The Bizible team is jumping for joy after raising $8 million.
The Bizible team is jumping for joy after raising $8 million.

Aaron Bird
Aaron Bird

Seattle marketing analytics startup Bizible — a 2012 TechStars Seattle grad led by former Microsoft program manager Aaron Bird — has reeled in $8 million in fresh funding that it will use to ramp up sales and marketing efforts and support a new product release.

Scale Venture Partners led the deal, with the firm’s Stacey Bishop joining the company’s board. Former ExactTarget Chief Marketing Officer Tim Kopp also participated, along with existing investors Madrona Venture Group, MHS Capital, Investment Group of Santa Barbara and RealNetworks CEO Rob Glaser. Total funding in the 16-person company now stands at about $10 million.

Bizible’s software-as-a-service solution attempts to align the efforts of marketers and sales professionals, getting them focused on common revenue goals and connecting dots within Salesforce.com. Right now, the company is growing at more than 20 percent per month, and the new capital will be used to accelerate those efforts.

“We help marketing and sales connect in ways that they couldn’t,” said Bird. “For marketers, instead of just measuring lead volume and cost-per-lead, there main (key performance indicators) can be revenue.”

That puts sales and marketing departments on the same page, eliminating some of the natural tensions that arise between the two organizations. (Marketing professionals can claim that they are delivering leads to the sales team, which often responds that they are crappy leads).

Bizible-Screenshot11“Once you enable this in an organization, it actually has a much broader impact on the sales and marketing teams working on a common goal, which is revenue,” said Bird, adding that before Bizible marketers could really only measure leads. Bizible pulls in data from an organization’s Web site, as well as Google AdWords, and then integrates that with Salesforce.com. (It is investigating

Bizible claims about 200 customers — including ADP, Delta, OfferPop, Apollo Group and others — who pay anywhere from $500 per month to more than $2,000 per month for the service.

“The role of CMO has transitioned from artist to scientist,” said Bishop of Scale Venture Partners in a release. “Marketing is under immense pressure to demonstrate positive impact on revenue but finding the right tools to do so has been difficult even in the digital age. Bizible is changing this dynamic, providing marketers with the insight to adjust campaigns and drive higher ROI.”

Plenty of other B2B marketing automation services exist, including Marketo, HubSpot and Portland-based Act-On. 

But Bird said that those tools are much broader, and only touch on the services that Bizible provides.

“This is like one of 20 things that they are doing, and so they are not as focused on solving the problem as we are,” he said. “All of our customers are using marketing automation, many of them thought they would get this out of it, but they don’t.”

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