Continuing our Dyn Research blog series, we’ve been doing a lot of internal analysis segmenting our customer base worldwide across both our ecommerce self sign-up sales channel and our direct sales channel to get a clearer picture of where our revenue comes from. Acting locally and thinking globally has been at the core of our success from the moment we turned into a growth oriented company in 2008. Earlier this year, I gave a talk called ‘Rise of the CRO: Marketing with Metrics‘ at HostingCon 2013 in Austin, TX, where the theme revolved around how to expose the knobs and the levers of your growth axis, which allows for constant tweaks and optimizations of these specific revenue streams. Without that insight, you have no way to check on your instinctive and experience-based decisions. You’re simply guessing on how to grow and won’t have the quantitative reinforcement you need to double down.
HostingCon 2013: Rise Of The CRO, Marketing With Metrics from Dyn
Direct Sales
We consider direct sales as customers & revenue acquired via our relationship-oriented, consultative global sales team. The United States is the core of our direct business, while our strong EMEA presence has seen a nice uptick with our growing office and customer base there:
Country
Rev Share
Customer Share
United States
75.2%
70.94%
Europe
8.7%
10.13%
Rest of World
16.1%
18.93%
Delving deeper in the numbers, more than 2/3 of our U.S. revenue comes from states that are all major Internet technology hubs. This has dictated that our inside sales focus should be out of our Manchester, NH, headquarters with a growing outside sales focus in the western United States.
Ecommerce Sales
While plenty of our direct sales customers reside in our ecommerce vertical, we consider that revenue as acquired through self sign-up via our Dyn.com storefront for our internal delineation. 40% of our revenue comes from the United States with the breakdown of the rest seen below. Europe remains a major customer hub and contributor to overall revenue with the remaining spread over a myriad of countries.
Country
% Of Revenue
Europe
20.8%
Rest of World
39.2%
Key Takeaways
There is an overlooked major benefit in a subscription-based, renewal business like ours. We’re able to very proactively scale our customer implementation and post-sales support teams, which in turn leads to amazing year-over-year renewal rates because of customer happiness, loyalty and advocacy. Customer satisfaction is at the core of what we stand for as a business.
There are several specific benefits to this growth data. First, it validates our intense focus on scaling resources within both our ecommerce and direct sales teams within the U.S. and our key geographically segmented target markets like NYC, Boston, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, Boulder, Austin, and Seattle. Secondly, It validates and encourages us to significantly invest into our EMEA direct sales efforts and overall internationalization strategy (i.e. we recently signed a contract with Smartling for translation). We mainly service users in acquisition channels that have more than likely adopted English, but what type of growth could we have with language translations in German, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and uh, British English?
Don’t underestimate the connection between our legacy DynDNS.org brand and that of our enterprise customer base. Although DynDNS.org is a consumer/home user remote access and home hosting technology, the user base is very technical and tends to have a technology focused job for a potential enterprise customer of Dyn. We’ve been able to follow the global ecommerce adoption and market ourselves into that base to acquire direct sales customers all over the world. Our global expansion is lead by this adoption. It’s a key indicator for overall Internet adoption in emerging markets.
Keep a continued eye on our expansion into our third customer acquisition channel, Partner Sales, where we have been investing heavily. We believe this group which includes resellers, MSPs, integrators (like hosting companies and CDNs), PaaS storefronts, etc. will become a clearer revenue axis for Dyn over the coming years, especially in markets, segments or regions in which we’ve lightly penetrated historically (i.e. government, APAC, South America, Fortune 500).
The importance of exposing this sort of data when trying to scale 50%+ year over year can’t be overstated. We have a cross company effort underway leveraging Domo Executive Dashboard for finance, SaaS, sales, and client services metrics to better expose and align all senior leadership towards growth. We’ve come a long way since 2008.