RevOps, or revenue operations, is defined by some as an operational strategy designed to maximize revenue by aligning sales, marketing, and customer service to drive growth for the business. 

This cross-functional approach works because RevOps breaks down silos between departments by making each team accountable for revenue.  

At Place, we believe RevOps also needs to connect to finance to complete the entire workflow - from sales all the way through collecting cash.  This is critical to truly maximize a companies ability to successfully and efficiently manage three key areas: bookings, billings, and revenue.  

We call this Sales-to-Cash.

So, what does it mean for Place to solve RevOps in Salesforce?

➡️ Help companies identify revenue opportunities and prevent revenue leakage

➡️ Aligning revenue producing teams with finance teams

➡️ Creating a single source of truth across departments

➡️ Cutting the costs of supporting multiple siloed platforms

➡️ Simplifying workflows

In terms of outcomes, Place can deliver:

✅ More accurate invoicing and revenue management

✅ Reduction in the very high costs associated with consulting firms delivering custom development 

✅ Reduction in headcount needed to manage manual workflows, redundant auditing, and reconciliations

✅ Improved reporting capabilities to investors and stakeholders

And we are just getting started...

Since we began launching our Salesforce-native Place Revenue solution a little over a year ago, we have delivered precision software to our initial customers that is more accurate, economical, and seamless than manual, custom-built, and non-native Salesforce alternatives.

We are very excited about additional product versions in development that create even deeper integration into Salesforce products (expected launch dates in September and October 2023). We feel these additional product versions will have the ability to enable Salesforce to sell more Salesforce product and expand Place's customer base to include more industries.

Want to join us on the journey?  

Why Invest in Place?

Existing Place Revenue customers report exceptional ROI, but we need to grow awareness of the product to build pipeline and support future product enhancements as we continue to align Place with Salesforce.

We feel Place is strongly positioned to benefit from Salesforce’s projected growth, and we are raising these funds to fund pipeline generation activities and our efforts to win new customers (such as advertising and marketing campaigns, product development and other sales efforts).

In 2024, we are shifting our focus to a traditional VC financial plan targeting institutional investors, so this is expected to be our last round of non-institutional fundraising.

Don’t miss your chance to be a part of solving RevOps in Salesforce. 

Why Salesforce?

Salesforce has been reported to be the fastest growing enterprise software company in history.   The company has a market cap of $203B as of mid-August 2023 and is a member of the Dow Jones Industrial Average.   

In April 2023, International Data Corporation (IDC) ranked Salesforce as the #1 CRM provider in its Worldwide Seminannual Software Tracker.  This was the 10th time Salesforce earned that spot.   

Salesforce grew its overall worldwide CRM market share position, and increased its revenue more than any other CRM vendor in 2022 over 2021.

According to Salesforce: 

This incredible growth does not appear to be slowing down and Salesforce has said that they are enjoying only about 10% of their total addressable market which is expected to grow to $290B+ in 2026, with a 13% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).  

This incredible success has a direct impact on partner products supporting this successful ecosystem - and more specifically, creates massive opportunity for Place.  

Note: Forward-looking projections cannot be guaranteed.That’s a big opportunity.

Investor Fast FAQ

What is Place? 

Place originally went to market in 2020 to solve financial forecasting and planning challenges on the Salesforce platform.  Customers demonstrated more critical needs well beyond forecasting and planning which led to discovering the true pain points that they wanted to solve - connecting the sales and revenue producing teams and processes with the accounting and finance teams and processes. 

In 2022, we expanded our scope to solve this and began launching our Salesforce-native RevOps product that offers revenue recognition, integrated billing, revenue forecasting, and pre-built bi-directional integration with accounting systems.

Getting Into the Details

What problems do we solve? 

Subscription-based and recurring revenue businesses struggle with managing revenue cycles accurately and efficiently, which results in unintended or unnoticed loss of revenue - and a lot of work. 

It’s not unusual for these companies to use five or more systems to accomplish the entire sales-to-cash process. This requires data to be moved out of Salesforce, but data that is moved out of Salesforce often doesn’t make it back in. This lack of centralization leads to siloed data, missed revenue opportunities, and revenue leakage.

After hearing the same stories over and over from customers and prospects that were paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for customized solutions to solve these problems, it hit us: there’s a RevOps gap for Salesforce customers, and we have the ability fill it.

How can Place help customers succeed?

Our customers have overcome many sales-to-cash challenges, including inefficient data entry, inaccurate revenue reporting, manual invoicing, and lack of end-to-end visibility into the process.

To date, our customers have reported that their ability to use Place to align finance and revenue within Salesforce has resulted in a variety of revenue improvements and savings.

Here are a few examples:

• Uncovering missed and inaccurate invoices
• Ending the need for ongoing custom development from consulting firms - saving tens-of-thousands of dollars every month
• Eliminating hundreds of hours reconciling data, auditing spreadsheets, and time spent finding inaccuracies
• Reducing operational costs by eliminating redundant disconnected software solutions and the need to maintain expensive integrations

Why take our word for it? 

Brandon Metcalf’s 20-year track record speaks volumes. Before founding Place, Brandon founded and led Talent Rover, a Salesforce-based global staffing and recruitment software company.

Under Brandon’s leadership, Talent Rover thrived, becoming the 9th fastest-growing software company and the 151st company within all categories in the US in 2017 (according to INC 500). 

