Databook: Accelerating Success in the New Era of Data-driven Sales
By Sam Fort and Sam Shapiro
Over the past several years, there has been a transformation in how enterprise sellers must identify and engage their prospects — a transition only accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Digitally driven selling is now a critical core competency for every enterprise, and sales reps must make every interaction count. Sellers must be armed with relevant strategic insights, compelling use cases, and personalized content to grab a prospect’s attention and help their product stand out. These shifts have led to a burgeoning opportunity for novel software solutions to provide deep customer intelligence, automate the sales process, and help reps more effectively compete.
In our search for the leading customer intelligence platform for sales reps, we are excited to have found the emerging market leader, Databook. Today DFJ Growth is thrilled to announce our Series B investment in the company.
Databook has built a product that is exceptionally well-positioned for today’s market environment.
Databook’s cloud-based software solution arms account executives with real-time insights that helps sellers identify customer priorities, predict the ideal buyers with need and purchasing authority, and develop customized point-of-view collateral which is tailored to the customer’s target business outcomes. In essence, Databook gives sales reps the ability to deliver the right pitch, to the right person, at the right time.
Previously, enterprises would hire research teams or engage industry consultants to analyze data and create these insights.
Databook leverages a proprietary intelligence layer, as well as advances in AI and natural language processing, to create unique account-specific insights with the same level of relevancy and value provided by professional consulting firms.
Anand Shah, co-founder and CEO of Databook, has the right background for building such a product. He spent 14 years as a management consultant focusing on strategic sales assignments, advising Fortune 500 leaders on strategies to drive topline growth and operational efficiency. Insights acquired from these experiences have driven Databook’s roadmap for productizing and automating what had previously been bespoke, people-intensive services engagements into a software platform that is at a seller’s fingertips.
One of the things we look for in software products focused on go-to-market teams is a strong, measurable value proposition.
This led to our investment five years ago in Outreach, the market leader in Sales Engagement, where we also heard amazing feedback about the value the product was delivering for sales development reps (SDRs) inside our portfolio. Similarly, Databook’s product has been making a tremendous impact for its target users — Account Executives focused on large, strategic sales. We spoke with many users who shared feedback that Databook saves reps weeks of preparation time in advance of key pitches and that the product has helped teams close millions of dollars in incremental sales each year. On average, sales teams using Databook achieve 3x more pipeline, 2.5x larger deals and 1.5x faster cycle times. These powerful results get noticed quickly, which is why Databook has spread like wildfire through its own customers and has led to the two leading cloud CRM providers, Salesforce and Microsoft, becoming strategic customers, partners, and investors.
As a result, Databook has been on a tear over the past two years, demonstrating remarkable growth while also maintaining exceptional capital efficiency and net customer retention.
We are proud to partner with Anand, his co-founder Alex Barrett, and the Databook team, alongside our friends at Bessemer Venture Partners, Threshold, M12, Salesforce Ventures, and Haystack!
