The most recent B2B Sales Enablement SaaS acquisition I tracked on my overview with 777 line items (export available) was:
22-Sep-2021, @LevelJumpS leveljump.io from Toronto, Ontario, Canada formerly Lurniture was acquired by Salesforce.
19-Aug-2021, Sentinel Capital Partners, private equity firm that invests in lower mid market companies, sold Corporate Visions Inc. corporatevisions.com @corpv a sales & marketing enablement company in the US, to The Riverside Company. The terms were not disclosed.
16-Aug-2021, sales enablement & marketing orchestration platform Seismic @SeismicSoftware acquired Lessonly @Lessonly a provider of sales training, coaching, & enablement solutions. [Obie acquired by Lessonly 29-Jul-2021.]
With this acquisition, the company will provide sellers the access to marketing & sales content as well as coaching plans, learning programs, & practice scenarios in one location. In addition to the acquisition, the company has also closed a $170M Series G funding bringing the company’s valuation to $3B.
$3Bn USD as the valuation for one single vendor in such a saturated market, which by the way is not a winner takes all market!
$3Bn USD is pretty close to the size of the entire Sales Enablement software market in 2021, if you left out revenue I always like to add to account for alternatives (instead of only focusing on competitors, also looking at alternatives).
This blog (turning 13 years old in 2022) had more visits in 2020 than in any year from 2013 on.
Spikes in Google search traffic for the term Sales Enablement (even compared to MarTech) seem to be a COVID trend worldwide.
Please note: The first ones are not in order of revenue!
Link 16-Aug-2021 Seismic raises USD $170M
Link 22-Feb-2021 Highspot raises USD $200M
13-Jan-2022, Highspot, a sales enablement platform that increases the performance of sales teams, raised $248M in Series F funding. Highspot’s post-money valuation is now $3.5Bn, which has quadrupled in the past two years. The company’s total funding is now $648M. New investors B Capital Group & D1 Capital Partners led the round with participation from existing investors: ICONIQ Growth, Madrona Venture Group, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire, & Tiger Global Management.
23-Aug-2021, Bigtincan acquired Brainshark, Inc. (Sales Readiness solutions for training, coaching & onboarding: Solutions for course authoring, course content creation, 1:1 video coaching with AI-scoring, & readiness scorecards to help customers train, coach, & assess the buyer-readiness of customer-facing teams incl. frontline sellers, field marketing, & support.)
5-Aug-2021, Mindtickle, which provides a “sales readiness” platform for enterprises, announced it has closed a $100M series E funding round led by SoftBank, with participation from Norwest Venture Partners, Canaan, NewView Capital, & Qualcomm Ventures. The funds, which bring the company’s total raised to $281M at a $1.2Bn post-money valuation, will be used to expand Mindtickle’s sales enablement, revenue operations, & training teams.
3-Jun-2021, Enterprise sales enablement platform Gong.io raised $250M Series E funding valuing it $7.25Bn. More than 3x its previous valuation $2.2Bn [Raised $584M in total]. 46% of b2b sales reps list lead quantity & quality as their top challenge. Gartner predicts that by 2025, 60% of b2b sales orgs will transition from experience- & intuition-based selling to data-driven selling, merging their sales process, sales applications, sales data, & sales analytics into a single operational practice.
Please check the following numbers for yourself. I took them from this post from 4-May-2020: EBITDA margins in SaaS are terrible
The vendors with the most acquisitions:
| Microsoft Office / Metaverse / Teams / SharePoint / Dynamics / Yammer / Skype / LinkedIn (PointDrive) sold SlideShare. Investment in OpenAI | 14 |
| SQN Investors hold 13.6% of the AI-powered software provider @Bigtincan: Bigtincan bigtincan.com [Contondo, FatStax, Zunos, Veelo (mobilepaks), Asdeq Labs, XINN, Agnitio, Clearslide (SlideRocket), VoiceVibes, Vidinoti, Brainshark, StorySlab storyslab.com, Task Exchange |
16 |
| Salesforce CRM CMS / Sites / Content / Chatter / Quip / Einstein / AppExchange / Trailhead / Slack / LevelJump formerly known as Lurniture | 13 |
| Showpad (LearnCore, LIA, Voicefox, Hickup, Taptera) | 7 |
| SAP (Callidus, iCentera, Litmos LMS, Emarsys, Signavio signavio.com) CRM, CPQ, CLM | 7 |
| Permira permira.com: Nu:Pitch became Seismic: Seismic (SAVO / SAVO Group, KnowledgeTree, Zensight, Percolate, Grapevine6, Lessonly [Obie acquired by Lessonly 29-Jul-2021]) | 8 |
| Private Equity Firm HGGC, LLC invested in Upland uplandsoftware.com: Altify, Kapost, RO|innovation, Qvidian (Sant & Kadient), BlueVenn, Objectif Lune Inc. objectiflune.com, BA-Insight Inc. |
8 |
| Adobe Experience Cloud / Marketo / ToutApp / Figma | 5 |
| Conga (Octiv [formerly TinderBox]) acquired by Apttus apttus.com owned by Thoma Bravo | 4 |
| ZoomInfo Technologies (Predecessor DiscoverOrg) TellWise, Clickagy AI, Komiko, Chorus.ai, EverString |
6 |
| Mediafly (Alinean / iPresent / Presentify / InsightSquared [acquired Olono Olono.ai]) | 4 |
| Aurea, Inc. an ESW Capital Group Company (Jive Software / XANT, Inc. XANT.ai [now once again insidesales.com] PLAYBOOKS) | 3 |
| Dropbox / Metaverse (HelloSign hellosign.com, DocSend docsend.com) | 2 |
| Insight Partners: Optimizely rebranded Episerver Inc [Insite Software acquired Storyworks Ondemand/Storyworks1 optimizely.com acquired Insite]) | 4 |
| Gong.io (Vayo, ONDiGO) | 2 |
| NICE nice.com @NICELtd NICE Ltd / NICE Systems Ltd. (ContentEngine / MindTouch @MindTouch) | 2 |
B2B Sales Enablement and Sales Tech SaaS 