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

Last month, after 20 months of building at Common Room, I took some time away from being a full time operator. 

It’s been an absolutely EPIC journey. 

In a relatively short timeframe that I’ve been there: 

-We 4x’d ARR 
-4x’d the size of the SDR team
-Sourced 7-Figures in outbound revenue
-20x’d monthly outbound pipeline $ and built the outbound engine from scratch
-Re-architected our internal Common Room instance. This involved “GTM Engineering” the brain behind our outbound program using our AI agents
-Recruited and worked with the best operators I’ve ever had the chance to work with in my career. 
-Opened career paths and had our first rounds of SDR to AE promotions (this is a really important one for me)

The program is now in fantastic hands with Sara Hanegby . 
 
There aren’t enough words to say how grateful I am for everybody on this journey. You know who you are!! 

On the side, I’ve also been running my own 6-figure media company. 

I’ve given my career my all over the last decade and needed to slow down to focus on some other aspects of my life. 

It’s why I’ve been quiet on here the last month as I've stepped away from the tech echo chamber.

But… I am baaaack!!! 

I have some really exciting projects in the works and I’m looking forward to doing some advisory work and helping the start-up ecosystem over the next few months. 

If you are a company < $20M ARR and are thinking about scaling your outbound program I’ve figured out quite a few things over the last 12 years in B2B SaaS: 

1. I've built outbound from scratch at 4 companies and 3 have already been acquired.

2. I’ve designed and scaled sales programs, selling into SMB to large enterprise (Fortune 100 companies). 

3. I’ve cracked the code selling into Sales, Marketing, Rev Ops, Engineering & HR Leadership and have built systems that work across industries.

Im also excited to work with orgs on the content and thought leadership side. If you are selling to GTM leadership, I’ve built a curated audience of ~90,000 across LinkedIn, Substack & X. 

I’m only a DM away. 

It’s the most exciting time EVER to be building. 

LETS GOO!

GTM Leader | LinkedIn Top Voice | Advisor

I just took a look at the new Nooks launch.

Users of Outreach and Salesloft are going to want to take a look after what I saw with the their new AI Sequencer.

I believe they are going to seriously shake up the legacy sequencing space. 

Not a lot of people know this, but I was one of the first 10 customers of Nooks when the company was still just Dan, Rohan & Nikhil and a virtual sales floor.

As a multi-time customer, not even I could have predicted the level of execution that their team was going to put forth.

Apart from building a quality product FAST, Nooks did something (intentional or not) that is going to give them a massive competitive advantage over the next couple of years.

They owned the action/execution layer FIRST, and have now built the Data Foundation layer (Account Research, Signals, etc.) around it.

Most GTM tech orgs in the market today are doing the exact opposite.

They built the data foundations and are now trying to build an execution layer.

Why is this important?

Because the action layer is where the rep lives. If you own the action layer and do it well, it’s VERY sticky.

Reps will kick and scream if you take it away from them. Re-training tens or hundreds of reps on a new system of action is a nightmare for enablement.

Trust me, I’ve lived through the kicking and screaming.

Selling GTM tech, everybody was constantly asking us… “Can you integrate with Nooks? That’s where our reps live.”

Right now there is a full-blown race to see who will own the full “Sales OS”.

Today, Nooks made this race a lot more interesting by launching their new Agent Workspace for Intelligent Outbound.

They just added:

1. Signals (Combining live web intent with your CRM and past calls)
2. Autonomous Account Research Agents (Running in the background 24/7)
3. List Building Capabilities
4. An Omnichannel Sequencer (Executing across Email, Phone, SMS, and Social)

Imagine autonomous agents that monitor web intent in the background, cross-reference it with your CRM, draft hyper-personalized emails, and then drop the warmest leads into a power hour calling block.  Because it's actually an action layer, the feedback loop makes it smarter with each engagement. 

You can argue that they have a real chance at being the MAJOR player in the consolidation of the GTM tech stack.

They also have a massive moat of call data (50% of our own outbound meetings came from cold calls)... which a lot of other data platforms simply do not have.

​​GTM Leaders: what are your thoughts on this space? Let's debate below

(PS - go check out the massive Nooks launch ). 

#NooksPartner

SDR teams are toast. 

In fact...

SDR teams are so screwed that OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring SDR teams aggressively. 

The thing is, outbound is not a game of AI and automation. 

AI is a tool. 

Outbound is a game of: 

Precision

Timing

Deep industry expertise

Human relationships

It's why orgs like Ramp recently shut off their autonomous outbound program. 

It's why the people that make these LLMs realize that humans are still necessary. 

At least for now :)

Here's what my calendar would look like 9-5 when I was managing the whole SDR function a few months ago. 

This is why I always tell reps to try to call decisions makers between 8-9am or 5-6pm. 

We ran the data across thousands of calls in Nooks. It supports this as well. 

Managers and execs are in an insane amount of meetings (for better or worse).

Give yourself a better shot. 

#sales #coldcalling

If you prospect on LinkedIn, you should watch this. 

This is something I’ve always struggled with that I’ve now found a solution for.

If you use sequencing platforms like Outreach, Salesloft and Gong Engage you’ll know that after you do the manual steps of sending connect requests, LinkedIn activity just gets lost to the void.

There is no easy way to systematically filter for:

1. New LinkedIn connections who are actually in your ICP vs general networking contacts

2. Prospects who have accepted your request but you never actually bothered to send a DM to

This has made systematic outreach that’s coordinated more difficult.

