[aytekin]

We have been self-serve product for the first 12 years and a year ago we launched our Enterprise version. As the article mentions because of the existing high traffic it has been pretty easy to find leads. We have already signed 100 Enterprise customers. Our main challenge was not to find customers, in fact we struggled to catch up with leads. The main challenges were making the product Enterprise ready with necessary features such as covering most popular SSOs and building admin privileges on the Enterprise product, and trying to build a sales team from scratch.

We had to hire 3 sales people before we found someone right. It is like someone hiring developers without any development experience. You get it wrong because you don't know what makes someone good. Get help from someone who has experience. We finally found the right person from our network and suddenly sales started flying.

[tomp]

Can you explain a bit more? I cannot quite square the fact that you had issues with sales (people) and the fact that you had no problem finding customers... Why do you need sales people, if not to find customers? Or do you actually mean customer support / integration people?

[wpietri]

The leads are the top of the funnel. Traditionally salespeople take leads and turn them into deals. So I presume they were seeing a big falloff between interest and conversion.

It also doesn't surprise me at all they struggled to find good salespeople. I hear that all the time. Seems like it's hard to tell the difference between a salesperson who can sell your product and one who's just selling themselves to you.