How Forcemanager CEO Oscar Macia grew Forcemanager to $16.8M revenue and 700 customers in 2017.

hello everyone my guest today is Oskar masya he's an experienced sales oriented manager and entrepreneur he's the co-founder and CEO of a force manager which has transformed from a small start-up to leading competitor and sales management in a very short amount of time the rapid growth has been forced managers impact spread globally this over 35 countries with offices already in Spain London in Latin America counting with a wide portfolio of clients including several large multinationals Oscar are you ready to take us to the top hi how are you doing I'm doing good ok so tell us about forced manager you know the sales space is a tough space what do you guys do and how do you make money well basically it's it's a tough space where it's a huge space there is opportunities and you know it is where you can you can get value from for instance in our case we have two specialized ourselves in field sales a field sales is a very important part of basilis landscape and and there are a lot of field sales reps out there that need a different solution that become potential CRMs in our case a we use and we leverage a contextual information AI and everything to to provide a solution for fist size reps that it's more sales assistant that's basically helping them on their daily activities so this is basically our our approach and well it's been quite successful and we are growing so much in the last years and I think it's a very good solution for these guys well basically we were doubled in our staff and our our business every year so before for this market I think it's a it's a great number of course and so are these these are teams that utilize field sales it's a mobile app that you know the sales rep in the morning pulls it up on their phone they see where they need to go today and they maybe recommend where they should drive and who they should close yeah so Lee and it's very important for a mobile application to understand the context of the user every time because as long as mobile users there it is look into their phones they're a very short window of time and we need to provide them always information that it's interesting for them at that time and it's actionable for instance we use geolocation to provide information on their surroundings for instance if he has to go to a nexus we take in account the traffic conditions so basically is everything all the information that we have already in the system to have this guy to do better each job mm-hmm now you mentioned on your website some of your clients include like zapper and Hertz and Ford can you tell us how maybe everyone knows Hertz I think how does Hertz use you well basically these guys they have a very interesting b2b model so because basically they are selling their services to corporations and small and medium businesses so basically when it comes to sales basically you have two parts you know the first one is hunting and the second one is farming in this case we have them two to get a new customers on board running through campaigns and track everything on the process and have a full track ability on how this a complaints are going or basically managing their sells seems like you do with your average or hurt sales reps I mean what are they doing each other are they driving around and in California where like I thought Hertz was a stationary rent-a-car place yeah that's it because they have a business unit that they sell their services to companies so they have to be sit come Panisse in-house to offer their services and this is where where our product really makes a difference I think they need to be they need to be proactive and go there to find their potential customers I see what's your business model how to make money well we are another software as a service company and yes and well basically we we charge of our customers a monthly or yearly and basically Percy and what do people pay on average would you say per month well it depends on the number of states that we can say that the the basic the basic what's your answer on yeah what's your average though like across your entire customer base would you say yeah we'd say it's around a 20 30 Celsius well that's probably around a to $2,000 per month okay so it's 100 bucks to see yeah more or less yes got it okay now tell me more about the backstory here when did you launch the company Oscar well we started back on 2011 so it's been doing such a long time since we started for manager and well it's been a very long story so a lot of things to happen at beginning where me and my co-founder basically two guys sitting together in front of each other and then we had to hire a lot of people we needed to build the technical staff at the beginning are you check with your sales marketing excuse me were you technical or business like how did you guys meet in the beginning well if my my co-founder is a tech guy I'm the business guy but the cool thing here is that I understand perfectly his needs because I have technical background as well and he has a business background as well so I think we are very complementary that we understand each other well what's our role in the company and did you guys just in the beginning to say okay we're just gonna split equity 50/50 or how did you have that tough equity conversation well I think the the it's very important to be very straightforward and put this over the table as soon as possible and in our case as long as we were providing the same amount of value to the project and we were 100 percent committed a 50% 50% it wasn't that it at the time was the the obvious outcome so this is basically what we did and you said at this time so you're inferring something has changed what has changed well from from that point has sent a lot of things and now we are scaling our company we are we are going to new markets so now the company is absolutely different from what the company was at the time so a lot of things had changed well how does that all impact the cap table though that's what I meant I mean is he still with the company or Missouri yep so Lee well every time we go for a funding run the table extend this because we have new investors that are coming on board and we've been through a seat Capital ground is series a series a boost and now a series V hammer gonna be raised we've raised so far I think it's about 15 from probably around six six sixteen million dollars one six right one six right okay sixteen million dollars and why did you decide to raise the capital versus can't to bootstrap like where is it going is the tech really hard that's ringing the capital or is it user acquisition that you need the money for where'd you use the money well it's it's a pretty good question because when basically when you're at that position it's the first thing that you have to jump to yourself if it's a good idea to raise money because when you have investors on board basically you have another response annuity and another people to be a Content too so and of course in our in our case as long as we are in the tech business we know that the best in berea 22a come to our competitors is growth so we needed to grow very very fast and the only way to grow very very fast this happens capital yeah to be clear though my question is where strategically do you spend the money to drive the growth is it on an engineering team because the tech is really hard is it on acquisition because those leads are expensive where is it well it depends on the moment of the company at the beginning was everything about product product and product but as long as the company has a stable product and it's a good market feed everything is about sales and marketing so right now I would say that a 80% of our expenditure every month it's going to market it in sales and other related activities to market in sales yeah by the beginning everything is about product what's your team size today we are about to get to 100 I think we are 95 properly ok so basically this is where we are and where you guys are based and we are based in Barcelona and then we have a team in in Madrid another team in in the UK in London another team in in Mexico in in another one in Colombia sorry very good ok so we are we are spread abroad yes yes spread out ok good and then you mentioned you're spending you know 80% of your spends on sales and marketing activities ignore sales reps and any human expenses what do you spend each month just on paid acquisition well right now we don't have a very active data acquisition strategy because we Suites from inbound to advanced and we we are investing heavily on admin campaigns and what I mean with at one is basically that we have HDR's we have the typical predictor with revenue team is yours phone calling then inside sales that basically getting delayed and running demos and then closing the deals so at the beginning we were very focused on on leader position through online channels like for instance mobility we were on Facebook and we were on Google Adwords and so on but now we are putting more resources on on advant because it's it's a way to be more strategic in sales because this way we can target better with the industries where we are more strong and the good thing here is that we get a lot of feedback because we can actually talk with our prospects it's basically the thing that you cannot do when you are doing a basically in online marketing yeah most of the times considering all of this you know you're scaling your sales team...