LONDON — Softbank Europe Ventures and Episode 1 Partners fund B2B start-up, theworkx.net to the tune of 3 million pounds. The Berkshire-based B2B company will use the investment to launch a pilot scheme of its qualified sales lead provision and management service in the UK, France and Germany later this year.
theworkx.net will initially target large companies looking to sell to SMEs in several business sectors, including PCs and servers, networking, mobile phones, ecommerce and the Net. According to estimates from the cross-industry body, The Foundation, large enterprises spend $3.3 billion (32.3 billion) annually on demand creation for the SME segment, and theworkx.net reckons it can reduce these costs by up to 90%.
According to Luke Spikes, MD of theworkx.net, “There has always been a need to reduce the cost of acquiring small business customers for large companies as this segment has not provided an acceptable return on investment… Losing leads in the sales cycle is a common problem; we provide tools to enable a central administrator to track leads status in the cycle, solving the problem of dropped leads. The high-quality leads are automatically routed to the appropriate person in the existing sales channel.”
Softbank recently merged its UK and European funds into a single $600 million European fund.