The Socrata Turnaround: Rebuilding a Function and Protecting the Deal Behind It
"I pushed for a clause the CEO didn't want in the room. Eighteen months later, it was the reason the deal still paid off."
Situation : I joined Socrata to lead strategic initiatives, and within my first quarter I negotiated a joint development agreement with Motorola Solutions to revive their CrimeReports.com product. The CEO didn't want the breakup clause in there - it was slowing the negotiation down - but I held my ground because I thought it mattered more than the speed of getting to yes. Not long after we signed, the CEO asked me to also take over as VP of Marketing after reorganizing out the incumbent CMO.
Problem : The marketing function I inherited was overspending and underperforming - a bloated database, an events calendar that wasn't producing qualified opportunities, no real demand-generation or sales-enablement system. At the same time, I still had to build, launch, and grow the CrimeReports business out of the new Motorola partnership.
What I Did :
Cut the inherited budget by 20%, down to 12.4% of revenue.
Rebuilt our target and customer databases and got the bounce rate under 2%.
Pruned the events calendar - 28% less spend, but average sales-qualified opportunities per event went from under 1 to 4.
Re-established product marketing, built out sales enablement, brought in Highspot, and moved demand gen onto Pardot with full-funnel reporting.
Ran the 9-person team building and growing CrimeReports out of the Motorola partnership.
Result : CrimeReports revenue grew more than 50% and traffic to the site grew more than 150% over eighteen months. We got to 100% marketing-influenced and 20% marketing-sourced revenue, and earned media on our customer programs climbed to around 16 placements a month. Over my sixteen months in the role, the sales team's qualified pipeline coverage went from under 1x to more than 6x of revenue targets. Two years after we signed, Motorola exercised the breakup clause - the one I'd insisted on - and that payment protected Socrata's downside.
Lesson
What I took from it : A good negotiator protects the upside. A better one protects the company from the version of the deal that looks great on signing day and turns bad eighteen months later - even when protecting it means a harder, slower negotiation.