For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. CASE: E-647 DATE: 02/20/18 STRIDE: THE EARLY SALES DECISIONS I hope that sales in the next year or two is about pattern matching. Right now we are in a phase when we have no patterns to match against, everything is about feeling it out for the first time. 1 —Elise Bergeron, Cofounder and COO of Stride At 5:37 p.m., traffic was heavy as usual for Friday evenings on California’s Highway 101. As her Uber slowly made its way to Stride’s Palo Alto office, Elise Bergeron checked the time and mentally listed all the to-dos she had yet to tackle before the weekend. She had just landed at San Francisco’s airport, back from another business trip focused on advancing negotiations to close a deal that had the potential to be a major breakthrough for the start-up she had cofounded. The past 18 months had been challenging, but also tremendously exciting. After quitting a prestigious job, she had launched Stride with two of her former coworkers and felt optimistic about its prospects. As Chief Operating Officer, she had led the team through the process to identify a target market for the company, define a sales model, manage the incipient sales cycle, and hire their first salespeople. The number of customers using Stride, a data-based marketing platform, had been growing steadily—more than ever, the venture showed real promise. A couple of months earlier, one of the world’s largest telecommunications companies had demonstrated interest in the platform offered by Stride. Its cofounders recognized that chance to take their young start-up to a new level as unique. However, negotiations proved complex and time-consuming; and while the entrepreneurs had high hopes, all the uncertainty was putting the whole team through an exhausting emotional roller-coaster. And more: the potential deal could also initiate a chain reaction involving every element of Stride’s sales organization and strategy. She wondered silently: “What should we do?” 1 All quotes from individuals affiliated with Stride presented in this case, as well as information about Stride not otherwise referenced herein, are based on interviews conducted on December 19, 2017, with Elise Bergeron, Scott Bessler, and Tim Fletcher, cofounders and, respectively, COO, CTO, and CEO of Stride. Amadeus Orleans (MBA 2017) and Michael Speiser, Lecturer in Management, prepared this case as the basis for class discussion rather than to illustrate either effective or ineffective handling of an administrative situation. Copyright © 2018 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. 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This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 2 STRIDE’S FORMATION From Coworkers to Cofounders Elise Bergeron met Scott Bessler and Tim Fletcher in the summer of 2013. She had just joined RelateIQ, a Palo Alto-based customer relationship software company, to lead product marketing. Bessler had been the company’s second engineer and Fletcher had joined a few months after him, as the first product manager. Despite their dissimilar backgrounds—Bergeron was a 2011 Harvard Business School graduate who had worked at Facebook, Bessler was an experienced computer engineer with a degree from the University of Illinois (2002), and Fletcher was a 2011 Stanford GSB graduate with a consulting background—the trio thoroughly enjoyed working together and quickly developed strong personal bonds. RelateIQ was an excellent early-stage school for the three coworkers: supported by a friendly internal culture, the company had focused on creating a platform capable of offering insights to salespeople based on data automatically captured from the sales process. The efforts proved worthwhile in July 2014, when Salesforce.com acquired the company for a reported $390 million.2 Renamed SalesforceIQ, the unit served as a core element of Salesforce Einstein, the Salesforce.com CRM platform with artificial intelligence capabilities. Less than one year after the acquisition, Bergeron, Bessler, and Fletcher had already become, respectively, VP of marketing, chief software architect, and VP of product at SalesforceIQ. Those significant career achievements in the new organization, however, did not cloud their fiery entrepreneurial ambitions. The three friends constantly talked about eventually joining forces to launch their own start-up, enthused by their shared experience in RelateIQ’s successful trajectory. In March 2016, they finally decided to take the leap. Bergeron recounted: “When things became somewhat stable at Salesforce, we said, ‘okay, team is in a good place, product has a plan—time for us to go.’” “If we can build this, are you going to use it?” As the squad discussed pain points that it would be excited to tackle in the new venture, a trend emerged. Every conversation inevitably converged towards the opportunities observed during their time at Salesforce. One of those involved applying data to create effective marketing strategies. Despite the wealth of digital data points available for marketing teams at the time, as well as the explosive growth rate of products such as Salesforce’s Marketing Cloud,3 it seemed that the vast majority of marketers continued to face difficulties. Those included accessing the data available 2 “Salesforce.com Agrees to Acquire RelateIQ for About $390 Million,” The Wall Street Journal, July 11, 2014, https://www.wsj.com/articles/salesforce-com-agrees-to-acquire-relateiq-in-390-million-deal-1405096071 (January 9, 2018). 