Sales teams have long turned to technology solutions to help improve the way they lead, develop relationships, and close deals. Now one of the startups helping at a key point on that trajectory is announcing a growth financing round to help fuel its own rapid growth. Showpad, a sales enablement platform that enables sellers to obtain and organize relevant content and other guarantees that they use in their deals, has generated a Series D of $ 70 million.
The funding, which carries the total raised by Showpad. At $ 160 million, it comes in the form of debt and equity. The equity portion is co-led by Dawn Capital and Insight Partners, with existing investors Hummingbird Ventures and Korelya Capital also participating. Silicon Valley Bank is providing debt financing. This is one of the first big Dawn Opportunity Fund investments that we wrote about last week.
The company is not disclosing its valuation, but Pieterjan Bouten, the CEO who co-founded the company with Louis Jonckheere (currently CPO), confirmed that it has doubled from the $ 50 million Series C it raised in 2016, with growth from the 90% company. Year over year at the moment in terms of income.
And as a point of reference, another sales enablement player, Seismic, last December raised a $ 100 million Series E with a $ 1 billion valuation.
Showpad, founded in Ghent, Belgium, today operates out of two main locations, its original European base and Chicago. The latter was the foundation for LearnCore, a company that Showpad acquired last year that focuses on sales training and coaching, which has been used as a strategic acquisition to expand Showpad’s core product, a platform that acts as a type of content management system for sales. collateral. (Today, while Chicago is where Showpad builds its marketing and professional services efforts, Ghent is focused on engineering and product, he said.) Chicago happens to be home to Seismic as well.
As Bouten sees it, Showpad is part of what he considers the fourth pillar of the technology marketing stack: storage (the cloud services where you keep all your data), CRM, marketing automation, and sales enablement, where you are. Showpad.
While the first three are key in helping to manage a salesperson ‘activities and work, the fourth is crucial in helping to ensure that a salesperson can do their job more effectively. Traditionally, much of the content that sellers used (presentations, white papers, other materials) to help make their cases and close deals was handled offline and directly by individual sellers. Showpad has taken part of that process and made it digital, which means that vendor teams can now share materials with each other more effectively; e Interestingly, the material and its link to successful sales become part of how Showpad “learns” what works and what doesn’t.
That, in turn, helps build your own artificial intelligence algorithms, to help suggest the best materials for a particular sales effort, be it to someone else on that team, or to other salespeople using the platform.
“To date, there has been tremendous innovation in automating the sales and marketing workflow. However, in the end, sales come down to one person selling to another, “said Norman Fiore, general partner at Dawn Capital. and a member of the Showpad Board, in a statement. “Historically, this has been an offline process that has been very inconsistent and opaque. “The Showpad suite of products succeeds in bringing this process online for the first time with data-rich feedback loops on the effectiveness of teams, managers, salespeople, and even individual pieces of sales content.”
This is a busy area of ​​the market with several independent companies developing sales enablement solutions, but also other companies within the sales group also add enablement as a value-added service. For now, however, Bouten points out that these are more strategic partners than competitors. Salesforce is a partner, he says, and “We integrate with Salesloft to make sure that the emails that are sent use the correct content. We become the sole source of the truth, but we are also being used for disclosure.”
Today, the company has around 1,200 business customers, including Johnson & Johnson, GE Healthcare, Bridgestone, Honeywell and Merck, and the plan will be to continue developing the services it offers around its sales enablement software.
“You can equip marketers with the best content, but if they are not trained and trained in the right way, they are not going anywhere,” he said.
