Greg Sharp (ZenContract)
New Zealand-based MSP contract management platform ZenContract is rounding the corner of market education and awareness to move towards a sales and customer focus as it experiences significant growth.
Founder and CEO Greg Sharp shared with Reseller News how the platform addresses a problem for managed services providers (MSP) and plans to accelerate growth through new products, markets and teams.
ZenContract streamlines contract management projects and claims to enable MSPs to reduce contract management time, increase efficiency and be audit and compliant ready resulting in greater profit.
The platform has more than doubled its contracted revenue for MSPs in the last twelve months, soaring past $540 million, with annual recuring revenue growing about 40 per cent quarter-on-quarter, Sharp said.
With around 750 end users across the globe, Sharp attributes the growth to “a significant amount of time and money invested in to educating the market that contract management is a thing.”
Using social media, being present at shows, appearing on podcasts and hosting masterclasses attended by 50-100 MSPs monthly to spread the word, Sharp feels that the market strategy has been well-targeted.
“We’re now on the back of that bow wave of education where we’re starting to see that growth happening.
“We grew 280 per cent over the last twelve months and I think we’ll more than do that again... I expect we will be at about 300-400 per cent growth next year.”
A soon to be launched product aimed at client policy management for MSPs, Zen Policy, will further drive growth taking the company from a sell-to to a sell-through model, Sharp continued.
“Our MSPs that we have - which is 100 plus - now become sales agents for us, so we’re looking at our monthly recurring revenue doubling in the next six months,” he said
Following the launch of Zen Policy, Sharp said future plans include integrating artificial intelligence (AI) solutions to help automate the platform.
“We will also, at some stage, enable MSPs to sell our solution outside the whole MSP channel once we integrate with Salesforce, Xero and other tools,” he said.
With growth comes bigger teams and Sharp will be looking at taking on more employees to build on the current team of nine.
After the appointment in August of a new chief technology officer, former Rocket Lab software engineering team lead Lee Cook to bolster the company's technical team, investment in staff will now be sales-led.
“As we scale, it’ll be more sales enablement and customer success people as opposed to engineering,” Sharp said.
“Every person we bring on now will be customer-facing – sales enablement and customer success.”
While a Kiwi company with global reach, one challenge has been on penetrating the North America market in particular, Sharp said.
“I thought we’d only ever have five or six customers in New Zealand, but we now have 25, so there’s more growth here than I thought there would be.
“There’s also more growth that we can achieve significantly in Australia, but ultimately the largest market is in North America.”
Despite having a Canadian-based VP of sales helping to engage market, Sharp said the biggest barrier for harnessing the market potential in North America has been the cost of attending shows in the region.
“You need to be at each and every one of those shows, so that’s one thing that we’ve found hard with the education is actually attending the shows and getting the message out."
Despite the challenges, Sharp is emphatic about continuing worldwide expansion while remaining a Kiwi based, owned and invested company.
“We feel that there’s no limits on how big it can go."
ZenContract is a finalist in two categories for the 2023 Reseller News Innovation Awards.
