Accord, which offers a platform to manage sales processes, secures $10 million • TechCrunch

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

Accord was co-founded in early 2020 by brothers Ross and Ryan Rich. Ross was an early salesperson at Stripe in 2015, while Ryan was an early salesperson at Google Cloud. The brothers say they learned first-hand about the challenges of modern B2B sales as their teams grew from a handful of reps to thousands in the go-to-market team.

“We started Accord to solve frustrating issues in B2B sales,” Ross told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Customers don’t want to talk to salespeople. B2B buyers have been conditioned by the business-to-consumer, Amazon-esque experience and expect no difference in the level of transparency, speed and ease of purchase. On top of that, there’s no system to reinforce a consistent, repeatable sales process, even if you’ve got it all figured out at the ideal sales journey. »

After rounding out Accord’s founding team with former LinkedIn executive Wayne Pan, Ross and Ryan kicked off Y Combinator’s 2020 winter bundle. The two built a prototype workspace that sales teams could use to define and execute a repeatable sales process.

“Typically, sales teams combine 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 these tools are integrated with CRM software, so you can’t create prescriptive workflows and all customer engagement data is lost.”

Ross says Accord’s platform today — available in both free and paid versions — does what disparate apps can’t: provides the ability to collaborate 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 to use Accord to make sure every salesperson in your sales organization gets the most out of every transaction and doesn’t let anything slip,” he said. he added in a tone that is reminiscent of a sales pitch, appropriately.

Accord has rivals in Clari and Outreach, which recently ripped off early-stage companies (i.e. DealPoint, Sales Hacker) to develop similar sales orchestration offerings. Ross also mentioned Quip, a company acquired by Salesforce in 2016, which integrates collaborative business process documents, spreadsheets and discussions into Salesforce.

But Ross sees Accord as a pioneer in its category (unsurprisingly), with a customer base dwarfing 130 sales organizations across brands including Figma, Affirm, Stripe, Headspace and BetterUp. He does not anticipate a slowdown; Accord plans to grow its workforce from 13 today to more than 30 by the end of the year.

“Recent economic challenges have resulted in tighter budgets, massive layoffs and a focus on efficiency. This leads to slower sales cycles for every business – more decision makers and due diligence for every purchase – but also an immediate reprioritization of the need for predictability, discipline and rigor when it comes to B2B sales and reliably achieve annual recurrence. revenue goals. The need for Accord is exponentially greater during these challenging times as every business is focused on increasing efficiency and effectiveness in sales – exactly what Accord delivers.