Sales and marketing are often considered a single category on a business plan, but ironically, when it comes to building apps and services to help with them, they usually become separate entities, and so too do the teams that address sales and marketing in organizations. Today, however, a startup called Terminus — which is building a platform that views sales and marketing in a more integrated way, through account-based marketing — is announcing funding and growth, a sign of how its approach is gaining more traction.
The startup has closed a Series C of $90 million, at a valuation we understand from sources to be around $400 million. This is a huge jump on Terminus’s valuation in its last round, which was $96 million post-money in 2018, according to PitchBook data.
Part of the reason for the hike is likely because of the huge focus that digital marketing has had especially in the last year — a time when, because of the pandemic, a lot of more legacy and traditional channels have ceased to be as visible). Account-based marketing alone was estimated, in 2018, to be a $458 billion market opportunity.
Another reason for interest in Terminus specifically is because of its customer record within that. It has around 1,000 enterprise customers, including divisions of IBM, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters, and more.
“We’re building the new marketing automation,” said CEO Tim Kopp in an interview. “We think account-based marketing is the most important thing to have happened in sales software. Teams are switching from lead-based to account-based approaches, and we’ve now moved into addressing all points of engagement, a modern B2B marketing cloud.”
The equity round is being led by Great Hill Partners, with previous investors Atlanta Ventures and Edison Partners, and new backer Hallet Capital also participating. The funding brings the total raised by Terminus — co-headquartered in Atlanta, GA and Indianapolis, IN — to about $120 million.
The world of marketing has seen a huge shift in the two decades, with the rise in internet consumption, and the proliferation of digital services, driving a big business in what is now collectively called “martech”.
The area that Terminus specifically focuses on within that is account-based marketing. In short, this is a way for B2B sales and marketing teams to conceive of potential targets at a business not as individual entities but collective groups. This means a more joined up effort to work across whole organizations, providing a way to market something to more than one person, increasing the chances of connecting with someone to then make the sale.
Terminus’ platform and approach, CEO Kopp points out, essentially brings the functions of sales and marketing together, instead of needing to hand off work from one to the other (eliminating the admin and cost of working across different software within those groups as part of that).
“We see an overwhelming opportunity in bringing together marketing and sales,” he said in an interview. “Marketing is joining in on sales meetings and sales has become a part of the client success, where you are marketing to your own customers. It’s an area where customers stink because they typically come at it from the sales or marketing side.”
Terminus’ platform today consists of a “data studio” that brings together sales intelligence, account information, and other data sources to help compile a list of would-be targets. On top of this, it also has been building out a marketing engine that includes the ability to build advertising, email and web campaigns, and chatbot management. Some of this has been built in-house, and some has come to the company by way of acquisitions (for example the chat functionality comes by way of its acquisition of Ramble last April).
Terminus is by far not the only company working in this area. Others include Marketo (part of Adobe), 6sense, Sendoso and many others. Terminus’s approach is to bring different aspects of the marketing and sales process (analytics, orchestration, automation and execution) into one platform.
Fittingly, the startup’s name was based on an early nickname for Atlanta, and used as a reference to its aim of being the single for its customers’ various marketing and sales activities.
This is one reason why investors have been knocking.
“Terminus continues to redefine how teams go to market, innovating how companies generate revenue in a digital-first environment,” said Derek Schoettle, a growth partner at Great Hill. “We’ve been so impressed with this team, the company’s significant growth over the last year, its continued product innovation, and the huge market opportunity ahead.”
