After six years on the market, digital sales enablement company Showell has secured a €1m investment it now wants to use to expand its operations, staff and outreach.
The app, also called Showell, is part of a niche market aimed to help with sales content management and presentations, essentially allowing professionals in the sales industry to have their material in one location and present it in a slick manner to potential customers.
Though digitisation has changed the way companies conduct themselves, the value of face-to-face customer meetings has not decreased, the company said. “On the contrary. People buy from people, not from companies.”
The purpose of Showell is to improve this experience and offer a platform in which sales professionals can find their relevant content quickly, easily and efficiently as well as create presentations on the go, allowing them to improve their marketing pitch to a customer.
Often, sales materials can be left unused with materials scattered around different locations or even if they are digitised, around several obscure different folders and servers.
“Empowering sales teams with an easy, fast and elegant sales enablement app means that sales people are able to convince and show customers benefits and reasons to buy. That’s buyer experience and a seller who can deliver the best buyer experience, beats competitors and wins more sales,” Showell CEO and founder Sami Suni told the Sunday Mail.
The idea was born coincidentally in 2011 when Suni was working with a software development company. Sitting with his current head of marketing Markus Lehto in a meeting, a customer asked them how their sales brochures could go on the iPad.
“iPad was new at the time, the first model was just launched. I said that ‘no problem, it can be done, but what if we also do a tool for updating the materials?’ Tool that would combine both content management and content presenting. That would be a killer combination, because then the customer would be able to do everything themselves,” Suni said.
“I don’t remember if the customer was actually interested in the idea as much as I was, because they didn’t buy it, but we started to investigate the business opportunity more. We found out that many companies were struggling with the same problems. How to get the most recent sales content to sales teams, how to make sure sales people are not creating their own presentations, how to make sure that they are presenting the right stuff, how to move away from printed materials to digital presentations, brochures, videos, images etc.”
The first version hit the market in 2013 and is currently available in English, Finnish, Swedish, German, French and Dutch.
In late July, the company secured a €1m investment led by Trind Ventures, an early-stage Venture Capital firm that invests in European technology companies together with entrepreneur and investor Andreas Kemi.
According to Suni this will help Showell open new offices and hire more sales people. “We’ll also invest in marketing and product development. The investment will speed up many of those processes and also it creates a positivity within our people, but also around us. It’s a great signal to partners, clients and prospects that they can trust us.”
Currently, their short-term goal is to grow in Europe but in the long-run they want to establish themselves in the US market and “ultimately be the sales enablement platform that everyone wants”.
“The whole sales enablement industry is pretty new and forming. Almost anyone can claim to be the number one or leader. But eventually the market will mature and at that time we want be in the top. We are not aiming to be the world’s largest, top 100 companies, but instead targeting smaller medium and large enterprises with 50-500 sales people.”
Popular in Scandinavia (Finland, Sweden, Denmark, Norway), Showell also has clients in Switzerland, Germany, UK and the USA. The plans also include adding Spanish and Italian languages to the app.
Showell app is available for iPad, iPhone, Android and Windows 10. For more information visit https://www.showell.com
