William Ballance

👋 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


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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

Strategic Advisor

William M. Ballance

Florin Tatulea

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.

Director of Sales

SDRs - Your cold call opener doesn’t really freaking matter. 

Sorry to break it to you. 

I've seen SDRs absolutely kill it using "Hey, how are you?".

I've also seen others kill it using a permission-based opener like: 

"Hey Tom, I know, I'm calling out of the blue. Mind if I take 30 seconds to explain why I'm calling? If it's not interesting from there, feel free to hang up".

Most of the ACTUAL battle is your tone, energy and confidence.

These are all things you can work on with enough practice.

You need to:

1. Deeply understand your persona - read books/blogs, look up what memes/jokes they like, how they talk, what they are measured on, where they hang out, how they think. Obsess over it.

2. Repetition - nobody likes to hear it but you just have to make thousands and thousands of calls. Period.

Get yourself a fantastic data platform like FullEnrich so you actually get shots at bat with real people.

(Their 30-provider enrichment waterfall is NUTS for mobile numbers… we use it).

3. A "just get it done" mentality.

4. Stop trying to be other people - The exact phrases that work for another person WONT work for you! 

Use words you are comfortable using, sense of humour (or lack thereof), natural tone etc. 

It sounds rehearsed and awkward (and probably makes you nervous) to try to force someone else into your calls. 

So…..

Stop analyzing everything all the time. Just make the damn calls and learn from your mistakes.

It's really not rocket science.

#FullEnrichPartner

GTM Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice | Advisor

PSA to all sales reps. 

Nobody is reading your ESSAY of a follow up email after a sales call. 

Why are we still doing this? 

Stop with the links, case studies and generic templates.

Here’s a template that’s short and sweet that I stole from Salman Mohiuddin  Mohiuddin a few years ago: 

——-

Hi , 
Appreciate your time today. 
A few highlights from our call yesterday:

* X
* Y
* X 
Confident {Your Company} can help solve all of these things and excited to continue the conversation. From here:

* XX
* YY
* ZZ

Anything I missed?

——-

That’s it. 

Oh, and maybe don’t just send the same email to everybody on the call. 

Tailor each one to the different people on a call. 

It’s really that simple. 

#sales

An important lesson here that dooms most GTM teams from the start.

Why is it so hard to grasp?

How you target and build your account lists is MORE than half the battle. 

First - let's start at the account layer.

Saying that your ICP is venture-backed "B2B SaaS" companies isn't helpful. 

There are so many differences in how a B2B SaaS company goes to market. 

Let's use their GTM motion as just ONE example:

An org can have a GTM motion based on Product-Led Growth, Sales-Led, Open Source-Led etc... all of these companies go to market COMPLETELY differently. 

The same message likely won't land for these different motions. 

Second - the persona layer. 

Based on the motion a company has, the problems a "Demand Generation Marketer" has are also completely different. 

Even with the best copy in the world, your message has now failed at the account level AND at the person level. 

Your reps were doomed before you even started.

A lesson I've learned the hard way in the past.

h/t to Yurii Veremchuk for the inspo

#sales #outbound

There's a fundamental flaw with how outbound teams approach messaging that I see over and over again.

We've gotten to a place where "signals/triggers" have become a commodity.

The signal should NOT be your message. 

The signal is actually just telling you that it COULD be the right time. 

Let's say I'm a rep at an observability platform that monitors outages for software teams... I happen to get a pricing page web visit from an ICP persona. 

Unfortunately most reps will default to Example 1 which is a massive problem for a few reasons: 

1. There is no additional value that a salesperson brings to this interaction that can't be automated by a simple marketing email.

2. Being on your pricing page MIGHT indicate interest, but you can't assume it. 

As a salesperson, your job is to take a signal and paint a contextual picture as to why this is the perfect time to evaluate/purchase your solution. 

CONTEXT is what is missing in a lot of outbound messaging and sales cycles. 

Tell an exec something they don't know or help them connect the dots on something they might be thinking about. 

Not enough teams are doing it. 

#outbound #sales

Here are the 10 platforms in our tech stack we ACTUALLY found valuable for our team in 2025: 

1. Common Room - the brain behind our GTM engine. The Jarvis to our Ironman. 

Having one platform where so much valuable GTM data and workflows are unified has helped us and our customers deeply. A lot of people still don’t fully understand how much the platform actually does. Most people at first glance think it’s a contact-level signal & intent platform. Much deeper actually.

Internally in 2025 we used Common Room’s AI agents to “GTM Engineer” and do the following:

TAM/SAM Analysis, List Building, Account Research (i.e. Crawling websites for custom signals, 10K reports etc.), Contact Enrichment (Phone, Email, LinkedIn), Duplicate Detection in CRM, Signal/Intent detection (i.e. CRM data, Gong Transcripts, Web Visits, Negative + Positive Reviews, Product Usage Data, Social + Community Engagement, Job Changes, Tech Stack, Job Listings), Dynamic Lead Scoring, Competitor Analysis...

