Sales enablement player SalesLoft announced a significant milestone since it was founded a decade ago. The company says it reached the $100 million annual recurring revenue milestone in Q1 this year.
SalesLoft also announced that Tope Awotona, the founder and CEO of the online appointment setting tool Calendly, is joining its board. Calendly itself has been on a rocketship ride, reaching a valuation exceeding $3 billion since its 2010 founding.
“I couldn’t be more excited to join this team,” Awotona said. “SalesLoft impressed me off the bat with their commitment to providing sellers the solutions they need to succeed. I’m looking forward to seeing how we can capitalize on SalesLoft’s momentum and continue to be the industry leader in sales engagement.”
Awotona’s appointment makes sense. Both companies are based in Atlanta. And both are proving tools that help automate the sales process.
As a sales enablement platform, SalesLoft provides a set of tools that help organizations sell more effectively. The company pitches an all-in-one solution but it’s comprised of discrete components. It breaks these down into three buckets. “Cadence” for managing multi-channel communications. “Conversations” is for recording and analyzing meetings. And “Deals” helps companies manage opportunities and pipelines.
One example of a specific solution is “Cadence and Automation“. This basically guides reps on how to pace calls and follow up calls, emails, etc., and syncs all that activity to the client organization’s CRM.
Its AI-based “Conversations” platform learned from sales conversations over time. It then uses this knowledge to build on the success of the best reps and replicate that success across a sales organization.
SalesLoft also has an extensive content library. Much of which is free and no doubt designed to help fill SalesLoft’s own sales funnel.
A Billion Here, a Billion There
We last wrote about SalesLoft in 2019, i.e., a thousand years ago. Then the company raised a $70 million Series D round at a $600 million valuation. SalesLoft crossed the unicorn Rubicon earlier this year (mix metaphors much?) earlier this year, topping a $1 billion valuation.
At the time, we wrote the following about sales enablement platforms like SalesLoft.
“Sales Enablement is a hot category. Particularly in B2B software sales, which faces a constant battle against high churn, rising customer acquisition costs, and uneven sales performance. The idea behind sales enablement platforms is to provide sales organizations with the tools and resources they need to produce consistent sales results.”
Based on SalesLoft’s progress since 2019, these words still ring true.
Here is the obligatory press release statement from SalesLoft founder and CEO Kyle Porter.
“We are grateful to serve the best companies in the world and help their sellers exceed their revenue goals. Our focus on our customers’ results has propelled our leadership and innovation in the market. Tope Awotona brings incredible experience and perspective to our Board. I look forward to working with him to execute our mission of helping companies maximize revenue by providing fantastic buying experiences.”
