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AuditBoard is continuing its steady growth push with executive appointments in critical roles. The risk and compliance software company, which was acquired last year by private equity firm Hg for over $3 billion, appointed Jim Sperduto as chief growth officer in September. His appointment comes a few months after the company named Raul Villar Jr. as CEO.
Sperduto spent the bulk of his career at ADP in various sales and leadership roles. Most recently he was president of small business, retirement, and insurance services. At AuditBoard, Sperduto is being tasked with furthering the company’s customer-centric ethos by growing and fostering its customer base.
Revenue Brew sat down with Sperduto to talk about his vision for AuditBoard’s future and how he’s applying three decades of learnings at ADP to his current role.
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Why did you want to join AuditBoard?
From what I gather is that our clients use the product because they like the product. The users take advantage of the solution that really then starts the engagement that connects the teams across the multiple functions, which helps provide data at an enterprise level, which ultimately helps to automate the processes.
Depending on who you ask, this is a $50 billion market. I would say it’s probably a nice, round estimate and it’s growing—it’s growing fast. It’s expected to potentially double by 2031, and I could see why because there is so much potential with product or new product, or market expansion, geographic expansion, partnerships, and more. When you’re in charge of growth, that’s a good thing to know that you have all these opportunities that are there for you.
How are you leveraging your experience and your learnings from ADP for this role?
I’ve worked in different segments of ADP, some that were much more at scale than others, but the one thing that I learned is that when you have the whole ecosystem firing on all cylinders, really good outcomes are going to happen. What do I mean by that? You have the right technology that the customer likes, wants, loves, and then you have a very talented sales team. Then you have the support with great implementation and service resources. When that whole system is working really well, the outcomes are usually pretty good.
Probably the No. 1 learning is that when you keep the customer front and center and that is what guides your decision-making, you’re going to naturally create real, new avenues for growth. That’s the same mindset I intend to bring into this role here at AuditBoard.
At AuditBoard, what is your sales strategy and what areas of growth are you looking at?
There’s a few avenues to chase here. First of all, we have an incredible foundation, so we want to continue to build upon that. We’re going to continue to scale our go-to-market teams and figure out ways to continue to deliver more value to the customers that we have, so obviously try to generate new logos, try to cross-sell into opportunities, but you also have the potential of new products, the potential to expand geographically, and the potential to double and triple down with partners. Organizations worldwide, they’re struggling with all these emerging risks. It’s in many ways coming at them from all directions, and we feel like we have a good solution.
What are your plans for implementing AI into daily functions?
AI is really embedded into all of the functions. As an example from a sales perspective: being able to leverage all of the internal content that we have and external resources to be able to reduce the time it takes to do pre-call planning, to develop targeted messages, to communicate more effectively and efficiently with different levels within the organization. There is a clear driver in productivity based on AI’s ability to help synthesize information. With the right content, it has proven to be very successful.
What are your goals for your sales strategy in the short and long term?
The goals are to, No. 1, keep growing and accelerate the growth. We have a really good opportunity to help businesses that don’t have the capacity to deal with the risks that are coming their way. Think about the economic volatility, geopolitical strife, regulation, deregulation, third-party risk, supply chain risk, cyber threats, and I’m literally just naming a few. That’s what is exciting. The opportunity is there and the solution that we have is really purpose built to help organizations take advantage of this connected risk platform, which ultimately makes the risk teams, their audit teams, their compliance teams better, more efficient, more effective, and they’ll deliver more strategic value to the organizations that they support.