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

Lavendo

We help startups build and scale high-performing GTM and sales teams by connecting them with the top 5% of sales talent in the U.S. Through our AI-driven recruitment processes, we deliver exceptional hiring solutions that cut recruitment costs and accelerate time-to-hire by up to 80%.

Why us?
✔ Direct access to the top 5% of sales professionals in the U.S.
✔ Expertise in building and scaling GTM and sales teams for startups
✔ AI-driven hiring processes that save time and significantly cut costs
✔ 90-day replacement guarantee for your peace of mind
✔ 100+ successful placements in critical sales roles
✔ Specialized in Enterprise SaaS, AI/ML, Cloud Computing & Infrastructure, Data Governance & Engineering, Cybersecurity, Marketing Technology, Financial Technology (Fintech), IT Staffing & HR Technology, IT Consulting & Digital Transformation

We specialize in recruitment for the following roles:
· Sales Development Representative (SDR)
· Business Development Representative (BDR)
· SMB Account Executive
· Mid-Market Account Executive 
· Enterprise Account Executive 
· Strategic Account Executive 
· Channel Account Executive 
· Account Manager
· Technical Account Manager
· Sales Engineer
· Solutions Engineer 
· Solutions Architect 
· BDR Manager
· Sales Manager
· Customer Success Manager
· Sales Director
· Partnerships Director
· Channel Sales Director
· Head of Sales
· Head of Business Development
· VP of Sales
· VP of Business Development
· Chief Revenue Officer (CRO)

Let’s connect to discuss how we can help your startup build a world-class sales team!

Founder

RevGenius

Member

Bravado

War Room Member

Groupon

Biglion (formerly Groupon RU) is the #1 e-commerce coupon website in Europe and CIS (10M+ MAU). Recognized as a Startup of 2012 by Forbes.

My contributions:
- Recruited, trained, and managed an Outbound Sales team, with 2 BDRs being promoted to Manager positions within 2 years;
- Led the launch of over 30,000 ad campaigns and special offers, generating over $6M per year;
- Showed consistent monthly and quarterly quota attainment averaging 110%;
- Delivered 22-25% year-over-year revenue growth from new business and renewals 

Tools stack: Biglion CRM, Google Analytics, Similarweb, Tableau

Sales Director

Weatlas.com — tours & activities

#1 sales hire at Weatlas, a Seed stage travel start-up and online service for booking excursions with Russian-speaking tour guides worldwide. IIDF startup accelerator batch 2014.

Major achievements:
- Closed over 1,000 deals, resulting in a 5x increase in revenue in the first year
- Showed consistent quota attainment averaging 143%
- Proactively prospected and cold-called both B2C and B2B accounts, making over 50 calls daily
- Wore multiple hats such as SDR, BDR, Key Partnerships and Account Manager

Sales Manager (#1 Sales Hire)

Hyatt Hotels Corporation

Ararat Park Hyatt is a 5-star luxury business hotel under the Hyatt Hotels Corporation. The hotel has 206 rooms, with a rack rate starting at $1,000 for a standard room.

Major accomplishments:
- Boosted the hotel's rating from 6.3 to 9.1 points by developing and implementing a new guest check-out procedure. This led to a x3.5 increase in the number of reviews within a three-month period, resulting in the hotel becoming one of the top 7 Hyatt hotels worldwide, and also increased the company's stock value.
- Developed and oversaw the implementation of IT projects to optimize Opera CRM and streamline internal processes. This saved 70% of the hotel's employees 2-3 hours daily.
- Got promoted twice within the first year.

Tools stack: Opera CRM, RESERVE, Scala, Gold Passport, Medallia

Back Office Coordinator & Loyalty program specialist

Founder @ Lavendo | GTM and Sales Recruiting for Startups

👀 Looking for a job? Visit https://www.lavendo.io/jobs to apply.

Passionate about building GTM teams that drive innovation in the tech world. My journey in sales and recruitment has taught me that behind every successful product launch or market expansion, there's a team of exceptional individuals. That's why I've dedicated my career to finding and nurturing the best GTM talent out there.

