Sales Enablement software vendors are buying reoccurring revenue by acquiring competitors and complimentary companies

Based on my own research I estimate that the Sales Enablement software market will be (in 2023) worth $10Bn USD in annual revenue.

Vendors (many of them took on a lot of VC funding) are buying reoccurring revenue by acquiring competitors and complementary companies.

• Edit: 17-DEC-2021, Mediafly is acquiring InsightSquared to provide revenue teams with 360-degree deal intelligence & prescriptive next steps.
• Edit: Trapit was acquired by ScribbleLive in May 2017. (Rock Content has acquired ScribbleLive on Dec 10, 2019. Rock Content: SaaS, Marketplace. Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais, Brazil)
• Edit: 28-May-2019 Upland Software acquired Kapost
• Edit: 25-Jul-2019, Bigtincan acquired the assets of Portland, Oregon, USA-based Veelo, Inc. for US$1.8m.
• Edit: 5-Sep-2019, @Mediafly acquired iPresent Ltd @iPresentapp
• Edit: 5-Sep-2019 Bigtincan acquired Asdeq Labs asdeqworkforce.com
• Edit: 30-Sep-2019 Xinnovation, Inc. (“XINN”) xinn.com @GoXinn acquisition by Bigtincan
• Edit: 7-Oct-2019 Upland Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: UPLD) acquired Altify @altifyinc
• Edit: In October 2019 @servicenow acquired @attivio
• Edit: 4-Nov-2019 Costello was acquired by SalesLoft
• Edit: 5-Nov-2019: Percolate percolate.com @percolate Percolate Industries, Inc. acquired by Seismic

After many large B2B companies made new decisions for investment in Sales Enablement teams/functions/tools/software/platforms, the market is not growing very fast anymore.

Now, the vendors have to buy each other to see strong growth in revenue.

I’m always surprised when I see a Series B or C funding round in this space as I do not believe that it will deliver VC-type returns (10x) for those coming in after the seed or series A stage. That happens in ‘winner-take-all markets’, but I do not believe Sales Enablement is one.

May 28, 2019, Upland Software acquired Kapost (Had $19M in funding) for approx. 3x revenue ($45M in cash) + $5M cash holdback payable in 12 months.

My Sales Enablement market deathwatch of companies that were acquired & shut down or went out of business has been growing a lot since 2017. You can also download my entire table of companies I’m tracking:

Expect to read comments like this one more often:

“We had been using SAVO for our sales assets/content mgmt. tool.  However, now that they’ve been bought by Seismic, we’re in the process of migrating over.  We have over XXXX pieces of content to manage across multiple verticals, so we needed a way to consolidate multiple XXX into one system.  We’ve developed a very thorough governance process […]”

There is growth in this market, but it is mostly in the number of LinkedIn users with Sales Enablement in their job title.

I track the number of LinkedIn users with Sales Enablement in their current job title. 5-Feb-2020, LinkedIn had 10,540 users like that globally & on 1-Sep-2022 it was 15k.

• Global list / companies worldwide
• Complete list (746 line items) to export/download
• European list / Europe-based companies
• Canadian list / Canada-based companies
• Australian list / Australia-based companies
• Vendors from the Nordics
• India based (or development in India)
• Sales Enablement market deathwatch
• Sales Enablement tools powered by AI