Bizible Raises $8M To Connect Marketing Tools With Sales Data

Bizible, a startup promising to help coordinate a company’s marketing and sales efforts, is announcing that it has raised $8 million in Series B funding.

The idea, basically, is to track whether online ads lead to sales. Bizible started out by pulling the data from AdWords search advertising campaigns into Salesforce, and it’s now expanding into other types of ads and marketing — earlier this year, for example, I wrote about its integration with A/B testing service Optimizely.

Bizible’s co-founders Aaron Bird and Peter Thompson both worked on advertising at Microsoft, and Bird told me that there can be “a big disconnect” at many companies, particularly when you’re selling to other businesses.

“What you see is that marketing and sales are just not connected from a data and workflow standpoint,” he said. “This is why you hear the term that marketers use, lead generation, when in reality, what matters to the sales team is revenue generation.”

In other words, Bird said, you can end up in a situation where the two teams end up at loggerheads, with marketing saying, “We beat our leads goal last month,” and sales responding, “Those leads were horrible” and didn’t result in actual sales. By connecting sales and marketing data, Bird says his product can put those teams on the same page.

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Bizible’s customers include Optimizely (so it’s a customer as well as a partner), OpenDNS, MongoDB, Xamarin, Open Colleges, Curtiss Wright, ADP, and Fujitsu.

The new round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with Scale’s Stacey Bishop joining the Bizible board of directors. Tim Kopp and previous backers Madrona Venture Partners, MHS Capital, Investment Group of Santa Barbara, Rudy Gadre, and Rob Glaser also invested in the Series B. Bizible has now raised more than $10 million total.

Bird told me that Bizible will continue investing in the product, but the main goal with the new round is “doubling down on sales and marketing.” So hey, maybe it’ll be making more use of its own product.