Ottawa-based dashboard solution provider Klipfolio will announce Thursday Mychelle Mollot will join its team as chief marketing officer.
“Mychelle Mollot has a proven track record of leadership in analytics space. Her decades of work with industry leaders and customers, her long tenure as a leading marketer in a highly competitive space and her vision for growth will propel Klipfolio forward,” Klipfolio CEO Allan Wille said in a statement.
Ms. Mollot, a former vice-president of marketing at IBM, left that company in the spring after 25 years with big enterprise software – she was with Cognos before IBM acquired it – in search of a startup to join.
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Zaahra Mehsen was three years into a biology degree at a local university when she realized she wanted to take a different path. “I realized that it’s not my thing,”
She said Klipfolio fit the three criteria she had in her search.
First of all, she said, analytics is a high-growth area that isn’t fleeting. Secondly, she wanted to go somewhere where everyone – customers, partners, and employees – loved the product. And last, she wanted to have good chemistry with the team.
She said the chemistry was immediately apparent after her first conversation with the Klipfolio team.
Dashboards help the user monitor and manage every aspect of their business and Ms. Mollot said the big vision is to allow the worldwide customer to do it in an affordable way, with the same skill set you would need to work in common software like Excel.
“Lots of people have Excel skills. It doesn’t require some technical guru sitting in a room, building for months and then going ‘Ta da!’” she said.
Ms. Mollot said Klipfolio is in a very aggressive market with plenty of competition but many are larger companies who offer dashboards as just one part of their analytics services. Other companies are trying to build the dashboard to end all dashboards.
But, Ms. Mollot said, they don’t give the customer the flexibility to monitor what’s really unique for their business.
Where Klipfolio stands out, according to Ms. Mollot, is its ability to let the customer monitor and manage specifically what’s important to them, while still offering the capability to expand it and do more complex calculations.
And it’s affordable, she said.
At $20/month, Ms. Mollot said the price breaks down barriers for customers so they can at least try the product.
Klipfolio has been an Ottawa success story since its launch in 2012, and the growth is continuing. Since the start of the year, it has doubled its customers (2000+), partners (140), and staff (30).
“We can only anticipate further acceleration,” said Ms. Mollot.
Ms. Mollot said she has two main objectives right off the bat. She wants to work to make the company’s website and marketing structure more targeted so the company can talk to specific buyers better, effectively serving them whether they are just thinking about buying or already know exactly what they want.
While Klipfolio has grown organically, and most customers come to its website, Ms. Mollot said she wants to be more aggressive in targeting potential clients that haven’t yet found their way to the company’s web page.
“Go to the places they hang out, if you will, and advertise to bring them in,” she said. “Advertise the value of it, advertise our unique advantages, particularly around speed and ease and affordability and try to entice them to our site.”
