Mar
09
2021
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Tackle nabs $35M Series B to help companies navigate cloud marketplaces

Each of the big three cloud vendors — Amazon, Microsoft and Google — has a marketplace where software vendors can sell their wares. It seems like an easy enough proposition to throw your software up there and be done with it, but it turns out that it’s not quite that simple, requiring a complex set of business and technical tasks.

Tackle, a startup that wants to help ease the process of getting a product onto one of these marketplaces, announced a $35 million Series B today. Andreessen Horowitz led the investment with help from existing investor Bessemer Venture Partners. The company reports it has now raised $48.5 million.

Company founder Dillon Woods says that at previous jobs, he found that it took several months with a couple of engineers dedicated to the task to get a product onto the AWS marketplace, and he noticed that it was a similar set of tasks each time.

“What I saw [in my previous jobs] was that we were kind of redoing the same work. And I thought everybody out there was probably reinventing the same wheel. And so when I started Tackle, my goal was to create a software platform that would take that time down to one or two days. So it’s really a no-code solution, and it makes it much more of a business decision, rather than this big technical integration project,” Woods told me.

While you may think it’s a pretty simple task to put an app on one of these marketplaces, Woods points out that the AWS user guide explaining the ins and outs is a 700-page pdf. He says that it’s not just the technical complexity of setting up the various API calls to get it connected, there is also the business side of selling in the marketplace, and that requires additional APIs.

“There’s not just the initial sale. There could be things later like upgrades, refunds, cancellations — maybe you need to do overage charges against that same contract. And so there are all of these downstream things that happen that all require API integration, and Tackle takes care of all of that for you,” Woods explained.

CEO John Jahnke says that the company usually starts with one product in one marketplace, which acts as a kind of proof of concept for the customer, then builds up from there. Once customers see what Tackle can do, they can expand usage.

It seems to be working, with the startup reporting that it tripled annual recurring revenue (ARR), although it didn’t want to share a specific number. It also doubled headcount and the number of customers and was responsible for over $200 million in transactions across the three cloud marketplaces.

Jahnke didn’t share the exact number of customers, but he said there were currently hundreds on the platform, including companies like Snowflake, GitHub, New Relic and PagerDuty.

The company currently has 67 employees spread across 25 states, with plans to almost double that by the end of 2021. He says that it’s essential to put systems in place to build a diverse company now.

“How we scale through this next 100% increase in headcount is going to define the mix of the company into the future. If we can get this right right now and continue to extend on the foundation for diversity and inclusion that we started and make it a real part of our conversation at some scale, we think we’ll be set up as we go from 100 employees to 1,000 employees over the long period of time to continue to grow and create opportunities for people wherever they are,” Jahnke said.

Martin Casado, general partner at lead investor a16z, says this type of selling has become essential for businesses and that’s why he wanted to invest in the company. “Cloud marketplaces have become a primary channel for selling software quickly and conveniently. Tackle is the leading player for enabling companies to sell software through the cloud,” he said.

Feb
10
2021
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Accord launches B2B sales platform with $6M seed

The founders of Accord, an early-stage startup focused on bringing order to B2B sales, are not your typical engineer founders. Instead, the two brothers, Ross and Ryan Rich, worked as sales reps seeing the problems unique to this kind of sale firsthand.

In November 2019, they decided to leave the comfort of their high-paying jobs at Google and Stripe to launch Accord and build what they believe is a missing platform for B2B sales, one that takes into account the needs of both the sales person and the buyer.

Today the company is launching with a $6 million seed round from former employer Stripe and Y Combinator. It should be noted that the founders applied to YC after leaving their jobs and impressed the incubator with their insight and industry experience, even though they didn’t really have a product yet. In fact, they literally drew their original idea on a piece of paper.

Original prototype of Accord sketched on a piece of paper.

The original prototype was just a drawing of their idea. Image Credits: Accord

Recognizing they had the sales skills, but lacked programming chops, they quickly brought in a third partner, Wayne Pan, to bring their idea to life. Today, they have an actual working program with paying customers. They’ve created a kind of online hub for B2B salespeople and buyers to interact.

