#269 - Erdem Gelal, CEO of Flowla - on creating fans, not just customers

This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to help us all deliver a buyer experience that wins deals. My guest is Erdem Gelal, Co-founder and CEO of Flowla. Erdem Gelal has a wealth of work experience, beginning with an internship at PricewaterhouseCoopers in 2010, Accenture in 2011 and a Financial Analyst role at Procter & Gamble the same year. His entrepreneurial journey started when he co-founded cubic.fm in 2013 and ProceedLabs in 2015. ProceedLabs was acquired in 2018. This didn't stop his passion for exploration. In 2020, he co-founded TalentGrid, and in 2022, Flowla, where he's currently the CEO.Flowla is on a mission to build an outstanding & frictionless way to get deals done. Because it's time we all should stop relying on emails to do that.They believe B2B processes deserve a consumer-grade approach, so closing B2B deals can be as easy as checking out a cat litter box on Amazon.And this inspired me, and hence I invited Erdem to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the B2B SaaS sales process. Erdem explains the fundamental decisions that helped take the company from its idea to where they are today, why he doubled down on a bottom-up PLG approach, and what he's learned to get traction going. We discuss his big learnings to drive the adoption of the solution and to spark word-of-mouth recommendations. Last but not least, he shares how their mantra to build 100 true fans has helped to be remarkable from the start. Here's one of his quotes:When we ask our users: 'What do you like most about Flowla?', the top answer we get is: Standing out from the crowd.They like the idea of making a difference to stand out in the noisy inbox, and increase win-win rates, not only because everything is just in one place, but also because they can reduce ghosting. It definitely crosses a certain threshold when it comes to an inbox with 100s of unread emails.During this interview, you will learn four things:How to leverage AI to prepopulate templates to scale conversion, and boost user adoptionHow having a helpful conversation helped them to close more businessHow to accelerate your journey toward product-market fitHow he's leveraging internal champions to do the upwards selling within their organization.For more information about the guest from this week:Erdem GelalWebsite Flowla