2 Years of Sales Lessons at a Company Obsessed with Eliminating the Need for Salespeople

On this episode of Ground Up, I interviewed Brian Moseley, Databox’s Director of Sales, about how Databox’s product, marketing, sales and services team have gradually improved the self-service buying experience for new Databox customers, and eliminated the need for us to build a traditional sales team.

When Brian Moseley and I met for the first time in 2013, I wasn’t convinced he’d make a great salesperson. But, one of my sales managers at HubSpot was and I approved the hire. With training, coaching and his insane work ethic, he became one of HubSpot’s top sales reps and was promoted to sales manager.

When he approached me about joining Databox as our first salesperson in March 2017, I wasn’t sure we could afford him and didn’t think we were ready for a full-time salesperson. He agreed to join on a commission-only compensation plan for three months and proved to me that we couldn’t afford to not hire him full-time.

He was instrumental in our first year as we found product-market fit and this past year in getting us to cash-flow break-even on a monthly basis as of last month.

During this one hour and 15-minute podcast, we walked through all of the sales lessons we learned in the last 22 months of working together. Things like:

• What it is like to sell to companies who are already using a free product.
• How our product team helped streamline his sales process.
• How our marketing team helped position our product more effectively to new users.
• How our customer support team helps users adopt the product and buy on their own.

We also shared some stats about the state of our business. As regular listeners know, John Bonini, our Director of Marketing, and I have shared our Company’s performance a handful of times on our podcast. But, we haven’t in a while as we all have been focused on driving the results (in other ways besides our podcast). Here are some of the stats we shared today:

• 924 customers, including 435 partners
• $1.7M ARR
• 25 employees (with 4 openings in customer support and marketing)

Moseley has been key in getting us to this point, driving our sales to marketing agencies and as a key member of our management team, he has helped us all do our jobs better. We are very appreciative of all of the work he’s done.

But, in this episode, I shared some bittersweet news too…

Brian will be leaving Databox to take on a channel sales manager role at Amazon Web Services. Moseley wanted to be a part of a big sales team again, and clearly, our goal has been to reduce the need for sales. While he was welcome to stay as long as he wanted and I am sure would have continued to help us grow, he also wanted to try something outside of marketing technology.

I, and the whole Databox team, wish him continued success. Enjoy our farewell podcast and please join me in thanking Moseley for his service to Databox, our customers and partners.

Click here to listen on Apple Podcasts.

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