Cosential Gets Funding from JMI Equity to Accelerate Product Innovation

Cosential is a  CRM market leader and proposal automation software for Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) firms, that recently closed a deal of a $34 million strategic growth investment from JMI Equity, a growth equity firm focused on investing in leading software companies. The funding will be used to accelerate market development, expand corporate infrastructure and continue fueling the company’s rapid pace of product innovation. Dan Cornish, CEO of the company Cosential, spoke with AECCafe recently about Cosential and its role in the AEC industry.

Cornish began Cosential in 1999, as a way to help large AEC firms win large projects. What he realized was that a crucial problem people had was pulling data together.

How did you start out building Cosential?

I started building online systems early on and then started building Cosential and over the years I sort of bootstrapped it from there to get to this point today, where we have the biggest market share for CRM in the AEC industry. So many people want so much from our tool, it made sense for me to bring on a financial partner who would help me grow and realize the financial vision I’ve had all these years, because I want to help customers have better businesses. It’s such an old-fashioned industry and people have been managing with spreadsheets. The tools that are out there are either very old, not industry specific or they require an enormous amount of customization that they never get quite right and so we build a purpose-built tool for this industry and it solves a lot of problems.

Our goal is to help our customers win more business and by using our tools they become more efficient, more effective, and they have a big ROI because they win more deals because their whole marketing and sales process is so much more efficient. I built an online system that’s available in network and mobile that integrates with all the major ERP systems, so it integrates with Deltek, Viewpoint, Oracle, CMiC, etc. and all the project management systems like ProCore and some other ones, as well as HR systems and then internal systems. It pulls all the data together in a way that allows our customers to quickly answer questions and RFPs, quickly put together proposals and track them with proper metrics, and all the other kinds of analytics, and see wat’s effective and not effective.

Since we’ve been doing it for twenty years, and we’ve pretty much figured it out. We’re all experts in the AEC industry. We’ve been building this thing for about 20 years, so our product is complete, very powerful and easy to use, and that’s why people buy it, and we provide all this great power.

Do people want Cosential in addition to a BIM or CAD system?

If you think of three major sources of record, or three silos of data, there are the following:

1. Sales data. What projects are we chasing, what are or estimates, bids, quotes? How accurately does that work?

2. Financial data, which is important for putting together proposals, like how many jobs have we done, change order over x amount, then project management systems, and CAD systems.

3. Delivery, which is CAD.

You need all three silos of data to run your business. Up until recently, people have just been running the business side on spreadsheets. If they automated CAD early on, they had to go out and get an accounting system, but now what ends up happening is to effectively sell, you have to integrate the CAD, the project management, the financial with the sales process and this is where true automation comes in.

So, it puts all that stuff together. If you’re 100-person firm, this becomes an enormous lever in terms of how to manage information. Everyone in AEC is in the information business. All they do is sell people’s experience with different projects.

Cosential helps them organize it.

What makes it specific to the AEC industry? Do you do other industries as well or just AEC?

No, just AEC.

Other software companies have, over the years, addressed financial and sales outside the project management and CAD piece, and then stuck it together with those things.

Most of the systems people have in terms of CRM systems are spreadsheets. Most had CRM systems. They’re not project based; they tacked it together so that’s why they end up replacing a lot of traditional CRM platforms. Again, it’s a caked together system.

What are you giving customers exactly? Getting people to transition their brains from spreadsheets, to something else, is probably kind of challenging.

Cosential has a spreadsheet view that works just like a spreadsheet. It’s part of an enterprise database. That’s one reason people use us because there is no learning curve.

They use it and all the intelligence is in the software.

Can it draw information from the other silos?

Yes. Also, the system is set up for customers It’s ready and they don’t have to figure out how to set up a system, it’s out of the box.

It’s incorporating materials, data, shipment data, etc.?

Yes, all of that.

So, in terms of coordinating with a BIM, it doesn’t matter what software, Cosential can still work with it?

Yeah, and a lot of information in the BIM model is not important for sales. The project type, and who worked on the projects and where they are, and what they experience is. We also have an image library as part of our system and our system can publish this, design in Word and combine all the data from all these data sources, plus all the photography into a beautiful high-quality proposal in design. We automate that whole process. For the proposal pieces we save up to 75% of the time it takes to build a proposal because our customers get all their time back and increases their hit rate, because they can focus on what’s really important. A lot of our customers say we’ve increased their hit rate up to 30%, so it’s an enormous advantage to be able to automate that piece of their business as well.

Each one of these existing software companies have some piece they provide, and they’re supposed to be integrated together. This integration is happening incrementally.

We’ve been integrating for 20 years. They’re integrating within their companies. We actually integrate better with Deltek better than they integrate with them.

Companies go out and buy companies and just slam the products together.

We learned that just saying that one field integrates with another isn’t being a smart integration. We actually are on our sixth generation of our integration tools. We really learned that mapping one field to another isn’t enough. Sometimes you want to pull data from the financial system, but then you want the marketers to look at the data as they want to see it, but still not go back and update the financial system. Or you plot data that you want to see another way. The reason – another competitive advantage we have: we have figured out how to really integrate. We actually know what we’re doing.

In terms of bringing this into an existing organization, do you have to set it up?

It’s ready to go and then we provide implementation services to help customers implement. That can be anything from a simple phone call anywhere to we’ll help you migrate the data, organize your data, or even advise you to modify your data so it becomes more meaningful.

We’ll train you. A lot of people haven’t learned how to use a system like this, but we’ll train you and our customers say they can’t imagine living without us.

After people started doing CAD they realized they couldn’t live without it.

Is your cloud a proprietary private cloud, and what about security?

It’s super secure, we’ve had the largest companies in the world using our system. Since this is in our DNA, we’ve done all the secure things we have to do.

Do you have to customize the system for different companies?

No, our customers can configure it themselves.

Price point?

Three different price points:

$95 per user per month, full user; $55 per user sales and a business development; for casual users $25 per user per month.

Tags: AEC, architects, architecture, BIM, building, building design, building information modeling, CAD, construction, design, engineering, infrastructure, integration, mobile

Categories: 2D, 3D, AEC, AECCafe, architecture, Autodesk, BIM, building information modeling, construction, construction project management, data archiving, Deltek, file sharing, IFC, infrastructure, integrated project delivery, project management

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