Diana Muturia on The Sales Scoop, Co-Founder @ Clyn

Automated Transcript

Alastair Cole 0:00

Alastair, Hello, good afternoon, and welcome to The Sales Scoop. This is a weekly live show for tech business founders who want to improve how they sell. My name is Alastair Cole. I'm your host for the day. I hold a bachelor's degree in artificial intelligence and have two decades experience building in sales and marketing, and today's guest on the sales group, I'm delighted to say, is Diana Muturia. Diana is the co-founder of Clyn, an exciting, very exciting, business out of the US. Hi, Diana. Hello.

Diana Muturia 0:38

Hi Alastair. It's great to be here.

Alastair Cole 0:41

It's fantastic to have you on the show. Thanks for joining. Very excited to get into your sales scoop what you've learned over recent years in terms of closing business and driving sales. But before we get into that, I'd love to hear you and a little bit about you and your story with Clyn and how you got here. So please, please share with our audience. Tell us about you.

Diana Muturia 1:06

Yeah, absolutely. Hi everyone. My name is Diana Muturia. I'm the co-founder of Clyn. It's a platform that helps vacation rentals and their cleaning crew stay on top of things. That's with guest turnovers, communication, payments, cleaning, and we've worked really hard on it. We're in Version Three right now, and really excited to see how it goes. A little bit about me. I'm originally from Kenya. I came here to the US when I was 18, and I came to study math and mechanical engineering, and in my last year, my math advisor said, I don't look like an engineer, and I found myself cleaning houses, and that's how Clyn came about. It was a place of saying, You know what, I have nothing to lose. Let me sit down and learn how to code. And since then, I've had a team of engineers who've helped me with the platform, and I'll have a really awesome co-founder, Einstein, who is head of technology, and we're here just helping cleaning companies, mom and pop shops, to national cleaning companies, be able to increase revenue and keep their customers happy.

Alastair Cole 2:17

Yeah, fantastic. I mean, it's an exciting world out there. I read that Brian Chesky talking about the merits the other day of the CEO of Airbnb of sleep, but actually reading quite a lot recently about the impact of their kind of their transparent pricing, right? That includes cleaning on Airbnb, and how important that is for, you know, short term rental and vacation owners to get a great deal on cleaning, right? What are your thoughts on that? What's happening in that space? The

Diana Muturia 2:49

The biggest thing that guests look at is cleaning. And so in terms of transparency, it's just the customer who's the guest of that host saying, If this is how much I'm paying for cleaning. This is the standard that I expect, and as long as the standard is high, the customer doesn't mind paying for cleaning. So I think it's spot on with the conversation. I think it's time that conversation is had. I will start seeing a lot of change and shift to using more platforms that help with, you know, quoting cleaning and pricing cleaning out to host and guests.

Alastair Cole 3:29

Okay, yeah, it's, I'm gonna, it's gonna watch this space. Chesky seems to, you know, he's very vocal, and he's driving a fantastic platform there. It's interesting to see what the change is. At least some changes are. Can you tell us a little bit more about the Clyn platform, the kind of most crucial functionality you've got at the moment? And if you're able to tell us a little bit about what's coming around the corner, what's happening with the platform, absolutely.

Diana Muturia 3:54

So again, Clyn is a platform that helps with automation. It automates every step of the process between the vacation rental and the cleaning crew. So that's auto scheduling. Clyn can auto schedule up to 100 bookings for each property. No matter how many properties that you have. You can integrate Clyn with property management systems that you use, like guest, host we honor is soon journey and home away and, yeah, that's how Clyn works. It also automates communication. It automates payments. You get to know in real time where your cleaners are at, which is really important so you can keep track of time. Something that we're really excited about is our integration with Airbnb. We have been working hard on this, and we want to make sure that we are serving our customers where they're at. We started with Desi and onerous, which are partners with Airbnb, but we feel that, you know, a lot of our customers are looking to just immigration. Directly with Clyn, with their Airbnb, because they don't want to do all the other stuff, of like going into other platforms, having one or two properties instead of 50, and they still like to use Clyn,

Alastair Cole 5:14

yeah, and in our recent discussions, one of the things that really jumped out of me was looking after the cleaners, right? You said recently, or last year, quoted that, you know, if we look after them, and they look after the households, they look after our businesses and help us grow, right? And I've always been inspired by that, that ability of the Passion you've got for looking after them, are you able to expand on how, how the platform works best, really well for cleaners?

