Influitive buys Triggerfox to go deeper into mobile

Triggerfox is a mobile relationship management app; this is Influitive's second purchase this month

Influitive, which turns a company's best customers into its best sales people, is going deeper into mobile.

The company has acquired mobile relationship management application Triggerfox, it was announced on Tuesday. No financial terms of the deal were disclosed.

The Toronto-based Triggerfox aimed to bring CRM back to the individual user, Frank Falcone, the company's co-founder and CEO, told me. 

With Triggerfox, users can get alerts about the people in their network, and get notified about things like job changes, birthdays, news mentions, life events, articles being shared and keyword alerts. It would also allow them to actions on notifications, such as sharing an article, making a network introduction or setting a follow-up reminder, as well as organize their contacts into a single location.

"Frank and I have known each other a few years. I was founder and CEO of Eloqua, which did marketing automation software. I was working with Frank when he was part of the Microsoft ecosystem, so we've known each other at least 10 years," Mark Organ, CEO and founder of Influitive, told me.

"We kept in touch and over the last couple of years I've been excited by what Frank was building, which was mobile first, and a hard problem to tackle. We had a lot of demand from our customers in advocate marketing to expand to the digital sales domain, and to put more product on mobile. So the company was a great fit."

Influitive will be incorporating Triggerfox's technology into its platform, so that sales representatives can also have access to advocate marketing. The core Triggerfox tech will be unified with Influitive, which will be, "Taking the team and the IP and leveraging those components where they fits around the social selling story," said Organ.

That means that the entire four-person Triggerfox team will be coming to work at Influitive. Falcone will be the company's senior officer in charge of the company's mobile apps.

It also means that Triggerfox will eventually be shutting down, and while Falcone told me that he doesn't know yet what will happen to the company's existing customers, he believes that there is a good amount of crossover between the two. 

"I imagine a lot of sales facing folks, like sales executives and the VP of sales, will see a central path where they can graduate the to Influitive platform," he said. 

"What excited me the most was basically that the advocate market relies heavily on relationships. The Triggerfox team spent a lot of time on that and now we can leverage the best practices and underlying tech to help build a stronger advocate network."

For Influitive, buying Triggerfox factors into its overall strategy of growing the company by expanding into new areas. 

"We want to be involved any place where advocacy happens. We have a role to play in making that advocacy more enjoyable, rewarding, and efficient. What about sales reps who need help? How can we help them?" said Organ.

"This is part of a series of things we're looking at. Acquisitions are now an attractive way to grow, and there are a lot of great companies, like Triggerfox, that we can leverage as part of strategy for growth. This won't be the last one we do and there are other areas where advocacy is important. HR for recruiting, as well as partnerships and alliances. So we can keep expanding our footprint."

Founded in 2010, Influitive helps B2B companies discover, mobilize and recognize their advocates in order to drive referrals, references and reviews.

By using Influitive’s AdvocateHub software, marketers can build advocate communities in which members gain recognition and status in exchange for activities that help promote the brand’s interests and reputation.

Some of Influitive's customers include Acquia, Atlassian, DocuSign, HireVue, Hootsuite, Oracle, Marketo and HP Software, which has engaged more than 1,000 IT service management customers in events, content creation and product feedback initiatives.

This is the company's second acquisition this month; it previously acquired mobile apps developer company Ironark Software. Ironark is the company behind mobile apps Hub, which is a home and family organizer, and Workbase, a business task and schedule manager. It's also fresh off a new $8.2 million funding round, which brought its total funding to approximately $50 million.

Founded in 2012, the Toronto-based Triggerfox had raised $2.6 million in venture funding from HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, Crashalytics co-founder Wayne Chang and Vleepo CEO Matthew Staikos. The company has 5,000 users.