KiteDesk lands $4M to simplify sales reps’ lives

These days, modern sales reps have so many choices about how to make their lives simpler.

One option, KiteDesk, is today announcing it has scored a $4 million seed round to put a salesperson’s info in one place. Tomorrow, version 2.0 of the company’s platform is coming out.

Salespeople commonly have to switch between email, a customer relationship management (CRM) system, and one or more sales tools. What they want is to find, track, and close deals with leads.

KiteDesk’s answer is a platform — available as a web app or a Chrome browser extension — that integrates email, CRM, and social media into one interface, and offers features to shorten the distance between them.

“Think of this as your morning sales newspaper,” CEO Sean Burke says in a promotional video.

A prospect’s name can be highlighted on a website, with full contact info available via one click. Leads are scored according to whether the CRM — and employees’ emails, calendars, or social networks — indicate that someone within the company has a connection. The integrated dashboard shows emails, appointments, and tasks connected to the most promising pipeline opportunities.

Above: An Action List screen in KiteDesk.

Image Credit: KiteDesk

There are a lot of sales productivity tools out there, and some of the key features in KiteDesk are available elsewhere.

Burke acknowledged via email that contact filtering is also offered by InsideView and Salesforce’s data.com, and streamlined opportunity management by SalesLoft, and that Relationship Science (Rel Sci), DataHug, and Introhive have “relationship intelligence” that can turn a cold contact into someone you have a connection with.

And, he added, the Gmail/Office 365 integration offered by Cirrus Insight also offers a similar sync between email and calendar events.

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So what sets KiteDesk apart? According to Burke, “We attack [the] sales productivity challenge across the entire sales process, within a single context and within a single interface. This is a major product differentiator that no one else has.”

The $4 million, which is the total outside investment raised to date, comes from unnamed angel investors. Burke said it will go toward the Tampa, Florida-based company’s sales and marketing functions, as well as further product development to add and refine such features as telephony, mobile, an analytics and reporting engine for sales execs, and integration with more CRMs than Salesforce alone.