Message from Shyam HN, Co-Founder & CEO of BuyerAssist.io
I am very thrilled to announce today that we have secured $2 Million in a seed funding round led by Stellaris Venture Partners and Emergent Ventures to work on our next round of product innovations and expand our incredible team. As our closed beta program moves into its next phase, we are excited to launch our beta product publicly today and look forward to helping our existing and future customers with their buyer engagement strategy. We are currently a team of 15 and actively looking to grow our team over the next couple of weeks and months.
Amit, Shankar, and I are truly humbled and honored by the support we've received from the beginning and would like to use this opportunity to thank every single person who has directly or indirectly been with us in the journey thus far. We really appreciate the fact that most of you have gone out of your way to help us as we set up BuyerAssist.io.
Thank you, Alok (Stellaris Venture Partners) and Anupam (Emergent Ventures) for leading the funding round, and Vaibhav (Better Capital) for being the first institutional investor to commit to participating in this round! Also, to our amazing set of angel investors across the world - from the Bay Area to Bengaluru - successful business leaders across different functions and pioneering startup founders who have been in our shoes before. We’re honored to have you on this journey with us!
Here we have a montage of some of our investors sharing their perspectives on what excites them about this space and BuyerAssist.io.
Most recently, Amit, Shankar, and I were early employees and colleagues at MindTickle, as the company scaled from a seed-funded startup into a hyper-growth $ multi-million enterprise business. Amit was focused on engineering and platform architecture, Shankar was in frontline enterprise selling and I was in a GTM leadership role. It was an amazing opportunity for all three of us, learning from the experience of every new colleague, prospect, or customer we had the chance to engage with. Our empirical lessons; and the continued shift towards the subscription model, came together to present a unique picture of how the market was ripe for the next wave of advancement in selling and buying subscription solutions, forming the foundation of BuyerAssist.io..
Here’s what we found - Buying and decision-making in B2B was becoming very complex. Because subscription purchases allowed you to try first, see the value and then scale in phases, the bets became more measured, and buying decisions were quite reversible. Also, the primary drivers of the B2B buying process switched from traditional purchasing functions to business functions like Sales, HR, Marketing, etc. (and even specific functions like Sales Enablement, Talent Acquisition, Media Relations, etc. are becoming more common buying groups with decision-making autonomy). Once the purchase was complete, the same B2B buyers were asked to present the ROI / impact metrics of the subscription solution 6-12 months later, to retain and/or receive an additional budget to expand within their organization. Because of this, the basis for purchase also moved from traditional considerations like brand and cost alone, to what we call the solution-problem fitness - can this solution help me solve my current business problem most efficiently and effectively (and scale to meet my evolving needs over time)?
On the other hand, the number of vendors increased manifold with each trying to identify their niche while the larger players entered to consolidate these markets. This causes further confusion for the B2B buyers. The size of sales teams has increased by about 2-3x in the last ten years, in order to scale with the increased size of buying teams. Traditional playbooks were failing to deliver predictable results consistently. It was becoming very difficult to predict deal outcomes and churn risks because new considerations crept into ongoing relationships.
As we navigated through all this from both sides (as vendors and buyers), we realized that the future of B2B selling and buying of subscription solutions must be anchored around Value - the jointly identified definition of customer value, value demonstrated to earn the trust, and subsequently value delivered as promised. This earns the vendor the right to ask for a formal partnership to be entered, with the same cycle continuing over time as the partnership expands. And value is not just about the product. It's the value associated with that partnership across all dimensions because ultimately it is people making other people successful (a concept called Ubuntu which we love and is one of our founding principles!)
The coming together of the outcome-minded B2B buyer (or buying teams) and buyer-centric sales organizations means there is an opportunity for transparency and candid conversations - to have productive discussions that are not necessarily hindered by the old mantra of 'keep your card close to your chest, to not operate in silos, to not have to guess the other person's motivation, to not have to assume things (and find yourself wrong).
Our first milestone with the Buyer Engagement platform is to help B2B sellers and buyers have these honest conversations that form the foundation for evaluating and building successful B2B relationships. It helps both sides identify potential solution-problem fitness, which makes sure the right partnerships are established that can continue to grow over time. This is mutually beneficial for both the sellers and buyers and creates a milestone-based roadmap for growing this relationship. One of the first use cases that we help our customers with is rethinking Mutual Success Plans as a jointly developed and operated roadmap for building and growing the partnership with each of their buying teams.
As we open up our beta program to new customers, we are very grateful to our existing design partners who have worked with us in the past few months to pilot the product, provide feedback, and help us improve the user experience. The kind of feedback and recommendations we are already receiving for new capabilities further strengthens our commitment to help our customers deliver a best-in-class buyer experience with an integrated Buyer Engagement Platform.
We will continue to share all key updates on our end through our website https://staging.buyerassist.io. Please subscribe here to be updated.
If you are a B2B revenue leader or a business buyer who resonates with the problem we’re looking to solve, I’d really appreciate the opportunity to connect with you! You can send an email to shyam[at]buyerassist.io or find me on LinkedIn.
