SaaS startup Showpad which has built a platform designed to improve other businesses’ sales productivity has closed a $50 million Series C funding round, led by Insight Venture Partners — with Insight’s MD Jeff Horing now joining the Showpad board. Existing Showpad investors Dawn Capital and Hummingbird Ventures also participated in the funding round.
The Belgium-based company, which also has offices in San Francisco and London, makes a b2b platform to deliver marketing content to sales representatives to enable them to present more polished and up-to-date pitches at the coal face of selling via mobile devices.
While, on the flip side, the marketing department gets to track which content has the biggest impact on the customers sales reps are talking to — with the promise being improved ROI on that marketing content.
The 2011 founded mobile-first startup was a relatively early mover in the consumerization of IT trend, powered by the rise of devices such as the Apple iPad being pulled into the enterprise sphere.
Showpad touts simplicity as its selling point vs traditional file sharing systems, portals and CRMs — with its platform allowing users to pull in relevant marketing content from other storage services where it might be siloed, such as Box, Dropbox and Google Drive, and showcase, manage and track performance on a single platform.
It also now dubs itself a “content activation platform”, albeit that’s a fancier way of saying it makes “marketing, channel and sales enablement” software.
The company says it has been more than doubling revenue for the last four years, and now has more than 850 customers in multiple markets at this point — name-checking the likes of Johnson & Johnson, GE, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Xerox, Kimberly-Clark, and Bridgestone.
It claims one of its biggest customers — Engi — has seen a 25 per cent increase in sales rep productivity as a result of using its platform. While more than 100,000 sales have apparently been made via Showpad to date.
Showpad integrates with other services to extend the platform’s utility by plugging into other apps where sales reps might be spending a lot of their time. Today it’s announcing two new integrations: Gmail and Salesforce, with the Gmail integration letting sales reps access Showpad content within the email client to create personalized emails. While the Salesforce integration lets users create contacts or leads in Salesforce without leaving Showpad.
Showpad last raised an $8.5 million Series B in November 2014 — when it was reporting $4.5 million in annual recurring revenue. So if they’ve been roughly doubling revenue annually they should have passed the $10M revenue mark at this point.
The startup raised a $2 million Series A round back in March 2013.
Commenting on the funding round in a statement, Insight’s Horing said: “Showpad is a powerful solution for marketing and sales organizations, and we are thrilled to partner up and enable their customers to leverage their content more effectively and improve their marketing effectiveness and sales productivity.”
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