G2 Crowd's Godard Abel Shares His Sales Secrets for Hypergrowth

In IVP's Hyper-Growth Podcast series, IVP investors talk with CEOs from the fastest growing companies to understand the ins and outs of company building in the hyper-growth environment.

In our fourth episode, IVP's Alex Lim sits down with Godard Abel, CEO and co-founder of G2 Crowd.

Godard Abel grew up in a family of entrepreneurs. His grandfather and father's pump manufacturing business started from the rubble of World War II Germany. During the early 2000s, Godard was inspired to bring businesses - like his family's - online, ushering them into the Internet era. Through BigMachines and SteelBrick, Godard and his team changed the way enterprises sell in the modern marketplace.

Today, Godard is on a different mission with G2: to change the way enterprises buy the technology and services they need to reach their full potential. In the age of digital transformation, the number of individual applications within the enterprise has exploded, and business users are struggling to keep up. G2 is changing this paradigm by building the most trusted peer advice network for technology buyers, while giving customers a voice in the marketplace.

Now building his third venture-backed company, Godard is giving back in more ways than one. From embedded philanthropy at G2 to mentoring young entrepreneurs to help them thrive, Godard is an inspiration to founders everywhere.

Listen below for Godard's story and a few lessons he learned along the way.

Authenticity Drives Sales When I was in business school, there was no class on sales.

Godard started his first company, BigMachines, in the tail-end of the dot-com bubble. When venture funding dried up, he hunkered down into organic growth mode. During this period Godard and his business partner, Matt Gorniak, learned to sell to enterprises by authentically listening to their customers, understanding their needs and preparing for scale through standardization. By constantly investing in playbooks, training, and development, Godard learned salespeople can train to know their next moves by heart, freeing them up to listen and contexualize customer engagements.

Alignment is Key for Successful Acquisitions A marriage made in heaven.

Over the course of his career, Godard has made several acquisitions as a CEO, and sees the key to success as aligning with the founding team. Both teams need to believe they are stronger together than alone. For Godard, he has chosen to work with founders that are great technologists, love building product, but haven't previously scaled companies, so need help reaching customers on a larger scale. When a new company joins Godard's entrepreneurial family, they get to build their experience, network, and resources so that when they embark on their next start-up, they are in an even better position to succeed.

A Family Based on Performance Different from your Thanksgiving family

At G2, culture and heart are at the center of everything the company does. Godard believes that G2 can be loving and kind and promote a culture of performance at the same time. He describes it as an entrepreneurial family, where everyone trusts and relies on each other for their careers. This trust has been key for generating loyalty amongst the team at G2 and allowed them to recruit top talent into their growing entrepreneurial family.

The full transcript is below.

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TRANSCRIPT Narrator: Welcome to IVP's Hyper-Growth Podcast. In this series, we talk with CEOs of the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of company building in the hyper-growth environment. If you like what you hear, consider following us on SoundCloud or subscribing to our podcast on iTunes. Thanks, and enjoy the show.

Alex: Hi. This is Alex Lim. I'm an investor at IVP. Welcome to the Hyper-Growth Podcast, a show dedicated to speaking with entrepreneurs and companies going through their rapid growth phase. Today on the podcast I'm honored to have with me Godard Abel, the CEO and co-founder of G2, the #1 B2B Technology Review Platform, which is disrupting how businesses discover, buy and manage the technology they need to reach their full potential. G2 is the definition of hyper-growth. After only six years in business, G2 has almost 3 million people relying on their insights every month, over 600,000 software reviews on the platform, covering tens-of-thousands of products and services. Based on this momentum, G2 has raised over $100 million in venture funding including a $55 million Series C round in October 2018, led by IVP. Godard is a serial entrepreneur, previously building and leading BigMachines and SteelBrick which were highly successful exits to Oracle and Salesforce respectively. Godard, welcome to the show, thanks for being here!

Godard: Nice to be here, Alex.

Alex: I want to get to G2 soon, but your entrepreneurial story is so rich and inspiring that I want to go back to the beginning. What was your first introduction to entrepreneurship and how did you end up founding BigMachines?

Godard: I grew up with entrepreneurship. My father was an entrepreneur, or at least a son of an entrepreneur. My grandfather had started a pump manufacturing company in Germany right after World War II, 1947 and he was inspirational to me, in a sense he did it in the rubble of post-World War II Germany, where he was really starting with nothing. My father had taken over the business in the 1970s, and so grew up around business and entrepreneurship from always talking to my dad about it, and I think ultimately that's what inspired me to build my own business.

Alex: And BigMachines, the idea for BigMachines came from your father's pump business, is that right?

Godard: Indeed. The idea was to bring my father's pump business online because later I wound u

LINK:	https://www.ivp.com/news/podcast/g2-crowds-godard-abel-shares-his-sale...
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