Yesware’s Matthew Bellows on His Ironic Challenge

Project Infomation

Converting free users into paying customers. By early 2013, even with a newly hired 10-person sales team, Yesware’s sales were abysmal and the company had yet to turn a profit, casting a pall over pending efforts to raise venture capital. Because he was struggling to sell a product built to make sales easier, Matthew Bellows, a co-founder, felt like the shoemaker whose own children pad about barefoot.
YESWARE is a four-year-old company that designs and sells software intended to make it easier for sales teams to record and analyze essential data. Released in late 2012, Yesware’s basic version, which can be downloaded free, quickly attracted more than 100,000 users.
  • Client : Insight Studio
  • Date : 20 Feb, 2018
  • Skills : Project Planning

Challenge & Solution

But this kind of oversight requires salespeople to type updates into customer relations systems, rather like police detectives pecking away on case reports back at their desks. Sales agents hate doing it, and sales managers hate hectoring them.
Clean house. Fire seven of the 10 salespeople.
Step in himself as vice president of sales and devote the necessary time to training and supervision. To ensure he would have that time, he would hire a chief executive to serve in his stead.
Hire a vice president of sales.
Have this person do the firing, hiring and supervision while Mr. Bellows remained chief executive. Such a search might take as long as six months, and with the need to raise venture capital looming, Mr. Bellows wondered if he could wait that long.
Promote the best sales person among the three
He deemed worthy of keeping to manage the team. The person he had in mind had six years of sales experience. He had never led a sales team but had demonstrated an aptitude for mentoring and leadership.

Our Process

In his previous company, with no investors and no need to raise money, business had been simpler. He could serve as chief executive and the lone sales rep. Any doubt that he was wearing too many hats at Yesware evaporated the day he discovered his entire sales team in a conference room at 2 p.m. on a Wednesday in June — “hanging out, listening to loud music and drinking beer, like it was a frat house.”
01
Improve sales & operations & production planning
02
Determine the right inventory level
03
Optimize the supply chain for perfect order planning
04
Improve sales & operations & production planning

Result Driven

Mr. Bellows closed the conference room door without a word. That weekend he went to a meditation center in Vermont to ponder how he might fix his sales team. (Credit: nytimes.com)
Reduced lead time by 43%
Decreased variability by 50%
Lowered the risk of back-order by 95%
Increased stock for finished goods by 10%

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