I'm working on something similar, but for customers. It's called customers-as-a-service. Basically, it provides on-demand paying customers for products that have none. It's quite simple and only charges a 10% premium on your base price.
* If you couldn't hire a strong sales team, what makes the team you just hired any good?
* How do you handle things like company culture? For sales-oriented businesses, the salesperson is the first contact, and the face of the business to the customer, do you try to integrate anything? are you white-label or upfront that you're outsourced sales?
* What about sales engineering? Sales can be technical, how is that handled?
I think that qualified lead-generation is slightly more interesting to me than getting sales. Warm leads would be fantastic.
All our sales reps are highly technical and just amazing startup hustlers. A lot of our success is also due to technology. Ping Steli at ElasticSales dot com and he'll give you the details.
* Conflicts of interest: how do I know my Product X is given fair treatment if you have another client with a similar Product X'. Say they have a higher price and your cut would be larger if you sell theirs, not mine.
* if you collapse, I stop using your service or leave for another sales team, do I get to keep the contacts?
* what measures do you have in place to prevent staff selling my contacts to my competitors or leaving with the client list?
Right now we solve conflict of interests by not working with competitive customers in the exact same space. There are long term solutions for this. Regarding contacts - yes you keep all of them :) We use contracts and processes that make it tough for our sales reps to steal any of your data. But beyond security we pay a lot of attention on who we hire in the first place :)
I'm curious about the pricing. Do you pick the companies you work with? Is pricing purely performance based? Do you take the risk for products that just don't sell?
What about dynamic commission? E.g. I tell you my product costs X/month and if you manage to sell it for more you keep the difference. If you manage to sell it with a set-up fee, you get to keep that as well.
1) Yes we pick the companies we work with :)
2) No. But it has a strong performance component so we only really make money when we perform
3) Not often
4) Potentially :)
A great product that is already generating revenue. A market that we can address. A sales cycle that is reasonable. Ping Steli at ElasticSales dot con for more info!
>The headcount growth has been purely from Elastic’s own reinvested revenues.
>Elastic has started to field interest from venture capital firms looking to provide funding, Efti says, but for now the company is focusing on the business.
Good for them. It's refreshing to see a company grow organically with their own reinvestment.
I'm sure there's even a name for it, and pretty soon a whole movement could develop around this amazing approach, complete with evangelists, books, e-books, courses, conferences.
Their website has a giant "Learn More" button that links to a contact form? Really? The "What We Do" page has three bullet points about how it works, but they really need to add more details on the actual service. There's more content on the "Work Here" page then the rest of the site combined.
That's a fair point. To be honest right now we have more demand than we can handle so we haven't really optimized the website for that. It's more of a recruiting tool for hires :) Definitely plan to improve on it though!
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I'm in the enterprise software business and there are already a lot of available options for enterprise resellers. The typical reason they fail is essentially dilution (lack of product knowledge or lack of incentive to sell your product vs another). It will be interesting to see how (or if) they manage to solve that. Does anyone from the company want to chime in (to a potential customer if you have a good answer?)
Sure :) We're not resellers. You can use dedicated sales resources on Elastic that exclusively sell your product and we have a track record at succeeding at this. Ping me at steli at elasticsales.com and we can chat more!
The concept is interesting, no doubt about it. More and more activities are outsourced (your hosting, your WP site, your customer service, your landing page optimization, etc, etc). When it comes to selling, mostly B2B as they mention, I believe there are long funnels in order to get new customers to pay the bills. Let's see how the concept evolves. Good luck!
Hi Elastic, welcome to the sales business. We're working on a sales process standardization system, which we assume will be a component of your business going forward, so it will be interesting to track your progress. We probably won't be getting anywhere near the sales-team-as-a-service area. Best of luck! Edit: removed a baseless assumption.
to do sales, you need to really know the product...I don't imagine an off the shelf sales guy will be all that effective.
And I'd imagine cost is also an issue. With your own sales team you can just hire people to work on commission...and here you not only have to hire a sales team...but also include a healthy profit margin for Elastic.
Companies use our service for the same reason companies use Amazon's AWS (even competitors like Netflix). If sales is not your core competency you probably want to work with us :)
