How Signpost Made 2014 a Breakout Year

Signpost makes software that helps small business owners build lasting customer relationships.This is a high growth area of online marketing thanks to digital word-of-mouth and the impact of opinions we all share online about local services. As business owners across the country turn away from chasing vanity metrics such as “likes” and followers, Signpost has seen tremendous growth throughout 2014. Here Rod Feuer, Chief Operating Officer, outlines three key areas of the company’s breakout year.

 

[ibimage==33287==Original==none==self==ibimage_align-left]

 

 

In 2014 we focused on building a strong business operations team and investing in scalable systems to support our high sales team growth. We implemented and customized Salesforce, which gives our sales team daily, data-driven reports to help managers and reps know where to focus their time to improve close rates. Our revenue growth is driven by the hard work of our dedicated sales team and good old-fashioned phone follow-up, so we also upgraded our Corporate IT infrastructure to improve network and telephony uptime and quality.

 

Director of Business Operations Emily Matorin also helped establish better strategic planning by implementing OKRs (Objective and Key Result), which helped the executive team prioritize key initiatives based on impact vs. effort and make sure they tied back to our corporate goals and financial targets.

 

 

Plenty of startups are able to grow quickly in spurts. However, being able to grow a team continually over several years as Signpost has done is a big differentiator. Our hiring success has been driven by market selection, sophisticated interview process and continued investments in sales training.

 

Both Austin and Denver have a high quality of life, thriving technology scene, and the type of educated reps we believe are the right fit. Austin in particular has great local colleges like UT and had plenty of great real estate options. We launched with a short term lease and a small sales team to begin with. We wrote up the experience on our blog here.

 

Our VP of Revenue Chris DePatria and Geoff Breneman, the Director of Sales in Austin, were both instrumental in getting our recruiting engine off the ground.  During the interview process our hiring managers evaluate candidates based on criteria that we have found to predict a candidate’s ultimate success: will, coachability, edge and skill. And we recently starting having applicants take a standardized personality test, which provides us with an objective metric to supplement our in-person interviews.

 

 

For me, what really sets an excellent company apart is its ability to scale without losing the culture that defined the organization in its earliest days. When our New York office recently moved to a bigger space, for a short time we lost a ritual where we read an article of the day. When that piece of culture went missing, it impacted the team’s day-to-day -- something felt “off”.  But that gap didn’t exist for long -- one of our values is to “act like owners” -- and several veteran sales managers identified the issue and brought the ritual back, continuing the long-standing tradition.

 

In 2014, Signpost Austin was ranked by The Austin American Statesman as a Top Workplace. For us, this was a great indicator that we have been able to scale our culture to new offices. Several months after our Austin office took the honors, Signpost New York ranked in Crain’s New York Business as a top workplace as well!

 

I still get excited every day to step foot into any of Signpost’s offices. We have a huge opportunity ahead of us, and with the right strategy and execution, we can own a huge chunk of the local marketing space.  In 2014, our Austin office was a big contributor to our success and will continue to be so as we kick-off 2015!