William Ballance

Lavender

Lavender helps you write sales emails that convert, faster. (🏆 #1 on Product Hunt • 🔶 9.9/10 on G2)

Lavender has everything a seller needs to get more replies in less time: email assistance, sentence suggestions, prospect research + email verification, mobile optimization, data-driven team coaching and recommendations, and much more. 

Integrates with Gmail, Outlook 365, Outreach, and Salesloft.
Get started at www.lavender.ai

CEO & Co-Founder

Sorter

🏅Winner - Techstars Startup Weekend (Atlanta 2018)

A marketing platform that combines neuroscience, psychology, and data science to build better communication at scale for brands like Yamaha, Gravity Blankets, and KettleSpace.

Sorter’s internal AI, CATIE( Creative Algorithms for Text and Image Enhancement) blends behavioral sciences with cutting edge data science and natural language processing enabling you to easily apply an objective science to the art of communication. 

We help create better content faster.

Fueling the backend of our platforms for healthcare, marketing, sales, and HR, CATIE analyzes and determines what distinguishes top-performing campaigns from baseline and under-performing content within your audiences.

Sorter (sorter.com): 1:Many Communications
Lavender (trylavender.com): 1:1 Communications

Co-Founder & CEO

Dooly

Strategic Advisor

Alum

Born out of a campaign to help save Sweet Briar College, a historic women's college in Virginia, Alum was a mobile app for alumni social networking and mobile fundraising active at over 200 colleges and high schools.

Founder

My Fun Filter

My Fun Filter was the #1 supplier of custom Snapchat filters on Groupon and LivingSocial in the US and Canada. Acquired.

Springbot

Springbot is a Magento Gold and Shopify partner that delivers a marketing automation and predictive analytics software to eCommerce stores ranging from early stage startups to $100mm global companies.

Springbot's awards include TAG Top 10 Most Innovative Technology Company, TiE Silicon Valley - TiE50 Top Startups 2016, and Atlanta Business Chronicle's Best Places to Work.

SDR & AE - US/UK/Australia

Candle Spas

• Co-founded the first digital e-commerce platform for subscription spa services in Atlanta, New York, and San Francisco. 
• Built our spa network to over 200 locations across three cities in 2 months. 
• Developed relationships with local and national influencers to drive sales and customer acquisition. 
• Spearheaded partnerships and advertising opportunities with nationally known brands including Stylecaster, Mercedes-Benz, Lululemon, Rocksbox, HowAboutWe, and Graze.

Employee #1

Loclly

• First permanent sales hire at a startup regional local services and "daily deal" e-commerce store.
• Grew annual revenue over 6,000% in a year and a half, then launched a new brand (Candle).
• Utilized strategic user acquisition, e-mail marketing, and pricing models to capture an active audience of buyers across multiple brands and verticals.

SDR & AE - US/MX

Pinnacle Fête

Pinnacle Fête began as an event and artist promotion company in the college town of Blacksburg, Virginia, representing nationally known acts including Rhêtorik, Tim Gunter, and Super Dopplar.

Hampton Roads Chamber of Commerce

Intern - Lead Hampton Roads

👋 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


--

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

William M. Ballance

Meagan Glenn

Founding Member

On the Goga

Built by people who hate burnout, On the Goga delivers employee wellbeing solutions that inspire connection, ease stress, and save HR loads of time.

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩
Driving product enhancements and process improvements while fostering cross-functional collaboration. My focus is on delivering customer-driven product features, optimizing internal workflows, and ensuring the team is aligned and effective.

🏅 𝐌𝐢𝐥𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐞𝐬
⚡️ Revamped Release Notes: Transitioned to Notion for better accessibility and clearer communication, setting a new company standard.
⚡️ High-Quality Research: Delivered a comprehensive competitor analysis in Notion, enhancing strategic feature positioning and competitive differentiation.
⚡️ Improved Engineering Collaboration: Established rapport with engineering, facilitating task weighting and process improvement, including the development of a product wiki.
⚡️ Updated Product Roadmap: Managed and maintained the product roadmap aligning with Q4 OKRs and paving the way for a productive quarter.
⚡️ Feature development and delivery: Spearheaded for multiple features. 
⚡️ Peer Inclusion in Product Development: Strengthened cross-functional collaboration, integrating diverse perspectives into product features.
⚡️ Optimized Meeting Cadence: Initiated daily standups and adjusted meeting formats, leading to better alignment and smoother operations.
⚡️ Process Improvement Initiatives: Proactively identified ticketing system gaps and implemented new processes, setting the stage for ongoing product enhancements.

