Time is money, or so the saying says. That’s also SUMO Scheduler‘s motto. The cloud-based appointment scheduling software does all of the heavy lifting for your sales and support teams by providing automated reminders, customizable self-scheduling sites, and analytics. It reduces the number of meeting no-shows so your team can concentrate on chasing leads instead of managing current appointments.
“Being the only solution built 100-percent natively on the Salesforce platform, SUMO Scheduler does not have any true competitors,” says CEO Jason North. That kind of innovation has helped one of SUMO’s larger customers solve a problem that used to cost them up to $400K a month, and help the company get named as one of Venture Atlanta’s 5 Startups to Watch this year.
North talks to Hypepotamus about SUMO’s recent growth, why they moved to Atlanta from Silicon Valley, and the reason he surrounds himself with other like-minded CEOs.
Year/Date Founded:
SUMO Scheduler was founded in 2013 with a limited Beta release. We are now on the 5th major release of our product.
Number of Employees:
We’re growing fast, with a current headcount of 25 and plans to grow to 50 by end of year. Our brand new office in India now houses 15 product engineers.
Funding or bootstrapped:
We’re bootstrapped, founder invested, with a clean cap table, 100 percent debt-free, profitable, and considering a raise later in 2017.
How’d you get the idea for this product?
Since 2008, we were a trusted consulting and product development partner of Salesforce.com. We started building custom scheduling solutions for Salesforce customers since a native solution did not exist on the platform. After several years of developing subject matter expertise in scheduling automation, we decided to productize our solutions and SUMO Scheduler was born.
We decided early on to focus on large enterprises as opposed to small business and to build a product that meets the various security, scalability, and compliance needs of these large organizations. We, therefore, decided the brand “SUMO” reflected this robust and powerful aura we were after.
What’s your pitch?
SUMO Scheduler is the most powerful appointment automation solution built for sales and support teams. SUMO is built for the enterprise and trusted by Amazon, Concur, Salesforce, Webster Bank, First Data, and more. SUMO does the heavy lifting of appointment scheduling.
What scheduling solutions does SUMO offer?
Our clients understand how manually scheduling appointments is a waste of time and resources, ripe for human error, a source of lost revenue, and customer attrition. By completely automating appointment scheduling 24/7/365, on any device, SUMO has helped organizations increase appointment volume, revenue, and customer satisfaction.
As the only solution built 100 percent native on Salesforce, SUMO meets the security, scalability, and compliance needs of enterprise organizations. It includes robust, enterprise-grade, real-time integrations with Microsoft Outlook, Office365, and Google Calendar.
Revenue Model:
Our revenue model is a SaaS (software-as-a-service), whereby our clients make annual and often multi-year commitments.
SUMO started in Silicon Valley. Why did you choose to open an office in Atlanta?
Our decision to open an office in Atlanta was multifold. There was a better time zone alignment with our east coast customer base, and we’re strategically focused on financial companies many of which call Atlanta their home. We believe Atlanta is a growing tech hub that is currently under-appreciated and undervalued.
As a CEO, what are some lessons you’ve learned that may be useful to other entrepreneurs?
Make customer success your #1 priority! Teach your team how to always go the extra mile for your customers. When they order a dozen, always give them the 13th donut. In the end, keeping our customers happy is all that matters.
Second, perfection is the enemy of progress. While it’s important to focus on quality, it’s also super important to create a company culture focused on results. At SUMO Scheduler, we’re doers. We focus first on running a highly productive organization where improvements and iterations are fast.
And lastly, as CEO, don’t go at it alone. Three years ago, I joined a group of 10 SaaS CEOs. We meet monthly and it’s been paramount to our growth. As a leader, you’ve got to constantly surround yourself with superstars and trickle down the learning throughout your organization to remain at the forefront.
You were named one of Venture Atlanta’s 2017 Startup to Watch this year. What’s coming up for SUMO over the next year?
We’ve earned the business of numerous Fortune 500 organizations and we’re heavily focused on their needs. Our future includes more support for large sales and support teams, including multi-language support, near real-time (< 1 minute) sync time with Google Calendar and Microsoft Outlook/Office365, Salesforce Lightning Experience support, and more.
