William Ballance

Lavender

Lavender helps you write sales emails that convert, faster. (🏆 #1 on Product Hunt • 🔶 9.9/10 on G2)

Lavender has everything a seller needs to get more replies in less time: email assistance, sentence suggestions, prospect research + email verification, mobile optimization, data-driven team coaching and recommendations, and much more. 

Integrates with Gmail, Outlook 365, Outreach, and Salesloft.
Get started at www.lavender.ai

CEO & Co-Founder

Sorter

🏅Winner - Techstars Startup Weekend (Atlanta 2018)

A marketing platform that combines neuroscience, psychology, and data science to build better communication at scale for brands like Yamaha, Gravity Blankets, and KettleSpace.

Sorter’s internal AI, CATIE( Creative Algorithms for Text and Image Enhancement) blends behavioral sciences with cutting edge data science and natural language processing enabling you to easily apply an objective science to the art of communication. 

We help create better content faster.

Fueling the backend of our platforms for healthcare, marketing, sales, and HR, CATIE analyzes and determines what distinguishes top-performing campaigns from baseline and under-performing content within your audiences.

Sorter (sorter.com): 1:Many Communications
Lavender (trylavender.com): 1:1 Communications

Co-Founder & CEO

Dooly

Strategic Advisor

Alum

Born out of a campaign to help save Sweet Briar College, a historic women's college in Virginia, Alum was a mobile app for alumni social networking and mobile fundraising active at over 200 colleges and high schools.

Founder

My Fun Filter

My Fun Filter was the #1 supplier of custom Snapchat filters on Groupon and LivingSocial in the US and Canada. Acquired.

Springbot

Springbot is a Magento Gold and Shopify partner that delivers a marketing automation and predictive analytics software to eCommerce stores ranging from early stage startups to $100mm global companies.

Springbot's awards include TAG Top 10 Most Innovative Technology Company, TiE Silicon Valley - TiE50 Top Startups 2016, and Atlanta Business Chronicle's Best Places to Work.

SDR & AE - US/UK/Australia

Candle Spas

• Co-founded the first digital e-commerce platform for subscription spa services in Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco. 
• Built our spa network to over 200 locations across three cities in 2 months. 
• Developed relationships with local and national influencers to drive sales and customer acquisition. 
• Spearheaded partnerships and advertising opportunities with nationally known brands including Stylecaster, Mercedes-Benz, Lululemon, Rocksbox, HowAboutWe, and Graze.

Employee #1

Loclly

• First permanent sales hire at a startup regional local services and "daily deal" e-commerce store.
• Grew annual revenue over 6,000% in a year and a half, then launched a new brand (Candle).
• Utilized strategic user acquisition, e-mail marketing, and pricing models to capture an active audience of buyers across multiple brands and verticals.

SDR & AE - US/MX

Pinnacle Fête

Pinnacle Fête began as an event and artist promotion company in the college town of Blacksburg, Virginia, representing nationally known acts including Rhêtorik, Tim Gunter, and Super Dopplar.

Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce

Intern - Lead Hampton Roads

👋 Hey, I'm William. My team and I design technology that combines communication psychology with AI. Want to write better emails faster? We built software for that. 👇

1. Install for free to use our AI Email Assistant at https://install.lavender.ai (for Gmail, Outlook 365, Outreach, and Salesloft)

2. Are you a student or unemployed? We give you Lavender for free until you have a full time job.

3. Want to start a startup one day? I write a lot about our startup journey + happy to help if I can.

4. Want to generate passive pipeline on autopilot? We built Ora, Lavender's new intelligent AI sales agent to help with just that. www.ora.im


--

about me:

👨‍💻 I'm a sales rep turned startup founder. 

🇲🇽🗽🍑 I spent a year and a half remote working in Mexico. We built most of Lavender during this. I'm based in New York but we got our start in Atlanta. 

🎨 🏛 I've been designing software since I was a kid, but went to school to study Government and Economics. 

🌍 I'm passionate about entrepreneurship. I wrote my senior thesis on using micro-finance to encourage entrepreneurship and bottoms-up development of emerging economies.

🦊 I'm most proud of starting a series of campaigns to help save a historic women's college, Sweet Briar, from closing. 

👩‍🎓The school was saved by its alumnae, and this experience led me to leave my job and start my first startup: an alumni social chat and mobile fundraising app. 

🧠 Through that I was introduced to the cognitive sciences, met my co-founders, and pivoted. We built technology for marketers that leveraged personality and decision making science.

