Welcoming Databook to the M12 portfolio

We’re thrilled to welcome Databook—a leading platform in enterprise customer intelligence—to the M12 portfolio as lead of their Series A round.

With fewer opportunities to meet with customers in-person over the past year due to remote work mandates, enterprise sellers needed to make limited interactions with customers really count. Customer intelligence solutions—designed to help sellers prioritize, close, and expand deals—have experienced major market tailwinds as a result. While the art of selling is not new, the prevalence and availability of high-quality data is. Databook leverages real-time insights to productize consulting-style intelligence—helping sellers identify customer priorities, predict which buyers are experiencing pain points or urgency, develop a point-of-view that aligns best-fit use cases to the customer’s desired business outcomes, and automatically generate contextualized collateral. This allows sellers to deliver the right pitch, to the right customer, at the right time.

In today’s era of information accessibility, enterprise buyers are better-informed and less compelled by traditional selling motions oriented around personal relationships or flashy product features. To establish confidence with buyers, sellers need to adopt a “sensemaking” approach to their pitch, helping customers evaluate a solution and understand its ROI. Databook combines internal and external data sources and performs strategic financial and competitive analysis to help sales reps know the right questions to ask, and better understand the factors that matter most in a buyer’s purchasing decision. These insights, previously only accessible from expensive consultants and industry experts, are now at sellers’ fingertips in Databook’s platform. By framing sales conversations in terms that resonate with the customer’s specific business needs and strategic priorities, Databook dramatically reduces the length of sales cycles, increases win rates, and grows contract values.

Databook Co-founder and CEO Anand Shah has an intimate familiarity with the problem space of enterprise buying and selling thanks to his 15+ years of experience as a management consultant, advising F500 enterprise CXOs on strategies to drive topline growth and operational efficiency. Recognizing a product gap in the market, Anand and Co-founder Alex Barrett, VP Product, set out to build a software solution that delivered more sophisticated sales intelligence. Alongside these co-founders, Databook’s leadership team boasts world-class experience in GTM strategy, sales operations, customer success, and engineering.

Across the board, Databook customers have become evangelists, offering accounts of how the solution has elevated conversations with customers and improved sales outcomes. Take it from Frank Perkins, AVP Enterprise Sales, Salesforce: “Databook will revolutionize how you do account planning, and how you prepare your reps to sell into their accounts. Their platform is a forcing function to uplevel the business acumen of your reps, help them prioritize their accounts, and aim their entire sales effort at the business problem…GAME.CHANGER.”

The Databook team plans to use this latest round of funding to double the size of the team, and accelerate product roadmap progress—expanding the use of AI to deepen real-world insights, improving workflows, and prioritizing product integrations. I’m thrilled to join the Databook board, and to invest alongside Salesforce Ventures, Threshold Ventures, Haystack, and Firebolt. Congratulations to Anand, Alex, and the entire Databook team on your successful Series A round!