Shawn Carpenter, the founder of Chicago-based online financial terminal YCharts, is moving on to his next startup. After spending six years providing people with access to investment research, he now wants to give sales people tools to more efficiently find their next customers.
On Wednesday, Carpenter officially unveiled RepIQ, an account-based sales platform that uses data to help sales reps target the right prospects. Carpenter, who left YCharts at the end of 2015, founded RepIQ in January with former Amazon executive Jonathan Suchland, who was responsible for a team of 30 that launched new consumer cloud services at the Seattle tech giant.
During his time at YCharts, and while running Google's revenue intelligence unit before that, Carpenter found that sales teams were using multiple tools for various aspects of the business, but not capitalizing on the vast amount of data that each of those sales platforms was creating. RepIQ is able to analyze all the data that's coming out of a sales organization and make recommendations about what's working and what's not.
RepIQ's platform has information on more than 500,000 companies and helps sales reps identify prospects that are more likely to be customers, Carpenter says. It gives sales teams data to make the sales process more efficient. Large teams with 50+ sales reps are doing tons of outreach every day, he added, and RepIQ helps track the information that's coming in, evaluates what's working and what isn't, and helps provide recommendations for future prospects. RepIQ says it's able to capture real-time workflow and detect engagement of potential customers.
"(Sales teams) are sort of winging it today," Carpenter said. "We’re really aiming to solve that problem and provide a Google Analytics for sales teams."
For example, RepIQ can give sales people the companies that are most likely to want their products and services, and the people within those companies they should contact. And it will automatically track sales analytics and make recommendations to sales teams.
RepIQ has raised an undisclosed seed round from Pritzker Group Venture Capital, Amicus Capital, Arba and Hyde Park Angels, and has "quite a few" enterprise software companies using its private beta, including Chicago-based SpringCM.
"Our team has been using RepIQ to track engagement of our prospects and the realtime data that is provided is unprecedented," Karry Kleeman, CRO of SpringCM, said in a statement.
RepIQ has two full-time employees--Carpenter and Suchland--and the company is hiring developers, content marketers and sales people, Carpenter said.
"You want your sales reps to focus on selling your products and services, and to sell efficiently and not spam people," said Suchland. "And the best way to do that is to use data. Use data from your workflow, from your outreach, from who your contacting, and what has shown to be successful."
Images via RepIQ
