We chatted to Moritz Delbrück, the current CEO of Flexperto, and Felix Anthonj, who founded Flexperto and formerly served as its CEO.
Moritz:
The virtual sales room is a digitization of the entire user journey, from scheduling a meeting to consulting and negotiating a deal to signing and automatically producing a summary of the conversation after the call. It provides functions such as a virtual meeting room, e-signature software, AI-generated summaries of the call, and extracts sales triggers from the conversation.
For example, if we're talking about occupational liability insurance and you tell me that your daughter is about to graduate, then you might be prompted to ask when that will be and then asking, do you know what your daughter is going to do next? Perhaps she needs car insurance.
Moritz:
Our vision was to make formal conversations as easy as possible, both for experts and for consumers. Conversations in regulated industries are pretty annoying so far for both customers and experts — there's so much red tape and regulation and security requirements.
Our vision is taking sectors like medicine or banking or law and making them more user-friendly and frictionless. These are essential sectors, but the user experience of dealing with these essential things is much more difficult than buying a tube ticket or ordering a pizza and we want to make it as easy as those things.
Felix:
As we were first time founders, the support we received from hubraum significantly accelerated our growth and we will be forever thankful for that. The fact that so many corporates visited hubraum each week was really helpful for us as an Enterprise B2B SaaS company. I also loved the fact that we could mingle with other startups in a similar space, exchange ideas and also celebrate successes — for instance, in sunset sessions on the rooftop.
Moritz:
Deutsche Telekom is a prime partner for many telecommunications businesses in Germany, so they seemed like a logical fit for us as a partner. They provide the telecommunications infrastructure and we are a specialised software vendor who offers our services on top of this infrastructure but who is still selling it to the same customers — it was also about tapping into a larger customer base.
Felix:
In 2015, hubraum invested in Flexperto as part of the incubator program and became our first institutional investor. Besides the financial support we received which ultimately led to other VCs and business angels believing in our vision, hubraum also provided us with office space and a lot of contacts in the Telekom ecosystem.
Moritz:
We’ve ended up working on mutual projects, and we also collaborate with Deutsche Telekom’s subsidiary company T-Systems. A leading car manufacturer in the south of Germany is subcontracting Flexperto, and that’s partly thanks to Deutsche Telekom.
Moritz:
Not entirely thanks to this, but our collaboration with hubraum and Deutsche Telekom has contributed — Flexperto is now the category leader in the sales for financial services market. We're not going to stop here, we're going to expand into other industries, like telecommunication, health, legal, tax, and government. We love regulated industries. We've already started dipping our toe into the market in France, Italy, Austria and Switzerland.
We also reached out to Michael Trapp, Senior Business Development Manager at T-Systems, for comment — as a mentor he helped support Flexperto with business development up until their market launch.
Michael:
What I found unique about the collaboration was just how much trust there was on both sides. Occasionally there’s a concern that when startups collaborate with big corporations, that the startups might lose out — but from the beginning, it felt like we were working on an equal footing towards a shared goal. Flexperto was happy to share as much info with us as possible, which again felt unique (understandably, some startups prefer not to show all their cards). We had a great relationship with the former founder Felix and his team. The relationship we have with the current CEO is just as fruitful.
Michael:
They have provided us with a complete and flexible software-as-a-service solution for B2B customers for a new and modern customer approach. It's great because it's a highly scalable and multilingual service that has a lot of potential to go global. We have already been able to successfully sell the system twice. Our corporate customer is very convinced of the savings potential and the new way of addressing customers and wants to continue the rollout internationally. Further consulting services are provided by Deutsche Telekom / T-Systems.
We also spoke to Holger Sbrzesny, senior innovation transfer manager at hubraum, who supported Flexperto by connecting them with our business units.
Holger:
As an innovation transfer manager, I maintain very close relationships with the business units so I’m always aware of their present and future needs. By continuously exchanging information, I build trust in hubraum and the startups that I recommend for collaboration. The business units appreciate that I not only facilitate meetings and help set up joint projects, but also support with know-how in terms of procurement processes and documents like NDAs, LoIs, MoUs, or collaboration agreements.
Intrigued and want to learn more? Check out Flexperto here.