Hi, everyone, my name is Mike Trudell. I'm the Vice President of Business Development here at Applause. So I work out of our Boston office here in Framingham. I've been with the organization for about six and a half years now and just truly enjoy the experience that I've had here at this organization.
About Applause and what they do
Applause, we live in this digital transformation era of helping organizations produce high quality digital apps for their organizations are about 15 years old and have grown up just outside of Boston, working with some of the biggest organizations today like Facebook, Amazon, Dick's Sporting Goods Best Buy to help ensure that when they're pushing their digital products to their clients, there's a flawless digital experience that they have. And users can have confidence and enjoyment with the digital apps that they're using day in and day out. We do this by providing what we call crowdsource testing. And that's leveraging individuals across the globe that fit almost any demographic that you can imagine, to give the organizations we partner with that true customer like experience. So to help them deliver digital products with confidence.
Details on Applause's sales team
From a field sales perspective, we've broken up the organization into to really three different departments. So we have our strategic team that's focused on growing some of our largest brands, and finding new ways and new opportunities to leverage the Applause service offering inside those accounts. You can think of all the different ways that some brands might be able to use our services. And we're continuing to try to grow that in our large strategic accounts. Below that we have what we call our enterprise team, which is focused primarily on new logo acquisition. In some of the largest brands that just aren't Applause customers yet, we're still in this education phase, explaining our services and uncovering opportunities and pain inside those accounts. And that's an opportunity for our clients as well. And then one of our smaller teams around new logo acquisition trying to find some are probably the smaller brands that may not have a QA team in-house to leverage our service to try and grow and expand how they build out their internal QA efforts. Supporting all those efforts, we have the team that I lead in our business development team, and they partner with our sales organization to try and find and uncover net new sales opportunities inside those accounts. So they partner with a rep in the field to work on those accounts. And go in and just create some educational awareness inside those brands to build up the activity, and hopefully the revenue pipeline for our field sales reps. And that's really how we've broken down the model to drive activity and account awareness across our North America field sales organization.
How the sales process works
So the average sales process here at Applause is is something that takes a little time and we see on average, it's, you know, three to six months as far as that first conversation with a net new prospect to when we're actually able to close a deal. And this is one where it takes a lot of education upfront, helping our clients better understand how they can integrate our offering into their software development lifecycle. So they can feel comfortable, and confident that a solution like Applause is going to deliver the results that they're looking for, but not disrupt what their testing and build process looks like from a software standpoint, typically work for clients to engage Applause us and a proof of concept. So they get to see some real time bugs that they found, we found on their app in their builds. So they can incorporate those into future builds and future changes that they're making to their mobile app with the intent that we're showing them value to engage in an annual contract once the proof of concept is complete.
What to expect during the interview process
For people who are interested to joining applause, and they want to learn more about the interview process, we have an I think a pretty efficient engagement for applicants when they come into organization. We have our standard conversations with our HR team to educate people on what our solutions are and what our business model is. So they have a real solid understanding of what we do in this marketplace. Like we've been talking about here today. This idea of crowdsource testing is fairly new to people. So we're we're educating and in providing information to our applicants of different from there, there's a there's a testing process that we take every applicant through called the Seacat. It's a very brief exam that each applicant has to go through. That gives us some information on the personality and skill set to help with our evaluation from the interview process. From there, depending upon the role if it's business development or field sales. There's a few individuals that they would meet with primarily the management teams in those different divisions. There's an opportunity to meet with some technical profile trundles as well. And then from there, again, depending upon the type of role that they're interviewing for, we act on pretty quick, our business development team is really three interviews. And then we're able to make a decision pretty quick for candidates. Our sales team, again, is a very efficient process, with a times kind of a mock sales call that we'll ask our candidates to go through, and it helps them understand more about what we do. And it helps us understand like how they might fit into our overall sales organization.
About Applause's culture
So from a cultural standpoint, this is probably one of the most exciting aspects that I can talk about here is an organization. So I've been with Applause for about six and a half years and truly love the people who I work with the opportunities that we've had. And the overall growth that individuals have a chance to go through as they progress in their career. The culture is one where everybody helps everybody else. If you think about challenges and issues that people are having either in learning the material, or working with their clients, the people around you are going to be your biggest assets to help you grow in learn in that space. We value education very much. There's a very robust onboarding and training program that each different department goes through. So individuals have that skill set to perform in the role that they're going to be working on. Whether it's a BDR, or a sales rep, right, there's very specific needs that each department has. And we're going to ensure that you have that skill set to be ready to go in that role. And it's it's a work hard play hard environment. You know, we think about the different events that we do inside of our office once we're back open. There's some great team building exercises and opportunities that we've had in the past that we're really excited to reintroduce here in the coming months. And it's a place where people can really enjoy opening up their ideas and expressing opinions and slots that they have on how we can continue to improve our workplaces continue to improve our culture, and continue to improve our customer facing opportunities inside of our organization.
Why now is the ideal time to join
Now is probably one of the best times and one of the best opportunities to join Applause. And the reason I believe this is is really what we've seen as far as the digital transformation that's taken place in the tech space over the last 12 to 24 months, organizations typically weren't digital fork first, businesses are now having this opportunity in this driver to jump into delivering a high quality digital experience for their customers, whether it's shifting their business to online, or all mobile apps, whether it's a buy online and pickup in store functionality that now needs to exist. Organizations are forced to invest in this type of technology, if they want to stay ahead of their competitors, or catch up to leaders in their marketplace, in organizations just can't do that without a solution like Applause to help them partner and build a high quality digital experience. Because of that momentum in this marketplace, it's really given us as a sales team, the opportunity to go in partner with some of the best brands across the globe, and from a selling perspective, go in and earn a good living because of these types of opportunities. And that's given everybody inside of the business a great place to grow to earn and to take on career opportunities that we probably wouldn't have seen even a few years back and I think that's one of the biggest reasons why now is probably one of the best times to join this type of organization for the growth that we're in, in this marketplace.
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