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If they knew the whole story, thousands of sales reps would pen a global thank-you note to the Columbia University Philosophy Department for failing to fully capture the imagination of Melissa Mabon.
Pragmatech Software Inc.'s CTO owes her status as the Amherst, N.H., company's co-founder, along with husband and CEO, Brooke Savage, as well as her place at the crest of a $10 million revenue stream, to distraction as her Ph.D. dissertation defense loomed.
Sales reps, in turn, owe Mabon, well, their lives.
That's not hyperbole. Just ask Hewlett-Packard. Before implementing Pragmatech's Proposal Express product, the PC colossus was home to a sales process that burdened reps with a 40-hour average for writing and creating proposals. The identical segment of their job description now consumes 20 minutes.
"I was looking for anything to do so I wouldn't have to do that dissertation," recalls Mabon, an Omaha, Neb., native, who admits only to being "in my 40s." "I never touched a computer before I met Brooke. He bought me a computer as a gift and I just sort of self-taught myself."
With Savage pulling the stings and financing the venture with capital he earned from an IPO, Mabon self-taught herself all the way to the pole position of a $500 million market the Aberdeen Group projects at $1 billion by 2006. HP's happy landing isn't anecdotal, either. An independent research firm's survey of Pragmatech's customer base revealed most report a 50-percent reduction in the time required to create comprehensive, customized proposals.
And it's quite a customer base: 1,800 from a broad cross section of industries, including 300 newbies in 2002 and headlined...