💜 COVID happened and we pivoted again, applying our communication psychology research to sales.

🙌 Now Lavender helps thousands of sales people around the world write better emails faster.

👉 Learn more about Lavender at www.lavender.ai and www.ora.im

William M. Ballance

Florin Tatulea

Common Room

Building outbound & pipeline generation systems with the very platform we are selling. 

Year 1: 500%+ pipeline growth

Head of Sales Development

Sales Flo

Building meaningful pipeline for GTM brands by engaging their audience through content creation across 80,000+ followers on LinkedIn, Substack & X. 

salesflo.substack.com
x.com/FlorinTatulea

I also do Sales Workshops and GTM Advising for some of the best B2B companies in the world: Shopify, LivePerson, Zendesk, Docebo, and Vendr.

pclub.io

Best Selling Course - Copywriting, Cold Email and Sequencing: https://go.pclub.io/florin

Course Author

Barley

Acquired by Workleap

Helping People/HR teams make smarter compensation decisions to stay competitive:

-Global Salary Benchmarking Data 
-Comp Planning Workflows & Reporting 
-Pay Equity Analysis 
-Total Rewards Communication

Director of Sales

Plato 

Acquired by Coda

Built the BDR/SDR function from scratch. 

Plato helps Engineering & Product teams build their skillset by providing access to the top mentors in the world from orgs like Google, Meta, Netflix, Spotify etc.

Director, Sales Development

Loopio

Acquired by PE

First sales hire at Loopio and part of an elite sales team as an SDR, AE & SDR Leader that grew revenues by 65x in 6 years leading to a high 9-Figure valuation.

As an SDR Leader, I helped scale the Inbound & Outbound function to a team of ~25 across Commercial, Mid-Market & Enterprise segments.

Senior Manager, Sales Development

Manager, Sales Development

Closed 100+ deals across Commercial, Mid-Market & Enterprise segments.

Notable deals include: Square, Ceridian, Mcdonalds (Dynamic Yield), Databricks, TripActions, Carbon Black, Bentley, Gainsight, Grammarly + many more.

Senior Account Executive

Team Lead, Sales Development

Founding SDR

PenPal Technologies

Business Development Manager

Banking Associate

STS Capital Partners

STS Capital Partners is an international investment banking firm specializing in mergers, acquisitions, divestitures, strategic consulting and advisory services for mid-market businesses. 

Worked on five $10MM - $100MM transactions within the real estate, airport logistics, IT & security and healthcare industries.

Analyst Intern, M&A

Sales Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice 2023 | GTM Advisor | Focusing on Seed → Series B

I'm a passionate leader that lives and breathes all things sales.

I was lucky enough to be the first sales hire at Loopio and have had the opportunity to be a part of and contribute to the exponential growth that had led us to a sales team of ~50 strong. In my 6.5 years at Loopio we grew revenue by 65x. 

I am now doing it all over again at Common Room

Whether it's been as an SDR, AE, Manager or Director, I'm constantly looking for ways to reinvent myself and my team.

I'm a people-first leader that understands that leading a team is not about me. It's about lifting others up and seeing them succeed. My success is simply a bi-product of my team's success. 

As a sales leader, I'm curious about scaling sales teams, generating pipeline, increasing win rates and lowering ramp times in a remote world.

As an individual, I'm passionate about copywriting, sequence/cadence building, leveraging social selling and the future of sales technology.

Harry Sims is the best SDR I've ever seen.

He's quite literally the 10x SDR I've been preaching about. 

The numbers speak for themselves:

When it comes to pipeline $ and sourced closed won revenue on our team, he's 5x the 2nd best SDR and close to 10x the average. 

His secret? 

Obviously he's obsessive about his craft but that's "fluffy" and not helpful for you all.

Is he working harder? Maybe. But not 10x harder.

He has the same Signals, same AI research, Same Call Transcripts, CRM Notes as every single SDR. 

Everybody has the same data. 

A lot of people think that the problem with outbound is data. 

Data isn't the issue. Most orgs have all the data they need. 

The hardest part about outbound is extrapolating insights from that data and adding meaningful context to it. 

If Harry gets a website visitor signal, he isn't think about that person in isolation and just popping them into a web visitor sequence. 

