Read Part I in this 5 part Series here.

It's often said that your website is your most important marketing channel.

That can be true, but only if you’re actually using your site as a marketing channel and investing in website content creation and search engine optimization (SEO).

If you’re not, it's kind of like saying, “TikTok is our most important channel,” and then never producing a single video.

The key to turning your website into a powerful channel for lead acquisition and customer engagement is building a series of web pages that attract relevant traffic.

The first step in that process is website content planning—the process of researching and prioritizing keywords to go after, then building a content calendar that acts as your source of truth for content production.

In this article, we’re going to guide you through the three broad steps involved in website content planning:

1. Defining your content strategy
2. Performing keyword research
3. Building the content calendar 

We’ll also provide detailed steps as we progress so you can follow along.

A quick note: This article is part of a five-part series, Building A Content Factory, featuring expert advice from Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional.

If you haven’t read part one and you’d like to get a bit of background on the whole thing, head here: Building A Content Factory: Part 1 of 5.

1. Define Your Content Strategy 

Before you start researching and prioritizing keywords to target, it's a best practice to establish clarity on your overall content strategy.

There are billions of keywords you could go after.

But what you need to know is which search phrases you should go after. 

Your content strategy acts as your north star for choosing which keywords are relevant and which aren’t and for determining which are more important or urgent to target.

There are three core inputs to this strategic process:

• Your industry and product: Who you’re competing with and what their website content assets look like, how your product and brand are different, and what sector of the market you’re going after.
• Your target audience: What interests your typical buyer, what information they are likely to be searching for, and where they often are in the buying journey (e.g., problem-aware vs. solution-aware)
• Your marketing and business goals: The metrics you’ve set to measure marketing success (e.g., new customer acquisition, new leads generated, trial to paid conversion rate)

Consider Warmly.

We exist within the broad account-based marketing and sales space, where there are a lot of established companies competing for the same eyeballs. 

But most of them are targeting enterprises, and we’re built for SMB B2B companies who are looking to scale personalized sales outreach processes and account-based marketing programs. 

Our product is unique in the market (read about that here if you’re interested), which means our customers are somewhere between problem-aware and solution-aware since they know about the industry-standard solutions but may not be aware of our unique take.

Finally, our primary marketing and business objectives are breaking away from the "red ocean" (competition) and making our way into the blue ocean, our own category, where we establish ourselves as the leader.

All of this informs how we choose and prioritize keywords to target as we develop a website content plan. We would be unlikely to target “account-based marketing platforms for enterprise,” for example.

PS. Write this all down in a Google Doc so you can share it with other team members, such as a content creator or social media manager.

Divide Efforts Between Funnel Stages 

A quick note here about funnel stages and a piece of advice from our SEO expert, Nate Matheson.

The funnel stage model (TOFU, MOFU, BOFU), is widely used in the world of content planning to divide and prioritize keywords and inform how the content itself is written.

(Image Source)

The problem is that many organizations (particularly startups) tend to ignore top and even middle-of-funnel pieces and focus solely on BOFU.

That’s because BOFU topics and customers are closer to conversion. So, it does make sense from the perspective of prioritizing spend on the topics that are most likely to deliver results in the form of customers.

But our goal in website content planning and creation is broader than that.

We need to not only have individual pages rank for their target keywords but more broadly raise the domain authority of our website, which works best when we produce content across the entire funnel.

When we create TOFU and MOFU content as well, this acts as a signal to search engines that our site is a trustworthy and relevant resource on the entire topic space, which has positive impacts on ranking potential across the whole site.

Nate’s recommendation here is to split your efforts broadly across the funnel, with ⅓ of the content you produce targeting each funnel stage.

2. Perform Keyword Research 

This is where you jump into the official research and planning stage, starting with keyword research.

Keyword research is the process of identifying which key search phrases you’re going to try to rank for using website content (specifically blog content in the context of this series).

Technically speaking, there are a number of routes you can take here, e.g.

• Speaking to customers about their search behaviors
• Looking at social media posts that perform well and seeking to replicate them with blog content
• Performing a content audit of competitor websites (we’ll look at how to do this soon)

In general, though, most content strategists will use this process to gather initial content ideas and then use dedicated website content planning tools (e.g., Semrush and Ahrefs) to perform the official keyword research.

Here’s how to do it in Semrush. 

The steps might look slightly different in your content planning tool of choice, but the process should be largely the same.

Keyword Research in Semrush

Open Semrush and head to the Keyword Magic Tool.

Add a broad topic idea (your industry or product category is a decent place to start).

Semrush then provides a series of related keywords that you might choose to target, most of which can be spun out into different blog posts (for example, “account-based selling system” is going to be different from “account-based selling strategy”).

Select the keywords you want to include in your content marketing plan and add them to your keyword list.

Volume and Keyword Difficulty

There are two additional pieces of data you want to consider here:

• Volume. This is the monthly number of searches for this keyword. A higher number is better, as it means greater potential for organic search traffic from this topic.
• KD% (keyword difficulty). This is an indication of how hard the topic is to rank for. Lower is better.

That said, you don’t need to pay too much attention to those details at this stage in your website content plan.

While a high-volume/low-difficulty keyword is the holy grail you’re seeking, these don’t tend to be all that common. There is most commonly a trade-off between the two (because high-volume keywords have more traffic potential, so they are more competitive.

Nate recommends against being scared off of high-difficulty keywords anyway. 

While some content marketing strategists set a hard bar at 60, 70, or 80, Nate believes that even as high as 90% is still worth going after, so long as you have a well-rounded strategy that:

• Includes a mix of keyword difficulties
• Publishes content consistently at scale
• Focuses on activities that build site authority overall (like building backlinks and creating top-of-funnel content)

Rinse and Repeat

Repeat this process for each of the keyword or topic ideas you have (refer back to your content marketing strategy from step one for inspiration) until you have a list of several hundred potential keywords.

This will be a fairly long and iterative process, but you don’t have to finish it all in one go.

Nate recommends running this process every two to three months. 

Not only does this split the workload up, but it also allows you to learn from what’s working and integrate this new knowledge into future keyword research.

Competitor Site Research 

Looking into competitors’ websites and seeing which pages are doing well can also be a good strategy for identifying keywords to target.

You should be able to do that in the content planning tool you used for the last step.

Here’s how it works in Positional.

Add your website URL and the competitor you want to compare against.

The app then suggests a list of keywords that the competitor is ranking for that would also be relevant for us to target.

In this case, “mql vs sql” looks like a good opportunity. The search volume is decent, and the competition is low, and we have a shot at knocking Rollworks off of page one.

Keyword Clustering 

Keyword clustering is the process of looking at a series of search terms and determining whether any of them share SERPs (search engine results pages).

Where this is the case, we can target several keywords with the same piece of content rather than wasting time and resources on multiple pieces that are actually going after the same SERP.

We’ll use Positional to cluster our keywords.

For instance, Positional has identified that the search terms “b2b leads” and “b2b lead generation” are essentially the same thing, and they share search results.

You can also do this manually by just Googling the two search terms.

If the results are different, then you need to target each keyword with a separate piece of content. If they are the same, you can combine them into one.

However, this does drag out the content planning process, especially at the scale we’re talking about, so you’d be wise to use something like Positional or Semrush to automate this.

3. Build The Content Calendar 

Step three is to take that prioritized list of keywords and convert it into a content calendar using a project management tool or Excel spreadsheet.

Determining An Appropriate Content Velocity  

Here’s where you need to lock in your content or publishing velocity (which is marketing speak for “how many articles are you going to publish each month”?)

Nate’s advice is that 1-2 pieces a week is a good place, 2-3 if you’re really serious. 

At the high end, 3-5 pieces weekly can help you run super fast, but this is likely overkill for most brands.

What you need to bear in mind here is that SEO is a long-term game. 

It’s a channel that compounds over time and takes a lot of upfront work, with the results being realized further down the track.

You also need to be publishing for a while before you start consistently showing up in search results and seeing any ROI out of content marketing efforts.

You’ll have to publish at least 20-30 pieces before Google starts really paying attention, and it won’t be until the 6-12 month period that you really see promising results.

But while faster might equal better, if you’re launching your first online content creation process, you’ll have some early learnings and hiccups to battle through before you can realistically achieve that scale.

A wiser approach would be to:

1. Start in the 1-3 a week range (which translates to 4-12 a month).
2. Get your content factory running smoothly 
3. Validate your assumptions about what SEO and content can bring to your business
4. Then ramp up into the 3-5 range.

Choosing The Appropriate Solution 

Your content calendar can totally exist in a Google Sheets or Excel spreadsheet like this:

(Image Source)

But if you’re serious about building a great content plan and maximizing efficiency, we’d recommend investing in a project management platform.

Something like Asana, ClickUp, or even Trello would be suitable.

Compared to spreadsheets, these solutions allow for:

• Better collaboration (things like assigning tasks and tagging other team members)
• Integrations with other tools and stages in your process (like the content promotion solution you would use to share the blog post on social media platforms
• Greater visibility over timelines, milestones, and due dates 

Note how much more user-friendly, organized, and collaborative this content calendar is, for example:

(Image Source)

You can still use Google Docs for all the drafting and editing tasks and then just drop links to the relevant docs in the project card.

Scheduling Content Production 

From there, it's just a matter of deciding which topics will be produced on which dates.

A good practice here is to spread the funnel stage load evenly. 

For example, if you’re producing three articles weekly, you might do one TOFU, one MOFU, and one BOFU piece weekly.

The same goes for the monthly traffic/ranking difficulty paradigm, though you might want to skew that a little so you start off tackling some of the easier topics first.

This will help you secure some page-one positions on Google early on, building your site authority before tackling topics with higher keyword difficulties.

Just don’t fall into the trap of only targeting easy topics.

Putting The Plan Into Action 

Consistently creating and publishing quality content is a great way to get in front of your target market.

The best practices discussed above will help you create a solid plan for producing new content pieces on a regular basis. But you’re still missing a part:

A well-oiled content creation process.

That’s the topic of discussion in the next installment of our five-part series: Developing Content Operations.

‎A quick note to readers: This article is actually part one in a five-part series on building your own content factory, with expert advice from Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional. 

‎‎Content, specifically blog content, has become a staple of the SaaS startup go-to-market strategy.

And for good reason.

If you can build up domain authority and rank for a number of high-value, high-intent keywords, you’ll be constantly driving organic traffic (that is, visitors you aren't paying for) to your site each month.

From there, it's a simple formula:

More traffic = more leads = more customers = more revenue.

But that point is a little bit down the track. To get there, you’ve got to invest heavily in content production, which brings with it a number of moving parts.

You’ve got to orchestrate research and planning, brief creation, content writing and editing, and publishing. 

To nail that process, you’ve got to build a content factory.

In this five-part series, we’re going to show you exactly how to build your own content factory. 

We’ll cover everything from high-level keyword strategy and planning down to the details of optimizing each specific piece you publish and reporting on your content marketing ROI.

Note: In this article, we’re going to be laying the foundations and discussing what a content factory even is, what it involves, and why you should build one. If you’re already set on creating your own content engine and just want to know how, jump forward to part two here: Building A Content Factory (Part 2/5): Website Content Planning.

What Exactly Is A Content Factory? 

A content factory is the entire infrastructure built around producing and publishing content on your website.

Specifically, we’re speaking about SEO-focused blog content here, but the term could be applied to the production of other kinds of content (social media posts, ebooks, etc.) as well.

We use the factory analogy here because your content production system shares a lot of parallels with a physical product line. 

Each person in the factory has a dedicated role and works at a particular stage. They are (or become) experts in that task, and perform it better than anyone else could.

The content creation process must proceed in a waterfall-like fashion (one task is dependent on the completion of another), and it must do so at scale, just like a real factory.

What Goes On In A Content Factory? 

