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 information. You might imagine if you’ve got 20 contacts and 10 internal employees collaborating, there could be hundreds of emails flying back and forth every month. We came up with a really neat data visualization on top of that and say, “You had 25 emails with this customer last month about this topic.”

The sales rep walks into the meeting and says, “I just want to let you know that I saw there was a lot of activity with this project. I’ve caught up with my team. They’re all over it. We’re going to make sure we get something to you tomorrow morning. The customer knows that these guys really care about the account. That’s an innovation that came out of the staffing world and their needs.

Sramana Mitra: Which is why I asked the question what is it that you can do that Salesforce cannot do?

Art Papas: A lot of it has to do with this notion of existing on-going relationship with the customer versus episodic. Most of our customers have an on-going relationship. Here’s another example of something that we can do. We can look at communication patterns and tell you who in the organization has the best relationship with a particular customer.

Let’s say you’re going into a meeting and you know that you want to get to the CEO. Who actually has communicated with the CEO in the past in the organization and how strong is their relationship versus somebody else’s? You might have three people who traded emails with the CEO two years ago but one person is on a softball league with them and gets together for drinks of something like that. That is the type of thing that we can tell you just by looking at email communication and then also appointment counters. The marriage of CRM and email is what Bullhorn is really known for.

This segment is part 5 in the series : How to Manage A Successful Pivot: Bullhorn CEO Art Papas
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