We’re pleased to announce the Bowery Capital 2019 Startup Sales Stack Report! Please check it out below. This report is meant to serve as a guiding framework for anyone evaluating sales solutions. Whether sales, marketing, customer success or management, if you’re thinking of using or buying software to optimize customer acquisition or management processes with software, this report should be relevant. We hope it will also be insightful for any parties interested in learning more about the sales & marketing automation software landscapes, from investors to advisers to prospective employees. Click here to see the report.
For those new to the Startup Sales Stack report, let us bring you up to speed on why we compile this piece in the first place. The Bowery Capital team thinks about the startup sales stack on a daily basis from three separate angles. First, sales software is core to our portfolio support platform: we work closely with every one of our founders to build an optimal enterprise sales infrastructure from the ground up. Second, it factors heavily into our diligence process: sales tools are critical to keeping acquisition costs low and sales cycles short, and we always evaluate how a startup has (or plans to) leverage them as they go to market. Third, the sales stack is an area of potential investment for Bowery Capital: we focus exclusively on enterprise software and sales automation has become a sub-sector in its own right over the last 7 years. Our team, therefore, has developed a unique view on the startup sales stack and we are exposed to innovative new solutions continually. As a result, we thought it would be helpful to aggregate our team’s and founders’ learnings into a piece that other startup stakeholders can use as they seek to build out or strengthen their own sales stacks. In 2017, we released the third edition of the report: The 2017 Startup Sales Stack Report. This fourth edition represents an upgraded and expanded report that we hope will serve as a good framework for evaluating sales solutions at any company.
This year, we once again revamped the categories to better reflect the growing variety of solutions available. From the top, we’ve separated the tools into “core” and “emerging” products. Core tools are meant to form, you guessed it, the core of your sales stack, while emerging tools are great add-ons to service your various needs. Within this high-level separation, we focus on the top 15 categories of tools: CRM, Marketing Automation, Sales Intelligence, Sales Engagement, Live Chat, Outbound Call Tracking, Sales Enablement, CPQ, Lead Intelligence, Sales Analytics, Email Tracking, E-Signature, Sales Coaching, Proposal, and Contract Management. Within each of these 15 categories, we have chosen an average of ~5 different solutions that we feel are a good mix of established companies and emerging startup solutions in the space, making for a catalog of about 75 profiles in total. This is reduced from previous years as we want to help streamline your decision-making and avoid the paradox of choice. To that end, we created a visual landscape of all these tools, which we hope to continually add to over time as a way to keep track of this fast growing and fragmented market. We’re happy to announce that G2 joins us as a data partner again in this year’s report. With G2’s help, we can ensure accurate user review info across all these categories. If you aren’t familiar with G2, it’s an amazing resource for software review data and is particularly strong in Sales Automation; you’ll find links out to them in nearly every profile in the report.
It’s important to note here that the list of tools in this Sales Stack Report isn’t exhaustive; we had to leave out some great solutions that are also worth considering. Though we worked hard to cover the full landscape, the truth is that each of these 15 categories could probably be expanded into a 100-page guide in its own right. But we believe this year’s 2019 update of the Startup Sales Stack Report will provide a great starting point for any early-stage founder, salesperson or startup stakeholder looking to take their sales infrastructure to the next level. Lastly, we welcome any feedback or suggestions for the next go-around. Feel we misrepresented a product feature or pricing structure? Are we missing your favorite tool or startup? We would greatly appreciate if you could please submit all of your comments and feedback directly via Twitter, LinkedIn or Email so that we can use them to improve the report for future years. Thanks and we hope you enjoy!