In March 2018, Talent Rover was successfully acquired by its biggest competitor, further cementing Brandon’s reputation as a skilled and successful entrepreneur.

Since Talent Rover’s acquisition, Brandon has applied his skills, innovation, and expertise to tackle the challenges he faced while globally scaling that business.

But, don’t just take our word for it! Hear from a customer:

Actual Customer Outcomes

➡️ Training software provider:

• Corrected issues with incorrect pro-rated billing
• Consolidated reporting in a single place and increased data reliability 
• Centralized subscription revenue and billing management in Salesforce
• Eliminated manual data entry and reconciliation
• Consolidated the company’s tech stack

➡️ Machine learning technology company:

• Eliminated the ongoing need for custom development and customizations that were costing more than $200,000
• Solved revenue, billing, and reporting needs
•  Improved user and business workflows
• Reconfigured Salesforce
• Streamlined the company’s tech stack

 ➡️ Lease management solution provider:

• Uncovered $45K worth of missed invoices
• Connected Salesforce with Stripe billing and eliminated manual invoicing
• Fixed the provider’s fragmented systems and ineffective workflows

The theme of all of these stories is that companies have tried to solve these challenges with extensive, and expensive, customizations in Salesforce or by integrating with several third party systems.  This has led to frustrations, wasteful spending (in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars), and missing revenue.

How is Place currently performing during challenging economic conditions for tech companies? 

In today’s challenging economic conditions, we believe that Place is an invalauble tool for helping businesses maximize revenue opportunities and minimize revenue leakage. This is an attractive value proposition for companies that want to grow their business during both strong and weak economies.  

With being a tech company, we too have felt the impact of the challenging economic environment. In the beginning of 2023 the leadership team decided to leverage the climate to pull back our growth efforts and focus on both our longer term strategy with the new RevOps product and capital efficiency.

This resulted in us intentionally trimming operational costs and focusing our time and resources on RevOps.

With that we've still seen what we feel is solid progression.

Our focus has shown us an even bigger opportunity.

As we adjusted our internal focus on RevOps, we also started to collaborate with Salesforce in a more meaningful way. Our goal was to assist Salesforce with solving these challenges more broadly for its entire customer base.  This collaboration resulted in two additional versions of our product.

The first new version is even more deeply connected to Salesforce Revenue Cloud, CPQ, and Salesforce Billing that we call Place Revenue for CPQ. This native integration allows Place the ability to bridge significant gaps for Salesforce customers, which we believe will help Salesforce sell more of their products and increase overall value. 

Our second soon-to-be-released version is driven by inbound requests from several staffing and recruiting firms to solve these same challenges - the industry Brandon had Talent Rover focused on. This version is being designed to apply Place’s core revenue recognition, billing, revenue forecasting, and accounting integrations to the unique needs of the staffing and recruiting industry. 

Key Investment Considerations

As we open up what is expected to be our last round of non-institutional fundraising, here are some things you need to know about who has already invested in Place and why the momentum is building.

We are currently nearing the end of this $2 million convertible note financing round, with $1.58 million of this round already having been raised. Geekdom Fund, our primary VC and lead investor, has invested over $1 million, with substantially all of the rest having been provided by existing angel investors.

Key Takeaways

Experience

With 20 years of experience and multiple companies founded in the Salesforce ecosystem, Brandon has deep knowledge of the platform and how to align Place with the RevOps needs of Salesforce customers. 

Focus

Place is a Salesforce-native product offering revenue recognition, integrated billing, revenue forecasting, and bi-directional integration with accounting systems. 

This keeps RevOps on a single platform, simplifying your tech stack, lowering costs, eliminating the need for time-intensive consulting and customization, and reducing overall complexity.

Lineage

Place’s foundation is built on financial forecasting and reporting companies. In 2022, the platform evolved to help RevOps teams solve the entire sales-to-cash workflow within Salesforce, including built-in compliance requirements. 

Market Opportunity

Place’s market outlook is strong, with an addressable market of $873M in the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland in 2023. With the expansion of the two new product versions the addressable market could expand to eight times that.

A big driver in Place's expected growth and opportunity is the continued expansion and growth of Salesforce. As Salesforce continues to grow, Place can continue to grow because we sell to companies that use Salesforce.

According to Salesforce, they projected their revenue to reach $31.4 billion in FY23 and generate as much as $1.56 trillion in new revenues for customers globally by 2026.

Business Model and Pricing Structure

Place generates recurring revenue streams based on:

• Per user and organization pricing
• Minimum 12-month subscription, with most clients signing for 24-36 months
• The average sales price of about $60k per year
• Majority of clients pay annually in advance

Why Invest in Place?

Subscription-based and recurring-revenue businesses that rely on non-native and custom-built products to drive their sales-to-cash processes are losing money one way or another.

• Our competitors’ products that are built outside of Salesforce require data to be moved in and out of Salesforce, leading to invoicing errors and missed revenue opportunities. 
• Customized Salesforce consultants are expensive and rely on their customers to diagnose the problems they want the consultant to solve (even if they don’t fully understand what the problem is).

We believe Place is perfectly positioned to solve both of these problems and we believe that our solution has the capability to drive exceptional ROI for our customers. With Salesforce projected to continue its high rate of growth, it can be expected that our addressable market will continue to grow as well.

Come join us on this incredible ride.