Atrium grabs fresh capital to help sales teams meet their quota
Is sales management having a “Money Ball moment?”
With sales teams now operating remotely, it is even harder to monitor how well they are performing. Atrium wants to make sure sales managers, sales development managers and customer success leads have the data-driven insights to be able to do that.
The sales management technology company closed on $20 million in Series A funding to continue developing its tools that automatically monitor a company’s most important key performance indicators, get insights into performance to evaluate what is working and what isn’t and how to proactively coach the team to improve productivity and revenue.
The latest round of funding comes nearly a year after Atrium raised $13.5 million in seed funding. The Series A was led by Craft Ventures and included existing investors Bonfire Ventures, BullPen Ventures, Charles River Ventures and First Round Capital. The company has now raised a total of $33 million in funding.
Jason Heidema, co-founder and CEO of Atrium, said the new investment was a little earlier than the company initially planned, but after meeting Mike Marg, principal at Craft Ventures, Heidema felt that Marg was an expert on go-to-market and understood how to help Atrium build a new category of sales management.
Smaller companies don’t have the kinds of resources larger organizations have for sales management, Heidema said. At the same time, people are having to do much of the performance analysis manually when software could be used to solve that.
Heidema believes that sales management is having a “Money Ball moment” in that with the move to remote work, there is a need for metrics to be the eyes and ears for sales organizations to run well and improve the quality of the sales.
“The focus is on how we take sales managers and out-of-the box monitoring of every metric that matters to the organization and alert them what is working, what is not working and what to do about it,” he added. “We are working on product development to get more data-driven insights, and from a go-to-market perspective, we are continuing to expand our footprint into more sizes of companies and geographies.”
When we last spoke with Atrium in 2021, the company was working with over 100 customers, and today, the company has doubled its customer base and also tripled its revenue during the same time. Its net revenue retention is at 150%, which Heidema explained tells the company that it has figured out the formula and can now build a team to manage the growth.
As mentioned, the new funding will go toward product development and market expansion while also adding to the company’s current 50-person workforce. He expects to double the size of the company in the next 12 months.
Meanwhile, Marg said he is bullish on sales technology in general, which has experienced some “crazy tailwinds” as more companies understand that business-to-business sales is the pathway to “an amazing business model.”
A big thesis for Craft Ventures is the SaaS business model, and there is a lot of go-to-market technology out there accessible for sales teams. However, he believes that sales teams can only go so far with having something like Atrium.
In talking with customers about what their salespeople were doing with productivity, he found their biggest specific need was predicting their performance.
“That is what Atrium does,” he added. “There are a hundred different ways to slice the data, but Atrium comes up with insights you would normally miss or see trend data and call it out so you can address it with your team. Sales managers were always constantly putting out fires, but there are more now.”