Tag: Accord

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Accord, which offers a platform to manage sales processes, secures $10M

Accord, a collaboration platform designed to support business-to-business (B2B) sales, today announced that it raised $10 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners, Nat Friedman and Y Combinator. CEO Ross Rich says that the new funds, which bring Accord’s total raised to $17 million, will be put toward growing the startup’s engineering, sales and marketing teams.

Accord was co-founded in early 2020 by brothers Ross and Ryan Rich. Ross was one of the first salespeople at Stripe back in 2015, while Ryan was an early sales hire at Google Cloud. The brothers say that they discovered the challenges of modern B2B sales firsthand as their teams scaled from a handful of reps to thousands on the go-to-market team.

“We started Accord to solve frustrating challenges in B2B sales,” Ross told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Customers don’t want to talk to sellers. B2B buyers have been conditioned by the business-to-consumer, Amazon-esque, experience and expect no difference in terms of the level of transparency, speed and ease of purchase. Compounded with that fact, there is no system to reinforce a consistent, repeatable sales process, even if you have the ideal sales journey all figured out.”

After rounding out Accord’s founding team with ex-LinkedIn exec Wayne Pan, Ross and Ryan kicked things off in Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch. The two built a prototype workspace that sales teams could use to define and execute repeatable sales process.

Accord

Accord’s UI.

“Typically, sales teams hack together a mix of Google Docs, Sheets, shared Slack channels and other general project management tools to accomplish sales process management, ” Ross said. “However, adoption is incredibly low and none of those tools are integrated into the customer relationship management software, so you can’t build prescriptive workflows and all of the customer-engagement data is lost.”

Ross argues that Accord’s platform today — available in both free and paid flavors — does what disparate apps cannot: offers the ability to collaborate around and share sales milestones, next steps and resources with all stakeholders. “Everyone needs to do more with less these days, and a great answer to that is using Accord to ensure that every seller in your sales org is making the most of each deal and not letting anything slip,” he added in a tone not unlike a sales pitch, appropriately. 

Accord has rivals in Clari and Outreach, both of which recently snatched up early-stage companies (i.e. DealPoint, Sales Hacker) to develop a similar sales orchestration offerings. Ross also mentioned Quip, a company Salesforce acquired in 2016, which embeds collaborative business process documents, spreadsheet and chat inside of Salesforce.

But Ross sees Accord as a pioneer in its category (unsurprisingly), with a customer base eclipsing 130 sales organizations at brands including Figma, Affirm, Stripe, Headspace and BetterUp. He’s not anticipating a slowdown; Accord plans to grow its workforce from 13 people today to over 30 by the end of the year.

“Recent economic challenges have led to a tightening of budgets, mass layoffs and a focus on efficiency. This causes slower sales cycles for every company — more decision makers and due diligence for each purchase — but also an immediate re-prioritization of the need for predictability, discipline and rigor when it comes to business-to-business sales and reliably hitting annual recurring revenue targets. The need for Accord is exponentially greater in these challenging times as every company is laser-focused on increasing their sales efficiency and effectiveness — exactly what Accord delivers.”

Accord, which offers a platform to manage sales processes, secures $10M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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Accord, which offers a platform to manage sales processes, secures $10M

Accord, a collaboration platform designed to support business-to-business (B2B) sales, today announced that it raised $10 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners, Nat Friedman and Y Combinator. CEO Ross Rich says that the new funds, which bring Accord’s total raised to $17 million, will be put toward growing the startup’s engineering, sales and marketing teams.

Accord was co-founded in early 2020 by brothers Ross and Ryan Rich. Ross was one of the first salespeople at Stripe back in 2015, while Ryan was an early sales hire at Google Cloud. The brothers say that they discovered the challenges of modern B2B sales firsthand as their teams scaled from a handful of reps to thousands on the go-to-market team.

“We started Accord to solve frustrating challenges in B2B sales,” Ross told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Customers don’t want to talk to sellers. B2B buyers have been conditioned by the business-to-consumer, Amazon-esque, experience and expect no difference in terms of the level of transparency, speed and ease of purchase. Compounded with that fact, there is no system to reinforce a consistent, repeatable sales process, even if you have the ideal sales journey all figured out.”

