Accord is a collaboration platform designed to support business-to-business (B2B) sales. With its new funding, the startup plans to fuel its engineering, sales and marketing teams in order to gain an even larger presence within the market. These efforts will help Accord become the go-to solution for businesses aiming to increased efficiency and collaboration within their sales process.
Accord is a Salesforce-based company that was founded in early 2020 with the goal of simplifying sales processes for companies. The company’s founders, Ross and Ryan Rich, both work experience in sales roles at Stripe and Google Cloud, respectively. They say that they discovered firsthand the challenges to scaling sales teams as their businesses grew. Accord is designed to streamline these processes by providing a platform for teams to cooperate and share data.
Accord was created with the goal of solving the challenges that sellers face when trying to connect with buyers. In a business-to-business setting, buyers have been conditioned by their experiences buying goods on platforms like Amazon. This leaves sellers feeling isolated and without a clear process for connecting with buyers. Accord provides a system to reinforce and standardize sales processes, helping sellers achieve success faster.
Accord’s traction in the early stages of the company’s development was a testament to Ross and Ryan’s creative use of Y Combinator tools and resources. Prior to joining Accord, both Ross and Ryan had experience building software startups in their previous roles at LinkedIn, where they helped bring the company public. With access to an extensive network of investors, collaborators, and fellow entrepreneurs inside Y Combinator, they met one another soon after arriving at the accelerator and began brainstorming ways to build Accord.
Accord’s UI is visually pleasing and easy to use. The layout consists of a list of menus on the left
What if the sales process was managed in a centralized, easily consumable format? Sales teams could automate workflows, gather customer data and track progress all within a single platform. Customer Relationship Management software would then be able to enforce business rules and predict customer behavior, providing tactical updates to sales teams accordingly. This would create a more efficient sales process that leads to higher conversion rates and better customer satisfaction.
Ross argues that Accord’s platform today – available in both free and paid flavors – does what disparate apps cannot: offers the ability to collaborate around and share sales milestones, next steps and resources with all stakeholders. “Everyone needs to do more with less these days, and a great answer to that is using Accord to ensure that every seller in your sales org is making the most of each deal and not letting anything slip,” he added.
While it is difficult to exactly assess the competitive landscape, some of the companies that Accord has rivals within its category include Clari and Outreach, both of which recently snatched up early-stage companies (i.e. DealPoint, Sales Hacker) to develop a similar sales orchestration offerings. Quip, a company Salesforce acquired in 2016, also embeds collaborative business process documents, spreadsheet and chat inside of Salesforce. This makes it increasingly difficult for any one company to dominate this market space as various applications continue to become more integrated into Salesforce- an important consideration for prospective customers.
Ross said that Accord’s willingness to experiment with new technologies and its customer focus are two reasons its insights have been so successful. “Accord is the first platform I have seen that actually makes data visualizations on top of Salesforce, which has allowed it to appeal to a broader set of sales professionals than other platforms,” he said.
Accord delivers exceptional sales efficiency, discipline and rigor in this challenging economy. This, in turn, leads to increased predictability and reliability when it comes to business-to-business sales. Companies are craving more stability and certainty when making big purchasing decisions – which is precisely what Accord provides. So if you’re looking for a partner that can help your business hit its goals with minimal hassle – look no further than Accord!
