CHICAGO-The SAVO Group today announced the company has secured a $14 million growth round of financing. SAP Ventures led the financing round and was joined by existing investor Sterling Partners. The investment will support SAVO's rapid expansion and accelerate the continued innovation of its sales enablement platform. Additionally, SAP Ventures' managing director Doug Higgins will join SAVO's board of directors.

"Sales enablement is evolving from improving the individual seller's ability to conduct an on-message conversation with a prospect, to a focus on C-suite execs looking to drive real growth and competitive advantage," said Mark O'Connell, CEO of SAVO. "They need to optimize return on sales and marketing expense in revenue-driving programs. They need to enable the collective genius of the enterprise to empower the front line. They need better controls and more predictability. In short, they need to manage change in an increasingly dynamic market. Our customers have experienced measurable business benefits from SAVO's sales enablement solutions and are leveraging the power of social networking with structured collaboration for sales and marketing to improve their company revenue performance."

To realize significant return on social sales enablement investments, organizations need to align these initiatives with specific business priorities and processes. This enables the creation of value-added sales interactions and makes these social interactions more consumable. This is delivered through promoting best practices, driving team selling and collaboration, reducing time around decision-making processes and accelerating revenue realization. SAVO is able to deliver these collaborative social capabilities in a manner that addresses specific business challenges and opportunities across an enterprise.

Historically, sales enablement has been viewed as a means for making sellers better positioned to engage prospects with the right information and resources. Companies often utilize simple social tools that, while attempting to foster collaboration, have little impact on overall productivity. The value of these pure social tools in the enterprise remains unclear, because their fit for a specific business process or purpose is unclear. Directing social tools in a purposeful manner aligned with business objectives is critical and increases the value of sales enablement.

"The 'do more with less' reality that persists within our client base is causing executive leadership to look for new strategies to streamline their sales and marketing activities while driving more intimate engagement with their customers," said Scott Santucci, principal analyst, Forrester Research. "The pressure to accelerate profitable growth had led an increasing number of our clients to develop new strategies to achieve these results. We are seeing the emergence of sales enablement functions whose charter is to optimize their selling system and drive profitable growth. This new investment in SAVO is yet another indication of the evolution and momentum of the overall sales enablement market."

SAVO is the market leader for sales enablement. The company's solution addresses the full breadth of the sales enablement challenge, driving highly prescriptive selling through compliant content customization and management, guided collaboration and contribution, content discovery and embedded analytics and governance. A multitude of enterprises across unique markets share common improvements in sales process and time to revenue by using SAVO's solution.

"We are very excited about the opportunity to invest in an industry leader in sales enablement," said Doug Higgins, managing director, SAP Ventures. "SAVO has created an on-demand, social collaboration platform with a focused purpose of solving the pressing problem of revenue optimization. SAVO enables its customers to drive the selling strategy from the CEO all the way through the conversation that the company's sellers have with their customers. Beyond our investment is our commitment to leverage our extensive network of relationships to help SAVO expand its global reach."

About SAP Ventures
SAP Ventures partners with outstanding entrepreneurs worldwide to build industry-leading businesses. We are funded by SAP AG (NYSE: SAP), the market leader in enterprise application software, and we leverage the relationship with SAP and its ecosystem for the benefit of portfolio companies. SAP Ventures invests in technology businesses that serve enterprises as customers or have enterprises as go-to market partners as well as companies that service consumers in their professional lives. Over the last 15 years, SAP Ventures has supported more than 100 companies on five continents. Past investments include Commerce One, Greenplum, MySQL, Red Hat, and WebEx. Current portfolio companies include Alfresco, Alteryx, Control4, Endeca, iYogi, LinkedIn, OnDeck, OpenX, SAVO, Spring Wireless, Tealeaf, Tremor Media, and Zend. For more information, visit www.sapventures.com.

About SAVO
SAVO is the industry's leading provider of cloud-based sales enablement technology and consulting solutions, maximizing a sales organization's ability to communicate value and differentiation in clear, consistent and compelling ways. SAVO's award-winning, on demand technology application combines proven sales and marketing best practices to address all aspects of the sales enablement challenge - spanning people, process, content and technology. SAVO's technology and unique consulting services have been developed and refined through long-standing relationships with companies such as Morgan Stanley, VMware, Walt Disney, ADP, Staples, Unum and GE Healthcare. The combination of real-world customer experience, ROI-enhancing consulting services and award-winning technology uniquely positions SAVO to deliver practical solutions to enable the entire sales organization. For more information, visit www.savogroup.com.