Panos Meintanis, formally the Global Enablement Manager at Talkwalker, just launched Dealsup, an all-around sales acceleration company for startups and scaleups. In this interview, he tells us more about his vision for the company and its role in the ecosystem.
What problem does Dealsup solve?
Dealsup focuses on helping startups with one of their most crucial problems: generating revenue and accelerating sales. Luxembourg is fast becoming a startup nation and the help provided to startups at times is remarkable. However, a fundamental gap still exists: building growth on a strong company foundation and building the required strategies, processes, and skills for this growth. A lot of the founders and early sales teams have never been on the field, or have very little experience selling, building processes and strategies. That’s where Dealsup comes in.
One of our recent customers, Kidola, was in a critical transition period. The company saw good growth in the Luxembourgish market and wanted to expand into different markets to continue its growth. That required building a strong foundation to be scalable. We helped them create and implement a sales process and trained the sales teams in our sales methodology and sales fundamentals.
As a result, their win rates doubled and they saw 30% month-on-month growth in the new markets they pursued. Through this new process and training, the founders built a predictable revenue machine where they were involved less and less in the day to day sales and allowed them to focus more on their customer problems.
Who is the target audience of Dealsup? What are the different services and courses you offer?
We focus mostly on early B2B startups and scaleups. Technology as a whole is a big focus but we are not limited to just tech companies. We work with all types of companies that need our support and we tailor our approach to their specific industry and needs.
Our services cover end-to-end most of the areas startups need support with. Starting with companies in their founder sales stage, growing sales teams, to startups experiencing hyper-growth.
Starting with foundational areas such as building your ideal customer profile, key messaging, and initial outreach that secures customers and leads to product market fit. For companies in their early scale stage, we assist with building on a strong foundation through a sales strategy, go-to-market strategy, repeatable processes and sales methodologies.
For startups that enter high or hyper-growth, we help them increase productivity through onboarding programs and skills development to either go up market, or enter new ones. Outside of our core services, we also created stand-alone courses for first-time founders, early sales teams, and managers.
What is the added value of working with Dealsup instead of other companies, or continuing to work with one’s current sales team?
We focus specifically on helping startups and early scaleups. We understand the unique challenges startups face and how to navigate around them. Removing unnecessary complexities down to the core elements required. Growth between startups and larger companies looks vastly different. Different growth stages require different strategies, processes, skills, and tech to get there. The blueprints for companies growing from 0 to 1m in revenue, or from 1m revenue to 10m or to 30m are fundamentally different.
What is Dealsup’s mission and what qualifications and experience do you bring to it?
After 9 years working at Talkwalker, I have experienced growth and the steps necessary to get there. I have seen what success looks like, but more importantly, I have seen and made many mistakes myself.
Panos Meintanis, founder and CEO of Dealsup.
Our mission moving forward is to pass on some of that knowledge and experience to help other startups grow through sales strategy, go-to-market execution, and skills development through training and coaching. We want to help others avoid costly mistakes that can set them back. For the last decade, I’ve worked in software startups and scale-ups, focusing on individual selling, managing teams, and enabling sales teams.
What are your goals and ambitions for Dealsup?
In the immediate term, Dealsup’s primary goal is to help our local ecosystem of startups grow and work closely with our startups, incubators, and accelerators to elevate the services and support that they provide to the startups. In the medium to long term, and as AI and other technologies and tools are developing fast, I foresee leveraging technology to solve some of these challenges at scale and help boost productivity and accelerate sales for startups.
