Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: A bit of question about your sales cycle. At 2014, you’ve been in the market for a couple of years. You’ve got good reference customers. How did the sales cycle evolve?

Janet Kosloff: It definitely got easier to get appointments as we got some recognition and references within companies. If we would get a subscription in a particular brand, we would look for opportunities to expand from brand to brand and continue to expand our footprint within those clients. Because we had a bigger team, we had the ability to look in other places for prospects. That’s when we started to really attack the biotech market.

Especially here in Boston, there are so many smaller, under-the-radar biotech firms around that could really value the ability to get very quick information to help their process along. We started to expand from big pharma and get into biotech. We also started to talk to clients outside of life sciences like advertising firms that work for the pharma industry. We expanded our prospect pool. At that point, there were about three or four full-time sales people.

Sramana Mitra: You’re still operating with the $350,000 first angel financing and the $2.2 million in venture capital.

Janet Kosloff: That is correct. We have not raised any more money.

Sramana Mitra:  Good. So in 2015, what are the big milestones?

Janet Kosloff: 2015 was really the year of focusing on the enterprise. We are doing business with a majority of big pharmaceuticals. W have our toe in the door pretty much everywhere. We have several clients who we have multiple subscriptions with. Our major goal for 2015 is to continue to get more and more subscriptions within our existing clients. It’s really the expand part of a land-and-expand strategy.

Sramana Mitra: Did average deal size change as a result of that?

Janet Kosloff: The average deal size has changed pretty dramatically since the very beginning on a couple of fronts. There’s a definite path that our clients take in terms of the first purchase, first renewal, and subsequent renewals. We see a very steady uptick of clients buying more and more with each subsequent purchase. It makes sense. At first, they don’t know. They’re a little skittish. If they like us, they’ll buy a little bit more. If they really like us, they’ll buy a large chunk because our pricing is volume-based. The folks who are really getting a tremendous amount of value want to be able to purchase a large amount at a smaller price.

Based on the volume discount, we’ve been able to move people to larger and larger subscriptions. We’ve also added more things for them to buy. This year, we’ve launched a product called Micro Tracker. A Micro Tracker allows our clients to track results of a particular survey wave over wave. Many of our clients will use us to track some of their key performance indicators over time, especially with newly launched products. In the old days, when a drug was newly launched, drug companies, and probably other business verticals, would do surveys to track the awareness of the product, competition, and uptake in the market.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship: Janet Kosloff, CEO of InCrowd
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