After rounding out Accord’s founding team with ex-LinkedIn exec Wayne Pan, Ross and Ryan kicked things off in Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch. The two built a prototype workspace that sales teams could use to define and execute repeatable sales process.

Accord

Accord’s UI.

“Typically, sales teams hack together a mix of Google Docs, Sheets, shared Slack channels and other general project management tools to accomplish sales process management, ” Ross said. “However, adoption is incredibly low and none of those tools are integrated into the customer relationship management software, so you can’t build prescriptive workflows and all of the customer-engagement data is lost.”

Ross argues that Accord’s platform today — available in both free and paid flavors — does what disparate apps cannot: offers the ability to collaborate around and share sales milestones, next steps and resources with all stakeholders. “Everyone needs to do more with less these days, and a great answer to that is using Accord to ensure that every seller in your sales org is making the most of each deal and not letting anything slip,” he added in a tone not unlike a sales pitch, appropriately. 

Accord has rivals in Clari and Outreach, both of which recently snatched up early-stage companies (i.e. DealPoint, Sales Hacker) to develop a similar sales orchestration offerings. Ross also mentioned Quip, a company Salesforce acquired in 2016, which embeds collaborative business process documents, spreadsheet and chat inside of Salesforce.

But Ross sees Accord as a pioneer in its category (unsurprisingly), with a customer base eclipsing 130 sales organizations at brands including Figma, Affirm, Stripe, Headspace and BetterUp. He’s not anticipating a slowdown; Accord plans to grow its workforce from 13 people today to over 30 by the end of the year.

“Recent economic challenges have led to a tightening of budgets, mass layoffs and a focus on efficiency. This causes slower sales cycles for every company — more decision makers and due diligence for each purchase — but also an immediate re-prioritization of the need for predictability, discipline and rigor when it comes to business-to-business sales and reliably hitting annual recurring revenue targets. The need for Accord is exponentially greater in these challenging times as every company is laser-focused on increasing their sales efficiency and effectiveness — exactly what Accord delivers.”

Accord, which offers a platform to manage sales processes, secures $10M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

Posted on

Accord, which offers a platform to manage sales processes, secures $10M

Accord, a collaboration platform designed to support business-to-business (B2B) sales, today announced that it raised $10 million in Series A funding from Matrix Partners, Nat Friedman and Y Combinator. CEO Ross Rich says that the new funds, which bring Accord’s total raised to $17 million, will be put toward growing the startup’s engineering, sales and marketing teams.

Accord was co-founded in early 2020 by brothers Ross and Ryan Rich. Ross was one of the first salespeople at Stripe back in 2015, while Ryan was an early sales hire at Google Cloud. The brothers say that they discovered the challenges of modern B2B sales firsthand as their teams scaled from a handful of reps to thousands on the go-to-market team.

“We started Accord to solve frustrating challenges in B2B sales,” Ross told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Customers don’t want to talk to sellers. B2B buyers have been conditioned by the business-to-consumer, Amazon-esque, experience and expect no difference in terms of the level of transparency, speed and ease of purchase. Compounded with that fact, there is no system to reinforce a consistent, repeatable sales process, even if you have the ideal sales journey all figured out.”

After rounding out Accord’s founding team with ex-LinkedIn exec Wayne Pan, Ross and Ryan kicked things off in Y Combinator’s Winter 2020 batch. The two built a prototype workspace that sales teams could use to define and execute repeatable sales process.

Accord

Accord’s UI.

“Typically, sales teams hack together a mix of Google Docs, Sheets, shared Slack channels and other general project management tools to accomplish sales process management, ” Ross said. “However, adoption is incredibly low and none of those tools are integrated into the customer relationship management software, so you can’t build prescriptive workflows and all of the customer-engagement data is lost.”

Ross argues that Accord’s platform today — available in both free and paid flavors — does what disparate apps cannot: offers the ability to collaborate around and share sales milestones, next steps and resources with all stakeholders. “Everyone needs to do more with less these days, and a great answer to that is using Accord to ensure that every seller in your sales org is making the most of each deal and not letting anything slip,” he added in a tone not unlike a sales pitch, appropriately. 

Accord has rivals in Clari and Outreach, both of which recently snatched up early-stage companies (i.e. DealPoint, Sales Hacker) to develop a similar sales orchestration offerings. Ross also mentioned Quip, a company Salesforce acquired in 2016, which embeds collaborative business process documents, spreadsheet and chat inside of Salesforce.

