Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Given that, what does it take for you to sell? You probably have some large customers but you’re also selling to a lot of small businesses.

Stuart Wall: Yes, we started with small. My first customer was my older sister who runs a pottery studio in Indiana. My grandmother and aunt are users. They were most of our first clients. The small business category is a great source of business for us. We really believe in empowering those businesses to be successful. Over time, we’ve started moving upmarket. We have a mid-market and an enterprise aspect to our business as well.

At the end of the day, whether you’re a Fortune 500 company or a single restaurant business, you have very similar needs. You need to know who your customers are for that location and you need to do very targeted marketing. The ownership structure may vary but our product works for size. We started with small, but we now serve businesses of all sizes.

Sramana Mitra: Obviously, customer acquisition is very different for the small business category versus large corporate accounts. How do you prioritize where you’re building your business? What’s the distribution between large clients and small clients?

Stuart Wall: That’s a great question. About half of our business today are what we consider small. That’s one to three location businesses and our list price is about $300 a month. For that, we have a lot of relatively junior employees where this may be their first sales job who either talk to a business that finds out about us online or we do some outreach ourselves.

We have a mid-market group which sells to national franchises and chains. That’s about 35% of our business. That’s where you might have a franchise that understands the value of Signpost and recommends us to their franchisees. The last bucket is enterprise, which are businesses that have between 25 and 2,000 locations. We charge on a per location basis. It’s a pretty different sale when you get to that size. A lot of the sales happen in person. You’re working with a larger team that includes marketing, IP, and CEO decision makers.

Sramana Mitra: Everything you described has a review element to it, right? The customers that you convert, you follow up with them to get their reviews. Is that a particular qualifying criteria?

Stuart Wall: It’s not just the customers we convert. It’s any customer that we identify for the business. They may already be coming in. They may be loyal clients. It’s just identifying who those people are. I think it’s one of the more unique and valuable parts of our product if you’re a business that has a physical location component. It’s really important that you have five-star reviews online. It would mean that people who find you online will convert at a higher rate.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Stuart Wall, CEO of Signpost
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