Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Did you have venture capitalists in your early rounds? Avi Steinlauf: There were some small venture funds that were portions of larger companies but none of the blue chip VC funds that you would be familiar with today. Sramana Mitra: When you were raising money at that time, was this part of the

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Unicorn in the Making: Avi Steinlauf, CEO of Edmunds.com (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: The Internet business model that you were settling on was CPA lead generation or was it just straight up advertising? Avi Steinlauf: CPA lead generation would be a fair description using Internet lingo. That was just the beginning because we were also being approached during the later part of the ’90s by a number

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1Mby1M Deal Radar 2010: SaleSpider, Toronto, Canada

Digital media company SaleSpider owns a 720,000-member social network for small and medium businesses (SMBs) accessed through the site, Facebook, and a mobile app, and an ad network for branding and direct response campaigns. The company focuses on helping small business owners make new contacts, maintain their networks, and find sales leads – a rapidly

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Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Mark Roberge, VP Of Sales, HubSpot (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada Sramana: The process of transactional selling, selling yellow pages memberships or club memberships is a very different kind of selling from the consultative selling you are talking about. It is much, much harder to find people who can do [consultative selling] on the phone. I have gone

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Thought Leaders In Sales 2.0: Mark Roberge, VP Of Sales, HubSpot (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest author Sudhindra Chada [This is our second interview is this new series; the first was with Dave Fitzgerald of Brainshark.] Mr. Mark Roberge, VP of sales, is responsible for sales at HubSpot. He has grown the team from one to more than forty sales reps in less than three years.

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Deal Radar 2010: LeadForce1 California, Michigan

Through its marketing automation 2.0 approach, LeadForce1 aims to provide the missing link between Web analytics and customer relationship management (CRM systems), thus enabling B2B sales and marketing teams to uncover previously hidden leads, new prospect opportunities, and critical business intelligence within existing accounts. LeadForce1’s SaaS product deploys a patent-pending intent determination algorithm that spots

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Top Seven SaaS Startups

In the recap mode, here are the top seven SaaS startups that I am tracking: * Qualys – Managed security and compliance; Interview with CEO Philippe Courtot; Forbes Column: The Next VmWare.

Deal Radar 2008: Genius

Imagine you are on the web site of a company, browsing about their products, and someone from that company calls you at that very moment? That’s the technology Genius provides. It’s spooky!