Evan Liang & Kelvin Cheung, Co-Founders of LeanData
When we founded LeanData in 2012, we believed that software could fundamentally make B2B sales and marketing processes much more efficient. The days of the meat-eating enterprise sales reps who could sell ice to Eskimos was over. We were sitting at the dawn of a new age of sales and marketing that had to be data driven and centered around the customer, similar to the evolution in B2C of Amazon.
We wanted to build a company that was customer centric at its core with products that solved their biggest pain points. As it turns out, we were fortunate in both our timing and our partners. A handful of early LeanData adopters, including Marketo and Palo Alto Networks, understood that by aligning sales and marketing around account-based motions, they could deliver a more personalized buying experience. But to do so would require fundamentally challenging the status quo – and exposing the inadequacies of native lead-assignment rules within their CRM systems to meet this challenge. And so, they collaborated with LeanData to develop a completely new kind of software solution – and then helped us evangelize that solution to the broader market.
Once companies realized an automated solution existed that could replace the manual, time-intensive and error-prone lead-management processes they’d learned to live with, they never went back. LeanData recently topped 600+ customers, and we count ourselves fortunate to work every day with high-growth innovators and market leaders like Zoom, DocuSign, AT&T, VMware and others.
A new mile marker
This month, we’ve collectively arrived at another major milestone: the formalization of a new tech category.
In recent years, after observing their highest-performing clients were adopting automated solutions like LeanData into their tech stacks, industry analyst firm TOPO Research started watching this space more closely. And this month they released the first in-depth study on this technology with the Market Guide for Lead-to-Account Matching and Routing. And as we were gratified to learn, the report recognizes LeanData as a category leader.
This is no fledging tech category; it’s been in the works for the better part of a decade. TOPO’s report is a significant validation that formalizes what we and our customers have worked hard to create, and reinforces the problem solved by Lead-to-Account Matching and Routing is real.
We believe the emergence of Lead-to-Account Matching and Routing as an official tech category, with de facto standards and best practices, will make it easier for customers to invest in the technology at this exceptionally critical time.
And yet there is still much more to do.
Looking ahead
We believe 2020 marks the tipping point for Lead-to-Account Matching and Routing as more companies adopt these applications as core functionality in their sales and marketing tech stacks. As TOPO has recognized, the use cases have become too compelling to remain a best-kept secret for long. The COVID-19 pandemic has only brought these use cases into sharper relief as companies of all size and nearly all sectors demonstrate this technology’s mission-critical role in go-to-market execution.
Customers that use LeanData once tend to bring us with them throughout their entire careers. And no surprise. Once they realize a solution exists to replace the manual, time-intensive and ineffective processes they’ve learned to live with, they never go back.
We want every company to have access to the same advantage. And we’re looking forward to partnering with our customers on the next step in our journey.
Evan Liang
