Salesforce announced a deal to buy Traction on Demand, a consultancy specializing in building solutions on Salesforce platforms. They’re reportedly the largest in the industry, with about 1,500 people if LinkedIn has it right. We don’t usually report on consultancy acquisitions, but this does give an idea of what Salesforce thinks will drive more sales.
Metadata.io calls itself “the operating system for B2B marketers”, which is a bit grandiose. But what they do, which is use AI to automate and optimize paid ad campaigns, including lead enrichment, is still pretty impressive. They just raised a $40 million Series B to do more of it.
Riogrande focuses on brands like home, kitchen and beauty, and after going through Y Combinator, has already taken several brands in the home space from zero to $1 million in revenue in a span of two months. To help the company scale its plan, it took in $12 million in seeding funding in a round led by Y Combinator and Wollef, with participation from individual investors including Arielle Zuckerberg and Justin Mateen.
Martech keeps taking larger bites out of marketing budgets: 17.3% last year, 19.9% this year, 23.5% next year, and 30.9% five years from now, according to the latest CMO Survey. This despite barely more than half (56.4%) of current tools being used and nearly half (48.8%) of the survey respondents reporting worse-than-expected results. Oddly enough, marketers rate selecting marketing technologies as the thing they do best.