There are three main components that make up a well-oiled content machine:

• Processes (what your people do at each stage)
• People (who perform the specific roles)
• Tech stack (like your factory machinery)

In this article series on building your own content factory, we’ll be covering each in detail.

But for you to quickly grasp how the whole thing works, here’s a high-level breakdown:

1. Content strategy and planning
2. People: Content manager
3. Tech stack: Keyword research tools (Positional), project management solution
4. What it involves: Determining what search terms to target, performing keyword and competitor research, building a content calendar
5. Writing
6. People: Content writer
7. Tech stack: Google Docs, Grammarly, content optimization tool, or my favorite, Letterdrop
8. What it involves: Research, drafting, proofreading, and self-editing the article
9. Editing
10. People: Content editor
11. Tech stack: Google Docs, Grammarly
12. What it involves: Reviewing the drafted piece against guidelines and briefs, making copy edits, providing feedback and suggestions to the writer
13. Publishing
14. People: Virtual assistant 
15. Tech stack: Your CMS (we use Webflow), Letterdrop
16. What it involves: Coordinating with designers, uploading the content to your CMS, ensuring everything is formatted correctly, content syndication.

From there, it's rinse and repeat.

You create a blog brief targeting a specific keyword and pass it to the writer. They draft it, and forward it on to the editor. The editor polishes the pieces and sends them over to publishing, who bring the article live.

Then it's back to the top.

The beauty of this content creation process is that it's highly repeatable and super scalable. 

Once you’ve built the processes and tech stack, it's just a matter of bringing on more writers, editors, and VAs to increase your publishing velocity.

Why Build A Content Factory? 

Building a content factory isn’t the only way to produce content at scale and drive SEO results.

But for most companies, it's the best way, and there are five key reasons why.

1. Scale

When it comes to SEO content, scale matters.

You’ll need to produce at least 20-30 pieces of content just to get Google to start paying attention to you. You’ll then need to publish 100+ pages over the course of your first year to start seeing results.

That boils down to around 2-3 articles a week, which is almost never going to be achievable by a single marketing person.

Yes, it's realistic for a writer to produce 2-3 articles a week. But many companies looking to invest in SEO have a marketing team of one. That person is responsible for marketing across all channels, not just SEO.

And even if you do have a dedicated content marketer, the actual writing of a blog post is just one of many moving parts.

Building a content factory allows you to bring on role experts to cover each of those tasks, and enables you to scale up production simply by hiring more people into the right roles.

2. Specialization 

Every person who works in your content factory plays a specialized role.

Content writing is different from editing, which is different again from strategic thinking and planning. Each of these undertakings is not only a different task; it's a different skill set.

Even the best T-shaped marketer is unlikely to be a master of all of them.

By separating these into distinct roles and having your team members focus on only responsibility, you can access skill and role specialization.

This leads to higher quality work (as nobody is doing something they aren’t that good at) that gets delivered faster.

3. Efficiency 

Efficiency and specialization go hand in hand.

If someone develops a given skill because they focus only on that (say, publishing approved content), they’ll generally also become faster at it.

If they’re great at their job, they’ll develop little efficiency hacks along the way, too.

The opposite is true when you have a one-person content marketing team working on everything: your workload is stretched thin, and you’re constantly switching between tasks, preventing you from working as efficiently as you could.

4. Consistency 

An important component of building your content factory is developing systems and processes for your team to follow, something we’ll dive into in more depth in Part 3: Developing Content Operations.

You’re going to create SOP (standard operating procedure) documentation covering the likes of:

• Your company's tone of voice and style
• Messaging and positioning guidelines 
• How to optimize a piece for search

Clearly documenting your content expectations from the get-go helps create consistency across the pieces you publish, as do the quality checks you put in place (e.g., where editors are responsible for holding writers accountable to your style guide).

5. Control 

Finally, building an in-house content factory gives you more control over content creation than does the common alternative of hiring a content creation agency.

Yes, there are several benefits to hiring an agency:

• Quicker to get off the ground
• Only one relationship to manage 
• Can be more cost-effective 

Plus, hiring an agency gives you access to experience and expertise (for instance, they might have some great hacks for generating free backlinks).

But by keeping the operation in-house, you can develop a team of strategists, writers, and editors who are not only role experts but experts in your product and industry.

Building your own content factory also allows you to retain control of hiring and firing decisions (so you can build your ideal team) and makes you more agile as far as strategic changes are concerned.

How To Get Started Building A Content Factory 

In the next four articles in this five-part series, we’ll be diving into the specifics of building a content factory and providing step-by-step details on how to do it.

Here’s how we’re going to break it down:

• Part 2/5: Defining a content strategy, performing keyword research, and building a content calendar.
• Part 3/5: Building a team, creating a content writing tech stack, and writing up the necessary SOP documents.
• Part 4/5: Generating backlinks (for free) and the importance of internal linking.
• Part 5/5: Measuring the impact of your efforts and optimizing for even better results.

Throughout this series, we’ll be drawing on the extensive SEO expertise of Nate Matherson, the Co-founder and CEO of Positional.

Positional is an AI-powered toolset for content and SEO teams, and one which we use here at Warmly as part of our own content machine.

Nate has years of experience building successful SEO content factories, and in particular, spent seven years scaling content at LendEDU, an online marketplace for financial products, where he and his team:

• Scaled up to producing 70 articles a month
• Published 2500 articles in total
• Achieved a traffic volume of over 500,000 readers per month

Ready to discover the inside secrets of building an SEO content engine? Head to part two here:

Building A Content Factory (Part 2/5): Website Content Planning.

‎‎In 2023 and beyond, revenue growth will not come from investing in a single channel.

Outbound sales email campaigns can be effective, but only when combined with powerful intent data and complemented with outreach across other channels (like LinkedIn).

Going all in on SEO content can be a great way to deliver a ton of traffic to your site, but you’ll need downloadable content assets, email nurture campaigns, and on-site engagement (like chatbots) to convert those visitors.

We're saying here that you shouldn’t put all your eggs in one basket. You’ve got to be across the entire field to win the game.

But it’s not just about being across all channels. 

It's about making sure that your activities and messaging across each channel contribute to a cohesive experience on the customer end.

Of course, there are many ways you can achieve that end, so it's always a good idea to take a leaf or two out of the pros' books.

In this guide, we’re going to dive into 4 real-life examples of omnichannel sales and marketing playbooks, giving you a tangible map for building your own omnichannel approach.

What Do We Mean When We Say “Omnichannel?”

Before we dive into our omnichannel examples, let's quickly make sure we’re on the same page.

At the etymological level, omnichannel literally means “all channels” (a channel, in this case, being a method of reaching prospects, e.g., email, display ads, social media).

But that doesn’t really mean that you have to use every channel imaginable. 

You can neglect display advertising, for example, and still run a solid omnichannel motion across email, social, outbound calling, and conversational chat.

The important thing is not which channels you choose to use (or not use). 

What matters with omnichannel is cohesivity across channels.

A potential customer should be able to read an article you published on your blog, see a post from you on LinkedIn, and see an email from you in their inbox, and all of those activities are interconnected.

They share messaging (though the actual words and approach may differ by channel) that is relevant to that person’s role, goals, and stage in the buying cycle.

Ideally, this is highly personalized based on the contact and intent data you have at hand.

Check out our walkthrough of Warmly’s own omnichannel sales playbook (just below) to see what we mean.

A Quick Note On Omnichannel Retailing

Omnichannel is a term that can also be used in the context of retail sales, where customers have multiple ways to purchase a given product. 

Omnichannel retail means that customers can choose to head to a mall for the store experience or buy online through ecommerce stores.

Take Dollar Shave Club. 

You can buy their products:

• At a brick and mortar store like grocery retailers and drug stores
• At mass retailers like Target and Walmart
• On their online store 
• Via subscription

Below, we dive into a selection of B2C and B2B omnichannel marketing and sales strategies. We will not be using the term omnichannel in the context of omnichannel retail examples.

1. Warmly’s Hyper-Personalized Intent-Based Omnichannel Sales Motion 

Keegan Otter, our Head of Revenue and Operations, has built Warmly’s sales motion to be as personalized, contextual, and customer-relevant as possible.

That means that our targeting has to be super narrow. 

Rather than trying to capture the whole total addressable market and asking reps to engage anyone who matches our ICP (ideal customer profile), our sales targeting is all about intent.

Intent could be demonstrated when someone is looking at our competitors or solutions that we work with and integrate tightly with, or, of course, if they are directly looking at our own site.

But it can also be signal-based, like a recent job change or if there is evidence that the organization is growing.

The point is that only prospects with demonstrable intent get dropped into sequences, meaning we’re not wasting any resources on customers who aren’t in the market. 

Prospecting: Keeping The Sales Funnel Full

Our outbound team adds about 25-30 new prospects into outreach sequences per day.

But only half of these are identified and added manually by SDRs. The other half is added automatically using Warmly’s AI prospector.

Here’s how that works:

1. We use our 6sense and Bombora to reveal accounts that are in-market to buy. We combine this account list with the accounts we reveal on our site exhibiting high engagement levels via Warmly.
2. We then use Seamless.ai to find the right buyers and stakeholders for each of these accounts
3. Our sales team then personalizes outreach to VIP contacts and adds them to relevant sequences via email through our Outreach integration or LinkedIn via our Salesflow integration.

The important thing about that last step—adding other people from the same company to sequences as well as the person who demonstrated intent—is that each sequence is role-relevant. We aren’t just adding everyone to the same email campaign.

For example, the messaging a VP sees from our reps speaks to Warmly’s benefits at the executive level, which differs from the sequence that, say, an SDR team leader would see. 

Below is a message that a revenue leader would see.

Vs. a message a stakeholder might see.

This helps keep communication contextualized and prospect-relevant, improving engagement. 

Email: Personalized Outreach with Dynamic Video

Once a prospect is in an email sequence, what they receive is also highly personalized. And we’re not talking about just using the prospect’s name in the email subject line.

We’re sending dynamic videos embedded within emails that act as a pattern-breaker. They stop the scroll, standing out against a sea of boring and unimaginative B2B emails.

That’s because they look like they’re personally created by the sales rep as a screengrab.

In reality, that video is pre-recorded, and the inclusion of their website as a dynamic video background is automated using Sendspark 😉

LinkedIn: Going Behind The Scenes 

At the same time that prospects start receiving those personalized outbound emails, they’re also added to outbound LinkedIn InMail campaigns using Salesflow.

It's important to note that this is not just a duplicate of the email content; it's designed to be complementary.

The messaging is similar, but the style is different (LinkedIn tends to be a little less formal than email—think texting style), and we even include a few GIFs as another sort of pattern-breaker.

The idea here is that we want to surround sound our prospects. 

They’re receiving emails, InMails, and outbound calls from our reps, and the messaging is consistent across the board (though tailored to the channel).

One unique piece we added to our LinkedIn sequences is a short tour of the Warmly platform via Tourial.

We’re not trying to hide anything behind a paywall or forced demo. We want prospects to see the goods upfront, letting them see and imagine exactly how Warmly would work in the context of their day-to-day, thereby promoting psychological ownership.

Conversational Chat: AI-Led Website Engagement 

With outreach firing from all angles, prospects inevitably end up on our site—a marketing channel in and of itself.

Then, they’re met by Warmly’s AI chatbot (think of it as a smart, more dynamic Drift alternative).

Fed by account, prospect, and intent data, our AI chatbot looks to engage with website visitors using dynamic, conversational language.

(Image Source)

Once we get a few bites and the prospect is engaging with the AI chatbot, the relevant rep is notified via our Slack integration and can take over the conversation from there (contextually, of course), with the end goal of booking a personalized demo.

During demos we use Fathom to record all our calls so we can review the transcripts and provide feedback (though we really should be using tools like Gong.io or Nayak.ai to give deeper insight into deal health)

The results for our latest quarter (Q3 2023)?