This is no longer a problem as I’ve started to use Kondo: Superhuman for LinkedIn DMs. 

I can now:

→ Filter for connections and bulk tag them as prospects

→ Search for specific personas very easily with a fuzzy search that actually works

→ Open a custom of these personas posts on LinkedIn to build more tailored outreach

SOOO much easier. 

They have a great promo running right now if you sign up by the end of the week (Feb 28):

2 months free with this code:  https://lnkd.in/gFETw84Z

You are welcome :) 

#KondoPartner

2026 is the year to double down on cold calling.

Last year, 50% of all of our qualified opps came from cold calling. 

Keep it simple.

First, get yourself a proper data provider for cold calls so you actually get connects. 

FullEnrich has been an absolute CHEAT code for us with their 20-provider waterfall. 

They now also have amazing search functionality directly in the platform so you can build proper lists. 

Then, I break this down into 3 parts (here's an example):

1️⃣ Permission Based Opener

Hey this is {NAME}, I was actually just on the customer tab on your website at
{ACCOUNT}, and had a question. Do you have a sec?

2️⃣ Menu of Pain (most important part)

Noticed you are selling to accounts like {ACCOUNT}. Typically when I talk to SDR leaders at commercial open source companies, they’re focused on one of these three things:

1. Your SDRs see tons of developer engagement but struggle to identify which users are actually ready for a sales conversation.

2. Your team relies on community signals, but it’s hard to surface and action on real buying intent.

3. SDRs waste time digging through GitHub, Slack, forums, and LinkedIn instead of working on the right leads.

3️⃣ Open Ended Question

How are you making sure your SDRs are focusing on in-market leads?

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I like the menu of pain, because if done correctly and the messaging is tight, at least one of the 3 challenges is something they are likely thinking about.

This then opens the conversation.

3 days left this week. Let's get it 🫡

#FullEnrichPartner

No alternative text description for this image

How do you feel about this take GTM leaders? 

To me it comes across as a take from somebody who doesn’t fully understand GTM. 

Sure, there are a lot of incredible things AI can do to automate TAM building, lead scoring, account research, funnel optimization etc. 

But GTM is also still one of the professions that is still deeply human. 

I doubt this person has spent a lot of time making cold calls, on demos, meeting clients in person etc. 

If you believe this, you essentially believe that robots will be selling to each other only in the near future. 

No offense to you Jay Sahnan. I respect the opinion and it’s a good discussion 🙏🏻

graphical user interface, text, application

We talk about “GTM Engineering” and “Revenue Orchestration” but how does it apply to outbound? 

Here’s how you tactically execute a strategy at scale using signal data. 

Now we have the ability to capture 100+ signals at a time, transform the data and tell us which leads are the lowest hanging fruit.

That’s a HUGE amount of context for sales reps to have in one place and it means that we can now get HYPER-specific with our messaging and sequences.

Each signal that is important to your organization should have its own purpose, messaging, and sequence built out.

Step 1: Write down all the signals that you currently have access to at your organization. 

There are standard signals everybody can use (I.e. web visits) but also very specific signals to your org (I.e. software outages for an outage tracking product) 

Step 2a: Map out where each signal implies a lead is in the buyer journey

Look at the image below. You can see that a signal and therefore message has to adapt to where somebody is in the BUYER JOURNEY.

Step 2b: Create a lead-scoring system that takes into account which signals (or combination of signals) tend to imply that an individual and account is ready to buy or at least talk to sales. 

This usually happens when they are in the “Solution Aware” and “Product Aware” stage.

Step 2c: Cross reference these leads with your account level- ICP criteria. 

Not all leads that exhibit buying behavior work at accounts that are good fits for your business. (THIS IS CRUCIAL). 

Step 3: Create messaging (i.e. email campaigns, outbound sequences etc.) for each signal.

You can get even more complex here and create messaging or sequences for combinations of signals.

Step 4: Set up alerts and workflows so that if a lead provides a certain signal or hits a certain threshold they get put into the respective “campaign”.

There are many platforms to do this in… Common Room, Clay etc. 

THREE OTHER THINGS TO CONSIDER:

1. Top of funnel leads that aren’t ready to talk to sales go in automated sequences that are more focused on education (this can either be done by marketing or SDRs)

2. Mid-to-Bottom of funnel leads are sent to the sales team and are put into the appropriate sequences (emails + call scripts + LinkedIn message templates are already built out by the team). It is up to the SDRs/AEs here to do additional research and tie your product's value to your prospect’s strategic priorities.

3. Consider the size of the account and the number of owners on the buying committee. Start multithreading into the various decision makers/economic buyers who will influence your deal so you establish momentum early.

(h/t FletchPMM  for the great visual)

#sales #outbound

There is a very simple but important question that most sales reps miss when they are selling to GTM leaders . 

And I say this from experience as somebody that buys software. 

Put simply: 

“Is your team hitting their number…What % of attainment is your team at?” 

The harsh reality is that unless you are a SVP/EVP/C-Level exec with long term incentives, the average GTM leader doesn’t really care to change much if things are working well. It’s a massive uphill battle to sell to a leader that is crushing. 

Even most VP, Sales are just trying to survive next quarter. 

It’s very difficult to sell somebody the “future” if they are at 110% of quota as a team and in accelerators. 

Saves you a lot of time as a rep. 

Just what I’ve seen over the last decade. 

Thoughts?

taplio

The Battle

William M. Ballance

Florin Tatulea

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taplio

The Battle

William M. Ballance

Florin Tatulea

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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);}Florin Tatulea's LinkedIn Performance

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