Diana Muturia 5:44

Yes, absolutely. So that's something that I felt very passionate about. I think cleaners are like I see them as Batman, you know, they go and swiftly clean up, and they're out of there. We don't see them, and sometimes we don't appreciate them, because when we go to the office and that coffee thing is not there the next day, we don't really think about it, but they make our spaces so clean and so fresh for us to just function. And so it's important for us to take care of our cleaners. Now, how we do that is by listening to them. What are their pain points? What would they like to have, making sure that we're solving the main thing, and first, the main thing, and how we can put more money in their pocket, which is what they're really you know, that's what they care about. They care about keeping their customers. They care about building those relationships, so we solve those problems specifically for them.

Alastair Cole 6:46

Yes, and I guess you know, automation and AI can help ensure that they've got, you know, less distance to go. They can do more jobs in a day, closer to home. All that, all sounds fantastic. Where could, where can people go to find out more about Clyn?

Diana Muturia 7:02

You can go to Clyn.com so that's c l y n.com and you'll get a lot of information there for vacation rentals, for homes and the services that we provide.

Alastair Cole 7:15

Clyn.com. Okay, fantastic. Well, look, you talking about listening to the cleaners there isn't. Is a nice segue into your sales scoop. Enlighten us what, what's the kind of the key area that you want to share today that you've learned sales.

Speaker 1 7:32

So a big thing that I've learned in sales. First of all, I was in sales my entire career. When I started off sales. I started off with selling cars. I sold used cars, and then I started selling new cars, and then tech sales, and then I ended up being a national business development partner manager for Cisco Systems and insight direct. So I've been in sales my entire life, but when it came to selling for Clyn I realized that I was just depending on the systems that they already set, and something that I didn't set already was customer discovery. So you have to be close to your customers. That's going to be your Swiss knife. I call customer discovery is your Swiss knife, because if you know your customers really well, you know exactly what to sell,

Alastair Cole 8:22

yeah, look, I, you know, the ultimate B to C selling used cars, right? And then, and then new cars, and gradually you're selling B to B and Clyn as a B to B to C platform. So you feel like you've, you've tried your hand at everything, and customers, you know, that's an important one, right? The people with the money. It's really tough, you know, convincing people to part with their cash for products and services, and the customers have to come right to the center. What would you do? How would you? How would you? How would you break that down within that Swiss knife, as you called it, right? Of customer discovery. What breaks it down for us? What? How? What does best in class customer discovery look like for sales people on the call,

Speaker 1 9:08

Customer discovery helps you not build in a bubble. Um, if you are, you know the reason why you're afraid to sell in the first place, especially you know you've worked really hard on something, and you're feeling like, oh my gosh, if I put it out there and they hate it, it's because you were building in a bubble. You have to have your customers around you when you're building your product, when you're building your services, you have to have customers there. So definitely not building a bubble. Keep them in the loop. Ask them, hey, is this, this is the thesis that I have. I want to see if it's the same problem that you have, and how painful that problem is, and how much you would, you know, pay for it if we solve this problem?

Alastair Cole 9:54

Yeah, you know, sitting with them, right, whether it's, you know, buyers, you know, understanding their needs, or Cole. Customers and how they're behaving, getting, getting right in there. And I think that extends beyond just, you know, sales, to so many different areas of actually being in there with the other humans, right? But, you know, we work out of partnership. We work with a lot of startups. Often they're very early on, and they haven't done that piece, and, you know, they are building in a bubble. And obviously that is, that is quite dangerous but we've all been bitten by it, right? I feel like is that one of those things that you have to go through the process, you have to do it in a bubble and

Diana Muturia 10:43

oh yeah, you have to go through it. Every founder has been in this situation where you feel like, I'm going to absolutely blow this out the water, and then you put it out there. No one wants it to happen all the time. So you have to, you have to have your customers around. And it can be as simple as having a zoom call. Just, you know, schedule zoom calls and say, Hey, you're in this space. I want I'm solve this problem in your space. I'd like to hear your thoughts, and just ask them what kind of challenges they have. And just let's just listen to them. You literally are going. By the time you get to call number four or five, you already see a theme. And so you may have a very real problem that you're solving, but you may be solving it in the wrong way. And so having those potential customers in the front line as you're building is really important for that sale.

