Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In B2B sales, we actually use a methodology that’s our own. We call it the Sales 2.0 methodology. We do email marketing and lead nurturing, which is basically funnel management. That’s actually a scalable and repeatable process. Investors like that scalability and repeatability very much. It works.

Mike Whitmire: It very much does. Fast forward three years, we now have a team of 22 BDR’s who are out there doing that same job.

Sramana Mitra: All on the phone right?

Mike Whitmire: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What is your price point?

Mike Whitmire: We price it based on the number of people they have using the application who are collaborating around it. The number of users is really the bulk of the pricing. We have a couple of add-on modules but it’s a smaller piece of the overall revenue. The vast majority is related to that user account.

Sramana Mitra: What is the average deal size in your accounts? What is the target size of the mid-market companies that you’re going for?

Mike Whitmire: I’d rather not disclose dollar values but I can give you a high-level understanding of who we’re selling to. We define the mid-market based on the full-time employee count of any business. A lot of companies use revenue. We don’t do that. We use employee count. We look at companies with 200 employees all the way up to about 5,000 employees. That’s our sweet spot for the mid-market.

We found our product, as it stands today, to be the perfect fit for companies with 200 up to about 3,000 employees. We just fit very well into that market. Once you get to that upper end of the range, that’s where things become more complicated. We’re a good fit for most of them but certainly not for all of them. That upper end is where we begin to compete with Blackline a little bit more.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have now?

Mike Whitmire: We have 490 at this point. We’ll exit the quarter with 500.

Sramana Mitra: You’re on a subscription model, right?

Mike Whitmire: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What has been the trajectory of growth? How many customers did you close 2014 at? 2015? 2016?

Mike Whitmire: It’s very simple. In 2015, we added about 50 customers. In 2016, we added about 120. In 2017, we added 250 or so. That’s the amount that we sold over the years. This year, we brought on 20 customers in.

Sramana Mitra: What about churn?

Mike Whitmire: Churn for us is very low. Our churn percent on a logo basis is about 4%. We up sell our client base. They generally add more users because they are high-growth customers. From a dollar perspective, we up sell our install base on the net every year. Our dollar retention is 115%.

Sramana Mitra: What causes churn?

Mike Whitmire: It’s interesting. Our customers don’t churn because they’re unhappy. More often, they’ve been acquired by a bigger company. We’ve signed high-growth companies so a lot of them do get acquired. What’s amazing though is when they get acquired and the parent company finds about FloQast and they buy FloQast, that turns into a very big up sell for us. That has happened a handful of times so far.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Competing with Blackline: FloQast CEO Mike Whitmire
1 2 3 4 5 6 7