OpenView Partners Releases Case Study on Success of Sales Execution Forum

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. Managing Director Brian Zimmerman and Analyst Devon Warwick organized the forum and brought in a sales consultant and industry expert 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.”

Read the case study in full on OpenView’s new website.

About OpenView Venture Partners
OpenView Venture Partners is an expansion stage venture capital fund with a focus on high-growth software, Internet, and technology-enabled companies. Through its staff of seasoned operating executives, who collectively bring several decades of technology and management experience to the firm, OpenView is able to help portfolio companies with quickly ramping up Product, Go-To-Market, and Organizational and Operational functions to best practice levels. The firm was founded in 2006 and has a total capital under management of approximately $240 million. OpenView Venture Partners is based in Boston and invests on a worldwide basis.