I joined CallRail about 100 days ago. Pretty dead nuts on when you take into consideration vacation. When joining I set myself two big objectives. Double our revenue in 2015 and then again in 2016. I was given one other, figure out what is going on in the sales funnel. So I set my sites out to do those things. This is a little bit of that journey in my first 100 days.
When I joined I was employee 17. I was the third person in marketing. Mark Sullivan who was doing a lot of byline articles and speaking events, and Erica Hawkins who did everything else. It was pretty obvious that if we were to scale this thing we were going to need more people. About two weeks in I also came to the conclusion that we were going to need to get a marketing automation program and enterprise level CRM in place to reach our goals.
About two weeks after that SignUp4 was acquired by Cvent. It just so happens that I was going to dinner that night with my old friend Melanie Hall who ran marketing at SignUp4. She told me she has the perfect person for me, Ashley Coleman. She was and is. Ashley joined in early June as Demand Generation Manager. Early in Andy Powell asked her when she was going to select the marketing automation platform. Ashley had to remind Andy that it was only her second day on the job. She also committed to making that decision along with me by the end of the month. We ended up with Marketo and are in the process of deploying that and a Salesforce CRM instance by the end of this month.
During this same time we had already put in motion some marketing programs to generate more leads. Leads grew 41% in the second quarter versus the first. Our two sales guys could not really get to them all. Leads were falling on the ground which was driving me nuts. That is when we decided to go down the road of sales specialization and bring on a sales development rep. We brought the first one on a couple of weeks ago, Mónica Mariño whom picked up out of HubLogix, and she is proving that the model will work for CallRail. So we have three people on the sales team and I expect we will be growing this in the future. So if you want to be an inbound SDR (we get about a thousand inbound leads a month right now), it’s not a bad place to be.
Along the way Mark switched from a byline focus to a partnership focus. He is working with companies like Acquisio, HubSpot, Marketo, Optimizely, and TapClicks to build integrations into their products and get increased distribution for CallRail. Good move to focus there and it was his idea to do so.
The last piece to come in place in my short time at CallRail is that we had a marketing coordinator come on board Monday. We have been looking for this person since before I joined CallRail. Essentially someone with three years of marketing experience that could write and knows social. It took two months to find one. Jessica Neal. At one point I was accused of being too picky. Maybe. But we need all A players on this boat.
Maybe we need a bigger boat. I believe Jessica is employee 29 and we have two more starting after her that will bring the total to 31. To totally mix metaphors it seems we are bringing on the power we need to make the growth flywheel spin. With a solid foundational team now in place it is going to be quite interesting to see where we are after the next 100 days.