How to Create Better Sales Emails: Will Allred, Lavender

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Mark Evans: Most sales outreach emails are terrible. They're often impersonal and reek of desperation. There's little or no research. It feels like a high volume based activity. If you throw enough spaghetti at the wall, you hope that some of it will stick. Well, frankly, there has to be a better one. Salespeople need to take a new and different approach to outreach, and email that is more personal and relevant. To better understand the sales outreach world, I'm excited to talk to Will Allred, founder of Lavender. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Guest: Hey. It's great to be here. I appreciate that.

Mark Evans: Why don't we start with the story of Lavender? Like many startups, it's a love child which emerged from a company called Sorter in Atlanta. Who is Sorter? What was the pain that you were experiencing, and what led to the decision to start Lavender?

Guest: I can give some quick background. Lavender is a Chrome extension that helps sellers at every stage of the writing process write a better email faster. Now how we got there is sort of a interesting woven path of interesting moments, I would say. At the time, this is 2018. I was working in a consulting firm in Atlanta, a firm. I went to a hackathon in Atlanta where I met my now cofounder, William Balance, who's the CEO of Lavender. He pitched this idea of why don't we take people's digital footprints and use that to create smarter segmentations within our marketing campaigns? Can we segment a marketing list by more than demographics or behaviors and actually try to get an understanding of why people are doing what they do so that we can be smarter about what we create and put in front of them? Really, we could personalize that entire digital experience to so much more in such a better way. There's so much great research around, you know, how people think and preference towards content, imagery, etcetera. I was immediately drawn to the idea. I, you know, had been working on running campaigns for brands. And so I saw the pain of I have this superficial idea of, quote, you have an idea of this, like, individual in a box, but you don't really see how they see. You don't know if they're introverted. You don't know if they're open to new experiences. We built that out for about two years working with brands like Yamaha, Gravity Blankets, really helping them think smarter about how they went to market. One of the things that came across along the way is you're in this marketing seat to keep with the persona. We're a 22 year old paid media analyst, and your job is to put these ads together. You don't know the personality science. You don't know how to do those things. So we built tech that's now pretty much underlying Lavender that would help you analyze the content to make sure it's going to the right prospect. Now fast forward a little further. It's March 2020. This whole thing happened. And all of a sudden, we start getting phone calls from all of our leads, all of our customers, basically being like, hey. We're cutting marketing budget. We're shutting this thing down. We're like, oh, we have, like, a couple months of runway, and we have no customers. So that's not good. What are we gonna do? We didn't really know how this thing was gonna weather out. We didn't know what the next trend was gonna be. We were up in New York altogether at the time, and Will, my cofounder, I was scrolling through TechCrunch, came across an article on LinkedIn shutting down support for Sales Navigator within Gmail, part of the Microsoft acquisition. We were like, we've got the data connections. This could be an easy thing that we bring to the surface for people, and we could probably make some cash to hold the business over. Well, we decided to strap the content analytics on the back to give you a sense for how your email was written and how it was gonna come across, a la Lavender. We started showcasing that to some folks around 2020. Got some really positive feedback, stuff that we had never heard before with our prior product. We were able to start iterating on it. Over the course of that summer, we worked with some investors and advisers to start testing different markets that we could go after with this product. One of the first ones was recruiters, job seekers, customer success. We tried several different avenues, and we kinda knew sales wasn't obvious, but we wanted to make sure. It wasn't until late July, I wanna say, of twenty twenty when Nick Bennett can't remember if he's still over at Alice, but he posted on LinkedIn about Lavender. And all of a sudden, we just saw our install take off. I mean, relative take off. Right? We're like, what's going on? We all of sudden had this realization. Salespeople love it. Salespeople love to talk about it. They love to use it. Let's lean into this. We started building what we refer to as the most helpful sales email assistant on the planet.

Mark Evans: Couple questions. One is, why do you think it resonated with salespeople in particular? What were they doing wrong, or what what was frustrating them about using email, which is obviously was and so is a very, very powerful tool for sales?