3 Marketing Cloud was Salesforce’s unified marketing platform dedicated to consumer engagement. This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 3 and creating personalized campaigns, which frequently required a variety of specialized technical knowledge. Fletcher explained the insight: We realized that all these big consumer brands have so many digital interactions with their customers, the data is amazing. But none of that data was on the Salesforce platform, it all existed on databases somewhere else; that was very limiting in terms of what the software could do. So all those companies were building tools [to use the data] themselves, and it was just terrible because it was manual and really expensive. And so we said: “There should be a product for that; someone needs to go build this and we are going to do it.” He and Bergeron immediately set off to validate the idea with personal and professional connections, as well as with companies that they knew could potentially benefit from a datadriven marketing solution. The responses were overwhelmingly positive and it became clear that the trio was onto something valuable. Fletcher recalled, “Then we started asking, ‘if we can build this, are you going to use it?’ As soon as someone said yes, we knew we had to make it happen.” In April 2016, Stride was incorporated in Palo Alto, and the cofounders self-allocated roles based on their previous work experiences (see Exhibit 1 for summarized biographies of the founders). Fletcher would be the CEO, splitting his time among customer-facing responsibilities, product management, and recruiting tasks. Bergeron agreed to be COO, in charge of operations and all go-to-market functions, including sales and marketing. Bessler was the obvious choice to be the new start-up’s CTO. Together, they envisioned and developed a system able to gather large volumes of data from disparate sources and aggregate such data in one platform with a simple user interface (see Exhibit 2 for a visual representation of Stride’s functionality). The tool enabled marketing teams to develop and launch personalized marketing campaigns through various channels, something the otherwise would require months of hard work from specialized teams of data scientists. Furthermore, the platform would allow for more creative iteration on each campaign and substantial cost savings on infrastructure technology. IDENTIFYING THE TARGET MARKET: WHO REALLY CARES? While Bessler and his team of two engineers—the only hires during Stride’s first three months— worked to build a first working product, Bergeron and Fletcher hustled to find an effective way to segment and select the companies Stride should focus on for the purposes of product development and sales. In other words, they needed to figure out Stride’s target market. Does Size Matter? A common criterion often used in Silicon Valley to determine target customers was their size. In fact, it was a widespread approach for start-ups at the time to start by focusing on small This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 4 businesses and progressively work their way up to larger customers, while gradually expanding the feature sets of the products they offered. As Bergeron and Fletcher considered that practice, however, she concluded that it could be problematic for Stride, given the start-up’s value proposition and the feature set of its product. She explained: “A product that we would build for a small business trying to do data-driven marketing is totally different from the product we would build for a mid-sized or large company.” As a result, the newly formed team would have to make a decision about customer size from the outset. And it would need to do so as soon as possible, since the engineering team needed to know what features to build. Bergeron considered the peculiarities and challenges of each potential target group. Small companies Contrary to common wisdom, small companies seemed to Bergeron to be the least interesting segment for Stride at that early stage. These businesses generally had very simple data models and usually already relied on e-commerce platforms such as Shopify. This combination tended to be sufficient for their modest needs. Additionally, the willingness of these companies to pay was expected to be low, while their technical and time requirements would be higher than ideal for Stride, as Bessler clarified: Small companies have more needs because you are their whole thing. They need support and constantly ask for help. This means that your solution will probably have to be more complete, because you cannot spend a lot of individual time working with all of them. From day one you need to have self-sign up, invite user, password reset, etc. Mid-sized and large companies More significantly affected by the problem of dealing with disparate marketing data sources, mid-sized and large companies tended to value a higher degree of flexibility and sophistication in their marketing tools. These businesses also had a larger volume of capital availability, which could translate into higher willingness to pay. The potential benefits from Stride’s value proposition seemed very relevant for those groups, which often had hefty legacy data setups stored in different formats and platforms. Bergeron elaborated: Any time they want to roll out a new campaign, it takes two months of engineering work to get the data feed pulled together. For these companies, Stride could become the kind of orchestration command center for a marketer to be able to say: “I have all of my data sources here and now I can build my campaign and push it out to any channel.” Among the benefits of targeting mid-sized and large