Gaps in Analytics: Jon Kondo, CEO of Host Analytics (Part 4)

Sramana: You talked about sticking with your core market segment of companies with revenues between $75 million and $1 billion. How do you feel when large enterprises call you? How do you deal with those queries?

Jon Kondo: We like those queries because they tend to be big opportunities. Large enterprises tend to spend a significant amount of money. However, we also have to be careful and take time to learn the landscape. Are they already predisposed to an Oracle or SAP? Are we going to be spending a lot of time and resources to try and win that account?

With a small, fast growing company like Host Analytics, resources are very precious. Time is perhaps the most precious resource. We really take the time to understand if the opportunity placed in front of us is truly a winnable opportunity. If it is going to be an open and fair competition, then we will go after it.

On one occasion, we mounted a fairly large campaign to go after a great opportunity. Oracle owned the account and swept up the deal as a subset of a bigger overall transaction. We learned quickly that we need to be careful and aware of those situations. We always look at every opportunity, but we will take our time to understand the landscape first.

Sramana: This is something that comes up all the time. A lot of companies struggle to determine where they should focus, and they scramble after every opportunity that comes along. When large opportunities come knocking on your door, they can be very seductive.

Jon Kondo: Absolutely. We talk about that all the time. We had a large customer come to us, and they did a paid pilot with us. It was a lot of work, but it resulted in one of our largest transactions ever. We have also had larger customers like Glaxo-Smith Kline and the Mayo Clinic join us. We are learning when to go after those deals as well as how to win those types of deals. When you do that, you get more confidence. The market is shifting a little bit and people are becoming more receptive to a true cloud offering. We feel that we are gaining some advantages there.

Sramana: What is your revenue level right now, around $20 million?

Jon Kondo: We don’t disclose exact revenues, but you are definitely in the ball park.

Sramana: You now have a rhythm going. You have a repeatable sales model and a good understanding of the cycles. The market is starting to shift, which is opening a new opportunity. It sounds like the large enterprise market is starting to be more receptive to cloud solutions. What do you need to do in terms of systems and processes to be able to take that opportunity?

Jon Kondo: We are indeed starting to put scale into the organization. We are doing that in a big way. It is an interesting challenge. Sometimes you have to put in another layer of management. We did bring in formal sales training this year so that we could get to a standard sales methodology across our organization. We have also put in systems to enable a knowledge base for a sales and support team. At the beginning of the year, we created our customer success team, which combines our support team and our professional services so that they were better optimized to serve the needs of our customers. Those are the things that keep me up at night and that I work hard on. I want to take the organization to the next level.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Gaps in Analytics: Jon Kondo, CEO of Host Analytics
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