Atlanta started 2021 off with Calendly and Salesloft crossing the $1 billion valuation mark, putting the focus on the city’s impressive productivity and ‘SalesTech’ space.
Michael Gorodisher has watched the sales landscape change over the course of his career as new software and techstack options sprung up to help sales professionals streamline their pipelines. But he didn’t see many options designed with the salesperson’s own workflow in mind.
“There are a lot of tools like Salesloft and Outreach that help with top of the funnel…and there are a lot of tools for sales leadership like Tableau, Salesforce, and Clari. But there’s nothing really for a salesperson to manage their pipeline. The common conception is that a salesperson’s job is to go and update Salesforce. We just thought that that could be challenged and modernized.”
Gorodisher founded Managr to do just that.
Managr’s platform helps sales professionals update and manage their pipelines directly in Slack.
Its AI solution helps salespeople stay inside Slack to track upcoming meetings, organize external contacts, and move those meetings into opportunities.
That Slack-first model tracks with overall trends Gorodisher is following in the productivity space. “My bold prediction is within the next five years I don’t think there will be many enterprise systems that people actually log into. I think the leading companies in the WorkTech space will have everything automated through some sort of messaging platform like Microsoft Teams and Slack,” he added.
Early Managr customers include Southeast startups like SaaSOptics and other national players like TravelBank, Emplifi, Yext, and QuotaPath.
And it has caught the attention of several impressive local investors.
Managr landed a $1.5 million seed round led by Atlanta Seed Company. Atlanta entrepreneurial veterans Tom Noonan, David Dorman, and Salesloft CEO Kyle Porter also joined the round.
Gorodisher said the seed round gives the company “at least a year of traction” to build out the sales, marketing, product, and engineering sides of the business. The team has recently doubled, adding three new employees over the last few weeks.
Meet The Founder
Gorodisher was born in Ukraine before moving to the States at an early age. While he grew up wanting to become a doctor, a job up in Boston grew his interest in sales ecosystem.
He spent close to 12 years at Meltwater, a corporate reputation startup that took him between Los Angeles, The Bay, and New York City.
He credits his time at Meltwater with helping him see the wider sales landscape and the traditional pitfalls salespeople face.
After relocating to Atlanta and opening an office up in Alpharetta, Gorodisher sees a unique opportunity to grow Managr in a city with a strong B2B sales and engineering workforce.
“I feel like we got really lucky that we decided to launch here in Atlanta and having access to people like Kyle Porter and all these other great tech companies. I just feel like it’s the right time to be here.”
He’ll be sharing the stage with other fast-growing startups next week as a seed-stage showcase company at Venture Atlanta 2021.
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