• Close rates above 32%
• SDRs are seeing 110%+ quota attainment
• 30%+ increase in meetings booked month-over-month

2. Supermetrics’ Contextual Retargeting Campaigns 

Supermetrics, a data analytics platform, makes heavy use of retargeting to deliver omnichannel experiences to prospective customers.

Retargeting (also known as remarketing) is a strategy where you push communications to people who’ve previously been browsing your website, but didn’t convert.

Typically, this communication is a paid advertisement using marketing automation tools, though you can also take advantage of other marketing channels, such as email, to create a truly omnichannel customer experience.

Here’s how Supermetrics does it.

Beginning With The Website Channel Experience

It's easy to forget that your website is a marketing channel and one that’s critical to the broad user experience.

For Supermetrics, the website is where their omnichannel strategy kicks off. Take their LinkedIn Ads landing page.

(Image Source)

This page is the perfect blend of product-based messaging that speaks to their target audience’s pains and needs, educational content recommendations, and conversion opportunities.

(Image Source)

The page is packed with helpful content like the above video clip or links to relevant blog posts (contextual in that they are purely LinkedIn-related), as well as conversion opportunities like this set of CTAs:

(Image Source)

The page does a solid job of maximizing customer engagement by providing elements that speak to prospects at all stages of the buyer journey.

Then, once you leave the page, Supermetrics kicks off their B2B omnichannel marketing strategy.

Retargeting Ads Across Multiple Channels

Supermetrics uses a combination of customer data and browsing behavior on its site to create retargeting ads that serve the goal of omnichannel personalization.

This ad (served on Facebook) speaks precisely to the goal of prospective customers who have already been checking out their LinkedIn Ads product: improving campaign performance.

This same ad, by the way, is served across other social media platforms (Instagram and LinkedIn) to create a cohesive omnichannel experience and maximize the opportunity to capture attention.

Into The Content Marketing Funnel

When one of Supermetric’s multiple marketing channels captures a click, customers are led back to the website, but this time to a detailed blog page that provides deep support on how to optimize your LinkedIn channel strategy and improve campaign performance.

(Image Source)

On the page, there are a few different ways that Supermetrics can convert. 

Their most promising (and the option they are clearly directing users to) is a free trial CTA, though there is also an option for prospects to book a demo with a sales rep.

(Image Source)

Improvements Supermetrics Could Make To Their Omnichannel Marketing Approach 

Supermetrics creates a seamless experience that neatly guides potential customers down the funnel while providing plenty of opportunity for buyers to “choose their own adventure.”

There are, though, a couple of ways that this omnichannel marketing example could be even better:

1. Their blog posts should look include a non-product CTA that has them sign up to receive email communications. That would add to the multiple marketing channels they’re already using and allow them to create a personalized experience using contextual email marketing methods.
2. A live chat function on their website (driven by AI, like Warmly’s AI chat solution) would help improve the overall customer experience by providing an opportunity for instance engagement. This would also be a solid conversion opportunity for Supermetrics’ sales team.
3. A little ad personalization (using something like Segment) would go a long way to delivering a more immersive experience.

3. TestGorilla’s Omnichannel Advertising Assault 

TestGorilla, a pre-employment testing platform, has an interesting approach to the omnichannel customer journey.

They take one take (advertising) and apply it across multiple channels, using behavioral data to create personalized offers throughout the buyer journey.

The First Hit Through Google

TestGorilla goes big on PPC (pay per click), which is another term for Google Ads.

Basically, they run paid advertisements against key search phrases that show intent for the product.

For example, if you search “hire developer test” in Google, you’ll see this PPC ad:

That’s step one. 

Once you click through and check out the landing page it directs you to, TestGorilla’s website identifies you as the site visitor and stores your details for the next step.

Next Up: Email Advertising

A fairly underused channel in the B2B world is email advertising.

Yes, we use email a lot, but it tends to be the kind of cold email outreach we discussed as part of Warmly’s omnichannel marketing strategy.

Here, we’re talking about ads that pop up under the Promotions tab in Gmail, like this retargeting ad from TestGorilla.

Third Strike, You’re out

Like us, TestGorilla clearly believes in the idea of surround-sounding prospects with relevant content, which is why the third arm of their omnichannel customer engagement strategy attacks social media, this time with a Facebook Ad.

(Image Source)

Where TestGorilla Could Improve Omnichannel Customer Experiences

There are a few small changes that TestGorilla could make to inject a whole lot more personalization into customer experiences, which would help to capture more attention and likely deliver better conversion rates:

1. Use platforms like Warmly or 6sense to dive into customer insights and gain a 360-degree view of buyer behavior on their website
2. Personalize the website and ads based on buyer behavior (for example, the email ad should be related to developer testing specifically rather than the idea more broadly)
3. Align their ad strategy with the customer journey map (“hire developer test” is a bottom-of-funnel search term, so it should be supplemented with BOFU ad content rather than TOFU educational blogs)

4. Divatress SMS and Email One-Two Punch 

Divatress, an online wig store, provides a great example of how unique customer insights, plus the combination of a capable ecommerce platform and a solid customer communications tool, can deliver a powerful omnichannel strategy.

Divatress’ is built on Shopify, and they’ve plugged in Omnisend to manage an omnichannel campaign across email, SMS, and push notifications. 

Getting Customer Onboard With SMS

SMS is largely an underutilized platform, which means its much easier to cut through the noise.

So, Divatress puts a focus on capturing customer phone numbers with a website pop-up box containing a special offer.

(Image Source)

Note that the pop-up asks for both an email and a phone number, enabling a multichannel approach.

From there, the team can access an untapped channel to promote upcoming sales:

(Image Source)

Recovering (Almost) Lost Revenue

In particular, they’ve designed a powerful abandoned cart recovery series, using several channels to generate a 29% conversion rate and drive over a quarter of the site’s total revenue.

Here’s what that simple campaign looks like:

• One hour after the cart is abandoned, an automated email is sent
• 10 hours later (if there is no activity), a second email is sent
• 24 hours post-abandonment, a one-two punch is sent: an email and either an SMS or a web push notification, depending on what the customer is subscribed to

That web notification, in particular, is seriously effective. 98% of those who click on it end up buying.

How Divatress Could Go Above And Beyond

This is a solid playbook and, clearly, one that is working for Divatress.

Their website chatbot, however, is taking a very reactive approach.

(Image Source)

Divatress could improve on-site conversion rates by taking a more proactive approach, using an AI-driven chat solution to initiate the conversation rather than waiting for a question from the customer.

Steal These Omnichannel Marketing Examples 

Each of the omnichannel marketing strategies we’ve covered above, from TestGorilla’s ad-based approach to our own combination of AI-driven social media and email outreach, can easily be replicated in your own organization.

All you need is the right combination of processes and technology. We’ve given you the playbooks, so now you just need the latter. 

Warmly, our AI-powered account-based orchestration platform can help you deliver omnichannel experiences to target high-intent prospects at key accounts.

Dive in here: Warmly: The Account Based Orchestration Platform.

‍Warmly, the signal-based sales orchestration platform, went from zero to 100+ paying customers in 2023. More importantly, we went from founder-led sales to a repeatable sales process.

We recently raised an $11 million Series A led by Felicis, helping us continue the momentum into 2024.

Introduction to Warmly's Success Story

It wasn’t all up and to the right even if it might look that way from the outside (founders getting awarded Forbes 30 under 30, participating in both Y Combinator and Techstars).

Warmly was founded in 2019 (yes, you heard that right) and our initial product was a virtual name tag for Zoom. While the original product won accolades (like this PLG123 video) and was a Zoom Apps launch partner, ultimately we struggled to sell it. We had a second major product pivot as well before focusing on the current iteration during the second half of 2022.

Because we already had another product in-market, we built the sales orchestration platform in stealth for six months before sharing it publicly. This new product gets customers warm leads by de-anonymizing website traffic and then automatically following up with visitors via chat, video, email, or LinkedIn. This helps customers generate 10x more outbound leads than a traditional SDR while seeing 3x higher close rates because these are warm leads rather than cold ones. 

Keep reading for our color commentary on how we built a repeatable go-to-market motion in 12 months and what we learned along the way.

Q1 2023: Founder-led sales 

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 0 → 10
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Design partners and founder friends
• 📈 Key experiment: Messaging
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can we sell Warmly at any price point?
• (2) Can I stand up a basic funnel?
• (3) Can I find the 10 most common objections and solve them?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: HubSpot (CRM), Mixmax (sales execution), ConnectTheDots (warm intros), DocuSign, spreadsheets

Entering Q1, “everything but sales were already in place,” and so I could spend the majority of his time scaling go-to-market.

Our main initial experiment was on Warmly’s messaging. I needed the words for a sales person to be able to talk about what we were doing. Since we had previously built a solution that was different from the problems that customers were trying to solve, I was particularly keen to avoid making that mistake again.

I began by looking at SEO rankings and researching what others in the space called themselves. One tactic is to go to every competitors’ website, write down all of the words on their homepages, and then build a word cloud around it. “Competitors spend five to six years figuring out how messaging works so why reinvent the wheel?”

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One of my early email outreach messages

There were a bunch of category and message variations in Warmly’s market (ex: account-based marketing, contact databases, intent data). I tested some of these messages with potential design partners, allowing him to find out what competitors got wrong and what we got right. I then tested a message focused on a live video caller Slackbot that would capture people before we leave the website. That failed to land – people instead wanted outreach to be done for them in an automated way and done across multiple channels rather than just video chat.

We landed on signal-based revenue orchestration, which captured what customers were trying to do and was meaningfully different from what competitors talked about. The simplified message was that Warmly helped you “get warm leads and talk to them live.” We could tell that it was working because prospects were nodding their head along and would say “here’s how I see that being used here”. (As an aside, I thought about AI sales orchestration, but found that people were sick of AI as a marketing message.)

I knew that Warmly's messaging wouldn't be completely solved in only a quarter. We were able to specifically tackle (a) what kinds of other tools did people have?, (b) what’s the category that we operate in?, (c) what phrases will get people to join a demo?, and (d) what phrases were other people using?

Another priority for Q1 was to set up a basic sales funnel.

Can I see that if I talk to roughly 10 people, one will close? If I talk to 20 people, will two close?

I had heard general benchmarks about having 5x coverage; that is, for every five qualified conversations, you close one deal. As a founder, I didn’t worry about hitting these exact benchmarks early on because he knew he was talking to “the most random people who weren’t in our ICP” and therefore would never buy. My bigger concern was the close rate among qualified prospects and finding out who was in Warmly’s ICP.

As a product with a $10-15k average annual contract value (ACV), I was looking to see that these deals could be closed in only a few meetings and with a 30-45 day sales cycle. Seeing positive signals, he was ready to scale the magic.

A snapshot of Warmly’s funnel stages for their outbound pipeline (we have separate pipelines for freemium, midmarket, and inbound)

Q2 2023: Sales leader-led sales, founder involved

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 10 → 30
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Founder friends, startups, email sequencing
• 📈 Key experiment: LinkedIn sequencing
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can a strategic sales leader who is a non-founder roughly hit projected quota? 
• (2) Can I as the founder hit quota and also reasonable terms (no opt-outs, annuals only, discounts)? 
• (3) Can I build trust with this leader to sell my vision and build a team around them?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Warmly/6sense (website de-anonymization), Outreach (sales execution), Seamless.ai (contact database, Warmly (AI website chatbot), Sendspark (video personalization), Warmly/Salesflow.io (auto-LinkedIn sequences), LinkedElf (LinkedIn connections)

After starting to prove out founder-led selling, I chose to recruit a sales leader and then hire sellers after that. This would've extended our go-to-market progress by a quarter if not for the fact that our early sales hires used to work at the same company as this new sales leader. If we had to recruit, ramp up, and train new sellers – particularly sellers who might not have been effective – it would’ve taken much longer. 

