In 2012, we started a “Sales-as-a-Service” business called ElasticSales. Our vision was to build the sales infrastructure necessary to empower companies around the world to scale their sales efforts.
We opened an office, hired top sales ta…
…lent, and signed up clients within the first few weeks. It was clear that there was a huge demand for this service.
Next, we searched the market for the best technologies available. Unfortunately, we came back disappointed.
Nothing was designed to help salespeople sell more successfully. Existing solutions seemed to be focused on turning sales professionals into data entry specialists.
None of them showed any understanding of the needs of a sales person when it came to their job and daily workflow.
After a lot of frustration we decided to fix the problem instead of complaining about it.
We started developing our own internal sales application, which we lovingly called our secret sales sauce.
It took 1.5 years of development and iteration with our internal development and sales team to realize our vision and create something truly special.
During that time our sales people generated millions of dollars in sales for hundreds of venture backed Silicon Valley startups using our secret sales sauce: Close.
We knew we were sitting on something special when we got more and more demand from other people who wanted to use our internal software.
At first we resisted (there is a reason we called it our secret sauce after all), but eventually we realized that making the sales software available to other teams was the right thing to do.
In January 2013 we finally released Close to the world.