INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
We hear so much about managing the customer relationship, but companies have to manage the products they sell, too
Propel, a Santa Clara startup, is taking a modern cloud approach to the problem, and today it landed an $18 million Series B investment.The
round was led by Norwest Venture Partners
Previous investors Cloud Apps Capital Partners, Salesforce Ventures and SignalFire also participated
on how you go through the life cycle of a product from concept to design to make, model, sell, service where everybody in a company gets
three core products to help customers track products through their life
For starters, there is the product life cycle management tool (PLM), used by engineering and manufacturing
Next, they have product information management for sales and marketing
Finally, they have service personnel using the quality management component.The company is built on top of the Salesforce platform, which
While Propel looks purely at the product, Salesforce is more interested in the customer, whether from a sales, service or marketing
perspective.These same employees need to understand the products they are developing and selling and that is where Propel comes into play
For instance, when sales people are filling out an order, they need access to the product catalog to get the right numbers or marketing
needs to understand the products they are adding to an online store in an e-commerce environment.Traditional PLM tools from companies like
SAP and Oracle are on-prem or have been converted from on-prem to cloud services
Propel was born in the cloud and Sean Jacobsohn, partner at Norwest Venture Partners, who will be joining the Propel board, sees this as a
pivot products in a matter of seconds based on real-time feedback gathered from marketing, engineering, sales, customers and the entire
