Sales tech evolution

Our latest fundraising round was twice oversubscribed in big part thanks to three things: team, market and product vision.

I’m sharing here our take on the sales tech market: a huge market yet moving very fast and we'll go through three phases.

2000-2010: the foundations

These are foundational years for the modern sales stack. CRMs like Salesforce, Hubspot are born providing a centralized database to ( painfully) track customer interactions and sales activities. SaaS becomes a widespread model, making it easy to access this information from any browser. Generic purpose business Intelligence tools like Tableau are founded and sales teams start to have a better understanding of their processes.

These are the years of books like “spin selling” and “the challenger sale”, bringing a systematic and intentional approach to sales methodologies.

2010-2022: the explosion of the sales stack

Many new categories were created: forecasting, conversation intelligence, sales engagement, sales analytics, productivity and many more. The market is so large that each of these categories has seen at least a couple of large winners and a couple of trends emerged: many of these new companies went for the large fishes, building for enterprise customers first and they went very vertical on their product niche. This led to awesome innovations in sales processes, but also very complex sales stacks, with reps and managers having to juggle between 15-20 different tools. Result? Very high variable costs as most of these tools are pay-per-seat, very high overheads as each tool required onboarding, management time, negotiations and, even worse, very complex workflows and silos.

2022 - ? : consolidation

Over the last 12 months market conditions completely changed. Suddenly nice-to-have tools were cut, as well as the resources to manage this stack complexity. Budget collapsed and selling became harder even for successful companies like Gong or Clari, who recently laid off part of their teams.

So what is going to happen? The trend is already there, we just need to zoom out. Clari purchasing Wingman, Gong adding forecasting or Outreach releasing Outreach commit. All these players will be fighting to build the CRM companion (or maybe their own CRM at some point?) for sales teams, adding more functionalities to their offering. At the same time all these players are geared towards enterprise customers, which means that most of these features will be hard to implement or too expensive for mid market and SMB customers, leaving room for new players to come in and grab their share.

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It’s an exciting space to be in with Superlayer, follow us for our next post on our product vision and let us know what you think!

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