Achievement. Motivation. Ambition.
That's what Brian Trautschold wants sales reps to feel when they use his company's software platform (named for the third adjective in that list).
Trautschold himself is feeling all of those things in the immediate aftermath of a $15.5 million Series B raise, which is two-and-a-half times the investor backing that Ambition had raised to-date.
The new funds will fuel expansion for the Chattanooga-based business. A lot of that will show up in Nashville — which will become Ambition's largest office if it isn't already, Trautschold said.
"We built a really strong company on $6 million, and that was hard. This allows us to be a lot more aggressive. It catalyzes and speeds up what we're doing," said Trautschold, Ambition's chief operating officer and co-founder.
"We talk about thinking in bets. We can now think in more strategic and long-term bets — things that don’t have to work in three to six months, but can work in 18 months from now or longer," he said.
Ambition is a sales management and coaching platform that "gamifies" that activity (or as a Harvard Business Review case study put it, "turned work into a fantasy sports competition").
"It's almost like Peloton for your sales organization," Trautschold said. "It's very data-driven. There's a lot of visibility and recognition to give you that carrot to keep going. At the manager level, it's really robust visibility so they can better coach, facilitate, help train and course-correct their team."
Ambition, an alum of the famed startup accelerator Y Combinator, is targeted to companies that may have dozens, hundreds or thousands of sales roles. Customers include FedEx Corp. (NYSE: FDX), Automatic Data Processing Inc. (Nasdaq: ADP) and DocuSign Inc. (Nasdaq: DOCU).
Ambition's growth has accelerated in the pandemic, and Trautschold expects that to continue as more major companies embrace some amount of hybrid or remote work.
"A lot of holding people accountable, celebrating wins, that feeling of being on the train together with everyone — that happened in the office. Those rituals are broken now," Trautschold said. "Just because some people will go back [to the office] doesn’t fix that, if half the others are out. You've got to find digital, remote-friendly ways to do that."
Ambition has 30 customers in the Fortune 500, Trautschold said. With the new funding, he's aiming to more than triple that roster to 100. Overall, he expects to hit 500 customers in 2022.
Cleveland, Ohio-based Primus Capital led the Series B round, along with Nashville Capital Network, an existing investor that led a $3 million round in mid-2018. Clint Smith, founder of local tech darling Emma, is among Ambition's investors and board members. Sid Chambless leads Nashville Capital Network.
Trautschold and his two fellow co-founders started Ambition in Chattanooga, and it remains headquartered there today. Ambition expanded into Nashville when it came time to find more executives and senior-level talent, Trautschold said.
Ambition has 25 people in Nashville, including vice president of sales Mark McWatters and Franklin resident Kelly Berg, the company's vice president of customers and formerly a top Nashville-based executive for Eventbrite.
Ambition has close to 70 employees total and has at least two dozen job openings. A number of employees are in Atlanta and other remote-work locations, Trautschold said.
"We take a regional-centric view of the Southeast. We can tap into the different advantages of each market," Trautschold said. "Nashville clearly has become a magnet town for all types of people, whether they're early-career or looking to leave coastal towns."
More than that, Trautschold said he's seeing Nashville quickly evolve into a city with ample software talent. He's excited by the arrival of Oracle Corp. (NYSE: ORCL) in the years to come, which will bring more software developer and engineering jobs and also more sales and consulting workers too.
"It's an important software city. Sid and Clint are turning Nashville into a very important SaaS [software-as-a-service] town," Trautschold said. "I don't think people thought that was possible five years ago, even three years ago. That success has allowed us to grow and become an exciting early-stage opportunity."
