Hub, a productivity platform for technical pre-sales, has formally launched with $1 million in seed funding.
CEO Freddy Mangum and CTO Karl Gainey based Hub in 2020. The pair each had expertise in technical sales and acknowledged the challenges of utilizing spreadsheets to handle their enterprise.
They researched and surveyed sales engineers at large and small firms alike, discovering that many of those professionals have been spending a lot of time doing issues like “wrangling data to report to management, forcing individual contributors to enter data into a CRM (customer relationship management) system.”
“Performing these kinds of mundane tasks was taking time away from them actually selling,” mentioned Mangum. “We also came to the conclusion that technical sales professionals have been the unsung heroes of sales, behind the scenes driving enterprise.”
So they set about creating a higher approach for presales, resolution architects and sales engineers to handle their day-to-day technical sales actions.
Then COVID hit, and clearly, as Mangum places it, digital promoting turned way more actual.
“That really accentuated the need for specific commercial tooling,” he mentioned.
San Francisco-based Hub was born. The firm describes its providing as a SaaS software that “securely interconnects and complements popular CRM systems and productivity applications.”
As a personalised productivity platform, Hub is designed to assist particular person contributors handle the sales course of. By gaining larger visibility into each step, the aim is to higher analyze and do extra correct forecasting so a company can higher “identify investment areas while taking corrective actions in real time,” Mangum mentioned.
“Our tool can help them automate the mundane tasks and put the focus on high-value tasks to actually win more business,” he added.
Image Credits: Courtesy of Hub
Targeting technical sales professionals is an underserved market, based on Mangum, which presents super alternative.
Investors in the corporate embody Tom Noonan, common companion of Atlanta-based TechOperators (and former chairman and CEO of Internet Security Systems, which was acquired in 2007 by IBM for $1.three billion) and SalesLoft CEO and co-founder Kyle Porter.
To Noonan, the pandemic offered the problem of preserving an enterprise sales power efficient whereas working remotely.
“The biggest concern was not that sales people couldn’t engage with customers. It was how the technical part of the sales cycle was going to be conducted remotely, such as the concepts demonstrations integrations, the modifications, all the things that have to be articulately communicated, and also aligned with the customer’s needs,” he instructed TechCrunch. “And to me that just made the need for this model of selling that we’re in today.”
Looking forward, Noonan believes these groups are going to query why they spent a lot time on journey and on-site actions.
“More and more customers have actually gotten accustomed to remote interactions and even more importantly, many of the customers are not working in a place of business now either,” he mentioned. “And that leaves a huge challenge for the solution architects, because they are the glue that bridge between a buyer saying that’s interesting, and an organization concluding that the capabilities of whatever system is being sold to them truly meets their needs both from a technical perspective and integration perspective and a functional perspective.”
Hub, he believes, can assist tackle that problem.
With a numerous founding group (Mangum is a Bolivian immigrant and Gainey is Black), Hub goals to replicate that range in its group. Its builders are based mostly in Argentina, for instance.
“As someone who graduated from ESL when I came to this country it is important that opportunities not be closed off to people just because of language barriers,” Mangum mentioned.
