Stage VP’s Startup Growth Series with Mandy Smith, CRO at SPIDR Tech
Please welcome Mandy Smith to Stage VP’s Startup Growth Series. Mandy is the Chief Revenue Officer at Stage VP portfolio company SPIDR Tech, the world’s first customer service platform built exclusively for law enforcement.
SVP: Welcome, Mandy. We’re very excited to have you join us for this series. To start, can you please describe SPIDR Tech, the need you serve, and your company’s product?
MS: From an end user’s perspective, the SPIDR Tech product automatically follows up with you on a one-to-one basis with text messaging and emails, as soon as you’ve called or reported a crime to your local police department.
I don’t think a lot of people understand how busy most police departments are. If you call your police department, what you are reporting is usually serious, but what we don’t understand is that police officers are going on call after call every day. It may be hard for them to provide the level of customer service you’re used to in your private life. You probably even expect a higher level of service from law enforcement than what you last got with Amazon. SPIDR Tech enables law enforcement agencies to programmatically provide an excellent level of follow up, customer service, and community engagement.
SVP: From law enforcement’s perspective, what is the value of SPIDR Tech? What is the status quo and how is SPIDR Tech improving it?
MS: Law enforcement is used to taking calls, triaging them, and responding as quickly as they can before moving on to the next. Despite the continual demands, law enforcement is often short-staffed. For police chiefs and police commanders who are looking to build a strong relationship with their communities, it’s really important for them to be transparent about their process. That means following up with every person, but they don’t have the resources to call every person back. They can’t just add staffing and they have to use technology to streamline the process, which is where SPIDR Tech comes into play.
SVP: Every law enforcement agency in the country has record management systems (RMS) and computer aided dispatch (CAD) already. One day, every law enforcement agency will have SPIDR Tech. What will be better about policing when that happens?
MS: I think every single person — whether they need service from their police department or fire department, or they have a case goes before the DA for prosecution — they all deserve to be in the loop during the entire process. If I'm completely in the dark and I don’t know what’s going on, I’m not going to feel connected to the agency that’s assisting me.
If the city takes your case to a preliminary hearing, you have a right to be there. Sometimes, you might not know it’s happening. That’s a real problem today with communication and making sure the victim feels supported.
SVP: What is the process of selling into government agencies? What do you need to be effective in sales enablement in government and how might that be different than the private sector?
MS: I’ve worked in government technology for all but one year of my career, so I love working in public sector sales. When selling in the public sector, you have to work within your customer’s parameters even more so than you have to do in the private sector. You often become a consultant to help them buy your product.
In the private sector, you have a buyer with a budget and P&L, and if you can provide them with a certain ROI, they can make that decision. With the government, it’s taxpayer money, so the process is very regulated, and rightly so. When selling to the public sector, you have to be an expert in how their procurement process works — what’s allowed, and what isn’t.
SVP: Let’s talk about data. What is the data that SPIDR Tech holds? What does engagement with the SPIDR Tech system look like? What type of system is SPIDR Tech?
MS: As we mentioned, there are two major systems that every law enforcement agency system has. First is the computer aided dispatch (CAD), the system where every 911 call is logged. The other system is the record management system (RMS), a system of record that holds everything from the crime all the way through the case outcome. SPIDR Tech sits on top of, and uses, the data from these existing systems.
Think of Salesforce and Hubspot on top. SPIDR Tech is a lot like the Hubspot component, where we’re communicating with people who have asked for the engagement. A law enforcement agency’s system of record, or CRM, is their RMS, while SPIDR Tech is the system of engagement like HubSpot.
SVP: There really aren’t a lot of systems of engagement for law enforcement agencies. How do you create awareness for the need for your product and communicate its value? What does an educational and consultative sale look like for your type of customers?
MS: In the very beginning of this company, we did a lot of educating. We were the first, and still are the first company to be doing this, but the landscape is continually evolving. People expect more customer service than they used to, and detectives can’t always call every person back. Law enforcement agencies have fewer resources, laws have changed, and cases are getting more complicated.
The education piece happened a lot for us at in-person events. Law enforcement is a tight-knit community that likes to learn from each other. They also have requirements for continuing education each year to keep their active duty status. Before Coronavirus, SPIDR Tech delivered educational content at a lot of these functions. That worked really well for us and we continue to do it whenever possible, including online events since the Coronavirus lockdowns.
SVP: Tell us about the sales organization at SPIDR Tech. What does the process of engaging with customers look like?
MS: We have a group of Business Development Reps and they, combined with our marketing managers, are in charge of lead generation in certain segments of the market. We segment our approach to agencies based on their size. As for lead generation, we’re reaching out to these agencies constantly. We try to be very targeted and thoughtful in our outreach. We don’t do big blast campaigns, because we think about our customer relationships as partnerships and we want to start it off on the right foot by showing them that we really care about their agency personally.
