SalesTing Connects Your Sales and Marketing Teams to Measure Real Impact on Leads

There’s no shortage of sales software to help you gather and pursue leads. But do you really know who within the team is qualifying leads and what strategies worked? Often, a company’s marketing team doesn’t communicate enough with the sales team, even though sales brings about 75 percent of new business.

SalesTing, an accelerate company in Georgia Tech’s ATDC incubator, bridges that connection between your sales and marketing team with their data science and human behavior software. The tool helps B2B marketers measure their impact on sales and tracks contributions from each member of the team. It’s like shining a magnifying glass on each lead and following the client journey since inception.

The startup also solves two other important issues, adoption of new sales software and data privacy.

“The companies that are most interested in our solution have often tried to rewire their sellers and realized the difficulty of getting user adoption. Secondly, data privacy is a big deal for CIOs so in order for us to do what we do, we had to solve that non-trivial problem as well,” says CEO Piyush Saggi. The team recently graduated from the Flashpoint accelerator and is already generating revenue from client sales.

Saggi shares more with Hype about why your sales and marketing teams should be connected at all times, how the local tech scene connected him with his founders, and his surprising competitor — his potential customers themselves!

What’s your pitch?

B2B sales is hard and lonely for sellers. The two roles whose job is to help sellers — sales leadership and marketing — have a very low-resolution view of the ground reality because sellers use multiple tools and often have inscrutable habits. SalesTing parses intelligence out from existing tools that sellers use and provides a high-resolution view of leading indicators. We offer a safe (data privacy), simple and smart product with immediate results.

Technology becomes magic when it brings humans closer. Our technology is making this a reality for Sales & Marketing. We’re so passionate about this that even our name (SalesTing = sales + marketing) reflects this ambition.

What problem are you solving?

If your company sells a product online, you have all sorts of analytics on sales and marketing to make better decisions. But if your company sells a high-value product via a field-based sales team, it hasn’t been possible to have a high-resolution view of what’s happening, what’s working, and what to focus on until it’s too late.

The value of even the most sophisticated marketing tools gets blunted because of this missing piece. Often, CEOs and sales leadership are relying on low-resolution information for deals in the pipeline and anecdotes from marketing that they made some unquantifiable contribution.

CRM systems typically don’t have enough relevant data to solve this problem. Interestingly, it’s not about getting more data into the CRM. Data by itself is like a curry without salt. Marketing and sales leadership need meaningful metrics and insights extracted from this data in an understandable language. That’s the real problem we solve.

How’d you get the idea for it?

I spent ten years in field sales at Microsoft and experienced first-hand the disconnect between these 3 sides (sellers, sales leadership, marketing). During my last two years there I led several initiatives to solve this problem internally but I couldn’t solve it because I was too deep in it myself. One fine day, we heard about Flashpoint and our life trajectory changed. Nitesh and Himanshu (co-founders) get full credit for converting the idea to a real product that our customers are using. They really brought the idea to life.

Who are your customers?

We’re focused on companies that have a field sales team selling high-value products/services. That is a big underserved market.

What’s your current funding situation?

Initial investment from the Flashpoint Fund, customer-funded since.

Revenue model?

Subscription software. We offer both a Cloud and an Earth (on-premise) option.

Who are your competitors and how do you stand out?

There are some other startups in the space and we see that as a good sign. We’ve bet big on three things to stand out – data privacy, a zero-click experience so no additional work is created for sellers, and our very human approach to AI. Being honest about what the product will/won’t do solves the churn problem for us.

Our biggest competitor is sales and marketing leadership who is afraid of the truth and data. My heart aches when I meet a CMO who is not seller-centric and rather all about creating top-of-the-funnel noise. I really do take that personally.

How did you meet your co-founders?

All three of us met here in Atlanta (at a social event at ATV many years back). I spent many of my professional years here and went to Georgia Tech. Our discovery of Flashpoint and one meeting with Dr. Merrick Furst became the catalyst for us to leave our jobs and work on SalesTing.

Our first customer, our advisors – all credit goes to ATL. All three of us founders are immigrants and ATL has embraced us like a beloved friend. So many selfless people here are helping us realize our dream and mission.

What’s next for SalesTing?

We’re very focused on ensuring customer happiness so that’s priority number one. We have a solid product roadmap and business goals that we want to reach in H2 and 2018.

While it’s not on our scorecard, I want to help every B2B company in Atlanta have truly aligned sales and marketing. Even if a company doesn’t buy our product, they can benefit from embracing the philosophy of unifying sales & marketing as “SalesTing”.