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WP Engine - Worldwide Sales Executive of the Year

Gold Stevie Award Winner 2019, Click to Enter The 2020 Stevie® Awards for Sales & Customer Service

Company: WP Engine, Austin, TX
Company Description: WP Engine is the world’s leading WordPress Digital Experience Platform that gives companies of all sizes the agility, performance, intelligence, and integrations they need to drive their business forward faster. WP Engine’s combination of tech innovation and an award-winning team of WordPress experts are trusted by over 75,000 companies across 130 countries.
Nomination Category: Sales Awards Individual Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Worldwide Sales Executive of the Year

Nomination Title: Matt Schatz, SVP of Global Sales

Tell the story about what this nominee achieved since the beginning of July 2017 (up to 650 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

WP Engine is the Digital Experience Platform for WordPress, the leading content management system that powers 32% of the Internet. With more than 600,000 digital experiences currently using the platform, 5% of the web visits a WP Engine-powered digital experience daily. Customers ranging from startups to multinational corporations and global agencies trust WP Engine to power their digital experiences including General Mills, Marriott, Thomson Reuters, Ogilvy, R/GA and MDC Partners.

In January, WP Engine secured a $250M strategic growth investment from Silver Lake, the global leader in technology investing. As WP Engine’s SVP of Sales, Matt Schatz was instrumental in defining and establishing the company’s global sales strategy - something that played a major part in helping the company secure that strategic growth investment from such a premier investment firm. Having joined as one of the first sales members in 2013, Matt has spearheaded the company’s growth to $100M in annual recurring revenue, a feat the company reached in January 2018 and one that only .04% of companies a year accomplish. He has also presided over the company’s incredible customer growth, which has rocketed to 90,000 up from 8,500 when he joined in June 2013, an astonishing 10X growth in five years. In addition to growing revenue and overall customer numbers, Matt has strategically and systematically expanded the sales organization by more than 58% already in 2018 - much of that by assembling teams in Europe, helping to open our London office in 2015 and our Brisbane, Australia office in 2017. Growth for the team has centered around capitalizing on the incredible WordPress market opportunity ahead of us and most importantly, ensuring that our customers businesses win online.

More specifically, the sales organization is focused on helping the company’s customers across SMB, enterprise, and agencies deliver incredible digital experiences. Matt has ramped up the sales organization to support the rapidly growing agency space. To date, the WP Engine Agency Partner Program has nearly 3,000 agencies officially enrolled (after only having launched the program last year) with many more that work directly with WP Engine. Alongside marketing, sales empowers agencies with the developer tools and the preferred platform to build, launch, and power their customer’s sites.

As noted above a major growth vector for the sales team has been international markets. This reflects the growth of WordPress around the world and WP Engine specifically - we currently have customers in 140 countries around the world. In October 2017, WP Engine expanded its global sales organization to Brisbane, Australia. The expansion supports the company’s surging customer base across Australia and New Zealand. With the Brisbane office, the company expects to more than double its customer base. The office is WP Engine’s third international office, following the opening of the London (2015) and Limerick (2016) offices. The London office serves as a hub for our EMEA customers, as well as local sales and sales engineering teams. To date, the international offices service more than 24,000 customers.

In addition to running the sales organization, Matt is also the executive sponsor of the Give Back committee. Give Back at WP Engine is special because it is an employee-run group, which Matt supports and advocates for at the executive level. In 2018 alone, Give Back has volunteered more than 1,000 hours and donated more than $80,000 to philanthropic causes around the globe. Matt’s passion for giving back extends well past WP Engine, as he has helped build and support orphanages in Burma, Bangladesh, Cambodia and Lao.

Above are all of Matt’s achievements over the past year. However, we encourage you to read what his team had to say in our supporting material. It provides amazing insight into the type of leader he is -- one that can drive business results while focusing the culture (not always common in sales organizations), his team and empowering employees across the organization.