A Chat with Bensik Vrellaku, CEO and Founder at Salesflow.io

If you could describe your journey in one line, what would it be

 

It was an overnight success story that consisted of constant evolution of experimentation in business that spanned 15 years and then only took one year to grow a successful business.

 

Tell us about yourself

 

I have been in business since I was 16, creating small websites and experimenting with using my own money from retail jobs. This continued in university – I had jobs to fund business ventures. I found that I had a knack for testing business ideas and validating them in different ways to understand their success, and this led to me creating 10 start-ups with different partners, including GrowthTech, Visyond Contentflow and now Salesflow.io.In 2018, I founded Salesflow.io – a leading force in Go-To-Market (GTM) software, revolutionising B2B lead generation for SMEs using multi-channel sales technology.

I’ve been creating successful SaaS businesses for a long time and have a lot to share on the topic.

 

 

 

 

How did you overcome adversity in your entrepreneurial journey?

 

My journey with Salesflow.io started around the same time that I began running out of money. I was working with a CTO to develop a product and knew it would blow up. I understood enough and knew it would help solve B2B lead generation problems. I was down to my last £1000, and knew I had to get through it. I contacted a guy who had a large community within Facebook groups. He was an influencer and growth marketer. We had a call, and I persuaded him of a feature that was a cornerstone of the market. He loved it, and we created an e-book, and it kicked off from there… just one strategy and one idea, and it grew.

You have to persevere through adversity. At the time, I was 27, so I still had a lot of energy. Luckily, the liabilities were just me. I had no kids or wife and lived at my parent’s house. Philosophically, that perseverance is ingrained in me from my parents. My motivation and adversities from the past gave me the personality traits to never give up.

That’s not to say that in the last 5 years, there haven’t been challenges, product delays, customers leaving, some of my team being based in Ukraine, and a tech recession. People think it just remains once they reach a certain level of success, but the challenges continue to happen. You have to look at how to grow and sustain the business, look at the lifecycle of a business and solve more problems for customers. It involves a lot of reinvesting and creating more momentum.

Ultimately, you are going to have problems. As an entrepreneur, you have to have the mindset to solve problems in the micro or macro environment. We’ve seen huge amounts of growth. We have diversified and learnt a lot of lessons—sometimes, money isn’t the solution. You have to hire people to help focus on growth, and that is how you stay resilient.

 

 

What is the best lesson you’ve learnt as an entrepreneur?

 

There are so many lessons to learn as an entrepreneur, whether it’s about sales strategies, marketing, or finance. However, the most significant lesson I’ve realised over time revolves around neglect – it’s a really hard lesson. Negligence isn’t always intentional; sometimes, it’s a result of being overwhelmed by everything happening in the business, causing you to overlook important signals or risks that can have a macro impact. It’s just always about controlling the chaos and being mindful of not disregarding or overlooking essential aspects of the business, whether it’s cash flow, strategy, leadership, or customer relations.

Sometimes, entrepreneurs take certain risks that disservice them rather than reward them, and sometimes, it can be carelessness. In my 10 years of business experience, I’ve seen how neglect can severely impact growth, revenue, and overall business success, even when unintentional or due to a lack of knowledge. The key lesson here is to develop a framework or mental model that helps avoid the virus of neglect, as it can lead to significant issues. Being mindful and aware of neglect, an often underrated word, is crucial for long-term success. It’s essential to pay close attention to every department and customer, as neglect can lead to revenue loss, slow growth, and turbulence that you’ll have to resolve.

 

Tell us about the company you have built

 

I’m very proud of Salesflow – we are bootstrapped without any funding and created a multi-million revenue-generating business. We are a multichannel sales automation platform across email and LinkedIn – we aren’t a marketing tool where you just send mass emails to all your databases – we have a human-like approach to cold prospecting both from email and LinkedIn.

We are different because we focus on very personalised automation. By engaging many different prospects, we can increase a business’s response rate. We are using multi-channel, which gives a higher response rate. Email itself has only a 2% response rate, but combining it with LinkedIn jumps to a 7%-10% response rate. You are more than doubling your chances of conversation rates.

We’ve seen huge success stories with Salesflow.io and we hired data scientists who helped us to realise we’ve generated over 500k responsive leads and opportunities over the years. If you imagine its impact on SMEs, it’s huge!

During the pandemic, it hit home that solving SMEs’ lead generation was our purpose. I had an email from a guy during lockdown, he said “Besnik, the things you’re offering to bring in new business means I can support my family.” What Salesflow means to GDP and deals/opportunities made is incredible. We have a cost-effective tool for prospecting and outbound sales for small businesses and larger corporations.

 

What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs?

 

My best advice is to find the reason why you want to be an entrepreneur. Is it freedom, to support your family, or is it being something and wanting to prove people wrong? What motivates you to be independent?

To thrive, you need to step back, see why you started, and be your reminder to keep going. For me, there were several reasons. I became independent early on, and it led to me finding that I love creating and innovating—it was a blessing. I capitalised on that core energy and put it into building businesses. Entrepreneurship isn’t for everyone; it was more complicated than I ever imagined myself to test the waters of your stress thresholds because they will be stretched beyond your current frontier and whether you can shed new skin or simply incapable of coping with it.