Capping a Year of Explosive Growth, Pendo Hires Former Marketo Senior Executive as Chief Revenue Officer
Today, Pendo announced former Marketo global sales executive Bill Binch as its first chief revenue officer. Binch is Pendo’s ninth executive hire in the last 12 months, rounding out a leadership team poised to repeat exponential sales and customer growth in 2018.
Binch is a key hire as Pendo expands into new market segments and geographies. In his role as chief revenue officer, Binch will oversee all revenue-bearing aspects of the business, including direct sales, customer success and professional services organizations. After developing sales leadership experience at Oracle, PeopleSoft and BEA Systems, Binch joined Marketo as its 17th employee in 2008, helping to grow revenue from $0 to $250 million.
Over nearly a decade, he helped lead the marketing automation giant from a small venture-backed startup to a public company to going private with its $1.79 billion sale to Vista Equity Partners in 2016. His sales operation grew from targeting B2B to B2C, from SMB to enterprise and from domestic to global, with customers and offices all over the world. Most recently, Binch managed Marketo’s Asia Pacific team based in Sydney, Australia.
“Bill has a proven playbook for taking a company like Pendo through its next several stages of growth,” said Pendo CEO and Co-Founder Todd Olson. “He’s a great addition to our leadership team and his appointment is an exciting way to start the year.”
Binch had several leadership opportunities with Silicon Valley software companies since leaving Marketo, but he felt a strong affinity to Pendo.
“Pendo is poised to become a dominant player in a very big market,” Binch said. “I see close parallels to the early days of Marketo and similar patterns to be applied. Rarely have I encountered a company with this much potential and shared passion by employees, customers and community alike. I’m excited to help lead Pendo through the next stages of revenue growth.”
By every measure, 2017 was a banner year for Pendo. Meritech Capital Partners led a $25 million Series C round in July, which allowed Pendo to expand geographically, acquiring Israeli startup Insert.io and opening offices in San Francisco and New York. Pendo launched several new product capabilities, including the ability to collect, analyze and discern product insight from Net Promoter Scores. The Insert acquisition also extended the Pendo platform into richer mobile use cases.
The year ended with a spot on LinkedIn’s Top 50 Startups list, two North Carolina Technology Association awards, a Best Place to Work nod by the Triangle Business Journal and a seat on a Mark Cuban-moderated Dreamforce panel, where Olson revealed how Pendo is building a Silicon Valley success story outside the Bay Area.
Revenue and headcount reflected the year’s progress too—Pendo grew revenue by 400 percent while the employee count more than doubled to 165 people.