We Stopped All New Sales On a High Performing SaaS Product

In his iconic book Good to Great, Jim Collins observed great companies were not afraid to confront brutal facts and stop doing anything not core to their business. Businesses need to take risks, not get stuck in the past, and constantly reinvent themselves.

We’ve recently made such a decision. Our plan is that it will fundamentally change the landscape of our company and the community we serve.

We’re shutting down new sales of our first successful product, Prospector

Salesloft will no longer sell new subscriptions to the product that got our company started. For current customers, we will continue to support and deliver the service but we’ve shifted our attention to Salesloft Cadence, our workflow application which allows companies to convert data into qualified appointments through email & phone workflow with built in accountability and analytics.

In summer 2013, we launched Prospector. To date, it’s been our highest revenue generating product. Who would cancel new sales of a product like that? Companies who expect to be great. Not good.

Why are we making this change?

Prospector is promoted as the simplest way on the internet to build accurate and targeted lists. A powerful product to be sure, but it doesn’t align with our mission for the sales development community like our newest product.

Our mission is to enable salespeople to sell with true intent and sincerity.

When we invented the idea of Prospector (which many others have since followed) it was what we thought the industry really needed. But Prospector was not the ultimate goal, it was a means to reach the ultimate goal. To reach the top of the funnel sellers. That goal is a conversion of data into qualified opportunities and healthy contribution to the pipeline. This is what drives revenue and healthy growth.

The concept of getting a good prospect list and pounding it to death is old, trite and has become a terrible strategy and drag on our customer’s brands. We have never intended to participate in that process. Salesloft Cadence is a different process, creates a different relationship, many different results and is executed by professionals with professional solutions.

Salesloft prides itself on being the most innovative company in sales development. We were the first company to create a "Prospector" product AND the first company to announce its discontinuation. And now we’re moving on to the next level. We’ve now become the first platform to combine sales dialing with emailing + analytics and an accountability engine and the results have been extraordinary.

Starting now, Cadence will now be known as Salesloft.

Salesloft is helping companies around the world convert their prospects (inbound and outbound) into qualified appointments.

The results so far:

• Growth of 25+% month-to-month, every month this year
• Acquired >1,000 customers
• Monthly net negative churn (upgrades significantly exceed downgrades and cancels)

With this shift, we’ll see the product (and these numbers) get even better.

Fortunately, along our journey, we created a healthy organization with the following attributes:

• A company of 80 amazing #rainmakers who are positive, supportive, self-starting, open, empathetic, and exceptional. This team won Best Places to Work in Atlanta and continues to impress me with their teamwork and passion for solving the challenges of the modern seller.
• The reviews on Glassdoor make me proud. They are unsolicited and are a true representation of the transparency that’s held to such a high standard among the team.
• Ranked among the likes of Google, Slack, and Dropbox, we took the top spot on the Highest Rated Products for SMB list on G2 Crowd.

Thank You

For too long, sellers have struggled to plan their phone + email process in a way that’s simple to follow. This community is tired of impersonal, spammy marketing email blasts, and are done trying to track accountability tasks in CRM. We know that making the first outbound call is the hardest; but, once you get going, it is productive and rewarding. As sellers, we know that data is the most overlooked element of the sales process and that by leveraging analytics and insights we can build a better sales machine.

For folks who took a chance on us in 2013 when I would breathe every word of your feedback as oxygen to stay alive, stay with us on this journey. We understand you and your needs and are working harder than anyone in the industry to provide the best solutions to you.

The Future

We are committed to our customers to be the best sales development partner they ever had. This is why we are devoting all our resources to the new Salesloft -- we are making this change to offer our best product to the market. We see the fork in the road and don’t want to shy away from a tough decision. We do it for our people. We do it for the industry of sales development, our customers and for our city.

Last week our team created a vigil for Prospector as part of our Halloween festivities.

They’re ready for the next chapter in our business. They recognize our actions today must be in line with our dreams of tomorrow and we’d be crazy not to funnel all the resources onto the amazing product we’ve built. With this change, we plan to become the greatest company in the world for the sales development professional. We’re grateful to everyone who has helped us get to where we are today and are excited for all the new relationships we’re building as we all head to the future.

Sincerely, Kyle Porter