customers, however, one important challenge stood out. As the organizational structures became more complex as a function of size, it was harder to understand their internal processes and decision-making dynamics. More than one department got involved in the negotiations and visibility as to who was the ultimate decision-maker in any sales process was murky. This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 5 Another hard decision was choosing among the possibilities for principal customer focus: should Stride prioritize mid-sized, large companies, or both simultaneously? Despite the similarities and complementarities between those two groups, the differences were too many to be ignored. On one hand, there were feature set differences, particularly with respect to administrative, organizational, and security requirements. On the other, there were sales process and cycle length differences. Pursuing large enterprises was very attractive financially, but this strategy brought with it numerous risks in terms of execution. Large companies had a greater number of users—which meant acute pain regarding data-driven marketing needs—and potential deals naturally offered a more robust financial payoff than those expected from working with smaller businesses. Additionally, the initial sale was expected to be hard, but future sales/renewals tended to be simpler with companies of that size, since their costs to switch out of the platform once it had been integrated were considered high. On the down side, the sales cycle tended to be longer and decision-making was slow in large companies. Moreover, the segment was very competitive and could end up being a costly distraction to a start-up. Contrarily, mid-sized companies usually had a shorter and less complex sales cycle, which translated into the possibility of conducting more deals within the same period of time. As a result, in theory, these types of companies allowed more opportunities to improve the product and to find product-market fit. Their individual tickets, however, were much smaller than those of large enterprises; and their willingness to pay was generally not as high. Finally, the simplified internal processes in mid-sized customers did not necessarily translate into more transparent or predictable decisions in all cases. B2B and B2C: Different Use Cases? In parallel to the size analysis, Bergeron and the rest of the team decided to investigate the target market matter from a use case standpoint, i.e., through the lenses of who would be the actual users of the product inside of the potential customers. In the case of Stride, this meant looking at the marketing professionals within the companies likely to be potential customers. After some research, she observed that marketers in companies that sold their products or services to other businesses (B2B) and marketers in companies that sold directly to the final consumer (B2C) had different experiences in relation to analyzing data and executing campaigns. Although both groups experienced the problem of accessing and making sense of data in order to develop marketing programs, the similarities stopped there. In general, marketers in B2B companies seemed more resigned to the lack of sophistication in their systems, while those in B2C firms showed higher engagement and interest in a potential solution. Unlike the former group, those in B2C companies seemed to appreciate the usefulness of Stride’s platform as central to their work, not just as a “cool” feature. Additionally, sales teams typically were the primary drivers of revenue in B2B structures, whereas marketing teams generally had direct revenue responsibility in B2C models. That reality usually gave the B2C marketers more influence over budget allocations and greater This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 6 decision-making power (see Exhibit 3 for a graphical analysis of the relative importance of sales and marketing in B2C and B2B companies). On a negative note, however, B2C clients also had needs and requirements that were significantly more complex than those of B2B marketers. DEFINING THE SALES MODEL: SEARCHING FOR CHANNEL MARKET FIT Another important decision on the plate of the recently formed team concerned the sales model for their business. Should Stride sell directly to their customers or use channels? If the latter, which channels offered more potential to the newly formed start-up? How about the risks of each one? Could a model that mixed direct and indirect strategies work? Direct Sales In the midst of the multiple doubts, Bergeron was certain about one aspect: “No matter what, we have to make direct sales work.” She believed that it was fundamental to own the relationship with the customer, especially during the initial stages following the product launch. Despite the considerable monetary and time-related costs of managing a direct sales effort, Fletcher agreed with his cofounder. He explained: “at the price point we thought we could get, we had to go for direct sales and [needed to] have at least some successful cases there.” How to approach potential customers directly was not completely clear, however. One possibility was to focus on performing sales to specific departments—certainly easier to access than the company leadership—and then hustling for a company-wide buy-in. Alternatively, Stride could adopt a top-down approach, trying to sell to the chief marketing officers of the potential customer, forcing a strategic decision early on in the relationship. This plan was difficult to execute, but would be helpful to avoid surprises late in the