"If you're a tech founder, especially if you're a bit introverted... you should try Warmly because it makes it so much easier to have a conversation."
Lilly Chen, Founder & CEO at Brainstory, shares how Warmly helped transform her startup sales program by uncovering and deanonymizing visitors to key landing pages.
Brainstory’s product-led approach
With a background in AI tech from an engineering role at Meta, Lilly became a founder back in 2021 when one of her side projects caught on and got picked up by VCs.
As with most tech startups, a pivot or two was in order, and eventually, the team settled on Brainstory, an AI-powered brainstorming tool for helping teams think through their ideas faster and better.
Brainstory has a unique GTM approach that is primarily product-led.
In the majority of cases, single users (mostly designers, product managers, and developers) sign up for a free plan. That’s the catalyst for Brainstory’s sales motion.
When those “single-player mode” users start seeing value from the tool, Lilly reaches out to recommend they give it a try at work and share it with some colleagues.
From there, it's all about traction.
“If we can get, say, 20 people in an organization to start using Brainstory at work, we can switch to a top-down motion and reach out to a VP and say, like, ‘Hey, a lot of your team is using Brainstory, shall we talk about taking this to the next level?’”
The challenge with founder-led sales
Like many early-stage startups, the sales team at Brainstory is one person:
Lilly.
As a busy founder, Lilly naturally doesn’t have the time to dive into hours of manual research and prospecting to find the right people to talk to. Nor did she have the tools to do this automatically.
“Before Warmly, we were getting tons of traffic to our landing page, but we didn’t know who was on the site. We could only see traffic by geographic region, which isn’t really helpful at all.
The other problem is that we can have tons of people on the site who just aren’t a fit for us. We’re an AI tool, and AI is obviously a big thing right now, so there are a lot of people who land on the site or even sign up for Brainstory, but they’re just interested in seeing what’s out there. They aren’t our ICP.”
The demoralization of cold outreach emails
Before signing up for Warmly, Brainstory’s outreach motion was pretty standard:
Cold emails.
“Honestly, it was so demoralizing sending cold outreach emails that we just stopped doing this, because nobody was responding. And you know this, obviously, because you don’t even read your own cold emails. So why are you sending them?”
Lilly tried out a few different tools—from HubSpot to Google Analytics to Pendo to Segment—but nothing stuck.
“We stuck with Pendo the longest, but, to be honest, I never really saw value from that tool. Before Warmly, I didn’t even know it was possible to do this, so I’m really impressed by the value we’re seeing already.”
Deanonymizing website traffic with Warmly
Like Brainstory, Warmly, too, offers a free option, which is exactly how Lilly got started.
“We’re on the free version, but we maxed out our number of warm leads on the first day. That’s how good it is. So we’ll probably have to upgrade.”
Right now, Lilly is primarily using Warmly to deanonymize visitors to Brainstory landing pages.
“Warmly helps us determine that the person who is on our site is actually in our target audience, so we only reach out to people who fit our ICP.
People generally sign up on a personal email, so before, we never knew where they worked. Now, we can get a headstart on developing a warm relationship with that brand.”
Lilly is also seeing how powerful Warmly can be in identifying new prospects to add to the sales funnel.
“We’re also seeing some tech companies come up that we’ve never reached out to. Without Warmly, we would never have known that they’d seen us.”
Time to value in less than a day
Unlike other solutions that Lilly tried, Warmly’s time to value was realized on the first day.
“With Warmly, the first time to value was literally instant. I tried it out myself by jumping on a landing page, and I saw my own LinkedIn profile come up in Warmly.
That’s when I understood how powerful it was and how I could use it to drive my sales process.”
Empowering founder-led sales with Warmly
Unlike other sales solutions, Warmly is built specifically to help small businesses and startups identify high-intent prospects as soon as they visit your site.
But Warmly is more than just visitor identification, we can help you build an AI SDR army by:
- Engaging website visitors through AI chat
- Running automated outreach campaigns via email and LinkedIn
- Enriching your prospect information with third-party intent data
Join Brainstory and dozens of other ambitious startups in creating and converting sales pipeline faster. Try Warmly for free today.