Scott Dorsey: evaluation

Transcript context

…How much do you think that sort of original DNA of totally giving pure commission-based sales to those early sales folks do you think kind of helped shape the way that the organization was built? Great question, Ben. A huge influence. We from day one were a very sales driven, customer driven organization and just the nature of the three founders, all sales marketing leaders, kind of general management background. Everybody sold, everybody spent time with customers. And early on, we would describe ourselves as marketers building software for marketers. We had a very keen sense for what problem we were solving and what we wanted the product to look like and how we wanted to function. So that was product management. V1 was really all driven by the founders but we created a sales culture early on where the three of us were very aggressive and selling and working with customers. And it’s perhaps my very favorite element of software as a service is that if you are a good listener and you work closely with customers, they will reveal your product roadmap for you. And it’s really your job to certainly bring your vision and your point of view, but you’re really distilling feedback from many, many individuals and organizations, your customers and your prospects in the marketplace. And if you can distill that feedback in the right way and take action upon it, you can build an amazing solution that clients really want. I think one of our real strong suits was being very close to the customer and being great listeners and really helping them shape our product. But we were incredibly sales driven and because of that kind of independent network of sales representatives that we built, we were very sales heavy early on. Actually I look back, I did a history of ExactTarget chat a few months ago and I looked back at one of our early decks. This was even staggering to me but at the moment where we had 44 employees, we actually had 26 in sales. That’s heavy. So we were very sales driven. Then we also unlocked a channel far earlier than most software companies. We realized that digital agencies could be great partners of ours. They were building websites, they were writing copy and content but they really didn’t have tools for email marketing specifically and we built a big channel program that allowed these agencies to leverage our tech platform, rebranded our white label where they needed to and build these reoccurring revenue streams that were advantageous for them. And that allowed us to start reaching into big Fortune 500 companies like General Mills and Home Depot became clients of ours through their trusted agency at a time when we were still a small and scrappy company. So it helps us kind of punch way above our weight class early on. That was a big driver of our early success. On that front, we should say for our listeners too, this is I think really our first or one of our first pure enterprise technology companies that we’ve covered.…

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