Kris Hartvigsen has seen more than a few job descriptions for sales positions over his career that looked shiny on the surface but then inevitably dulled when peering a little deeper.
“There's always this list of responsibilities,” says the CEO of Dooly Research Ltd.
“And the responsibilities are maintaining the CRM [customer relationship management system], handling your pipeline, updating your forecasts — all of these different things. And so we're just chipping away at all of those things that I would consider to be low-value work, that takes you out of your high-value mode of earning your paycheque and engaging with your customers.”
His Vancouver-based firm specializes in doing away with administrative grunt work and redundant tasks sales teams deal with through a platform that connects to other tools such as Salesforce, Slack and G-Suite.
Dooly’s technology has been quick to catch on with investors.
Having closed a US$3-million seed round in September 2020, the company revealed Wednesday (March 3) it’s now backed by fresh capital following the close of a Series A funding round that brought in an additional US$17 million.
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The seed round was led by New York’s Boldstart Ventures Managment LLC, while the Series A was led by Addition LP.
Hartvigsen said the initial lockdowns brought on by the pandemic left sales teams with significant uncertainty about where their budgets stood.
But sign-ups for Dooly’s platform began accelerating throughout 2020, according to the CEO.
“It was pretty obvious that the pandemic was going to be a positive for us in terms of what we do,” Hartvigsen said, referring to the throngs of workers now landing sales while working from home.
“It has been a signal to the market that we needed to change the way we operated because everybody is remote and we need better connected solutions or a connected workspace [that] will allow for people to report up information without it being arduous.”
With US$20 million in hand since the initial seed round last year, Hartvigsen said he’s now setting his sights on investing more in product development and expanding Dooly’s headcount.
The company had a team of eight employees last September, which has since grown to 22 employees.
The goal is to more than double that current figure with a total of 50 workers by the end of 2021.
“We're looking to build on that Canadian footprint, that British Columbia footprint and that Vancouver footprint as much as humanly possible,” Hartvigsen said.
