remember thinking to myself; “this is crazy.” But I pushed on packing up the equipment and picking up one of my co-workers to head down to the event. Once the booth was setup, an individual approached me about using our product. He was using Constant Contact for Email Marketing and needed an online registration system for his events. Online registration was the core of our product.
At that time, I had no idea who Constant Contact was and even less knowledge about “Email Marketing. So, we did acquire this one new customer who exposed us to Constant Contact. Yada yada yada, two and half years later, we were acquired by Constant Contact! I have the distinguished honor of being the first company Constant Contact acquired. They acquired seven companies in total before being acquired themselves in 2016.
To the original question as to insights for entrepreneurs, one word comes to mind. That one word is PERSISTENCE. If you truly have a great product, don’t give up. You just never know what’s around the next corner!
Contact Info:
- Website: https://dealcoachpro.com/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/dealcoachpro/?viewAsMember=true
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UChQWiSPnJxfGDI9v1TNLEPQ
Image Credits
Bob Guatelli, Erik Mintz, Joseph Simone, Joseph Hennessey, Lindes Roets, Paritosh Patel, Sixcia Devine, Ira Sigman, and Chris Whyatt