App for sales reps supercharges selling

“We can’t be just complaining about it for the rest of our lives.”

That exhortation from Stanley Chee is what led him and his friend Jeffrey Chan to join forces and create a new startup.

With SalesCandy, they’re aiming to solve something that’s been hampering companies and their sales teams for many years: the large and wildly varying chunks of time that it can take a salesperson to follow up on a sales lead.

What Chee has come up with is an app that he likens to Uber. Rather than connecting a nearby driver with a passenger, it hooks up salespeople with potential customers who have just registered their interest.

Photo credit: Alexander Andrews / Unsplash

For example, you’ve just called up the hotline of a new condo complex that’s being built. The automated hotline now has your number, so this is where Chee’s SalesCandy comes in. The app pings an available sales rep at the real estate firm who then makes a speedy callback to you.

The goal, says Chee, is five minutes. Because within that time, the property you’re curious about is still fresh in your mind, and you’re more likely to be free around the time you placed the call rather than at some random point later in the day or the week.

That’s backed up by a 2011 Harvard Business Review analysis that found an eight times better chance of converting a sale if you follow up on the lead within five minutes rather than after one hour.

“And it’s 60-times better than after one day,” he adds.

In one of the Malaysia-based startup’s own case studies, Chee claims the app has hit its speed target, bringing one client’s sales reps’ average follow-up time down from 4.7 days to just four minutes. The same study also showed the conversion rate improved markedly, rising from 8.6% to 13.6%.

Keeping sales reps honest

Aside from speed, the enterprise-oriented service is also focused on accountability.

Without such data, “there’s not much a sales manager can do” when sales teams are inefficient, says Malayasia-born Chee.

Stanley Chee / Photo credit: SalesCandy

Data dashboard

Wasted leads