What is Yesware?

Our Hypothesis

Pressure on salespeople is ever increasing, but the tools that most companies give them are crap. The software that salespeople use, especially Outlook, is not designed for the way they work. The services they use, especially CRM, were designed for management oversight, not sales productivity. Yesware will optimize email and CRM functionality, and add some special sauce, so salespeople can do more deals faster.

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Background

Cashman and I started Yesware with the overall goal of improving the professional lives of salespeople. I’ve been in sales for most of my career, both at other peoples’ companies and as the revenue guy for our previous startup, WGR Media. So I know the responsibilities that salespeople feel towards their companies, and the pressures that we are under to make the numbers. If we could help a salesperson do her job better, contribute more to a conversation, keep up with a thread, communicate with just a few more clients, close a few more deals, their business would benefit, they would benefit, and we could build another company.

We are starting with email because it’s the most important communications medium for B2B salespeople right now. People send about 47 billion emails a day (Spambots send the other 200 billion) so even a small improvement in the email experience would make a big difference. We are building stuff that will make more than a small difference in the way salespeople use email. Moreover, although most salespeople hate CRM, there are aspects of it that are essential for their daily work. The two main problems with CRM are:

1. It’s designed for sales oversight, not revenue generation
2. It requires a huge amount of time-wasting data entry

Yesware is built from the start to serve the needs of salespeople – to minimize data entry, to automate conversation status and deal tracking, to simplify and standardize reporting, to research prospects proactively, and to inspire greater performance with goal setting mechanisms that work so well in video games.

People say that starting a company is difficult, stressful, hard – and I suppose it is. But we have been inspired and mentored by a lot of great people, with Yesware and our previous company. Building a company is fundamentally a creative process, and being creative at your job is pretty much the best thing anyone could want. We’d love to keep in touch with you. Please add us to your RSS feed, or follow Yesware on Twitter. If you’d like to join the Yesware beta test team, please give us your email here. Thanks for your interest!