Navigating the Microsoft Ecosystem to Build a 12 Million Dollar Company: Brian Knight, CEO of Pragmatic Works (Part 5)

Sramana: How did you build your company from an organizational standpoint during that timeframe?

Brian Knight: We started with commission-only sales people. We are no longer that way, but it did serve its purpose. We aligned our five commission only sales people into the same five regions that Microsoft had for their sales force. At the same time we built a high number of leads for our sales force so we started doing Webinars. They would bring boatloads of leads for our sales team.

Our Webinars were all about education. They were not about our products. By doing that we learned what software various companies had in their environments. We could do a hard sale after the webinar. That was the number one lesson learned as far as growth goes. We now train about 40,000 people a year with those Webinars. We do them like clock-work on Tuesdays and Thursdays. We don’t have any particular vertical or size of company that attends these webinars, but the key is to lead via education. That builds our brand and establishes goodwill.

Sramana: How did you find commission-only sales people in each region?

Brian Knight: Tim had built several small companies various times. He already had contacts and he brought those people together. Keep in mind that at this time the economy was lousy. Finding people who just needed something to do while they were looking for a job was easy. All five that we brought on were unemployed.

Sramana: How do people find out about your Webinars? How do you market them?

Brian Knight: At first we partnered with niche websites to get the word out there. We were co-branding webinars together. Our first one was called our Summer School program. We saw 10,000 leads that came from that first webinar. We took a publishing company, a professional community website and we partnered with them to do the first webinar as a co-branded effort. By doing that we kick started our company with 10,000 leads.

Sramana: What was your lead qualification process?

Brian Knight: After the webinar we sent out a two to three question survey. A question on that survey would be something like “What version of SQL Server are you running in your enterprise?” and we would gain good intelligence from that. If the same person came to three or four webinars and we asked different questions each time then we were able to get good business intelligence from that. We would then have an inside sales rep call on a very warm lead.

Sramana: From the 10,000 leads you had, what percentage were you able to convert?

Brian Knight: The initial campaign launched our company. That first year about 20% of our leads converted to opportunities. I think about 8% converted to actual business. That is far better than any direct marketing campaign we could have done. We tried to get people to buy something, even if it was small. That started the funnel of converting leads into customers.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Navigating the Microsoft Ecosystem to Build a 12 Million Dollar Company: Brian Knight, CEO of Pragmatic Works
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