Founding Product Manager

Lavender 💜

✨ Company highlight ✨ 
Hired as a founding team member (first non-sales/eng hire), employee #7. 

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭:
Focusing on customer feedback to shape our product roadmap. 
Collaborating closely with go-to-market to guide product development.
Monitoring product analytics and refining the product to meet customer needs.
Goal = build a product our customers want! 

🏅 Milestones 
⚡️ Created a quarterly Gantt chart to monitor goals and KPIs
⚡️ Conducted an average of 2.5 user interviews a week in Q1/Q2
⚡️ Utilized Mixpanel to inform product decisions, including creating dashboards to share across the org
⚡️ Built and manage a public roadmap in Productboard, resulting in 112% increase in user feedback
⚡️ Developed processes for beta testing and gathering data for product development
⚡️ Launched surveys and user feedback initiatives
⚡️ Collaborated with Design, GTM, and Engineering on a revolutionary redesign, inclusive of new product features and enhancements. 


𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬:
Leading a team of CSMs and Success Specialists. 
Helping to develop new strategies, increase retention, and reduce churn. 
Oversee CS Ops.
Goal = keep customers, build new processes, and expand key accounts.

🏅 Milestones 
⚡️ Set team wide OKRs for a team of 3 CS professionals
⚡️ Merged a CX/CS team to create one aligned department. Restructured in Q2 to maximize bandwidth. 
⚡️ Defined health scores and created dashboards to help proactively monitor existing accounts
⚡️ Created trigger based playbooks, for both Scaled and Enterprise CS initiatives
⚡️ Worked with the team to provide customer education materials, including interactive demos, videos, and written articles 
⚡️ Developed new processes (Sales > CS handoff, renewals, QSCs)
⚡️ Created a customer journey, including 6 new value points for each customer
⚡️ Led the implementation of our CSP, Vitally

Senior Program Manager, Success & Product

My goal at Lavender was to focus on the success of our users. This success was reflected throughout the business but primarily focuses on Marketing, Product, and CS. Examples of where I spent my time in this role: beta testing new features, iterating onboarding, 1:1 customer feedback, optimizing email campaigns, elevating our UX, and optimizing customer education content.

🏅 Milestones:
𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭:
⚡️ Evaluated, tested, and purchased a no-code onboarding solution. 
⚡️ Built our first no-code onboarding, reducing TTFV by 14 hours. 
⚡️ Collected 250+ beta testers for a new environment and successfully tested new features.
⚡️ Assisted our Design team in user testing, collecting helpful feedback. 
⚡️ Utilized Mixpanel to track product usage data and monitor feature adoption. 
⚡️ Led a PMF survey to gather data and understand our position. 
⚡️ Ran internal projects and data collection for pricing updates. 
⚡️ Created a public roadmap and backend feature board with Productboard.  

𝐌𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠:
⚡️ Developed and executed two onboarding campaigns for trialing and paying users in Customer.io, achieving a 52% open rate and an average 3.1% CTR.
⚡️ Built a re-engagement campaign that successfully brought 704 users back to Lavender.
⚡️ Built and managed many trigger-based campaigns. 

𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬 + 𝐒𝐮𝐩𝐩𝐨𝐫𝐭:
⚡️ Built workflows, macros, and our first help center in Intercom.
⚡️ Answered 3,700 conversations in 2023, with an average CSAT of 96%. 
⚡️ Led a churn committee in 2023 to reduce voluntary churn by 6.1%
⚡️ Implemented a feedback initiative in 2023 to increase our user reviews by 10%. 

𝐂𝐒 𝐎𝐩𝐬/𝐆𝐞𝐧 𝐎𝐩𝐬:
⚡️ Setup Notion/Asana workspaces for my team. Constructed first SOPs.
⚡️ Set OKRs and KPIs for my team.
⚡️ Completed all internal invoicing for contracted accounts.
⚡️ Followed up on past-due accounts for collection. 
⚡️ Created alignment between CS and our ENG team.

User Success

Newchip Accelerator

Selected to become a mentor to Series A, Seed, and Pre-Seed startups.
Mentoring 2-3 startups at a time, averaging 4-6 meetings per month. 

About Newchip:
🚀 The #1 Online Accelerator: 
👩🏻‍💻 We provide founders with all of the tools and skills necessary to build, scale, and fund their startups. 
🌍 2500+ Portfolio Companies 
📈 $2.2B+ Raised by Alumni

Startup Mentor

arileau

Supporting job seekers with mock interviews, resume reviews/rewrites, and LinkedIn profile optimization. 

