A new North East cyber security business has unveiled ambitious growth plans after launching with an initial £200,000 investment to plough into product development.
Newcastle based SalesLynk has been launched by tech specialists Ian Todd, Alan Easton and Neil Stephenson, with the aim of supporting the global cyber security market. The SalesLynk trio have set out on a sales and marketing campaign to aggressively scale the business over the next three years, after creating a data-driven business intelligence platform to help cyber security sales teams around the world.
The firm – led by chief executive Mr Todd, chief technology officer Mr Easton and chair Mr Stephenson – aims to have team of 10 by the end of 2023 and it will roll out to Europe and North America following the UK launch. Mr Todd said: “The SalesLynk platform is ground-breaking for both the cyber security sector and the global sales teams employed within it. Early indicators show the potential return on investment will be transformative, saving tens of hours per week for sales people, removing the vast majority of the manual effort that goes into sales research and dramatically speeding up sales cycles.
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“SalesLynk is the collective effort of Alan, Neil and myself. My background is cyber security and the technology industry, with over 10 years’ experience of building revenue and generating business units for global organisations. During this time, I successfully built multiple business units from their origin, for some of the largest global organisations based in the UK and North America.
“I was introduced to Alan via my brother who works at Newcastle-based Boxmodel, of which Alan is chief executive. Established in 2009, Boxmodel is a 36-strong team of software engineers creating solutions for organisations operating in global markets. Neil has a special understanding of how to grow value and deliver exits, having personal experience of working with private equity and venture capital backed businesses in the tech space. He is best known as the former chief executive of OnyxX Group, transforming it from £1m turnover to £30m. Neil exited the business in June 2016 when Onyx was acquired in a deal worth £65m.”
Mr Easton added: “SalesLynk has been designed to tackle a range of sales challenges that we see day-to-day across the cyber security industry, and that is often the salesperson being at a substantial disadvantage going into most sales cycles, as the buyer holds a set of preconceived notions, which they will look to validate during initial conversations.
“When a SalesLynk user organises a meeting with their client or prospect, they are automatically provided with personal, business, cultural and industry insights of the prospect, from a range of public and proprietary sources. The data is aggregated in seconds, displayed intuitively in the platform and needs nothing more than the name, email address and business of the prospect when setting up a meeting.
“There are thousands of new vendors selling their solutions, many of which have huge budgets, but almost no sales experience or expertise. SalesLynk is the exact platform they need to improve conversion rates and help their teams win business.”
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