Business Builders to Know: Mounir Nejjai’s Journey to Success
When Mounir Nejjai co-founded his business three years ago, the path ahead seemed straightforward. Now, in 2022, Cezium, a provider of SaaS solutions for Salesforce Marketing Cloud, has been ‘reborn’ multiple times following unforeseen struggles and roadblocks.
By choosing to view these hard times as opportunities, and lead with innovative, solutions-based thinking, the founder has been able to keep the business on the path to success, learning first-hand the importance of agility, fostering support networks, and prioritizing customer success.
We spoke to Mounir about how the Salesforce platform has enabled him to put these values into practice, how he continues to upskill as a founder, and why you cannot underestimate the power of a great product.
Can you tell us how Cezium was born?
Three years ago, I was working with a Salesforce consulting partner specializing in Salesforce Marketing Cloud, when myself and two co-founders decided to launch our own company. At first, we thought of ourselves as a kind of a hybrid company: integrators but also software vendors. The idea came from clients asking us for capabilities that were not available yet on the Marketing Cloud platform and realizing we could add these features for users. Every time we received a request for something new, we tried to build a generic app for them to solve the issue and then made it available on Salesforce AppExchange.
Having to constantly innovate and create new solutions set Cezium off to a strong start. As a company, we liked the challenge. Then came the pandemic and we took a big hit. The majority of our clients were retailers and, for many months, were forced to shut down entirely. However, we decided to view this as an opportunity. While these clients were unable to work, we went to them to ask if we could build some new, innovative capabilities with their support. Many agreed and shared feedback and ideas about what they would like to see in the platform in the future, and then we got to work building these new technology assets.
Then last year, we saw another opportunity. We wanted to scale, but recruitment is not easy in France at the moment. From speaking to successful ISV founders in the Salesforce ecosystem we decided to productize the company and build industry-specific solutions on Marketing Cloud. So, just four months ago, the company was reborn. We abandoned all our consulting services and gave them away to other partners, freeing us up to focus solely on being a software editor
What made you choose the Salesforce Platform to grow and develop your business?
I had worked with lots of different marketing automation software platforms before, so when I was launching the company I questioned whether I should work with one editor only. Being profitable was the number one priority in those early stages, so I decided to go with Salesforce Marketing Cloud because it was the leading platform and had achieved the biggest growth. However, I left the door open to work with other platforms too.
What I quickly realized was that the competing software platforms lacked a progressive mindset. With Salesforce, there is a big focus on business value and customer success, whereas the competitors, in terms of marketing technologies, were shifting to cloud-based strategies but their focus was on the first sale and not on customer success. So, I ended up working solely with Salesforce because I wanted my customers to be happy with the product we delivered to them.
I also wouldn’t have been able to develop products on top of the existing technologies without Salesforce, nor would I have had a marketplace like AppExchange to sell it on. These benefits as well, as all the support you get from the Salesforce ecosystem, made me feel very confident in my decision.
How do you stay one step ahead of the curve as a founder?
I never stop learning; I’m constantly reading and upskilling. I am also very aware of competitors and their products — part of this is because we started out as integrators and the best way to replace a tool is to know how it works. Listening to clients and understanding what they need is crucial too.
In terms of the Salesforce platform, I make sure I am aware of new releases and the product strategy in order to stay ahead of the curve. There is so much to learn from within the ecosystem too, being part of this network means you’re constantly interacting with people and learning new things. Especially when we were able to meet in person, now a lot of these interactions have shifted to online which takes some getting used to, but the information is all there. The Partner Learning Camp, for example, has a great range of courses. Often these resources aren’t as readily available on other platforms.
Can you share with us a customer success story?
We started working with Alltricks initially to implement Salesforce Marketing Cloud for them as a consulting partner. We then went on to test our ISV products with them and now they are using a range of our apps which have become a big part of their customer journey, including a voucher app that we created especially to support Alltricks with upsell. It’s a double win; we built a great app with this customer which they’ve been using for 2 years, and now the relationship has evolved into more of a partnership.
As a founder in 2022, what do you think the key to success is?
The pandemic has taught us that you can never predict what’s around the corner, that’s out of our hands. The best approach, I believe, is to focus on creating great products for customers. For Cezium, that means concentrating on creating the best UX, UI, and technology capabilities possible. If you have a great product, no matter what the world throws at you, you have something valuable in your hands. That’s something you have control over.
Cezium is a provider of SaaS solutions for Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Discover more about the solution here.
