3 Things: Zapier for Sales Processes, Cross-Chain Bridge Security, FB Marketplace Delivery Service

Happy Sunday and a very warm welcome to all the new subscribers! I’m thrilled and honored to have you as readers and truly appreciate your thoughts and feedback 🙏. Each edition of 3 Things will contain a dive into 3 rabbit holes I’ve found myself going down recently. Subscribe to get each week’s edition straight to your inbox and if you enjoy it, please share (I suck at self-promotion so can use your help)! This past week I’ve been thinking a lot about:

• Zapier for Sales Processes

• Cross-Chain Bridge Security

• FB Marketplace Delivery Service

1. Zapier for Sales Processes

Despite the current excitement around PLG (product-led-growth) companies, the vast majority of B2B SaaS is still sold using a sales team consisting of either inside sales (SDR/BDRs), account executives, or both. Companies talk about building a repeatable sales motion or process that involves taking a lead and moving them through the pipeline until they become a paying customer. For years, VC investment in sales tech had died down but the last few years have brought renewed interest with the growth and success of companies like Gong (raised $583M) and Chorus (acquired by Zoominfo for $575M in July 2021) in the conversational intelligence space, and Outreach (raised $489M) and Salesloft (acquired by Vista Equity at a $2.3B valuation) on the sales engagement side. In the past 3 years, there have been numerous companies such as Dooly and Scratchpad who have raised large rounds focused on removing busywork, speeding up data entry/notes, and focusing on team collaboration.

Others that have received significant funding like People.ai, Lusha, BoostUp and Playbook add layers on top of Salesforce and focus on various aspects of helping sales teams with revenue intelligence, prospecting data, and forecasting. While I think that these tools are valuable and can clearly point to ROI around increased productivity (in both the closing more deals as well as wasting less time senses of the word) by rep, they all focus on internal functionality and collaboration. By nature, sales is a cross-company exercise so concentrating on collaboration with the prospect account could dramatically decrease sales cycles and increase close rates. In particular, pretty much every enterprise sales process involves dealing with legal, procurement, security, and IT, regardless of who your buyer is… and this is often both the slowest and most painful part of closing a sale. The idea is to create a Zapier-type product that ropes in each of these stakeholders in the right way at the right time via smart triggers based off of best practices and data that lives in your CRM. The solution could look at your historical data (plus data from other companies), and create if/then statements that trigger actions such as: “if Opportunity moves from Stage 3 to Stage 4, send email to [CHAMPION] requesting the security questionnaire”. People often us BANT, CHAMP, or MEDDIC to qualify opportunities, but what if you created a similar “closing qualification” checklist that could be mostly automated?

2. Cross-Chain Bridge Security

Cybersecurity is top of mind for nearly every company these days. When you look at cybercrime statistics, they are all up and to the right which is unfortunately *not* the metrics you want to see in this category. Malware, ransomware, social engineering and other attacks have been growing exponentially over the past decade. In 2021 alone, venture capital firms poured over $30B into cybersecurity startups. Companies in the security space typically focus on securing one vulnerable attack vector for a business such as network security, application security, infrastructure security, cloud security, or operational security; which is each a hard enough task unto itself. Now that so many pieces of software are intertwined via integrations and APIs, which creates another security vulnerability that is extremely hard to monitor as it’s somewhat out of your control since you’re relying on a 3rd party for the API.

Since the creation of Bitcoin in 2008, the crypto/blockchain/web3 industry (whatever you want to call it) had been rife with security issues. There have been a slew of incredible attacks from the hack on Mt Gox that resulted in a loss of 850,00 bitcoin (equivalent to $40B today) to the exploitation of The DAO (siphoning $150M from the smart contract and resulting in hard fork of Ethereum) to the crazy story of Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan who recently got caught as the people behind the 119,754 Bitcoin that were stolen in a 2016 hack of Bitfinex (a cryptocurrency exchange based in Hong Kong). More recently, as we’ve seen the rise of many different Layer 1 blockchains, cross-chain bridges have been built to port data from one chain to another and have been the target of many recent attacks. Just last week, Sky Mavis, creator of the very popular play-to-earn game Axie Infinity, had their Ronin bridge compromised resulting in a loss of $650M+. Given the likelihood that we will end up in a multi-blockchain world, the need to cross-chain bridge security will only grow. Given the similarities to API security, an exceptionally strong team from a web2 API security company like Salt Security, StackHawk, or one of the full-suite security players should start something focused solely on monitoring and securing cross-chain bridges.

3. Facebook Marketplace Deliveries

Facebook Marketplace launched in 2016 as a place for individual users to buy and sell goods, and by the beginning of 2021, the social media giant’s e-commerce marketplace garnered over 1 billion monthly active users. That is literally 17.5% of the entire global population above the age of 13 who interact with Marketplace every month! When you have the reach and engagement of Facebook (now Meta), adding commerce is inevitable. Over the last two years, the company continued to double down on e-commerce and have moved beyond just a peer-to-peer marketplace to now allowing merchant Shops (ie they look less like just Craigslist and more like Shopify). They already passed the million store mark with over 250 million customers engaging with them monthly. There are now articles, websites, and even courses devoted to teaching merchants how to sell on the platform.

Though Marketplace now enables customers to search products by both “local” and “shipped” filters, the vast majority of the platform’s usage is still around local items. Local is often the preferred option because you can get the item asap and also don’t have to pay for shipping which sometimes ends up being extremely cost prohibitive. You also have the benefit of buying from people who are either directly connected with you or one degree of separation away which adds a layer of trust. The problem with local, however, is that you now have the burden of pickup placed on you. Even if the seller is only 15 minutes away, you still have to deal with scheduling a handoff and carve out time and find the energy to drive both ways. We have gotten so accustomed to services like Amazon and Instacart that offer free (with subscription) same-day or next-day delivery right to our door. A company could handle the last mile piece and offer courier services for local deliveries. The panacea would be to integrate directly into Facebook Marketplace so that the buyers could select “Deliver it to Me” as an option and pay to have someone grab the item and deliver it same day for a fee (still lower than shipping). The easier option to get started would be to work through repeat sellers or even the merchants and offer this as a service for them if they sell primarily locally or use 3PLs who provide distributed fulfillment. Information could be collected through the listing and simple SMS based communication can be used for coordination and notification purposes to let the buyer know when to expect delivery.

That’s all for today! If you have thoughts, comments, or want to get in touch, find me on Twitter at @ezelby and if you enjoyed this, please share with a friend or two!

~ Elaine