What is the key to Intuit’s phenomenal success in the SMB marketplace?  IMO, this is their formula:

• Make enterprise software that is easy to use. For just about everybody!
• Keep making incremental improvements to the user experience
• Make it usable out of the box. No need to build custom reports and the like.
• Price it to make it accessible for companies of all sizes.
• Provide world-class support so users feel well taken care of.

We thought these were pretty good ideas to build our own company around.

So we are doing to marketing automation what Quickbooks did to accounting for small businesses.

We do not need to promise the moon and stars to make a sale, our prospects see the value right away. In addition, we are reaching a whole new class of customer: in over 50% of  our closed deals, we have no competition.  These are companies of all sizes in all kinds of industries.

Over 30% of our business every quarter comes from upsells, indicating that customers are using us more and more. Contrast this with the reports that in over 75% of the cases, owners of traditional marketing automation systems are struggling to get the most value from their automation investments, and that the automation platform ends up getting used as a glorified email engine.

We like to think that our anti-ERP approach stands in sharp contrast to that of traditional marketing automation vendors.

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In case you were wondering why there have been no new blog posts since Nov 19 2010, let me tell you it’s very difficult to write when moving at warp speed.

• We had a very successful financing round close at the end of November 2010.
  We pitched 4 firms, received 3 term sheets and ended up doing the round with 2 of them. We are very thrilled to add US Venture Partners (Menlo Park, CA) and Voyager Capital (Seattle, WA) to our list of backers, joining earlier investors Cisco Systems and Subrah Iyar (founder & CEO of WebEx).
• We had a monster Q4, the sales team blew past their quotas and are off to Las Vegas soon to celebrate. The celebration might be premature; Q1 2011 is shaping up to be even bigger.
• We had a splendid holiday party at one of the coolest restaurants in Portland.
• We rounded out the executive team, with David Appelbaum of BigFix fame joining us as our new CMO.  This David also loves to take on Goliaths; check out this and this to see samples of his slingshot tactics.
• We doubled the size of our sales team and our customer success team. We were fortunate to be able to attract the very best people possible, proven all-stars in web touch sales and support of SaaS.
• We opened a new office in Roseville, CA. We have a fleet of private jets (ok, Southwest Airlines) so our teams can go back and forth between our 2 locations easily.
• We won an award from the City of Beaverton for being a cool up-and-coming company.
• We replaced our aging database servers with speedy new NetApps based servers without any downtime. Sort of like changing your oil while you are driving on the freeway.

Could I possibly have squeezed any more excitement into this period (in addition to Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year)?

The answer is yes!  My family and I spent 10 enchanted days in Egypt (Jan 1 to Jan 10), and got home right before the political situation over there exploded.  We had glorious weather, spectacular sightseeing experiences in Cairo, Giza, Luxor, Aswan and Abu Simbel, amazing food and priceless memories.

Looks like the stars are in alignment.

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