In a sea of potential customers, you need to know who wants to buy, or who might buy, what you are selling so that you can focus on your pitches. Today, a startup that is building tools for businesses to help with that lead generation specifically in B2B sales is announcing a big round of funding on the back of strong growth in the last year.
The Series C round of funding raised $95 million for Qualified, which will be used to continue building out its technology and expand its business. Tiger Global and previous backers Norwest Venture Partners and Redpoint Venture are participating in the funding, which is being led by Sapphire, the venture arm of another bigCRM player. The Series B was led bySalesforce last year.
For a reference point, PitchBook put it at $376 million last year, and it has likely grown to more than a simple valuation of $376+95 million, given Qualified's other growth: revenue for the San Francisco startup is up 400% year over year. Some of the customers include GE healthcare, GRUBHub, iHeartMedia, Talend, Transplace, and Vonage.
Swensrud's focus is both practical and cultural. He and his co-founding partner Sean Whiteley used to work at the company, and it's the most popularCRM package in use these days, giving Qualified a very qualified audience of potential customers.
It's fitting that Qualified now calls its platform thePipeline Cloud, a reference to the terminology thatSalesforce uses for all of its own product lines.
Hundreds of thousands of B2B customers allow us to speak their language. We are solely and exclusively focused here.
The challenge and opportunity that Qualified has identified and is building to address is the fact that most B2B sales these days are initiated, if not completely carried out end-to-end, on digital platforms. This has been going on for a while, but was accelerated during the Covid-19 epidemic, where many in-person meetings evaporated into thin air.
The problem with online is that you lose a lot of the human touch that is so essential to sales being initiated, developed and closed. As a salesperson, you have access to more data about who is interested in a product if you can figure out how to use it.
The company provides a series of tools that are incorporated into a site and other digital channels, as well as a dashboard for the sales person, to better understand more about those visiting their site, to determine more about them and to see how they might be used. These are not similar to the kind of programmatic tools that adtech or marketing tech people might use to measure audiences on the web, except that they are being applied to a more specific, B2B sales use case. They are able to see how a visitor came to a site, whether they are existing customers or not, and link them up with wider data in a company's database.
Swensrud said that they take those and buyers that are qualified so that you can have a conversation with them.
Traditional digital tools such as filling out details in order to read a white paper are no longer necessary. They are not only tedious and annoying, but they are also becoming obsolete because people are less tolerant of sharing personal information about themselves.
It is interesting to see how Qualified views the positioning of a website, which in a way becomes the digital proxy for a physical office, or a company HQ, or a physical event. It becomes the place where meetings are happening.
The vision of transforming the website into a sales and marketing machine for companies by using buyer intent data and providing an in-the-moment, personalized sales experience will transform how B2B companies approach their sales process. He is joining Qualified's board with this round.
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