I emphasized that I wasn’t looking for a sales leader from a really big, later stage company. It was important to me that the sales leader be scrappy, hungry, entrepreneurial, and experienced – but not someone who’s done it twenty times. If I couldn’t find someone like that, I believed that the safer path for Warmly would’ve been:

• Founder-led sales first
• Then hire a BDR/SDR to scale the founder
• Bring on the first AE to report to me
• Once that’s successful, hire a second AE
• Then, hire a sales leader

My big experiment for the quarter was LinkedIn sequencing as a source of qualified pipeline. I had heard from other go-to-market leaders that email wasn’t working as well as it used to and that LinkedIn sequencing was still effective.

My co-founder Alan, Warmly’s SDR leader, and I adopted LinkedElf and Salesflow to max out our LinkedIn connections, adding 100 sales and marketing leader connections every week on auto-pilot. Then we wanted to do messaging on auto-pilot, too. We were able to send out 300 connection requests a week, seeing about half of them accept, and then one-eighth of them reply (half of which would be positive replies, the other half not so much…). Collectively, we were able to book about 10-15 meetings per week just from conversations on LinkedIn – and found a channel that we could continue to grow Warmly’s pool of leads.

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A refined version of Warmly’s messaging now that we have more customer validation

Q3 2023: Seller-led sales, founder involved

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 30 → 60
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: Omni-channel (Linkedin/email), inbound (warm calling on the website with Warmly), territories
• 📈 Key experiment: Conferences
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can an AE and ISR ramp and hit quota in the last month of the quarter? 
• (2) Can our sales leader enable the sellers to ramp and hit quota? 
• (3) Can we build a V1 sales process that can be understood and executed?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Warmly (AI auto-emails), Warmly (AI auto-LinkedIn), HubSpot Quotes ,Tourial (pre-made demos), Spekit (sales process documentation), AccountAim (territory building)

At this point, our new sales leader and I needed to quickly build out the go-to-market team. First, we made a financial model to check whether the math would work out. If you’re not reconciling your quota against your financial model, you’re screwed. The financial model allowed our team to see things like:

• When is the next milestone we need to fit for fundraising?
• How do we get there without being cash-out?
• If Warmly had these milestones, how many reps do we need and when do we need to hire them?
• What would quota have to be in order for all of this to work out?

While in the past mature SaaS companies might’ve aimed for a 5x quota to on-target earnings (OTE) ratio, I didn’t believe that was realistic given the current buying environment and given that our sellers would need to source some of their own leads. We instead aimed for a 3x quota:OTE ratio and a 50/50 split between base and OTE commission, which would fit Warmly’s financial model and allow us to attract the right caliber seller. (As an aside, I encourage others to pay a higher salary-to-commission ratio in the early days so you don’t lose talent while you’re figuring out what’s working and what’s not working.)

Here’s what the team structure ultimately looked like:

• Sales leader (KPI = overall revenue that was sales-sourced / sales-closed)
• Account executives, i.e. AEs (KPI = closed-won revenue)
• Inbound sales reps, i.e. ISRs (KPI = closed-won revenue for very small deals and qualified opportunities among inbound demo requests)
• At Warmly, the ISR role creates a path for SDRs to get promoted; ISRs can advance to AEs if they consistently hit quota
• SDRs (KPI = sales qualified opportunities)
• We do international SDR hiring, which helps keep costs down, and has a 1:1 ratio between AEs and SDRs
• Sales assistants, aka SAs 
• The SA helps with sales admin work, joins demo calls, drafts replies for AEs, pulls lead lists, and writes internal and external follow-up notes
• We got our sales assistants via Virtualis

In Q3, we bet on attending conferences to diversify pipeline generation beyond LinkedIn, greenlighting five conferences for the quarter. For each conference, our sales leader Keegan Otter would attend with one sales rep. We decided not to buy a booth for any of them; rather, we simply went, were friendly, and tried to meet as many attendees as we could.

Three of the five events turned out to be successes; two were not, including Dreamforce which was both extremely large and lacked buyers in our ICP. Overall, the conferences generated more money in closed won sales than it cost for us to attend. But there were drawbacks. For example, I found that there were tons of meetings booked from conferences, but also a spike in demo no-shows. And it was draining for the team to be on the road for five events over the course of only six weeks.

Reflecting on the quarter, I believe that most companies find three to four channels that work for them. It’s important to try all the channels early on, then get laser focused and double down on the ones that work. Conferences were a ‘tweener’ – we needed to keep iterating.

Q4 2023: Seller-led and sales leader run

• 👨‍👩‍👧‍👦 Customers: 60 → 100+
• ⚡️ GTM strategy: No change from Q3 (repeatability!), just optimization
• 📈 Key experiments: LinkedIn social to drive inbound, PLG
• ❓ Key questions: 
• (1) Can I as the founder step away from closing altogether? 
• (2) Can the sellers hit quota each month across the quarter?
•  (3) Can we find repeatability in our core metrics (meetings held, SQOs, closed/won) and rates?
• 🛠️ Key new tools: Letterdrop (LinkedIn social), Alysio (gamified daily sales metrics), Warmly (cross-tool signal-based revenue orchestration)

By Q4, Warmly’s go-to-market started to look more and more repeatable. My focus turned to optimization. 

We bet on product-led growth (PLG), which Warmly had gotten good at during a previous pivot and hadn’t yet applied to the current product. Unlike the Zoom name tag product, the sales orchestration platform involves extra friction for self-service adoption – users have to install a script on their website.

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Warmly’s pricing page includes a free account for smaller customers

We got creative with the free offering, designing it to be an on-ramp to Warmly’s core product rather than a replacement. Free users would get access to up to 500 free warm leads each month along with intent signals and alerts about those leads. If users then want automation to act on those leads, that’s when they'd have to pay for it. There have now been over 1,000 installs of our PLG offering and we're still early in optimizing free-to-paid conversion. 

Two key learnings that made PLG different this time around:

1. PLG became an acquisition strategy for a more valuable product. Before the pivot, we built a great product but people weren’t willing to pay for it. This time we validated that we could sell it before investing in PLG.
2. PLG helps segment Warmly’s prospects. We thought if we had both ‘book a demo’ and ‘try for free’ on the website, everyone would click ‘try for free’. It turns out that companies with less than 50 people naturally sign up for free while companies with more than 50 request a demo. That’s what we wanted.

Reflecting on the last 12 months – and what comes next

First tip: your CRM setup is critical (we chose HubSpot). At first I was very anti having a bunch of form-fills and I understand why reps hate updating a CRM, but the better you can do this in the early stage, the better. I would recommend five fields to always fill out:

1. How did we hear about us?
2. How was the meeting booked? (Get really specific – Warmly has 20 sub-channels – because that will tell you what channel to double down on.)
3. If you closed-won or closed-lost to a competitor, which one?
4. Who was the associated AE?
5. Who was the associated SDR? (An associated SDR might be the same person as the AE if your AE’s are full-cycle.)

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The beauty of CRM reporting when you have good data (the actual numbers have been anonymized)

Second: clean deals are better. The sooner you can get away from month-to-month, opt-out, weird deal terms, do it. It becomes a big headache for CSMs and for managing how you pay out reps.

Third: pay out your sales leader on a percentage of overall revenue that was sales-sourced and sales-closed (i.e. everything except for deals that are founder-sourced and closed). I don’t give commission out on deals that I find and close on my own as a founder. But any deal where an AE is involved or an SDR is involved, the sales leader gets a commission on overall revenue to align incentives.

Fourth, and finally: you and your sales leader should stay accountable for closing deals on your own. I still try to self-source and close three deals a month and my sales leader does, too. You have to be so close to the process and find issues with it before taking a step back.

Google and Yahoo announced that they aim to reduce the amount of spam emails received by their users and improve email security.

Any bulk email sender will be subject to strict new requirements to avoid experiencing email deliverability issues.

Google will begin enforcing the new requirements on February 1st, 2024, while Yahoo will enforce theirs in Q1 of 2024.

These restrictions will change the way many organizations think about outbound prospecting.

How is "bulk sender" defined

A bulk sender is defined by Google and Yahoo as an organization sending 5,000 or more messages a day to any gmail or yahoo email address.

The daily threshold pertains to all emails originating from your entire organization, regardless of the platform or method used to send them.

This includes email marketing platforms like Hubspot or Mailchimp, sales sequencing tools like Outreach or SalesLoft, or emails from your application like password reset emails, newsletters, or product announcements.

What does this mean for bulk email senders?

You want to be careful to make sure your organization is not being flagged as spam. Once marked as spam it takes time for your email domain to normalize and your messages landing in the inbox again.

When do people mark your emails as spam?

• When you aren't emailing the right person
• You're sending irrelevant emails
• You aren't kind in your communication
• The email you sent was clearly AI-generated
• You added the prospect to a multi-step automated email cadence (which auto-followed up five times with no response)

What are the risks of not following these requirements?

Starting February 1st, 2024, if a bulk-sending organization has an abuse complaint rate of 0.3% or higher, Google and Yahoo will automatically block all messages coming from that organization.

That's only 15 emails getting flagged before the hammer is dropped.

Globally, Gmail is the number one free-email service, usually making up between 40-60% of subscribers on a B2C sender's list worldwide, and a top three B2B mailbox provider. Yahoo is also among the top three for global representation on a B2C sender's list.

By not adhering to their new email guidelines you can expect your engagement metrics to begin dropping as your emails land in spam folders more and more.

Because Gmail and Yahoo's reputation-ranking system for senders is also based on subscriber engagement and your engagement has plummeted, it will create a snowball effect.

You'll begin to see open rates plummet, conversions plummet, and eventually, be unable to reliably deliver email from your domain.

Mailbox providers hold all the cards. It's how it's always been.

Why is Google and Yahoo doing this?

Google noted that their AI-powered defenses stop more than 99.9% of spam, phishing and malware from reaching inboxes and block nearly 15 billion unwanted emails daily.

"But now, nearly 20 years after Gmail launched, the threats we face are more complex and pressing than ever." -Google

The short answer is they want inboxes safer and more spam-free.

One thing is certain, email prospecting has already become saturated and buyers are getting numbed to anything that doesn't stand out. Now with ChatGPT, it's become even more difficult to distinguish a personalized email from one that AI generated.

Because of contact database tools like ZoomInfo and Apollo and email prospecting platforms like Outreach and Salesloft, any sales team can add thousands of prospects to email sequences with a few clicks.

Buyers are getting 20-30 "do you want to buy?" emails daily that they unsubscribe from or mark as spam.

It's a massive drain for everyone involved.

Successful sales teams are going to be those that can stand out from the crowd and create an incredible customer relationship.

How should sales teams be thinking about this?

I don't see these updates as anything but a good thing for sellers and customers. Totally agree that those who might be affected could be worried, but it's also an opportunity to improve processes and build better relationships with prospects.

If you're doing outbound the right way, you've got nothing to worry about. "Right" meaning adding value, thoughtful, contextual, human, relevant, and so on.

Sales leaders may need to reduce the autonomy they give to reps and have greater control over the outbound rules.

Reps will need to be more intentional with their outreach rather than carpet-bombing their ICP market with bulk email sequences.

Hopefully, in the future, when emails land in buyers' inboxes they'll be relevant and targeted towards actual need, which creates a better overall buyer experience.

Imagine seeing 1-2 emails daily from a seller helping you solve a problem you have today.

That would completely change the lens through which buyers view salespeople.

The Future of Outbound Outreach

Building effective outbound sales will come down to two things:

• Is the company you're targeting in-market (ready to buy)?
• Does the company have a favorable outlook on your brand?

As we've talked about in How the B2B SaaS Funnel Has Changed, nowadays, buyers do the majority of their research before even talking to a salesperson.

