Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 1)

Qstream uses insights on how the human brain learns to power sales empowerment and training. It’s an interesting concept that could be applied to many other use cases, and it seems like a ripe arena for entrepreneurial experimentation.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to you as well as Qstream.

Duncan Lennox: I’m the co-founder and CEO of Qstream. Qstream is a spin-off from Harvard Medical School. We provide, what we call, a sales performance platform to help organizations manage and improve the capability of their sales force.

Sramana Mitra: Give us a bit more color on this value proposition. Double-click down on some of your customers and tell us how, specifically, are they using your product. >>>

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Craig Hinkley, CEO of WhiteHat Security (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I’m absolutely on the same page with you. For the small to medium business segment, it has to be as a cloud service offering. It’s hard for a player to go both enterprise and SME because the go-to-markets are so different. The DNA is so different. Everything is so different. It’s hard to do both for one company. A $50 million company has to be somewhat focused. That’s my question.

Craig Hinkley: Now I understand the question. From a market perspective and serving the market, the underlying technology capability to serve the SME versus the large enterprises is the same. Yes, your go-to-market may be different, but one of the benefits of being Security-as-a-Service is we can scale that offering.

The challenge that I’m faced with as the CEO is making sure that we serve the right markets with the correct go-to-market strategy. That’s why our go-to-market strategy is using both direct and indirect models. Indirect models are channels and partnerships that can scale to handle >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: In a nutshell, you basically pivoted to a vertical CRM strategy and then started building out more and more verticals and developing work flow in your product for those verticals. You went after mid-market companies in each of those verticals.

Art Papas: We did. We have a lot of tiny customers and then we also have a lot of mid-market customers. Being SaaS, you can service a one-person company. You can service the person who wants to be on their own or you could service a mid-market company. Being vertically-focused allowed us to go up-market. We landed our first Fortune 500 account back in 2005. We got traction because we had all this vertically-focused workflow. We were able to get traction with these very large players early on. That also has been a key to the success – being able to go all the way up and down. We applied that across multiple verticals as we grew. >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I get the whole vertical workflow woven into your product. Can you provide some examples of what somebody who’s buying a Salesforce.com CRM system would not be able to do versus your system? Let’s say recruitment vertical. What’s an example of workflow that’s specifically designed in your product?

Art Papas: A great example I use all the time is how many times, as a sales person, have you walked into a meeting and you’re there to pitch something new to the customer. You’ve been servicing the account and you’re there to say, “I’ve got something new I want to talk about.” But they open the meeting with, “I want to talk to you about this that occurred over the last three weeks with your team.” Your entire meeting is just blown out of the window because you can’t pitch a new business idea when you’re not delivering on the business you sold last time you were in there.

In the staffing industry, we would hear that from customers all the time, “I need visibility into the performance of my team.” An interesting invention that came out of that was one of our developers said, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could give the sales rep a bird’s eye view into all the communication activity over email with that customer and all the contacts?” We came up with some really cool ways to organize that >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Before we go on to 2008, give me a bit more detail about the strategy of building the business. You started with this recruiter CRM system as you described it. How much business did you do in the recruiter vertical? It sounds like that’s you’re primary vertical in the beginning, right?

Art Papas: It was. In many ways, it’s still an important part of what we do. Those early customers were all in the recruiting industry. We branched out to more professional services from there because those were natural corollaries. Now, we have commercial real estate, accounting, and all sorts of different types of business. Back then, it was just the recruiting industry.

We got to know more about that industry than I ever thought I would. We engaged deeply with customers to understand how they sell to customers. When they land an account, how do they expand it over time? What are the challenges they face? How do they differentiate from the competition? How can we help them have a better leg up? >>>

How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Was it a large recruiting firm?

Art Papas: It was mid-sized. There was about 45 people. It wasn’t a huge business. For them, all of a sudden, they’re able to service national accounts. It was a big deal during the recession. He was really looking for ways to get his business going. He was now able to deliver an outsized growth rate even in the recession compared to the rest of the industry. It was a great outcome for him.

We went to our investors and said, “We have this amazing thing that we’ve stumbled into. We should be a CRM for vertical markets and focus on these niche industries.” The investors hated it. They wanted nothing to do with it. They were like, “The Internet thing seems like a fad. Who’s going to buy a CRM software from the Internet?” We could not raise money from an outsider. >>>

Successful Pivot to $5M in Revenue from Chicago: Cohesive Networks CEO Patrick Kerpan (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: We are huge believers in content marketing. That’s the only kind of marketing that we do.

Patrick Kerpan: We clearly lost some opportunities but for a small company, we would never hear from customers until they were POC complete. They’d go to Amazon. They’d use the free edition. They had tried it and they probably have something up and running. Now, they needed to grow it. We put in place a mechanism where we didn’t want to hear from a customer unless they were close to completing proof of concept. Rather than having big, wide funnels, we would have 15 leads at 60% probability.

Sramana Mitra: In general, any kind of inbound leads are very good news. If it’s an inbound query or request, you’ve won half the battle.

Patrick Kerpan: Right, but you don’t have that kind of pipeline where you put everybody you’ve ever met in the pipeline and they’re all a million dollar deal with 10% probability. You just get killed with all that talking. The other thing that’s different is I think we got the pricing right. There’s some competition now. >>>

Serial Bootstrapper: Oversee and Manage Founder Fred Hsu (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do? You’ve had one successful exit. You’re in a financially comfortable position. You’ve built a second company that is also bootstrapped and very profitable. You’re still fairly young. What do you want to do with your business? How are you thinking about your choices and options now?

Fred Hsu: For me, it’s all about people. From a business perspective, I want to make sure my founders and the employees who stuck around see similar success to what I’ve seen in the past and also take enough knowledge from what they’ve learned here to their next startup. On a personal side, I have two children. They’re three and five. I want them to see daddy work. I don’t play golf. I’m not going to be home in my bunny slippers. I don’t even have slippers. Probably work, life normalcy, and high aspirations for my co-founders, employees, and my kids.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to continue running this company and growing this to a much larger scale? Or do you want to exit this company and start another one? >>>