Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox (Part 3)

Duncan Lennox: Another classic case for us would be on-boarding. Like a lot of our technology companies, customers are very fast-growth companies. They’re bringing on board a lot of sales people all the time. They’re also acquiring companies. When they acquire a company, they get a new set of sales people with that as well. The issue is what we would call time to productivity. How quickly can you get those new sales people up to speed on your products, selling methodology, and sales tools so that they can get out on the field and be effective?

Typically, that’s a process that can take eight to nine months with traditional approaches. We’ve been able to do a certain amount of that material up front with Qstream, in perhaps two or three months. Then get you out into the field faster and use Qstream to drive your capability and effectiveness once you’re out in the field.

Sramana Mitra: Is your customer base enterprise customers largely?

Duncan Lennox: Yes, it’s pretty much all enterprise customers. We focus specifically on the largest organizations. These are the Fortune 500 type of organizations. We look for organizations that typically have a salesforce of, at last, a thousand people. Most of our clients would have a salesforce that’s quite a bit bigger than that.

Sramana Mitra: What are the major trends in using the kinds of tools and techniques you’re talking about particularly with the mobile and social uptick?

Duncan Lennox: Firstly, we’ve been mobile first with Qstream for more than five years now. Honestly, up until two years ago, we were only seeing 15% of usage of Qstream actually being done on the mobile device. In other words, the majority of people were still using a laptop to participate in Qstream. That’s gone from 15% to 75% in less than two years in the enterprise.

That leads directly to your question about why mobile is important. Mobile has been very unusual because as a trend, it started on the consumer side first. We all have our iPhones now for our personal use. People then began to expect that they could use that kind of technology and have that kind of access and ease of use in their work lives. They started wanting to use those devices in their work life. We’ve driven mobile into the enterprise from the consumer side, which of course, is historically the reverse of the way technology adoption has gone.

We see a lot of expectations particularly – I hate to use the word but I don’t have a better one – with millennials. Once you get to younger generations who’ve essentially only known the world with smart phones. There’s an expectation that, even when it comes to business applications, they should be able to access in a time, in a place, and using a device of their choice. Usually, they expect to be able to access it in very small increments. We’re all used to Twitter and Facebook. People are looking for experiences that are three minutes or 90 seconds long, and not something that they have to sit through for an hour, for example. Convenience of time and location and convenience of device are driving a lot of mobile in the enterprise.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Qstream CEO Duncan Lennox
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