Nov 24, 2023

Lavender is an AI email assistant that combines everything you need to easily write sales emails that get replies. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Lavender co-founder and CEO William Ballance to learn more. William Ballance’s Background Along with being the co-founder and CEO of Lavender, Ballance is a sales email coach that helps people write more effective emails faster. Ballance said: “I held several sales roles in my early career, and I was the first sales hire at an early-stage daily deal e-commerce startup. In the role, I grew total sales from $30k to $2.5 million across two brands.” “I then founded companies including Alum, My Fun Filter and Sorter, which laid the foundation for Lavender.” “In college I was entrepreneurial, attending and starting businesses at both Virginia Tech and Hampden-Sydney College.” Formation Of Lavender How did the idea for the company come together? Ballance shared: “My team was building Sorter, a tool for marketers, developers, and designers that could take an audience, analyze key data on them, and make predictions on their personality type to help messages better resonate on a 1:1 level. We won the Techstars Startup Weekend Atlanta, which built serious momentum behind the tool.” “As it evolved, Sorter aligned people into four quadrants inspired by the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) to help marketers and advertisers adjust their messaging to appeal to these mental frameworks for decision making.” “As the world moved toward a remote-first model because of COVID, we saw the opportunity to apply foundations of our technology to help people write better emails. And then Lavender was born. Our first users were people who had been laid off from Airbnb, who used the tool to help land their next job. Lavender is still offered for free to job seekers today, as well as students and bootstrapped entrepreneurs.” “There is an urgent need for Lavender because it transforms the traditionally inefficient and impersonal world of sales—and this was especially valuable when people were no longer answering their phones in the office at the start of the pandemic. It is necessary in the modern world of selling, which is increasingly relying on written email and social selling.” “Using Lavender, our users achieve an average of over 20% email reply rate, which is significantly better than the industry average of 1-5%.” Favorite Memory What has been your favorite memory working for the company so far? Ballance shared: “By far one of my favorite memories is when we brought our entire team to SaaStr 2022. It was electrifying to be back at an in-person conference, and we generated a lot of buzz by walking around the expo halls with Lavender suitcases filled with our swag. We handed out CDs with our ‘ It’s Lavender Duh ’ song and remixes (all available on Spotify) as invites to our event party—an epic rave thrown at an Irish pub.” “We packed the space with 300 people and got connected with several other founders and VCs. The party was a big contributor to us raising an additional $13M over the following month. This year we threw a follow up party at SaaStr, and over 1,000 people came.” Challenges Faced What challenges has Ballance faced in building the company and has the current macroeconomic climate affected your company? Ballance acknowledged: “As most founders have experienced, cash flow is a challenge when you’re in your earliest stages. We were not venture backed until 2022, and we have been building together since 2018. We pivoted to Lavender during COVID, with only a month of runway in the bank. We would hustle monthly for bursts of angel checks, typically 5-20k, and use that to stay afloat as we were building traction.” “We never had more than 3 months of runway at once. We saw the early signs of customer love and knew there was light at the end of the tunnel. We kept building and growing, and now we’ve now secured more than $14M funding to date and provide Lavender to many brands that inspire us like Twilio/Segment, Google, Brex, Demandbase, Sendoso, and more.” “Now, one of our key challenges is continuing to hire exceptional talent as we expand further from the founding team and are acquiring customers all over the world.” “Our process focuses on finding ambitious, innovative creators on a relentless pursuit to build unforgettable customer experiences. Lavender has become a movement – at least one user has a tattoo – and we must continue to innovate as the market becomes noisier as more companies build generative AI as a feature. While we apply generative AI, it is not our core feature.” “As other companies start to follow suit and the space becomes more competitive, we’re doubling down on attracting the best talent to differentiate Lavender from the rest of the generative AI hype.” Core Products What are the company’s core products and features? Ballance explained: “Lavender is an AI sales email coach that helps sales teams create more pipelines and close more deals with stellar, high-converting, emails. It blends communication and behavioral psychology with deep learning to deliver personalized data-backed recommendations that improve email reply rates.” “The average email reply rate is 1-5%, which burns the majority of leads. Using Lavender, teams are regularly achieving a 20%+ average reply rate.”  