Software buyers are now more sophisticated than ever. In an early age of software sales, suited-and-booted Oracle salespeople were taking buyers out to dinner and educating them about a solution while engaging in a formal discovery and RFP process. It was an excessive and long sales cycle, with buyers learning about a product and building a trusted relationship with a small number of sellers. This formal dance led to a mediocre problem-solution fit, no concept of after-sale customer success — and still came with a big-ticket price tag.
Today, buyers are far more savvy and educated software purchasers, and range from CIOs to departmental teams. They know the right questions to ask and if they don’t, formal and informal networks exist for virtually every job function — from CISO slack channels to engineering manager meetups to conferences for finance heads and HR leaders. Public forums like G2 Crowd and Capterra have digitized formal review services (which now include feedback from peers as well as experts) while data-driven buyer intelligence platforms like Vendr support the full procurement lifecycle.
Buyers now come to vendors already understanding their needs and how it will work with their tech stack, and it’s very likely they already know which solution is best for them. With hundreds of B2B SaaS companies in our global portfolio, we have had a front-row seat as these interactions between reps and prospects changed over time, and this market transparency has been an incredible forcing function for software vendors to step up their game — from product to sales to customer success and beyond. And as a result, the existing tools of managing customer engagement are no longer sufficient. Software vendors and their sales and marketing teams need solutions that help them engage with better-educated customers at precisely the moments customers want that interaction.
Enter Warmly, which is building the world’s first AI-driven, autonomous sales orchestration solution to help software vendors thrive in this digitally-enabled, fast moving environment. Warmly intelligently alerts sales and marketing reps when a potential customer engages across channels, complete with context about the prospect’s role and network. Warmly automatically sends intent-based outreach on behalf of the sales team, which frees time for higher value activities like building relationships with customers or personalizing messaging. It allows sales teams to scalably interact with prospects in a way that is productive and personalized for both parties. We believe Warmly can be a foundational solution for this type of event-driven sales future.
Congrats to founders Maximus Greenwald, Carina Boo, Alan Zhao, and the visionary team at Warmly on their $11M Series A funding from Felicis, NFX, Zoom Ventures, Maven, and F-Prime Capital.
Buyers now come to vendors already understanding their needs and how it will work with their tech stack, and it’s very likely they already know which solution is best for them.