Full Circle Insights raises $4.7 million Series B to make marketing count for more than just leads

Full Circle Insights, a sales and marketing analytics company, is announcing today a $4.7 million series B round led by Aligned Partners and Salesforce Ventures. Along with the company’s previous round, this brings the total raised to $9.5 million — with the plan to significantly expand sales and marketing and to develop new products.

I caught up with CEO Bonnie Crater to talk about the exploding nature of the sales tech landscape and where her company fits within the spectrum of hundreds of companies and $10 billion in funding for the total sales tech landscape.

“We call it marketing performance management,” Crater said. “Marketers today struggle to figure out which campaigns are impacting revenue. The traditional way of trying to figure that out is to get some data and extract it out of Salesforce.” This process, Crater explained, can be a bit of a kludge — not to mention the highly compensated data scientists it takes to derive any value from it.

Full Circle Insights does this process of calculating attribution through a variety of methods, which can be customized for each client. As a B2B marketer, if you’re able to truly understand which campaigns drove which revenue in what amounts — you get the chance to play “offense,” as Crater put it, instead of constantly scrambling to defend your content marketing activities.

Above: Full Circle Insights platform within Salesforce

That seems straightforward enough. In a typical sales and marketing organization, marketing handles a certain amount of lead volume and quality to supply to sales. It’s essential to have an accurate way of measuring which specific marketing campaigns have affected which specific revenue outcomes. Historically, this hasn’t been the case for most companies. Marketing can make some best guesses based on engagement with specific campaigns or rely on anecdotal evidence. Getting a truly accurate view of this information allows marketing to take part in lead flow and conversions. Conversions mean signed deals, revenue, and accurate forecasts — all metrics that board rooms care about (which is not the case for traditional marketing metrics).

What’s unique about Full Circle Insights, compared to competitors like BrightFunnel, is that the company’s platform is completely integrated as an app within Salesforce, and looks and functions like a Salesforce reporting dashboard. “The core of our company is to help marketing people understand the impact of marketing campaigns on pipeline and revenue so they can optimize their budget around those metrics,” Crater said.

Some Full Circle Insights customers include Jobvite, Axcient, and Box.

Correction: This article originally reported competitor BrightFunnel as being an external application from Salesforce. BrightFunnel has since launched a Salesforce application for their platform.