But Ross sees Accord as a pioneer in its category (unsurprisingly), with a customer base eclipsing 130 sales organizations at brands including Figma, Affirm, Stripe, Headspace and BetterUp. He’s not anticipating a slowdown; Accord plans to grow its workforce from 13 people today to over 30 by the end of the year.

“Recent economic challenges have led to a tightening of budgets, mass layoffs and a focus on efficiency. This causes slower sales cycles for every company — more decision makers and due diligence for each purchase — but also an immediate re-prioritization of the need for predictability, discipline and rigor when it comes to business-to-business sales and reliably hitting annual recurring revenue targets. The need for Accord is exponentially greater in these challenging times as every company is laser-focused on increasing their sales efficiency and effectiveness — exactly what Accord delivers.”

Accord, which offers a platform to manage sales processes, secures $10M by Kyle Wiggers originally published on TechCrunch

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B2B sales platform Accord adds $1M to seed round

Accord opened up its previously announced $6 million seed round to accept over $1 million from a group of CEOs and sales leads at companies they are working with to officially launch its business-to-business sales platform.

Brothers Ross and Ryan Rich co-founded the San Francisco-based company in 2019 with Wayne Pan to create a customer collaboration platform that, in the words of CEO Ross Rich, “makes the process of buying and selling suck less.”

The average sales deal can involve 14 people, just on the buyer side, which means teams do a lot of “herding cats” in order to drive consensus on sales, he said.

Accord launches B2B sales platform with $6M seed

Instead, Accord’s application provides shared next steps and milestones for buying and selling teams to align on so that the right people are looped in at the right time.

“Our unique approach is helping management and sales, but also helping the buyer, which is how you build a relationship,” Ross Rich explained. “Before COVID, you could go onsite, but now you can’t do that. You also have to adjust to the buyer’s expectations, and with business-to-consumer, everything is ‘now and immediate.’ ”

The company’s target market is technology startups, but Ross Rich said Accord is now attracting interest from medical device companies and others where there is no software that bridges the gap between external parties.

Over the past six months, Accord doubled its team and was approached by multiple companies with acquisition offers. However, just a year-and-a-half into the company Rich said he is not entertaining those kinds of offers just yet.

“We have barely scratched the surface and would be selling ourselves short not having had a swing at it,” he added.

The company decided to focus on non-institutional investors when it raised this uncapped round, opting not to grow the board, Rich said.

Instead, it gathered a group of CEOs and sales leads from companies it works with — people who were getting it and seeing the value, including Mike Murchison, co-founder and CEO of Ada Support, who said via email that Ada’s B2B growth “exploded in part because of our focus on being a true partner — not simply a vendor — to our clients.” He added that Accord made it easy for Ada’s sales teams to offer a collaborative buying process.

Another investor, Stephanie Schatz, one of Accord’s advisors, said via email she got in on the round due to Ross Rich having “all the right ingredients for a successful founder,” and the product, which she said was taking into account how people want to buy.

“Ross has intelligence, drive, passion, vision and charisma, but on top of that, I have found that he has excellent instincts for leading a team and building a generational company,” she added. “Accord offers CEOs and sales leaders the opportunity to build a high-performing sales team from the very beginning that truly puts customers at the center.”

The new funding will go toward the general launch of the platform and adding to its team of 13. Rich expects a Series A round to quickly follow.

How startups close their first big sales

 

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Volvo to supply Chinese ride hailing giant Didi with autonomous driving cars

As the autonomous driving race in China heats up, Didi is rushing to expand its car fleets by picking Swedish automaker Volvo, an old partner of Uber, as its ally.

Didi said on Monday it will be using the XC90 SUVs of Volvo, which has been owned by Chinese auto company Geely since 2010, for its network of robotaxis in the long term. Didi created a subsidiary dedicated to autonomous driving last year and the unit has since raised about $800 million from investors including SoftBank Vision Fund and IDG Capital. The subsidiary now has over 500 employees.

Didi started out as a ride-share app in 2012 and gobbled up Uber China in 2016. It now offers a range of mobility services including taxi hailing, ride-hailing, carpooling, shared bikes and scooters, as well as financial services for drivers. The company is seeking a valution north of $100 billion in an initial public offering, Reuters reported last month.

