StorySlab, a digital sales enablement technology company based in Syracuse, NY, announced today it has raised $2.7 million in funding led by Armory Square Ventures, along with participation from RiverPark Ventures and TIA Ventures. Martin Babinec, founder of TriNet and nonprofit group Upstate Venture Connect; and Doug Pinckney, one of the founders of the marketing services agency Pinckney Hugo also joined the round as investors.
StorySlab provides sales enablement tools for sales representatives selling to customers both remotely and face-to-face. Its platform tools include built-in web conferencing integrations, data reporting, offline storage of presentation materials as well as file sharing capabilities martech news.
“Our platform makes it easy to have a flexible and seamless conversation with the client,” explained Hans Fuller, founder and CEO of StorySlab. “Whether in person or over the web, a salesperson can become more responsive and consultative, keeping the conversation active so the sales process is seamless.” StorySlab serves over 100 clients in a range of industries, including chemicals, machinery, plastics, electrical components, and consumer products. With new funding, StorySlab will expand across new industries, scale its marketing team and grow its operations.
“We were impressed with StorySlab’s vision and the Company’s strong product/market fit,” explained Somak Chattopadhyay, founder and managing partner of Armory Square Ventures. Chattopadhyay joins StorySlab’s board of directors as part of this round. “Our team has two decades of experience investing in B2B SaaS companies and supporting their growth. We believe StorySlab has the potential to be a market leader in the sales enablement category.”
The investment marks StorySlab’s first institutional funding round. “We originally started the business to solve a very specific set of problems for our clients,” explained Fuller. “Not relying on external investment really kept us focused on solutions that customers were willing to pay for and has resulted in a very refined product and a clear value proposition. Now we’re at the point where taking investment lets us build the technologies and staff that will help us scale.”
StorySlab has also had a strong track record recruiting talent to Central New York. “We recruit people from all over the country. Our team has gone to school elsewhere and lived elsewhere. We are finding, at this stage, that people originally from regions like Upstate New York want to return,” explained Fuller.
Optimove, the Science-First Relationship Marketing Hub, announced today that Gartner has identified it as a Challenger in its 2020 Magic Quadrant for Multichannel Marketing Hubs1.
This is the first year Optimove has been positioned in the Challengers quadrant and third consecutive year that it has been included in this market’s Magic Quadrant.
The previous two inclusions were as a Niche Player.Gartner defines the multichannel marketing hub as a technology that “orchestrates a company’s communications with and offers to customer segments across multiple channels.
These include websites, mobile, social, direct mail, call centers, digital advertising and email.” This year’s report evaluated 19 different vendors on 15 different criteria and positioned Optimove in the Challengers quadrant.A complimentary copy of the full report is available on Optimove’s website at https://www.optimove.com/lp/gartner-2020-magic-quadrant.According to Gartner, “multichannel marketing builds relationships by responding to expressed and implied customer needs through relevant, connected engagements to targeted audiences.
It also requires knowing how channels operate most effectively — in isolation and in unison — to deliver the right content to the right audience at the right time.”“We believe Optimove being recognized as a Challenger for the first time is validation of our ability to solve enterprise-grade multichannel orchestration and optimization challenges,” said Pini Yakuel, Optimove’s Founder and CEO.
“We are committed to continue to provide our customers and partners with the ability to transform data into insights that fuel personalized customer journeys, at scale.”As part of the evaluation process, vendor customers are surveyed.
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