A couple of weeks ago we announced that we had raised a Seed round. We were featured on TechCrunch, which put Heresy on the radar for a lot of people. In fact, we had to create an impromptu waiting list to deal with the extremely high demand the TC article generated (a good problem to have I suppose 😉).

Up until then we had been keeping a very low profile, solely focusing on building a kick-ass product. We constantly ship new features, but you wouldn’t know about that if you didn’t get early access to Heresy.

We’ve been working our way through the waiting list, onboarding new teams as quickly as we can. If you’re still waiting to get your hands on Heresy, rest assured, your turn will come very soon! In the meantime, we’ve decided to start making our product announcements public and not limit them to existing users only.

With the above in mind, I am thrilled to announce that today we are shipping Badges!

Before I tell you what Badges are (though as the name suggests it should be pretty self-explanatory), I’d like to share a few sentences on why we even care about them in the first place.

We’ve always said that we’re building Heresy first and foremost for the salesperson (i.e. the individual contributor). One of our key objectives as a company is to help salespeople become a better version of themselves month after month, allowing them to close more and more deals along the way. In this context, the main purpose of the Heresy badges is to mark the significant milestones you hit along that journey. Whether this is the first 50 deals you close or hitting $1 million in total sales, we want you to get the recognition you deserve. A badge you’ve been awarded in Heresy is truly a “badge of honour”. It will not only remind you of the hard work you’ve put in to earn it; it will also signal to all your teammates who you are as a salesperson. And yes, we do have big plans for Badges — we hope that one day they will become an established benchmark for sales competence, just like a lot of people see Stack Overflow reputation (more on this soon).

So how do you earn a Heresy badge?

Well…it depends. Some badges are relatively easy to earn. For example everyone who joins Heresy automatically gets the Heretic badge — our way of saying thank you for being part of the quest to finally fix Sales. Other badges are much harder to earn and are likely to take time, effort and a lot of grit to unlock. There are badges that require all of the latter, plus perhaps a little bit of (self-created) luck. An example of this would be the Whale badge (awarded for closing a whale). On that note, I am very happy to say that the first ever Whale badge was won by one of my former teammates at Stack Overflow in London 😃 Well done, team 🙌👏
Finally there are a handful of badges that you can earn not only for being a great salesperson, but also for being a great member of the global sales community. We’ve always said that we’d like to make Sales more open and more collaborative. We see sharing of knowledge and best practice as one of the main means of accomplishing this. From Heresy’s perspective, we do this by facilitating team collaboration within the app and of course by interviewing some of the best minds in Sales on our podcast.

Now you can also get involved! If you feel you’ve got something worthwhile writing about (sales related of course), regardless of whether it’s on a tactical or more strategic level, we’d welcome you to join us and write for the Heresy publication (just drop us a line on team@heresy.io In return you’ll be getting not only the respect and admiration of your peers, but also a brand spanking new Hemingway badge :-) And while Heresy badges are normally only awarded to Heresy users, we’d like to make an exception and give a Hemingway badge to Steve O’Hear for the awesome article he did on Heresy last month. Thanks, Steve!

If you’ve been on Heresy for over a month, there’s a good chance that you’ve already earned a couple of badges. If that’s the case, you’ll see them in your Profile next time you log in (as well as some of the achievements that you are yet to accomplish).

If you don’t have a Heresy account, you can create one here.