Behind the Term Sheet: How LeadIQ Has Quietly Built the Next Global SaaS Leader Unifying Top of Funnel Sales with Hyper-Efficient Teams
By: Denis Barrier, Nicolas Du Cray, Rajive Keshup, Jason Chen & Lorraine Ge
With a global economy in rebound, businesses are focusing on revenue growth with all eyes on sales. And while outbound selling is one of the most important functions in business, it remains one of the most difficult and inefficient with the majority of reps still resorting to manual processes to identify the right buyers.
Just consider these quick stats:
- Most sales professionals only spend about a third of their time actually selling
- 57% of sales reps were expected to miss quotas last year
- 40% of sales professionals think that prospecting is the most challenging part of the process
At Cathay Innovation, we’re fortunate to partner with many B2B companies from North America and Europe to Latin America, Asia and Africa. During our conversations, some of the growing issues we’ve seen in outbound sales teams are primarily centered around having a concise and unified view of targeted buyers along with addressing the inefficiencies of the prospecting process given the growing complexity of the sales stack.
Against this backdrop, we’re happy to announce our investment in account-based prospecting SaaS platform LeadIQ that is simplifying lead management, prospecting and unifying sales at the top of the funnel. Leading its $30M Series B, and with Cathay’s Denis Barrier joining the board, we’re thrilled to join the journey as this startup out of the US and Southeast Asia transforms the global sales landscape while enabling teams to be hyper-efficient. Here’s why.
“With 65% of teams missing revenue targets, outbound sales efficiency is a major challenge for enterprises globally. Today, account-based selling is still highly manual and time consuming thanks to fragmented data across multiple systems, repetitive busy work, low quality research and varying privacy laws. We built LeadIQ to help sales teams everywhere make authentic prospect connections with a more thoughtful approach. With this latest financing, we look forward to working with Cathay Innovation who has the global reach and local market expertise across the US, Europe and Asia to help us scale further during this next phase of growth.”
Mei Siauw, Founder and CEO, LeadIQ
The growing complexity of the sales stack & top line growth
Account-based selling has been around for nearly two decades, yet irrelevant outreach continues to flood inboxes (at least half of prospects are not a good fit) and sales teams still operate on a contact-by-contact basis. This is difficult and time consuming as data is fragmented (sales reps use an average of 5 tools) and processes are highly manual (reps spend 34% of their time on entering data and researching leads).
In recent Gartner posts, analysts describe the current market for tools across categories from technology giants to emerging startups as “Sales Tech Mayhem.” We all know that data (and personalization) is the name of the game, but the growing number of tools “needed” to make sense of the mass amount of buyer data produced on a daily basis is further fragmenting the entire process. Adding to this, organizations face compliance challenges with various privacy laws across regions. So with the influx of tools, teams are spending a disproportionate amount of time ensuring data hygiene opposed to focusing on actual prospects.
What does this all mean? The increase in fragmentation, inefficiencies and overall complexity of the sales stack and processes is hampering productivity and efficacy of outbound sales teams. And with quota and revenue targets coming up short, that’s impacting top line growth.
Enter LeadIQ — empowering hyper-efficient teams by optimizing the end-to-end sales cycle
LeadIQ has built a next-gen, enterprise-grade, account-based prospecting platform that streamlines the process of identifying and managing qualified leads throughout the sales lifecycle.
The company was founded in 2015 by Mei Siauw, a former Product Manager at Oracle and Co-Founder of children’s e-commerce marketplace TotSpot (acquired by Poshmark), with the vision of helping sales teams everywhere make more strategic and authentic connections. Headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore, LeadIQ employs a remote workforce across 6 continents and serves over 1,200 enterprise and mid-market customers in 45 countries globally, including notable names such as Okta and Mulesoft.
“Led by a resilient and tenacious CEO with incredible vision, LeadIQ is the glue that unifies sales at the top of the funnel. Its workflow automation builds a strong moat and competitive advantage which is critical with the pandemic-era digital transformation and subsequent talent wars forcing sales leaders to prioritize efficiency and effectiveness beyond the quota. ”
Denis Barrier, Co-Founder & CEO at Cathay Innovation
LeadIQ offers the most comprehensive solution on the market and its product works intuitively with most sales tech environments. Operating alongside existing browsers with its chrome extension, it enriches and captures leads as users browse sites (like LinkedIn) and adds them directly to CRMs or other sales engagement tools with a single click. With deep integrations with the most common sales tools and built-in automation, LeadIQ aggregates insights and buyer intent data from the fragmented or siloed sources across the sales stack into a unified view to orchestrate outbound sales workflows. Additionally, users can auto-sequence outbound campaigns directly in the platform — further enabling hyper-efficiency.
Finally, LeadIQ enables enterprises to control which regions or countries teams can prospect with territory management. Understanding that privacy laws vary by geography, this admin portal helps customers comply with various regulations such as GDPR and CCPA — allowing enterprises to scale globally while minimizing privacy risks.
The results? LeadIQ massively reduces repetitive tasks for sales teams while enabling quick and easy research and capture of potential leads, data-driven account prioritization, buying team orchestration, collaborative selling and personalized outreach.
Take digital adoption platform leader WalkMe as one example, which saved its team thousands of hours a quarter and increased discovery calls by ~20% in the months following deployment. Similarly, revenue operations customer Clari saves around 600 hours a quarter and has seen its ideal customer profile (ICP) alignment improve from 50% to 85%. At roughly a cost of $35 / hour for the average SDR, LeadIQ typically pays for itself within the first few weeks of deployment.
Parting thoughts — global innovation & entrepreneurship at its best
The LeadIQ story, and Mei’s journey, is one that deeply resonates with us at Cathay — a global venture capital firm convinced that the best innovation comes with no borders. When first meeting Siauw, a mother of 2 who immigrated from Indonesia to Singapore and the US, we were immediately captivated by her innovative vision, impressive intuition and obsessive focus on customers.
In every customer interview, a light was shone on how critical LeadIQ was for sales teams along with Mei’s fixation on being customer and product first. A ferocious learner that continuously questions the “narrowing gaps” in the ever competitive sales stack, Mei has proven to be tenacious and resilient in building and (quickly) scaling a global enterprise SaaS company and category leader. These traits are a consistent thread throughout the team, translating to LeadIQ growing over 3X YoY to double-digit million ARR, while only spending $6M since inception and with some of the best enterprise SaaS unit economics we’ve seen!
“A melting pot of different backgrounds, cultures and perspectives is what produces the best, global solutions. Our team spans 22 different countries, a big strength that also takes work, and we’re fortunate to have found investors like Cathay who believe in us as well. I met various Cathay team members, all from different continents, yet completely aligned in vision and through the common language of sincerity, who have learned from experience the power of diversity in global innovation and entrepreneurship.”
Mei Siauw, Co-Founder & CEO, LeadIQ
At Cathay, we look forward to leveraging our platform and worldwide resources to further scale the business on the global stage. It’s an honor to welcome LeadIQ to the Cathay family and we’re humbled to be a small part of its journey to unify and augment the global sales prospecting landscape. As always, the hard work starts now.
Allez, Lets Go!