Building a strong brand in your buyers' mind around the problem you solve will play an important role when it comes time for the buyer to evaluate solutions.

Especially in B2B SaaS there are so many solutions out there it becomes difficult to parse through the noise.

Things like G2 reviews, awards, household brand case studies, and thought leader product endorsements matter.

If you know when prospects are in-market for your product AND they have developed a strong liking to your brand, then you don't need AI-generated copy and mass emails. You just need to find these people and say "what's up."

Easy right?

How Warmly Helps Sales Teams Thrive

Warmly is "warm leads" platform that helps you discover companies in-market for your product AND companies and people who have engaged with your brand. The platform synthesizes metadata across your sales and marketing techstack to arrive at an "Account Intent Signal Score."

When the score reaches a threshold, we help you autonomously outreach to the buyers at these companies who would find your product most relevant. And we take an omnichannel approach across email, LinkedIn, and website chat to reach them.

You can still use your favorite sequencing tools like Outreach, Apollo, SalesLoft or HubSpot. But now you're sending emails more responsibly and, with "fewer bullets in the chamber," more strategically to prospects that have the highest likelihood of converting.

Introducing a "warm outreach" process reduces the risk of over-sending mass emails AND being marked as spam for your entire email domain.

This announcement from Google and Yahoo, coming in the year's final quarter, offers an opportunity to put an outreach plan in place that sets your sales team up for success in the years to come.

Sales reps need a platform to help them outreach effectively without burning through your domain.

You can try Warmly for free here.

Qualified is somewhat of an industry standard when it comes to account-based marketing and chatbot-led lead gen.

They offer solid conversational chat, decent B2B buyer intent data, and fantastic customer service.

But here’s the thing:

Qualified is built for enterprise, not SMBs.

At a minimum, it will cost you $42k a year, plus the costs of running a sales team large enough to take the heavily human-led approach that Qualified promotes.

Plus, you pretty much have to be using Salesforce.

For large enterprises running a Salesforce + Marketo + 6sense tech stack, Qualified makes a lot of sense.

But for anyone not working in Salesforce (yes, other CRMs exist) or with a more modest budget, there are many other suitable options.

In this article, we’ll explore 8 more realistic Qualified competitors & alternatives.

1. Drift - Best For Enterprise
2. Intercom - Best For Customer Support
3. HubSpot Chat - Best For Basic Chat
4. 6sense - Best For Conversational Email
5. ZoomInfo Chat - Best For An All-In-One Platform
6. Demandbase - Best For ABM Execution
7. Clearbit - Best For Developer-Focused GTM Teams
8. Warmly - Best For Account-Based Orchestration
9. Why Consider An Alternative To Qualified?

8 Qualified Competitors & Alternatives

1. Drift - Best For Enterprise

Drift is kind of the industry standard when it comes to automated chatbots.

It sits at the other end of the human-automation spectrum to Qualified, designed for high-volume lead funneling.

(Image Source)

Why Consider Drift As An Alternative To Qualified?

Drift is basically built for large enterprises with millions of visitors to their sites each month, something which would require a huge salesforce to cover with Qualified’s motion.

They’ve also started leaning into AI-powered chatbots, though there are other more advanced tools in this space.

One key feature that Drift has over Qualified is video. A sales rep can send an embedded video in an email (like a Vidyard). This kicks off a cool little playbook:

• Prospect clicks the video
• Directed to a landing page to watch the video
• Drift notifies the rep that the prospect is watching the video right now
• Sales rep can reach out to start a live conversation with the rep while they’re engaged

Where Drift Falls Short

Drift kind of missed the boat on a deep integration with a CRM.

They’ve caught on now (they have native integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, and a couple of others), but they decided earlier to be an independent platform that you do everything out of.

This means you didn’t have the tie-in to CRM deals and opportunities that Qualified offers.

So, it's not really a perfect alternative if you’re just looking for a non-Salesforce version of Qualified.

Drift Pricing

Drift is cheaper than Qualified, but still fairly expensive.

You’ll pay at least $30k annually for their standard plan and $90k upward for their more advanced packages.

So, Drift is still serving the same market as Qualified (and thus not ideal for SMBs).

2. Intercom - Best For Customer Support

Intercom is a household name in chat, though it comes at it from a support angle rather than a sales one.

(Image Source)

Why Consider Intercom As An Alternative To Qualified?

Intercom is an industry standard for customer support.

It’s a people-driven chat tool, but they have started integrating more automated, AI-driven flows to respond to market demands.

This is great news for small businesses that might not have the budget for a dedicated support team but still want to provide at least some level of customer service, as Intercom’s AI chat tool is more cost-effective (and claims to resolve 50% of support requests instantly).

Where Intercom Falls Short

Intercom isn’t focused on the sales use case.

It is a passive rather than proactive chat tool (Qualified, Drift, and Warmly all take a proactive approach), and so it doesn’t respond to buying intent signals, like these solutions do.

Intercom Pricing

Intercom’s Starter plan begins at $888 per year. This includes their AI chatbot, but with limited functionality. You’ll have to upgrade to the Pro plan (custom pricing) to create custom answers.

3. HubSpot Chat - Best For Basic Chat

HubSpot Chat is a good out-of-the-box chat tool that requires minimal setup.

(Image Source)

Why Consider HubSpot Chat As An Alternative To Qualified?

Okay, we gotta be real here.

HubSpot Chat isn’t super sophisticated. Out of all the Qualified alternatives, it's the weakest tool as an outbound chat for sales teams.

The big win, however, is that it's free. So, it can work as a starting point for small organizations with no budget.

Where HubSpot Chat Falls Short

The list is pretty long here, but to keep things as simple as possible, HubSpot Chat lacks intent data, company reveal capabilities, sales orchestration, and reporting. However, this might change with their recent acquisition of Clearbit.

Alternatives like Warmly and Drift provide these functions, but HubSpot Chat isn’t designed as an ABM tool so much as a human-led live chat solution.

HubSpot Chat Pricing

HubSpot Chat is one of many free tools from HubSpot.

Being a freemium tool, though, functionality is limited. You’ll need to subscribe to a paid plan to go deeper (in which case, you’re probably better off going with one of the other alternatives listed here.

4. 6sense - Best For Enterprise Account-Based Marketing

6sense is one of the most well-known platforms in the account-based marketing space and is also core Qualified partner.

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Why Consider 6sense As An Alternative To Qualified?

6sense is a hugely comprehensive platform.

In 2023, it was named a leader in the Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Account-Based Marketing Platforms for the third year running, joined only by Demandbase.

Specifically, Gartner called out 6sense’s customer satisfaction, sales alerts and insights, and marketing strategy.

For those with an enterprise plan, 6sense also offers AI-driven recommended actions, helping sales reps focus on the highest-value activities.

Another cool feature is their conversational email.

It basically sends and responds to emails on your behalf using natural language. Obviously, this is a little scary, especially for enterprises, so it's generally reserved for low-stakes emails, but it's a cool way to clear a lot of tedious work off your plate.

Where 6sense Falls Short

For SMBs, the biggest challenge with 6sense, like many other competitors, is its pricing model.

Sure, it's great that you can pick and choose different modules and features to customize your plan (and pricing), but certain tiers need to be bought before others can activate.

For instance, to get the conversational email function we discussed above, you’ve got to buy the ABM platform, Predictive Analytics, and Orchestration tiers.

To get to a point where you have full end-to-end orchestration of a workflow, you’re spending ~120k.

Additionally, much of this is experimental and only works on Salesforce.

A few other drawbacks, as mentioned by Gartner, include:

• Lack of attribution modeling
• UX complaints
• Some reports regarding ICP traffic (like ICP traffic converted to a meeting) are missing

6sense Pricing

6sense customizes pricing to your company’s specific needs. However, it's not cheap. You’re looking at about the same price range as Qualified or Drift.

5. ZoomInfo - Best For An All-In-One Platform

ZoomInfo is a suite of GTM software platforms. They have tools for marketing, operations, sales, and hiring, as well as a decent chatbot with solid “if/then” workflows.

(Image Source)

Why Consider ZoomInfo As An Alternative To Qualified?

ZoomInfo is well-known as a best-in-class solution for contact and company data.

That’s really the core of their product offering. Everything else is built up around that.

For example, their SalesOS platform has prospect insights and buying intent signals, conversation intelligence (think Gong), data enrichment, and engagement tools like chat workflows and email automation.

They also have their own demand-side platform, so you can sync your audience so you can advertise to them.

The big benefit, then, is that when you want to add another GTM-related offering to your contract, you don’t need to stitch together another vendor. You just buy from the same supplier, reaping the benefit of native integrations.

Where ZoomInfo Falls Short

ZoomInfo does a lot of things well.

Where they fall short, though, is that in trying to do a lot of things well, they’ve started to lose ground on being the expert at any one thing.

ZoomInfo built its name on having the best contact data out there. But contact data has been commoditized and, in general, is an ongoing depreciating asset.

Realizing this, ZoomInfo has taken a “acquire and cross-sell” approach to expand revenue and keep growing ACV. They bought Insent.Ai for their chatbot tool, Comparably to expand their Talent asset, and Clickagy to improve intent signaling.

Diversifying into other offerings means less focus on their core competency, and so other vendors (like Apollo.io and Seamless.ai) have been gaining ground on contact data.

Their chat is also less powerful than alternatives like Qualified and lacks full CRM integrations. Again, this is a consequence of tackling too many surface areas at once, and acquiring tools rather than building them natively.

ZoomInfo Pricing

ZoomInfo is one of those “you gotta talk to us first” companies. We don’t have any pricing available, but we’ve heard that they’re also a pretty expensive solution, depending on the modules you opt to include.

6. Demandbase - Best For ABM Execution

Demandbase is another solid ABM tool and the only other platform named as a leader in Gartner’s 2023 Magic Quadrant.

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Why Consider Demandbase As An Alternative To Qualified?

Demandbase is, for all intents and purposes, a #2 version of 6sense.

It's been around for a bit longer (so it kind of has a legacy interface) and was a proponent of ABM for years before other brands jumped on the idea.

It does most of the same stuff as 6sense, with slightly better segmentation and reporting, though Gartner scores it slightly lower on both its Completeness of Vision and Ability to Execute scales. 

They also have a cool Buying Group AI feature in beta, which purports to “define, track, and engage members of a buying team within an account, outcome-driven ad campaigns to achieve marketing objectives, and prescriptive sales dashboards with recommendations for sellers.”

This is something many vendors have hand-waved at, but never quite nailed.

Where Demandbase Falls Short

Demandbase, like ZoomInfo and 6sense, has an “a la carte” model, and there’s plenty to choose from.

Unfortunately, “a la carte” generally translates to “expensive,” so this is another out-of-range tool for SMBs.

Demandbase Pricing

Demandbase creates pricing on a company-by-company basis, which is pretty much the standard for software solutions in this category.

7. Clearbit - Best For Developer-Focused GTM Teams

Clearbit is somewhat of a different beast from the rest, but still worthy of mentioning as a Qualified competitor thanks to its visitor identification and prospecting functionality.

More importantly, Clearbit was recently acquired by HubSpot, which has the potential to be a huge partnership in this space.

This acquisition combines CRM, data, and workflows, creating a solution that can break down data siloes and integrate seamlessly across systems. It will be one of the first to bring forth the new era of signal-based revenue orchestration.

As Whitney Sorson, CTO of Hubspot, puts it:

"Picture having complete data on over 20 million companies right inside HubSpot. All with over 100 rich data points about the companies and their decision-makers. Then, imagine being able to easily find high-fit prospects natively within your CRM. Finally, imagine that once those companies and contacts are in HubSpot, being alerted when those companies are showing buying intent."

(Image Source)

Why Consider Clearbit As An Alternative To Qualified?

Clearbit is great at deanonymizing site traffic, enriching it with best-in-class B2B data, and then syncing that back to your CRM.