Alastair Cole 11:34

Yeah, and it's interesting you talk. You mentioned four or five there, you know? And Which reminds me of Jacob Nielsen, the highly esteemed UX researcher, and his study that we used, you know, decades ago was around. The fact that you find people being interviewed is enough to get 80% of the problems right. It doesn't need to be millions of calls right. Like you said, the trends come out, but you've got to make the time to sit with them. What else? What else? What else could we do, as well as building, not building in a bubble? What else would you recommend?

Speaker 1 12:09

I would say, also with the iterations, definitely have them in those iterations, send the ugly baby and say, Hey, this is the ugly baby. Let them say, hey, maybe just put, you know, a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and remove this and remove that, they will let you know. Because if they're going to pay for it, they're going to let you know if it's going to work for them or not. So definitely have them also through the iteration, not just at the front of before you build the product, but also during the building of the product.

Alastair Cole 12:42

Yeah, one of the phrases that we use is kill your children, right? In terms of making those coming up with the ideas, doing the little spikes and the features and stuff, and then if it isn't working, you've got to get rid of it, right? You've got to, you've got to take the ugly baby, you don't know, and then you've got to, you know, you've got to be confident enough to just be ready there for kind of failure feedback? Yeah, but talking about that, you know, how important is confidence? Because obviously, sitting next to people and taking products or ideas that can, that can be, you know, it can't feel like a personal attack. How on your confidence, on your idea, on your ideas, right? You know, we've all been there. Nobody likes to be shot down. What? What? How important is confidence in that, in that process.

Speaker 1 13:31

So this is my philosophy, is that confidence is built because you just put yourself out there and you talked to the customer, and the customer shot you a few times, and they did that before you put it out. For example, if you have like a service or a product before it's out in the world, you've worked with your closest potential customers, so any kind of negative feedback has already been provided, and so you've already got out of that, like, scared, you know, situation, and by the time you've iterated with the customer over time, and now you're out there selling it, you're so confident, because you know exactly their their their words, that they Use the pain points, how it solves their problem, you know. And by the time you're out there, if you talk about it, you just say one sentence about what you're solving, and it's exactly how that customer sees that problem and how they want it to be solved. So their faces light up, their faces light up, and it gives you more confidence. So you just have to put yourself out there say, Hey, this is this product. This is the solution, and then get that feedback at the beginning. So once you're out there selling, it doesn't feel like a big heel. Yeah.

Alastair Cole 14:56

Yeah, you My. My mind went back to that. That kind of you talked about the words, and it's almost the rehearsing of the patter, right? The sales pattern, the line. And as you talk to more people, you realize that word X resonates more than word wine, so you it's kind of a live value proposition, yeah, evolution right with them early on, until things get solidified, and, yeah, you make it. You know, confidence is about getting out there, right? But that's easier said than done. You, you, you're more, you're more towards the super confident end than a lot of founders. Where are you? When? When? You know when? When have you lost your confidence? Have you, as have been times where you haven't, you know, you haven't felt it, or it's, it's, it's felt difficult to get upbeat about things. Oh yeah,

