Companies spend over $500B annually to attend and sponsor the various trade shows held each year in the US, so it’s important for companies to make the most of their trade show investment by meeting prospective clients. That’s why SummitSync has created the most efficient meeting intelligence platform, that enables marketers to efficiently reach out to prospective clients and know ahead of time which events potential clients are attending. SummitSync centralizes both employee and prospect data from tradeshows and business conferences and the platform also seamlessly connects to a company’s CRM.
AlleyWatch spoke to CEO and cofounder John Corrigan about SummitSync’s latest funding round, which brings it total funding raised to $6.9M over four rounds.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Series A – Loeb Enterprises was the lead investor.
Tell us about the product or service that SummitSync offers.
SummitSync is a business intelligence platform identifies which industry events and conferences your clients and prospects are attending. Maximizing their conference/trade show marketing budget to drive the highest return on in-person client meetings.
Features:
- Know Which Events Your Prospects Are Attending
- Schedule and Manage More Meetings with SummitSync
- Track meetings, team members, and overall trade show success
- Track Revenue Opportunity Across Every Trade Show and Event
- Know which events and individual team members drive revenue without manual work
What inspired you to start SummitSync?
I was really terrible at being an employee, so I decided it best to stop doing something I was really bad at. My cofounder and I were traveling to 25+ business conferences and trade shows per year. They all had the same three problems: 1) who of my clients/prospects are attending the event, and how can I know this information well in advance 2) efficiently reaching out, scheduling meetings across our team, space, time, etc. 3) how can we capture all that activity data uniformly and connect it to CRM and marketing automation.
These were the questions that drove the building of the SummitSync products and business.
How is SummitSync different?
SummitSync is the only platform that combines offline business intelligence with sales enablement and workflow automation connected to CRM and marketing automation.
What market does SummitSync target and how big is it?
According to PWC, there are 284K business conferences and trade shows in the US annually. 90M American’s attend and marketers spend over $500B on attending and sponsoring. B2B marketers spend 23% of their marketing budget on trade shows, conferences, and events to engage customers in person. Our customers are the companies who are sponsoring and sending employees to attend these events.
What’s your business model?
Hybrid SaaS fee – we charge a monthly fee based on volume and necessary features. We also charge a data fee for conference/trade show attendee lists.
What was the funding process like?
Long, costly, and awful. It’s basically standard for any venture financing. If you don’t have to raise money, don’t.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Paperwork and managing the due diligence process as opposed to being able to run the product or the business. Converting noteholders and the vast amount of paperwork. It taught us that notes come with significant drawbacks and something we would not do again.
Would you tell us about the company’s experience participating in ERA and what impact that has had?
ERA is an incredible program, we were actually quite hesitant about entering the program and it turned out to be one of the best things we did on the journey of building SummitSync. We as a team cannot say enough positive things about ERA, it’s leadership, the program, and the community. If you want to start a company in NYC going to ERA will give you a significant advantage on your road to success.
ERA is an incredible program, we were actually quite hesitant about entering the program and it turned out to be one of the best things we did on the journey of building SummitSync. We as a team cannot say enough positive things about ERA, it’s leadership, the program, and the community. If you want to start a company in NYC going to ERA will give you a significant advantage on your road to success.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Customer traction and revenue growth based on the initial product platform that we had built during our seed round.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
- Continue to iterate our product based on customer feedback.
- Onboard and scale customers through direct sales – we have a 250 customer backlog
- Launch our first channel partnership with Adobe. Grow our team bringing on strong contributors across product, engineering, marketing, and sales.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Revenue solves all known problems. Period. Build a great product and sell it, a lot of it.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Continue and expand delivering products for our customers that provide a high level of marketing utility, individual relevance to our users in marketing and sales, while reducing organizational friction and providing more revenue opportunities for our customers.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Gramercy Tavern