As co-founder Ross Rich points out, these kinds of sales are very different from the consumer variety, often involving as many as 14 people on average on the buyer side. With so many people involved in the decision-making process, it can become unwieldy pretty quickly.

“We provide within the application shared next steps and milestones to align on and that the buyer can track asynchronously, a resource hub to avoid sorting through those hundreds of emails and threads for a single document or presentation and stakeholder management to make sure the right people are looped in at the right time,” Rich explained.

Accord also integrates with the company CRM like Salesforce to make sure all of that juicy data is being tracked properly in the sales database. At the same time, Rich says the startup wants this platform to be a place for human interaction. Instead of an automated email or text, this provides a place where humans can actually interact with one another, and he believes that human element is important to help reduce the complexity inherent in these kinds of deals.

With $6 million in runway and a stint at Y Combinator under their belts, the founders are ready to make a more concerted go-to-market push. They are currently at nine people, mostly engineers aside from the two sales-focused founders. He figures to be bringing in some new employees this year, but doesn’t really have a sense of how many they will bring on just yet, saying that is something that they will figure out in the coming months.

As they do that, they are already thinking about being inclusive with several women on the engineering team, recognizing if they don’t start diversity early, it will be more difficult later on. “[Hiring a diverse group early] only compounds when you get to nine or 10 people and then when you’re talking to someone and they are wondering, ‘Do I trust this team and is that a culture where I want to work?’ He says if you want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace, you have to start making that investment early.

It’s early days for this team, but they are building a product to help B2B sales teams work more closely and effectively with customers, and with their background and understanding of the space, they seem well-positioned to succeed.

Nov
24
2020
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Adobe expands customer data platform to include B2B sales

The concept of the customer data platform (CDP) is a relatively new one. Up until now, it has focused primarily on pulling data about an individual consumer from a variety of channels into a super record, where in theory you can serve more meaningful content and deliver more customized experiences based on all this detailed knowledge. Adobe announced its intention today to create such a product for business to business (B2B) customers, a key market where this kind of data consolidation had been missing.

Indeed, Brian Glover, Adobe’s director of product marketing for Marketo Engage, who has been put in charge of this product, says that these kinds of sales are much more complex and B2B sales and marketing teams are clamoring for a CDP.

“We have spent the last couple of years integrating Marketo Engage across Adobe Experience Cloud, and now what we’re doing is building out the next generation of new and complementary B2B offerings on the Experience platform, the first of which is the B2B CDP offering,” Glover told me.

He says that they face unique challenges adapting CDP for B2B sales because they typically involve buying groups, meaning you need to customize your messages for different people depending on their role in the process.

An individual consumer usually knows what they want and you can prod them to make a decision and complete the purchase, but a B2B sale is usually longer and more complex, involving different levels of procurement. For example, in a technology sale, it may involve the CIO, a group, division or department who will be using the tech, the finance department, legal and others. There may be an RFP and the sales cycle may span months or even years.

Adobe believes this kind of sale should still be able to use the same customized messaging approach you use in an individual sale, perhaps even more so because of the inherent complexity in the process. Yet B2B marketers face the same issues as their B2C counterparts when it comes to having data spread across an organization.

“In B2B that complexity of buying groups and accounts just adds another level to the data management problem because ultimately you need to be able to connect to your customer people data, but you also need to be able to connect the account data too and be able to [bring] the two together,” Glover explained.

By building a more complete picture of each individual in the buying cycle, you can, as Glover puts it, begin to put the bread crumbs together for the entire account. He believes that a CRM isn’t built for this kind of complexity and it requires a specialty tool like a CDP built to support B2B sales and marketing.

Adobe is working with early customers on the product and expects to go into beta before the end of next month with GA some time in the first half of next year.

Jul
14
2016
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The 3 biggest sales mistakes enterprise software companies make

bananaoops For early- to mid-stage B2B software and SaaS companies, selling in to the enterprise is hard. Getting enterprise customers to pay for your solution on a repeated and long-term basis without seeing your sales growth stall out? That’s really hard. Welcome to the challenging world of enterprise sales. Many factors are in play, including competitive challenges, timing issues and product… Read More

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