OpenView Partners with Balihoo to Ramp up Inside Sales Effort
As young companies grow out of the startup phase, 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 partnership 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.
To learn more about this partnership, please read the case study in full.
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.