One Step at a Time

To wrap up our event with Salesforce.com we organized a follow up call between the attendees, and two of the sales leaders from Salesforce.com. The follow up call gave the attendees an opportunity to ask the questions that they thought of after the visit, once all that information had a chance to simmer.

One of the themes of the call was about where Salesforce.com was 7 years ago when it more closely resembled the expansion stage companies in our portfolio. What practices and processes did they have in place back then, and what changes in their business and in the market occurred that helped them achieve such rapid and steady growth?

An obvious point that many management teams sometimes tend to overlook is that you can’t do it all at once. The great thing about the call that the meeting lacked was a focus on the idea that Salesforce.com didn’t get to 1.3 billion over night. There growth came in stages, and their model has been iterated over and over again to help them get to where they are. And they will continue iterating on it as they continue to grow and change.

At OpenView Labs, some of the tools we are trying to develop are capability maturity models for different functional areas. These models are designed to help our portfolio companies identify where they are on the model in terms of capabilities and maturity, and help them figure out exactly what needs to happen to get to the next level in a particular functional area such as finance, sales, or product development.

In the future these capability and maturity models will be extremely valuable in our effort to provide operational support to our portfolio companies. The models will help them narrow their focus on the few things that matter, and will identify specific milestones that will show them how to bring their company’s to the next stages one step at a time.