Selling commercial products has become pretty complex, and the pandemic has not helped. Sales teams are often hampered by the difficulties of building trust in their product, especially in a hybrid world where much of the interactions are virtual. Legacy sales tools like Highspot, Seismic and Showpad were also built in a different era.
U.K.-based Workbounce thinks it might have the answer by allowing the huge amount of content on complex products to be searched for the answers salespeople need to win deals. It does this by being platform agnostic and connecting to tools like Google Drive, Slack and Notion. The company calls it a “Google meets Slack” product for sales teams.
It’s now raised $2.7 million in early-stage financing from Index Ventures and a group of angel investors. The funding is timely. According to Crunchbase, there has been a 22x growth in investment in sales enablement tools over the past five years — from $21 million in 2017 to $477 million in 2021.
Founded in early 2021 by Rowan Bailey and Adam Smith (who were among the first hires at employee feedback company Peakon, acquired by Workday for $700 million in March 2021), Workbounce says it acts as a single point of entry to all the different knowledge hubs that sales teams use.
“The way businesses engage with their customers one-to-one through sales and customer service teams is changing—and it’s driven both by increasing customer expectations and shifts in the way we work,” co-founder and CEO Adam Smith said in a statement. “The next generation of B2B relationships will be about collaboration towards solutions, not just selling products and services.”
Workbounce says its remote-first structure is built for the post-pandemic world.
“Workbounce has the potential to become the go-to tool for accessing sales knowledge and improving B2B customer relationships,” added Hannah Seal, partner at Index Ventures. “As the workplace is changing, finding the right information at the right time is becoming more and more challenging. Workbounce solves this problem and helps sales teams engage with customers and close deals.”