Sustainability, Scalability, and Capability

Heading in to 2011, expansion stage technology companies uSamp, Kareo, and Central Desktop weren’t exactly struggling to sell their product.

Sales were up, revenues were strong, and the businesses’ trajectories certainly pointed skyward. But that didn’t mean the three companies couldn’t improve their sales performance and processes, and gain clarity on their sales philosophies.

“At the startup stage, we’d just go out, sell, and hit our targets,” says Susan Hwang, uSamp’s Senior Vice President of Survey Solutions. “It was almost that simple. But now it’s becoming extremely important to create a scalable model for growth and have a much more focused sales strategy in a marketplace with much different needs and challenges.”

That’s why OpenView Venture Partners, a Boston-based venture capital firm that counts those companies among its portfolio of expansion stage technology businesses, invited uSamp, Kareo, Central Desktop, and executives from several of its other portfolio companies to a Sales Execution Workshop in January.

The workshop gave founders like uSamp’s Matt Dusig and Kareo’s Dan Rodrigues the chance to compare and contrast their sales structures, discovering what has — or hasn’t — worked at this particular stage of their growth. OpenView also brought in sales consultant and industry expert Rich Chiarello to lead the workshop’s participants in a series of exercises that focused on things like sales recruitment, sales metrics and executive dashboards, value proposition, and sales culture.

“It was, without question, one of the more effective and informative workshops that I’ve attended,” says Rodrigues, who founded Kareo in 2004. “We left with much better clarity on the things we needed to implement and the sales processes and concepts that we could focus on to prepare us for the next step.”