BevSpot, the Boston-based provider of bar management software, has made a second round of layoffs after it closed an $11 million Series B round led by Bain Capital Ventures over the summer.
The startup laid off its entire outbound sales team, which had about 16 employees, on Thursday, two sources close to the company told me. Rory Crawford, BevSpot's CEO and co-founder, did not respond to two requests for comment.
It's unclear how many employees BevSpot has after this most recent layoff round. The startup previously laid off 15 sales and marketing employees in mid-July, which represented around 17 percent of the roughly 85 employees the company had at the time. But Crawford told me in early August, shortly after the July layoffs happened, that the startup had recently brought on five new employees and that he planned to add 70 to 80 employees over the next year or so.
One source said that Crawford brought the outbound sales team into a conference room Thursday morning to inform the employees they would be laid off and given severance packages. The source said the news was a surprise in the way that it happened but not the fact that it did happen. Crawford told the laid-off employees that the decision was not based on performance but because they weren't given the right tools to do well as an outbound team, the source said.
The source who described the conference room meeting said the challenge the outbound sales team faced was that many restaurant and bar managers weren't receptive to cold calling. The source said Crawford told the laid-off employees that they could re-apply for four to five new positions that the source described as "experimental outbound" roles.
BevSpot had been seeing double-digit growth month-over-month, Crawford told me back in August, but a general challenge it has faced is selling software to an industry full of customers that traditionally run on low margins and may require extra convincing to adopt new software systems, especially for bars and restaurants that still use pen and paper for inventory.
As of early August, BevSpot had more than 400 customers, Crawford had previously said, saying that the company's software had shown good progress so far in helping bars and restaurants save money and become more profitable, with the median customer being able to reach a 7 percent savings in pour costs after using the software for six months.
