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On March 25, 2014, Ambition participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2014 Demo Day. Almost exactly a year later, we were featured in the Harvard Business Review. This week after being honored to be recognized by HBR and being inspired by YC's latest batch of amazing companies - we wanted to take a few moments to reflect on the past year.
At Ambition HQ in Chattanooga, TN - you could say we’ve had a good year. Roughly 368 days ago, we were letting our little light shine at Y Combinator demo day and having the privilege to partner with some of the best investors in the world, such as Redpoint, Google Ventures, SV Angel, Highline VP, and Ryan Peterson.
If you haven’t been following the action first-hand, we followed the YC momentum by launching our partnership with Salesforce as a member of their App Exchange - bringing the power of Ambition’s sales performance enhancement platform to hundreds of thousands of Salesforce customers. By the fall of 2014, some of the most dynamic sales orgs in the world were utilizing Salesforce + Ambition to deliver sustainable productivity increases for their sales and customer support teams with fun competitions, advanced metrics, and predictive analytics.
Ambition Founders, Brian, Travis, Jared, & Wes (from left)
The best part of our 2014 story is that the results were not only real - but they were significant. Key sales behaviors increasing by factors of 3x in some cases and often measurable improvements in metrics of at least 50% within 8 weeks. And of course, the holy grail: revenue, showcasing increases up to 40%.
That “clever fantasy football for sales” app had transformed into a mission-critical enterprise solution with definitive impact data, creating a path to success and inspiring performance for an increasingly millennial workforce on sales teams around the world. As they say in startups, once your product is working - exciting times ahead indeed.
Its more than worth mentioning at this point that Ambition is not simply the result of a vision-made-reality; it is the product of accumulated effort and creativity of an incredible group of engineers, designers, and experienced mentors - intensely focused on building a product with sustainable positive outcomes that weaves itself into the integral fabrics of companies’ day-to-day culture and success.
A Dream Team: photo feat. Micah, Wes O, Jared L, Jeff, & Rob
This team is uncanny, having honed their talents on product development and data problems at NASA, Google, Salesforce, ORNL, a myriad of startups, some of the world’s finest super computers, and even the classrooms of Harvard, Reed, and Covenant College. Encompassing a wide variety of topics of study and expertise, the team is comprised of individuals with expertise in behavioral science, rhetoric, fine arts, systems engineering, computer science, statistics, enterprise management, and more.
As one can imagine, when intelligence and creativity are combined with enduring ambition, a company transforms into an object in motion - with ever increasing momentum and force behind it.
That is why we are proud today to announce a new partnership, with Nest Labs.
At first blanche, our deep integration with Nest thermostats can be easily misunderstood - but it comes after months of careful deliberation, study, and conversations with our customers. At our core, Ambition is a data company - ingesting, analyzing, and producing useful data - married deeply with a personal enhancement, recognition, and motivation platform: those aspects that ultimately encourage users to action, change, and improvement.
Our mission at Ambition is to make work suck less. However, as we have learned from inspirations such as Jane Fonda, Jillian Michaels, and Benjamin Franklin,
“Industry need not wish, as Poor Richard says, and he that lives upon hope will die fasting. There are no gains, without pains…” (The Way to Wealth, 1758)
Slight discomfort - and admittedly occasional pain - are incredible and effective motivators to manufacturing and sustaining behavioral change in humans. Which brings us to the cornerstone of this partnership with Nest.
Ambition customers will now be able to directly correlate employee performance to atmospheric conditions in the workplace. Instead of relying solely on preemptive coaching, data-driven suggestions, social triggers, and peer-to-peer transparency - managers and company leaders will have the capabilities to encourage behavior change by manipulating the temperature in specific areas of their office, which will then result in increased or modified activities of their employees. Not only will Ambition + Nest give companies the ability to reactively reflect performance changes in temperature conditions, but Ambition also has the capability to predictively and intelligently adjust settings in hyper-specific office-zones to encourage increased productivity for individuals before your team is behind the proverbial 8-ball.
Yes, this functionality exists today and is in production with a select few highly effective sales orgs who are willing to innovate at breakneck speed to exceed their own goals and expectations.
Not only is it being tested in the wild - but we are proud to announce that we have been dogfooding our own system at Ambition HQ since the start of the new year with tremendous results. Not only with our sales and customer service team - but with our engineering team as well.
Jared, Sr. Engineer @ Ambition
At Ambition, we believe in utilizing data, behavioral science, and real world inspiration to align incentives between companies and employees - both to chart an attainable path to success as well as power a continual system of encouragement and improvement. As we continue to add partners and integrations, expect to see more unique and creative ways to achieve success with Ambition.
Thanks for checking in, and just wait to hear what the folks at Ambition HQ have in store for next 2016... Happy April you guys!
Ambition: Sales Motivation & Performance Management
Ambition clarifies and publicizes real-time performance analytics for your entire sales organization. Using a drag-and-drop interface, non-technical sales leaders can build custom scorecards, contests, reports, and TVs.
Ambition is endorsed by Harvard Business Review, AA-ISP (the Global Inside Sales Organization), and USA Today as a proven solution for managing millennial sales teams. Hear from our customers below.
Watch Testimonials:
- FiveStars: Adam Wall. Sr. Manager of Sales Operations .
- Filemaker: Brad Freitag. Vice-President of Worldwide Sales.
- Outreach: Mark Kosoglow. Vice-President of Sales.
- Cell Marque: Lauren Hopson. Director of Sales & Marketing.
- Access America Transport: Ted Alling. Chief Executive Officer.
Watch Product Walkthroughs:
- ChowNow. Led by Vice-President of Sales, Drew Woodcock.
- Outreach. Led by Sales Development Manager, Alex Lynn.
- AMX Logistics. Led by Executive Vice-President ,Jared Moore.
Read Case Studies:
- Clayton Homes: HBR finds triple-digit growth in 3 sales efficiency metrics.
- Coyote Logistics: Monthly revenue per broker grew $525 in 6 months.
- Peek: Monthly sales activity volume grew 142% in 6 months.
- Vorsight: Monthly sales conversations grew 300% in 6 months.
Contact us to learn how Ambition can impact your sales organization today.