Speaker 1 15:51

absolutely, all the time. All the time, I wake up and I'm like, What am I doing? Why am I here? It happens all the time. When you're doing something new, you'll always feel a little weird and off, and that's just the journey of doing something new. When you're talking to customers, you're going to fumble on your words at the beginning. You won't know what the system and how to actually go about it, until, again, in Cole four or five, that's when you start having, like, a good structure around like, Oh my gosh. You know, the last four calls, they've all said this. So let's dive even deeper into the conversation in these specific parts. And so don't be afraid to put yourself out there, because you are not confident. The confidence comes with the work I'd like to provide, like one story that I think is actually very useful. So in my first year of college, when I came to the US, my professors and I, who do not like hearing each other, had a very heavy southern accent. I have my Kenyan accent. I was not listening to them. They were not hearing me. And I was like, I cannot fail my classes because of this. So after four hours of lecturing, so exhausted, I would lie down in the bed and repeat the words that I heard. I would just repeat it from the demeanor and how they use their words, how they express themselves, I would literally mirror that. And so I got so good at it, until when I'm talking to someone, they're like, oh my god, I can relate so much with Diana. It's because I'm just mirroring what they're saying. It's the same thing and that builds more confidence. So it's the same thing with sales. Once a customer is talking to you, you hear their voice in their frustration, the words that they say, the words that they use, solutions that they would like to have you use those same words. That's how you relate to them. That's how you build your confidence. That's how you build the relationship between, yeah,

Alastair Cole 18:01

it's, it's words that do it. You know, my mother was a special needs English teacher for decades, and I remember her explaining that that kind of, you know, human groups really are defined by the language. Whether you're in the gang or out of the gang is really about whether you know the words right. It's the lingo. And it's the same with customers. When you, if you're using the right terms, then you're you in the tribe, right? Yeah, absolutely. You talked there about calls. And I guess you know phone calls and video calls are great ways to spend time with customers. Spend time with them and understand. What would be your tips on organizing those sessions? Or what do you do before those sessions. How should they run for people, anybody watching or listening? What would be your tips about how to run a great customer discovery call? Now,

Speaker 1 18:50

if you're starting by yourself, I would just start with, like, going and talking to people and saying, Can you, can we schedule a time just have, like, a Calendly link, and send that Calendly link, have them schedule the time, what the time is good for them, but preparing, have some questions that you know, write your assumptions down, the assumptions that you have. That's the best way to go about it. Just start asking those questions. For example, let's say it's an industry of, you know, the fashion industry. Write all your assumptions down, jeans don't fit well. You know, blue jeans are popular and black jeans should be more popular, whatever those assumptions are. And then ask them those questions eventually, over time, you'll know the assumptions that actually matter to that to be validated, and some that should not even be in the list in the first place. But that's how I'd go about it. As just starting, however, we've been working together with Alastair, and we've set out a CRM and. A campaign, and that has been really, really helpful. I would definitely check out the uplift partnership on this, in just organizing the calls, is like reaching out, doing the outreach over LinkedIn, and then having the outreach be able to have conversations first and then be able to schedule, which has been really helpful for us to scale our, you know, our go to market, but that's how I would start, is just start simple, schedule those calls, have it all in one week, so that the next week you're solving the next problem in your company. But that's how it would go about it,

Alastair Cole 20:37

okay? And that's what's making me think about the kind of features in the product, in the Clyn platform. What would you say are, you know, are all the best features ideas that have come from you and I, inside the team, or all the great features come from customers? Are they all from customers? I don't know. What's the kind of how it ended up?

Speaker 1 20:56

It was all customers, when we're talking to them. You know, my problem was I was a cleaner and I wanted more customers. And then when we got out in the world, we found that customers have their own problems that are even more pressing. And so once we talked to customers, we realized that they want automation. Automation is a big thing. They were depending heavily on text, calls and emails, which is very highly inefficient if you want to scale your business, whether you're a cleaning company or a vacation rental property agency, and so we needed to figure out how to automate all the manual and cumbersome problems that they have. So auto scheduling, looking at before and after photos, and being able to analyze those photos really quickly and provide feedback to the cleaner so that they can fix it right away, instead of having a recall, which becomes an issue with guest experiences, being able to train the cleaner being provided, provided that report back to you so that you know, you can know if the cleaning was done properly, providing the best route for the cleaners, whether they're under you or you're using a provider. So those things are like all, even like knowing where the cleaners are. Did they arrive on time? You know, a lot of our customers say, I'm constantly blowing up my cleaners. I don't know where they're at, but the cleaners are there. They just probably put their phone aside in their cleaning so being able to know where they are at what time, if the job was done properly, those are the biggest issues from customers, and we are able to solve them.

