It has been about six weeks or so since I joined the CallRail team. We have made a lot of progress in that short time. Getting our arms around some high level important metrics. Tweaking some of our current marketing efforts to make them a bit more productive. Hiring Ashley Coleman to implement some marketing technologies (we don’t have that many at the moment) and really drill down on what is driving customer growth so that we can make our marketing more effective and kick revenue into hyper growth.

This week we made the biggest decision to date. We decided to organize the sales team using a sales development model.  There were a lot of factors that lead to this decision. My experience watching Kyle Porter build the Sales Loft sales development organization, our investor Wain Kellum encouraging us to go down that road, and my general belief in the model.  But the big driver of the decision was that our monthly inbound leads have increased 40% since the beginning of the year and our account executives are straining to pay attention to the big accounts that we want them to close and qualify new leads. We pay account executives to close deals. They need to be able to focus their time on doing just that.

So CallRail is going down the road of sales specialization. Right now we are looking for an sales development rep to join the team to respond to the healthy flow of new leads every day, qualify them for our account executives, help us map out a winning SDR sales flow process, and potentially scale into a larger role as a leader of an SDR team. And while this great article “How I Ramped Sales Development in a Month” is focused on outbound one of the first things I am going to do is have the person we hire read it. Great roadmap for a lone SDR.

Once we get inbound humming a suspect we will be ready to specialize a bit more by starting an outbound team. Just like in industrialization, specialization in the sales function is the winning road to be on.