Once a BDR has identified an agency with interest in SPIDR Tech, one of our account executives takes over from there. Our account executives walk the prospect through a demo or a consultative sale, where they ask a lot of questions about the customer’s current systems, future plans, priorities for the year and next five years, and challenges they’re facing. We see a lot of the same challenges across the country and that’s one of the great things about having so many law enforcement customers. We can become their advisor and tell them about best practices from law enforcement agencies in their area. The account executive takes the sale all the way through to a contract signature or a Request for Proposal (RFP).
SVP: How long does the sales process often take knowing that government agencies can move at different speeds than the private sector?
MS: We do everything we can to incentive prospects to move quickly. That’s part of the biggest challenge in sales for any government-focused product. You’re trying to do anything you can to incentivize speed, such as tying discounts to a date, explaining that pricing may be going up in the future, or offering a paid pilot.
SVP: Have you stumbled upon any growth tactics when selling to government agencies that might not be readily apparent?
MS: We have an interesting one that happens from time to time. Oftentimes commanders from neighboring cities will travel, say for vacation. They might notice something and call 911, and it might so happen that the police department in that city has deployed SPIDR Tech. Once they’ve called 911, our system will send the officer, acting as a citizen in this case outside their own jurisdiction, a text message about the incident and what will happen next.
A number of times, the commander receiving one of our texts then contacts the agency that sent it, asking them “how did you send that message?” When they get introduced to us, we usually hear something along the lines of “I don’t know how you did that, but I need to know how we can have that in our city.”
SVP: Once an agency has deployed SPIDR Tech, what are the major metrics for evaluating the efficacy of the product?
MS: We actively survey the people who receive automated communication from their law enforcement agency via SPIDR Tech. This is the same thing Amazon does when they ask a customer whether a delivery met their expectations. Police commanders can see the survey results coming in in real time, and they get a digest of survey responses every morning via email.
The vast majority of survey results are positive which is fantastic, especially since law enforcement agencies are always worried about officer morale and retention. People put a lot of stock into being told they’re doing a good job, and SPIDR Tech can help with that through surveys.
SVP: Given that you have big contacts and sales cycles that can be idiosyncratic, how do you forecast your growth?
MS: In government sales, good forecasting means understanding when budgets turn over. We look at whether agencies have the money to purchase now, or have to wait for next year’s budget cycle. When budgetary cycles prove challenging, customers have found funding to purchase SPIDR Tech in creative ways outside of normal cycles. Some have reallocated funding from other technology products that were not delivering to their expectations. Others have identified sources of grant funding. If none of those alternatives are available, agencies may have to go to the city to make a special request for that funding to be added. We walk them through these different scenarios and when we know which path they’re working on, that helps with forecasting. If we don’t know where the money is coming from, that’s really hard to forecast.
SVP: How do the agencies you speak with think about technology and innovation?
MS: Especially in the beginning when we had some of our first customers, we prioritized innovative agencies who are known for trying the brand new technology. For example, Tucson, Arizona has been an early adopter of police technology that has later been adopted throughout the policing community, including SPIDR Tech. We’re grateful for them because their innovation can help pave the way for the rest of the industry.
SVP: What does customer onboarding look like?
MS: Our engineers are fantastic and they can deploy to a customer in a matter of days. That’s due to the fact that we’ve already integrated our software with almost any system of record out there, so we already know what we’re doing when we work with a new customer. Once it comes time to configure the system — such as who should get messages, when should they get them, and how they should be formatted — it’s really a self-serve system and our customers can move as quickly as they want.
Once we go live with a customer and we’ve had a successful launch, our Customer Success Managers are constantly reaching back out to customers to share their performance over the last 30 days, pointing out places for optimization, discussing plans for the next year, etc. Our CSM’s are always trying to uncover ways that our clients can increase the amount of the platform they’re using.
SVP: Mandy, do you have anything else you’d like to cover?
MS: I think it’s really important for people to know that our company is mission-driven. We really care about our customers. Two of our founders are law enforcement officers and one of our engineers just graduated Academy to be a reserve officer. I think it’s really important and a driver of our success is how much we care about helping our customers succeed. You really can’t fake that and when you work with law enforcement, they’re trained to detect when you’re not being genuine. They are trained interrogators and you really need to be genuine.
SVP: Mandy, thank you so much for taking the time to speak with us. This has been an insightful conversation. We’re excited that readers will not only be able to learn more about SPIDR Tech, but also all of your helpful advice around selling to government agencies.