Optimized for scaled growth in the sales function
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STATUS
Active
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Year
2021
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LOCATION
Seattle, WA
KEY TRANSACTION DETAILS
- 2021 Acquisition (Bain Capital Private Equity)
BUSINESS OVERVIEW
The leader in cloud-native network detection and response
50+
Artificial intelligence and machine learning patents held
THE BAIN CAPITAL ADVANTAGE AT WORK
When Bain Capital came across the opportunity to invest in ExtraHop, an innovative provider of enterprise cybersecurity, we saw a company that had the potential to achieve accelerated growth but was early in its sales and marketing design evolution.
Bain Capital’s operational capabilities around sales and marketing have been deployed to great effect at ExtraHop. Our in-house experts have taken a highly engaged approach to supporting the management team as they make fundamental enhancements to the company’s go-to-market strategy.
As a fast-growing startup in a secular-growth category like cybersecurity, ExtraHop has a boundless opportunity set ahead. We recognized early that taking advantage of this opportunity requires building a world-class sales and marketing organization.
A critical component of our approach is a comprehensive diagnostic that enables our companies to identify, size, prioritize and sequence its Sales & GTM value creation strategy. This diagnostic revealed three areas that would accelerate growth – optimizing customer segmentation, strategic account planning, and building a hiring machine.
We first assessed our current customer segmentation and determined that sales reps were spread over far too many accounts. We built a customer data platform (CDP) creating visibility into account-level sales opportunities. The data from this analysis helped the company optimize its account assignments for sales reps, which has meant deeper account-level engagement and enhanced conversion.
We coupled this territory strategy with a renewed emphasis on strategic account planning, creating systematic sales plans to engage our ultimate customer – the CISO, understanding their unique challenges and creating powerful solutions to protect and defend their infrastructure footprint.
Bain Capital’s operating experts built a capacity model, and in conjunction with the CDP – identified the value of adding many more sales reps to cover our addressable market at full potential. We identified improvement opportunities in our current talent acquisition approach and rapidly constructed a world-class hiring machine to scale and meet our growth objectives. We also noted variances in rep productivity based on tenure, and helped the team develop a new Training & Enablement program that will accelerate new rep “ramp” time significantly.
While we are still in the early innings with ExtraHop, the company is well on its way to continue scaling as a hyper-growth cybersecurity leader with a potent sales and marketing engine.
With a deeper understanding of a customer’s org structure, budgets, business challenges, ExtraHop is better able to connect those to its sales and marketing plan. It’s key to answer the question: ‘What will drive sales momentum with this customer?’ And while those insights were resident in a lot of people's heads, they were not in a system that could be deployed across the sales team globally. So, we helped them do just that.
