Showpad raises $50M, integrates with Gmail and Salesforce

Content activation platform, Showpad, has secured $50 million in a Series C investment round led by Insight Venture Partners. The investment will be used to build on Showpad’s leadership position in the marketplace, accelerate the growth of its sales and marketing teams globally, and further enhance its platform. The investment also saw participation from Dawn Capital and Hummingbird Ventures.

The investment comes in the wake of rapid expansion and customer growth for Showpad. The company claims that it has been rapidly growing in the last four years, getting hundreds of clients in its kitty. Showpad has been focused on driving sales and marketing productivity, and new functionality is being developed to address the wider content challenge every business faces today. Its clients include names like Johnson & Johnson, GE, Coca-Cola Enterprises, Xerox, Kimberly-Clark, and Bridgestone.

“Analysts estimate that 60 to 70 per cent of a company’s content goes unused, in large part because the content is languishing in silos, or is irrelevant. We’ve built Showpad to solve that problem and created the only platform that increases the effectiveness of a company’s content by making it incredibly easy to find, use, share, and measure,” says, Pieterjan Bouten, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Showpad.

Unlike traditional file sharing systems, portals, or content management systems, Showpad claims to be the only platform that allows users to effortlessly present and share content, and easily measure its impact on the business.

“Our focus on bringing simplicity and joy of use to enterprise software has put in place a great foundation for growth and innovation, and this newest round of funding will position Showpad to further establish the company as the market’s leading content activation platform,” says, Louis Jonckheere, Co-CEO and Co-Founder, Showpad.

Showpad’s marketing, channel and sales enablement solutions help ensure sales and marketing teams are aligned and working together more effectively to increase productivity. Sales teams are able to consistently deliver the most relevant content to the right audience and optimize their time in front of prospects and customers.

By providing powerful analytics, marketers gain full visibility into which content sales teams are using and how successful the materials are with prospects and customers, while reducing the time spent looking for materials and the cost of developing content that is never used.

Jeff Horing, Co-Founder and Managing Director, Insight Venture Partners, will be joining Showpad’s board of directors, says:

“We are excited to join existing investors Dawn Capital and Hummingbird Ventures to assist Showpad in fully exploiting the strong and rapidly growing demand for its product. Showpad is a powerful solution for marketing and sales organizations, and we are thrilled to partner up and enable their customers to leverage their content more effectively and improve their marketing effectiveness and sales productivity.”

Integrations

Showpad has also launched two new products to activate content within email (gmail) and CRM (Salesforce) to further strengthen its current offering. With Showpad for Gmail, sales representatives can find and share the most relevant marketing content without leaving their email solution, and through a new integration with Salesforce, relevant content will be pushed to them via their CRM.

Showpad – Gmail offering

With Showpad for Gmail, sales representatives will be able to leverage all relevant content from the platform in which they spend the majority of their working day. Showpad content can be accessed within Gmail to create personalized emails, speeding up their ability to progress opportunities, engage with prospects, and follow up on ongoing deals.

The integration gives sales representatives visibility into how prospects are interacting with their shared content so they can prioritize their pipeline and coordinate follow-ups based on engagement. It provides marketing teams control over content used in this way, as well as insights on which content resonates best with customers.

Showpad – Salesforce integration

According to Showpad, a salesperson on an average spends only 22 per cent of their time actively selling. The rest of their time is used for preparation and performing administrative tasks such as logging data into a CRM system, like Salesforce. This data is often inaccurate and incomplete since it is entered after a meeting has already taken place.

With the Showpad and Salesforce integration, sales professionals can easily access and create contacts or leads in Salesforce through Showpad, log all content shares with prospects as activities, provide salespeople and managers with in-depth insights into any deal, log in-person or online meetings as activities and view how your prospects are engaging with content in Salesforce. This will allow salespeople to easily identify how engaged a prospect really is and provide a more accurate sales forecast.