Lavender has several powerful features, helping with: — Prospect Research: Lavender draws key insights from a prospect’s social media channels, the technologies that their company uses, and personality data to help sales reps better engage them. — Personalized Email Content: Lavender uses company data to suggest relevant and timely ways for reps to personalize their outreach—like showing a news article that the rep can reference in a natural way. — Team Coaching: Every email is assigned a score of 0-100 by Lavender as reps write it, all in their inbox. Over time, Lavender learns more about individual users and their teams to improve its scoring and recommendations based on what is (or isn’t) working. Our coaching dashboard shows team leaders at-a-glance stats on their team emails and success, which can identify which reps might need additional support or coaching. — Starting an Email: After a user provides a few bullet points or research points, Lavender’s “Start My Email” feature drafts an email that the rep can then personalize. The feature also analyzes email threads to understand the history and propose a response. We’ve found the feature is helpful for overcoming writer’s block, and it is meant to fast-track email writing, not replace a rep entirely.” Evolution Of Lavender’s Technology How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Ballance noted: “Lavender started as Sorter, which applied communication psychology toward marketing and advertising audiences. We expanded and refined the systems and algorithms we built to narrow in on sales email, which has been incredibly successful for our customers. For example, Sendoso achieved a 580% increase to their reply rate.” Significant Milestones What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Ballance cited: “One of our most notable milestones is when we raised our $11 million Series A, which closed just weeks after our $2.2 million seed round.” “Norwest Venture Partners led our Series A with participation from Signia Venture Partners. Signia led the seed round, with participation from CapitalX and Position Ventures.” Customer Success Stories After asking Ballance about customer success stories, he replied: “Clari is a standout customer story because Kyle Coleman , its CMO, is one of the top sales thought leaders on LinkedIn. Kyle is known for writing really great cold emails, and he implemented a thorough training program for all of their new SDRs specifically on cold email. Most teams barely train their team on email, so Clari was an exception to the rule and had a higher-than-average reply rate. Before Lavender, his team accomplished an 8% reply rate, and with Lavender they’ve doubled their reply rate to 16%. They’ve also increased their onboarding speed by 300%.” Funding/Revenue After asking Ballance about funding and revenue metrics, he revealed: “We’ve raised over $14 million in total, including angel and seed investments from Arash Ferdowsi (Dropbox), Alex Lieberman (Morning Brew), Troy Osinoff (JUICE), and Braydan Young (Sendoso).” Total Address Market What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Ballance assessed: “Lavender overlaps with several categories that are primed for massive growth in the coming years, including sales technology, generative AI, and workplace productivity technology.” “The sales enablement platform market is projected to reach $11 billion by 2032 , and generative AI is projected to reach $44 billion this year (and grow to $207 billion by 2030). As we continue to expand our capabilities, we expect organizations will find plenty of uses for Lavender outside our core focus on sales.” Differentiation From The Competition What differentiates the company from its competition? Ballance affirmed: “Numerous companies are doing adjacent things in AI-assisted email, but few approach it from the email coaching perspective.” “Almost every company that offers generative AI for sales is trying to fully automate the sales email. We think that’s a bad future for the world, and it’s risky from a business perspective.” “In the past, automated systems have increased SPAM and turned buyers off to cold email and we predict this will continue. As more companies use fully automated email solutions, we predict that those emails will increasingly be flagged as spam—and never reach the intended recipient.” “Buyers want less automation, not more. They want to buy from people and be treated as people instead of numbers in a CRM.” “Our approach empowers users to write better, personalized emails faster. The human is always in the loop. We build every feature to focus on both effective and efficient, whereas full AI automation makes reps more efficient but not effective. Using Lavender, people can write personalized emails in just 3-5 minutes, which is more than 50% faster than the 15+ minutes it usually takes.” Future Company Goals What are some of the company’s future company goals? Ballance concluded: “Lavender is an Email Intelligence company, which means data is a core part of our business. We use data to make our users more effective and efficient at their jobs, and make their buyers happier with the messaging they receive. As we progress, we aim to pull in more data from the edge; any data we think will influence whether someone replies to an email or not. Our goal is to deliver the most precise recommendations and help people get more positive replies.” “A large part of our strategy is to enhance our aggregate data and give managers at-a-glance stats that help them understand what’s working and how to train their teams in a remote-first world. Sales teams are commonly challenged in understanding what’s being sent, why it’s working, and what’s not working. Lavender solves this challenge, and we are continually refining how we make it effortless for teams to send personalized emails.” “Through this experience, William was introduced to the cognitive sciences, met his co-founders, and after a couple of pivots, applied their communication psychology research to sales using AI, creating Lavender.” Sponsors