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Ambition, a gamified sales management platform based in Chattanooga, Tennessee, today announced that it closed a $15.5 million series B funding round led by investment firm Primus Capital. According to the enterprise, the infusion — which brings Ambition’s total raised to more than $20 million — will assistance the startup’s ongoing development initiatives.
Ambition occupies the sales overall performance management industry, which largely comprises software program that turns commission plans into dashboards. While valuable, cofounder and CEO Travis Truett argues that it is a reactive method that does not align with rapid-paced environments exactly where income leaders need to turn insights into actions.
“Ambition was founded in 2013 prior to going through Y Combinator in January of 2014. Jared Houghton, Brian Trautschold, and I continue to lead the company today,” Truett told VentureBeat by way of e mail. “Ambition turns all the noise being created by sales tools — such as Salesforce software, sales acceleration, or conversation intelligence tools — into human-centric insights that revenue leaders utilize to consistently coach, incentivize, and maximize their people. [Our] unique approach to rep performance management helps Fortune 500 and rapidly growing sales teams alike embrace remote work and combat both employee disengagement and manager data overload. Ambition’s mission is to help teams create momentum and achieve goals in the work-from-anywhere world.”
Gamified sales
Ambition’s sales, coaching, and gamification platform syncs with current client relationship management and tech stacks to provide insights. It offers structured one-on-one and group coaching applications that integrate with overall performance metrics for a summary of each and every rep.
“Remote work has presented a huge challenge to revenue teams, as traditional coaching rituals and culture initiatives were broken by leaving the office. Ambition has seen enormous momentum over the past year as companies prioritize the future of engaging, coaching, and developing our most precious resource: talent. The opportunity for Ambition is to own the burgeoning rep performance management space — a critical cornerstone of the enormous sales enablement category,” Truett added.
The sales overall performance management industry was valued at $3.19 billion in 2020 and is anticipated to climb at a compound annual development price of 13.09% amongst 2021 and 2026. Beyond startups like Mindtickle, Ambition competes with Ascent (formerly LevelEleven and Geopointe) for buyers investing in sales gamification software program.
“Ambition provides a new opportunity to allow visibility into the impact of a company’s sales coaching programs, or even the effectiveness of managers on their employees’ performance. By tracking ‘attribution’ of coaching, sales enablement leaders can gauge programs and adjust to maximize rep outcomes,” Truett stated. “Many Ambition customers have hundreds of managers, so creating a reporting and insights layer on the impact that variables like coaching discussions, training content, management process, or check-in cadences are having on individual employees leads to massive implications.”
Image Credit: Ambition
There’s proof to recommend that gamification performs. In a TalentLMS survey, 89% of persons stated that when their work was gamified, they had been more productive at work. Another study discovered that games in the workplace can enhance an employee’s capacity to find out new capabilities by up to 40%.
“Ambition focuses on large sales teams at enterprise companies or rapidly scaling organizations. Today, we have over 160 customers, many of which with hundreds to thousands of users on Ambition,” Truett stated. “The pandemic and remote work accelerated the workplace transformation we have believed in for years — which is one where work-from-anywhere is normal and engaging and cultivating talent is critical. The business has continued to accelerate this year, with momentum both on the new logo side and rapid expansion to new business units — such as customer success — in our existing customers.”
Ambition says it doubled its client base of Fortune 500 organizations more than the last year. To assistance the development, the enterprise hired 26 new workers across its offices in Chattanooga, Nashville, and Atlanta, bringing its workforce to 67. Ambition plans to employ 85 persons by the finish of the year.
