🤩 They Did What to Sell More…?

3-Second memory? Try a goldfish that can drive a car. Yeah, would you believe those Israeli researchers developed the tech almost a decade ago and trained fish to do that? How on Earth don’t we have them as pets yet?

In this Open Letter:

• Niche boost: Driving sales with the human connection.
• SA-Indian solar boost, Cannabis on the JSE & Uber permits.
• Big deal: How to build a bigger, more valuable business.
• What you want more scanners for: The results are in.
• Startup power: 100+ businesses SA needs right now.

Together with:

TRENDING NOW

Connecting Sales Faster than You Can Say WhatsApp

When it comes to sales, rapid response is a game changer.

In fact, responding to a sales enquiry within 5 minutes has a 10 times higher chance to convert compared to after 10 minutes. Let 20 hours go by, and you’ve probably lost the deal.

Now, inbound call centres are great for that rapid response agent, but that’s not always practical or financially feasible.

Think estate agents or car salesmen. They’re on the road a lot and leads are coming in all hours of the day. Arguably the fastest and most convenient way to connect reps to leads is likely on an app.

Preferably one they both already use… WhatsApp.

But this is problematic for a few reasons:

• Many aren't comfortable giving out their personal numbers.
• That relationship is then between the rep and the customer, not the company.
• The company has no way to monitor sales rep’s response times and engagement if it's on their personal WhatsApp number.

Empowering the human-first connection

In a world that’s going AI-driven chatbots for first response, Sudonum is building tech to supercharge human-first engagement… and we are here for it – reaching out to an estate agent, you want the human touch.

Because, let’s face it, when it comes to facilitating emotional decisions, humans just work better.

Makes the whole sales process a little less daunting.

Sudonum enables companies, like estate agencies, to add a “Contact via WhatsApp” button on a website or digital property (like Property24). Clicking this button, the customer gets routed via a WhatsApp Business account to a real human agent (or sales rep).

In WhatsApp, in a chat, without having to add a new contact, retype standard messages, and repeatedly copy-paste text.

What’s more, while the chat itself remains private between participants, the company can track some all-important business metrics:

• how quickly a lead was responded to (if at all)
• how individual reps are performing
• and conversation durations.

At the same time, the lead gets popped into a CRM of choice to ensure it doesn’t get lost and that the company keeps the relationship details (not the agent).

And they have great traction. With customers across four continents and several industries including real estate, automotive and marketing agencies, rapid human response is taking off and we are watching this space…

Refer one friend to sign up to The Open Letter and view our top opportunity pick for this trend (and all future trends we cover).

Get your sharing link here.

IN SHORT

☀️ Funding Solar. Local clean energy company candi solar has closed its Series C funding round securing $38 million to support its growth plan including bringing 200 MW of business solar across SA and India.

🚙 Legal Lifts. SA Prez Cyril Rampahosa has signed the amended National Land Transport Act into law bringing regulation for Uber and Bolt operators to obtain operating licenses just like other public transport providers.

👕 Profitable Threads. Mr Price’s financial services division is about to hit the R1 billion revenue mark. This after the division’s revenue increased by nearly 5% to reach R869 million according to the group’s Financial year-end results.

🌿 Listing High. Cilo Cybin Holdings will become the first cannabis company to be listed on the JSE when its listing on the AltX market takes place on the 25th of June.

🚍 Reversible Lane. The MyCiTi bus lane on the R27/Marine Drive between Loxton Road and Broad Road in Cape Town will become reversible allowing inbound travel to the City in the mornings, and outbound travel to Table View in the afternoon.

Manage Your Money Better

Things have gotten pricey over the last two years in South Africa. With inflation of 6.9% and 6% in ‘22 and ‘23 respectively, and interest rates kept at the highest rate in 14 years, consumers are feeling the pinch. In fact, the South African middle class is facing increased pressure with debt servicing levels at 79% of their income, up 28% from two years ago. It's never been more important to budget well. That’s why we recommend Finwise.

