Scaling enterprise sales with digital transformation for a niche industry

we've got George elfand from rally Ware whose revenue is north of five million dollars give it up for George everybody thank you very much everyone really appreciate seeing you all here 9 A.M on Friday I know it's on the second day is not that easy to come in that early but uh really really good to see everyone so uh my name is George alphand I'm the co-founder and CEO at rollaware and uh

we'll talk today about a couple of uh things first like I'll start like I'll talk about the revenues uh well actually we're at around uh slightly above 7.5 and um as you can see the revenue is interestingly like the growth is has been uh actually accelerating rather than decelerating over the years and if you look at 2000 before 2018 it probably took us as many years as it took us to grow to get to that number and the reason for that is I'll be talking about

we are in the uh primarily like we do a lot of work in a smaller Niche industry and it takes a long time to actually establish yourself to build the reputation to get uh to the right place with it and some of the lessons some of the rules when you're operating selling into a smaller industry are very different than when you're selling like what is being taught like for startups that are selling like into a very large

broad broad market so I will talk about a couple of things one I'll talk about the sales in Niche industry as I said already how we transformed our messaging to help us accelerate the sales what are the must-haps of conquering a smaller industry and lessons for quick and sustainable scaling I'll then switch the gears and talk about the importance of core values because you could build sales you could do a lot of great things but uh what we learned is the team is the key the people are the most

important assets you have and a lot of people keep saying that but as you grow more the more you actually feel it and the more you realize it and how it comes to the point like when it's important to have the core values not just because someone said that but because you're actually feel that's the way how your team should be operating and how you uh how you succeed and the third one I'll talk about the case study how they actually our core values uh helped us

like this is the case in point how Corvallis helped us in a very specific very tragic very difficult situation we had a big part of our team uh in hark even Ukraine on the day that the invasion started so we'll talk about that and that will be another part very emotional part of the of the presentation so let's go right in it um so let me start before even I go what we do uh let me start into what rollover

what is our overall broad mission statement is rollover's mission statement is to provide an opportunity for every member of any distributed group to feel connected engaged and valued within the other overarching community to unlock their full potential a lot of great words a lot of how we feel what we want to change but how does it transform into the marketplace you can't come with just your mission statement and expect the customers to buy it so we decided we

want to conquer with the world we want to go into The Big Industry and we said okay so what our product does it's rollover reinvents Enterprise training by connecting learning activities with operational and performance data and this as a result delivers great significant kpi improvements for companies with remote and distributed workforces a lot of interesting great words great insights what we learned from it like when we went to the uh to

the marketplace and tried to sell it like we've faced quite a few obstacles and the obstacles were we saw that this is not specific enough for the industry pains there is a lack of emotional connection with the buyers with the industry it sounds interesting but what's in it for me very often we were getting that question not enough credibility with existing industry players is less Mission critical that's the question you'll always be getting

regardless whether you are mission critical or not and there are very few instances when you can actually prove it without before getting into into a customer and uh we're getting low conversion uh rates on ours on our funnel as a result so we went back and we realized okay we're getting most of our sales in uh one industry and that industry is getting a lot of value so instead of being overly generic and trying to

conquer the world why don't we actually focus on that industry and focus on the language for that industry it's in the industry it's a relatively smaller uh industry that's called direct selling like companies uh like Avon Herbalife Etc and uh it has its own rules it has its own um uh structure and everything so we had to really build uh the language and build the messaging right for that

industry so we introduced the rollover Suite which is uh correct it has a field performance enablement platform and it's an end-to-end software a software suite a purpose built to maximize the user experience engagement and success of direct selling field teams across their entire selling life cycle very specific very language that really fits into the industry that really resonates with the panes that they're having

then we were very excited to talk about the metrics that we've got so it was great like the numbers are tremendous like could change the world still didn't really resonate as much as much with the industry so we went back and really went specific on that industry so what is rollover like we talked about like years of experience in specifically in that direct selling industry uh what we do

that we are trusted by a large number of of the largest brands in that industry and the most important like the specific capabilities and the most important is the specific Roi numbers on the specific metrics in that industry so as specific be as specific as you can be with the industry don't worry about not being broad enough you can start a small you can focus and then you you can conquer the rest