🏅 Milestones:
⚡️ Conducted market research to identify a business need and ICP. 
⚡️ Utilized business planning to outline initial ideas.
⚡️ Tested multiple CRM options and landed on using Hubspot for daily management. 
⚡️ Built our website from scratch.
⚡️ Consulted with 100+ job seekers on their journey.

Co-Founder

Inverge 

✨ Company highlight ✨ 
Hired as a founding team member (first non-eng hire), employee #7.

My goal at Inverge was to build a CX department from the ground up. Focusing on building our Support department out to prioritize the current CX. From there, I improved Onboarding workflows and automation. After improving those, I worked on finding opportunities to build out a CS department.

🏅 Milestones:
⚡️ Built automated workflows in Hubspot to nurture users through the sales cycle. 
⚡️ Constructed onboarding pipelines and workflows based on 3 separate personas. 
⚡️ Implemented KPIs and OKR tracking. 
⚡️ Began construction of our first SOPs
⚡️ Conducted user research, documenting our customer journey and user pain points along the way.
⚡️ Increased user engagement by 23% through the successful launch of a newsletter
⚡️ Led the transfer of our Support department from Hubspot Service Hub to Intercom resulting in a 20% reduction in response time.
⚡️ Used Google Analytics to track website traffic and make data-based improvements.

Head Of Customer Experience

#GirlsClub

Girlsclub is a 6-month-long leadership program that ends in certification.

Protege

Brand30

Brand30 is a cohort-based course that has taught over 3,500+ students the fundamentals of digital personal branding.

Thinking about signing up? Ask me about my referral link!

Demio

✨ Company highlight ✨ 
Hired as an early team member, employee #26.

🏅 Milestones:
⚡️ Led a new customer education program from initiation to close.
⚡️ Worked collaboratively on identifying expansion opportunities in the customer journey. 
⚡️ Implemented a new CSAT initiative in Q4 of 2021 and a new coaching initiative in Q1 of 2022. 
⚡️ Utilized Heap to build data scorecards for customers in Adoption.
⚡️ Maintained a customer satisfaction score of 100%.
⚡️ Maintained between 15-30 Enterprise accounts at any given time. 

As a Customer Adoption Manager, I was the first point of contact after a contract signature. I performed onboarding and ensured proper implementation of the Demio platform by the users. 

I worked on many internal projects to improve the customer experience and worked closely with the Customer Success team to ensure the long-term success of all customers.

I used analytics via Heap to drive projects to increase engagement, improve automation, and promote early product adoption.

Customer Adoption Manager

🏅 Milestones:
⚡️ Raised our trial conversion rate by 1.8%.
⚡️ Shaped a brand new role, with the help of my leader.
⚡️ Mentored and trained two new AE's on the Demio product.
⚡️ Worked collaboratively on migrating users to new Demio plans.

As the Head of Demio Experience it was my role to drive process improvement for trial conversion.

Head of Demio Experience

🏅 Milestones:
⚡️ Received an average of 97% CSAT scores. 
⚡️ Average of 1 minute and 9 second response time. 
⚡️ Received 450, 5-star survey results. 

I spent my time providing high-quality technical support to those in need. When about to go live to their audience, my job was to be there and "cure their crisis" as many of them would say.
I accomplished many side projects as they came in for my manager, which helped support my team.

Customer Success Specialist

Pana

🏅 Milestones:
⚡️ Held 9 direct reports. 
⚡️ Facilitated biweekly retrospectives and arranged biweekly status reports. 
⚡️ Worked directly with high value accounts such as Meta, Netflix, and SpaceX.
⚡️ Completed a 6 month project within scope. 

My group was brought in to help staffing levels and teach new practices to current staff. In doing this we developed new training materials and trained staff on new tools.

This role was contracted out to a SaaS company, Pana.

Team Lead

Singles Travel International

🏅 Milestones:
⚡️ Planned and executed the first chatbox on the company website. 
⚡️ Performed negotiations, with vendors, for 25+ large contracts. 
⚡️ Managed communication with stakeholders from website launch date to travel date.

Operations Manager

🏅 Milestones:
⚡️ Designed the first NPS system for the company. 
⚡️ Hit 150%+ of quota for 9 months. 
⚡️ Reduced ticket response times by 48 hours.
⚡️ Planned 25+ trips for groups of 50-150 people - all traveling from different destinations, all single travelers.