Guest: There's several trends going on that had that impact. One, I would talk to is the market as a whole. So you have everybody going remote. Everyone is away from people within the office. I remember when I was at the consulting firm, I would look over my shoulder and be like, hey. Do you mind giving this email a look? We no longer have that, like, easy in person frictionless feedback. The other one is you have a time in which the amount of emails going out the door more than doubled. You had a lot of outbound going into people's inboxes. And as a result, the amount of response that people were getting almost got cut in half as some data that HubSpot put out. What sellers used to be able to rely on was the, you know, volume knob. They could crank the volume knob, and it would just be okay. That security blanket disappeared pretty much overnight, where all of a sudden, we overwhelmed our readers within the inbox, and they weren't able to triage through all of that inbound. People stopped seeing as many replies. That would be number two. And then the third is really if you think about it, how we're taught to write in school. We're not taught to write in a business email tone. No one ever says this is the way to write an email. When you think about this important note that you have to put together, you actually end up thinking about it in the wrong way because of the way you were taught to write is not the way that you should be writing in this particular instance. It's not formal. It's not comprehensive. It's, in fact, the opposite. Your goal should be to build curiosity and leave questions unanswered and speak as though they're a friend you haven't met yet. You've got remote, the overall volume of emails going out the door, and how we're actually taught to write, those three things had a huge impact on how sellers really felt about our product. The fourth trend that was really impactful for us as we got started was sellers flocked to LinkedIn to share their experiences and talk about what they were doing. We happened to be at the right place at the right time with the right product where we just recognized pretty quick, hey. People are talking about us on LinkedIn, and we should lean into that.

Mark Evans: I was listening to a podcast, the Pivot podcast, with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, and one of the things that they mentioned was that people are spending less time in front of screens, which is a good thing. Gotta get out there, gotta socialize, gotta see people, go to concerts, go back to work in person. Scott called it being untrapped. It does spark the question about what do you think the impact is on Lavender now that people can go to conferences? They can meet people for coffee, and salespeople, they're busting out. They wanna get out there. A salesperson does not wanna be stuck in front of their computer all the time. Give have you thought about what the impact might be, and what's your plan to adjust to the new reality?

Guest: There's two things that we looked at when that was going you know, when things were getting back to being in person, which was let's see what happens. Having faith in the fact that our data science behind the scenes is going to track, analyze for this, and help us continue to provide valuable recommendations for sellers. Two, couple of the things within our own product and design of product account for this. So one, we're the only platform on the Internet that provides a mobile preview for sellers when they're putting together an email. You talk about being unplugged. Your email is eight times more likely to be read initially on a phone. So that's your first impression, and we're actively tracking and monitoring for that. We're putting that right in front of your face and showing it to you and being like, here. You can edit right here within this phone view and make it look exactly like you'd want it to look on their screen. The other thing that was unexpected, we didn't really think about is when you're in your inbox at the office, we have a nice little purple icon that sits in your compose window, and it's sort of like your hub for using the product. Well, we actually saw growth take off in January, and it's because people in the office would see their colleague using the tool, and they'd be like, oh, I love it. It's my personal assistant for writing emails.

Mark Evans: Let's talk about the sales landscape, which has dramatically changed over the past two years as sales becomes more digital and less in person. And my take is that conferences will come back. Maybe companies will approach them more strategically. It it may not be a maybe a quality game versus quantity. How do you guys see the sales landscape? How is it different, and and how do you think it will dramatically stay different going forward?

Guest: Well, I think we've normalized much more now to having sales teams being remote. I would say that's probably a major shift as far as the makeup of a sales team and where they are. I'm just excited that we get to lean into new experiences and give off advice and think through new challenges. Because you talk about going to a conference, well, now we've gotta account for the fact that post conference follow-up emails are probably a category of email that we should either be creating content around or thinking about within our own product experience.

Mark Evans: In terms of how salespeople are operating these days, what do you think it's like to be doing sales? What are the new rules of engagement? Because, obviously, they're leaning into email just as they always have, but they're trying to take a smarter, more personalized, more relevant approach given the fact that our inboxes are overflowing. Marketing automation is a Pandora's box. Once you let it out, it got it went wild. What do you think it's like to be a salesperson these days from the lavender perspective?

Guest: It's it's interesting because I talk to a lot of sellers on daily, and I think one of the things that stands out is, you know, we have this idea in our head of the lazy sales rep who's just pushing automated messages. And when you actually look at the conversations we're having, people are they want to do better. They want to not have poor results. The the reason you see the conversation feel so automated, etcetera, is because, one, you can automate and send a lot of emails, and that doesn't necessarily have to come from the majority of people to create the majority of email. Two, the the other piece of that is negative experience with an email is going to stick with you a whole lot more than an indifferent positive one. Right? Most positive email experiences are fairly indifferent. Yeah. Every now and then, you're like, wow. That was a great email. But it's it's not, like, all the time. Right? I think the goal for email should be it didn't upset them, not necessarily that they're, wow. That was amazing. Right? That comes with its own slew of conversations. But I think when I talk to sellers, they're trying to get better. They're trying to figure out, okay. I know personalized emails get two times the amount of responses their automated peers. How do I do that? How do I think about that? What should I be putting down on paper? One of the interesting challenges with sales is most of these people move in from SDR to AE or to manager, and they move out of the role. That skill doesn't get to continue to hone. It's just the organizations that train it back down. It's a tough time to be an SDR, but at the same time, there's never been a better time to lean into community. There's never been a better time to lean into technology tools to enable you to get better.

