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We’re excited to announce that Correlated has raised a $8.3 million seed round led by Harrison Metal and NextView Ventures to build the leading platform for Product Led Revenue! We’re also fortunate to have some fantastic entrepreneurs joining this round including Apollo Projects (the Altman brothers' fund), Brian Long (CEO, Co-Founder at Attentive), Andrew Jones (CPO, Co-Founder at Attentive), Ben Darnell (CTO, Co-Founder at Cockroach Labs) and Pete Kazanjy (CRO at Atrium and author of Founding Sales, among others).
We’re also publicly launching Correlated out of beta and into General Availability - that means that you can get started with Correlated today with our free trial. Correlated is working with sales and revenue teams at leading software companies like Ally, Pulumi and ReadMe to help them drive free to paid conversion and discover new expansion revenue opportunities.
With this funding round we’re hiring across engineering, account management and sales. If you’re interested in joining the team, check out our open opportunities!
What is Product Led Revenue?
The way software is bought and sold is changing. The sales process for software used to be predominantly driven by salespeople and most software was inaccessible without talking to a salesperson first. It would go something like this: a prospective buyer would fill out a form on a marketing website, talk to a BDR or AE across multiple, sequential phone calls, then eventually be shown a demo. Many companies wouldn’t even offer trial access to their product!
The old way of buying software is dead in favor of self-service. Today’s software products, exemplified by tools like Slack, Zoom, Calendly, AWS, and Snowflake, can be adopted with a few clicks. This means that individual end users, business teams and even entire companies can solve problems with software all without having to speak to a salesperson. This leads to the inevitable question: why have software salespeople at all?
The role of sales in the self-service era
Self-service software does not mean that sales teams are obsolete. In fact, for most of the companies I mentioned above, sales and marketing as a percentage of revenue is ~50% and they employ hundreds of salespeople. At Correlated, we believe the role of sales is more important than ever in this new world!
Salespeople in companies with a self-service product are no longer gatekeepers. Instead, they are consultants that help customers maximize the value of what they’re buying. A big portion of the sales motion now occurs in the product - and the role of salespeople is to identify which customers need human engagement to either convert or expand. The problem is many sales teams struggle with understanding how their customers are using their products because they don’t have easy access to customer usage data. Without easy access to these insights, sales teams can’t easily prioritize which self-service customers to reach out to, when the appropriate time to reach out would be, or what message to use that would resonate the most.
Enter Correlated
Correlated includes a founding team that has experienced this problem first hand across numerous companies like Timescale, MoPub and Cockroach Labs. We’ve been frustrated by the friction involved in getting usable insights from customer data to help sales teams decide which users or customers to focus on and the context of their outreach. As commercial leaders, PMs, designers, and engineers, we’ve all seen how data can empower business teams to be successful. Sales teams shouldn’t have to rely on data science teams or ad hoc reports to effectively prioritize which customers to reach out to and how to talk to them. This led us to create Correlated last year.
Correlated is the best way for sales teams to implement data-driven strategies at product-led software companies. This means building a platform that surfaces insights and allows you to orchestrate powerful, easy-to-use workflows so that sales teams can spend their time on the best opportunities.
In our private beta over the last several months, we've already been able to drive meaningful success by helping our customers easily uncover signals from their customer data and take action. This has led sales teams using our product to drive a higher conversion rate from self-service free accounts to sales-led paid accounts. We’ve also seen sales teams uncover expansion opportunities within existing paid accounts that they otherwise would not have been aware of, meaningfully increasing their net dollar retention (NDR), a critical SaaS metric.
What makes Correlated extremely powerful is how we uniquely surface customer data from multiple sources to empower sales teams. For example, using Correlated, a salesperson can easily sort their Accounts based on a variety of criteria that combines firmographic data from Salesforce (company size), product usage metrics (log ins) and derived metrics in Snowflake (total self-serve licenses sold). This allows salespeople to easily determine when to engage and with what message. By connecting to downstream tools like Outreach, sales teams gain a huge amount of leverage to customize messaging based on product signals combined with other key factors.
This is just the beginning. As PLG becomes the de facto go-to-market strategy for SaaS companies, they’ll need a smarter, more intelligent platform to implement data-driven and automated sales motions. We envision a future where sales teams can focus their talents on the right customers at the right time with the right message, driving more revenue more efficiently. Over the coming months we have more announcements about how we’ll help deliver this vision to sales teams at product-led companies.
We’re just getting started
With this funding round, we plan to invest aggressively in making Correlated the best way for any sales team at a software company to use product data to drive higher free-to-paid conversion rates and more expansion revenue opportunities.
If you’d like to get started using Correlated, we are happy to onboard you to the product, it’s free to start. If you’re interested in joining the team, here are our open roles or email us at jobs@getcorrelated.com if you don’t see a description that perfectly matches how you think you can help.
We can’t wait to help you power product led revenue at your company!
