SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
910 Sales Call Technology On How To Sign 1000+ Seat Accounts, Pass $24m in ARR
20 Jan 2018
Chapter 1: How did Eric Esfahanian connect with Gryphon Networks?
This is the Top Entrepreneurs Podcast, where founders share how they started their companies and got filthy rich or crash and burn. Each episode features revenue numbers, customer counts, and other insider information that creates business news headlines. We went from a couple hundred thousand dollars to 2.7 million. I had no money when I started the company.
It was $160 million, which is the size of many IPOs. We're a bit strapped. We have like 22,000 customers. With over 5 million downloads in a very short amount of time, major outlets like Inc. are calling us the fastest growing business show on iTunes. I'm your host, Nathan Latka, and here's today's episode. Hello, everyone. My guest today is Eric Esfahanian.
He is the CRO at a company called Griffin Networks, a Boston-based SaaS company that specializes in driving phone-based sales effectiveness for large distributed sales teams.
Chapter 2: What unique challenges does Gryphon Networks face in sales effectiveness?
With over 30 design and process patents covering every aspect of advanced telephony, Griffin accounts ADT, Sprint, Santander, and New York Life among over 700 enterprise clients. Eric, are you ready to take us to the top? I am, Nathan. Thank you. Good. So give us context first. Obviously, you're not the founder. You're not the CEO. You're the CRO.
Chapter 3: How does Gryphon's telephony platform enhance sales performance?
I assume that's Chief Revenue Officer. How did you get in touch with the founders and why did you join? Well, I met the original founder at an airport security line in Toronto International Airport. And he was wearing a windbreaker from a town nearby where I lived. We struck up a conversation and
Long story short, he said, hey, come down and talk to me about this company that I run, and we're looking to do some really interesting things around business intelligence. At the time, I was working for a small startup out of Connecticut, and it was time for me to take another shot. And I was always very interested in business intelligence, performance management software, that space.
Because of my background, I said, you know, let's go talk in about six months of conversations and meetings. resulted in me joining on board around 2011. And when was the company founded?
Chapter 4: What is Gryphon Networks' business model and pricing structure?
The company was founded, believe it or not, in 1998. We were a SaaS company before there were SaaS companies. We were way ahead of the curve. We developed a little application that would ensure do-not-call compliance for bank branches and insurance brokers and stock brokers, people who weren't in sort of a call center environment.
we developed an app for them to call through so that we would block numbers if they happened to be illegal. Now, at that time, in 98, 99, there wasn't a federal do not call list yet, but some of the states had begun introducing legislation around restricting calls and solicitations to phone numbers, and obviously that really took off in the early 2000s. And what's your current business model?
How do you make money? We still offer a SaaS service. It is an advanced telephony platform that both captures, collects all phone-related activity for reps who happen to be calling from any device. These can be reps in an office. They can be reps out in the field.
Chapter 5: How has Gryphon Networks evolved since its founding in 1998?
They can be reps at home and everything in between. From the kiosk to the call center, we capture and aggregate all that activity that every rep conducts, and we process it in real time and give management insights into the behaviors that get results
the behaviors that you want to obviously multiply as you improve your organization, and obviously the behaviors that you want to root out and replace in order to drive overall sales effectiveness for reps calling from any device, any phone, anywhere.
And then we also have a significant portion of our business that's focused still on that compliance because now there's hundreds and hundreds of rules and laws regarding who you can contact and when and which device, and it's a complete... labyrinth for a lot of large companies. We solve and make that process as simple and risk-free as possible.
So just to be clear on the sales efficiency side, so this is something like you can go and say, listen, your number one salesperson that just killed their quota, they always use the word price in the first two minutes. The people not hitting quota, they don't use it till the last minute of the call. You should train those people who are underperforming to talk about price earlier.
Yeah, I mean, you're looking sort of a couple steps down the stream a little bit. The first question you want to ask is, how many calls do you want your average reps to be making? And now, these aren't necessarily reps that are on the phone all day long, like a call center. These are reps that, in many cases, have other parts of their job that don't involve outreach.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of customer compliance in Gryphon's operations?
