SalesLoft soars with $50 M Series C

SalesLoft, an Atlanta-based startup that helps companies manage the contact phase of the sales process, announced a $50 million Series C today.

Insight Venture Partners was lead investor with participation from LinkedIn and Emergence Capital, which also participated in the company’s A and B rounds. Today’s investment brings the total raised to $75 million, so this was a significant capital infusion.

What attracted investors was that SalesLoft has concentrated on an area of the sales pipeline called ‘sales engagement.’ It provides a framework for sales people around how to contact potential customers, how often and with what language. It is significant enough that it caught the attention of Jeff Horing, co-founder and managing director at Insight Venture Partners, who was willing to write a big check.

He sees sales engagement an emerging and fast-growing area of the sales stack. “SalesLoft consistently helps customers increase their pipelines, but also strengthen their relationships with buyers — that’s a huge differentiator,” Horing said in a statement.

Kyle Porter, co-founder and CEO at SalesLoft says that what his company does is essentially create a contact workflow for the sales team. It provides a framework or blueprint, while applying a measurable structure to the process for management. Whether the sale is successful or not, there is an audit trail of all the interactions and what the software recommended for actions and what actions the sales person took.

That involves providing the sales team with the next best actions, which could be an email, a phone call or even a handwritten note.”The suggested email content and phone scripts come from experience with buyers. Here’s the right way to communicate,” Porter said. “At the end of the day, we are enabling our customers to deliver better sales experience,” he added.

Machine learning will play an increasing role in building that workflow, as the system learns what types of interactions work best for certain types of customers, it will learn from that, and the system’s recommendations should improve over time.

It appears to be working. The company, which launched in 2011, currently has 230 employees and over 2000 customers including Square, Cisco, Alteryx, Dell and MuleSoft (which Salesforce bought last month for $6.5 billion.) The company reported that they have increased revenue over the last two years by 800 percent (yes, 800 percent).

Porter says this money sets them up to really scale the company with plans to reach 350 employees by the end of the year. In fact, they have more than 40 openings at the moment.