Full Circle CRM’s new $3.8M will help connect tops and bottoms of more funnels

Full Circle CRM has landed $3.8 million to continue its mission of making Salesforce data better.

The San Mateo, Calif.-based company, founded in 2010 by Salesforce veterans, offers a Marketing Performance Management solution that runs on the Salesforce1 Platform. The key idea, the company said, is to use a company’s data in Salesforce to better determine which marketing campaigns have the greatest impact on revenue, connecting marketing spend with sales results to assess return-on-investment (ROI).

The Series A funding round, led by Aligned Partners, included Salesforce Ventures as well as WI Harper Group. Salesforce Ventures, as one might expect, focuses on companies that use its platform.

“We help marketing people accurately track their campaigns,” Full Circle CEO and cofounder Bonnie Crater told VentureBeat. She said the new money will be used for product development, sales, and marketing of her company’s solution.

“A lot of marketing folks like [the idea of a sales funnel],” she pointed out, and Full Circle is built to track “what goes in [the funnel], what goes out, and everything in between.” This includes sales volume, sales cycle velocity, and conversion rate, she said, “stage by stage.”

Crater noted that marketing automation systems, like Salesforce’s ExactTarget, do “a fantastic job at the top of the funnel” where prospects come in, and Salesforce “is focused down at the bottom on the funnel” where sales are made. Full Circle, she said, connects those two parts with the middle, where sales nurturing occurs.

“CEOs want to know, what is the impact of the marketing spend?” The real trick in managing the data inside Salesforce, she said, is to “make sure you track all the stages,” in particular connecting marketing data and sales data.

“That’s what we solve.”

Full Circle’s chief competition, she said, is the spreadsheet, since connecting the various data components in Salesforce is often done manually. Business intelligence tools also probe the connections in the data, she noted, but, like a spreadsheet, they extract the information out of Salesforce while Full Circle employs it within the platform.