Crushpath Launches Play-By-Play Platform for Salespeople

Crushpath, a software platform designed to streamline the sales process from deal to close, made its debut today at LeWeb London.

"We saw big, insanely old systems that corporations used to track their pipeline, and we wanted to solve a big problem that everyone else seemed to be avoiding," Sam Lawrence, cofounder and CEO of Crushpath, told CRM magazine in an interview last week. "We wanted to offer a single place where salespeople could do everything they need to get a deal done."

Behind Crushpath and a $2 million seed round of funding led by Charles River Ventures is a management team led by Lawrence, former chief marketing officer for Jive Software, and Matt Wilkinson, chief technology officer and vice president of products for Crushpath, who most recently served as vice president of product development for enterprise microblogging network Socialcast, acquired by VMware last spring.

The crux of Crushpath is the core of the application, where users can access things like files, email, calendars, and document sharing, and maintain a chronological view of their deals during all stages of the sales cycle. If the sales rep is using a CRM system like Salesforce.com, he can pull in deals and opportunities upon log-in, and encounter a two-way synch between the platform and Salesforce.com.

"We wanted to provide a real-time look into deal activity," Wilkinson emphasizes, which extends into capabilities built for sales managers and sales teams. The feature Crushpath Coach "can offer up Just In Time coaching as a sales rep is working or controlling [a] deal." Stages can be triggered as a deal progresses, such as alerts for when a rep should send a contract on a deal.

Another Crushpath feature is Customer Sites, through which a rep can create a private portal for prospects and customers where they can share documents, videos, presentations, marketing materials, metrics, and third-party research. Customer Sites offers templates so that a rep can reuse a particular set of data and information for another prospect; an integration with Box lets users pull in collateral from a local file store.

Crushpath's purpose, Lawrence maintains, is "to filter out the noise and to proactively pull relative information about a deal from internal and external sources [like social and news sites]" to empower sellers and to dually improve the purchase process. Crushpath is available by subscription beginning at $29 per user per month.