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SaaS Strategists,

Right after the first exclusive edition with Jakob of Butter, comes a new SaaS breakdown.

Today I had a chance to speak to Arnaud Belinga, Co-founder & CEO of a Sales CRM platform for LinkedIn & Email power users, Breakcold.

Arnaud shared his insights into growing Breakcold and some strategies he utilized in order to position the product inside a very competitive market.

He also talked about 2 strategies that worked great for them in terms of user acquisition and user retention.

If you’re in sales, this is the issue you don’t want to miss!

Let’s dive right in 👇

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Reading time: 5 minutes

I love how Arnaud describes Breakcold in the first place.

“Sales CRM to close deals in 2024, not in 2010.”

This is such a powerful message, as the sales game has definitely changed over these 14 years.

And maybe the biggest change was that email is slowly being replaced by social media.

Breakcold’s USP is that it’s targeted at SMBs.

Every major CRM tool targets enterprises as it’s where the majority of the big spenders are.

Prices are higher and naturally, they expect big returns on investment.

But this brings a big gap in the startup world.

Startups are meant to be lean, fast, and adaptable.

They utilize different strategies making their sales process much different than in an enterprise.

By using a standard “enterprise-style” CRM tool, startups are forced to adapt to enterprise-level sales pipelines, which isn’t really suitable or efficient for a business in their stage.

Here comes the Breakcold to break the cold era of enterprise-level CRM tools.

By allowing startups to focus on flexible CRM organization and social selling, Breakcold positions itself as a startup-first CRM tool.

As Arnaud mentions Breakcold has 3 really innovative features that help their user acquisition and retention process.

Let’s break them all down. 🔨

The first feature that sets Breakcold apart is an embedded LinkedIn feed.

How many times have you missed important updates from your prospects?

With an embedded social feed, Breakcold makes social selling as easy as it can get.

Their secret?

Simply do your sales at one place.

Create your own centralized sales process, where you can directly reach out, comment, or engage with your potential clients, while automatically saving your whole interaction history???

Where do I sign up?!

This is something I’ve been talking about for months now.

LinkedIn doesn’t allow you to create custom feeds.

Breakcold does.

Enough said.

You can easily segment your audience into a specific list, that you would like to have control over.

Examples include:

What makes Breakcold a social CRM platform is also easy access to your LinkedIn inbox.

Not only can you track your prospect’s LinkedIn posts, but you can also keep all of your LinkedIn and Email messages in one place, not having to switch to multiple different platforms or tabs, and scratch your head on missed pieces of information.

But there’s another thing - with social selling, it’s important that you don’t immediately jump into someone’s inbox.

You want to build a GENUINE CONNECTION.

So you will first comment on a few of their posts, and only then jump into the conversation.

This is where Breakcold truly shines with its social centralization.

One of the biggest benefits of Breakcold and what truly sets them apart is the ability to access the platform outside the platform itself.

Now what do I mean by this?

This is something I see many CRMs lacking.

I don’t want to copy someone’s name, email, phone and bunch of other details.

I want to import the data with one click.

Breakcold understands this, as their Chrome extension allows them to immediately add a prospect to specific list directly from LinkedIn.

Truly a power feature that plays a huge role if you’re considering switching to another CRM tool.

Arnaud is very active on LinkedIn, Instagram, and YouTube, sharing new features, and updates and creating that bond with his customers using his personal brand.

His YouTube channel is a great definition of the awareness funnel.

1. It educates on the importance of having a solid sales funnel and a CRM tracker.

2. Introduces the Problem aware stage of not tapping into social marketing and LinkedIn.

3. Finally going all the way to the product aware stage and showcasing how you can improve your Sales pipeline using Breakcold.

Founder-led content is becoming more adopted in B2B SaaS, as founders finally start to realize their main efforts should be distributed on the marketing side and most importantly - towards true relationship building.

Arnaud mentioned that LinkedIn lead magnets were surprising to get customers even with a small reach.

He said that in 100% of the cases they always work and bring results.

So if you’re currently building your SaaS product, consider including a lead magnet for greater audience reach.

Another thing that surprised Arnaud that works so well are annual plans.

He mentioned that they always underestimated annual plans, but once implemented, they drove additional signups.

A truly interesting insight.

Arnaud continues to grow his audience mainly leveraging video content, and you can check out his YouTube channel here.

A CRM’s core purpose is written in its name.

Customer Relationship Management.

And what’s the most important part of any relationship building?

It’s being able to look through the HISTORY of events and interactions.

Breakcold puts the pressure off of you and doesn’t require you to constantly update the interaction history, as it does that automatically.

Whether you congratulated someone on changing companies or gave a compliment on their pet, Breakcold has you covered, as it stores the whole history of messaging and social interactions, and after all:

Relationships are a social thing.

And this is how they truly break the CRM cold.

I hope you enjoyed and learned something new from this breakdown!

It was a longer one indeed!

What SaaS would you like to learn about next?

Feel free to reply to this email with your thoughts.

Ognjen Gatalo

Chief SaaS Strategist ☁

P.S. Follow me on LinkedIn and Instagram for bite-sized SaaS content.