the rest other Industries or you can expand within the industry so as a result of these efforts we were able to get great customers letter leaders in the direct selling industry and interestingly even though our language was focused on that industry seeing the success in the industry we were able to get outside and got some really cool customers in the in the tech world and uh and a few other verticals so let me talk about a couple of the must-haps for Conquering the smaller

lineage industry on the marketing side be as deep as you can with the industry it's important you're developing the reputation it's all based on long-term relationships it's all based on knowing your customers so going into any trying to get any industry Awards as many of them as you can case studies very specific ones of specific kpis specific numbers not just to publish something but really when you can like less is

more what you can you can have less case studies but with very very specific insights if you're doing press releases it's very important to make sure that they're published by customers not by you because it adds a lot of credibility sometimes there's a lot of back and forth on that sometimes you have to provide the discount for that but those discounts are very well worth it um and webinars and many other things that could be pertaining to you very

important in terms of the expansion because everybody is asking like Niche industry what do you do how do you expand like what uh what can I do how can I grow the business to be like on the Venture Heights so there's a lot of opportunities for expansion the more the deeper you get into the industry the more the industry understands you and as you're bringing value they will want to buy more from you so you can form the right Partnerships that can provide additional value for you you can introduce and should introduce new

product offerings because the customers like if you're truly bringing them value they keep asking like what else can you do for us we're ready to pay we're right here but just just give us something International expansion sometimes the industry could seem much smaller within the us or like some of the marked traditional markets but globally there is a lot more opportunities so sometimes it takes time and effort to uncover them but as you're in covering them you will

get a lot of value as well and always look every industry has adjacent Industries adjacent verticals that with small modifications primarily on the messaging you can actually go ahead and and with your with having proven a value and having great metrics into in that industry you can actually go and conquer them like for example a lot of drug selling is is an industry but it's also a way it's a channel it's

a way of selling but a lot of companies with indirect selling sell cosmetics so after we've developed amazing results amazing case studies with the companies in direct selling and a lot of our customers happen to be Cosmetics we're like okay we can go into retail with the Cosmetics use case and really proving the value through that so there's lots of opportunities don't think that the niche market is is small by itself what's critical is really showing them

especially if you're in the Enterprise is showing the meaningful quantifiable Roi and here I don't mean just showing the usage metrics or engagement and that's what most of the software companies do like to really prove your value you need to prove and show how it affects the business of your clients it takes time sometimes sometimes it takes in especially in the beginning non-scalable methods like doing a lot of

those calculations by hand and then productizing them but the value you're bringing with that like don't underestimate it and of course the Rockstar team especially in sales that operates uh based on values for that like are only the best people people that have within the niche industry that have the reputation that that other people in the industry know well and trust them and also very importantly especially within the Enterprise sales when you're selling

based on Roi based on the increase in kpis it's very critical that it's very critical that you bring the sales leaders let not only just build relationships and uh can shake hands and ask for the order but really can challenge the customers that you have this problem and here's how you solve it and this is the best solution those are the types of people that make the difference for you so when you're doing some of the awards

very feel free to be memorable if you feel free to do what you care about when you're accepting them for example for me this year I'm from Ukraine originally a big part of our team is in Ukraine we happen to get the industry award in direct selling very unexpectedly for us when we were in the audience and I had a Ukrainian flag right with me so I didn't know what the reception would be and but I knew we were doing this for the team and uh while like a lot of people were

being bombed right at that moment it was very important for us to stand the Ukrainian flag we got a standing ovation and everyone people were coming up and everyone was really really touched and that like actually helped people remember us better and really not just fulfill like what we felt really strongly about but also build an impact for the business case studies of course have numbers have quotes have very very specific

information as specific as you get you're not doing it for a SEO you're doing it for uh really impact and the law and the customers read them of course get into as many Publications that your industry could have it's important to stay on top of mind it's important for people to remember you it's important for people to feel oh if they got printed here they're credible so I should talk to them this is this is very critical uh so to finish that part of the

conversation let me give you a couple of myths and the reality on them so for example like a lot of people say oh small Niche industry is quick to capture I wish so it's not true it takes years but once you take that time and you conquer it you're actually you build a reputation and you can scale very fast second is you know in all the startup schools they'll say they'll tell you

