Leadspace, a company that brings in sales leads and scores them to better help marketers determine which ones to prioritize, said it raised $18 million.
Leadspace plugs into marketing software like Marketo and Salesforce, pooling the data from the leads that marketers generate with other publicly available data — such as from social networks. It then gives marketers a way to score those specific leads against other customer profiles — and better leads generally mean more revenue.
“It’s automating what a great salesperson does,” CEO Doug Bewsher said. “Net new [leads] is one thing, but then for example having inbound leads or you go to a conference and get a list of attendees at a conference, to enrich and score that, this is where we’re seeing huge growth in terms of usage.”
Leadspace pulls its data from internal databases as well as that publicly-available data. One example of the social networking component is Twitter, which can be useful in a limited number of cases, Bewsher said. “We focus on businesses, so if someone is following a hashtag — there’s probably two or three of them — for those people it’s a good signal.”
Prior to this round, Leadspace had raised a total of $17 million, bringing its total funding to $35 million. It was founded in 2012, and later brought in Bewsher — previously the CMO at Salesforce and Skype before that — to be the company’s CEO. Leadspace lured Bewsher away from Salesforce, who wanted to run a product-driven company, he said.
Naturally, coming from Salesforce, Bewsher said that companies like Salesforce and Marketo are “absolutely willing” to support services like Leadspace that sit on top of those platforms. These companies always have an option to build a business like that, but the advantage of having an open platform means they don’t have to build it.
“If you happen to fill out a form that said, ‘I’m Mickey Mouse,’ assuming we’ve got your email or something, we’ll enrich it and say, this is the company you’re working for, this is who you are and what you’re interested in, we’ll use that and push that back into your software.” he said. “To make really good marketing programs, you need a combo of that score and the underlying data. When those two come together, that’s where you see transformational results.”
