Marketing: "Why isn't sales calling my leads? We sent the MQLs over two days ago!"
Sales: "I don't have time to work these leads, they aren't ready to buy compared to *these* leads."
If you work in marketing or demand generation, does the above sound familiar?
I'm Gabriel, co-founder and CEO of Saleswhale (YC S16) 👋
I started Saleswhale to solve the above problem.
We saw marketers frustrated by their hard-earned marketing leads slipping through the cracks. Growth marketing frustrated that Sales are not following up with product-qualified leads (PQLs). Demand gen folks forced to grovel and ask their sales / SDR teams for "favors" to follow-up with leads generated from their campaigns.
⚡️ There has to be a better way, we thought.
💡 That's why, we decided to build the first Automated Lead Conversion system, that integrates with Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoom and more.
📈 Fast forward to today:
- over 500+ crazy visionary marketing teams from companies like Sage, Anaplan, Forter, Citrix, Software AG, SAS use Saleswhale to automate the conversion of their neglected leads into sales pipeline.
- 32+ reviews on G2Crowd and 4.8 average rating
- millions of two-way email conversations processed a month
📬 We shipped a major feature called Email AI Conversation Flow that exposes a powerful visual conversation builder to build intent-based email campaigns. To put it simply, it allows you to trigger email campaigns that understands & handles simple responses from leads - Not a Good Time Now, Not the Right Person, Send Me More Information First, Out of Office, Interested in Sales Meeting and more.
👩💻 We are on a mission to automate away brain-draining tasks for sales & marketing teams. We want to empower a new generation of marketing teams to play a more proactive role in pipeline and revenue contribution.
🐳 It begins by putting powerful lead conversion workflows and automation in every B2B marketers' hands, so they can control exactly how they want their leads to be followed-up with. No favors from their sales team required.
p/s: Read more about our vision here: https://blog.saleswhale.com/why-...
Wow, this is awesome! Such a compelling value prop. Heard that conversations multiple times working with the marketing and sales teams at @FiscalNote. Congrats on the launch, @sg_gabriel
@fiscalnote@earlvlee Thank you Earl! You and the HeadsUp team have been AWESOME to work with, and I can't wait for your 1.0 launch! To all PLG marketers out there - you should definitely check out what Earl and team are doing at http://headsup.ai/
Hello @justin_jarman! We are always exploring new ways to integrate with multiple CRM's. As of right now for Close.com, you would need to integrate either through Zapier or our open APIs
@sliu Awesome, looking forward to integrating via Zapier. Big problem you're solving here. The amount of time saved for SDR teams is huge. Best of luck
@glen_creaser Thank you! Apollo is mainly an email sequencing tool similar to Outreach and SalesLoft. Their unique differentiator is that they provide Email Addresses in the form of email credits, similar to ZoomInfo. So it's a really robust all-in-one platform for SDR/sales teams.
Saleswhale is built for demand generation and marketing ops teams. We sit in the background, and run autonomously with little to no human intervention (by integrating with systems of record). The unique differentiator is the ability to read, understand, and *reply* to simple responses (>85% of responses) autonomously, and only loop in a sales rep when a lead "hand-raises".
For example,
- If a lead replies and says, "Now is not a good time, maybe check back again next quarter" -- it triggers our "Not a Good Time" scenario, and we are able to reply politely, tokenize "next quarter" -> 17th June 2021, and automatically re-engage the lead again when the date arrives. Not many sales reps / SDRs have this level of follow-up discipline (or tenure!)
- If a lead replies and says, "Thanks for reaching out, but I'm not the right person for this." -- it triggers our "Not a Right Person" scenario, and Saleswhale can reply something like "Thanks for letting me know. If it's not too much trouble, could you point me to the right person I should be talking to about this?" -- 12% of the time we actually get a referral, and we loop the sales rep in
There are dozens of such simple scenarios, and they do add up significantly time-wise. Our vision is to automate as much of such busy work as possible, while making sure that no marketing lead slips through the cracks.
@justin_hegyi Thank you! You guys are on to a huge macro shift at HeadsUp too. Looking forward to see how our companies will shape the future of GTM automation!
As part of product team, we are SO excited to give every demand gen and growth team a Saleswhale Lead Conversion AI
If you are someone (like me) who…
🤬Hates seeing all of the freemium, free trials and marketing leads just sitting on Salesforce/Hubspot
😭Wants someone to proactively reach out to qualified leads to move them to a demo
🥵Is chasing down sales team to follow up with all the prospective customers who are using your free product actively but haven’t paid
😴Needs sales team to focus on the best deals and have their sleep at the same times
We’ve got you. With Saleswhale AI, it’s almost like your hire a superhuman for your team. They will email back and forth to your leads from Salesforce and Hubspot, handle replies gracefully and cc sales reps in when the lead is interested for a call or meeting.
As always, please give it a try and let me know what else we can do to make it better.
@killian_wale Thanks for the question! The short answer is that we are complementary to marketing automation tools like Marketo and HubSpot.
Many customers use us in tandem: Marketo/HubSpot for lead nurturing, Saleswhale for lead conversion.
Think of Saleswhale as an automated inbound SDR (sales development rep), that watches out for "triggers" from your integrated marketing stack - lead trips an MQL score but is not touched by sales in 48 hours, lead gets stuck below a certain MQL threshold for >3 months, aged leads with no sales activity etc. - which triggers Saleswhale to intelligently reach out to try to surface hand-raisers.
We can also read, understand and handle simple email responses from prospects to take the automation further - most email tools in the market today can't.
@irina_seng Thanks! Currently, the main AI assistant capabilities is to parse and understand simple responses, like "Interested in a meeting", "Not Interested", "Send More Information First", "Not the Right Time", "Not the Right Person" etc.
But we have more stuff cooking in our kitchen, and we can't wait to reveal it when we are done building!
Saleswhale - Automate Outbound Process