Venture Capital News: LevelEleven Secures $2M
2014-08-15
DETROIT, MI, LevelEleven, a leader in sales motivation software, today announced $2 million in additional venture funding and the introduction of marketing veteran Tim Kopp to its board of directors.
LevelEleven, a leader in sales motivation software, today announced $2 million in additional venture funding and the introduction of seasoned marketing veteran Tim Kopp to its board of directors. Kopp was Chief Marketing Officer of ExactTarget prior to Salesforce's $2.7B acquisition of the company last year. Kopp's marketing expertise, as well as an investment in LevelEleven, will aid the company as it expands to help companies solve the historical misalignment of sales and marketing departments.
'When I first learned of LevelEleven, I immediately saw a powerful solution to drive alignment of sales and marketing teams,' said Kopp, who has also held senior marketing roles at WebTrends, Coca-Cola and Proctor & Gamble. 'The modern CMO is being held accountable to revenue goals for their marketing investments, but there has been no clear way to get sales teams quickly aligned and rallied around the execution needed to maximize the return on those investments. Literally billions of dollars in marketing are being wasted because of this issue.'
B2B organizations with tightly aligned sales and marketing operations grew 24% and saw profits increase by 27% in 2013, according to analyst firm SiriusDecisions. In addition, MarketingProfs found that aligned organizations had 36% higher customer retention rates and achieved 38% higher sales win rates. The LevelEleven software, built directly on Salesforce.com, allows marketing or sales leaders to specify what they want their teams focused on, and immediately launches real time visibility, leaderboards, and collaboration around that initiative.
LevelEleven founder and CEO, Bob Marsh, says, 'It's like flipping on a full blown marketing campaign, within the walls of your own company.' The most common uses are following up on new leads, driving prospects to conferences and field marketing events, generating more qualified sales opportunities, taking new products to market, or simply booking more client meetings.
Initially focused on sales leaders, this marketing trend has turned into a new business development category for LevelEleven. Recent key customer wins interested primarily in using LevelEleven for sales and marketing alignment include Forrester Research and MicroStrategy. Existing customer Interactive Intelligence leveraged LevelEleven to increase conference attendance and surpassed by seven-times the marketing team's customer attendee goal. Dyn's marketing team recently increased qualified lead flow to sales by 25 percent, using LevelEleven. Overall company growth is continuing to accelerate, too. LevelEleven has signed 175 customers in 18 months and year-over-year revenue is up 300 percent.
'As LevelEleven has grown over the past year, we've seen customers use our platform in a wide variety of ways that we never imagined. First it was sales, but now it's everything from marketing to customer service to even motivating health care workers,' said Marsh. 'I'm particularly excited about what our customers are experiencing here with marketing because it's just such a massive problem, and we're making an immediate ROI impact simply by optimizing the performance of an existing spend and an existing team. We're just squeezing more juice out of orange.'
This recent funding, which took the form of a convertible note leading into a future Series A round, came primarily from LevelEleven's existing investors who were ready to 'double down' on growth. New investors include the Dallas Angel Network, and Tamiami Angels. To learn more about LevelEleven, or to download one of the company's latest e-books on sales and marketing alignment, visit http://leveleleven.com.
About LevelEleven
LevelEleven is a sales motivation engine, used by VP's of Sales and Marketing at companies like Comcast, PointRoll, Stanley Black & Decker, Tapjoy, & eBay. The software taps into a sales team's competitive nature and desire for recognition, so their sales leader can motivate what matters: Booking more meetings. Building a more qualified pipeline. Taking new products to market faster. Aligning sales and marketing. Driving focus and energy around the sales behaviors most critical to the growth of their business. The Detroit-based company was founded in Fall of 2012. LevelEleven has obtained over 175 customers to date and boasts an investor roster that includes Detroit Venture Partners and Salesforce.com.
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