Bringing On WebEx 2.0: DimDim CEO DD Ganguly (Part 6)

SM: What is your strategy going forward? I understand your open source go-to-market strategy, which is a viral spread. What is your hypothesis on where DimDim Pro and Enterprise are going to gain traction?

DD: All sales that have happened to date have been inbound inside sales.

SM: How big is your inside sales team?

DD: Two people. It is completely amazing what they can do. Right now we are moving towards tracking yield per sales person, so track revenue per sales person and divide by the total cost of the company. We are operating at 40x, and the recommendation we have received is 2-3x.

SM: Have you noticed any pattern with the folks who are coming to you requesting sales?

DD: Yes. We see three different sets of people. First is education. Ohio State University is a big client. We have just put up our customer page that lists all of the other universities. Harvard Medical School is also using DimDim.

SM: What is the education segment using it for?

DD: One use case is teacher-led instruction, the other is study groups. The goal of these institutions is to make education a lifelong process. Education from the university does not end after four years. If you studied at MIT, wouldn’t it be great to extend your learning process whenever you wanted, or to reach back and be a teacher in the school. Those are the two use cases. Even when you are on campus it is good for alternate education.

The second market is service providers. Internet service providers, etc. If you are an audio service provider you want to increase your revenue per user, and our product is a natural extension for that. If you are an audio conferencing equipment manufacturer, and you provide a box for an audio switch, then you can sell another switch, which is a web meeting box.

The third segment is less well defined. These are the large Fortune 500 organizations who want to take their internal collaboration to the next level. If you are hosting your own collaboration servers, you can do richer collaboration with our offerings.

SM: Where are your teams located?

DD: All of our teams are distributed. They are all integrated teams. Engineering is in Boston. There are also a good number of folks in India.

SM: I presume your plan is to scale inside sales?

DD: As we have gone ahead and hired salespeople; we have looked for people who not only have the capability to do inside sales, but also for people who can do field sales. Once an account goes to a site, there are certain accounts that need more touch. We know if we nurture those accounts we will be able to scale those businesses even more.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bringing On WebEx 2.0: DimDim CEO DD Ganguly
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