OAKLAND, Calif., Nov. 26, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Vivun, the creator of the world’s first product for Presales, today announced $3M in seed funding led by Unusual Ventures, the seed-stage venture firm led by serial entrepreneurs Jyoti Bansal and John Vrionis.
Vivun sells to multi-billion-dollar software companies, fast-growing B2B startups like SignalFX (recently acquired by Splunk) — and Bansal himself. Not just an investor, Bansal is also a Vivun customer. He first encountered Vivun’s software as CEO of his latest startup, Harness.
“Our head of Presales came in and said, ‘You’ve got to see this,’” Bansal recalled. “It didn’t take long to see why. To be successful, a technology company needs to understand three things: where it will be in five years, what its customers need right now, and what the market wants that it’s not currently providing. Presales has answers to all three questions and is a strategically important department that needs management, analytics, and tools for accelerating deals. Yet, no one was making software for this critical department until Vivun.”
Also known as Sales Engineers, Solution Engineers, Solution Consultants and Field Engineers, Presales is one of the largest divisions in the enterprise. Though officially part of Sales, Presales serves as a bridge between the product and revenue-generating functions. Once Sales makes contact with a potential customer, Presales is called in to determine the customer’s technical requirements, walk through a demo and, if all goes well, guide the pilot deployment.
As VP of Presales, then Product, during Zuora’s IPO run, Vivun CEO Matt Darrow saw the impact Presales could have on a business. He also saw how much of Presales’ potential went unrealized because they were doing their jobs with a mishmash of spreadsheets and systems owned by other teams.
“The thing people don’t realize about Presales is that they get even closer to the customer than Sales,” Darrow said. “Presales are the ones rolling up their sleeves and working alongside the users. They know things no one else knows, including what it takes to get a prospect to buy. But because there’s no system of record for Presales, all that knowledge goes untapped. Sometimes you launch a feature that could win a bunch of new customers or drive upsells, but the sales team never hears about it. Or Presales sees capabilities the market is demanding, and word never gets back to the product team. In both cases, the intelligence the business needed is locked up in Presales. It happens all the time.”
Vivun poured those lessons and others like them into Hero by Vivun. Hero unlocks the strategic potential of Presales with sophisticated features for team management, as well as tools for channeling customer intelligence to product and sales staff, identifying critical shortfalls and flagging opportunities that have come back to life.
Hero by Vivun’s innovations include:
- Sales-Product Hub: Align go-to-market and development teams to achieve breakout growth
- Market Foresight: Prioritize features that drive maximum business benefit (revenue, competitive differentiation, churn reduction)
- Activity Management: Shorten sales cycles by uncovering the patterns that get deals done
- Hero Score®: Nail the sales forecast, leveraging data science to rank opportunities on their technical merit
- Deal Revival™: Close the deals your sales team forgot about
- Smart Alerts: Accelerate opportunities with real-time, personalized alerts
“All too often, Presales is relegated to a support role as the ‘demo team,’” Darrow said. “That’s a big mistake. Presales is your product and industry expert. It’s your most strategic asset. If you’ve ever worked a deal you knew would never close, or seen a product team spend months building features that didn’t move the needle, you can be sure information wasn’t flowing from Presales to the teams that needed it. Presales staff are scarce, expensive and hard to hire. You owe it to the business to give them the proper support. If you do, you’ll not only make Presales more effective, you’ll transform your entire go-to-market.”
For more information, visit Vivun’s website here.
About Vivun
Vivun is the creator of the world’s first software for Presales, Hero by Vivun, which transforms the way B2B tech companies go to market. Hero by Vivun unlocks the strategic potential of Presales by keeping product and sales teams aligned, improving product-market fit, accelerating deals in flight and capturing dormant sources of revenue. Backed by Unusual Ventures, Vivun is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Media Contact
Chris Ulbrich
Firebrand Communications
T – 415 848 9175
E – vivun@firebrand.marketing