eSalesHub, a Yorkshire tech firm analysing big data using AI to optimise clients marketing spend, has secured a GBP1.65 million funding round from NPIF – Maven Equity Finance, part of the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund (NPIF) and managed by Maven Capital Partners (Maven).
The NPIF – Maven Equity Fund invested GBP1.35 million, alongside the GBP300,000 from the Maven VCTs.
eSalesHub will invest the new funds, alongside internally generated cash, to scale the business and further develop its proprietary A.I technology solutions. Expansion is expected to create 25 new jobs across technology, data science, business development and sales & marketing at the company’s Doncaster head office. “The time is right to accelerate our growth and invest across the business in our proven technology solutions to expand their take-up and unlock new AI applications,” says CEO and founder Mark Taylor.
eSalesHub operates in the GBP2.5 billion UK data analytics and insights market, with an existing product suite that covers call centre and recruitment media, tracking and analysis. In terms of call tracking, the trend in recent years to online shopping has been mirrored with rapid growth in online marketing, which in 2020 is estimated to account for 69p2 of every GBP1 of UK marketing spend. Despite the growth in online, tracking sales from online clicks through offline sales remains as important as ever. Click through calls from Google alone are estimated by the Company to exceed 750,000 each and every day, as consumers still require that human interaction before making purchases of goods and services. This has created problems for marketers, who historically have been unable to track the customer journey when it shifts from online to offline, making accurate measurement of digital marketing success and value for money, impossible.
eSalesHub’s technology was developed in-house to solve this problem, connecting the on and offline customer journey to provide meaningful insights into all elements of the customer experience, broken down by demographics. The technology automates call tracking, covering both the classification of calls into categories such as Sales, Customer Service or Supplier and also tracks each call through to its outcome. This provides clients which include British Gas, Connells Estate Agency and Europcar, full marketing attribution back to the initial keywords that triggered the enquiry, enabling marketing professionals to accurately measure the effectiveness of their digital marketing spend. This rich dataset is used not only to save marketing pounds but also to improve client’s customer service offering by understanding where sales and customer service operations are currently falling down.
Regarding recruitment, large companies typically lack the integrated systems to track back and understand the original source of the applicants who have proved to be both their best and worst employees in terms of ability and retention. The company’s recruitment solution combines the source of applicants with payroll and other internal data to measure the success of direct hires from different media channels.
Mark Taylor, CEO and founder of eSalesHub, says: “Our AI technology has the power to analyse big data, including categorising 10,000 customers calls in just 0.2 seconds, providing clients with a real time, complete view of the customer journey, actionable customer insights and an average 20 per cent more value from their Google spend. However, we are only just scratching the surface of the AI opportunity and have ambitious plans for expansion beyond our current call centre and recruitment product suite.
“The backing of NPIF and Maven Capital Partners will enable us to triple the local workforce and bring more high quality tech jobs to Yorkshire. We will grow our sales and marketing team to raise awareness of our proven product suite, combined with increased investment in technology and business development to extend the application of AI as we seek to become Yorkshire’s leading technology business.”
James Rosthorn, Investment Manager at Maven Capital Partners, says: “eSalesHub has developed a technology platform that addresses a genuine data gap between online click and offline conversion. The business has already achieved a number of milestones and supports a growing list of impressive clients. We’re delighted to back Mark and the team at such an exciting stage in the company’s development and look forward to working alongside them to support their growth plans.”