Alastair Cole 22:38

Okay, fantastic. And you know that spending time with them is, is, is great customers, right? But it's quite intense, you know, it's a big, big chunk of diary time. Is it something you do continuously? Or do you do it in bursts? Or do you do it, you know, once a once a year,

Speaker 1 23:06

we do it that we have sprints where we're like, okay, we're one is solving, we want to solve this problem, and so we're going to dedicate, you know, a certain long, dated period of time to the to Do the customer discovery so that our sales process is really aligned with the people that we want to sell to. That's how we do it. However, over time, as we're building the product, we're talking to them. We have spurts and cadences where we talk to them over time, but it does start with a big spurt, and then over time, we just have, like, those cadences with them. We keep them up to date through newsletters. We keep them up to date with some messaging here and there, so that they can try us out, tell us, and give us some feedback. And then eventually, when we're out there, saying, Okay, here's a product. We're not just selling, we're providing a solution. Yeah,

Alastair Cole 24:01

and, and, you know, it is hard, but we can get it right. It does work sometimes. How do you know? How do you know when it works? How do you know from the customers that you've got it right,

Speaker 1 24:14

their faces are going to light up? That's how you know. All the time, when I go to events and I talk about Clyn I would just see someone go like, and immediately they want to just talk to me like, oh my god, where have you been? This is so genius. So it will show in their face that the solution is actually what they were looking for.

Alastair Cole 24:42

Okay, well, look, that's, you know, that's fantastic. I think that that overarching theme of putting the customer, the buyer, right at the heart, we know how, how important that is in 2025 right? Whether it's you've got B to C business or a B to B or B to. Need to see like yours. You know, Gartner, I think it was who Garner stated that we push out there is that 87% of buyers expect to be delighted before and after the purchase, almost like almost nine out of 10 people, they expect the stakes are so high, they're expecting you to be delighted. And so that's you can really only achieve that if you're listening to them like, super carefully, right? So look, that's, that's, that's really fascinating. Thank you. And you shared three or four, five different areas within the Swiss knife of customer discovery for sales. Before we wrap up, how are, what's Can you talk a little bit about what's coming down the road for the rest of this year? For you, you know, you're in, you're in Austin, Texas, but Clyn is, you know, serving a much broader part of the UK, the US, as anything coming up this year, events that you're at, or new features coming in the product, or new developments that you can you can talk about where you're going to be for the rest of 2025 Diana, yes,

Speaker 1 26:18

Our biggest goal is to have version four out. We're currently in version three, which helps with the automation process and provides cleaning services in 18 cities. But version four will be available for the entire nation, the entire nation of the US, and also internationally, because you'll be able to add your cleaners, you'll be able to automate with AI. We have been lagging a little bit with AI because we just didn't want to just throw it out there and it would not be useful to our customers. So again, we went back to customer discovery to figure out what are the solutions that we can provide with AI? So it's really exciting. And also being integrated with Airbnb, too, is going to be a major thing this year. Yeah, I

Alastair Cole 27:13

I think that the Airbnb integration is very exciting. And the other AI bits and pieces you've got, which is, which is fantastic to hear all about. And as you mentioned previously, you can head over to Clyn.com if you want to know more or you want to book a cleaning. That process is unbelievably quick through the search function to get something booked, something my brother in law has used in the south east. Look, thanks very much for your time. Diane, I really love that focus on customers. So thanks for your sales scoop.

Diana Muturia 27:55

Thank you. Alastair, I appreciate it.

Alastair Cole 27:57

No, absolutely my pleasure. You talked a little bit about, or we talked a little bit about confidence. And one of the previous shows was on building confidence as a founder seller. And you can, you can get all of them, see all of the previous show recordings at the sales scoop.com and our next show a week today is with Kieran Gill and me. It'll be the hottest AI tool for sales. That's Tuesday, the 25th of February, back at our regular time of noon, GMT, so all that's left me to do is thank you, Diana, thanks for your time.

Diana Muturia 28:42

Absolutely. I enjoyed this. Thank you for having me

Alastair Cole 28:44

My pleasure. It's great to see the focus on customers. Great to hear about the clean platform, and I hope everybody listening and watching has enjoyed your sales scoop. Okay, great. Well, I'm just going to say bye and we'll take the show to a close. So thanks for your time. Goodbye everybody. Bye.