​✅ He's already mapped the buying committee
✅ Understands the macro of what is happening at that account
✅ Has talked to multiple people at the org to get the deep insights that don't live in a database 
✅ He's thinking about adding an insight to the data he's aggregated that the prospect has not already thought about

That’s the kind of insight AI can’t replicate... it's what breaks through the noise. 

I'm going to be diving deeper into this topic with the legendary 🏄🏼‍♂️ Scott Leese on a webinar this Wednesday at 11am PT / 2pm ET. 

Here's the link to register: https://luma.com/tiy64fji

GTM Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice | Advisor

There are two metrics that not enough SDR teams are tracking.

It’s crazy to think about, but the reality is that most SDR teams are still largely ONLY tracked on volume, meetings and pipeline.

Don’t get me wrong ALL of those are still important. 

But you MUST be tracking SDR efficiency to really unlock and ultimately improve an outbound program.

Two metrics that are still extremely overlooked and tell you A LOT about your reps and business:

→ Contacts touched per qualified opp (S2)

Most teams (including ours) are not going wide enough into accounts...depending on who your ICP is. 

As an example: we sell to 4 Personas…. Sales, SDR, Marketing & Rev Ops.

Yet in our growth segment, our average contacts touched per account is 3. That needs to be fixed.

→ Penetration Rate: How many accounts to S2?

It quite literally tells you how many accounts you need to touch or assign to your reps in order to hit your number.

Let’s say you have an S2 quota of 24 per quarter. If each rep has 300 accounts and your avg. penetration rate is 6%, all else the same… your avg. rep will be hitting 18. 

You either need to increase the accounts they own/touch or need to figure out how to increase efficiency.

Otherwise you don't even stand a chance.

This is a great way to counter a top-down approach to quotas that are often unrealistic.

It's been pretty hilarious to see what some of the younger SDRs on our team that are more "AI-Native" use ChatGPT for. 

I had an SDR the other day making an argument for an opportunity that he believed should be marked as "qualified". 

He ran the full Gong transcript through GPT, input our qualification criteria and sent me a 3-page report explaining how it was in fact qualified. 

Fair enough Mr. SDR. Fair enough 🤣 🤣 🤣 

(It was still a no). 

Jking. 

I thought it was funny. Not something I would have thought of myself.

Shoutout to all the cold callers out there 😭 😭 😭 

We ran FullEnrich across our own contact database recently…  the results speak for themselves:

30% coverage in USA -> 80% coverage!!!

10% coverage in EMEA - 70% coverage

How?

They run a waterfall against 30 providers.

For the last decade, mobile numbers have been a constant battle for me. 

People are SLEEPING on FullEnrich.  

I met Benjamin Douablin earlier this year… after seeing the quality of what they built, we knew we had to integrate FullEnrich data into Common Room. 

Our customers now have access to premium phone number data as well.

One of my main goals for this year is partnering with a smaller number of brands that I actually use and find value in every day. 

FullEnrich is one of them. 

Fantastic product.

Brand partnership • GTM Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice | Advisor

There are two types of sales reps going into Thanksgiving week:

1. You convince yourself that it's the holidays and you let your foot off the gas

2. You bust your ass for the next 3 days, before a well deserved 4-day weekend and set yourself up for success come December. 

Which one are you? 

...If you are going to work. Why not be the second? 

Otherwise, just take the week off.

SDRs & AEs - here are 5 things that will help you finish strong in Q4 going into the Thanksgiving/Holiday Season (it's coming fast..)

1. Stop telling yourself that everybody is off and that you won’t book meetings.

There is always going to be an excuse any time of year. Talk to your prospects or somebody else will.
 
2. Understand that budgets for 2026 are being made right now. Executives are actively thinking about spend + what solutions they need to hit their 2026 goals as we speak.

3. Closed Lost/Not Now reports in your CRM are going to be your best friend right now. Make a list of everyone who told you that “next year” was a better time to talk. HIT THEM UP NOW!

We've actually completely automated this play in Common Room. We built a workflow that automatically finds and enriches every contact that's been on a Gong call with us in the last year and use our RoomieAI agent to go through the calls and write emails based on the context of the transcript. 

We've found 3600 contacts we can hit up. 

4. Your biggest objection right now is going to be "Not Now / Let’s talk in the new year"

ADDRESS THE OBJECTION UP FRONT BEFORE YOUR PROSPECT DOES:

Here is a template:

“I can appreciate that the holidays are coming up and things are going to be crazy.

Would you be opposed to taking a peek at how we can help with X, before everything gets crazy with the holidays / Q1?

