A New “Vieu:” Guiding Companies Through the Next Evolution of Account-Based Selling
Pictured: Vieu co-founders Simon Skaria (center left) and Samir Manjure (center right) with Chuck Stonecipher (left) and Elisa La Cava (right) of Trilogy Equity Partners.
A New “Vieu:” Guiding Companies Through the Next Evolution of Account-Based Selling
When IBM institutionalized the concept of account-based selling (ABS) decades ago, their method quickly became the standard. Salespeople were trained to learn as much as possible about an account – which included activities such as account mapping, understanding your company’s relationships within different parts of that account, and getting to know that account’s product and target customer segments. The goal of all of this was to bring rich context and nuance to selling conversations with the aim of better understanding a prospective account’s pain points and then applying that understanding to best match IBM’s products.
Since those early IBM days, advances across the next generation of sales software have been staggering. This is both because of technological advances and because selling remains an evergreen priority for businesses – in both bull and bear markets. In the more recent timeframe of 2015-2021 which included a stock market run up, ZIRP, and elevated levels of growth for many companies, many enterprises prioritized adopting new sales tools to “pour even more fuel onto the fire” and maximize on the positive economic climate. During that period, there was an explosion of new prospecting and sales software companies, many of which specialized in “spray and pray” outreach techniques. In the post-pandemic and post-ZIRP economy of 2022-present, dramatically different and volatile market dynamics have been at play: buyers’ budgets have shrunk, sales cycles have extended, and the overarching market transition from a posture of “recovery” to one of “resilience” has been slower moving than many had hoped. During this period, the “spray and pray” outreach methodologies are collapsing upon themselves. Enterprises cannot afford to waste time and resources on shallow prospecting methods – instead, they want real focus, real intelligence, and real topline ROI. So how, then, do you do this? How do you sell better?
Account-based selling is an effective strategy but, historically, it has also been an expensive one. Customer acquisition cost with this method is usually high because searching for, ingesting, and synthesizing information on an account-by-account basis is time consuming. Most often, this “white glove” approach is reserved only for a company’s most lucrative prospective accounts (often called Strategic or Named Accounts) because the high ticket price justifies the higher cost. It remains, then, that the Holy Grail of sales is to find a way to achieve white glove-level insights and actions with a meaningfully higher ROI than before.
Above: Introducing Vieu: Warm Introductions at Scale
Enter Vieu, which helps its customers lower the minimum efficient scale needed for account-based selling. Their account “Vieus,” powered by their proprietary semantic graph technology that indexes billions of relationships and industry-specific data sets, weaves together the strongest signals about an account and enable sales development reps and account executives to conduct prospecting in a rich, personalized, and scalable way that benefits not only strategic accounts, but also the segments beneath. Companies like Rubrik, Datastax, Seclore, Hyperproof, and Productiv are using Vieu today to accelerate their sales teams, bring faster ROI to their customers, and shorten sales cycles.
Above: A view into Vieu, highlighting the connections graph which is one of an integral set of capabilities that bring account intelligence to life.
Vieu co-founders Samir Manjure, CEO, and Simon Skaria, CTO, are both repeat founders. Samir spent 17 years at Microsoft with roles spanning engineering to management in directing CRM innovations, managing Bing Ads’ advertiser platforms, and leading big data and machine learning initiatives. He then founded KenSci, a platform that helped healthcare organizations predict clinical, operational, and financial risks by aggregating patient data from a variety of sources, that they sold to Providence. Simon spent over 16 years at Microsoft where he led product engineering across HoloLens and mixed reality, and also led the team that transitioned the Office server to the cloud.
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Trilogy Equity Partners led Vieu’s $11m seed round. We are joined by Incubate Fund, Vela Partners, and a large group of angel investors which includes celebrated founders, CEOs, sales & tech leaders. We are excited to be partnering with Samir, Simon, and team to help companies bring much-needed ROI back into their prospecting efforts.
To learn more about Vieu, visit https://try.vieu.com/request-a-demo or reach out to samir@vieu.com.