Sales-oriented professional networking startup Bravado raised $26 million in a Tiger Global-led Series B round, the company said Thursday.
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Bravado is a community for sales professionals to find jobs, get training and receive support from their peers to grow in their careers. The idea for the company came from CEO Sahil Mansuri’s own experience entering the world of B2B sales after working in politics.
Mansuri worked on President Barack Obama’s campaign from 2006 to 2009, phone banking, having conversations with voters, and amplifying the message of the campaign.
His skills translated well to B2B sales, but instead of convincing someone to vote for a candidate, it was to buy software. But Mansuri noticed there wasn’t as much training for sales professionals to know their product and be subject-matter experts.
“Walking into sales, I was so surprised,” Mansuri said. “Why isn’t there a ton of training about best practices in the industry? Why isn’t there a community to support the work being done here?”
Sales is a critical function of any B2B tech company, though it tends to have a high turnover rate and low success rate, Mansuri said, pointing to the stat that the average tenure for a B2B sales representative is 11 months. There are other industry-focused professional networks, like Doximity for health care professionals or Stack Overflow for developers, but Mansuri didn’t know of one for sales.
“You either become quite wealthy because you’re really good, or you end up fired,” Mansuri said.
So Mansuri built Bravado as a way for sales professionals to level up in their own careers and elevate the sales profession. Sales people can get advice, discuss compensation, and learn to develop their craft.
Bravado has launched three products so far: War Room, Portfolio and Jobs. Since launching its jobs marketplace in late 2021, the company’s grown its annual recurring revenue from its first paid product to $4 million in seven months. Bravado’s War Room, where sales people can talk in a pseudonymous environment, has grown from 10,000 members in January 2021 to more than 200,000.
The company plans to use the funding to continue to build out the jobs marketplace, get more top-tier employers onto the network, and help sales professionals on the platform get trained up through features like certification programs, mentorship programs and other career development tools. Additionally, Bravado announced its first acquisition–the tech sales compensation data platform Compgauge.
“Sales is an amazing gateway into many other professions even if it’s not the thing that you do for the rest of your life,” Mansuri said.
Illustration: Dom Guzman
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