Software release could give fast-growing Sigstr another boost

Since hiring former Salesforce executive Bryan Wade 16 months ago and securing $5 million in financing 12 months ago, local marketing-tech company Sigstr has been on a growth tear.

And with the release of updated software with a new application Wednesday, officials at the 4-year-old Indianapolis-based firm say they expect Sigstr’s growth to accelerate.

“We see this [new platform] as a big leap forward,” Wade told IBJ. “We think it has a lot of potential.”

Sigstr sells software that enables companies to leverage employee emails for marketing purposes. Sigstr’s software allows messages—often incorporated into the email signature line—to be customized based on a number of factors including who within the company is sending the email and who is receiving it.

The new application, called Pulse, is geared more toward sales and marketing. 

In addition to allowing custom email messages across all—or subsets of—employees within a company or organization, Pulse tracks when an email is opened, tracks how fast it generates a response, how many messages are sent back and forth between parties, the number of calendar invites generated between parties emailing and other factors to determine relationship strength. 

Then the software rates—or keeps a score on—the relationship between the sender and recipient, thus allowing companies to to do more effective marketing.

All of this, Wade said, helps measure how tactics are assisting sales teams in garnering new relationships at key accounts.

Pulse is the “only platform to score the relationship,” Wade said, adding that it tracks how that relationship changes over time.

“Email and calendar invites are underrated indicators of a [work] relationship,” Wade said. “We’re rolling out a much bigger vision around relationship intelligence.”

Pulse not only scores the relationship between a company and its client or potential client, it also shows which employee within the company running Pulse has the strongest relationship a contact within a prospect company. 

Wade emphasized that Sigstr’s software is not mining data from emails’ subject lines or bodies but is instead gathering metadata—small bits of information embedded in the emails—that helps rank the strength or weakness of the relationship between sender and recipient. 

“Sigstr Pulse gives our team a new way to calculate the most important metric in business: relationships,” Sangram Vajre, co-founder of Atlanta-based Terminus Software, said in a statement. “As marketers, everything we do is in effort to create authentic connections with our audiences, and Sigstr Pulse helps provide guidance on the best strategies to accomplish that. Sigstr Pulse is [account-based marketing] on steroids.”

Sigstr has grown from 28 to 63 employees since Wade took over the CEO reins from founder Dan Hanrahan. Sigstr has nearly tripled its revenue and its customer base to 400 in that time, Sigstr officials said. 

Wade declined to reveal the company’s revenue, adding that Sigstr is focused on growth and not yet profitable. The company is currently experiencing 250 percent year-over-year revenue growth, Wade said, and he expects revenue to triple in short order with the release of Pulse.

Currently, there are more than 100,000 people within 400 corporate clients—including Amazon, AT&T, California Closets and United Way—running Sigstr’s platform. “I’d like to be run by 1 million employees by 2020,” Wade said.

Sigstr is targeting a number of sectors (mostly business-to-business) with its platform, but the top three are technology, professional services and health care, Wade said, adding that manufacturing is another target.

There’s a wide range of prices for Sigstr’s platform, Wade said, from “a few thousand dollars to hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Sigstr moved into a new, bigger office in August 2017, but Wade thinks with all the growth, the company will have to expand its current office at 20 N. Meridian St. or find a bigger home in 2019.

“We feel we have a lot positive things going right now,” Wade said. “And the challenges we have are all good ones. They’re a sign of our growth.”