Before SalesLoft became a $1 billion startup, the founders struggled to create a working product.
CEO Kyle Porter and President Rob Forman founded SalesLoft in 2011 with the plan to use technology to make the work of individual salespeople easier. Nothing seemed to be working until Forman went to help an intern with a project.
“That was it,” said Forman, who's also the chief strategy officer. “That was our core product.”
That product became the first iteration of SalesLoft’s flagship product. That has evolved into Cadence, which helps salespeople increase appointments by managing and automating phone calls and emails.
Now, SalesLoft has more than 600 employees across six offices and $245 million in investments. The company is a long way from its early days in Buckhead’s Atlanta Tech Village incubator. But Forman says scaling a healthy and collaborative workplace culture was just as important as scaling the business.
“To build something special, you need to do it as a team,” Forman said.
When the SalesLoft team became too big to fit into one conference room — about 30 people, Forman said — that’s when new team-building challenges started to arise.
Organizational structure, such as leadership collaboration and role clarity, became necessary conversations in order to maintain a healthy company culture, he said. Forman says the executives try to lead by example, but he also meets with all the new hires to emphasize the importance of SalesLoft’s five core values.
“One of those values is ‘team over self,’” Forman said. “If you’re working to translate team over self into your corner of the business, that allows us to scale.”
The pandemic renewed culture challenges, Forman said. Remote work increased productivity but made collaboration and connection more difficult. SalesLoft is now allowing employees to decide how often they go into the office with one main policy — “use good judgment.”
As the pandemic lessens, the startup recently implemented “Synch Week,” where teams of employees gather to socialize and plan for the next quarter, Forman said. The company also has a system that automatically pairs up employees to grab coffee together to foster more connections among the team.
“We need to bounce off of each other as we pursue something bigger than any one of us,” Forman said.
Listen to the full interview:
