Winning a category in business requires incredible differentiation. Whether it’s in how you serve your customers, build your product, go to market, or organize your team, you must stand apart in order to win. Differentiation can even take place in the way you raise capital. I’m excited to announce such an example with Salesloft today as we share the details of our $15 million Series B funding and what that means for our customers.
Whether you’re a leader in modern sales, an honored customer, member of the startup and SaaS communities, or just a Lofter fan in general (hey mom!) – today is a good day (well except for our competitors). Like our Series A announcement, it will be more detailed than most. Here are the sections:
Recent history
Our last fundraising took place 22 months ago in March 2015. We raised $10mm then, led by Emergence Capital with the goal to build and deploy our sales engagement platform. At the time, core product was less than $200k in ARR. Since then, we’ve added a thousand+ customers, doubled the team, and grown ARR by over 5000%.
Headed into the new year, our growth left us with enough cash in the bank and a modest enough burn rate to keep running for the next few years. But we’re on a mission to transform the sales industry and be the clear #1 in our category. Achieving that mission requires additional investment in the platform, innovation, and our community so we deliver significant value to our customers. For that reason, we decided it was time to double down on our market and put more capital to work.
A different path. Why this round is unique.
In Q4, as I prepared for a week full of first meetings with investment groups, I got a call from David Cummings. David is a close friend, mentor, investor, board member, and advisor who has been on the journey with Salesloft since the very beginning. He made his mark on SaaS after bootstrapping Pardot to a $100 million acquisition which ultimately became one of Salesforce’s fastest growing products. The call went something like this: “Hey Kyle, what do you think about us raising the round primarily from folks in Atlanta?” He had my interest…
Not long after, David came back with more details: “What do you think about me leading the Series B with a personal $10 million commitment on a $15 million round?” This would allow us to keep our board the same, move fast to close, and get back to the work of serving our customers immediately.
We said yes.
Now to put this in perspective, not many know more about our business than David. Having pioneered the marketing automation category, his knowledge of the market is incredible. David’s career journey had imprinted on him the value in being a market leader and he recognized the magnitude of the sales engagement opportunity.
Emergence Capital and Tom Noonan also each participated above their pro-rata amounts, and we couldn’t be more excited to work with them. We wouldn’t be here without their support.
It’s not often an individual investor commits this kind of money into a single “bet”. It’s not often the other two major investors invest above their pro-rata…but it’s also not often you find such product market fit and timing, team health, and customer love.
Financial details
The post money valuation puts us right around ~$100mm.
The team
At the beginning of 2014, Salesloft was a team of five people. Today, we stand at 125, each driven by the intentional motivation to serve our customers. This attitude of service is led by my co-founder Rob Forman, the management staff, and our superstars throughout the organization. It was our intention to build a company based entirely on a set of core values and to this date, it’s been the best decision we’ve ever made.
These are our core values:
Focusing on values allows us to be intentional about our behavior on a daily basis. This sets the foundation for healthy teams to establish trust, inspire growth, and achieve something special together. Inspired by Patrick Lencioni, this is how we think about teamwork:
For Salesloft, culture is not the way we dress, our snacks or perks; it’s not the location of our office, where we live or what kind of beer we drink. To us, “culture is our values, consistently applied,” as our COO Rob Forman reminds.
This entire team demonstrates love for our customers and colleagues each day. They are focused on innovation, delivering results, sharpening the saw, and helping customers be successful. They do it so you can win; so sales can win. And I’m extremely grateful for them.
As we continue to build the team with these core values at the center of hiring, we are proud to share some of the firepower recently added to the crew: CTO (Scott Mitchell), VP of Enterprise Sales (Fred Fried) and Head of Solutions Engineering (Don Otvos). We’ll use our new capital to continue to add incredible people who possess our values.
The Salesloft platform and the future of revenue.
With our Series B financing, we’ll be even more focused on driving value for our customers. It means you’ll see even more innovation from us at an even faster pace.
Salesloft customers have many common characteristics. The most common characteristic is the genuine desire to connect with their prospects on a human level. This is part of our shared DNA.
The most successful companies are focused on the customer, and an account based engagement approach is the best strategy for delivering that personalized, tailored experience to prospective customers at the earliest stage. It orchestrates the alignment between sales and marketing.
Salesloft empowers users to provide a personalized communication experience at scale, most effectively converting target accounts to customer accounts. Salesloft customers are transforming their teams into modern sales organizations.
In 2017 we will continue to deliver new features that make our users more efficient and effective, including:
- True orchestration of engagement activities between sales, marketing and supporting executives.
- Enhanced insights and reporting on account engagement effectiveness.
- Increased governance features for enterprise-wide management and version control for marketing’s cascading messages.
- Workflow assignments for roles ranging from sales development reps to C-Level executives.
- Next generation dialer with turnkey live call studio for sales managers to monitor and coach their teams.
- Analytics enhancement and custom report builder to surface your most important data.
- Salesloft will be at your fingertips at all times, delivering core applications to wherever your reps live in everyday, like Gmail, Outlook, Dynamics, and Salesforce.
- Continued expansion of our ecosystem of partners and integrations
We believe modern sales is the cornerstone of business that leads to a brighter future. You are at the forefront of this movement and we believe in you. I’m absolutely dedicated to putting our funding, our amazing platform, and our incredible people to work to help you grow as a company, achieve your goals, and change the world around you.