Jeff Cotton

So as we started to look at how am I going to get more demand in, I also had to look at the types of deals that I was doing and what was going to help us be as efficient as possible in that demand generation model.

We were primarily SMB focused when I joined, which is interesting because our platform, the product itself was really not an SMB product.

we were integrating a lot of legacy technology with new modern technology, like say Avaya phone systems with Salesforce CRM.

Well, most of you today are probably not going to go to Avaya or Cisco and buy a Cisco phone system for your employees or for your inside sales teams or whatever else you have, right?

You're going to go buy some, you know, modern VoIP based system and you're going to have a lot of the built in features that our product was ultimately buying.

So we kind of misdiagnosed the market.

And as we got really maniacally focused on large enterprise, of course, large enterprise is going to have much larger deal sizes.

So we had to really understand the market.

And that was really key in terms of getting a more efficient demand generation model.

So as you can see here, a multi-year view of how we ultimately increased deal size, which was a huge part of our turnaround.

and the sort of shift there also was as we were thinking about the types of sales people we needed we had to really kind of remake the sales team um so first and foremost we were maniacal at aligning investment with revenue i had a quarterly cadence and i'll show you a scorecard here in just a few minutes that we completely ran the business on monthly i knew exactly where networking capital was

and cash balances and what pipelines and last quarter numbers were with cash likely coming in over the next 30, 60 days.

And we aligned the company 100%.

I was making decisions on do I hold back three hires this week or this month based on how we're performing today.

We would review cash literally every single week in my weekly staff meeting.

We also cut down vendor spend significantly.

I was shocked and I'm sure some of you have seen some of this.

You may even have the desire to do it yourself.

But as a startup, I think everyone wants to use all the coolest, newest, latest, whatever.

And when I looked at our vendor stack, we had three of everything.