sale process. Channels As to whether the firm should also pursue indirect channels, the considerations were more nuanced. At Salesforce, Bergeron had witnessed the complex dynamics of the “partnership community”—the start-ups that sold their software through the Salesforce platform. The exposure offered by the platform contributed significantly to early growth, but there was a high cost in terms of revenue-sharing. In the case of Salesforce, the cut was approximately 30 percent of total revenue. Furthermore, the founders feared that relying on such a channel could generate an undesired level of dependence. Bergeron pondered: “We want to build a big, impactful, industry-changing company; I think you don’t do that by attaching yourself to a single platform, partner, or channel.” It seemed that many companies that had built products on a partner’s platform tended to end up selling only to customers of that partner. Bessler shared the concern: “It’s hard to justify a long-term vision of becoming the best marketing platform if you start as an add-on to something.” Nonetheless, they were not ready to rule out the possibility of also developing an indirect sales model. The team recognized that sales channels seemed to be an important element for the scaling efforts of a start-up. Bergeron elaborated: This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 7 When we talk about scaling we do think channel is really important. Starting conversations with Infosys, for example, and using that as a path to get to bigger companies is key. In order to sell to bigger companies you need that channel relationship, because a lot of them rely on these partners or on technology vendors to recommend technologies. System integrators and firms that provided information technology services, such as Infosys and Accenture, often acted as advisors to larger companies. Cultivating a relationship with those partners could probably help get Stride into deals. Its founders were definitely interested in getting into business conversations through such channels but how could they reconcile that desire with their strong commitment to direct sales? “We want to have relationships with all these channels, but we don't want to be dependent on them,” summarized Bergeron. FORMING PATTERNS: THE SALES CYCLE As processes gradually were put in place, Stride’s sales efforts developed a consistent rhythm. The volume of conversations with potential customers increased and sales cycle patterns started to emerge. From Sourcing to Closing Generally, the sales process at Stride started with the development of an outbound campaign strategy. Such campaigns were built based on a combination of (i) identifying potential customers based on their profile, (ii) monitoring online forums to find professionals dealing with a problem that could be solved by Stride’s product, and (iii) relying on referrals from existing customers. After defining a set of potential targets had been defined, the Stride team sent outreach e-mails from either Bergeron’s or Fletcher’s e-mail accounts. The COO explained the content of these emails: “The pitch there is much more like, ‘Hey, we are building a company to solve this problem; is that something you have experienced? We would love to get your insight in how to tackle it.’—It was a much softer approach.” Whenever the response was positive, the team moved ahead to work on qualifying the potential customer and setting up introductory calls. Qualifying prospective customers for a product that was not a direct replacement for an existing offering proved particularly difficult, resulting in unforeseen expense of time and cash. Once the company had been successfully qualified, the team would then schedule a first meeting to present the product. Contingent on how fruitful that initial encounter was, Stride would then look to pull in more people from different teams—often marketing and IT—within the potential customer to evaluate the product in greater depth. For larger customers, the next step often was a demo presented by Bergeron, with the presence of Bessler or someone on his team—the CTO tried to participate only in demo meetings in which his presence was fundamental. He commented on Stride’s approach to demos: This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 8 One nice thing about big deal sizes is that you can spend a little more effort on the demos. Rather than having one general fake demo account to show people, we tend to create a demo account for each organization, which we semi-automated pretty early on. Following a successful demo, specific conversations ensued about aspects of implementation, price, and timing. This led to the last step, in which the team tried to close the sale. The whole process normally lasted from two to eight months, depending on the size of the deal. Founders’ Participation Bergeron, Fletcher, and Bessler were strong believers in the importance of founders being actively involved in the sales efforts, especially in the early stages of the start-up. While the CTO focused on helping with deeper technical conversations with customers, the COO and the CEO usually joined the important business meetings attended by individuals that were higher up on the prospective customer’s hierarchical ladder. These were normally later negotiations about deal terms or solution design—but sometimes potential clients engaged their senior executives from the very first meetings, which prompted the participation of Stride’s founders fairly early in the process. Bergeron had hopes that the sales model would eventually run independently, as the team developed