Sales and marketing are often considered a single category on a business plan. Still, ironically, when it comes to building apps and services to help with them, they usually become separate entities. So do the teams that address sales and marketing in organizations. Today, however, a startup called Terminus — which is building a platform that views sales and marketing in a more integrated way through account-based marketing — is announcing funding and growth, a sign of how its approach is gaining more traction.
The startup has closed a Series C of $90 million, at a valuation we understand from sources to be around $400 million. This is a significant jump on Terminus’s valuation in its last round, which was $96 million post-money in 2018, according to PitchBook data. Part of the hike is likely because of the enormous focus that digital marketing has had, especially in the last year — a time when, because of the pandemic, a lot more legacy and traditional channels have ceased to be as visible). Account-based marketing alone was estimated, in 2018, to be a $458 billion market opportunity.
Another reason for interest in Terminus is explicit because of its customer record within that. It has around 1,000 enterprise customers, including IBM, Salesforce, Thomson Reuters, and more divisions.
“We’re building the new marketing automation,” said CEO Tim Kopp in an interview. “We think account-based marketing is the most important thing in sales software. Teams are switching from lead-based to account-based approaches, and we’ve now moved into addressing all points of engagement, a modern B2B marketing cloud.”
The equity round is led by Great Hill Partners, with previous investors Atlanta Ventures and Edison Partners and new backer Hallet Capital also participating. The funding brings the total raised by Terminus — co-headquartered in Atlanta, GA, and Indianapolis, IN — to about $120 million.
The marketing world has seen a massive shift in the two decades, with the rise in internet consumption and the proliferation of digital services driving a big business in what is now collectively called “martech”.
The area that Terminus specifically focuses on within that is account-based marketing. This means a more joined-up effort to work across whole organizations, providing a way to market something to more than one person and increasing the chances of connecting with someone to make the sale. In short, this is a way for B2B sales and marketing teams to conceive of potential targets at a business, not as individual entities but as collective groups.
