Saurav Gupta

Co Founder and CEO

SalesRobot

Salesrobot is the easiest way to automate your cold outreach across LinkedIn and cold email and get quality leads using AI-personalized outreach

Founder

Avid Secure Inc (acq by Sophos)

- Built the first version on ML technology for securing cloud environment with log analysis
- Part of team of early engineers acquired by top British cybersecurity firm (Sophos)
- Created highly innovative cloud data visualization features post acquisition

Data Scientist

AliceAI

- Built AI software for CCTV video analysis in real-time
- Sold to top real estate companies in India
- Onboarded stellar team of advisors from the real estate industry
- Accepted by top Indian startup accelerators such as Nasscom 10k and Axilor Ventures

Genome Institute of Singapore

Developed machine learning techniques to discover gene regulatory networks from single-cell RNAseq data.

Research Officer

Hiperware Pte Ltd

Developed machine learning techniques to create a personalized learning experience for the users of a K-12 education app.

Software Engineer

Sysmex Corporation

Developed a software application to classify medical images using machine learning techniques.

Research Intern

Still getting new clients using your network? Talk to me and I'll help you get clients with cold outreach.

We help you generate more leads from Linkedin, period.

We have the latest growth hacks for Linkedin and we have helped our clients get amazing results on Linkedin.

We can share case studies with you on how we got:
- 60% connection acceptance rates on average (across industries and personas)
- 30% reply rates
- 100s of leads per week

Let's face it. This pandemic hasn't been kind on any of us. Lead generation has become much harder.

So if you're an agency doing outsourced lead generation on behalf of your clients from Linkedin (or a business owner/salesperson looking to generate leads consistently from Linkedin), do get in touch with me. We can be your secret sauce.

Book a call at calendly.com/sam_gupta/15min

Roman Hipp

BetterContact

Co-Founder & Growth

Amazon

Business Development

charles

Business Analyst & Expansion

Moss | All-in-one spend management

Customer Success

BlackRock

Spring Week

Building BetterContact | Helping early-stage B2B SaaS companies with insights & ready-to-use templates

Currently building BetterContact, a B2B SaaS that aggregates various data sources to find and verify any email and mobile phone number.

Growth Co-Founder

The last 3 months have been our strongest so far for BetterContact (+113.9% growth), and this time, we finally have a better understanding why:

1. The amount of times we get mentioned by happy customers has skyrocketed (⅔ new customers come through a referral)

2. We’re now far more deeply integrated into the Martech ecosystem (almost every major player in that space integrated our data in one way or another)

PS: there are some new big partnerships on the horizon

3. A lot happened on the data verification frontier, and people seem to especially love the improved accuracy on the phone side (as: more connects -> more conversations -> more revenue opps)

4. Significantly improved product performance due to a more robust infrastructure & error handling capabilities (100% uptimes in the last 60 days)

Our biggest challenge remains pushing churn below the 10% mark (it’s edging that for a while now).

While it won’t be an easy one, we put a lot of work into our Q4 roadmap, so we’re confident to get there EOY!

Building BetterContact | Helping B2B companies win outbound through more and better contact data

In October, BetterContact reached sub-10% customer churn for the first time, after battling with >25% churn waves. While still not optimal, it’s one of my proudest moments since we launched 26 months ago.

The difficulty of this astronomically high churn was that we’d win a new customer, only to watch an existing one leave.

So we *needed* to make it our #1 priority - here’s what we did:

1. PARTNERSHIPS & INTEGRATIONS

Over the last months, we partnered with tons of great companies:

- Outreach tools (Instantly, Smartlead, Saleshandy, Lemlist, Reply, et al.)
- CRMs (Hubspot, Breakcold)
- No-code tools (Clay, Zapier, Make)
…and many more

As many already use these tools, a seamless integration with them allows for using our product more easily. 

And as we’re going where the user already is, it decreases friction & churn.

(there are many more exciting partnerships in the pipeline!)

