“The advance of technology is based on making it fit in so that you don’t really even notice it,
so it’s part of everyday life.”
- Bill Gates
If you did us the honor of reading through the first four installments of our thought map series, we talked about four over-arching themes we believe are strategic, 12 discrete sub-segments, and referenced over 200 vendors in total. While this is only the tip of the iceberg, we recognize that this is a lot of information to digest, and your head may be spinning trying to make sense of the space and the hundreds of innovative businesses driving change in the land of sales tech today. Rest assured, you are not alone in this sentiment.
Ask any revenue leader today, and I guarantee you – they aren’t asking for more technology. They are trying to make sense of what they have, replace things that aren’t adding measurable value, and build a cohesive tech stack that integrates into the existing workflow of their sellers and enables them, not overwhelms them.
We could have easily touched on 50+ sub-segments and over 1,000 companies in this series. If we can leave you with one takeaway from it all, remember this: technology should be an enabler, not the end all be all. This is especially true in the world of sales tech.
Salespeople are unique beasts, and we love them for it. They have their idiosyncratic ways of going about their business. They are driven by success, defined as closing business and making sure it sticks. They are compensated accordingly and are the lifeblood of any growing company.
Enable your sellers, enhance their efforts, and eradicate tedious tasks with software-enabled automation. Extend your sales tech stack into existing systems of record to build an integrated backbone that improves your team's workflow and lets them spend time on the thing that matters most – selling.
Technology applied most elegantly should heighten what the awesome human beings in your organization do, making them better, smarter, and more productive than they already are.
Pick any stat you want to out there – the number of tools the average enterprise organization uses for sales technology, marketing technology, and customer success; it is an eye-popping number. The key is not to add more dials and knobs to the ever-expanding tech Frankenstack but rather to leverage software to build a neural network that serves as the cape that your superhero sellers dawn, helping them fly higher, faster, and stronger. Like the CIA, it should do its job by operating in the background, without anyone even knowing it is there.
This is not to say that technology is the enemy by any means or even that there is too much of it out there. Instead, we believe that the best way to deploy technology is as that pure-form enabler, allowing human beings to reach their full potential.
As investors in the innovation economy, it is our job to become deeply entrenched in the categories we invest behind to understand the nuances and the dynamics at play at a granular level, while also being able to zoom out and see the broader trends unfolding over years and years. It is with that lens that we offer a final, hopefully informed, industry perspective to leave you with.
The bull market that lasted for over a decade has come to an end. Every company – regardless of industry vertical, end customer focus, and GTM strategy – is feeling the pressure to reduce costs and grow efficiently. This means that almost every business out there is cutting headcount and reducing spend, but still needing to see growth to sustain and increase value in the long term.
That is a complex algorithm and we’ve seen companies most successfully solve it through the intelligent application and integration of software to improve your organization from top to bottom.
Most organizations are reducing the number of sales reps or SDRs they have – many are reducing both. And while the market will “rebound” and improve over time, we believe this will be a gradual improvement, not a hockey stick-shaped return to normalcy curve. In reducing headcount, companies are looking to supplement their human efforts with software, driving automation for their teams and improving productivity through the intelligent application of AI and other fast-moving technologies (LLMs and Generative AI).
In a world where growth is expected and required, but you have less people to drive that growth, software must be seen as an extension of the folks you still have. Choosing the right technology for your organization, and really understanding the value it provides and how to best glean that value to enable your team is what it’s all about. Hopefully, this thought map series shed some light on some of the newer categories of sales tech software we think are valuable, offered a perspective on why we think so, and provided some indicative vendors to look into to get you started on evaluating these technologies yourself.
The investment landscape has experienced growth similar to that of the sales tech arena over the last decade. Hundreds of firms, offering billions of dollars of capital have emerged and expanded and there is more money out there than ever before. All investors are selling money, but be forewarned, it is all not the same shade of green.
An investor’s capital loss ratio is the percentage of dollars invested that go to zero. Across 50+ partnerships as a firm, we have only lost money once – our capital loss ratio is just over 1%. The industry average is more than 30x that level – 35.4%. This means that if you take money from an “average” VC investor, you have a greater than one out of three chance that your business goes to zero. That is a SCARY statistic. If you have spent a major part of your adult life building a business, having a binary outcome shouldn’t be palatable to you. It isn’t to us either.
The key is to align with a partner that is not just another investor in your “investor stack” but serves as an enabler of achieving a great outcome. In our view, this requires deep domain expertise, sincere passion for your mission, and alignment around a sensible definition of success. This should start with first protecting the tremendous value you’ve created to date, buttressing and bulwarking it, and then building out the city walls from there; never overexposing it to unnecessary risk. You wouldn’t add a piece of software to your tech stack that had a small chance of helping you grow faster, but also had a high probability of torpedoing your entire operation. So, choose your investors wisely, because many will tout logos of companies that have had massive success on their website, but never talk about the dozens and dozens that failed because they were pushed too hard to do unnatural things in the pursuit of unrealistic objectives.
At PeakSpan, we look to align with teams that understand how to build resilient, sustainable businesses. We invest in the judgment of our entrepreneurs and understand that pushing companies to do unnatural things by driving them to try to grow faster than they can palpably digest is a recipe for disaster. We see far too many companies get overcapitalized and have venture investors that encourage them to hire at an absurd clip and take their spend posture through the roof to gun for an outlier outcome, knowing all well there is a decent chance the business burns out in the process.
We note this not to boast or to claim that we are the best investors on the planet or have worked with the best companies ever built – although, to be clear we have worked with tons of amazing teams! Instead, we call this out to elucidate in a statistic that awesome things can happen when you align with a partner who knows your business and category cold, set your sights on a pragmatic set of goals, capitalize the business appropriately, and build value iteratively and incrementally over time. We call ourselves PeakSpan because we believe successful growth company development involves scaling successive “peaks” of value creation, not attempting to sprint up the summit on day one and at the risk of perishing in the process.
It is impossible to cover any category comprehensively in a piece like this, and that is absolutely the case with sales tech – as we said in the beginning, this is not meant to be an exhaustive review of the ecosystem but rather a look into the areas we are focusing on and believe are strategic and resilient. We are always learning and believe that it is our job to continue to do so as we strive to be domain experts in this space and others we cover, enabling us to be true thought partners to the teams we work with. Gandhi once said “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.” We love this quote and would love to hear from you with any thoughts, reactions, similar resonant quotes, or ideas for improvement with regard to this series. And most importantly, we hope you enjoyed it and gleaned something from it!
Lastly, and most importantly, reach out if we can be helpful to you. We got into the business of working with growth-stage companies because we are passionate about helping entrepreneurs. If there is a chance to work together, that’s awesome. But if not, we are huge believers in business karma and just want to be helpful at the end of the day. Put us to the test, and let us prove – through actions, not words – that we can be a great partner in your scaling journey.
Missed a part of our series? Review Part 1: Value Proposition Articulation here, Part 2: Data-Informed Decision Making here, Part 3: Strategic Knowledge Flow here, and Part 4: Optimized Execution here.