This info was then summarized by our AI agents, pushed to reps in real time and provided suggested messaging/actions to take. 

2. FullEnrich - contact database and waterfall enrichment across 20 providers. For us, it was especially fantastic for phone numbers across all regions and hard to find contact data for prospects outside of North America. It was so good we built a deep integration directly into Common Room for customers as well.

3. Wiza - As a stand alone contact database and provider, they have some of the best contact info out there right now. 4x connect rates compared to Apollo. Solid workflows from Sales Nav.

4. Nooks - AI-Dialer and Virtual Sales Floor. Doing power hours together, being able to listen in and coach on live calls, all while making it way easier to have more conversations on the phone. We 10x’d the number of conversations we had with prospects per month.

5. Outreach - our Sequencer. Lots of people hate on Outreach, but the backend, workflows and deep integrations into other GTM platforms (especially Salesforce) are still relatively unmatched.

6. Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs - LinkedIn inbox management. Made us SO much more efficient at LinkedIn outreach. Can't believe there wasn't something like this sooner. 

7. Gong - Call recording, analysis, deal management & forecasting. Best platform in the market for this IMO.

8. Chili Piper - scheduling and lead routing. Super easy to use and helps us run all inbound.

9. Perplexity - our day-to-day LLM. Deep research, ideation, data analysis, completing tasks that are mundane with ease.

10. LinkedIn Sales Navigator - Still the most up to date database of professionals on the planet. Very helpful for building the best lists. 


Hope this was helpful! Stay tuned for my list of tools I'm bullish for going into 2026 👀 

#sales #gtm #outbound

LinkedIn DMs are a MESS.

What that means is, if you’ve been prospecting consistently over the past 6-12 months...

You probably have at least SIX FIGURES in STALE PIPELINE to re-engage.

The problem is that LinkedIn’s DM search and UI make it nearly impossible to navigate and find buried gold. 

Luckily, I stumbled upon the solution a few months ago and I have a prediction: 

Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs will be one of the most widely adopted productivity tools in 2026 with massive growth. 

It makes executing on LinkedIn so much easier for reps. 

One of my reps booked 3 meetings right away after installing Kondo.

I almost can’t believe that it took this long to come out with a solution. 

With it you can: 

1. Actually search keywords properly and find profiles 

2. Organize, Label & Tag conversations: I use “Prospect”, “Vendor”, “Customer”, “Side Hustle” tags

3. Set automatic reminders to follow up..

4. See exactly who has accepted my connection request. 

5. Sync convos back to CRM.. much better visibility for coaching reps on how to use LinkedIn

All in a clean UI. 

I’m never going back.

If you want to keep wasting time and navigating an Inbox that hasn't been updated in 20 years, you should ignore this. 

Otherwise, jump on this January promo ending in 2 days...

2 months at no cost 👉 https://lnkd.in/dsYeYi8v

#kondopartner #sales

Turns out... I still got it.

Cold Email Showdown on 30 Minutes to President's Club.

Had a TON of fun going up against one of the best cold email reps in the game, Evan Greek.

3 Rounds... very different context for each email. 10 minutes to write on the spot and judged by the man himself, Jason Bay. 

Here's the email that gave me the edge early:

(Situation: Selling vegan burger meat to McDonalds)

------

𝐒𝐮𝐛𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭: 𝐑𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐝'𝐬 𝐛𝐞𝐞𝐟 𝐢𝐬𝐧'𝐭 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐮𝐬

Saw The New York Times report on Ronald threatening to quit after the market share loss, Jason.

Was looking at both of your menus and noticed a potential opportunity for you all. Have you considered a vegan burger option? 22% of the world is vegetarian, and there is a big opportunity to increase market share that you aren't paying attention to.

Can I send over a couple of patty samples? I promise not to disappoint.

Let's win you back the crown.

------

30 minutes of us walking through our thinking process. 

Give this a watch if you have some time :) 

Full video in the comments

#sales #outbound

Is Juliano Massarelli dominating anybody else’s social media feeds or is it just me? 

🤣🤣🤣

Most sales tools aren’t actually designed for the nuances and workflows of how sales reps operate. 

I know because I’ve tested hundreds of platforms over the last decade.

It’s usually the small decisions… sometimes even just simple UI/UX designs that determine whether a tool fits in your workflow or fights against it.

One platform with truly thoughtful design is Prospeo.io. 

They just shipped a V2 of the platform and I’ve genuinely enjoyed using it.

3 things stick out for me:

-Triple verified emails and mobiles 
-Weekly data base refreshes (most providers are every month or quarterly)
-Lowest price per mobile number ($0.010 VS. $1 for others)

They actually have the best match rate for verified emails in Clay’s waterfall. 

Sharing a quick video with what changed + why these product designs matter a real SDR workflows.

What’s been your favorite sales tool recently? 

#prospeopartner #sales #outbound

taplio

The Battle

William M. Ballance

Florin Tatulea

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The Battle

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Florin Tatulea

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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);}Florin Tatulea's LinkedIn Performance

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