Open to Close…
— Nikolaus Kimla, Founder & CEO, Coevera
Want to close the deal? Open the app. We devised this tagline to shine a light on Coevera’s impact on individuals, enterprises, and the overall marketplace.
By the numbers: The author notes SelectHub lists roughly 1,700 systems in its CRM category, yet argues the majority only suit smaller companies with simpler sales — because investors push for rapid revenue, flooding the market with products the author calls superficial at best.
We have just created, for Coevera and for the company itself, a new tagline: Open to Close. Why have we created this tagline, and what are its meanings?
Difference to All
As a company, our perspective is that improved trade leads to an increasingly peaceful and independent world. So far, however, sales tools have been distinctly lacking in understanding how to relate to people in an engaging and engrossing way. This lack has caused friction, resulting in unnecessary costs, decreased efficiency, and impeding the flow of free trade.
We have developed Coevera as a communication tool that stands above stagnant competitors. Coevera is people-focused, helping foster a strong sense of personal satisfaction through ease of use. The product is nimble and flexible, adaptable to the individual and the organization. Because Coevera is different, it effectively causes the market to think differently about sales.
In Contrast to Others
Coevera and its new tagline are radically different when compared to competitor taglines. Taglines claim other products to be “#1,” “The Best,” or the one “Teams Love.”
These taglines do not conceptually convey a deep understanding of all sales activities within an organization. This is true not only of the taglines but the products themselves. The reason is that other companies have not truly analyzed the real issues for sales teams and sales managers.
Coevera allows salespeople to take control of their opportunities, remain consistent through every stage of the sales process, and always stay focused on important priorities. It's the CRM that salespeople actually enjoy using.Precise Focus of Coevera
Coevera is developed for sales reps and managers focused on the consultative sales process, in teams of 20 or more. These types of organizations have specific needs and wants on which we focus. Our product is not for industries such as real estate, health care systems, government, or transactional sales, where typically sales activities do not occur through a consultative process.
As we limit our focus to this specific client type, we do not attract leads that aren’t a good fit for us or where we are not right for our prospects.
Coevera’s first impact is efficiency. When an individual or a team becomes efficient, they become productive because they can accomplish more with fewer resources. Productivity, then, leads to profitability.
Our Tagline’s Numerous Meanings
Our new tagline, Open to Close, brings about a deeper understanding of our focus through its multiple meanings.
An enterprise’s sales process is encompassed by Coevera. A sales process begins with something (“open”) and then leads to a close. It is not instant or transactional. “Close” means to end something. This can refer to the end of a sales cycle or the end of the day when the user closes the app. As a whole, this phrase describes both the user experience and the sales process. More broadly, it also means opening one’s mind to new ways of operating and closing business more quickly.
How the Tagline Applies to Our Company
Coevera, in its “open” phase, started small. Our focus was on the development of the product as opposed to the rapid growth of the company, so we wanted to grow the product first for the kind of client companies that we wanted to serve. The type of complex and detailed development that we undertook cannot be accomplished in a short time.
Other CRM developers did not start out in this fashion. Some have even been out to give birth to a “fully fledged” product nearly overnight. How many systems are out there? SelectHub, at this time, lists roughly 1,700 systems in their CRM category, and the majority of these are only usable by smaller companies with less complicated sales situations. Why has this happened? Because, in the SaaS industry, investors typically push hard for rapid revenue growth numbers to support their investment goals. As such, many of the products coming to market are superficial at best.
The type of functionality we were aiming to program requires years, and focus. As a result, growth is steady, unlike the many shooting stars we see where the vast majority of investment capital has been directed into sales and marketing to drive hyper-growth. Hyper-topline growth that belies the bottom lines causes losses and brings crushing debt to the balance sheet. This is why many of these products then plateau and ultimately start to backslide because the lack of investment in development means they can’t deliver on the needs of bigger customers or indeed on their own marketing promises. The Coevera approach is similar to becoming a violinist, concert pianist, or top athlete. Excellent performance comes about gradually. So that we could build our business, we initially sold the first version of our product, with less functionality, to companies with fewer users, from 2 to 10. This allowed us to continue to invest in the product.
High-end CRM development for big companies can be compared to formulating a vaccine, which can take 15 or 20 years. In this industry, many don’t want to invest the money for such a long runway, in which we created our product incrementally. We decided to be patient and take the time to build our product the way we knew it should be. The “magic sauce” for us was to be able to attract the customers we had in the beginning years and, as we progressed, we were fortunate to add bigger opportunities and more customers, and with them we grew further and arrived where we are today.
When looking back on this strategy, it was, in my opinion, quite profound. No one in this industry was willing to pay for 15 years of development. A highly complex system such as Salesforce did not, in the beginning, have its complexity. Their customers grew with them, and ultimately there was a demand for that product. 15 or 20 years ago, no product had that kind of complexity. But because Salesforce evolved (and purchased) so many features, other systems had to develop them, too, in order to compete. For quite a number of years, Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics were the only real competitors in the market because no one had the development power to keep up with them. They also never ceased development.
Had we not taken the strategy we did, we would not have arrived where we have today, in direct competition with—and in many cases, overtaking—the CRM giants. Now, we have genuinely made it from “Open to Close!”
