Genius.com Raises $19M, But Does It Eat Its Own Dogfood?
Genius.com, the on-demand software startup that makes the email-based lead generator SalesGenius, said this week that it’s raised $19 million in its third round of funding, this one led by Accel Partners.
Genius.com also announced its largest-ever customer, BT Business, a retail arm of British Telecom, which has 3,000 sales reps and owns more that 40 percent of the markets for DSL and voice in the UK. Both events are big boosts to the four-year-old startup — it had just 400 clients before BT signed on, and the funding round brings total monies raised to $34 million.
SalesGenius is a “push” product that allows salespeople to closely track prospects’ responsiveness to email pitches by tracking when they click through to the web site, what product sites they mouse over, etc. Such data is “highly indicative of what a person might actually be interested in buying,” says Genius.com co-founder and CEO David Thompson. In other words, sales leads.
SalesGenius is a lift up from old-school CRM, says Accel’s Kevin Efrusy (think Siebel), which weren’t really ever designed to help sales people sell more, but rather, help upper management keep tabs on what reps were doing. “When did you last call on that client?” SalesGenius automates it all, including the live chat between a rep and a prospect.
But in an ironic twist, Thompson said he’ll use most of his new capital to hire more of his own live sales people. That’s a lot to spend on show-leather types for a startup, which is sort of odd if your whole business is about selling more, with less. Genius.com ought not to need tens of millions worth of reps — at least, not if the product works as well as he claims.
I have used Genius.com software. It works. It is a very good tool for online marketing. I recommend it.
Thanks Scogostology! While we do plan on hiring a few field sales reps, 90% of our sales force is indeed practicing what we preach with the Sales 2.0 model, selling through the web via SalesGenius tools. This is what’s fueling our growth and the interest in our company. As mentioned, we’ll be using the funds in several areas, including sales, marketing and engineering, to keep up with the demand for our products.
Holy crap! That’s a huge round for a company like Genius. They must be acquiring somebody, otherwise they gave away the farm. Though Genius is different from LivePerson (LPSN) I would still consider them to overlap in their respective offerings. LPSN is doing something like $50M in revenue and trading at $180M market cap. You can’t tell me that Genius is doing $20M per year recurring. NO WAY!
I only wish that serious salespeople can comprehend the opportunity that Salesgenius places in their hand
They must be building out a huge datacenter network to run their SaaS (ala WebEx or Salesforce.com where their founders/board members hail from.) I think WEBX raised something like $50+ million back in the day. It is hugely expensive for all the servers, colo’s, bandwidth, networking gear, etc. (plus, the uptime/reliability/redundancy needed for SaaS).
They are smart to be raising so much $$$ esp as the economy has turned south. Employees/founders take a big hit due to the dilution, but building the business for the long term will (eventually) yield a pay out if their technology actually helps.
Wonder why the privacy concerns about online tracking have never really surfaced for this company. They actually track individual surfers and have identifiable information. Seems ominous.