David Cancel and Elias Torres, the co-founders of Drift, scaled their business to thousands of users and hundreds of thousands in revenue. However, they were falling short of the annual revenue target they communicated to the board of directors. Having scaled the business to date with a team of largely product and engineering resources, they contemplated bringing on their first sales hire. Within one week of announcing the plan for the hire, three promising candidates surfaced. Was it time for the team to bring on a salesperson and, if so, which candidate was ideal?
As one of the few female entrepreneurs in Saudi Arabia, Lateefa Alwaalan had been trying to produce the perfect cup of Arabic coffee for over a decade. In 2007, she began testing various coffee blends, which she later branded Yatooq, the Arabic word for "craving" or "longing". She soon realized that the brewing process was just as important as the blend in consistently producing a great cup of Arabic coffee. Therefore, she developed the world's first Arabic coffee machine in 2013 to complement her blend. Sales of the Yatooq coffee machines grew rapidly in Saudi Arabia, exceeding $2 million in sales in 2014. However, an increase in competition combined with an economic slowdown in the country led to declining sales and increasing costs for Yatooq. Alwaalan reflected on the decisions she made to date, wondering if the revenue decline could have been avoided. She also contemplated on the path forward, specifically whether she should iterate on her go-to-market strategy with her existing product or pivot to an entirely different product.
The case raises issues around sales force deployment and management issues in the SaaS industry. Specifically, VTS sells a software product to the real estate industry, and has designed a Go_to_Market strategy for what the founders perceive to be the unique characteristics of that industry, and the way in which those factors contribute to the importance of referrals to VTS's sales. In the case, the founders are considering changing some aspects of their strategy including: sales force compensation, where a change from a team-based incentive comp system to a ore individualistic system is under consideration; sales force specialization where specialization by account size or stage of the selling / buying process is under consideration; and, sales management roles & responsibilities, where a change in the role of senior management from quota-carrying sales rep AND sales team leader to simply team leader, with no quota, is being considered.
The first module of TEM focuses on business model analysis and lean testing. Your business model defines your company and sets its strategic direction, including customer value proposition, operations, scaling, the context in which the company operates, and so on. Designing and evaluating a business model is a complicated task, given all the considerations that must influence your decisions-external opportunities and threats, internal resources, your goals as a founder as well as your investors' desires, plus laws or obligation to your community or society at large. While not simple, a well-designed and properly tested business model serves as a strong guiding compass for the company and aligns priorities and critical actions.
Amara Kaggwa leads the small but rapidly expanding sales team at ZenRecruit, a recruiting software application used by small businesses. Armed with six months of sales performance metrics, Kaggwa is preparing for her monthly performance conversations with two under-performing sales people. This case concerns a metrics-driven sales organization, challenges the students to combine quantitative and qualitative observations to craft productive sales coaching plans, and provides students with the opportunity to role play these difficult yet important performance-review discussions. It is suitable for Sales, Marketing, Organizational Behavior, and Entrepreneurial Management courses.
eSig, an early-stage startup, offers an electronic signature application as a "freemium" product- i.e., users can upgrade from a free basic version to a premium version by paying a subscription fee. Using 9 months of data from 50,000 user activations, available as a case supplement, students are asked to project the number of new users eSig will acquire in Q1 2016, and recommend how much they should spend during the quarter on each major marketing channel (e.g., Facebook ads, Google ads, content marketing, etc.). Note: the name and functionality of the actual freemium application upon which the case is based have been disguised.
Which sales candidate is a startup's ideal first hire? What marketing channels are best to invest in? How aggressively should an executive team align sales with customer success? Early stage founders, sales leaders, and marketing executives often face one, and sometimes all, of the above scenarios as they grow their ventures. This case presents three short vignettes, with three fictitious organizations, to facilitate a discussion around these important decisions.
When Mark Roberge joined HubSpot as its fourth employee, he had no sales experience but still was charged with building the sales team. His background proved to be an advantage, however: With his engineering training, Roberge brought an analytic rigor to the task. And he quickly realized that the sales compensation plan could motivate salespeople not only to sell more but also to behave in ways that advanced the start-up's evolving strategy. Each time the firm entered a new stage of growth, Roberge revised the comp plan to support its changing priorities: (1) Customer acquisition. Early on, HubSpot needed to bring in lots of customers and see how well its offer was working. So it rewarded salespeople for customers who stayed at least four months, and soon grew to 1,000 customers. (2) Customer success and retention. In the second phase, HubSpot focused on ensuring that its product fit the market. Realizing that many customers were jumping ship because they'd been given the wrong expectations, Roberge began tying commission rates to the rate of customer retention. (3) Sustainable growth. After it fixed retention, HubSpot saw that its service worked best for customers who made a commitment to it. So the firm's third plan rewarded salespeople for customers who signed up for a full year at a time. The continual adaptation paid off: In seven years HubSpot hit $100 million in sales.