Need High-Velocity Sales Solutions? This Startup Knows How To Do It LeadSquared boasts of serving over 1,000 customers worldwide across different high sales-velocity segments such as insurance, edtech, higher education, lending, real estate and tech-based marketplaces, among others

"Our customers have seen an average increase in sales by 40 per cent, achieved zero lead leakage, increased closure rates by 20-30 per cent and reduced time to close a sale by almost 30 per cent," said Nilesh Patel, founder and chief executive officer of LeadSquared. In this world of cut-throat competition, if a sales representative is a millisecond late in identifying a possible lead or failing to close a deal, it would lead to a loss for the enterprise.

LeadSquared, a Bengaluru-headquartered SaaS-based sales execution and marketing automation platform, has come up with a solution for enterprises that cater to high-velocity sales environments.

Bringing Multiple Tools Under One Roof

Before LeadSquared, Patel founded Proteans, a software product development platform. The platform served over 100 independent software vendors (ISVs) across the world and was later acquired by Symphony Teleca Corporation in 2010. Post-acquisition, Patel decided to start another venture, MarketXpander Services, under the flagship of which LeadSquared was launched.

"The LeadSquared story started in 2012. The idea came to us 15 months into working with dozens of B2C and B2B clients for our marketing agency MarketXpander Services Pvt. Ltd," he added.

At the time, the platform was helping businesses build their marketing and lead generation engines. The team generated tens of thousands of leads for their clients running several hundred marketing campaigns through inbound and outbound channels. LeadSquared beta was finally launched in February 2013.

"When we first started with MarketXpander Services, we found that businesses were using multiple tools to run their marketing, lead generation and sales operations and struggled to make all this work together. With all the data scattered across multiple tools, it was very hard and tedious to get meaningful and actionable insights," Patel said.

According to Patel addressing these challenges was behind that led to the inception of LeadSquared. He wanted to build easy-to-use yet powerful software that can help businesses streamline their sales and marketing operations.

What Does LeadSquared Do?

As in Patel's own words, "What we do is simple. We build truly connected, empowered, and self-reliant sales organizations, with the power of automation."

Explaining further he said LeadSquared is solving the sales challenges for high lead-volume, high sales-velocity businesses as they typically have multiple sales channels and teams. Leadsquared ensures high sales efficiency from all these channels, teams, and individuals by obliterating guesswork from the salesperson's life.

High-velocity sales is a multi-touch process, with multiple channels—offline, online (self-serve) or partner, or multiple-team call center, field sales, or operations—involved in making one sale. LeadSquared helps all these teams and channels sell smart and fast while providing a great customer experience.

The platform's solution spans over four main areas which are digital sales, call center sales, customer journey builder and field force automation. Depending on the industries and client's specifics, LeadSquared provides services.

"For instance, higher education institutes want their application process automated and they use our admissions portal to achieve that. Edtech businesses have a high lead volume, and fast sales cycle, so they rely upon the student tracking capabilities, prioritization and automation to match the pace," he added.

The platform boasts of serving over 1,000 customers worldwide across different high sales-velocity segments such as insurance, edtech, higher education, lending, real estate and tech-based marketplaces, among others.

COVID Impact and Expansion Plans

The ongoing pandemic has wreaked havoc across businesses all over the world. While LeadSquared initially was hit, it was able to get back to its feet sooner as the services it provided enabled digitization, which witnessed significant demand.

"One trend that everyone saw, across all verticals, is that businesses were forced to adapt to digital operations very fast, even the businesses that have traditionally been resistant to digitization," Patel shared.

He is confident that the ongoing trend will continue, and will see higher requirements for better connected, digital, end-to-end sales processes even more in the future.

The startup in December last year raised $32 million in its Series B round from Gaja Capital, along with participation from existing investors Stakeboat Capital and Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal. The company is now utilizing these funds for global expansion which includes tapping new markets and identifying new industry opportunities in our existing markets. The platform is expanding its partner network and has made inroads into various geographies including Latin America, Middle East & Africa which will be a key growth driver.

"We envision North America, which accounts for 15 per cent of revenue, to generate at least 50 per cent of revenue in the next two years," he concluded.