Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: There was nothing specific to the mortgage industry? It was pretty much a horizontal product that you apply to the mortgage industry and when you decided to diversify after the financial crisis, it translated reasonably easily into these other verticals?

Nick Hedges: Exactly right.

Sramana Mitra: You’re back to $4 million in revenue and you were still VP of Business Development at this point?

Nick Hedges: Correct. Actually another thing happened within the first nine months. The company hired a new CEO. The existing CEO Founder wanted to narrow his focus just on the product. The investors brought in a new CEO and that CEO moved some people around. For me what that meant was he asked me to not only run business development, but also the sales organization. That happened in October 2008 for me. That was actually a phenomenal opportunity for me because we have, in my view, the most groundbreaking sales software on the planet and what I was able to do is to really cut my teeth in a sales organization and understand what makes a sales organization successful in that role, which I did for about three years.

Sramana Mitra: That brings us to 2011 then?

Nick Hedges: Yes. During that time, we also added to the product. We did a couple of things. First of all, we built prioritization. What it did was it allowed people to create optimized contact strategies for their leads and from a user’s perspective, to have a prioritized list of leads. What it enabled is a sales person to know that whatever is at the top of that list is always the most important thing for them to be working it at that point in time.

It tells them what to do with that lead. It’s one of the biggest fundamental problem or issue that a sales manager has. You can design a process. You can train your salespeople but it’s really difficult to get them to do the optimal thing. Your best sales people typically do that. They’re following some form of process but everyone else is relatively chaotic in how they spend their day.

Sramana Mitra: Sales people tend not to be very disciplined. Today with the way sales is happening, you need to be disciplined, quantitative, and metrics-oriented.

Nick Hedges: Exactly. That relatively simple concept was groundbreaking in enabling us to transform how the sales organizations that use our platform got results. The other thing that we did was we added a telephony component to our system. We built a highly integrated telephony capability because we saw that every company that was using our product was essentially trying to orchestrate a contact strategy with phone communication at the centre.

The founder sat down who is now running products and looked at our integrations. We had 20 telephony companies that were integrated into our platform. We realized that we could do what they did better by building a telephony platform inside of Velocify. That’s what we did. That had an immense impact on our business. It allowed us to go from a growth rate of 30% to 60%. It delivered a huge amount of value to our customers.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify
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