They’ve got strong integrations with both Salesforce and HubSpot, with the latter likely to strengthen, given the recent acquisition.

They also have a powerful tool called Prospector.

This uses AI and their B2B database to find the buying committee for a given account and then sync that back to your CRM to line up orchestration in engagement tools like Outreach and SalesLoft.

Lastly, they offer a robust API for custom connections. So, if you’re a developer-focused GTM team and have people who can stitch together systems to create automation off of data, Clearbit is a winner.

Where Clearbit Falls Short

That last point works both in favor of Clearbit and against it.

If you’re running classic sales-led motions, Clearbit doesn’t come with any out-of-the-box playbooks to execute sales workflows. It’s designed more with the developer in mind.

That might change as the HubSpot acquisition plays out, though it's clear that any workflows will need to take place in their own sales tools.

For now, though, Clearbit is like the building blocks but doesn’t necessarily solve the problems end to end. You need to integrate it into your other tools to make sure the data is being used to fuel the rest of your GTM.

Clearbit Pricing

Clearbit’s plan structure looks pretty simple. You’ve got a free option (obviously limited), a paid option (no pricing information given), and an option to just buy API credits.

8. Warmly - Best For Account-Based Orchestration

Did we save the best for last? Obviously.

Let us introduce you to Warmly, our AI-powered platform for account-based orchestration, purpose-built for SMBs.

With Warmly, you can build an army of AI SDRs, finding that sweet spot between the human touch and AI-led engagement.

Also read: The Rise of Account-Based Orchestration in the Age of AI and Automation.

Why Consider Warmly As An Alternative To Qualified?

Compared to the other alternatives discussed here, Warmly takes a different approach.

We use generative AI to automate and personalize outreach on your rep's behalf.

That outreach is triggered by intent signals from tools in your tech stack (Slack, SalesLoft, Apollo, and so on), and enriched with best-in-class intent data from 6sense, Bombora, Clearbit, and PeopleDataLabs.

We call this account-based orchestration. It is a far more scalable, efficient, and cost-effective alternative to account-based marketing.

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The goal here is scalability and speed to lead.

35-50% of sales go to the company that responds first, but only 7% of companies respond within five minutes of a prospect filling in a form. Half don’t even respond for five days.

Achieving this speed is super difficult (and ridiculously expensive) to do with a human-centric approach. Warmly finds that perfect middle ground between human touch and AI automation.

Our AI platform runs your entire workflow—from intent being triggered to outreach being fired—until it's the right time for a rep to get involved.

(Image Source)

From the customer’s perspective, it looks like they were speaking with a human the whole time so that transition is seamless.

With this approach, you can build and scale up an AI SDR army on an SMB budget, creating full-cycle automated orchestration with human intervention at the right point based on real-time purchase intent data.

Learn more: Warmly: The Account Based Orchestration Platform.

Why Warmly Might Not Be A Good Fit For You

We, like all of the platforms discussed here, aren’t a perfect fit for everyone.

Warmly is designed specifically for the SMB and lower middle market.

So, we’re a great alternative for smaller organizations who find Qualified’s enterprise-facing feature set to be overkill or who simply don’t have the budget for that kind of sales motion.

However, it does mean that our integrations right now aren’t perfectly supporting the middle market or enterprise-level companies.

Warmly Pricing

Warmly offers 3 different plans:

(Image Source)

Our most basic paid plan comes in at $850 a month, or about ¼ of what you’d pay for Qualified.

We also offer a free plan, meaning you can start getting free warm leads without having to speak with a salesperson.

Get started for free here.

Why Consider An Alternative To Qualified?

Qualified is clearly a solid tool.

In fact, there are a few things it does exceptionally well:

• Reporting - You can see exactly who’s coming to the site, what percentage of traffic fits your ICP, which campaigns are driving conversions, which accounts are hot, and so on.
• Salesforce integration - Qualified is built by ex-Salesforce people, so they’ve got a pretty strong tie-in. The Qualified-Salesforce integration is about as deep as integrations get, so it's a great choice for larger teams who need everything fed into Salesforce as the source of truth.
• Amazing customer support - The team at Qualified is hungry to get you leads, and you’ll have a dedicated CSM to guide you through setup, including setting up Salesforce.

It's billed as “pipeline generation software,” which largely rests on their conversational marketing tools (i.e., website chat).

While there is an AI component to the software (you can build automated chatbots), where Qualified differentiates itself from competitors like Drift is in taking a distinctly human-led approach.

The idea is that customers are chatting with real people, which is where the drawbacks begin.

Only Works If You Can Scale Your Sales Team

Qualified’s ethos is human-first. That means that, as a customer, when someone reaches out through website chat, it's a human being on the other end.

This is great from a personalization standpoint, providing better buying experiences (assuming the skill is there on the other end). But it also means you need a dedicated person to “man the chat.”

This is made clear by Qualified’s reporting, which is built around things like chat leaderboards and analysis of traffic hours, so you can set up your team around peak times.

It's a great tool if you can organize humans appropriately, but it is largely out of reach for SMBs and even mid-market businesses that don’t have inbound reps on hand nor the budget to hire them.

Not Built For SMB Budgets

Speaking of budget, Qualified is expensive.

It's one of the most expensive chat-based ABM tools around. You’re looking at $42k a year for their Growth plan and $72k for the Premier plan, and those are just the “starting at” points.

Then, you’ve got things like implementation and integrations with your tech stack (you typically see Qualified paired with Salesforce and 6sense) to build.

All of this means lengthy setup times, and requires an established revenue organization to set up all the reports and workflows, plus organize all the reps.

Non-Salesforce Users Are Out Of Luck

Lastly, Qualified only works on Salesforce.

As mentioned, the Salesforce integration is strong. But they don’t integrate with any other CRMs.

So, it's basically a Salesforce-only platform.

An Army of AI SDRs at ¼ The Price of Qualified

It's tough to deny that Qualified is a solid platform.

If you’re deeply embedded in the Salesforce architecture and have the manpower to run a human-led motion, Qualified makes a lot of sense.

That’s a pretty niche situation, though.

For small and medium-sized businesses, lean sales teams, or any company working in any CRM that isn’t Salesforce, Qualified’s value prop becomes questionable, especially considering how expensive it is.

With Warmly, you can begin receiving hard ROI in 20 minutes with just two steps

1. Add a code snippet to the site
2. One-click authenticate your existing systems (Hubspot, Outreach, Apollo, Slack, LinkedIn, etc.)

You’ll immediately start improving conversion rates by revealing who is on your site, enriching that with best-in-class data, syncing that data back to your CRM, and routing hot accounts to the right rep.

Plus, with plans starting from just $850 a month (billed annually), you’ll reduce your Qualified bill by ~75%.

Discover how Kandji booked 2 qualified meetings just 8 minutes after going live with Warmly.

What is category design?

Category design is the process of creating a new category of products in the market.

The reward for being a category king is extraordinary.

According to Harvard Business Review, category kings capture 76% of the value within the category - as measured by market cap.

If you're not #1 in your customers' mind, try reframing and designing new category.

Benefits of being king:

1. Market Leadership: As the king of a category, you set the standards and define the norms within the market, often resulting in a loyal customer base that sees your brand as the go-to authority.
2. Pricing Power: Dominance in a category typically grants the flexibility to command premium pricing due to the perceived uniqueness and value of your offering, with less pressure from competitive pricing.
3. Enhanced Visibility and Growth Potential: Being at the forefront of a category often attracts more media attention, strategic partnerships, and investment opportunities, fueling further growth and solidifying market position.

Creating a category doesn’t mean having the best product. It’s about being seen in a different light — standing alone rather than in a crowd.

Here's how Warmly is designing the category of Signal-Based Sales Orchestration.

When to pursue category design

Pursue it when your market has many competitors.

I would argue that for any venture backed startups there's no reason not to pursue this strategy because you are inherently trying to disrupt the status quo. There are always incumbents.

Those incumbent solutions already occupy a space in your buyer's mind.

How do you enter and not only compete but capture market share quickly?

Warmly ran into this problem when we first brought our product to market.

There were already so many tools that help you capture more leads. People were also biased in what they liked.

Prospects had trouble figuring out where to put us in their techstack because our category didn't exist yet.

They knew they needed a CRM like Salesforce or a sales engagement tool like Outreach. Some sophisticated buyers would already have intent tools like Clearbit or 6sense in place.

But the concept of orchestration wasn't something people actively looked for.

Some of our early evangelists would describe us to others as "If 6sense, Drift, and Clearbit had a baby... that's Warmly."

Prospects began to view us as a cost-saving because we consolidated three tools into one for cheaper. Not a bad start.

But sales deals would stall because buyers would compare us directly with established kings and queens of existing categories they were familiar with.

It was difficult to compete in someone else's story.

Instead, we wanted them to see that "you can keep using tools like 6sense and Drift, AND Warmly, and here's why 1+1+1=5..."

Step 1: Select the right problem

Market >>> everything else. As Marc Andreessen, Founder and General partner of a16z, puts it, "In a great market - a market with lots of real potential customers - the market pulls product out of the startup."

A great market is more important than a great team or product for building a big business.

We felt a lack of market with our prior nametags product.

The market wasn't there.

Luckily, our team got better over time.

Given the recessionary market environment of Q3 2022, every company was looking for more warm leads, including us.

Teams that predominantly fed off inbound leads now had to go outbound.

We found that the key sub-problem of finding more warm leads was:

• Identifying who was in-market for your product
• Getting in front of them in that buying window

Tools like 6sense, ZoomInfo, and Apollo have raised hundreds of millions to try and solve this problem. It's not solved yet. But the market was already validated.

Step 2: Frame the new, different future for the customer

Bring your customers into the future by showing them something new.

As Category Pirates explains it...

Unique points of view have a simple architecture.

• Frame a different problem/opportunity.
• Evangelize a different future.
• Show customers how your “solution” bridges the gap from the problem/opportunity to a different future.

Most importantly, the company evangelizing the POV is immediately viewed as the leader.

For us, there were already many awesome tools out there to help with intent data and buyer signals, but all of these siloed solutions still have to be orchestrated - usually by humans, which is expensive and time-consuming.

Incumbents created their products during the golden age of the sales development representative, where companies solved their lead generation problem, which required a lot of manual effort, by throwing more humans at it.

With advancements in AI, instead of coordinating humans who need to operate multiple tools to catch a buyer's attention, we leaned into the point of view of using automation and orchestration to do the repetitive work.

Let humans do what they do best, building relationships, and let automation take care of the rest.

Step 3: Crystalize a radically different brand

What's the number one thing you want your audience to think when they see your name?

We wanted our audience to shortcut their mind to "AI Sales" when they thought of Warmly. Conversely, when they think of AI sales, they think Warmly.

Next, what do you want your audience to "feel" when they see your name?

We wanted them to feel powerful, that they could access something mystic and extraordinary by having Warmly.

We studied Carl Jung's brand archetypes and how they could be applied to companies.

Jung theorized that humans use symbolism to understand complex topics. And these symbols can be timeless and understood as categories. In the case of brands, these categories exhibit personality traits that customers easily understand. Archetypes, he called them.

‎Image Source

We selected the "magician" brand archetype, the ethos of which you can see reflected in our website.

Source: Warmly.ai

We chose our category name to be signal-based sales orchestration because

• It encapsulates our unique point of view and the future that we saw.
• Nobody else occupied it from an SEO perspective.

Once we crystallized our brand, we reflected it in every facet of our marketing and product - website, language, social posts, blogs, sales calls, feature naming, branding.

As Seth Godin, world-renowned marketing author, explains, "Having a brand means you've made a promise to people. They have expectations. It's a shorthand of what they should expect the next time."

Step 4: Lightning strike!

Once you define your problem, unique point of view, category, and brand, you're next step is to let the world know who you are and what you stand for in a lightning strike.

