Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How did it impact the revenues? How long did it take for you to start producing really strong multipliers on your revenue numbers using the channel?

John Pope: It had an immediate impact. We were starting from nothing back then but we’ve built a third of our business through the indirect channel. We’re a company that’s nearing $100 million in revenue and about a third of that has come through our reseller channel.

Sramana Mitra: That’s one of the major strategic initiatives that produced. Were there other inflection points it

 the course of that journey? What’s the next major move?

John Pope: Our vertical marketing program was another big one. I had learned from my other two businesses that niche marketing and vertical marketing gives you an advantage because you’re able to focus and understand the community that you’re selling to a lot better and speak the same language.

We decided to go after public sector and education back in 2009. It was the same kind of story as our channel program. It started from nothing and became experts at it. It paid off and still continues to be a big part of our business. I couldn’t say exactly how much we’ve grown but I know it’s been significant. We pivoted from there using that model and applied it towards financial services and insurance.

Sramana Mitra: Your product is kind of horizontal. What were you able to work into the vertical marketing strategy that was unique to the vertical that you chose? Can you elaborate?

John Pope: Sure. In K-12, the first thing was to hire people who had a deep understanding of the needs of the market. It was mostly to collect information and learn about the vertical itself. As soon as we started to understand their challenges with procurement, school security, and maintaining telephony products, we were able to customize both our sales process as well as our product to map to the needs of that group.

We’re big on security and features that can be controlled via the cloud PBX system. We understand their buying cycles and we understand how to deploy to massive multi-thousand seats in a very structured way. In these other verticals with insurance and financial services, we also ran integrations into some of the most popular as well as the niche CRMs. A customer calls in and you immediately, on your screen, have all of their information and their orders.

It was a mix of understanding the needs and the mentality of the market and shifting into being able to solve some of those. We’re continuing to go deeper and deeper as time goes by.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrap to $25 Million from Utah, Raise Money Later to Scale to $100 Million: John Pope, CEO of Jive
1 2 3 4 5 6 7