The 2017 Startup Sales Stack Report

I’m pleased to announce the release of our 3rd annual Startup Sales Stack Report! This report is a comprehensive ~250 page analysis of the Sales Automation space, including usage & buying trends and over 200 top tool profiles. The piece is meant to serve as a guiding framework for anyone evaluating sales software. Whether sales, marketing, customer success or management, if you’re thinking of using or buying solutions to optimize customer acquisition or management processes, this report should be relevant. I hope it will also be insightful for any parties interested in learning more about the sales & marketing automation software landscapes, from investors to advisors to prospective employees. Please enjoy via SlideShare below and check out our blog post for more info (further follow-up posts to come).

What does this report include?

1) 10+ pages of analysis on usage & buying trends in Sales Automation space, broken down into a new taxonomy 20 key market sub-segments (e.g. CRM, Predictive Analytics, Lead Engagement, Marketing-Sales Alignment, Data Automation, etc.).

2) Results from an exhaustive survey on sales tool usage and affinity from 100 top SaaS startup respondents (plus a rankings by prevalence, importance & Net User Score)

3) New Market Landscape to help visualize & analyze the Sales Automation space, incorporating hundreds of software providers to populate all 20 categories

4) >200 full-page profiles of top Sales Stack tools for founders, salespeople & analysts, with key info & scores on Product, Pricing, Prevalence, and Reasons to Pass or Buy.

5) Insightful user review data from G2 Crowd incorporated throughout the report to ensure your peers' feedback and key pros & cons are fully considered.

Why did we create the report?

For those new to the Startup Sales Stack report, let me bring you up to speed on why we compile this piece in the first place. The Bowery Capital team thinks about the startup sales stack on a daily basis from three separate angles. First, sales software is core to our portfolio support platform: we work closely with every one of our founders to build an optimal enterprise sales infrastructure from the ground up. Second, it factors heavily into our diligence process: sales tools are critical to keeping acquisition costs low and sales cycles short, and we always evaluate how a startup has (or plans to) leverage them as they go to market. Third, the sales stack is an area of potential investment for Bowery Capital: we focus exclusively on enterprise software and sales automation has become a sub-sector in its own right over the last 5 years. Our team, therefore, has developed a unique view on the startup sales stack and we are exposed to innovative new solutions continually. As a result, we thought it would be helpful to aggregate our team’s and founders’ learnings into a piece that other startup stakeholders can use as they seek to build out or strengthen their own sales stacks. In 2015, I released the second edition of the report: the Ultimate Guide to Startup Sales Tools. This third edition represents an upgraded and expanded report that we hope will serve as a good framework for evaluating sales solutions at any company.

What's new this year?

This year, we once again revamped the categories to better reflect the growing variety of solutions available. I hope the resulting 20 categories herein will provide a good taxonomy for the ongoing evaluation of this market: Calling, Collateral Management, Competitive Intel, Live Engagement, Content Sharing, Contracts & Billing, CRM, Customer Success, Data Enrichment, Data Automation, Email Intel, Lead Gen, Lead Intel, Lead Engagement, Marketing Alignment, Outreach Management, Predictive Analytics, Sales Ops & BI, Social Sales, and Development. Within each of these 20 categories, we have chosen an average of ~10 different solutions that we feel are a good mix of established companies and emerging startup solutions in the space, making for a catalog of about 220 profiles in total. This is expanded from previous years as we continue to see many new and emerging sales tools come into the mix every year. To that end, I created a visual landscape of all these tools, which we hope to continually add to over time as way to keep track of this fast growing and fragmented market.

Now Including: Data Partnership with G2 Crowd

I’m happy to announce that G2 Crowd joins us as a data partner in this year’s report. With G2’s help, we can ensure accurate user review info across all these categories. If you aren’t familiar with G2 Crowd, it’s an amazing resource for software review data and is particularly strong in Sales Automation; you’ll find links out to them in nearly every profile in the report.

Now Including: The Sales Stack Survey

In advance of this year’s version, we also conducted a Sales Stack Survey (survey itself is no longer active) to add buying & usage trends to my analysis. The survey captured feedback from over 100 SaaS startups, asking each which sales tools they use / like the most and which tools they see as most impactful business-wise. We feel the inclusion of these buying trends (summarized in the report) will be helpful to determining which sales tools might be best suited for your company, and also an interesting indicator for trends in the Sales Automation market.

It's Not Perfect, But Should Be A Good Foundation & Resource

It’s important to note here that the list of tools in this Sales Stack Report isn’t exhaustive; we had to leave out some great solutions that are also worth considering. Though we worked hard to cover the full landscape, the truth is that each of these 20 categories could probably be expanded into a 100-page guide in its own right. But we believe this year’s 2017 update of the Ultimate Guide To Startup Sales Tools (now the "Startup Sales Stack Report") will provide a great starting point for any early-stage founder, salesperson or startup stakeholder looking to take their sales infrastructure to the next level.

TypeForm Link For Any Feedback or Corrections

Lastly, we welcome any feedback or suggestions for the next go-around. Feel we misrepresented a product feature or pricing structure? Are we missing your favorite tool or startup? We would greatly appreciate if you could please submit all of your comments and feedback directly via this TypeForm (as opposed to Twitter, LinkedIn or Email) so that we can easily aggregate and use them to improve the report for future years.

Thanks and we hope you enjoy!