A lightning strike is a category-defining event.

It defines a new problem or, like in our case, an old problem that can be solved in a new way.

It must be carefully crafted to trigger a moment in the minds of your prospects where they say, “Wow, this is new... I want that.”

We wanted to frame the problem, claim the solution, and own the narrative.

We decided to use our Series A funding announcement as our lightning strike to spread word of mouth.

Super important here is to tell your story in three bullet points. Because that's all people will remember.

Any more and it dulls the punch of what you're trying to say.

Our template looked something like this:

• "The world is changing..." (Problem reframe)
• "Because of X, Y" (Unique point of view)
• "Warmly closes that gap" (Bridge the gap to a different future)

It's difficult to unwind the narrative once it's been released in a lightning strike to the world. You get one shot.

It's worth spending the time to get your story right.

Image caption

‎Source: ‎https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/19/warmly-pivots-from-zoom-tool-to-directing-warm-leads-to-sales/

Step 5: Make your position as category king permanent

Once the category king dominates the category, it can use that position to expand the category to higher levels.

Create a flywheel to continue reinforcing your position as category king.

We instituted a constant beat of mobilizations and lightning strikes we call "operation rolling thunder."

• Our investors wrote thought leadership pieces about our space, expanding awareness around the category, and putting us at the center. For example, Why NFX Invested in Warmly: Harnessing AI to End the Cold Call by NFX or Investing in Warmly by Felicis Ventures.
• We launched on Product Hunt, Bookface (a launch within YC's community), Hacker News, and others
• We actively engaged with revenue operations, account-based marketing, and demand gen community groups across Slack, LinkedIn, and Reddit, extending the reach outside of our inner circle of influence
• Our evangelists and affiliate influencers educate our category within trusted CMO/CRO groups
• We sought out additional press and newsletter coverage to keep our market attuned to how Warmly was developing
• We built an ecosystem of affiliate influencers, integration partners, and agencies
• We use each new customer as an opportunity to turn drive more testimonials and positive G2 reviews.
• We leveraged Lavender's playbook, consistently generating high-value content like webinars or blog posts and distributing across other channels like YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Medium, newsletters, and emails

Each lightning strike gives the flywheel another shove. It amplifies the effects of each of the prior listed initiatives, furthering the gap between the category king and the rest.

When people who haven't heard of us before read the press about our fundraise they assume that success is a straight line. It wasn't.

Those who are close to us know that progress was not linear. We pivoted four times before landing on the current iteration of our business, so we've learned a couple of things that didn't work before we found one that did.

See Max's LinkedIn post about our various pivots.

We want to share an unconventional framework for early startups that worked for us as we were navigating the idea maze.

Step 1: Assemble An Anti-Fragile Founding Team

The cofounders, Carina, Max, and myself were lucky enough to have met each other when we did to start this company.

Max and Carina met at Google, launching a "Where's Waldo" April Fools prank inside of Google Maps.

Max and I met through a founders fellowship program called On Deck (which I highly recommend for any early stage founder to apply).

Although we all shared a common goal and vision, we had very different styles and ways of thinking to achieve that goal - just ask any of our employees.

Over time, our unique approaches complemented each other and extended our strengths.

The archetype of each of Warmly's founder might look something like...

Max is our legendary purple cow.

Dreams big. Stands out. Reaches for the unreachable. Hustler.

Max is someone who, when you meet, you won't forget. He's a compelling character who can turn noes into yeses.

Top tier investors. Enterprise companies. The best talent in the market.

Eventually, they all cave.

He goes where nobody goes and thinks unconventionally.

For example, when Max takes a stroll, he'll sometimes select random numbers to call just to say "hi" and catch up for two minutes. It keeps the network warm and Max updated on where people are at and what they need.

This is a mindset you can't teach.

Carina is our methodical empire builder.

Filters out noise. Weights every decision. Leaves nothing to chance. Turns ideas into reality.

Carina is someone who has diagrams and graphics for everything. She is a systems thinker who has no problems calling your bull$&!+. She's the perfect complement for Max's creative energy and ideas.

Carina, although smiley by nature, is unemotional when it comes to decision-making, has the least bias out of the founders, and actively solicits everyone's opinion.

When the "processing period" has concluded, you won't look at the final proposal and think "that doesn't make sense."

It always makes sense.

Alan is our scrappy explorer

Curious. Dives headfirst. Always seeking the next big opportunity.

I started off in engineering at Warmly but have moved around a bit to sales, customer success, and now marketing.

To be honest I'm not detail-oriented enough to execute to perfection like Carina, or have the same relentless creativity that can pull rabbits out of the hat for the company like Max.

What gets me fired up is identifying and solving big bottlenecks in the company. And it's allowed me to learn how to pick new things up quickly.

Once the founders understood each other better we gravitated into roles that extended our zones of genius.

The wholeness in how we operated meant that with each pivot we learned more about product, market, and ourselves. We became anti-fragile, and by extension so did our company.

Eventually, after 4-years, the score takes care of itself.

Step 2: Leave Your Ego At The Door

Initially, we were naive enough to think that our ideas would be the ones to shape the world.

"Just imagine if we could build a better LinkedIn where people listed their asks and offers like in On Deck's slack channel."

Our first product, pushpull, connects people authentically to help each other out.

Source: pushpull.community

“You were so preoccupied with whether or not you could, you didn't stop to think if you should” - Jurassic Park

We didn't ask ourselves "If this idea was so good why hasn't it become a billion dollar company yet?"

There was no big favor marketplace.

We were trying to be the first.

And in doing so, we understood why many failed before us.

"How much money were people saving or making by doing this?"

Unclear.

We couldn't charge anything for the product.

We moved on to our next pivot, job change tracking for sales teams, where we started asking for money up-front.

That worked well until we realized we couldn't scale the product, another prerequisite for large VC backed company.

We went through a few more pivots, each one teaching us a new way to kill our ego.

To spare you the details, here are a couple more lessons:

• Acknowledging that we didn't have all the answers allowed us to seek external advice and shortcut our path to learnings. Nowadays we speak with founders of failed startups, former employees of competitors, investors in our space, anybody who could help diversify our perspectives
• Focusing on learnings rather than the satisfaction of being right ultimately led us to cut losing and embrace winning ideas. It's not enough to make revenue, we needed a path towards making one hundred million in revenue.
• Adaptibility became our superpower. A shortcut to building what other people wanted was learning the art of copying. Elon musk figured out that a lot of people in the world liked driving things with four wheels and a steering wheel. And there were already a bunch of roads out there. Why not re-create that (car) but just change one thing (battery)? Stand on top of the shoulder of giants.

Step 3: Stay as close as you can to the market

We did everything we could to stay close to the market.

At first we talked to prospects, customers, investors, competitors, former employees of competitors.

We even became a full-time SDR at another company to live and breathe the role.

We did in-depth interviews with our ICP buyers using tools like user interviews.

We studied competitor ads, websites, products, reviews and testimonials to see what people were saying.

We listened to sales and marketing podcasts daily to see the current issues and how people were resolving them.

We kept our eyes and ears peeled for any new entrants.

We contracted with former competitor employees to learn best practices.

We engaged in sales and marketing communities.

We posted on social frequently about our thoughts on the space to see how on the mark we were.

We ran language tests on landing pages with our ICP using tools like wynter.

We started co-hosting sales and marketing webinars.

Eventually, we became sharp about the market and how we could build something that was not only better, but new.

Step 4: Run toward your vision

Goals should be as clear as they are ambitious. When we knew the outcome we wanted and why we wanted it, we made the most progress as a company.

From there, it's a battle against time and distraction. Every second counts. Anything has the potential to take your mind away from the real north star.

Sales people will understand this: nothing matters but the revenue you bring.

You connected with 100 people on LinkedIn, sent 50 personalized emails, responded to all your internal slacks. But did you close any deals?

It's easy to get lost in "tasks." If we're not careful, the things we end up doing (or are asked to do) don't move the needle. Days start to melt. A month might go by and a lot was done on paper but it doens't feel like what James Currier, General Partner of NFX, would call "fast moving waters."

In the words of our General Manager of Nametags, Alessandro Cetera, "Sometimes it felt like we were swimming, but not moving."

We needed to maximize the impact of every second of the day.

It required a shift in thinking.

Say no to everything, except the things that matter.

Someone wanted to meet for 30 minutes for advice?

"Sorry, slammed right now."

Someone at Warmly wanted to introduce me to a potential partner?

"After Q4, thanks."

Manager is recommending a cool idea we could do?

"Interesting idea. Thanks for sharing."

Our head of Sales, Keegan Otter, does a fantastic job of protecting his time and mind. He says no to just about everything, and he does it all with a smile :). He works days, nights, and weekends - doesn't let a second go to waste.

And you know what happened? He doubled revenue for Warmly within months of joining and he's just getting started.

Words are cheap. Results speak louder than any pitch deck.

Doing something that sounds good is beside the point. Proving that you were right when it matters, consistently, especially when the decision was controversial was what maneuvered us into the "fast-moving waters."

It might seem chaotic from the outside to investors, friends, and even employees because you have trouble explaining how your mind is working. It's not useful towards your goal that everyone understood you perfectly. Your thinking is recalibrating every day anyways to new information.

On the inside, the picture gets clearer every day as you're trying new things, refining mental models, and building off of these "truth blocks" until your vision becomes not only clear, but obvious.

You realize that you actually have everything you need to make this a reality.

Suddenly the language you start to use with customers sounds like music. Their eyes light up when you show them your demo.

Everything downstream becomes easier once you've pivoted into something that was proved, iteratively, from first principles.

Sales come easier. Marketing comes more naturally. Product and engineering know what to build and can see the impact of their work with customers.

The whole company becomes 100% mission-aligned.

The funny thing about frameworks is that they tend to be backward looking mechanisms to explain to others how you think you got to where you did.

But every product, person, customer, and market environment is different.

We created Zoom Nametags during COVID, and now an AI sales platform during a tech downturn.

We may need to scrap it all and pivot again one day. Can't say how we'd do it. But now that we've done it once, after so many failed attempts, we're 100% confident of what it takes for us to do it again.

Hi World,

I’m Max, CEO of Warmly, a startup going through Y-Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch. For those unfamiliar, Y-Combinator (or YC for short) is a startup accelerator. Thanks to YC, our startup alongside over 200 others will learn, grow and accelerate over the course of the next 12 weeks. Curious about what goes on at YC and what a startup can learn from the process? My co-founders and I plan to blog about our experience to give you the inside look at the program and help us reflect on what will be a whirlwind experience!

So who the heck are we? Well, the Warmly cofounding team is made up of Val, Carina, Alan and me (Max). We’re a motley crew and sometimes in quarantine we make rap songs.

You might notice that above I hyper-linked something strange called a PushPull card instead of traditional LinkedIn profiles. That’s because in our first attempt at a startup we built authentic actionable business cards. But after going through another incredible accelerator this winter called Techstars (in Boulder, Colorado), we pivoted to Warmly.

What the heck does Warmly do? Warmly builds software that helps B2B companies get more customers easily. Our first product, TrackAdvocates, tracks the job changes of a business’ customer contacts and provides the tools to reconnect and generate new sales. This allows them to resell their software to users who already love them.

But back to the humans behind the business. Over the coming weeks, each of the cofounders will be writing up their honest thoughts and reflections on going through YC and what we’re learning. While it is mostly for us to process all the goodness we hope to come from the summer, we hope you’ll find it interesting too. So anyways, let’s start with Week 1:

YC Bootcamp. YC started off with a bang with a bunch of back to back Zoom sessions all week in what they call “Bootcamp”. Because of COVID, everything is remote. The sessions in Bootcamp are designed to give us a variety of topics to think about — from the best growth metrics to track, to product development cycles, to enterprise sales advice to how to write good emails, it was certainly a whirlwind.

