Hey everyone, on today’s show we have Travis Truett, CEO of Ambition, an enterprise-grade sales productivity platform inspired by Fantasy Football.
We talk about how Ambition was able to triple revenue in just six months, how they use gamification to show the amount of revenue employees are making and increase ROI, how they grew the to a 7-figure company via word of mouth and customer referrals, and what they do to have a negative churn rate.
Download podcast transcript [PDF] here: Here’s How Ambition Tripled their Revenue in just 6 Months and Scaled from a $1M to $10M Run Rate TRANSCRIPT
Episode highlights:
- [1:59] – Ambition has nine people and started 2-3 years ago. They focused on larger companies, and the growth started slow, but they have tripled revenue in the past six months and scaled past the million dollar run rate, and now they have their sights set on the 10 million run rate.
- [2:53] – Revenues are in the lower seven figures. They are focusing on product instead of rushing sales. Now they are looking at 7 figures and looking to 8.
- [3:50] – They raised several seed rounds, and have taken some smaller funding checks.
- [5:40]- As a startup they are trying to grow in a methodical and safe manner.
- [6:16] – A case study for Ambition would be a larger organization with 100s of sales people that may want to drive sales and transparency. They create a scorecard for each role. There is accountability across all data systems. Then they deploy gamification and to set some goals. It’s also a fun way to drive sales towards goals and manage productivity.
- [8:28] – They track when employees set records or hit a benchmark. They are experimenting with tools like Slack and tools that connect companies.
- [9:16] – Employees log in. They see their score card and their daily, weekly, monthly goals. Then there is a competition widget with a score chart and projections. It shows overall ranking and productivity scores.
- [10:19] – They charge $60 per person per month, with large company discounts.
- [10:49] – They showed a logistic company that each employee was making about $425 of revenue a month, so they were seeing an ROI of 6x on Ambition.
- [12:25] – The big goal for the rest of the year is to productize and upsell Ambition.
- [13:00] – They have a negative churn rate. The product is focused on making an employee’s lives more fun. They focused on a harder sale of increasing the employee experience. When it increases employee satisfaction and success it spreads to departments and companies.
- [15:18] – They can serve any metric based employee. Sales are the easiest segment to improve ROI, but they have already expanded into customer support and other areas.
- [17:16] – Mid-market companies they focus on are in the 75 to 100 seat mark. This size gets a lot of benefit from scaling. A company with product market fit is a good fit.
- [19:12] – Outsourcing customer success and support too early was one of the biggest struggles for Ambition. Which forced Travis to take ownership of customer support and success. Now he directly interfaces with customers and gets answers to really targeted questions and fix problems. He can systematically reduce support needs.
- [20:58] – Chasing early partnerships too early was also a pain point. It was just way too early and they were over their heads.
- [21:53] – Not taking vacations in the first two years is also a regret. Travis leaves the country every quarter now. He comes back refreshed and ready to roll.
- [23:43] – If Travis could go back in time, he would learn to program earlier.
Resources from this interview:
- Ambition
- Must-read book: Dispatches by Michael Herr
- Travis@Ambition.com
- Twitter @tdtruett
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