Before MSDSonline  was the profitable, 200-employee company it is today, the founders were struggling to stay afloat. It was around 2000 when the founding team really hit a wall: they were down to their last $100,000 and were only hitting 30 software orders a day instead of the needed 150.

“We had a theory of ‘build it and they will come’ and the product would sell itself,” Trout said.

After realizing this theory didn’t quite work for them, the founding team took it upon themselves to hire a salesforce, a class of 10 temporary salespeople, to help tell the product’s story. But still “people weren’t buying the product at the scale we needed because the people coming to our site weren’t the decision makers.”

Additionally, the temporary sales team’s lack of tech experience didn’t help bring across MSDSonline’s value to the decision makers that were on the site. So, “immediately, within two days, I let 9 of the 10 go,” Trout said.

The one who stuck around was the one person in the class who was fresh out of school. His trustworthiness and realism sparked something for Trout, and within the next few months Trout added five similar people to the sales team.

Of those original five sales whizzes, three are still at MSDSonline: Kevin Sy (who is now Director of Sales),  Melissa Nelli (who is now Enterprise Sales Director) and Annie Prues (who is the Regional Sales Manager of the Southeast today). Not only have each of these early employees grown into their own roles, but they have grown the sales team itself to about 120 currently.

After these successful sales hires, it still took a few more years and two funding rounds (raised ahead of growth) for MSDS to get profitable because “the goal was to keep growing, not getting to profitability,” Trout said.