Didi’s autonomous driving arm has been testing robotaxis for the past two years in China and the United States, but Volvo’s XC90 model will be the first to adopt Didi’s freshly minted self-driving hardware system called Gemini, which contains sensors like short, mid and long-range lidars, radars, cameras, a thermal imager; a fallback system; and remote assistance through 5G networks.

Didi said that its Gemini platform, coupled with Volvo’s backup functions including steering, braking and electric power, will eventually allow its robotaxis to remove safety drivers. If any of the primary systems fails during a ride, Volvo’s backup systems can act to bring the vehicle to a safe stop.

Didi is competing against a clutch of well-funded robotaxi startups in China, such as Pony.ai and WeRide, which are busy tesing in major Chinese cities and California while splurging on R&D expenses to reach Level 4 driving. AutoX, another Chinese robotaxi company, announced last week that it will be using Honda’s Accord and Inspire sedans for its test drives in China. The edge of Didi, some suggest, is the mountains of driving data accumulated from its ride-hailing business spanning Asia, Latin America, Africa and Russia.

Rising electric automakers like Nio and Xpeng have also joined in the race to automate vehicles, making bold claims that they, too, will be able to remove safety drivers soon. Meanwhile, traditional car manufacturers don’t want to fall behind. BAIC, a state-owned enterprise, for instance, is adding Huawei’s advanced automation system and smart cockpit to its new electric passenger cars.

SoftBank led $500M investment in Didi in China’s biggest autonomous driving round

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Accord launches B2B sales platform with $6M seed

The founders of Accord, an early stage startup focused on bringing order to B2B sales, are not your typical engineer founders. Instead, the two brothers, Ross and Ryan Rich, worked as sales reps seeing the problems unique to this kind of sale first-hand.

In November 2019, they decided to leave the comfort of their high-paying jobs at Google and Stripe to launch Accord and build what they believe is a missing platform for B2B sales, one that takes into account the needs of both the sales person and the buyer.

Today the company is launching with a $6 million seed round from former employer Stripe and Y Combinator. It should be noted that the founders applied to YC after leaving their jobs, and impressed the incubator with their insight and industry experience, even though they didn’t really have a product yet. In fact, they literally drew their original idea on a piece of paper.

Original prototype of Accord sketched on a piece of paper.

The original prototype was just a drawing of their idea. Image Credits: Accord

Recognizing they had the sales skills, but lacked programming chops, they quickly brought in a third partner, Wayne Pan to bring their idea to life. Today, they have an actual working program with paying customers. They’ve created a kind of online hub for B2B sales people and buyers to interact.

As co-founder Ross Rich points out these kinds of sales are very different from the consumer variety, often involving as many as 14 people on average on the buyer side. With so many people involved in the decision-making process, it can become unwieldy pretty quickly.

“We provide within the application shared next steps and milestones to align on and that the buyer can track asynchronously, a resource hub to avoid sorting through those hundreds of emails and threads for a single document or presentation and stakeholder management to make sure the right people are looped in at the right time,” Rich explained.

Accord also integrates with the company CRM like Salesforce to make sure all of that juicy data is being tracked properly in the sales database. At the same time, Rich says the startup wants to this platform to be a place for human interaction. Instead of an automated email or text, this provides a place where humans can actually interact with one another, and he believes that human element is important to help reduce the complexity inherent in these kinds of deals.

With $6 million in runway and a stint at Y Combinator under their belts, the founders are ready to make more concerted go-to-market push. They are currently at 9 people, mostly engineers aside from the two sales-focused founders. He figures to be bringing in some new employees this year, but doesn’t really have a sense of how many they will bring on just yet, saying that is something that they will figure out in the coming months.

As they do that, they are already thinking about being inclusive with several women on the engineering team, recognizing if they don’t start diversity early, it will be more difficult later on. “[Hiring a diverse group early] only compounds when you get to nine or 10 people and then when you’re talking to someone and they are wondering ‘do I trust this team and is that a culture where I want to work?’ He says if you want to build a diverse and inclusive workplace, you have to start making that investment early.

It’s early days for this team, but they are building a product to help B2B sales teams work more closely and effectively with customers, and with their background and understanding of the space, they seem well positioned to succeed.

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