Talk about investments off the charts: 22-Feb-2021 Highspot raises USD $200M
The round included all existing investors: ICONIQ Growth, Madrona Venture Group, OpenView, Salesforce Ventures, Sapphire Ventures and Shasta Ventures. The round values Highspot at $2.3 billion.
$2.3Bn USD as the valuation for one single vendor in such a saturated market, which by the way is not a winner takes all market!
$2.3Bn USD was pretty close to the size of the entire Sales Enablement software market in 2020, if you left out some revenue numbers I always like to add to account for alternatives (instead of only focusing on competitors, also looking at alternatives).
I estimate annual revenue by creating an average across multiple sites such as:
growjo.com/company/Highspot which guesses that:
Highspot’s estimated revenue per employee is $145,000
getlatka.com/companies/highspot
This blog (turns 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.
The most recent acquisitions I tracked on my overview with 760 line items (export available) for market players in Sales Enablement and related industries were:
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)
19-Aug-2021, sales enablement & marketing orchestration platform Seismic acquired Lessonly, a provider of sales training, coaching, & enablement solutions. 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.
4-Feb-2021: Box Inc acquires Amsterdam’s e-signature startup, SignRequest for €45.6M. 10-Jul-2018: Box acquired Butter.ai for an undisclosed amount.
Signavio signavio.com @signavio (now part of SAP) WALLDORF, Germany. 5-Mar-2021, SAP SE (NYSE: SAP) announced it completed the acquisition of Signavio (in the enterprise business process intelligence & process management space). Signavio’s products become part of SAP’s Business Process Intelligence portfolio & complement SAP’s process transformation portfolio. “With Signavio now an official part of our business process intelligence unit, we can help companies quickly understand, improve, transform & manage their business processes at scale.” SIGNAVIO COLLABORATION HUB: Harness the wisdom of the crowd, & transform the way you work together. Discover A New Way To Work: Business processes & decisions are the foundation on which your organization is built. Signavio Collaboration Hub & Live Insights acts as a single source of truth, giving employees across your organization a transparent meeting point to combine their work & expertise. Manage your process content across the entire Signavio Business Transformation Suite. Streamline presentations & provide easy-to-understand updates to your stakeholders. View any & all process content in a clear & simple way. Drive initiatives across your organisation by ensuring everyone is on the same page. PROCESS MINING FOR SALESFORCE: Get the story behind your sales cycle with game-changing insights to supercharge your sales. FACTUAL INSIGHTS DRIVE EFFECTIVE SALES: Signavio Process Intelligence for Salesforce app: Analyze your sales performance over multiple dimensions, & compare the effectiveness of your sales teams across regions, market segments or product lines. Who is doing better than the rest, how are they doing it, & then apply those lessons across your whole 
organization. Turn your best salesperson into every sales person. Hidden within your sales cycle are habits, risks & process behaviors that can have a dramatic effect on your bottom line. Signavio Process Intelligence for Salesforce: See visually, how your sales process is actually being executed. See every action & interaction over time, from the moment leads enter the top of your funnel through to deal closure. Refine your sales methodology, focusing entirely on excellence across the end-to-end sales cycle. Monitor & identify inefficiencies, duplication, or wasted steps within your sales cycle: The whole picture of how your sales have performed over time, not just a single point in time like traditional business intelligence. Taking this historical view is crucial to understanding how to improve the way you’re selling & continuously upskill your sales team. Signavio ANZ PTY LTD, Melbourne, VIC, Australia & Signavio UK Ltd., London, UK & elsewhere & Berlin, Germany
Dropbox dropbox.com @Dropbox (acquired HelloSign) Dropbox for Business helps companies seamlessly collaborate with secure file sharing, access from anywhere, & robust admin controls. San Francisco, CA, US. Acquired HelloSign hellosign.com @HelloSign Simplifying work for the businesses of tomorrow:
We are HelloSign, HelloFax & HelloWorks. San Francisco, CA. 10-Mar-2021, Dropbox announced it plans to acquire DocSend for $165 million. DocSend docsend.com @DocSend helps customers share & track documents by sending a secure link instead of an attachment.
