I’m thrilled to announce Extole’s $14 million Series C funding, led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from our investors Norwest Venture Partners, Redpoint Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and Trident Capital. ScaleVP is at the top of the list when it comes to SaaS marketing. I can’t wait to get down to work with them, especially Stacey Bishop, who joins our board. (Read her thoughts on the ScaleVP site.)
We’ve been 100% focused on making referrals the best way for companies to power their growth and building the platform to handle big companies who want to scale their referral efforts from web widgets to complete programs. It’s paying off, for our customers and for us. Our average customer already gets 5 – 15% of their new customers from referrals. At the top of the charts they get 40%. And these aren’t just email addresses, these are highly valuable, loyal new people for their brands. I’m incredibly proud of the Extole team for making this possible. But they know their work is far from done.
With our new funding we’re going to make referrals not just a growth channel but THE growth channel for business everywhere. For our new customers like Virgin America and Boden, our long-standing customers, and the future customers who’ll join us, 2015 is going to be a big year. We’ll continue to help them generate high-quality new customers that they can’t find anywhere else, analyzing their current programs, helping them optimize what’s working, and improve on what isn’t. We’ll expand our core platform with upgrades like the awesome predictive modeling engine that’s in the works. And we’ll focus on growing referrals internationally.
Last year I walked into the offices of American Giant, one of our customers. I love them for their product but more for their attitude and effort. They’ve got a quote from former PepsiCo CEO Don Kendall on the wall: “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary.” I love that damn quote, but there’s more to it than that:
Work comes after success as well as before it. A lot of hard work got us to this point today. A lot more is still coming. I’m excited to dig in even harder next year with ScaleVP behind us and our customers alongside us.
(Read more about our funding news at VentureBeat.)