Mark Evans: Before we talk about Lavender and its approach to marketing, one last question about sales and and just your thoughts about where do most salespeople go wrong digitally? Digital is so important these days Yeah. In person means, but where do they stumble and undermine themselves? What are the biggest bugaboos that they run into?

Guest: The biggest thing when it comes to sellers is getting out of your own head, getting out of your own shoes, and putting yourself in the buyer's shoes. I see this over and over again. When they're putting together an email and the mindset is, well, I need to add this piece of information about me. I need to tell them what I can do for them. They need to understand. They need to add that clarification. And in reality, this person on the other end is putting out fires, not thinking about you at all, and honestly doesn't really care about you at all. What they care about are those quote fires that I'm referencing. It's that shift of mindset of let me try to convert them to let me try to converse with them about their problems. That is the biggest piece of feedback that I could give sellers. It's just like, stop talking about yourself. We could talk about the data of shortened emails, simplify them down, make them mobile optimized, lean into tentative tones. But if you're not talking to them about them, you're not necessarily going to find the optimal result. What people really care about is that you show up, you provide an understanding of their current scenario, and you try to genuinely engage them about what's going on at their,

Mark Evans: you know, day to day job. I often say that customers are selfish as they have no interest in you. They're only interested in themselves and what you can do for them. If you're not talking about their issues and their aspirations, then you're really running up a running up a hill. Like a lot of companies with really cool technology, Lavender comes out, you've got a product, and I would love to get into the strategic approach to marketing. Did you have a plan of attack? Were you just mostly focused on product and getting a little bit of traction and then something happened like a Nick Bennett, who's an influencer on on LinkedIn? Or did you have a road map that said, we're gonna use this channel and this channel, and we're gonna see if we can leverage them as well as we can?

Guest: I am a huge proponent of this book, traction. And one of the things that it emphasizes over and over and over again is the idea of power laws. You've got a power law distribution. That means, basically, 80% of your results will come from 20% of your actions. And so as you set up test experiments, it's, okay. This week, we're gonna try these three channels, and we're just gonna go all in, see if we get any traction there, and let's see what happens. We've tried things. We've gone reached out to news publications. We've gone and we've tried email marketing. We've tried retargeting ads. We've tried all these different things. And when you see something like Nick Bennett posting on LinkedIn and seeing that engagement happen real time, it's okay. That's the next experiment. Let's go all in on that. When you think about it, most of our results are directly tied to LinkedIn right now. And so now we're starting to diversify out from that into other channels, but that's still at the core of the strategy.

Mark Evans: Let's take a step back. Got this product. And and like many startups, we gotta get the word out. We gotta market this thing. What was step one for Lavender?

Guest: Step one for Lavender is thought about it from the end user's perspective. The person scrolling on LinkedIn and trying to do their day job while sitting at home for the fifth month in a row. And it's, what are they here for? What could we do that would be helpful? And helpful is really the word that kinda describes it all because it's let's just lean into being useful generator of content, ideas, etcetera. Because we we'd seen other brands do this and have success. Gong's notorious for putting out those reports on, you know, what to say and what not to say in a call and all of this, that, and the other. And so we're we've got that data too. Why don't we lean into that? Why don't we do it because we're a team of four people? Why don't we do it with a personal flare of you know, we're literally trying to assist you in writing that email?

Mark Evans: The question I wanted to ask you, lot a lot of b to b brands, b to b SaaS brands look at LinkedIn, and they recognize that this is where a lot of the action is happening right now. A lot of the influencers and some decision makers are spending a lot of time on LinkedIn trying to identify new possibilities and opportunities. But there are two ways to play the game. There's personal and there's company. What's the lavender approach? Because you have a big presence on LinkedIn, a big personal presence. You've built a personal brand. But at the same time, a lot of companies don't do a lot with their company pages. It's almost like they go through the motions with the company page. The exceptions are companies like Gong and Lemonade. What's been the lavender approach? Is it a bit of a balancing act, and and what's the difference between what you do on your personal profile from what you do on the company page?

Guest: For the longest time, we ignored the company page as part of our strategy. We leaned into where the algorithm sat, and we said, okay. LinkedIn doesn't care about company pages. They care about personal brands. We just leaned into it. Now as a byproduct, people started following the company. I think we're over some 6,500 company followers at this point. Now we've started to play around with putting some content out and really making it personal. We're not trying to make it feel like a corporation is publishing a PR report. It's cheeky stuff like, hey. Take the commas out of your writing. Fun exercise. If I was talking to another brand about how to approach that, it would be it's actually funny you asked this because I literally just got a text from a friend who works at another company, and they're trying to get into LinkedIn. Much bigger company than a quote, baby brand. He was asking me about LinkedIn groups, and I was that is a forgotten feature. If I had to give advice to another, you know, brand, it's one, it's gonna take some time and effort. There was a wonderful paper that compared social networks and blockchains. And if you think about it, if you're early to Twitter, if you're early to LinkedIn, if you're early to TikTok, it's a lot easier to gain following and currency, social currency of following. And, like, early days of Bitcoin, it was a lot cheaper to mine Bitcoin and gain capital. Now that the noise has gotten more populated, it's harder to gain that traction. And so what are the tips that I have when it comes to that? Lean into the fact that other folks have that capital. Use the comment section. Crazy concept that no one seems to understand there. Just I'll just post. By posting, I'll see my engagement rise. Well, anytime I see my engagement fall, I know that I need to go out and start commenting some more, and then I see it go back up. It's pretty simple.

