Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion (Part 1)

A short discussion on how marketing and sales technologies are evolving.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to your company.

Carol O’Kelley: Thanks for having me. I’m the CEO of Salesfusion. I joined the company earlier this year after having spent most of my career in technology, marketing, and operations. I’ve done a number of very small entrepreneurial things – everything from being the 34^th employee at Retek, which was ultimately acquired by Oracle to starting and managing a self-storage business. I’ve also worked at larger companies like Red Prairie and Oracle. I’m passionate about technology. I love the pace of this business.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you based?

Carol O’Kelley: I’m based in Atlanta, Georgia.

Sramana Mitra: That’s where the headquarters of Salesfusion is?

Carol O’Kelley: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about Salesfusion. Tell us a little bit of the history of the company and what you do.

Carol O’Kelley: Salesfusion was founded by Chad Ruff who recognized the need to have visitors come to a company website and be able to identify who they were and target those visitors. We spent a couple of years bootstrapping the program to build the marketing automation platform and then took an outside investment in 2013. We’ve also taken a couple of rounds of funding that have allowed us to add employees and fuel our growth to over 400 customers.

In terms of what we do, we have, what I’d like to think as, an easy-to-use marketing automation platform. We’re all about aligning sales and marketing around a cohesive lead management process and allowing marketers to develop and nurture long-term relationships to drive more revenue to their company.

Sramana Mitra: Would that put you in direct competition with Marketo for instance?

Carol O’Kelley: Absolutely. We provide very similar types of functionalities although Marketo is focused on enterprise players with much larger user counts and volume. We’re focused more at the SMB and mid-market.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the industry level. Tell me what the key trends are that you observe in the Sales 2.0 world today. That includes marketing automation. That includes a variety of different types of innovations that have happened in the sales and marketing technology area. Of course, marketing technology is going through an incredible renaissance right now for many years. There have been a lot of interesting things that have come about. Synthesize for us the key things that you see.

Carol O’Kelley: I like your use of analogy to the renaissance. There’s just an incredible amount of thought leadership happening in terms of Sales 2.0 right now.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Thought Leaders in Sales 2.0: Carol O’Kelley, CEO of Salesfusion
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