2. STRONGER PRODUCT

We didn’t only add 10+ new data providers, but also invested a lot in:

- Mobile phone verification, including geo-/name matching & activity scoring
- BetterAI, our algorithm to find the best provider sequence based on lead characteristics
- Stronger infrastructure & error handling capabilities, leading to better uptimes & enrichment times 
- Country-specific improvements to deliver better data to specific markets

We’ve seen a lot of users that rigidly compared our data with other solutions, and became customers after.

3. CO-MARKETING & EVENTS

Partnering & doing cool stuff together with brands our users already love drives a lot of brand advocacy - also, I’ve met a lot of great people in the space through that.

I can’t wait for our first ‘real-world’ get together at the Clay x BetterContact GTM Christmas Party in Berlin on 4th December! 

Our next big goal is approaching 5% churn - tough challenge in this market, but there’s a few things around the corner that make us confident to get there soon!

I was convinced we’d already tested every good contact data provider - but last week, one of our top customers challenged us to test one  we didn't know yet for the BetterContact waterfall

After testing their data thoroughly, the provider was able to add 0,4% valid numbers to our mobile phone finder waterfall.

Considering we already have 20+ providers in the mix, it was quite a pleasant surprise!

(good reminder to listen to your customers!)

So apparently, hidden gems still exist… and now we want more, to help us squeeze out every last % of valid data.

That's why we're putting out a bounty of $1k for everyone that points us to a data provider that adds to our current valid output by at least 0.5%, and which we will ultimately make part of our waterfall - please reach out! 👇

Last month, I spoke to an European agency owner who just hired 3 cold callers but is having trouble scaling cold calling with traditional data vendors (or ‘their existing setup with Zoominfo/Apollo’). Here’s what their problem is:

1. They use a mix of Apollo and ZoomInfo. Their connect rates are <7%. As they pay their cold callers a decent hourly base wage, the time it takes them to dial the 90% non-connecting numbers leads to significant fixed costs + low productivity.

2. Their cost on data is exploding. They average $0,3/enriched number - which is not bad. However, their cost/connect is at +$3 (due to unusable numbers). This discrepancy & the resulting ‘hidden costs’ are driving them nuts.

3. As Apollo/ZI are US providers, they often get +1 (US) numbers for their European leads, which they can’t call due to high fees (and it's not the right person anyways). This adds another layer of costs for unusable data.

Here’s how we helped them solve it:

1. We do proper activity scoring, which analyzes if the number has been recently active and picked up calls. If not, we don’t push it back and treat it as invalid.

2. As they’re an outbound agency, we put them on an agency plan, so 30% discounted ($0,28/verified number). This allows for good margins, as providers such as Lusha ($0,9/number) or Kaspr ($0,5) are not feasible at scale.

3. We conduct line type & geography checks, making sure that the number’s country code actually matches where the lead is localized.

They have just been with us for a months already & here are some stats they shared:

1. Connect rates average 19%. Their callers are now able to do more than double the conversations they were able to do before. This does not only lead to more booked demos, but just happier callers in general.

2. As they are on agency pricing, they average $0,28/enriched number. Considering their connect rates, their cost/connect decreased by ~60%.

3. Their non-EU dials (+1 etc.) for their European-only leads were driven to near 0 (we’re working on eliminating that completely).

What is your cold calling stack?

🎄Only 8 more days to go until the Clay x BetterContact GTM Christmas Party in Berlin, can't wait to see you there! (link to sign up below)

Even after 1000’s of Google meets & scaling BetterContact to a 7-figure ARR business, I never *really* talked to someone in ‘real life’ about what we do & the sales tech space in general 

Last week, however, I met one of our earliest customer quite randomly, which was one of the coolest experiences of that journey so far.

10x more personal than talking to someone on a Google Meet, and just… better.

That’s why I’m even more excited that in December, there will be an opportunity for many more of these ‘real life’ conversations.

Because on the 4th, we’re co-hosting a Christmas Party in Berlin together with Clay.

Very excited for this one as it’s the first SaaS event that I’m attending (and at the same time, the first one that we’re co-organizing).
 
Hoping to see as many familiar & new faces as possible (I'll put the link to the event in the description)!

🎄Only 14 more days to go until the Clay x BetterContact GTM Christmas Party in Berlin, can't wait to see you there!

