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FrenchFounders

Surfe helps with sourcing, optimization and being more efficient as a team

Alexandre Bejaoui, Business Operations at FrenchFounders

Learn how FrenchFounders connects Salesforce with Sales Navigator and helps clients accelerate businesses

FrenchFounders unites over 4000 french-speaking decision makers – top executives, CEOs, entrepreneurs and investors all over the world. Members of the community come from different backgrounds: retail, finance, tech, marketing, luxury, fashion and many more.

The Club’s mission is to facilitate networking with a personalized digital platform, powered by a predictive algorithm and a team of dedicated Relationship Managers. To foster business connections, FrenchFounders organizes events in various locations. FrenchFounders takes pride in helping decision makers build global relationships while networking locally, aiding their companies’ business growth, expansion, fundraising and innovation.

Alexandre Bejaoui told us how Surfe helps FrenchFounders prospect efficiently on LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Challenge 1: Prospecting on LinkedIn Sales Navigator is time consuming as there is an apparent gap between LinkedIn and Salesforce

FrenchFounders aspires to make sure that its local communities have a large number and a vast variety of club representatives so that members can fully leverage the network’s potential with a global impact. As a Business Operations manager, Alexandre used to manage one of the communities based in the Silicon Valley and was also responsible for bringing in new members locally. His colleagues at FrenchFounders also seek to source valuable members for their local communities while a dedicated sales team targets prospects globally.

Slowly transitioning to a multiple business line company, FrenchFounders is now targeting several personas, however mostly focuses on French-speaking top executives and founders all over the world. LinkedIn is the best acquisition platform for sourcing relevant leads for FrenchFounders. Sales representatives leverage the LinkedIn network to identify and target new leads for their communities and use a mix of Salesforce and Sales Navigator as well as sales engagement, data enrichment and emailing tools.

FrenchFounders was looking to cut back time spent on manual actions such as switching between the softwares in their toolstack – to be able to focus on building relationships with their personas.

Solution 1: Surfe bridges Salesforce and Sales Navigator to eliminate any back-n-forth

This is when Alexandre introduced Surfe to his sales flow. This simple yet effective tool seamlessly connected Salesforce with LinkedIn, allowing FrenchFounders to bridge the gap between their CRM and prospecting tool – Sales Navigator.

It became easier to prospect on Sales Navigator, as the need to switch tabs to access CRM data was eliminated. Surfe conveniently displays all contact details on top of their LinkedIn profile as an overlay and completely synchronizes any changes with Salesforce.

FrenchFounders can easily add leads as contacts and use the contact enrichment feature without leaving Sales Navigator, knowing that everything will be backed in the CRM.

Challenge 2: Verifying whether or not someone is already in the CRM forces sales-reps to spend more time going back and forth between LinkedIn-Salesforce

While utilizing Sales Navigator as the main prospecting tool for finding new club members and enriching the FrenchFounders community, sales representatives found the process a bit lengthy and cumbersome. It often happened that they would stumble upon people whose contacts have already been added to CRM while searching for prospects. Of course, they would only realize this after heading back to Salesforce to create their contact, losing time and returning to Sales Navigator to continue their venture.

Another recurring issue was that different sales representatives approached the same prospect unknowingly. Needless to say, such situations would cause confusion on both sides, while hampering the team’s efficiency.

Solution 2: FrenchFounders utilizes Surfe to help them identify who is already in the CRM directly on LinkedIn to increase work efficiency

With Surfe highlighting CRM contacts in blue, it is easy to detect prospects who have already been added to Salesforce which makes browsing lead lists for opportunities so much more efficient.

FrenchFounders can also see who is in charge of a lead or client directly from LinkedIn and which company is being targeted. Alexandre says it eliminates any confusion in the team and makes sourcing new prospects quicker.

By leveraging what Surfe has to offer, FrenchFounders is able to better execute their ABM approach and targeted sales, sourcing more valuable platform members to provide the best environment for their clients to accelerate their businesses.

ROI for FrenchFounders


  • FrenchFounders managed to save up to 33h per month on switching tabs

  • Prospecting is easier as Salesforce and Sales Navigator are synchronized

  • Surfe allowed FrenchFounders to view 10400+ leads and 1300+ company profiles directly from LinkedIn

  • FrenchFounders optimizes their sales flow and increases efficiency as a team

Looking to add more leads to your CRM? Talk to one of our experts to discover Surfe at [email protected]


Want to simplify your recruitment process and eliminate the burden of manual work? Reach out to Alexandre at 
[email protected] to find out how.