Smindle provides a browser-based sales platform and call center system for B2B sales teams and outsourcing companies, integrating with CRMs like HubSpot and supporting international operations. We speak to Jouko Koskinen, CEO of Smindle, to understand how streamlining scheduling for their customers turned into a significant competitive advantage for their platform.

The problem:

Sales teams spending hours on scheduling meetings, not on reaching the right stakeholders

Smindle provides a browser-based sales platform and call center system for B2B sales teams and outsourcing companies, integrating with CRMs like HubSpot and supporting international operations. We speak to Jouko Koskinen, CEO of Smindle, to understand how streamlining scheduling for their customers turned into a significant competitive advantage for their platform.

Nowadays, outbound sales are changing. “Ten years ago, outbound call centre systems were made for high frequency sales with robots,” explains Jouko. “There was a gap in the market for B2B outsourcing. When you try to reach a CEO, you have to know what you’re selling and you need a lot of different data on hand.” That’s where Smindle came in to disrupt the market.

Smindle differentiates itself by allowing users to create contacting automation loops for full-funnel touchpoints, weaving in SMS, email, and sales calls that surface information from various sources. “We focus on how to make the calls high quality, without sacrificing quantity. We provide a service that allows our users to be efficient and very controlled in their outreach, so SDR’s always know who to contact, when to contact and have all the supporting data from all sources needed.”

When it came to progressing deals with time-poor senior leaders, streamlining scheduling for follow-up calls was a vital offering to Smindle’s users. “Normally, you’d have everyone’s calendars open on different tabs. It took 15 minutes to write everything down, create all the calendar invites, and send all the emails to everyone. We wanted to streamline that, and that’s how we eventually found Cronofy.”

The solution:

A scheduling API that’s easy to integrate, every time

When it came to the choice of developing scheduling functionality in-house for Smindle, this decision was cut-and-dry. “It’s a very important supporting feature, but we were not building that. We were definitely buying it. We had so much on our hands with the VoIP and everything else, so scheduling infrastructure was a nice find, and with Cronofy, it was easy.” The team wanted to focus on building out the differentiating features of their platform, not scheduling.

Having been a Cronofy customer from their early days, Smindle re-evaluated pricing from different vendors when it was time to move their customers over to a new version of their platform in a bid to cut costs. However, it was a decision that slowed them down.

Our developers found Nylas, and the API documentation looked good. The pricing was very cheap, so we went with it, because we thought — whatever, it doesn’t matter. But then we noticed that it does matter.

Smindle ran into a number of issues when it came to trying to make Nylas work for their platform.

The verification process was a nightmare. There were a number of weird things, and we had to give Nylas ownership of our Google project so they could verify it. It was a major liability, even if it’s just one project.

They tried to complete the verification process without handing over ownership of their project to no avail. “We got their documentation and we just couldn’t do it,” explains Jouko. “It was impossible. It said — click this button. There was no button. So we thought, screw this.”

Luckily, there was a solution that solved all of their needs with ease. “We checked Cronofy out again, and it was all plug and play.”

Smindle returned to Cronofy, and was up and running in no time.

The result:

The result: Complex sales meetings scheduled from 15 minutes to 5 seconds

Now, Smindle’s busy engineering team is reaping the benefits of working with a scheduling provider that prioritises 99.99% uptime and responsive support. “We have our own hands full with our own product, so we want the supporting solutions to be easy. Because we move fast, we need fast answers. Everything needs to be easy, good service, and a decent price, and Cronofy delivered.”

Smindle’s users are seeing hours saved per team member, per week, quickly adding up to significant productivity gains. Scheduling complex meetings has gone from 15 minutes to mere seconds, and turned into a significant advantage against Smindle’s competitors:

When it comes to lead generation for our B2B outsourcing customers, scheduling sales meetings with external calendars takes 15 minutes. With our system and the Cronofy integration, the calendars are linked. It takes five seconds, so you save 15 minutes per meeting booked. If you have a hundred agents, you can quickly calculate the amount of time saved. It’s a big advantage.

When it comes to delivering even more value to their users through upcoming features, Smindle is now looking to cut through the AI hype to deliver specific and valuable insights at scale using transcription. “We have this cool system where our customers can collect all of the data on one company. One interesting thing is getting transcripts combined with call and company history. We tried seeing what happens if you put a thousand discussions for OpenAI to analyze, and the results are amazing.” We’re certain we can expect Smindle to deliver more competitive advantages for forward-thinking sales teams in the near future.