Spending time with Central Desktop in Pasadena

Greetings from sunny California! This week I am spending time with Central Desktop’s sales team at their headquarters in Pasadena, CA. Central Desktop is an expansion stage company that offers a robust collaboration software (Saas), and OpenView made venture capital investment in their business two years ago. An interesting fact about our relationship with Central Desktop – OpenView used their product before we made the investment, and it is a tool that all employees at our venture capital firm use to collaborate on a daily basis even to this day. 

As you may have read in a previous post, OpenView Labs is working with Central Desktop to support their sales team (that currently primarily works with inbound leads) with outbound lead generation services. This is one way that the Labs (the management consulting arm of the business) supports the companies in the portfolio. Because the management teams at these growing businesses have so much on their plates (Central Desktop had over 800% employee growth last year, despite the poor economy – they’ve been busy!), OpenView is able to step in and hire, support, and manage a team of Lead Qualification Specialists, or junior sales people responsible for outbound prospecting to find leads for the Account Executives to close.

As an analyst for OpenView Labs, I have heard a great deal about Central Desktop (in addition to actually using the product to collaborate with my coworkers), but it has really been a wonderful experience working with the team in-person while they are in their element. The Pasadena office has about 40 employees, and every person in the office has made an effort to introduce themselves to me and the new hires (who will be working for Central Desktop, but working in the OpenView Labs office in Boston). Marketing, finance, customer service – everyone. What a great group! Even the CEO, Isaac Garcia, has made an effort to spend time with us.

Personality is such a major piece of criteria that OpenView considers making an investment (and the partners are very particular about finding the right fit), so I can completely see why Central Desktop made the cut.

Check out a recent article in USA Today about SaaS models and small businesses. Central Desktop got a great shout out!