March 2021
Case
HBS Case Collection

Seeding and Selling Asana

By: Jeffrey F. Rayport, Susie Ma and Amram Migdal

Format:Print
| Language:English
| Pages:19

Abstract

This case explores a radical new way of organizing a sales team to sell a SaaS product with tremendous organic growth. In 2019, Oliver Jay was head of global revenue and business development at Asana, a company whose namesake product was a work management software app that enabled teams to collaborate on projects. Even though Asana’s sales reps met their annual revenue targets, Jay realized most of this revenue was coming from seeding Asana within new companies and upgrading existing customers from the free to a paid tier of Asana, or from one paid tier to a higher tier. Jay grew concerned that Asana was not establishing itself deep within companies and creating enough opportunities for enterprise sales. He determined that organizing sales by stages of the customer journey, rather than by the time-honored traditional approach of organizing by account size, would help the company land deals for more users at bigger clients. Now he wondered how Asana should implement the new plan and prepare its sales reps for success?