Three-year growth 77%
InsideSales.com clearly isn’t phoning it in. The sales automation, training and analytics company — which “makes a superhero out of an everyday sales person” — did more than $9 million in revenue last year, received $35 million in funding this past December, and has customers the likes of Inc., Groupon and Dell ringing its praises. And there’s no sign of dialing it down. “Our ultimate dream? Total world domination,” says Dave Elkington, co-founder of the Provo technology business. “The goal for InsideSales.com is to be the next multibillion-dollar global company from Utah. Few companies have accomplished such a big, hairy, audacious goal. We will be among those that have.” Way to call it.
We knew we wanted to be the first vendor in the inside sales space. My business partner, Ken Krogue, and I found the guy who owned the InsideSales.com domain, and we kept negotiating with him until right before Christmas when he needed money that very day. We bought the domain and had the website live by the first week of January 2005. We typed “inside sales” into Google and there were 40,000 companies hiring and not a single vendor in the space. The first day we had eight web leads, today we get more than 250 leads per day.
Our name was so powerful on the Internet we never had to cold call. It’s ironic we had the world’s most powerful cold-calling technology and never made a single cold call the first five years of the company. Word of mouth spread through the Internet, but it really took off when we did two research studies: the first in conjunction with Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, and then with Dr. James Oldroyd at MIT. This powerful research has since been done again in conjunction with Harvard Business Review and published in the likes of Inc. and Forbes. The study went viral and has been accessed or downloaded by more than 190,000 companies.
We researched how fast a company should respond to a web lead, and the results were fantastic. Responding within five minutes is the secret, yet our research showed the average company took 46 hours. Also, we proved sales people were only making between one and two phone calls to follow up on web leads, when they needed to be making six to nine calls. The scariest stat of all is that we tested 17,000 companies and found only 27 percent of leads ever get contacted. As a CEO myself, I knew this was critical information that other CEOs needed.
In the fall of 2008, when the economy started to crash, our line of credit was called in from Wells Fargo. Our contact at Wells Fargo told us we had nothing to worry about — we’d never been late on a payment. One morning we looked at our bank account and all the funds had been taken out. We started giving hugs and saying our goodbyes, but our senior managers rallied together and decided to go without pay to keep the company alive. Some of our clients paid months in advance for our product because they believed in it. Then, to our complete surprise, by December of 2008, InsideSales.com started taking off in the midst of the worst economy of our lifetimes.
The culture at InsideSales.com has remained the same as we’ve continued to grow. We’re scrappy — we do whatever it takes to get things done and we do them with less money than anyone else. Our theme this year is “Grit.”
I want my employees to become leaders. We’ve made sure every employee is now an owner in the company. We send them for training to Disney, Zappos, Miller Heiman, trade shows and thought leader summits. We invest in them because they invest so much in us.
It was important to me the business was grown organically — without outside funding. Eventually, I knew we’d have to take on funding in order to keep up with industry demand, but I waited as long as I could. We didn’t want to take money until we didn’t need it. Ken and I wanted to become exceptional at executing with discipline rather than just spending our way out of problems — anybody can do that.
In December 2012 we took our second round of funding, $35 million. Honestly, at that point it was validation of what we’re doing. We received much higher valuations than the one we accepted — but we went with the VC firm that was aligned with where we wanted our company to go. Life is too short to work with people you don’t enjoy.
Data beats intuition. Test, test, test. We run everything by the numbers. We have tested thousands of variables in our business, true A/B and multivariate tests. Are we perfect? Heck no. But we’re testing that, too.
We didn’t want to take money until we didn’t need it.