There are two metrics that are key to a SaaS business’ viability – conversion rates and churn. One focuses on the efficiency of the sales process, the other measures how happy customers are with the service being provided  When you have a startup that boasts of 100% year on year growth AND has a near perfect customer renewal metric, that gets attention. In the case of SalesFUSION, that attention also gained them $1M in series A venture capital. Even better then that the company is already profitable, has some big name clients and is deeply integrated into some of the big names in CRM.

First a little about the company – SalesFUSION provides software that accelerates revenue by connecting sales and marketing with prospects at the moment they are ready to buy. The SalesFUSION 360 suite adds an on-demand enterprise lead management service to whatever CRM a customer uses. SalesFUSION helps to increase lead quantity, lead quality, and revenue conversion rates by integrating and automating the lead management process. It competes in the super hot marketing automation space with well-established companies like Marketo and Eloqua along with startups like CrushPath and Hubspot.

Interestingly the investment comes from Atlanta based Hallett Capital – better known for backing Google Apps stars Cloud Sherpas and BetterCloud. SalesFUSION states that despite being profitable for some time, the enterprise attention that marketing automation is garnering encouraged them to up velocity and get some funding to fuel further growth – one only needs to look at the M&A activity that has occurred in the marketing automation space in the past few months to see that is a logical strategy – SalesFUSION could well be a quick flick sort of an investment.

SalesFUSION, has several hundred midsize and large enterprise clients including Hitachi, Coverall, Avanade and Green Giant. The company has differentiated itself in the general marketing automation market by offering what they claim to be the industry’s deepest integrations to CRM systems from Microsoft Dynamics, Sage, SugarCRM, SalesLogix, NetSuite and Salesforce.com.  They’re also articulating a strong focus on customer satisfaction – that would seem to be borne out from the 99% per annum renewal rate that they’ve enjoyed since 2009.

SalesFUSION has an end-to-end view of marketing automation As Chad Rudd, CEO and founder says:

…Plenty of marketing automation vendors can manage a bulk email campaign, but by combining web analytics, lead scoring, social profiles, dialog responses and key CRM data, we are able to strip out the noise and present the most relevant and useful information to sales reps – directly inside the CRM system.  This is absolutely unique in the industry

SalesFUSION looks like a good product and far more than the shallow offering that many other startups are trying to sell into the crowded marketplace – I suspect we might be seeing some news fro this company in the months to come.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.