Jan 17, 2023

On Jan 17, 2023 CloseFactor , a go-to-market operating system for revenue teams, announced it has raised $15 million in Series A financing led by Vertex Ventures and Sequoia Capital with participation from GTMFund and Neythri Futures Fund. The Series A brings its total funding to $20M. Founded in 2020, B2B technology veterans  Leena Joshi ,  Ben Cheung , and  Erik Buchanan  set out to solve revenue teams’ age-old productivity problem with target account research. By leveraging machine learning to automate the entire process, the CloseFactor team realized they could free up reps to do what they do best: sell. Continuing to hone in on this massive disconnect between go-to-market strategy and execution, the CloseFactor set out on its mission to help revenue achieve GTM excellence. As much as we want to believe that Sales and Marketing are “aligned,” both teams think about GTM differently. Marketing identifies buyers by focusing more on firmographic and intent data as key signals, whereas sales identifies buyers by focusing more on pain points or budget. What you get are two teams who have a completely different idea of their target market, leading to the same old spray and pray tactics that they’ve grown accustomed to in order to hit their revenue goals. “Growth at all costs is a thing of the past, and efficient growth is here to stay,” said Leena Joshi, CEO and Co-Founder of CloseFactor. “To achieve GTM excellence, you need to get back to the basics. Intentionally designing every aspect of your strategy — from inbound lead generation and outbound prospecting, to closing deals and expanding customers — with absolute focus. That starts by aligning sales and marketing around a rock-solid foundation. And we’re excited to help the world do just that.” Several investors commented about their decision to back CloseFactor: “Early stage investing, when a new idea is introduced, requires a large market and an incredible founding team,” said Jonathan Heiliger, General Partner at Vertex Ventures. “We believe the CloseFactor founders cracked the code in giving sales and marketing teams an unfair advantage with a compass to revenue. “Despite a very thick sales and marketing tech stack, go-to-market teams lack the information to prioritize sales opportunities,” said Bogomil Balkansky, partner at Sequoia. “CloseFactor fills this critical gap by surfacing opportunities with accounts who are ready to buy, and gathering all the necessary context for value selling—from details on the prospect’s business priorities to information on decision makers. We’re thrilled to double down on CloseFactor as they empower revenue teams with a platform to plan and execute their GTM strategy.” With revenue growth of 5411% over the last ten quarters, CloseFactor has companies like Zuora, LaunchDarkly, Turing, Chronosphere, and Alteryx using its platform to achieve GTM excellence. Alteryx , provider of the leading  Analytics Automation Platform , delivers easy end-to-end automation of data engineering, analytics, reporting, machine learning, and data science processes, enabling enterprises everywhere to democratize data analytics across their organizations for a broad range of use cases. Given the breadth of business applications and the many different types of employees that can be empowered with the Alteryx platform, it is important for the Alteryx sales team to engage the right customer organizations with the largest potential, and multiple functional teams within them to maximize the value delivered. “Sales productivity is a key priority for Alteryx, particularly given our value-based go-to-market motion,” says John Lens, Senior Vice President of Americas, Alteryx. “CloseFactor has been instrumental in helping our sales organization know which accounts to prioritize, how to identify the key entry points and buyer personas, and execute on a multi-threaded engagement approach to bring the full value of our Analytics Automation Platform.” CloseFactor is the world’s first GTM operating system for revenue teams. With its quickly evolving set of tools, CloseFactor serves up tailor-made opportunities with people who are ready to buy now. Using machine learning to automatically curate unstructured information about companies and extract meaningful insights that go-to-market teams can act on, CloseFactor identifies your best customers, empowering sales and marketing teams to hit their goals. Write in to  psen@itechseries.com to learn more about our exclusive editorial packages and programs.