Companies often face challenges when configuring their customer relationship management (CRM) platforms, either because of requirements specific to their organization or industry or because of a lack of institutional technical knowledge. In the worst case, the consequences can be serious. A 2021 questionnaire from CRM software provider SugarCRM found that 50% of companies don’t know how to access customer data in their marketing, sales and service systems, while 53% said the administrative burden of their CRM software is causing friction for their sales team.
With the aim of easing the development burden around the Salesforce ecosystem in particular, Sweep emerged today from stealth with a no-code toolkit for building sales playbooks in Salesforce’s CRM software. The startup is well capitalized, with $28 million in equity funding from Bessemer Venture Partners (which seeded Sweep) and Insight Partners (which led the company’s most recent round, a Series A).
Adam Fisher of Bessemer said in an emailed statement: “Modern companies are constantly making changes to their operations to drive productivity and efficiency, but are held back because they rely on system integrators. Sweep’s no-code approach empowers Salesforce users to take control again and makes Salesforce a more flexible and responsive platform.”
Sweep was co-founded by Ido Gaver, who says he’s spent the last 10 years experiencing the pain of managing business processes on CRM platforms firsthand – both as an administrator and manager of go-to-market teams. Gaver previously co-founded Flok, a customer loyalty platform, which was acquired by Wix in 2019. Gaver stayed with Wix for three years as general manager of Wix’s business-to-business division before starting Sweep in July 2021.
Eran Kirshenboim, the other co-founder of Sweep, also helped launch Flok. Kirshenboim worked with Gaver at Wix until they left the company together in early 2021.
Sweep’s visual editor for sales funnels in Salesforce software. Image Credits: Sweep
“The lack of flexibility and the gap between how go-to-market processes are managed versus online funnels were constant points of frustration [for Sweep’s co-founders], including me,” Gaver told australiabusinessblog.com in an email interview. “In addition, we saw how difficult it was for the Revenue Operations team to do their job – how they were constantly struggling between different areas of responsibility – and we decided we wanted to create a tool that would transform their day-to-day work.”
To add to Gaver’s point, CRM implementation can prove to be a costly endeavor when dealing with a company that lacks in-house CRM development skills. CRM company Close pins the bill is between $10,000 and $20,000 for a sales team of about 10 users, including the time spent choosing and deploying a CRM and costs associated with consulting, training, and reduced productivity during the migration process.
Sweep is adjacent to installed Salesforce software, enabling teams to create and update sales funnels – the marketing term for the journey potential customers take to purchase a product. Abstracting the typical Salesforce code and validation rules, Sweep provides templates for adding funnels to Salesforce and provides guidelines for managing data within existing Salesforce layouts.
With Sweep, users can create and visualize CRM processes, rules, and automations with drag-and-drop tools, while the platform builds the necessary backend infrastructure in Salesforce. For posterity, Sweep logs processes and generates reports for all elements in a funnel.
“We believe that traditional solutions lead to excessive complexity, resulting in lost deals and limiting a company’s ability to realize its growth potential. [Moreover, there’s a] shortage of skilled Salesforce admins to support ecosystem growth; companies are struggling to hire talented managers to support their growth.” Gaver said. “Today, when businesses are trying to save money and cut costs, Sweep’s no-code editor helps them run a streamlined operation without relying on outside resources.”
Sweep is one of the vendors building businesses around Salesforce’s growing CRM portfolio. On the DevOps side, there’s Gearset, a tooling provider for Salesforce software, as well as AutoRabit and Copado. It’s certainly a lucrative market to chase, given that global spending on CRM software is expected to reach $49.6 billion by 2025 (according to to Statista) and that Salesforce had a 32.2% share of the CRM segment in 2021 (with a estimation).
The sizeable investments in Sweep to date are a strong bet for its future success. It’s been a slow run for the 30-person startup, though — Gaver named only two clients, Empathy.com and Demostack, and declined to reveal any revenue coming in.
