Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: They should and they do, but from a software design point of view, you have to keep in mind that they’re two different departments. You can’t assume that the user and user interface are going to be exactly the same.

Jason Wells: We learned that over the next couple of years as we went to sell to a Marketing Director who was really sharp. They wanted a campaign management because they knew that when they were sending people from their Google AdWords campaign, somebody would click and then they’d pick up the phone and call. That data looks like a bounce to them because they went to an offline world. They weren’t getting the data attribution for the phone calls. They wanted to run campaigns but the sales group wanted to know what the conversion rate was. They wanted to know if there were any missed opportunities.

It’s the same call but they wanted to look at it differently. That starts bringing us up to over the next couple of years from 2012 to the launch of Convirza. We did a couple of things. One is we introduced speech recognition and turned it into a conversation analytics platform. We built that to listen to every single call.

Sramana Mitra: You were recording and transcribing and doing natural language analysis on that.

Jason Wells: In essence, those are the nuts and bolts steps. We looked at the acoustical values and how fast somebody was talking. We ran some statistical models on predicting, based on the words, tones, and conversation to see if this was a good lead or not. Then we would be able to say if that converted to a sale. If not, what should we do about it? When a call came in, we can automatically identify that this was a good lead. They were actually asking about pricing, but in the end, they didn’t set up an appointment to go to that dentist or to apply for a loan. That would then constitute a missed opportunity which would automatically trigger, within minutes of the phone call, an alert to call back or send out an email.

If the campaign was driving poor quality leads based on a certain keyword, then we begin integrating into big management platforms to automatically adjust their bid for their keywords. We could now, for the first time, know what kind of quality was coming in. In an online world where people fill forms, click on pages, that’s how you measure a lead. When somebody dials a phone number, it’s like a black hole. There’s no information.

Sramana Mitra: This product that you then built resonated with the market and you created new user interfaces for marketing and sales. Did you enter the account through marketing or sales?

Jason Wells: With our recent launch, we split the application. We rebranded it as a Convirza product for call quality management, which is the sales group. Then, we created Convirza for advertisers, which is a campaign management platform. You can manage the campaign and think of it more as a campaign flow that has automation and integration features built into marketing automation platforms and big management platforms. We actually looked at two different products depending on who you would be selling into. These are lessons learned. Even though they are using the same underlying platform and the same technology, they need different interfaces. They need different words. They need to do different things with it.

Sramana Mitra: That functions and work flows are different.

Jason Wells: It’s silly. That’s like basic business. Sometimes as an entrepreneur or somebody who’s trying to solve a problem, you see it holistically. You say, “These guys should just be working together.” You miss their individual roles and we did. We also see that, over time, they are converging as well. We see more marketers who care about, not just the lead score, but also about how well it is flowing through the funnel. They’re looking deeper into it and want to know if they can tweak the sales performance. There’s some alignment between the organizations. I think that will continue to happen.

Sramana Mitra: This is the suite of products that you sell today, yes?

Jason Wells: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What has been the evolution of the company in terms of revenue ramp and funding?

Jason Wells: Last year, we raised a round of $20 million. Let me step back a little bit more. We raised $3 million and then a year and a half later, we raised another million, and then another million. We were still developing the product and we needed more. All of this funding is from the same investor.

Sramana Mitra: From the original investor who gave you the $3 million.

Jason Wells: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You only have one investor and that’s this investor?

Jason Wells: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: The total is about $23 million?

Jason Wells: A little under $25 million.

Sramana Mitra: What about revenue or other metrics that you feel comfortable sharing? What’s been the growth rate? What kind of revenue level are you at?

Jason Wells: We have been growing 100% to 200%. We made some acquisitions that were doing basic call tracking and where can add on top of their technology. We are now at a scalable level. We are pushing the growth model. We’ve rebranded. Convirza is really talking about conversations and conversions. How do we help businesses provide attribution, analytics, and automation based on the understanding of what’s going on in the channel. We have over 70 employees now.

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to sell the company? What do you and your investors want to see happen to the company?

Jason Wells: Our investors are long-term investors. They have no need nor timeline for us to exit. We have no pressure like a traditional VC funding where they have a limited partnership. For us, it is important to really be innovators and change the market. We like to find ingenious ways to create value for businesses by understanding these customer conversations.

We will continue to push forward and grow. We believe, at some point, this probably fits in a marketing automation suite. We’re focusing on the call components of this. At some point, it may make sense for us to fit into the puzzle of marketing automation.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Marketing Software Company from Utah: Convirza CEO Jason Wells
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