procedures to improve its efficiency and speed. For the time being, however, she saw her involvement in sales as both an obligation and an opportunity: I think that it is not reasonable at this early stage to ask any salesperson to be able to deliver that whole thing end-to-end. They need to be able to strategically pull you in to build trust at those key moments. It is important for the sales dynamics and morale, for the teams to know that you are in it with them. Also, as a founder, you need to have some sort of visceral understanding of what is happening in the market and you need to be able to get signals. Fletcher, as the CEO, also dedicated a significant part of his time to helping drive sales. He and Bergeron had adopted a divide-and-conquer approach, allocating meetings between themselves based on their availability and other commitments each had on that particular day. Yet, the flexible approach did not muddle the separation of roles between the founders. “Elise is the quarterback on any given deal, and it is up to her to call whatever play she wants to do for that deal; she runs the show and I am there to help,” clarified Fletcher. AN UNEXPECTED OPPORTUNITY As of the second half of 2017, the Palo Alto start-up seemed to be finally hitting its stride. Funded by a seed round of approximately $2.5 million and a Series-A round of over $8 million, the then 15-person team had steadily signed several customers. The sales efforts were proving especially effective with mid-sized, B2C companies. These companies typically had enough data complexity but often lacked the engineering capability to build their own solution. Thus, they usually recognized the need for a product like the Stride offering and were willing to sign contracts in the $40,000 to $60,000 (per year) range. This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 9 Shiny Object or Unique Chance? Stride’s leadership, motivated by the positive momentum, had started to develop relationships with system integrators and other partners. They believed that such conversations could eventually generate new leads and accelerate deal flow quality. The intuition was right. In October 2017, the enterprise IT department of one of the partners contacted by the team informed that it was impressed with Stride’s platform. At the time, that partner was providing consulting services for a big client that needed a way to orchestrate all of its consumer data and connect its marketing teams. After a couple of phone calls, the partner recommended Stride as a core part of the clients’ architecture for 2018. Bergeron recalled the excitement: “It was amazing, an enormous potential deal, a long-term relationship—it was perfect!” The potential customer turned out to be one of the largest global mobile telecommunications companies in the world, with annual revenues upwards of $30 billion. The contract size, if the team could land the deal, was expected to reach the hundreds of thousands of dollars. This could be a massive inflection point in the trajectory of the young start-up. Skeptical at first, Fletcher recognized the opportunity and was determined to seize it: My reaction was, “I just want to know, are we selling the same product or are we selling a different product?” And then we talked about how it does look pretty much the same, so I said: “All right, interesting—if it really is, then I am all in, let’s do this, let’s spend time on this and let’s go find ten others!” Over the following two months, Bergeron, Fletcher, and the sales team concentrated much of their time and resources towards transforming the recommendations made by the partner into a closed sale. Disappointingly, however, after multiple calls and meetings—some of them all the way up in the Pacific Northwest—the path to closing was far from clear. The company’s IT team had been involved in the discussion and showed interest, but there seemed to be no business sponsorship. While multiple stakeholders would engage in meetings and discussions, the founders had a hard time figuring out who within the large organization had authority to make the purchase. To make the situation even harder, they had no experience with that potential customer, its sales cycle, or any of its decision-makers. Bergeron explained the frustration: It is just super-painful, trying to figure out whether we should continue to invest and push against this one deal. It is time-consuming and that is a central conflict for us right now. It feels too good to walk away from—we could be on their freaking architecture diagram and we are a year-and-a-half old. But is that really the right thing to focus on or should we be going out and getting another five “Art.coms”? Every time we psych ourselves up to just walk away from this one, then we get another positive signal from them and think, “Oh, they love us!”