Before the Call Secures $2.54 Million in Series A Funding; Gould Investments and Band of Angels Lead First Round for On-Demand Sales Intelligence Solution.

SUNNYVALE, Calif. -- Before the Call, the market and technology leader in on-demand sales intelligence solutions, has received $2.54 million in funding led by Gould Investments of Menlo Park. The Band of Angels, a formal group of more than 100 former and current high-tech executives in Silicon Valley, also contributed to the round, along with Steve Blank, Epiphany founder, and Martin Brauns, former CEO of Interwoven.

Before the Call will use the funds to finance its go-to-market strategy, increase marketing and sales efforts, and expand the company's on-demand sales intelligence offering to a broader group of customer relationship management vendors. Its sales intelligence solution currently runs on salesforce.com's AppExchange, the world's first on-demand platform.

"There is an undeniable need for greater efficiency within the intelligence-gathering part of the sales process, which is typically expensive, disjointed and extremely time-consuming," said Kathryn Gould, who heads up Gould Investments. "Before the Call dramatically improves sales effectiveness by letting reps focus on closing deals instead of on research, and its on-demand model costs a fraction of what traditional intelligence tools run."

Dr. Ian Sobeiski, Ph.D., a founder and managing director of the Band of Angels, said the Band examines more than 700 business plans a year but only invests in about eight. "We look for companies that are using cutting-edge technologies to solve real business problems, and that's exactly why Before the Call captured our attention. Sales effectiveness is a major challenge facing today's enterprise, and Before the Call has come up with a cost-effective solution that we believe will change the way companies run their sales operations."

"This investment validates the need for sales intelligence solutions that empower sales professionals," said Fred Walters, Before the Call co-founder. "For anyone who has lived the time-consuming pain of researching and cobbling together data, Before the Call will undoubtedly make a difference in their future success."

"Sales intelligence is exactly what sales organizations need to become more efficient and more effective," said customer Andy Creach, Intervoice director of inside sales. "So much time is wasted manually researching leads that turn out to be irrelevant, and hot leads often go cold because no one gets to them in time. Before the Call not only tells you which leads are hot, it brings the intelligence you need to close the deal right to your fingertips."

About Before the Call

Before the Call incorporated in March 2005 and is privately held. Its on-demand sales intelligence solution provides details about each sales lead and ranks the leads according to the criteria that the user chooses, including industry, company size or location. Content partners include idEXEC, Factiva, Harte-Hanks, LinkedIn and ZoomInfo. Before the Call then automatically provides the most appropriate internal documents for each sales call, such as relevant case studies, product brochures, technical whitepapers, and other sales collateral. Before the Call retains all the information in a customer "portfolio" that is forever associated with the lead record within the user's CRM system and is made available throughout the entire sales process. The company is located at 1250 Oakmead Parkway, Suite 210, Sunnyvale, Calif. 94085. More information is available at www.beforethecall.com or 408-501-8889.

About Gould Investments

Kathryn Gould began investing her own money through Gould Investments in 2005. She was a venture capitalist for nearly 20 years, the last 10 at Foundation Capital, which she co-founded in 1995 and which now has more than $1.5 billion under management. Before that she was a partner at Merrill, Pickard, Anderson and Eyre and was the original vice president of marketing at Oracle. Companies in which she has invested include Interwoven, Documentum, Chordiant Software, Applied Digital Access, Eloquent, Visioneer and Storm Technologies. More information is available at www.gouldinvestments.com.

About the Band of Angels

The Band of Angels is Silicon Valley's oldest organization still dedicated exclusively to funding and advising seed-stage startups. The Band is a formal group of more than 100 former and current high-tech executives who have founded companies such as Symantec, Logitech, and National Semiconductor and been senior executives at the likes of Sun Microsystems, HP and Intuit. More information is available at www.bandangels.com.