Video: Crittercisms CEO on Enterprise Sales

Andrew Levy, CEO of Crittercism found out early on that enterprise sales is no cake walk. In 2013, his company’s flagship product had more than 800 million monthly active users tracking over 3 billion events per day. But the path to that success required hiring up from twelve to 50+ people including adding an exec team, outside sales force and second head of recruiting. What’s more, the CEO was also busy defining his user onboarding strategy, finding his pricing model, and crafting his core messaging.

In a recent Heavybit presentation, the entrepreneur and ex-HP engineer offers a look back at Crittercism’s last two years and the go-to-market strategies, key non-engineering hires and value proposition that got him where he is today.

Perhaps one of Levy’s most surprising insights is the fact that his marketing and sales hires taught him how to talk about his company in a sales environment. Despite the fact that Crittercism is a developer-facing product, he found that by changing his tactics, he increased his chances of landing a major deal.

Says Levy,“We went from talking about features and stories to problems that customers are running into out in the marketplace,and then finally to an ROI type of sale…You can see the impacts of not using a product like ours. What it can cost you. In some sense, a lot of customers fear a lot of these things and they’re running into a lot of these problems today. You want to be able to easily illustrate those.”

On the above slide he notes, “Another example of how to construct ROI [is to] show prospects. What was it like before you used our product? What happened afterwards and how do you measure that impact? …If you’re going in there and asking for half a million dollars, it’s much easier if you can say, “Well, we save you 10 FTEs. What are 10 engineers worth to you?” I’d pay half a million dollars to save 10 engineer worth of time.

For more lessons and insights from Crittercism CEO Andrew Levy, visit the Heavybit library.