Finwise connects securely to your bank account, to track your income and expenses and then it helps you:

• Budget and keep tabs on your spending (per category).
• Track and compare your spending to previous months.
• Track all your investments and your net worth.
• Plan and forecast your future finances to see if you’ll have enough.
• Get tips, insights and nudges to manage your money better.

Use FinWise to simplify the way you work with and think about your personal finances. Save money, get peace of mind, and be in full control of your finances.

Start your Finwise journey for free today — Sign up here.

BUILDER’S CORNER

How to Increase the Value of Your Business

by Elvorne Palmer from The Open Letter and Stream

Once you’re going and growing, something that always comes up is: Where is this going?

Do you want to list, sell or build an ever-growing stable group of companies?

Either way, at some point, you’re going to want to know how to increase your value…

There are several ways to deliver a big payday for shareholders. The one the startup world is probably most familiar with is the growth-focussed “winner-takes-all” method. Where you build out a new idea, raise a ton of VC money and try to grow as big as you can, as fast as you can, to dominate the market and then list on the stock market to create liquidity for the shareholders.

But that doesn’t always work in SA, though. We have a smaller market and thus it’s not always possible to reach profitability at scale.

So another more sensible approach is to build for profitability as fast as possible and leverage that success to build an even bigger business in that specific sector.

Here’s how that works…

The consolidation play

1. Build for profitability

The goal isn’t necessarily to become big early on, but rather as stable as possible. Prove the business model and the unit economics. This often means prioritising optimisation and streamlining the business over growth. You want to understand the dynamics well and also start building up some cash — you will need both later.

2. Build a strong team

It’s vital to build a company that can eventually run by itself – without too much of you as the founder’s interference. And the easiest way to achieve that is to have all the right staff in all the right places so that if you, as the founder, step out, it doesn’t really affect the business’s ability to earn. This will free up your time to focus on doing the deals later which will make this go big!

3. IP or Proprietary processes

It’s a tough one because you can’t always own IP, copyright or trademark, but it really makes a big difference if you have something – a process, system, method or technology — that’s clearly identifiable as your own. This could be vital for helping you do number 4…

4. Buy out others to augment your offering in the same sector

There are often major opportunities in consolidating smaller businesses into a larger company. This brings about scale benefits which unlocks bigger margins.

The thinking around this in the startup space would be: if you’ve developed some tech/IP that helps you do business better/faster/cheaper – whatever – than the other guys, there should be some “traditional businesses” or competitors who will eventually be struggling more than you.

And the idea is to use your success (or this is even a good reason to raise some funding) to go and buy them out – competitors, suppliers and other companies in the same space. So you can take whatever customers they have, optimise it as much as possible and assemble a group that’s perceptibly more valuable.

There’s even a formula for these kinds of buyouts:

• Only offer to put up a percentage (say 10%) of the business’s purchase price upfront.
• Then to do a leveraged buyout deal – you take the assets of the business you’re buying and put them up as collateral for a loan to buy it (asset finance).
• You could even create a deferred payment deal with the seller – where you agree to pay them off over time instead of all at once.
• And then you pay back the loan or the deferred payments with the money the business you’ve just bought makes – hopefully, combining it with your business you can optimise it enough to have it pay for itself very quickly.

So effectively you use a little bit of cash, but mostly your track record and future vision to buy entire companies.

Today’s Builder’s Corner was written by Elvorne Palmer from The Open Letter & Stream who is an expert in go-to-market & content.

Connect with him on Linkedin here.

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YOUR VOICE

We asked what types of scanners you’d use, and truth detection it is…

🟨🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️ 🥑 Food nutritional content scanner (30%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤸 An “Is my exercise actually working?” check (17%)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤖 Scanners linked straight to AI doctor for diagnosis (17%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🧌 A real-life internet troll toxicity checker (3%)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 🤬 Instant bulls#$% detectors for parliament and meetings (33%)

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