Ambition gamifies advertising and marketing with a $15.5M elevate

Ambition, a gamified gross sales administration platform based mostly in Chattanooga, Tennessee, right this moment introduced that it closed a $15.5 million sequence B funding spherical led by funding agency Primus Capital. In accordance with the corporate, the infusion — which brings Ambition’s complete raised to over $20 million — will assist the startup’s ongoing development initiatives.

Ambition occupies the gross sales efficiency administration market, which largely includes software program that turns fee plans into dashboards. Whereas helpful, cofounder and CEO Travis Truett argues that it’s a reactive method that doesn’t align with fast-paced environments the place income leaders should flip insights into actions.

“Ambition was based in 2013 previous to going by way of Y Combinator in January of 2014. Jared Houghton, Brian Trautschold, and I proceed to guide the corporate right this moment,” Truett informed VentureBeat through e-mail. “Ambition turns all of the noise being created by gross sales instruments — equivalent to Salesforce software program, gross sales acceleration, or dialog intelligence instruments — into human-centric insights that income leaders make the most of to constantly coach, incentivize, and maximize their folks. [Our] distinctive method to rep efficiency administration helps Fortune 500 and quickly rising gross sales groups alike embrace distant work and fight each worker disengagement and supervisor information overload. Ambition’s mission is to assist groups create momentum and obtain targets within the work-from-anywhere world.”

Gamified gross sales

Ambition’s gross sales, teaching, and gamification platform syncs with present buyer relationship administration and tech stacks to ship insights. It gives structured one-on-one  and workforce teaching applications that combine with efficiency metrics for a abstract of each rep.

“Distant work has introduced an enormous problem to income groups, as conventional teaching rituals and tradition initiatives have been damaged by leaving the workplace. Ambition has seen monumental momentum over the previous yr as firms prioritize the way forward for partaking, teaching, and creating our most treasured useful resource: expertise. The chance for Ambition is to personal the burgeoning rep efficiency administration area — a important cornerstone of the large gross sales enablement class,” Truett added.

The gross sales efficiency administration market was valued at $3.19 billion in 2020 and is expected to climb at a compound annual development charge of 13.09% between 2021 and 2026. Past startups like Mindtickle, Ambition competes with Ascent (formerly LevelEleven and Geopointe) for patrons investing in gross sales gamification software program.

“Ambition gives a brand new alternative to permit visibility into the influence of an organization’s gross sales teaching applications, and even the effectiveness of managers on their staff’ efficiency. By monitoring ‘attribution’ of teaching, gross sales enablement leaders can gauge applications and modify to maximise rep outcomes,” Truett stated. “Many Ambition clients have lots of of managers, so making a reporting and insights layer on the influence that variables like teaching discussions, coaching content material, administration course of, or check-in cadences are having on particular person staff results in large implications.”

Above: Ambition’s gross sales gamification and administration platform.

Picture Credit score: Ambition

There’s proof to counsel that gamification works. In a TalentLMS survey, 89% of individuals stated that when their work was gamified, they have been extra productive at work. One other study discovered that video games within the office can enhance an worker’s potential to be taught new expertise by as much as 40%.

“Ambition focuses on giant gross sales groups at enterprise firms or quickly scaling organizations. At present, we have now over 160 clients, a lot of which with lots of to hundreds of customers on Ambition,” Truett stated. “The pandemic and distant work accelerated the office transformation we have now believed in for years — which is one the place work-from-anywhere is regular and interesting and cultivating expertise is important. The enterprise has continued to speed up this yr, with momentum each on the brand new emblem facet and fast enlargement to new enterprise models — equivalent to buyer success — in our present clients.”

Ambition says it doubled its consumer base of Fortune 500 organizations over the past yr. To assist the expansion, the corporate employed 26 new staff throughout its workplaces in Chattanooga, Nashville, and Atlanta, bringing its workforce to 67. Ambition plans to make use of 85 folks by the tip of the yr.