As young companies move toward expansion, the need to recruit and hire experienced senior leadership becomes inevitable. Such was the case for Balihoo, a local marketing automation software company based in Boise.

As 2011 approached, the company found its rising fortunes slowed by challenges with its inside sales team. Balihoo founder and CEO Pete Gombert identified one of the primary issues — the lack of an experienced sales executive to lead the operation.

“We were doing the best with what we had and we were succeeding,” said Gombert. “But to say that there wasn’t some turbulence would be a lie. We were borrowing resources from within our own company to make it work. It wasn’t very efficient and if we wanted to really go after some new opportunities, that had to change.”

So in early 2011, Gombert and company teamed up with OpenView Venture Partners to revamp its inside sales process. The firm, which made a capital investment in Balihoo in 2009, offered to help provide the insight, training, and recruitment services the company needed to build an efficient and scalable inside sales organization.

In a short time, the collaboration had succeeded in refining Balihoo’s database of sales leads, promoted and executed a couple of well-attended webinars, and developed a 25-page sales training handbook for both seasoned and incoming team members. Most importantly, the company found a qualified VP of Sales to lead the way.

“Without question, what they did in less than three months would have taken us at least nine. We went from flying blind to a singular, repeatable sales process in one quarter,” said Matt Borud, a senior member of Balihoo’s Client Development and Program Management team.

“The OpenView team helped us to design, implement and hire an inside sales team early in 2011.  By the end of 2011  the team had become a consistently producing machine that is poised to grow significantly in 2012.  The team started off 2011 from scratch contributing 0% to topline revenue and has grown so rapidly that in 2012 we expect inside sales to deliver over 20% of company revenue, which is an amazing feat,” added Gombert.

For the full story of Balihoo and OpenView’s inside sales collaboration, view the complete case study.