Giridharan S and Roman Hipp were attendees

View event: Clay x BetterContact GTM Christmas Party (Berlin)

Clay x BetterContact GTM Christmas Party (Berlin)

The reason why most outbound campaigns fail is that they are built in the Red Ocean: targeting the exact same leads everyone else does. The Blue Ocean is where teams win these days.

Here’s why: legacy providers like Apollo, Zoominfo & Lusha only cover 30–60% of your TAM.

(i.e. you'll only get 30-60% valid emails & mobile numbers)

Means what?

Literally everyone else, including your competitors, gets the access to the same 30-60% of your TAM. So you end up competing with EVERYONE for the attention of the exact same leads.

Meanwhile, there's the Blue Ocean.

In outbound, 'Blue Ocean' doesn't have to mean a new, bigger market.

It can simply mean covering 20-30% more of your existing TAM, and going after the 'untouched' leads almost no competitors can find.

It’s the same market you already target, just the part no one else can reach.

At BetterContact, by working with 20+ data providers, we've built the tech to find, score, and verify contact data others miss (25–30% 'untouched leads').

This gives you bigger TAM coverage, higher connect rates and better results... Without ever diluting your ICP (the greatest sin of outbound).

Outbound isn’t broken. You're just fishing where everyone else is fishing too.

You can…

🩸 Keep fighting for 'leftovers' in the Red Ocean
💧 Or swim in the Blue Ocean, where others can’t

The 'outbound death zone' is probably the reason why most companies doing cold outreach shine at first, but fail miserably after & say 'outbound is dead' 

To better explain what I mean, here’s a real breakdown of the figures for a unicorn company that came dangerously close to getting stuck there:

𝐏𝐑𝐎𝐁𝐋𝐄𝐌

They used a mix of Apollo & ZoomInfo to break into the European market. High ACV, small TAM.

Their list building/lead sourcing process is rock solid and is based on 1st party intent data.

However, using Apollo and ZoomInfo, they found less than half of valid mobile numbers of these prospects for their sales teams.

This pretty quickly placed them in the middle of the ‘outbound death zone’ process: ICP dilution

As they did not have enough dials for their sales team anymore, and in order to hit quota, they were forced to also prospect leads which were not exactly matching what they initially agreed on as ICP.

Here are their numbers for a recent micro cold calling campaign they did:

Total dials: 1400
Conversations: 217
-> connect rate: 15.5%

Meetings scheduled: 17
Closed Won/Lost: (no data yet)

The problem is that the initial list that they built had around 3.000 leads.

So they were not even able to reach half of their list.  

𝐒𝐎𝐋𝐔𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍

So here’s how we helped them to solve it:

The big goal was TAM maximization.

We ran the 1.600 non-reachable through BetterContact, and found additional 750 verified mobile numbers, so 25% extra to their previous enrichments with Apollo and ZI (totals to 72% found) .

Extra dials: 750
Conversations: 174
-> connect rate: 23.2% 

Meetings scheduled: 15 
Closed Won/Lost: (no data yet)

𝐑𝐄𝐒𝐔𝐋𝐓𝐒

Just by using BC, they had an additional 174 actual conversations with their ICP, and 15 additional meetings booked.

Looking at their high-five figure ACV, we’re looking at an additional ~$750k in high-quality pipeline.

Considering previous campaigns they ran, and their meeting-to-closed won ratio, they will most likely hit their target for this micro campaign. All because they squeezed out that 25% extra reachable ICP coverage.

taplio

The Battle

Saurav Gupta

Roman Hipp

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance ScoreRoman Hipp's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

taplio

The Battle

Saurav Gupta

Roman Hipp

Followers

Posts

Engagements

Likes

Performance Score.css-goub6s{font-size:var(--chakra-fontSizes-md);font-weight:500;color:var(--chakra-colors-gray-600);display:block;margin-top:var(--chakra-space-1);}Roman Hipp's LinkedIn Performance

Ready to grow your LinkedIn presence?

Performance ScoreRoman Hipp's LinkedIn Performance