SalesTechStar Interview with Alina Trigubenko, CEO and Founder, Profi

Alina Trigubenko, CEO and Founder at Profi chats about what fascinates her about the world of professional service providers or ‘’profis’’ and how this fascination led to the development and inception of the Profi platform:

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Hi Alina, welcome to this SalesTechStar chat, tell us more about your journey through the years and the story behind Profi? 

I’ve always been fascinated by what we call profis — professional service providers like coaches, trainers, therapists, consultants — and their dedication to their craft of helping people.

I’ve also been a client of a big variety of profis (benefitting from these engagements greatly, of course), and what became so evident to me is their ongoing struggle with finding service enablement tools. Because honestly, there were none!

At one point in my career I trained as a mind-body practitioner and an executive leadership coach, and I got to experience this same struggle from the other side of the market.

The helplessness you can feel and the overwhelm of holding a world-changing, life-changing, heart-by-heart changing vision as a profi, but being sidelined or held back by technology… well, that just shouldn’t exist!

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Technology is here as a tool for us to advance our purpose and mission as people wanting to help other people. Our tech stack should make our visions real, not make our visions impossible. We all have enough challenges in this world already. That was my call-to-action to build Profi.

So our mission is to help the helpers maximize their impact.

• What that means is we want to automate daunting admin tasks so you can focus on the helping and revenue-generating activities instead of managing a tech stack you likely have no expertise with.
• And what it also means is we want your tech to integrate into your entire service operation and service design, so the helpers we help can create a cohesive customer experience from their first client touchpoint on.

What inspired the recent enhancements to the platform and how does it benefit sales and marketing teams?

Profi has already established itself as an all-in-one cloud-based platform that helps professional service providers — solopreneurs, teams and organizations

– increase revenue through optimized service delivery, deeper client activation and automated business processes. Because of this, sales and marketing teams and consultants were naturally drawn to our platform. They were looking for a better way to work remotely without having to use multiple tools and systems, which gets to be time-consuming and confusing.

The Profi platform solves this problem by providing turnkey, holistic tools and workflow automations that help these busy professionals increase client engagement, manage their teams and services, provide customized client experiences, securely collaborate, manage and automate payments, and much more.

But in addition to operations automation, Profi also gives sales and marketing professionals the ability to create programs, packages, courses, and supports 1:1 and group sessions with built-in HIPAA-compliant video conferencing and secure messaging. So not only can busy sales and marketing professionals connect with customers and prospects remotely, they can also upsell, take payments, host live webinars, collaborate with colleagues and more – all from one platform. Profi really is where CRM, sales enablement, client engagement and operations come together.

Can you share a few thoughts on building the Profi platform through the years and what were some of the challenges you faced while enhancing capabilities?

I learned a ton by doing user research on both sides — providers and the consumers of the services.

What’s not always top-of-mind for profis is how much customer experience has become the value proposition for top-performing profis. Since COVID-19 forced digital transformation across industries, consumers’ habits and expectations online have only risen — people paying high-ticket for your services now expect a top-notch digital service delivery experience from you.

This has become one of the “from good to great” differentiators in business. You can’t turn into a tech company overnight (and we shouldn’t all try to turn our businesses into tech companies in the first place — we all should optimize and maximize our strength points). This means that you need to partner with a comprehensive, niche-specific, purpose-built platform solution. We’re profis ourselves, and we research and design our platform with other profis in mind.

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As far as our challenges: we started selling in a pre-COVID world. And fewer professional services organizations saw the immediate need for digital transformation, customer experience and additional security layers. Now these are a must-have for organizations wanting to scale, retain customers and unlock additional revenue that’s only possible with an all-in-one solution. This kind of unified approach gives orgs a single, secure portal for everyone from the business owners and managers to their service providers and their clients.

Can you shed a light on a few top operational challenges that are common to sales and marketing teams in your view? What best practices can you share to help alleviate these?

Clarity and alignment of goals. Oh, and trustworthy data!

There are infinite ways to approach a problem, but a lack of team clarity and alignment diffuses any proven approach. Imagine your team members are each reporting that they’re rowing in the same general direction. Great! But you come to realize when you take a step back… not everyone’s even in the same boat or rowing at the same time. So, there’s this energy dissipation actually happening that translates into a loss of velocity and momentum, or a productivity loss.

At Profi, we’re intent on building a culture of transparency, trust and camaraderie by setting unified OKRs across both Sales and Marketing for pipeline, conversion rate and revenue targets. We openly review (to a high degree of detail) how each team is doing, regularly share news, and work through how we overcome roadblocks together. It’s important in this process that everyone has a voice and is heard.

And, identifying and optimizing the right tech to enable the Sales and Marketing teams with data that enhances our clarity and goal alignment is always challenging. As a team, we’ve got to pull the right data and be able to trust that data so we can make informed decisions on where to prioritize our efforts.

A few thoughts on the future of all-in-one automation platforms and how they will change the game for customer-facing teams?

Realistically our customer-facing teams aren’t hired or trained to be software implementers. And they have a higher standard they’re held to today than ever before by both their organizations and our customers. Teams expect to be able to do their work and not to have to juggle through multiple, disparate tools to do it effectively. The constant changing of tool contexts in a Sales or Marketing team member’s typical day can be incredibly draining and ultimately impacts the depth of attention they’re able to bring to their work.

With the “Great Resignation” in full swing, companies are forced to find ways to enable their teams to be that much more productive.

• From finding time savings at every turn, process bottlenecks and unclosed loops to potentially increase team productivity,
• uncovering additional revenue streams,
• providing end-to-end service, product and customer support,
• getting a high return on investment,
• finding ways to scale,
• offering enhanced analytics,
• And a professional client experience – one where you don’t have to train clients on multiple solutions/logins to onboard and retain them.

Some last thoughts and entrepreneurial takeaways before we wrap up?

Never give up. Continuing to show up however and wherever you are in that moment is literally the secret ingredient to anything important in your life or work. Ask yourself: what might happen if I showed up today completely as me, even if I don’t want to? Try it. You just might be surprised!

Find the people you trust, keep them happy, and take them everywhere with you!

I had to start over two times in failed business partnerships. But by my third time, I’ve certainly learned a lot the hard way. Which makes how well Profi is growing and thriving that much sweeter. It’s all about the people, really.

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