A new CEO’s blueprint to start afresh at tech firm
Guts Sales Team
When Dan Shimmerman walked into the offices of Toronto-based Blueprint Software Systems in 2013, it only took him 15 minutes to decide that the company needed to radically change.
The sales team was uninspired and directionless; it showed in Blueprint’s “anemic” sales, he said. “It was easy for me to take no prisoners.”
Shimmerman’s first instinct, as a “bag-carrying sales rep” at heart, was to gut the organization’s workforce and start fresh. Within two weeks, there were only three people left from a 30-member sales team. The entire payroll was slashed in half. Retrospectively, he still feels he could have gone further.
It seems like a ruthless move, but Shimmerman believed Blueprint’s sales model was broken. He retained a core group of staff and brought in experienced leadership, including people from the company he founded and later sold to IBM, Varicent Software. “They helped galvanize the company and form a new nucleus.”
Now, Blueprint, which manages clients’ IT projects, has about 100 employees and expects to add 50 this year. The revamped organizational chart is just one part of why Blueprint’s sales are projected to triple this year from six-straight years of less than $10-million revenue until Shimmerman came on board as chief executive.
His biggest challenge, he said, was to get his new team to be more outwardly focused. That meant less attention on the product and more on marketing it. “A lot of companies believe they’ve got a great product,” Shimmerman said. “They’re confounded why this thing doesn’t just fly off the shelves. Here, it didn’t happen.”
He felt the time was right to make an aggressive sales push. The market was ripe, but there wasn’t any particular player that was capitalizing on it. “It was a sleepy market. There weren’t a lot of dominant players. (There were) a lot of bottom feeders.”
His strategy was multipronged. First, Shimmerman narrowed down the target market to large corporations, in particular ones in the financial services sector.
Next, he got his team to focus on people in those organizations with more purchasing clout — chief information officers and vice-presidents, instead of junior buyers. Once the connections are made, the sales representatives try to persuade clients to accept a companywide solution, rather than offering to fix one problem.
The result of all these changes is an average deal size that’s grown 10-fold into triple-digit figures. Now, the beefed-up sales force, backed by a bigger development team, is expanding into Asia and reinforcing its position in Europe.
As part of this year’s hiring, Shimmerman plans to add 25 developers and 30 sales people. But that won’t be easy: Plenty of firms on the West coast are also recruiting talent, and many of the recruits are more than happy to relocate.
His pitch to graduates is that Blueprint offers an environment where IT personnel also learn business acumen.
“We feel we have a very compelling story,” he said.