Costello launches a sales deal management platform that helps sales reps consistently follow sales methodology, gives managers visibility into the quality of every deal and shows sales leaders what's working and what's not.

Costello announced today it has secured $1 million in funding led by Dundee Venture Capital with participation from Elevate Ventures, M25 Group, and Service Provider Capital.

Costello connects sales team members to close deals faster, reduce administrative tasks, and gain valuable insights. The company emerges as a premier tool to improve effectiveness during sales calls, create repeatable processes across sales teams, and empower managers with analytics to provide more valuable feedback to reps.

"We worked collaboratively with over 50 sales leaders and professionals to solve the most important challenge faced by sales reps and leaders...execution," said Costello Founder Frank Dale. "Before Costello, reps were forced to use ad-hoc tools like post-it notes and Google docs to guide sales conversations. Costello gives every sales rep a co-pilot for sales conversations, an analyst to improve performance, and an assistant to reduce admin burden."

Today's Buyers Expect Higher Quality

Yesterday's sales approach will not close today's buyers. As technology continues to evolve, consumers become more savvy and have higher expectations from salespeople. Consumers are busy; they have little time to waste. Nearly all buyers research software solutions on their own before ever contacting the company. Adweek reported 81 percent of buyers conduct online research before their first point of contact.

Sales Processes Must Also Evolve

As the buyers change their decision-making process, sales teams have aggressively adopted digital tools to keep up. Sales teams invest $12 billion annually in sales acceleration tech. These tools are primarily designed to increase activity volume. Reps are doing more at every stage of the sales process. They make more phone calls, send more emails and because of that they manage more deals. Reps are asked to increase both activity volume and manage more tasks, which makes their jobs more difficult. CRM systems we provide them with were not designed to help reps navigate sales conversations, create business cases and track multiple deals from start to close. As a result, reps turn use ad-hoc tools like post-it notes and Google Docs to help them navigate sales conversations. Ad-hoc tools inevitably lead to ad-hoc execution. According to CSO Insights less than 60% of reps hit quota, and the average sales team delivers only 82% of the company revenue plan. Inconsistent execution of the sales process is the primary reason reps and companies miss their targets. Inconsistency leads to longer sales cycles and fewer reps hitting quotas.

Meanwhile, sales management has little to no visibility into how reps execute the sales process to properly coach, motivate and train their reps.

Deal Management Software Need Emerging

Sales teams must develop a new way of working to succeed. Sales tools have recently become a necessary strategic investment for companies to increase sales productivity and accelerate deals to close faster. Costello's deal management platform aligns sales reps, managers and vice presidents to help everyone work together to close more deals.

Ability for Sales Reps to Consistently Execute Methodology

Costello provides sales reps with a platform to easily organize their process from pre-call research to post-call follow up. Integrating with Salesforce and Gmail, Costello customers can access CRM data and their calendar while managing each deal all within one system. Costello guides reps through your structured call flow to ask the right questions and follow a consistent agenda. After each call, sales reps can take immediate follow-up actions, access relevant marketing collateral and easily sync notes directly back to their CRM. Costello gives real-time suggestions and establishes winning habits that lead to better handoffs.

"Costello allows us to control the conversations we have with potential buyers," said Steven Shattuck, Chief Engagement Officer at Bloomerang. "It guides my team to ask the right questions at the right time. Our prospecting calls have transformed into better conversations that lead to faster closer rates."

Provides Managers with Powerful Insights

Through Costello, sales managers have visibility into critical deal details to view how reps execute throughout the entire sales process, identify patterns and gaps and then create actionable deal quality information to better coach reps. Managers can turn tedious pipeline reviews into productive strategy sessions.

Further, deal management platforms accelerate new rep training. Costello allows you to structure the process and leads reps through appropriate messaging for simplified onboarding.

"Costello has been extremely beneficial in understanding why we are or are not moving prospects to closed won," said Mavis Norwich, TINYpulse Sales Manager. "Costello makes me a better manager. It gives me insight into my reps day-to-day to coach more efficiently. We have measurable metrics and key information within one platform that enables us to pivot quickly based on actionable data."

Increase Pipeline Confidence

Sales leaders can build confidence in their pipeline reports and sales forecasts with deal management software. With Costello, leadership can make data-driven decisions and replicate a winning sales process across the entire team.

For more information on Costello or to see a demo, visit andcostello.com.

About Costello

Costello is a deal management platform that aligns sales reps, managers and VPs to work together to win more deals. We help sales reps consistently follow sales methodology, give managers visibility into the quality of every deal and shows sales leaders what's working and what's not. Visit andcostello.com to learn more.