— like there is still a chance. This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 10 The Interrelatedness of Sales In addition to the emotional toll caused by the uncertainty, the Stride founders knew that the potential new deal, if successful, would inevitably have a significant impact on their sales organization. They were well aware that all the major sales decisions of a start-up—target market, sales model, sales cycle, hiring practices—were closely interrelated. Changing one piece had the potential to set off a domino effect throughout the whole organization. First, signing up such a large account would represent a sharp deviation from the original sweet spot Stride had discovered among mid-market, B2C companies. Bergeron reflected: This particular customer was interested in using us across the B2B and B2C sides of their business; and the requirements on the B2B side could be super-thrashy for us, but if that is the path to this huge B2C deal…maybe we have to do whatever it takes; we have very scarce resources but I don’t want to turn an opportunity like that away. Second, in order to expand the range of potential customers to include large enterprises, Stride’s sales model would likely need to be adjusted to double down on the channel relationships. These seemed necessary to credibly access larger corporations, but until just a few months earlier, Bergeron and Fletcher had prioritized direct sales almost completely. Additionally, the new focus would require hiring a different profile of professionals for the sales team: people with experience selling to larger companies, and knowledgeable about those specific organizational structures and complex buying processes. Fletcher explained: We have to find somebody who sold to that size of company, if not that buyer. There are patterns for this size and vertical—carriers are different than ecommerce companies. So we really have to find some sales talent that has already built up some of that pattern recognition for us. Someone who can manage an enterprise pipeline. Finally, the sales cycle would be affected substantially. Selling to larger customers demanded more time and resources—as Stride had experienced firsthand in the potential deal with the telecom conglomerate. The organizational complexities multiplied at this level, so Stride would certainly need to identify (and include in its sales playbook) the correct leading indicators, as well as more sophisticated project management tools. Furthermore, the level of the founders’ involvement would have to increase in order to build credibility and goodwill with potential enterprise customers. Bergeron analyzed the issues: The sales motion for those early customers was not that complex. We were working directly with the single VP who could make the decision. They needed to loop in their engineering or data team to give us access, but they usually had the power to do that—it was a two-step review process. These were not 19-step This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 11 review processes. Whereas these bigger deals, which are super-tempting, have really long sales cycles and it is hard to discern signal from noise. The doubts accumulated, as did the resources spent with the impending, but uncertain, deal. THE WAY AHEAD As the Uber made a left onto Hamilton Avenue in Palo Alto, Bergeron was still immersed in her thoughts. The development of early sales practices for her start-up had been a road filled with difficult decisions. Defining the target market, choosing a sales model, hiring a sales team, and optimizing the sales cycle—all while trying to keep an unproven start-up alive—had been some of the hardest challenges of her professional life. Deciding the next step for Stride was about to join the list. “We are here,” her driver announced, unlocking the door. This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. p. 12 Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 Exhibit 1 Founders’ Short Bios Elise Bergeron Elise is the COO and cofounder of Stride. Prior to Stride, Elise was a VP of Marketing at Salesforce, where she led marketing for SalesforceIQ and what is now Salesforce Einstein. She joined Salesforce through its acquisition of RelateIQ, where she was also the VP of Marketing. Elise previously held marketing and product management roles at Facebook, Amazon, and VistaPrint (Cimpress). Elise has an MBA from Harvard Business School and a BA from Stanford University. Tim Fletcher Tim is the CEO and cofounder of Stride. Before Stride, Tim was a VP of Product at Salesforce, where he was responsible for many of the products behind SalesforceIQ and Salesforce Einstein. He arrived at Salesforce through its acquisition of RelateIQ, where he was the first product hire and led product management. Tim previously held roles at Trunk Club (Nordstrom) and McKinsey. Tim has an MBA from Stanford and a BA from the University of Chicago. Scott Bessler Scott is the CTO and cofounder of Stride. Scott has over 15 years of experience engineering and architecting enterprise software. Before Stride, he held a Senior Architect role at Salesforce. He previously was the Chief Software Architect of RelateIQ (acquired by Salesforce), the VP of Engineering at Strata Decision Technology, and held technical roles at Northern Trust Bank in Chicago. Scott has an engineering degree from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Source: Stride. This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. p. 13 Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 Exhibit 2 Stride’s Functionality (Data Sources  1:1 Marketing) E-mail Whitelist Salesforce Ad Systems (Google, Facebook) Transaction Application/Web Inventory System System/ Database Server Logs (user (SKU availability) (price, history) info, URL) Marketing Automation System Personalized communications to customers, distributed using various channels (e-mail, website, ads) Source: Stride. This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019. For the exclusive use of s. golani, 2019. Stride: The Early Sales Decisions E-647 p. 14 Exhibit 3 Marketing v. Sales – Relative Importance for Different Customer Types Source: Stride. This document is authorized for use only by sagar golani in SHU - Case Studies taught by JANET BUMSTEAD, New York University from Dec 2018 to Jun 2019.
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