Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP Of Marketing, Exinda (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada

Kevin F.R. Suitor, Vice President of Marketing

Kevin is responsible for identifying key partnerships and building market awareness globally for Exinda Networks. Prior to Exinda, Kevin was VP of marketing and business development for Redline Communications, where he became widely recognized for his expertise in the telecommunications industry and was Redline’s primary WiMAX Forum delegate. Prior to joining Redline in 2001, Kevin built a solid track record at the executive level in a variety of roles with organizations such as CopperCom, CTI Datacom, Tekelec, DCI Digital Communication Inc., and Wandel & Goltermann. His extensive market and technology knowledge of service providers and equipment manufacturers has helped him to write articles in several industry publications. Kevin is also a regular speaker on topics such as unified performance management, WAN optimization, application acceleration, broadband fixed wireless, 802.16, WiMAX, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), and virtual private networks.

About Exinda

Exinda is a U.S. technology company that provides computer networking products and services. Headquartered in Andover, Massachusetts, Exinda delivers WAN optimization and network bandwidth management solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises.

Exinda was founded in Melbourne, Australia, in 2002 by Con Nikolouzakis and Chris Siakos and has nearly 2,000 customers.

SM: Kevin, if you would give some context about your company before we dive into the sales and marketing process, that would help our readers to understand the scenario we are dealing with.

KS: Sure. Exinda is a small organization, fewer than 100 employees. At present, we have global operations with sales in 80 countries around the world, supporting over 2,000 nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and other organizations. It is a business-to-business sales organization, and the organization sells technology products, wider in-network optimization solutions that are focused on providing application performance improvement for corporate networks and applications.

SM: How long has the company been around?

KS: The company was founded in 2002, but it wasn’t until about two years ago that they put a professional sales and marketing engine in place. In fact, one would argue that it wasn’t until last year that we actually put a professional marketing engine in place. So, basically it was an engineering and tech company for the first seven or so years of its life, and for the past couple of years, it has had a sales engine and now finally a marketing engine.

SM: What were the revenue numbers and growth between 2002 and, say, 2008?

KS: Between 2002 and 2008, revenues were quite small. Starting out in 2002 of course at pre-revenue, growing in 2008 into the $3 million to $4 million range.

SM: And after you put in the sales and marketing process or engine, how did that trajectory change?

KS: The trajectory changed significantly. For example, in the past year, since we added the marketing engine, we have increased our revenue 70% year over year between 2009 and 2010. So, we grew from the $6 million range to the $11 million range.

SM: All right. Let’s dive in and understand what you have done to accelerate growth by so much after a significant number of years of flat or even slower growth. How did you manage to accelerate things?

KS: In the midst of what we consider to be a three-year process to fully implement a turnaround of sales and marketing engine, 2009 was effectively our crawl year, and we focused on building a solid set of tools. We went back and rebuilt our corporate website, and we implemented a communication program with the partner community. Our sales are not done directly; they are done through a channel program, so we implemented a strong channel communication program. We set up and began the efforts of our public relations and influential marketing program with the assistance of our backers, OpenView Venture Partners. OpenView believes very strongly in the influence of marketing program. We built and began to implement a referral program for customer partner referrals. We basically tore the entire engine apart, put it all on the floor, and started to rebuild it.

SM: So, you got a lot more granular. Would you step us through this? When you say a website, is there anything special about the website you put in?

KS: We went out and did a complete evaluation of the options available. The original website was a Microsoft-based website; it is the third generation site the company has put together starting with one that was put in originally by the engineering team. Then we made a choice to migrate to a website built on a Force.com platform using a content management system from StandUp technology. It is a company based out of Kingston, Ontario, that has built the Orchestra CMS – a content management system that rides on top of the Force.com platform

SM: What is special about this?

KS: It is a cloud-based service tightly tied to and fully integrated with Salesforce, so we as a company use Salesforce as our primary sales management tool, and in going through our decision making, we decided we wanted as tightly integrated a solution with Salesforce as we could obtain. Looking at it, we made the decision that the best way to get that type of integration would be to build on top of the Force.com platform.

SM: Are people actually registering? Are warm leads registering on the websites that go directly into your CRM system on Salesforce.com?

KS: Yes. When visitors visit Exinda’s website, their activity, the pages that they view, everything is registered and logged into the CRM system, so we have a complete visit history of all customers – what pages they have opened, how many times they visited, how long they stay on each page, what the click-through processes click through the site. We can track a customer’s journey through the website.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Kevin Suitor, VP Of Marketing, Exinda
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