The coronavirus outbreak, which has slashed sales, has enabled field sales teams to gain the ability to do business on online platforms. Making investments in technology is inevitable to manage the current field works more efficiently.
Startups specialized in sales automation, such as Ekmob, which read the future correctly, are witnessing an exponential increase in their business nowadays, when customer data has become much more valuable.
The sales automation platform that increases the productivity of field sales teams caught the wind of digital transformation at the right time and received an investment of TL 25 million ($2.9 million).
The investment tour attended by TechOne Venture Capital Fund, Lima Ventures and nine angel investors under the leadership of Angel Effect has managed to be one of the biggest tours of the startup ecosystem in 2020, overshadowed by the pandemic.
The investment received by the Ekmob, alumni of Türk Telekom’s venture acceleration program PILOT, has provided a source of morale for the venture ecosystem that is having a difficult time due to the outbreak.
With the tour, Ekmob aims to increase its global effectiveness and to open up to new markets.
“We provide services from Istanbul’s Esenler district to 53 countries with our fully domestic software,” Ekmob Founder and CEO Sunay Şener, said, evaluating the investment. “With this investment, we will open up to new markets and increase our technology exports.”
Having faced an intense interest during the pandemic period, Ekmob had earlier received an investment of TL 6 million in 2019. In one year, the company quadrupled its value.
Ekmob's investors included Agah Uğur, Koray Gültekin Bahar, Serdar Urçar, Levent Akpulat, Erol Teberoğlu, Ali Rıza Babaoğlan, Erman Turan, Merve Gürel, Samican Tandoğdu, Angel Effect, Engin Frayman, Altay Tınar and Melih Herman.
In addition to TechOne Venture Capital Fund and Lima Ventures, angel investors Hasan Ekin Sezer and Teknasyon Founders Mustafa Sevinç, Mustafa Vardalı and Burak Sağlık also participated in the new investment.
Among the existing investors, Angel Effect, Bahar, Babaoğlan, Tandoğdu, Turan, Öner, Uğur and Frayman also participated in the latest tour.
Established in 2017 to build a new culture in the field sales processes of companies, the platform has been providing services to over 5,000 sales personnel affiliated with more than 300 corporate companies by 2020, including Temsa, Ekici, Eczacıbaşı, Fıratpen, ING Bank, NG Kütahya Seramik, Korozo, Izeltaş, NN Hayat ve Emeklilik, Novartis, Fiba Emeklilik, Prometeon (Pirelli), QNB Finansbank and Scania.
Ekmob enables sales teams to be managed with data. The mobile application, designed for the daily needs of sales teams, can be used on mobile phones, smartwatches, tablets, and computers.
Teams using Ekmob can record all activities such as calls, videoconferencing and visits they make with their customers and convert them into customer relationship management (CRM) data. It offers field sales teams efficiency, performance, proactive management and instant data access with an easy-to-use experience.
During the pandemic period, every move in the field must be planned. Ekmob's SFA application – which automates repetitive tasks from salesperson preparation to sales notes and reporting – improves the productivity of sales teams working in the field by up to 40%. SFA is seen by sales teams as the most efficient tool in achieving their goals.
Companies communicate more effectively with their customers, thanks to automation. It increases their sales volume by appealing to the right customer.
It also shortens the sales cycle and saves time. It collects the data in the field directly on the mobile device, controls it and instantly transmits data to the manager. SFA also projects sales. It makes predictions for the future with the past information accumulated in its corporate memory. In this way, it shows areas that need improvement. It reports the activities of the sales team based on data.
The platform has also introduced Ekmob BI and Ekmob Marketplaces systems together with SFA. Ekmob BI enables companies to design their own reports. Ekmob Marketplace allows the platform to integrate with the most used ERP, CRM, payment systems and negotiation infrastructures in Turkey. Besides taking into account that the rate of remote work of field sales teams has increased due to the COVID-19, it integrates the teams with applications like Teams, Zoom and 11Sight. Sales teams can interact with customers via videoconference calls using the applications. Thus, Ekmob became one of the first companies to create a solution through which sales teams can manage their customers remotely.