Okay, so just to be clear, you're not doing intelligence with the voice data. You're literally just measuring time of day of the phone call, how many phone calls, things like that. No, we're doing both. We're doing both. So what are you doing on the voice data?
On the voice data, we capture all the audio of every conversation, and we run it through a speech analytics engine, and we provide a dashboard for managers to get both quantitative, that what you were just referring to, calls, contacts, outcomes of the calls, and then qualitative, which is the conversational indicators, the phrases and words that are either used or omitted by
that are getting results or not getting results. Oh, I thought you told me the example I just gave was something you don't do. You said it's far down where you're going, but you are providing recommendations like that.
Yeah, what I meant, and I apologize for the confusion, what I meant was a lot of our clients at the very baseline when we start talking to them, they don't even know how many calls are being made by their reps. If they guess, they usually overestimate how many calls are being made. They don't know how many calls it takes to get somebody on the phone.
They don't know how many conversations it takes to get a desired outcome
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Chapter 7: How do large sales teams benefit from Gryphon's solutions?
So they don't even know the basic stuff. So what we do is we train them to start with getting your arms around that activity to get a benchmark of what's going on. And then once you get familiar with that, you begin to start tweaking and optimizing your sales team based on this accurate data.
Then you're going to naturally want to start digging a little deeper and going into, okay, I know that Eric's a very good rep. I know that he knows how to get appointments. What is he doing on the phone? How are customers responding? How is he handling objections? Or how is he asking for referrals?
Because I got a new hire class coming in, and I want to be able to give them examples of what success sounds like. Got it. Now, how do you price? So what's your SaaS-based pricing model based on?
Chapter 8: What are Eric's insights on scaling and growth for Gryphon Networks?
It's based on per user per month, and the user is defined by a rep that would be calling through the system. Reps are issued what we call universal access. And what that means is that we give them a way to make phone calls and receive phone calls from any device anywhere, whether they're at the office. Because a lot of our clients have reps that are in one place all the time.
Maybe they're working from home. Maybe they're at the airport or in the car. And then they're in an office or several offices. With Griffin, it doesn't matter where they are. They can make calls anyway, and then we roll up all that activity in a consolidated view for managers. Okay, and then give me just a high-level sense here. So the average per seat per month is what?
What's the average seat cost? Well, our list price out of the gate is $40 per month. Okay, good. So that'll be a good minimum. That'll be correct. Yeah. And then it obviously goes up or down based on some of the features that you deploy. Yep, yep. Now, give me some more of the backstory here now that I understand the business and the pricing model. So founded in 1998, you recently joined.
Is the company bootstrapped or have you guys raised capital? We had one capital round in 2010, but we are majority controlled, local board of directors here. What I like to say is we're in control of our own destiny. That's good. Well, what's total funding into the company, though? What was that 2010 around? I want to say around $10 million.
Okay, that sounds like that was right before you joined, right? Yeah, that was actually the year before I joined. Okay. And then where are you guys today in terms of team size? Around 60 employees. Okay, and where are you guys based? Hey, I like small. Boston, Massachusetts. Small can be good. Yeah, small. Yeah, right downtown Boston where a good portion of our clients happen to reside as well.
Yeah, like Milk Street area? Yep, you got it. That's awesome. I'm looking at Milk Street right now. Oh, that's funny. I actually have friends on Milk Street. That's good stuff. All right, so 60 folks based up there in Boston. Again, you joined in 2011, raised $10 million in 2010. And then why, I mean, so from your perspective, why join a startup many, many years after it's launched?
If you're going to take a startup risk, why not go start your own thing from scratch? Fantastic, fantastic question. Because we are a unique culture here. We have very much a startup culture. We're very entrepreneurial here. What we're doing is really innovative and unique.
But we also have a stable, secure business that is profitable that we use to basically invest in all of our growth and all of our innovation. So I was struck by a very simple idea when I was first starting to talk to the founder all those years ago. this idea of capturing activity for sales reps from different devices.
I was familiar with the boiler rooms, and obviously everybody knows about call centers. But all I could think about was I spent about eight years at Hewlett Packard's in the enterprise group. And at one point, I was a manager, and I had 30 sales reps all across the country. Now, I was in an office in Boston, and they were all in home offices everywhere all across the country.
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