Upland Software uplandsoftware.com 2-Mar-2021, Upland Software, Inc. announced it acquired BlueVenn, a cloud-based customer data platform (CDP). BlueVenn bluevenn.com @BlueVenn Learn more about your customers & deliver outstanding, omni-channel customer experiences with the BlueVenn customer data platform. Raleigh NC, US & Bristol, UK. With BlueVenn, Upland customers can now securely unify their consumer data, unlocking the insights needed to create omnichannel digital engagement strategies to drive their business forward, all from a single vendor. A step forward for Upland in the Customer Experience (CX) category. Centralizing customer data has been a persistent challenge for enterprises since today’s digital consumer uses text, email, mobile applications, & websites to interact with the brands, products, & services they love. BlueVenn will sit at the center of the Customer Experience Management (CXM) offering & deliver a single view of the customer that will drive better engagement across every digital channel. Securely access all your online & offline consumer data sources – from in-store to email to mobile – in one centralized location. This unified view unlocks unique insights into crucial buying behaviors & makes them actionable, which allows companies to optimize omnichannel marketing campaign performance. All while ensuring consumer information is kept secure & compliant with regulations. With a unified consumer database sitting at the center of Upland’s CXM product suite, customers will have the power to reach their consumers where they are, driving engagement & conversions whether on email, mobile application, SMS, or online.
19-Apr-2021, DANVERS, Mass., USA, Demand Science DemandScience demandscience.com @DemandScience (Buyer Intelligence Platform / B2B Sales Enablement & Market Intelligence Solutions) completed the acquisition of Leadiro leadiro.com @leadiro B2B sales enablement, sales intelligence & data enrichment platform with 60M+ verified records. Moreover, Demand Science achieved 50% CAGR since 2014, & is on track to exceed $100M in revenue in 2021. UK-based Leadiro experienced more than 100% year-over-year revenue and EBITDA growth in 2020. Q1 was a record revenue quarter with approximately 150% year-over-year revenue growth. Demand Science is a global buyer intelligence platform that accelerates demand generation for the world’s largest software, technology & B2B companies. It delivers data & prioritized buyer insights that align sales & marketing professionals with more qualified audiences through its PureB2B, Klarity, Internal 
Results, Leadiro, Tidings, & BIOMES brands. Interestingly on 3-Feb-2022 klarity.com started to redirect to leadiro.com. 20-Jul-2021: Airborne App Airborneapp airborneapp.io @Airborneapp_io sales engagement & enablement software platform (Toronto, ON, Canada) acquired by Demand Science.
8-Feb-2021, global buyer intelligence platform @DemandScience acquired Tidings tidings.com @TidingsCo on-demand automated newsletter creation SaaS platform, to expand its sales enablement (klarity.com which used to be prospectone.com) & intelligence solution suite.
Brandwatch acquired by Cision for USD $450M, creating a PR, marketing, & social listening giant: 26-Feb-2021, Online consumer intelligence & social media listening platform Brandwatch has been acquired by Cision, best known for its media monitoring & media contact database services. Brandwatch’s key executive team will be staying on. The move combines two large players to offer a broad range of services, from PR to marketing & online customer engagement. The deal is expected to close in the 2nd quarter 2021.
Link 22-Feb-2021 Highspot raises USD $200M
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
| Microsoft Office / Teams / Loop / SharePoint / Dynamics / Loop / Yammer / Skype / LinkedIn (PointDrive) sold SlideShare | 13 |
| Bigtincan: Contondo, FatStax, Zunos, Veelo (mobilepaks) Asdeq Labs, XINN, Agnitio A/S, ClearSlide (SlideRocket), VoiceVibes, Vidinoti, Brainshark | 13 |
| 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 |
| Seismic (SAVO, KnowledgeTree, Zensight, Percolate, Grapevine6, Lessonly) | 7 |
| Upland Software: Altify, Kapost, RO|innovation, Qvidian (Sant & Kadient), BlueVenn, Objectif Lune Inc. objectiflune.com @objlune | 9 |
| Adobe: Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) / Adobe Experience Cloud / Marketo / ToutApp / Figma / Adobe Firefly: Adobe’s family of new creative generative AI models | 5 |
| Conga (Octiv [formerly TinderBox]) acquired by Apttus apttus.com owned by Thoma Bravo | 4 |
| ZoomInfo Technologies (acquired by DiscoverOrg) acquired TellWise, Clickagy AI, Komiko | 3 |
| Mediafly (Alinean / iPresent / Presentify / InsightSquared [acquired Olono Olono.ai]) | 4 |
| Dropbox (HelloSign hellosign.com, DocSend docsend.com) | 2 |
| Episerver Inc. (Insite Software acquired Storyworks Ondemand / Storyworks1. Optimizely acquired Insite optimizely.com/insite/ Sep-2020, Episerver [Acquired by Insight Partners] acquired Optimizely In Bid To Drive ‘Experimentation’) | 4 |
| Gong.io (Vayo, ONDiGO) | 2 |
B2B Sales Enablement and Sales Tech SaaS 