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.

Duncan Lennox: Maybe, it will be useful to talk about the genesis of how we came to be and how that took us to the road towards our target customers. My co-founder is a practicing surgeon and professor at the medical school. About 10 years ago, he started doing research into what was originally medical education. He was teaching classes at Harvard and started wondering if these extremely smart and motivated learners were actually remembering most of what he was teaching them. He discovered what has been proven again and again over the last hundred years in research that they were forgetting most of it. How we teach people things doesn’t actually align with how we now know the human brain works.

He started developing a methodology for changing behaviour, essentially looking at how to rewire people’s brains and help them remember things. That led to the original creation of Qstream where we got this scientifically proven methodology that can extend retention and change behavior. The company was formed to commercialize that – take the science and develop a commercial platform that could allow the science to be used.

We built an enterprise scalable SaaS platform that was designed to be mobile first. We focused on large sales organizations. We worked with the largest brands in the world that have field sales organizations. We initially worked with life sciences companies. Today, about 50% of the top 50 pharmaceutical companies use Qstream including 12 of the top 15. We’re also now being used in technology and financial services companies. The common thread being where they have an expensive distributed sales force selling complex products.

What we’re doing is we’re providing a mechanism where we can reinforce the skills and knowledge that they need to be successful. We do that by having them play a game on their iPhone for three minutes a day. On the backend, we take the data and run it through some proprietary analytics that we developed. We use that to provide visibility into the capabilities of the organizations and also allow managers to go in and help improve, coach, and mentor people that need help. We can do that in a very prescriptive way.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox
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