Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify (Part 7)

Nick Hedges: At the same time, the current CEO was facing unfortunate circumstances. Two weeks after he joined the company, his wife was diagnosed with cancer. He spent two years as the CEO of Velocity, or Leads360 as it was called then. All the time, he and I knew that he was not going to be the CEO forever. The only good thing was that I was lined up for succession very early in his tenure. That’s partly why I was promoted so quickly to a number of different roles and how I ended up becoming the CEO of Velocify.

Sramana Mitra: How has revenue been tracking in this period that we are talking about?

Nick Hedges: We grew at 40% to 60% from the time that I’ve been at Velocify. That’s year-on-year growth. Growth accelerated in 2012.

Sramana Mitra: What was the trigger that accelerated that growth?

Nick Hedges: The primary acceleration was telephony. Adding that to our product helped us a lot. Once we had the telephony product, I think we also became much more organized and disciplined about how we approached sales and marketing in general. Over the past year, the thing that has fuelled growth a lot has been a transition from a purely B2C focused sales platform to a completely horizontal one.

Two years ago, I decided that we were going to do a very deep integration with Salesforce. One of the reasons why we wanted to do that was that in the B2C world, it was fine for us to have a standalone platform because there were various backends that industries use and there was no need for a CRM. Basically, a lead would come in, it would work all its way through to becoming a customer in our system, and then be pushed into the backend ERP without the need of a CRM. That was limiting us to about 20 verticals.

In order for us to go horizontal rather than vertical, I realised that what we needed was a very strong capability from a CRM perspective. I didn’t want to build that ourselves. We spent a year building a very deep integration with Salesforce. Over the past year, that’s really what has fuelled our growth. We have a lot of customers that are both in B2B and B2C but in verticals that we have never touched before. They are Salesforce customers.

Sramana Mitra: Is there any other significant strategic moves that you’ve made? I got the telephony integration piece as a major move. I got the Salesforce integration piece as a major move. Is there anything else that is a major trigger or strategic move that caused growth?

Nick Hedges: No, I think those are the primary ones.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a High Growth SaaS Company from Los Angeles: Nick Hedges, CEO of Velocify
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