It seems like only yesterday I was joining team CallRail. Truth to be told it has been a bit over a year. I was reminded of this when that Atlanta Business Chronicle published an article on CallRail tripling in size adding 70 more employees to our swelling ranks. In true Atlanta style what the ABC published was a real estate article. Yes in the last year we moved from a live/work condo in Midtown to an entire floor of the Equitable Building. There is a lot more to it than a leasing story. It’s a story of business growth.

If you look at the new and improved CallRail team page when I came onboard I was the 17th or so employee. About half the company had technical degrees and were building product. Four were in sales and marketing. The rest were helping customers. Today we are in the range of 55 people. Those people are much more evenly spread across development, customer service, marketing, and sales. Here’s a look back on what we have accomplished from a sales and marketing perspective.

Marketing

• Grew from a team of two to eight data-driven marketers.
• Stood up a world-class marketing stack with Marketo, Salesforce, and our own app at the core. It was a finalist for a Marketo Revvie. We didn’t win but our video was shown to 6,000 marketers at the Marketo Marketing Summit.
• Moved from Niche player to customer satisfaction market Leader on G2 Crowd Review site.
• Doubled our PPC spend while lowering direct CAC.
• Grew our social reach by 190%.
• Experimented with new ways to fill the top of the funnel.
• Gave away a boatload of t-shirts. Too many to count, but it is two budget line items.
• Entered into some nice partnerships with companies like Acquisio, HubSpot, Marketo, Unbounce, and VWO.
• Grew lead generation by over 300%.
• More than doubled revenue.
• Held CAC steady through all of this.

Sales

• Added seven new sales team members, bringing the team total to nine.
• Changed comp program to be more performance based.
• Implemented a predictable revenue sales organization with specialization of inbound SDRs, outbound SDRs, and account executive closers.
• Created cadences and scripts for the inbound team. Along with our marketing stack this resulted in a 20% increase in lead to close ratio.
• Created a dedicated outbound team.
• Defined monthly metrics for each sales role.
• Created leaderboards to drive sales team competition.
• Identified and promoted team leads to put us in a position to scale the sales organization.
• Closed enough deals to double the size of the customer base.

As the ABC article stated CallRail is seeing brisk demand. However it’s not just latent demand. We made it, or at least built on demand that existed. The base of this demand generation is due to the founders focus on product and our engineering team’s ability to deliver a superior product.

What I learned and had a hand in creating in the past year is a brand that is well-respected on the marketing technology space. CallRail is now used by nearly 40,000 companies and we are seeing larger and larger companies reach out to us on a daily basis.

With all that said what got us here, which is perhaps the fastest growing profitable tech company in the South, is not going to get us there. The next year is going to be focused on organizing to scale. Scaling in a way that does not require heroic effort but does require skilled organization building.

The last year has been full of challenges, tons of fun, and team CallRail has accomplished a lot. The coming year is going to be equally challenging and fun as we open a new chapter on the CallRail story.