Why giving away our software was the right choice
Last month we announced that we were going to give the Kiite Playbooks platform away for free. Since then, many people have asked us why.
When we founded Kiite, we never could have anticipated that our vision of enabling every employee to be an expert would have brought us to where we are now — giving away the very software we’ve spent years sweating and grinding over, entirely for free.
Solving the tech sales performance dilemma
After decades of selling technology to businesses, we came to appreciate that tech businesses frequently faced the same challenge. On one hand, these companies were racing to hit their revenue targets. But at the team time, they struggled to grow sustainable, high performing sales teams.
As a founding team, we were intimately familiar with this problem.
These businesses all needed skilled sales professionals to hit ramping revenue targets, But all too often, they failed at sufficiently supporting the sales professionals they’d spent big money hiring to sell. Sales reps couldn’t get the answers they needed from their systems and managers fast enough to keep up with the increasing demands of their job. Too many of them would throw up their hands in frustration and quit.
So we launched Kiite, an intelligent sales assistant that automatically answers a sales rep’s questions via chat. It was our vision to transform every employee into an expert resource, allowing sales reps to perform at their best. Kiite’s chatbot was going to be how we’d make it happen.
It wasn’t about sales efficiency after all. Turns out knowledge sharing was broken.
However, after 18 months of considerable effort, we stumbled onto a surprising (and more fundamental) problem. We learned that even when we automated the answers to frequent sales questions, sales reps still weren’t getting the information they needed to meet their targets.
What had masqueraded as an efficiency issue (answers from the organization were too slow to keep up with revenue demands) was, in fact, a knowledge sharing problem. The information sales people needed (not to mention every other employee in the organization) was fragmented across the business. And the key to unlocking high performing sales teams and sustainable growth lay in fixing this broken knowledge pipeline.
And so Playbooks was born. It’s intelligent “cheat sheets for sales pros” centralize and make accessible all the knowledge a sales rep might need to advance their deals, overcome objections and close more business.
Within just a few months of Playbooks hitting the market, we began to see remarkable results. Some of our users had new employees onboarding themselves to the Playbooks platform. Sales enablement leaders were rolling out sales playbooks in 1/5th the time. Across the board sales process adherence was improving 3-fold. More than 14,000 sales professionals now use Kiite to dynamically power their sales playbooks.
While our customers were delighted with Kiite, they were still struggling to hit their growth targets. As more and more data accumulated in the Kiite platform, we started to see a pattern emerge. Our customers weren’t just struggling with sales reps who didn’t have all the information at their fingertips. They were struggling with sales reps who didn’t know how to sell.
Our Aha! Moment: With Knowledge comes Demand
With tens of thousands of sales playbooks on our platform, we surfaced the skills gaps tech firms were struggling with when it came to sales. From that foundation, we worked with our customers and our partners to build a curriculum that closes those gaps. A half a year later, in January 2020, we launched Uvaro.
Uvaro is a tech sales bootcamp designed to help aspiring sales people build the essential selling skills that will land them jobs at growing technology companies. Our employer partners are all technology companies that need to hire skilled sales professionals. They want their new hires trained and ready to sell.
When we launched Uvaro we had no idea what the coming year would bring in terms of global transformation. We could not anticipate that millions of people would lose their jobs overnight due to the economic crisis brought about by a global pandemic.
We could not have known that people would need technology sales jobs, and that technology businesses would need skilled salespeople, more than ever before. Uvaro’s unprecedented and surprising growth in the face of economic turmoil is proof of that demand.
A New Chapter Begins Now
Since launching Uvaro, we have come to understand one critical thing: by making knowledge sharing free for more individuals and companies, we stimulate demand for skilled sales professionals. The path to growing sustainable and high performing sales teams, where every sales rep can deliver instant expertise, has never been more clear.
Our decision to offer our Kiite software for free may not have been fast nor painless, but after everything we’ve learned, it was an easy choice to make. By giving our software away for free, we can more easily enable more of this:
Like any new venture, our journey has been anything but linear and we have only begun to write the next chapter. Everything we’ve accomplished to date has been with support of our customers, community, teammates, and investors. They believe in our ability to make a lasting impact, and they share our vision for a better working world.
It’s with deep and humble recognition of this unflagging support and generosity of spirit that we acknowledge you, our supporters. You’ve gotten us here, and we’re crazy excited for what comes next.
Thank you all and happy selling!
Joseph, Derek, Donna
At Uvaro, we take pride in the growth and success of all of our students, and we’re just getting started! If you’d like to step into tech, you can apply to join our program at uvaro.com
Photo by Max Fischer