Mark Evans: The other platform that I wanted to ask you about, and this came out of a conversation I had with Will Aiken from SalesLoft, is the use of TikTok. When I asked him whether there were anybody else out there who was b to b SaaS people who are using TikTok, you mentioned a handful of people including yourself. What has been your TikTok journey? Were you originally using it for fun like everybody else and watching your dance videos, or did you see it as a viable marketing channel? And what did you learn so far from using TikTok?

Guest: So couple of things. One, I cannot claim to have used TikTok before using it for work. It's really one of those things where I've I've dragged my feet on it for probably too long. The reason I started with TikTok was pretty simple, and it was I was looking at my feed on LinkedIn, and I was seeing what stood out to me. And Will Aiken over at Sales Feed stood out above and beyond because he's putting together creative, fun videos. Nick Caposi, for example, over at Demostack, he's putting together these wonderfully engaging videos. Nick Posey, for example. His following is not massive, but his engagement rate's insane. Mhmm. You talk to anyone who knows Nick Posey. I love Nick. And part of the the lasting power of video is it's actually memorable. It sticks with you. When I was thinking about TikTok, actually worked with the both of those pretty closely, getting advice from them on how they're doing video, how they're thinking about it. And I was like, okay. Let's start doing the same thing that we did with LinkedIn. Post helpful content, be, you know, of service to those that we're trying to serve. With that, we've seen some pretty good engagement. Can't say I've figured out TikTok by any stretch. I think the only thing that we figured out is subject line content does well there, but I more prefer it for posting it to other platforms, posting it to LinkedIn, for example, where I go to one of our advisers, Morgan Ingram, has a event in Atlanta, more social than SaaS. And I show up there and somebody walks up and says, hey. I've seen your TikToks before. Cool. I was that's surprising. You think about what that does for a brand is it makes, one, it more personable and approachable. But two, it brings a little bit further recognition beyond just your little profile picture. Pre TikTok, I'd be terrified to change my profile picture because how are you gonna recognize me within your feed other than my name?

Mark Evans: I do find TikTok interesting. I'm I'm on TikTok. I'm making some very bad videos right now, but I'm experimenting. You know? I'm getting that mirror and seeing what works and what doesn't, and this have to, over time, improve. The one thing I sense from a b to b SaaS marketing perspective is a lot of marketers are looking at LinkedIn and and sensing that there's I don't know if there's LinkedIn fatigue or maybe it's the shiny object syndrome. Is that there's a tendency to look beyond. And TikTok seems to be that new shiny toy that we wanna play with.

Guest: It's it's a little different, and I think what it comes back to is TikTok is easier to gain traction on with less work. Whereas companies, when they think about something like LinkedIn, now the game is more similar to an SEO strategy where it's just something you need to be consistent with. Otherwise, you won't see the results.

Mark Evans: This has been a great conversation. Final question would be, where can people learn about you and Lavender?

Guest: If they're looking to connect with me, I always push them to my LinkedIn. They can always email me. It's will.allred@trylavender.com. Outside of that, those would be the two places that I would tell them to go. You can go to the website, lavender.com.

Mark Evans: And one final question about lavender pricing, how people use it. You said it's a Chrome extension. Mhmm. Provide the mechanics before we sign off.

Guest: Anyone can go in and install the product for free. There's a free tier, but it comes with a free trial as well, so you can try out all the premium aspects of the product. There's three tiers to the the product. You could be on a team plan of one or a million, and that includes all of our integrations. It provides, like, access to beta functionality, things like our Lavender Anywhere tool, you can use it anywhere across the web, or you've got our pro plan, which is an unlimited access to our tool sets and features. It doesn't come with all the integrations. And then our free tier, which doesn't have things like mobile preview. You you don't get as many profile lookups per month when you're trying to personalize an email to somebody.

Mark Evans: Well, thanks, Will, and thanks for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review, subscribe via Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app, and share via social media. To learn more about how I help b to b SaaS companies as a fractional CMO, strategic adviser, and coach, send an email to Mark@MarkEvans.ca, or connect with me on LinkedIn.