Whether I'm working with a scrappy seed-stage startup or a well-funded unicorn, I bring the same level of enthusiasm and dedication to every search. I've helped scale GTM functions for dozens of tech startups across multiple geographies, and each success story fuels my passion for this work.

When I'm not connecting top-tier talent with exciting opportunities, you might find me geeking out over the latest AI tech and automation tools. 

If you're a startup looking to build your dream GTM team or a sales professional ready for your next big challenge, I'd love to connect.

Julia Chimisova 🇺🇦

I remember when Juicebox was still called PeopleGPT – when the website was just a "get early access" form asking for your email.

I left my email. I waited.

So months later, when I visited their SF office, I came in as a fan who'd been watching since the beginning.

For those who don't know – Juicebox is the AI recruiting platform that gave a 6-person team like Lavendo the sourcing capability of a company 10x our size.

Access to 800M+ profiles. Natural language search. Outreach that actually lands.

But what I was most impressed by wasn't the product. It was the philosophy: build for recruiters, not to replace them. Make the great ones unstoppable. That's exactly the kind of tool we want in our stack.

What sets them apart? They actually listen to users, ship updates regularly, build features recruiters love – and they've gone from a "get early access" waitlist to one of the fastest-growing sourcing tools in recruiting.

If you're in recruiting and haven't tried Juicebox yet – you're making your job harder than it needs to be :) 

David Paffenholz 🧃 👋

#TalentAcquisition #AIRecruiting #HRTech

GTM Recruitment Expert | Building high-performing AI/ML, HPC, Cloud Computing, Cyber Security sales teams

Everyone says AI is replacing recruiters.

Here's what's actually happening (from someone who runs a 6-person team placing people at AI companies):

AI didn't replace my team. It gave a 6-person boutique the firepower of a 30-person firm.

We now maintain warm communication with thousands of candidates monthly - something that was physically impossible 3 years ago.

But here's what AI still can't do:

→ Recognize that a candidate's "gap year" was them building a failed startup (that's the hire)
→ Hear the hesitation in someone's voice when they say "the comp works for me"
→ Tell a founder that the role they posted is not the role they actually need
→ Build the trust that makes a candidate tell you what they'd never put on a resume

The recruiters losing to AI were never really doing recruiting.
They were doing resume forwarding.

The ones thriving are the ones who learned to use AI for the machine work (sourcing, sequencing, screening volume) and freed up time for the human work: listening, advising, reading between the lines.

In 2026, the best recruiter isn't the one who knows the most candidates.

It's the one who understands people well enough to know which conversation changes everything.

Are you using AI to do more of the same, or to do something you couldn't do before?

#TalentAcquisition #AIRecruiting #FutureOfWork

A teacher almost ended my career in tech before it started.

I was 12. Top of my math class. I'd been admitted to a special advanced program — algebra, geometry, logic — way beyond grade level.

One day my teacher told my parents:

Julia is good. But she's not a genius.

That was it. One sentence.

And I quit math immediately.

Switched to languages and literature. Told myself I wasn't built for technical fields. Spent years in hospitality, then sales, then built a recruiting career from scratch — all while avoiding anything that felt too "technical."

It took me until my 30s, building AI-powered recruiting workflows and obsessing over automation, to realize:

I never wasn't a technical person.

I just believed someone else's assessment of my ceiling more than my own experience of enjoying the climb.

The lesson I carry now, and the one I try to pass to my team:

Collect feedback. Filter ruthlessly. Only keep what makes you better — not what makes you smaller.

Not every experienced person telling you "you're not a genius" knows what your genius looks like.

Sometimes the person who almost stopped you is just someone who never saw what you were becoming.

#WomenInTech #CareerLessons #MindsetMatters

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Julia Chimisova 🇺🇦

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The Battle

William M. Ballance

Julia Chimisova 🇺🇦

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);}Julia Chimisova 🇺🇦's LinkedIn Performance

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