Vacation Specialist

User Success @ Lavender | Mentor 🤝 | Helping startups create exceptional user experiences.✨

Hi there 👋 I’m Meagan, and I'm passionate about sharing my journey working at 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬 and breaking into 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩. What can I say? I thrive on chaos and geek out over OKRs. 

I've spent the last 4 years working at tech startups and it's changed my life. Here's why 👇

𝑫𝒐𝒊𝒏𝒈 > 𝒂𝒔𝒌𝒊𝒏𝒈
Early stage startup = no processes. You get to solve it on your own and see if it works. If you fail, learn from it. If you succeed, document it. 

𝑻𝒊𝒕𝒍𝒆𝒔 𝒂𝒓𝒆𝒏'𝒕 𝒆𝒗𝒆𝒓𝒚𝒕𝒉𝒊𝒏𝒈
Startups are long games. Ignore the title and focus on serving others. It comes back to you tenfold. 

𝑭𝒂𝒎𝒊𝒍𝒚
There's a lot of heat around this term, but you are one of few at a startup, and your role is often essential. This can mean long hours, and your coworkers become a second family. These relationships you build often will stand the test of time. Don't fight it - embrace it. 💚 💜 

These have shaped my mindset to collaborate extensively, fail fast, and serve others. 

If you want to learn more about 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩𝐬 or breaking into 𝐥𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐩 - let's connect! 🙌

 🤝 𝐇𝐨𝐰 𝐈 𝐜𝐚𝐧 𝐡𝐞𝐥𝐩:
Please check out my resources section under my profile picture! I aim to support job seekers as much as I can. 

✨  𝐌𝐲 𝐌𝐲𝐞𝐫𝐬-𝐁𝐫𝐢𝐠𝐠𝐬 𝐏𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐲 𝐓𝐲𝐩𝐞
ENTJ
https://www.16personalities.com/entjs-at-work

💪  𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐭𝐡𝐬
----
𝐒𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐠𝐢𝐜 
I act when challenges arise and provide solutions for long-term success. 
𝐃𝐞𝐭𝐚𝐢𝐥-𝐨𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐝 
The last thing I want is someone going behind me and needing to clean up my work. I ensure it is done right the first time. 
𝐂𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐨𝐮𝐬 
Gaining knowledge and sharing it with others is something I am passionate about. You will find me learning, growing, and sharing new things often.

💻   𝐌𝐲 𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐜𝐤
• 𝐂𝐑𝐌𝐬 - SFDC, Hubspot
• 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 - June, Heap, Mixpanel, Userpilot, Productboard
• 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐣𝐞𝐜𝐭 𝐌𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 - Notion, G-Suite, M365, Tableau, Asana, AirTable, ClickUp, 
• 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐦𝐮𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 - Slack, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Intercom, Customer.io, Apollo, Survicate
• 𝐒𝐜𝐡𝐞𝐝𝐮𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐠 - Gcal, Calendly, Hubspot Meetings
• 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 - Stripe, Profitwell, Baremetrics, ChartMogul 
• 𝐎𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 - Zapier, Miro/Mural, Totango, Hotjar/FullStory Vitally 
*𝐋𝐢𝐦𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐝, 𝐛𝐮𝐭 𝐬𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐰𝐨𝐫𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰𝐥𝐞𝐝𝐠𝐞 - MongoDB, Figma/FigJam, AWS, SQL (actively learning)

Senior Program Manager, Success and Product 

𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭:
Focusing on customer feedback to shape our product roadmap. 
Collaborating closely with engineering and design to guide product development.
Monitoring product performance and refining the product to meet customer needs.
Goal = build a product our customers want! 

🏅 Milestones 
⚡️ Created a quarterly Gantt chart for Product initiatives 
⚡️ Co-led a daily standup initiative to increase communication and efficiency
⚡️ Worked with the team to user-test a new design system
⚡️ Conducted user interviews and live testing 

𝐒𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐬𝐬:
Leading a team of CSMs and Success Specialists. 
Helping to develop new strategies, increase retention, and reduce churn. 
Oversee CS Ops.
Goal = keep customers, build new processes, and expand key accounts.

🏅 Milestones 
⚡️ Led the implementation of a CSP, Vitally (In progress)
⚡️ Merged a CX/CS team to create one aligned department
⚡️ Led a daily standup initiative to increase communication and efficiency
⚡️ Developed a Sales > CS handoff process that includes collecting success metrics

taplio

The Battle

William M. Ballance

Meagan Glenn 💜

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