From Start-Up to Industry Leader with Myphoner

To grow the business, Monsido has been utilizing cold outreach from day one, and their weapon of choice was always Myphoner.

Founded in 2014, Monsido’s mission is to empower businesses to achieve a perfectly optimized and accessible online presence, ensuring all visitors have a positive experience. Monsido has grown from a team of 4 based in Denmark, to a global team of 90 today with offices in the US, Australia, the UK and Denmark.

At its core, Monsido is a web governance solution, with a suite of services and scanning tools to help companies manage the day to day operations of managing and running their websites.

Monsido works with businesses in several sectors with the most customers in Education and Government. Their target client is essentially anyone that needs to make regular changes to websites and ensure a great user experience.

To grow the business, Monsido has been utilizing cold outreach from day one, and their weapon of choice was always Myphoner.

We sat down with co-founder Jacob Riff who started using Myphoner back in 2014 and Tyler Yezerski who is a business analyst at Monsido and manages Myphoner for the US team.

Early days, bootstrapping

Jeppe, founder of Myphoner and Jacob sat down through a Zoom meeting continents away to discuss how Monsido started using Myphoner in the early stages of Monsido.

As a co-founder of Monsido, Jacob wore many hats and at some point, he needed to wear the hat of a cold calling agent. Having had previous experience with cold calling in another venture, he knew that managing the leads was incredibly important. Previously he had used Google Sheets to manage leads, which was disastrous as he was spending more time managing the Sheet than actually calling leads. Eventually, Jacob gave up on cold calling as he didn’t have a good way to manage callbacks and keep focused on the right leads.

Having met Jeppe through Rocket Labs, Jacob knew that Myphoner had recently launched and realised it could be a possible solution to his cold calling problems.

He started using Myphoner in 2014 and noticed instantly how user friendly and intuitive Myphoner was. Myphoner achieved his goal rather quickly and Jacob felt there was a perfect match for what he needed.

What Jacob truly enjoyed about using Myphoner was that it kept him focused on the leads and the calls for the day and he, “didn’t have to worry about anything else”.

Jacob loved the simplicity that is built around great features which gives users a lot of power. Users can utilize Myphoner for many things such as scripts/dispositions/integrations, “Swiss army knife of a cold calling tool” as he puts it.

Being a programmer himself, Jacob also quickly realized the power of Myphoner beyond the simplicity of the user interface.

Zapier integrations and the webhooks were integral in making these automations happen.

Upon hiring the first SDR (Sales Development Representative) Myphoner was easy for them to simply pick up and start using. As Monsido moved to the US and the team grew, it was natural that the sales team would continue to use Myphoner as their cold calling solution of choice. Myphoner became such an important part of the SDR’s day that they spent 75% of their time on it.

As a co-founder, Jacob stepped away from the day to day use of Myphoner to take care of other mission-critical jobs which were easy to do as the SDR’s could understand how Myphoner worked quickly and the integrations he created meant they didn’t have to worry about much manual work themselves.

Myphoner was integral to the growth of Monsido as it kept their SDR’s efficient, their motto is “doing a lot with less”.

As Monsido grew, more agents were brought on board to use Myphoner and they had about 65 agents using Myphoner by 2020.

Jeppe and Jacob discussed what Monsido would have done without Myphoner, which Jacob simply stated Monsido would not be where it is today without using Myphoner from the start.

The sales growth that Monsido saw in its initial phase allowed the company to take on seed investment in 2018 and Jacob can directly link the cold calling efforts to this growth and subsequent investments.

Growing the team, scaling the effort

Daniel, head of customer success at Myphoner had a chat with Tyler about how Monsido has been using Myphoner in the most recent times.

The conversation with Tyler started with understanding the role of the SDRs, which is to call leads and book sales appointments and then hand-over to the sales team. Myphoner makes this simple by using integrations with Salesforce and other applications.

The agent simply fills out the required information in Myphoner, selects the appropriate disposition, and Zapier, along with custom webhooks, populates all the information directly in Salesforce and Monsido’s internal tools. This enables SDR’s to, “make over a hundred calls a day”.

When Tyler came onboard at Monsido he took it upon himself to learn exactly how Myphoner works and all its features. He also made a change to incorporating emails when prospecting leads which increase touchpoints. This was made easy as Myphoner already had built-in email integration with Gmail allowing the team to send emails directly inside Myphoner.

The email templates were “a game-changer” for Tyler and the team as it meant that they could easily send customized emails within a few clicks of a button. Again saving the team time and helping them to continuously focus on making calls.

One of the other big changes that Tyler made while learning to use Myphoner effectively and moving to the role of senior business analyst, was to take ownership of the leads being generated and managed.

Tyler explained “that the way Monsido worked in the past was great for a small team where everyone gets their own leads and manages them”, however for a growing team in the US they needed a more systematic approach.

Tyler looked at trends within the industry and if certain verticals suddenly became interested, he created new segments in Myphoner. The SDRs would then immediately be able to focus on that segment.

Luckily Myphoner is specifically designed for this type of approach, by consolidating their lists, the data they held and starting to use segments Tyler was able to more efficiently manage leads and run targeted sales campaigns.

Let’s have a closer look at the way Monsido has been managing leads.

By utilizing a simple export/update/re-import workflow he was able to provide more information to the SDRs and secondly create more useful segments.

Within the industry that Monsido encompasses it's important to understand ‘what’s hot’ at the moment and where to focus on sales. Tyler looked at trends within the industry and if he saw certain markets, states, industries were becoming more interested (for various reasons) he would go ahead and make a segment. The SDRs would then focus on that segment until completion or another campaign was created.

Tyler said that by doing this it led to better efficiency as well as SDR happiness. The SDRs always had the most up to date information for each lead and were also able to focus on calling, knowing that they had the hottest lead possible at that moment.

We discussed how Monsido was affected by the Covid pandemic and he explained that it was rather easy for everyone to work from home as having an application like Myphoner meant the only difference was “instead of working from the office we moved our work stations to our houses, so nothing really changed”. Tyler mentioned that the ability to create sales campaigns remotely ensured the SDRs kept motivated and Myphoner’s reporting tools allowed for continuous updates on how the team was doing.

He found no significant changes in terms of the sales over the last 6 months as the team could simply focus on what's important…. Calling!

Update December 2020

As Monsido continues to grow, their needs have changed and they have at this point decided to move away from Myphoner to invest in an enterprise solution that allows them to consolidate and reduce their internal application stack.

We at Myphoner understand that depending on where a company is in its growth, different products are good in different scenarios. We wish Jacob, Tyler and all of Monsido all the best of luck with their onward journey.