1Mby1M Deal Radar 2015: LevelEleven, Detroit, Michigan

LevelEleven is a sales performance management platform. The main value proposition of LevelEleven is its unique platform that includes personalized performance scorecards for managers and salespeople, alert systems to tell a team when a key metric or team member is falling behind, and a contest engine to quickly get behavior back on track. Named by Salesforce as one of the “Top 8 Apps to Help Your Sales Soar,” it is the most deeply integrated platform within Salesforce.com, which is used by more than 100,000 sales organizations around the world.

LevelEleven was founded by Bob Marsh in October 2012. Bob has worked in sales and sales management over the last 20 years, with a focus on technology. He worked for 12 years at ePrize, which grew from a small startup to a company with 400+ employees during that time.

While managing a 100+ sales team and implementing a CRM system in Salesforce.com, Bob saw an opportunity in the market to help companies keep their salespeople focused on what matters in order to drive more sales. After initially testing a beta version of the product within ePrize, it quickly became apparent that this was a real business opportunity.

Initially, LevelEleven focused specifically on companies in North America who use Salesforce.com. The best way to access those companies was through a combination of outbound prospecting, content marketing to generate inbound leads, and getting a booth presence at Salesforce conferences.

LevelEleven now has more than 200 customers including Comcast, Dun & Bradstreet, Symantec, ReadyTalk, Forrester Research, and Ford, to name a few. Its top target segment is companies with 25 to 2000 salespeople in high tech, finance, insurance, and media and communications industries. Its most common segment is those with 75 to 250 salespeople. Its competitors in the space include Hoopla and Ambition. As these are all early stage, privately held companies, LevelEleven says it is leading the market for mid-size and large enterprise customers.

Its pricing model is on a per user basis. Typical pricing is $500/salesperson/year, but it has plans to increase it to $1000/salesperson/year as the product capabilities and services become more robust. Average contract values range from $10,000 to $150,000 and their revenue is over $2.5 million with more than 100% annual revenue growth.

According to their research, over 100,000 companies use Salesforce Sales Cloud and based on an average contract value of $10,000 (which is a low average estimate), it equates to a TAM of $1 billion, specific to Salesforce. Any company that has a sales CRM system will need an integrated sales performance management solution. Salesforce has 18% market share, which means the total market size is closer to $5 billion.

LevelEleven has raised $9 million so far. Its past and current investors include Detroit Venture Partners, Salesforce.com, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Rick Inatome, Jamal Mashburn, and Winston Justice. Its most recent round was for $2.6 million, which was led by NCT Ventures who put in $1.5 million.

LevelEleven plans to use its recent round of capital to accelerate growth and further build out its platform. It expects to raise an additional round of capital in 2016.

LevelEleven has a strong management team. CEO Bob Marsh has 20 years in sales and sales management and this is his fourth technology startup. CTO Kevin O’Hara is an acclaimed enterprise CRM developer and a frequent speaker at Dreamforce. Jeff Dolan,VP of Sales, was earlier a sales leader at CareerBuilder and COO Bill Johnson has 10 years of experience in finance and operations focused on taking companies from late early stage into growth stage.

LevelEleven is headquartered in Detroit, Michigan and Bob says they have no plans to move their offices elsewhere. They want to play a role in the revitalization of Detroit and have a sense of responsibility to develop future technology leaders for the area. However, they do expect to open offices in other parts of the country to be closer and more accessible to their customers.

Regarding their exit plans, Bob says, “Our focus is on building a great company and we have just gotten started. We believe that we are addressing a huge problem that can change the way that companies manage their sales teams. There is a rapid shift happening right now in sales and sales management and we are helping companies make the transformation into a modern sales organization. If we are able to continue evolving our solution to make sales teams more effective and to do so with strong business discipline, we will have many options. While we are a venture backed company investing in growth, we still focus on ensuring we have a sound business model that has the potential to generate strong cash flow for the long run.”

This segment is a part in the series : 1Mby1M Deal Radar 2015