One highlight was certainly hearing the Airbnb founders tell their origin story — I really respect them. They started exactly where I am now, in Y-Combinator. And their determination through the program led them to be “ramen-profitable” or making enough money to cover rent and basic food for the cofounders. As I watched them so at ease with one another telling their story by passing the speaking baton between each of the three, it was so clear how close they were to one another and how much they trusted one another. I felt grateful to share that amongst my cofounders.

Armed with 20+ pages of notes, my cofounders and I had a lot to digest and dozens of action items to implement with our startup. Personally I felt stressed and anxious. Starting a company is hard. Really hard. And we have a long way to go to be successful. I posted about my stress in the YC Slack group and was comforted to have a lot of support from other founders feeling similarly!

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about our posts? No problem — would love to hear them at [email protected]

P.S. if you want a way to to invest/support startups and small businesses like ours you can use Wefunder.

Hello! I’m Carina, Cofounder & Head of Product at Warmly. A few months ago, I left my beloved Google Maps family of 4 years to start a company with three amazing humans, Max, Alan, and Val. Since then, we’ve launched our first product PushPull, pivoted off that product (now available as a free platform 😊), launched our new product Warmly and got our first customers.

Two weeks ago we joined Y Combinator Summer 2020 batch (first remote batch because of COVID-19). For those who haven’t heard, Y Combinator (YC for short) is a 3-month startup accelerator program, which many companies in the Silicon Valley have gone through in their early days, e.g. Airbnb, Stripe, Dropbox, Coinbase, Instacart, Doordash, Segment, Docker. YC provides you with mentors and a network of alumni and other founders to accelerate your learning, growth, and traction — and hopefully prevent you from making similar mistakes as other first-time founders might.

What happened in Week 2 of Y Combinator?

YC is actually a lot less structured than you might expect. Generally, there’s 1.5 hour of sessions every Tuesday and Thursday. This week they covered finding product market fit and our YC partners/mentors Eric Migicovsky (ex-Founder of Pebble smartwatch) and Gustaf Alströmer (ex-Product Lead at Airbnb) shared their founder stories. They have pretty wild stories — we can’t share the actual talk, but here’s snippets public on YouTube we can share: Eric (YC 2011) talks about his Pebble Smartwatch Founder Story, and Gustaf (YC 2007) doesn’t have his founder story public, but he has an awesome How to Get Users & Grow talk, pulling from real examples from his Airbnb experience!

We also went through something they call Prototype Day, where each startup gets a few minutes to mock-pitch, in preparation for pitching to investors on Demo Day in August.

3 key points you want to get across in minutes:

1. What do you do? In 1 line! Just enough for the listener to be able to picture what it is your product does and be hooked into wanting to know more.
2. Why do users care? Show why the market size is huge. Show you have user traction.
3. Why is your team the one to do this? Why is your team amazing? Do you have founder-market fit and the right skillset?

You want people to remember you and what you do. Note that there’s 200+ startups in each YC batch. Investors will be listening to these back to back!

For example, our ‘What do you do’ 1-liner is:

“Warmly gives you weekly warm intros to warm leads for any B2B Company. When you sync your CRM with our software we monitor the job changes of all your users and let you know which companies they’ve gone to next so you can sell into new companies through people who already love your product.”

We also started with a funky team bio to help us be memorable. 😛

“Hi I’m Max and my co-founders are awesome. In their free time Carina is a chicken farmer 🐓, Val is a circus aerialist ️🤸‍ ️& Alan is a wushu master 🥋. I’m just the guy who convinced them to leave Google with me to start Warmly.”

Besides these sessions, there’s 2 office hours to discuss whatever you need help with. One with your group-mates (about 5 startups per group). One with just your team and a YC partner.

The rest of the week, it’s up to you to make the most out of it! Our team has been rapidly focusing on growth: getting more users, talking to users, improving new user experience, scaling the backend to support all the incoming new users, and hashing out clearer metrics to measure growth.

A realization: CEOs & founders are human too 💡

As I heard founder stories from Airbnb founders (YC 2009), from the Pebble founder, and other YC 2020 batchmates, I realized that all of them were in our shoes when they first started.

I remember when I was in college at UC Berkeley doing Computer Science. Getting a Software Engineering job at Google seemed like a far-off dream job. I remember I didn’t even apply to Google because I legitimately didn’t think I’d get in.

When I was at Google, every time I bumped into a VP or Exec, I definitely felt like they were levels above me — I wouldn’t even know what to say to them. And I remember reading news about the CEO of Facebook, the CEO of Uber, and seeing them as superhuman.

It wasn’t until we started fundraising that it really hit me. As part of reference checking our investors & VC firms, we chatted with some of the founders who those investors were funding. We met some famous CEOs. And they were just incredibly nice, humble, human beings. They also had struggles. They also had to go through rounds of failures and learnings. Same with the now-famous founders who came to YC to tell us their founder story and give us advice. The key things that made the difference was they made the leap to start a startup, and they constantly learned from others to get better, and they didn’t give up but instead pushed through all the challenges they faced.

You can do it too. :)

Bonus realization: I realized that all cofounders and first employees do a TON to get a startup to where it is today. Usually only the CEO is known (think Mark Zuckerberg, Travis Kalanick, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs). But going through a startup now and talking to other founders, I have mad respect for all cofounders. And I’m super grateful to have an amazingly quirky, smart, caring, driven hustlers whom I call cofounders.

A few asks: Product Feedback, Intros, and Sales Advice 🙏

Feedback on Warmly: If you have experience working in B2B in the Sales, Customer Success, or Marketing realm, we’d love to show you our product and get feedback on whether it’s intuitive and get ideas on how we can improve it!

Intros to potential users: If you know anyone in a company who might want to use our product, let us know! Even if they can’t currently buy our product, just giving us feedback on our product idea or trialing our product is extremely helpful! Ideally if you know a Chief Revenue Officer (or someone in Sales or Customer Success), that would be great — these are our ideal users. But intros to a good friend in any role who works at a B2B/Enterprise company works! (We can reach out to them to see if they can intro us to someone in Sales or Customer Success. 😊)

Advice on sales: None of the 4 cofounders have sales backgrounds, although we’re pretty good at being sponges and learning from smart people and putting things to practice. We could use advice on how to source leads, prioritize and nurture them, close deals, etc. Thanks so much to Eric Davis, Scott Leese, and our talented Techstars and YC mentors who’ve helped us a ton so far!

What happened in Week 1 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Max Greenwald’s post Week 1 in Y Combinator.

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them at [email protected]

Here are three assumptions we had invalidated by YC.

Hello! My name is Val and I’m a co-founder & CPO at Warmly. My fellow founding musketeers (Alan, Carina, Max) and I are going through YCombinator this summer.

*****

Something YC does really well is accumulating thousands of data points about startup activity. When they give opinions on what you should be doing, it is usually based on the experiences of scores, if not hundreds, of companies before you.

Here are three assumptions we had invalidated by YC.

1. “Our pricing matters”

We came to our partner meeting with a question of “how should we be pricing” and the answer was a literal ‘LOL’.

Pricing is irrelevant at our stage. Choose something decent and go with it, it’s a colossal waste of time to try to optimize pricing while our user base is in the double-digits and our monthly revenue is the quadruple-digits. Our primary focus is now purely on getting paying customers at the price point we have.

2. “We need to anticipate backend errors and have robust code that is unlikely to break”

As a team of mostly former Googlers, we are the Queens and Kings of optimization. We know how to take something that’s decent and make it awesome. In a startup, however, you need to take something that’s nothing and make it decent. For a crew of Type-A overachievers, making something “decent” can be extraordinarily painful.

We learned to not try to optimize our product. We are not Google. Startups need to take giant swings and then see if they work. Don’t bother fixing code unless it’s breakage is impacting your ability to get more sales and keep churn low. If customers are tolerating a suboptimal experience, great. Don’t touch it. Work on what is preventing new sales or what is going to make people quit your product in the next two months. Don’t plan features further out than that. Why? Because being slow to launch = delays in getting user feedback = less understanding of users and the problem = you’re slow to iterate solution = startup death.

As a former designer, I had to learn to be content with a “not atrociously terrible” UX. It wasn’t easy. Our YC partners, Gustaf and Eric, really drove home the idea that “if people aren’t complaining, then you’re wasting your time fixing it”. Focusing on “delightful” UX is a luxury for businesses more developed than ours.

3. “A lost sale is a failure”

If a prospect didn’t want our product it’s a “gosh darn it, well better luck next time”.

NO. If a prospect didn’t want your product, document exactly what it was about them that made them a bad fit. Track this. Celebrate disqualifying certain demographics because that helps you narrow in on your actual ideal customer.

If you do this documentation and still feel like the prospect would have benefited from your product, then you’re a crap salesperson and you need to get better. Record your sales calls. There is nothing quite as cringy as watching a recording of yourself, do it. You’ll catch all of your “likes” and see how terrible it is when you don’t make “eye-contact” with the person on Zoom.

Gross salesguy/dad from Matilda, my favorite childhood movie. I literally used to try to make things move with my mind. It never worked. :(

What happened in Week 2 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Carina Boo’s post Week 2 in Y Combinator.

Hey all! I’m Alan, co-founder & VP of Engineering at Warmly.

My co-founder Val mentioned in our last post “Three Things YC has changed our minds on”, that moving too slowly can lead to startup death. Another way to think about it is that you aren’t moving fast enough if things aren’t breaking. See, if a startup had 100 days of runway to make something happen, shipping features every 10 days means it only has 10 bets to make on the market. But the truth is nobody knows the odds of success for each bet. The only thing we can control is the number of bets we take. For a small team like ours, up against well-funded startups and entrenched incumbents, speed is our only advantage.

During our most recent YC office hours, YC’s advice to us was very simple: aggressively pursue growth. As a team we’ve always tried to move fast. But this week we dialed it up a bit.

We launched Warmly across YC’s internal network and its “B2B Preview Day” and saw an 11x spike in inbound interest from customers in 2 days. It was kind of a shock to the system. On the business side we were underwater with customer calls, sales-demos, and follow-ups, in addition to managing existing users. Our engineering backend system limits were tested when multiple customers simultaneously integrated with our platform. The result?

Some of our customers weren’t able to integrate. Cue: sinking feeling.

The product roadmap we had agreed to for the week was thrown out the window, and all hands were on deck to fix critical system issues, while delivering value to our new customers. At the same time that this was happening, we received feedback from a few existing large trial customers that we needed to tighten up the product and improve our offerings, ASAP, for them to convert.

I remember thinking back to something one of our mentors once said.

“In startups, it doesn’t get easier, it only gets faster.”

But just like personal growth, startup growth also happens in moments of discomfort. This growth doesn’t materialize in the traditional sense i.e., more customers, more employees, or more money in the bank. Instead, the discomfort forced us to identify new areas of improvement across the company — from business, to engineering, to team communication. The thought crossed my mind that the environment we all operated in suddenly shifted and that our company would need to level up to survive because the startup clock doesn’t wind back.

Warmly’s growth also necessitated personal growth. It’s at the point of breakage, when I’m scrapping and struggling against a deadline, that I can see clearly where the biggest and most important pains (and gains) are. And that’s when we can go back to the YC community, who are all going through the same thing, to commiserate and ask for advice. In this way, the team grows, the product grows, and so our company grows. YC’s advice is simple, but wise. Pursue growth.

It’s a never-ending, virtuous, innovative cycle of things breaking and fixing, all the time.

And yet, through all the insanity, we still make sure to find time to laugh, gently tease, and connect with each other through fun little team bonding activities, like Wikipedia races or Draw My Life.

What happened in Week 3 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Val Yermakova’s post Week 3 in Y Combinator.

Want to get in touch or send thoughts about the post? Would love to hear them at [email protected]