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HubSpot, the IPO-bound company that makes marketing software that runs in the cloud, expanded into two new lines of business today.
For years it has focused mostly on the practice of helping midsize companies generate sales leads — that’s essentially what marketing is, after all. Today it added two new product lines — one is a customer-relationship management (CRM) application, and the other it calls a sales acceleration application.
I had a short talk today with Dharmesh Shah, HubSpot’s CTO and co-founder, who told me that while the CRM business is a crowded one — the world’s biggest cloud software company is Salesforce.com, and its main product is a CRM application — HubSpot is going after companies that Salesforce and other CRM vendors tend to overlook. He called it the “mid-market,” or companies with 20 to 2,000 employees.
“We have about 12,000 customers using the marketing platform, and most of them are not using a CRM product at all,” Shah said. A CRM add-on has been HubSpot’s most-requested addition.
These companies, he said, are often too small to justify the expense of running Salesforce’s product or other CRM offerings from Oracle, SAP or Microsoft. “More often than not, they tend to track their sales process on spreadsheets,” Shah said.
As for the sales acceleration part, HubSpot has changed the name of an existing tool called Signals, which debuted last year, to Sidekick. The basic point of Sidekick is to let you know when a potential sales lead is “engaging,” which is a fancy of way of saying checking out your stuff.
This all comes a few weeks after Boston-based HubSpot filed to raise $100 million in an IPO. Its filing shows that it lost $34 million on $78 million in revenue last year. For the first six months of this year, it took in $51 million in revenue and lost about $18 million.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