fail fast and and learn from it uh great learning when you have a huge industry and you can sell to as many people as you can and you'll never remember the people that you failed with not in the smaller Industries reputation is the key and your fast failure as much as you learn from it will be remembered a small Niche industry means small addressable Market don't agree with that either because once you establish yourself once you have a reputation they want to buy more

from it so from you there's a lot of opportunities for expansion you can also expand not just in terms of products but also in terms of geographies so um so then uh that's all for my first part now I'd like to switch gears a little bit and talk about the importance of core values how you build the team and so forth all right uh so let's do that uh we

started with the key beliefs to Founders who want to do good things be with people lead by example and so forth uh hire people the same way but as you scale the beliefs don't scale by themselves so we decided we need to introduce the core values and our values are go all in we make things we go all in we make things happen and we grow together very important for us and we've been doing a lot like as we realized

like a lot of the traits a lot of uh a lot of the qualities come from them so recruiting goal settings on boarding performance evaluation all of these are utilizing our core values and we've realized that it's a really good way to to to see like how people are performing and where they're going um I want to jump on the section about the war uh that's where our core values came uh into play on February 24th uh

2022 this year Our Lives got changed and uh we were we had 82 people in kharkiv Ukraine 20 minutes from the Russia border it's been crazy we knew something was going on the weeks coming in but we didn't know what I personally didn't believe in the wars happening but it did but as a CEO we had to prepare how do you prepare for the war they don't teach at the business school they don't teach it at accelerators but

um what we did we looked at a lot of plans some of them said one of them said like at 10 A.M after the invasion we will all get at a bus stop and we'll get evacuated good luck doing that this is really really tough when the war starts everything changes so instead of that we decided okay we have core values we'll develop a set of operating principles that will operate by we can't provide you a detailed plan but we can tell you how we will be making the decisions when we do that so what we did we did we did this as a par

a brief outline of our plan we said we can confirm to everyone physical Safety and Security the most important things will help you with accommodations will help with evacuations but we don't know where how what like we will be what we're promising we will be making the decisions as like as as there's a need to come in will be very quick to make those decisions and we'll take everyone's interest into into account

with uh we started uh uh really uh working very close what happened didn't I okay uh so as the war started the attack changed everything we got two days before we told people to evacuate only 20 did the rest like were really having a hard time for the next uh at least two weeks because you couldn't get out of hard give people were getting staying in the office because that

proved to be the safest location with kids with um uh with pets with ever everyone and uh our team was getting just stronger you know like all the you've seen all the Articles all the Press about it and uh we one thing I want to say was politely Tim rollover became basically three teams one is uh the the team in Ukraine who was told don't work don't worry about work don't worry about uh anything will take care crisis management myself

and a couple of other other leaders in the company were 24 7 figuring things out for the team and then business continuity is the rest of the executives and the teams in the US and the rest of the world were actually taking care of business which worked out very very well we didn't have any disruptions any problems with the customers it's actually as you've seen the business has been growing this year despite all the craziness so here's some pictures from our office 24 7 operations

it's been insane now we only have three people in in hark if out of 82 everyone else was left the city in the country since then uh as I said business continuity went great we relocated people out of Harkey first out of um out of Ukraine and then we found the permanent relocations uh we actually ran a rescue operation for this guy he was 50 days in the outskirt of kharkiv he got

into the he was in the village that was taken by Russians on day one we lost electricity they lived in a basement for 50 days we've been trying like for all that time to figure out how to get him out and we ended up hiring International rescue agencies to get it like this is this is a story for a movie it's been incredible he is now in Toronto we're very excited to have him um our customer gave us a house in Germany just said please guys live there

we really want to uh want you to be well so really people reacted and have been great with us uh new offices Toronto and Barcelona were extended our Toronto created Barcelona as a new European location and we're looking forward for good times to come back as I was listening yesterday to presentation about the global Retreat for the uh for the team like I'm like that's what we're doing next year after after

we win and after Ukraine gets gets its place back so thank you very much guys thank you for your support and [Applause] [Music]