Apttus, a company that helps customers manage the second half of the sales cycle involving quotes, contracts, and collecting the money, announced $41M in Series B funding.
The investment was led by Salesforce Ventures, the investment arm of Salesforce.com. It’s worth noting that it’s the largest investment ever in a company that Salesforce wasn’t buying outright, according to Apttus CEO Kirk Krappe.
Additional investors include K1 Capital and Iconiq. Today’s money brings the total raised to $78M.
Apttus is built on top of the Salesforce platform, and according to Krappe it’s a perfect complement to Salesforce CRM. Sales people begin making sales calls and entering information about a given prospect in Salesforce.
Over time, as they sell products and services to these prospects, they convert to customers. At that point, the sales person enters a new phase in the sales cycle and Apttus is designed to support this part of the process.
After the quote goes out and the customer agrees to the deal, next comes generating the contracts and that’ s another level of complexity when the lawyers get involved. Once you’ ve got the negotiation complete, the customer has to pay — and there may be payments by milestones or by certain dates or however it’ s outlined in the contract.
