Build It While You Fly: The Story of Lavender.ai with William Ballance #022

The Sales Consultant Podcast

In this episode, we hear from William Ballance, the founder of Lavender.ai, a successful startup that offers AI-powered personalized email outreach.

William shares his experiences of traveling around the world while building his company, attending industry events, meeting investors, and working with his team. He also talks about the challenges and successes Lavender has faced, including the company's focus on hiring for product and engineering roles.

Additionally, William discusses Lavender's approach to driving revenue and their strategy around communities and product-led growth. The episode also touches on the unique aspects of Lavender's AI-powered email outreach platform and how it differs from other cold email tools in the market.

Finally, William shares his perspective on failure and how it should be viewed as an opportunity to learn and evolve.

#salesconsultantpodcast #coldemail #emailprospecting #email #ai #generativeai #artificialintelligence #b2bsales #gtm #growth

Time Stamps:

[:30] WIlliam shares how things are going at Lavender and what it’s like to travel as often as he does to places around the world while building a successful startup. He literally takes us around the globe.. Portugal, Finland, and Poland, as he attends industry events, meets with investors, and works all sorts of hours to connect with his team. All this while closing their series A. William also shares a quick story about how Twilio (https://www.twilio.com) laid off 11% of their staff at the same time that they implemented Lavender and were able to increase their demos booked by 60%.

[6:38] He talks about what has changed for Lavender in the last 10 months since the last time I interviewed him.

[10:00] Talks about how they’re hiring for product and engineering and how building out those areas is their top priority so that they can get caught up on their backlog of product releases.

[13:35] I ask WIlliam to share with us what they’re doing to drive revenue (other than using their platform) and he gives us the full scoop on how they approach GTM.

[16:00] Talks about the role they have now dedicated to driving their strategy around communities and product-led growth.

[17:38] He explains how their ‘give first’ strategy (without expectation) works with their content and their product. Then goes into how they zig when everyone else is zagging

20:50] The story on how the Lavender song came to be.

[21:25] Other b2b companies get caught up in being b2b companies which prevents them from being more innovative in their GTM approaches.

[25:00] I ask him to talk about how they’re different from the other cold email tools built on AI that we’re starting to see emerge.

[32:00] We go back in time to the inflection point where he and his partner decided to focus on building a product to enable one to one emails. It was a big bet that has paid off and I wanted to know how they knew this would take off.

[38:25] William shares his perspective on failure as an entrepreneur. It should be viewed as an opportunity to learn and evolve so it should be celebrated.

Mentions:

• https://www.lavender.ai
• https://www.twilio.com
• https://www.outreach.io
• https://woodpecker.co

Guest Bio:

William Ballance is the CEO and Co-founder of Lavender.ai, a startup that helps sales professionals write better emails faster by leveraging personality and decision-making science. William is a former sales representative turned software designer who has been passionate about entrepreneurship from an early age.

After studying Government and Economics, William wrote his senior thesis on using microfinance to encourage entrepreneurship and bottom-up development of emerging economies. Later, he led a successful campaign to save a historic women's college from closing, which inspired him to leave his job and start his first startup.

Join us as we learn from William's journey, and how his experience in cognitive sciences has contributed to the success of Lavender.ai.

Connect with us:

https://www.lavender.ai

William’s LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/wmb1/

Williams’s Instagram - @wmb1

William’s TikTok - @willstartup

The Sales Consultant LinkedIn Page - https://the-sales-consultant-podcast.captivate.fm/

Derrick’s LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/derricklwilliamsjr/

Derrick’s Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/derrickis3linksales/

Derrick’s Twitter - https://twitter.com/derrickis3link

These interviews are also available on Derrick’s YouTube page - @derrickis3linksales