Thank you, Vengat, that’s great to hear!
I think there’s an answer to the first one in one or two other responses I’ve given today, hopefully you can browse through them and find out that it’s the case.
I believe we’ve been extremely lucky while we’ve also worked very hard. The luck part is rooted in the fact that so many customers of ours have consistently found us on their own and then advocated us to their friends. We provided support, and worked the hell out of ourselves but they did the actual selling. When you think about it in business terms that dynamic alone lowers acquisition costs dramatically and fuels growth while offsetting the high churn on the other end. A prime example of this is that we had no one in Brazil working for us for nearly ten years while we had thousands of Brazilians working for us for nearly ten years. In other words, no employees + thousands of customers = 10% of our business worldwide and 2nd largest market.
The hard work part meant that we took a lot of time to learn sales through practice in different settings, be it enterprise or door-to-door. We spent years prior to Pipedrive on this. It shaped me to be able to know which concepts work for salespeople when it comes to such tools and which won’t. The co-founding group was very good at recognizing that many things go into a successfully scaling business:
- raising money early on and learning from investors who had seen success,
- hiring the best people we can get and giving them a chance to build up important parts of the business,
- setting up systems for smooth global operations even without local presence,
- staying true to simple/useful in order to win the minds and hearts of massive numbers of salespeople worldwide (often at the expense of losing larger businesses to competitors),
- quantifying our efforts and results in daily and hourly data that we can use for insights, problem recognition and decision making,
- being business oriented when it comes to goals, customer-oriented when it comes to promises and deliveries, and employee-oriented when it comes to company.
I’m not saying we were incredible in all these things but I liked that, as a group, we found these things important enough to pay attention to and do something about them. By the way, this here is all my account - I’m sure my co-founders have different takes on what worked and why but that’s part of having a little larger group.