Hello!
Hope all is well at <your company>!
Are you interested in connecting with customers through email? Did you know that most mailboxes are inundated with hundreds of emails a day?
I’d love to talk to you about a terrific new startup to help you cut through the noise! Do you have time for a quick call next week?
Looking forward to hearing from you!
– Scott and Elaine
What do you think? Are we crazy to expect a response? Perhaps we’re just really terrible at outbound marketing?
All possible. But you’d be surprised how many sales and marketing pros send precisely these kinds of messages out by the thousands every hour, hoping that someone will bite. There’s always that person already looking for the thing you’re offering, right? Still, you’d probably have a better chance of selling a ketchup popsicle to a person in white gloves than getting conversions from that impersonal, out-of-touch, and just plain crappy email.
Yet we still play this game because we’ve conditioned ourselves to believe that as long as we play the odds (massive volume) it will result in a percentage of sales. Truth be told, this has worked in the past. And to date, most of the innovation we have seen in the sales software space has been around increasing the volume of sales outreach. Companies such as Outreach and Salesloft have done a great job of automating outbound workflows and dramatically increasing the volume of email outreach.
Ok, so we have the superhighway in place, but the vehicles are underpowered beige minivans with AM radios. Yes the vans run, but they’re completely unmemorable. Kinda like our generic email earlier. Our names are on it, there’s a product/service that’s mentioned, and it made it to someone’s inbox. But then it’ll probably get deleted. Immediately.
What kind of email doesn’t get deleted immediately? The kind that feels personalized, like talking to someone who has taken the time to understand you and your needs.
So how do you connect with that stranger on the other side of the inbox?
Well, we think we’ve found a solution. Today Norwest is thrilled to announce our Series A investment in Lavender, the leading AI-powered sales email coaching platform.
What kind of email doesn’t get deleted immediately? The kind that feels personalized, like talking to someone who has taken the time to understand you and your needs.
Product Vision: Write Better Emails Faster
It takes about 15 minutes to write a personalized email, and the average time a recipient takes to read it is 15 seconds. Lavender’s mission is to help bridge this gap so sales reps can focus on what they do best: building relationships and selling products.
The feature we heard the most raves about is the Lavender Score. As the name implies, Lavender scores every email on a scale of 1 to 100 against metrics such as sentence length, the ratio of I’s to You’s, and mobile friendliness. Lavender’s AI will then suggest edits in real-time to optimize the email. Most sales teams guide their reps to score 80 or above before sending an email.
Another amazing feature is the “personality” function. Basically, you type in an email and Lavender generates an entire personality profile based on a proprietary AI algorithm. We were amazed by how quickly Lavender identified the best sales approach for each prospect. Scott found it so effective that he even used it on his wife to figure out how best to get on her good side (hey, it worked!). We absolutely think it should be adapted for dating sites (but that’s a blog for another time).
Anyway, Lavender’s product has so many great features that you just have to take it for a test run yourself. Lucky for you, it’s free!
It takes about 15 minutes to write a personalized email, and the average time a recipient takes to read it is 15 seconds. Lavender’s mission is to help bridge this gap so sales reps can focus on what they do best: building relationships and selling products.
Passionate, Focused Team
When we met Co-founders Will Ballance (CEO), Will Allred (COO), and Casey Corvino (CTO), we were struck by their grit and resourcefulness. They had spent years obsessing over how to write the best cold outreach emails that would yield the highest reply rates and had applied their learnings to building Lavender.
From the UI to the product workflow, it was clear that they deeply understood their end user (SDRs and AEs). It takes 15 seconds to install Lavender as a Chrome Extension, and you see value in the first few seconds of use. Will B. is constantly thinking of how to improve the product. Casey was an early adopter of GPT-3 and continues to push the envelope on applying generative AI. Will A has been a thought leader in the sales community for years. It was no surprise to us when Will A. was named a LinkedIn Top Sales Voice in 2021, and he and his co-founders have created the leading AI-powered sales email coaching platform.
Strong Customer Love and Community
We love backing founders who think long-term. Lavender has always led with value from Day 1 and adopted an ethos of sharing sales best practices with everyone. And they’ve done so in a fun, approachable way (hey, Lavender Joe). As a result they’ve built a tight-knit community of sales leaders and SDRs.
In our diligence process, we were blown away by the customer love for Lavender’s product. We heard countless stories from SDRs, AEs, and sales leaders on how Lavender had empowered them and made them successful. Not only did customers see a 2-4x increase in cold email conversion, which led to booking more meetings and a lift in pipeline, but Lavender also helped them write better emails faster, reducing the email creation time by up to 50 percent.
People #LoveLavender so much that they’ve even gotten a Lavender tattoo! And even jammed to the Lavender single (yes, they recorded a single).
Want to write better sales emails faster? Check out Lavender.