From there, if it’s not something that makes sense, I won't waste either of our time in the new year."

5. Plan - There are 4 full non-holiday weeks left until end of year. Figure out your daily game plan. What do you need to do every day to hit your goals? 

Focus there.

Here’s an insane hack to rank your brand #1 in ChatGPT that’s worth millions of $$$ in pipeline.

Steal this exact play if you sell to the Forbes ☁️ Cloud 100.

It requires some orchestration between the Growth and SDR team and was a play that Josh Lind and Matteo Tittarelli ⚡️(legends!) help us build:

Background: 

 ✅ The Forbes Cloud 100 are key target accounts for us… and also for our top prospects and customers.

 ✅ One of the value props of our RoomieAI agents is that it can generate full contextual account plans in seconds based on your internal data (i.e. CRM, Call Transcripts, Signals) and external data. 

—--

The idea: 

-Generate account plans for the Forbes Cloud 100 list and turn that output into SEO and GEO (generative engine optimized) pages for LLMs to rank. 

-Reps are using LLMs and searching for things like “[strategic account] + business model” as they conduct account research. 

-This allowed us to highlight the value prop of our product in a unique way and also drove LLM-based search traffic to our website. 

-----

The Execution of the Play: 

1. Generate 100 account plans for each company using our RoomieAI agent

2. Created 100 landing pages for each account plan and used an AirOps workflow to expand and format the account plans into LLM optimized pages that brought in traffic. 

AirOps is particularly good to rank in ChatGPT/Perplexity etc, where most search traffic is going.

3. Use our website de-anonymization functionality to identify key stakeholders on these pages and have our SDR team hit them up with tailored messaging.

4. Repurpose the account plan pages and send them as value adds to accounts that likely have the Cloud 100 as key accounts.

AirOps made a free tool that shows you exactly how often ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity mention your brand vs competitors.

Comment "RANK" and I'll send you the link to run your AI Search Audit.

(Takes 30 seconds and it’s FREE)

Happy Thanksgiving to all of our American friends down south! 

Grateful for you all. 

Enjoy the long weekend :)

The data speaks for itself. 

We found images in emails work 3x better. Here’s why…

We recently ran an A/B test and found that images in cold emails outperform plain emails (when done right).

“An image is worth a thousand words” 

Obviously it depends what the image is about. For us, relevant memes work extremely well at breaking through the noise (it’s not something AI has done well at scale yet).

The problem has been that traditionally this would hurt your email deliverability. 

That’s why we always saved the links and assets for the follow up email after you hit the inbox. 

The rules of the game have changed though. 

Maildoso recently launched Custom Domain Tracking that allows you to safely add links straight from your FIRST email without hurting deliverability. 

This means you can finally:

-Embed direct booking links
-Drop videos right away
-Add images to paint a better picture 

Check it out for yourself: maildoso.com

Here’s a question that I think most of these outbound AI agencies with the “I’ve booked 1000 meetings in the last week with this AI workflow” would be hesitant to answer: 

1. How many of the meetings you booked for your clients showed?
2. How many were qualified? 
3. How many were closed won?

A booked meeting doesn't mean anything in itself. 

Don't always believe the hype.

WHAT SDR LEADERS ARE IN AUSTIN TOMORROW?

We got an absolutely epic workshop lined up at the Cloudflare office in the evening for SDR Leaders on Coaching with Data set up by Anastasia and ATX SDR Leaders. 

Tito Bohrt is going to kick us off (the guy knows his data, just had a good chat with him today).

This is a hands-on session for both 1st and 2nd line leaders. We have 54 leaders attending so far!!!

We'll brainstorm around real scenarios and business challenges we all face in these roles... excited to provide some of my learnings as well. 

Already seeing some epic and familiar faces on the list... Andrew Mewborn, 💡Dave Breshears, Erica Zaretsky, Tina Henderson 👀 

👉 Register here... it's free: https://luma.com/18oogvz9

X is soon releasing “Hiring” and “Jobs”. 

As a matter of fact, it’s already here: 

Is LinkedIn cooked? 

Doubt it. 

It’s one thing to have job posts up. 

LinkedIn is still the best database for real-time information on where people work. 

That data is invaluable and there are network effects that make it difficult to switch. 

Many have tried to replace it. Only time will tell. 

What do you all think?

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The Battle

William M. Ballance

Florin Tatulea

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The Battle

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Florin Tatulea

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