Crushpath, a startup BetaKit first covered when it launched its real-time play-by-play interactive timeline to track the sales process from the pitch to close, announced today that it closed a $6 million Series A round in addition to launching a new offering called Pitch Sites to expand its focus. The new funding round was led by The Social+Capital Partnership and Charles River Ventures, with the new platform targeted at what CEO Sam Lawrence refers to as “sometimes salespeople” to equip them with all the tools to better engage their target audience. Since launch, the startup has more than 6,000 enterprise users across 18 countries.
“We’re allowing anyone, salespeople or ‘sometimes salespeople’ an easy way to pitch, get responses and then build relationships from there,” said Lawrence in an interview. “We’re bringing the ability for everybody to manage their own new business, not just salespeople….there’s tons of people where new business is part of their jobs, they’re consultants, they’re entrepreneurs, recruiters, agents, they spend a huge portion of their day pitching their businesses or managing the relationships they have with people.”
Looking to replace emails and cold calls and CRM sales software, the company’s Pitch Sites allows users to create a landing page as an online elevator pitch for whatever they’re selling, be it their event, idea, product or service. With industry-specific templates, salespeople or anyone looking to garner new business can start embedding photos, videos, text, links, references and other sales materials, setting the Pitch Site as either private or public so they can then send links to their target market. The premise is to have prospects instantly get more information about a product or idea, while allowing whoever sent it to track and manage their efforts.
Having started off by launching what Lawrence referred to as the second half of its solution, the interactive timeline, this latest product update is a way to give users the tools to bring in the relationships which they can then use the existing platform to manage. The company has both an individual and enterprise tier, starting at a monthly rate of $9.99 per user, with a more comprehensive enterprise solution geared more towards collaboration around an organization’s sales efforts.
Lawrence also spoke about the company’s shift in focus from primarily salespeople to those who have other aspects of their business to manage, while bringing individuals the capabilities that companies like Unbounce and Bislr have brought to SMBs in creating their social campaigns and landing pages. “The big shift for us in what we learned going to market that what we launched was so attractive to the sometimes salespeople, we are now focused mainly on that market versus full-time salespeople,” Lawrence added.
Crushpath will look to add features that make it easier for people to pitch on the go or while on the road for its future iterations, and it also plans to create a marketplace where individuals can access the services that are being pitched using the platform, which also opens up another potential monetization stream. With catching and holding attention getting harder and harder for salespeople and anyone looking to sell a product or idea, Crushpath wants to be an alternative to the cold call or static email, however, whether it can drive adoption where ingrained habits often trump new platforms remains to be seen.
