On the heels of Outreach’s $114 million Series E, SalesLoft landed a $70 million round D led by Insight Partners with participation from HarbourVest Partners, Emergence Capital, and LinkedIn. Total funding reached $145 million.
While the market valuation was not disclosed, TechCrunch indicated that the valuation was around $600 million. Last year’s Round C valued the firm at $250 million.
“As the creators of the Sales Engagement category, we’ll use this investment to continue leading the innovation that has come to define the category,” blogged CEO Kyle Porter. “This means investments in our ecosystem API, the mobile application, and our AI-powered sales coaching network.”
Porter laid out a vision for The Sales Coaching Network of full-time digital assistants which “gathers data from our network of distributed sellers and identifies what works and what doesn’t.”
The Sales Coaching Network “learns best practices, proven effective across a variety of situations. It identifies those outlier cases where a creative seller finds a new, better solution, and adds those techniques to its coaching. This allows others to learn from the experience of those more creative sellers.”
Coaching advice will be tailored to individual sellers and their current activities. According to Porter’s vision:
The Sales Coaching Network brings out the best in every authentic human-to-human interaction. Sales can never be fully automated, but machines can coach humans in ways that improve our ability to deliver the customer with the best sales experiences while making decisions that allow them to generate the most revenue.
The additional funds will also be directed towards expanding their services team, certified partner network, professional services, and global support.
Over the past few years, SalesLoft has evolved from a cadence service to a multi-channel communications platform which supports inbound and outbound leads, meeting management, analytics, and a partner ecosystem. Its top partner, LinkedIn, is also an investor.
“We are seeing the highest usage in our LinkedIn integration among all the other integrations we provide,” said Porter. “Our customers find that it’s the third most important behind email and phone calls.”
Porter called many of the sales tools on the market “dumb databases or repositories” which “are not focused on improving how to connect buyers to sales teams in sincere ways,” said Porter. “And anytime a company like Salesforce has moved into tangential areas like these, they haven’t built from the ground up, but through acquisitions. It’s just hard to move giant aircraft carriers.”
SalesLoft doubled revenues the past two years and recently opened an EMEA sales and support office in London. Recurring revenue has grown ten-fold over the past three years.
Porter listed a set of reasons for Salesforce’s customer success including company purpose, reliability, adoption, and impact. SalesLoft’s purpose is to elevate the sales profession and promote authentic selling:
SalesLoft exists to activate the authentic seller in all of us. While some focus on simply sending more email, we focus on elevating the sales professional as a whole. Today’s buyers deserve an incredible sales experience… one that is sincere, human, and relevant to their needs. They want sellers to provide insights and solve their problems. It’s essential for sellers to take a buyer-centric approach. This is the heart of what we do.
Great sellers also need to be methodical and efficient. At SalesLoft we’re dedicated to helping you codify a scalable and effective sales process so you can consistently hit and exceed your targets.
Reliability is based upon email deliverability, phone quality, and application speed.
Adoption is evidenced by their leadership position on the G2.com grid for Sales Engagement while impact was borne out by a recent Forrester “Total Economic Impact of SalesLoft” study which measured a 329% ROI, a 20% lift in Sales Qualified Leads to Opportunity Conversion Rates, and a 13% improvement in customer renewal rates.
“So many software companies build a product to meet a market need and then focus purely on selling. SalesLoft is different. This team is continually innovating, pushing the boundaries, and changing the face of sales,” said Jeff Horing, co-founder and MD of Insight Venture Partners. “This is one reason the company’s customers are so devoted to them.”