It all started the day...
... I founded my first eCommerce company at age 19. In the countryside in Denmark. No investors anywhere nearby. I don’t even think anybody around us had ever heard the word investor. We had to make our own money. Bootstrapped. And we did; generated $10m Revenue by age 22. Sold the company, while still in law school. Got myself some bigger goals. Started a few other businesses, but quickly realized that being an entrepreneur in a small country like Denmark, means you only have strategy available.

Conquering like the Vikings. The country is simply too small for big goals. So moved to Spain, Germany, US.

Fast Forward:

• Started a Loyalty Application for Merchants.
• Developed the application.
• Called 100 Merchants myself.
• Got the first Merchant committed.
• Integrated it for them in their Prestashop Store.
• Hired a Sales Team.
• Called 1,000 Merchants.
• Turned out no one had their own resources to onboard, so we needed to onboard for them.

Learned that no solution to easily onboard to all the POS System existed, so had to build the integrations on our own.

Realized the first integration we had built had not considered the salesperson, so had to optimize.

Did the typical sales process. Schedule Discovery Call. Qualify. Schedule Demo. Qualify. Proposal. Negotiate. Data Privacy Audit. Sign Contract. (YES!). Then handed over to integration to focus on the next deal.

Then integration ended up only happening in 40% of the cases. No one had expected it. Nobody had time.

Luckily our IT people were all sitting in the middle of a circular office with the salespeople around them, so everything was very public.

We realized we couldn’t just build integrations as an IT side effort with IT specs. We need the integrations to be built with marketing, sales, conversion, flow in mind. IT was just a sidenote, a very important sidenote, but none-the-less a sidenote.

We turned the sales process upside down. Integration first, then demo with real data, real store, then proposal, negotiation etc.

The result: Our Sales Reps went from 8 Sales on average to 42 Sales on average. A +500% uplift.

Meanwhile in our core business (the Loyalty Application) we had partnered with a number of other eCommerce Apps. They were typically interested in the data we collected with our loyalty application, until one day a company told us, that they didn’t care about the data, but they were actually interested in the integrations we had built.

We realized this was an even bigger problem. Anyone selling to merchants, building eCommerce Apps had this problem. Therefore, we spun of the technology in a new company, hired industry specialists to help focus fully on this problem.

Today, companies from high growth startups to Fortune100 Companies, have used our Framework to onboard over 300,000 Merchants worldwide to their eCommerce Applications and Services.