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6sense Review: Is It Worth It in 2025? [In-Depth]
6sense Review: Is It Worth It in 2025? [In-Depth]
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Are you trying to figure out if 6sense is the right sales intelligence software for your marketing and sales team?

In this honest 6sense review, I’ll go over the platform's features, usability, data quality, integrations, and even customer support to help you make an informed decision.

TL;DR

  • Range of features: 8/10. 6sense offers a good range of features for sales and marketing teams, most notably their dynamic audience-building and visitor identification software. Despite that, the platform does not provide contact-level data of website visitors and does not have live engagement features.
  • User interface and usability: 5/10. The platform has a steep learning curve that has been confirmed by multiple users of the software. Building automations with the tool’s orchestrator is not easy in the beginning, either.
  • Data quality: 7/10. There are negative reviews regarding intent data inaccuracies and duplication issues, but there are still some customers who are satisfied with the tool’s keyword research intent data and other signals.
  • Integrations: 7/10. 6sense has a good range of native integrations, partnerships, and a whole bunch of other integrations that could already be in your sales stack – but some users have reported difficulties setting up the integrations.
  • Customer support: 8/10. The platform offers best-in-class account management and customer success, but some of the customer support reps have shown poor product knowledge, according to G2 reviews.
  • Pricing model: 5/10. 6sense does not have transparent pricing, and 3rd party data shows that their average cost is higher than alternatives on the market – making it too expensive for SMEs. The tool has a free plan but with only 50 credits to spend monthly.

Average rating for 6sense: 6.6. No pun intended.

6sense Overview

6sense is an AI-powered ABM platform that combines B2B data with intent signals to automate your ABM workflows.

The platform can identify the accounts that are most likely to buy so your sales reps can react in time.

The tool has gained recognition for its advertising capabilities, which help you build retargeting campaigns based on its intent data.

I think of 6sense as a platform that is ideal for medium-to-large enterprises looking to Identify surging accounts on their website so their sales team can reach out to them and nurture relationships.

💡 Since this review aims to analyze 6sense in good detail, I’ll be giving my unbiased ratings on the platform’s features, user interface, data quality, integrations, and customer support.

Let’s dive deeper into the software’s sales features: 👇

6sense’s Core Features

1. Get access to in-depth B2B intent data

6sense collects intent signals from multiple sources (the platform claims it analyzes 500B+ intent signals monthly), such as website visits, keyword searches, and engagement patterns of prospects. 

This data helps sales teams better understand what their target accounts are researching, allowing them to pinpoint the ones most likely to convert.

Sales teams can then create relevant and highly personalized campaigns accordingly to capture the demand.

2. Lead prioritization dashboards

6sense’s lead prioritization dashboards provide your sales reps with a personalized, 360-degree view of all their deals, accounts, leads, etc.

As a result, your sales reps can identify opportunities in real-time and gain a deep understanding of which accounts to focus on and how.

Moreover, all the essential information is constantly updated, meaning that you’ll always have the most relevant and accurate data.

3. Dynamic audience building

6sense provides your team with 80+ segmentation filters that let you quickly define your ICP and identify accounts that best fit it.

It combines proprietary data with your CRM data and the intent signals it picked up to create detailed account lists that enable you to prioritize high-value accounts.

The software dynamically adjusts account lists by moving accounts to different audience segments based on relevant real-time factors such as changes in their buying stage, annual revenue, keywords they are researching, etc.

4. Marketing orchestration

6sense’s platform lets you create dynamic, always-on campaigns that react to buyer behavior and automatically update audiences as they move through the buying journey.

Your team can automate data enrichment, contact acquisition, audience building, and regular syncs between your sales platforms to save time and keep lead data up-to-date.

Rating: 8/10.

6sense offers its customers a comprehensive range of features for sales teams, such as its visitor identification software, lead prioritization, and dynamic audience building for advertising.

However, the solution can only identify companies visiting your website and not actual stakeholders (i.e., who exactly is visiting your website).

The platform also does not have real-time engagement features, such as some 6sense alternatives on the market (e.g., an AI chat) and has no integration with LinkedIn for automated outreach (only with LinkedIn Ads).

For example, customers of the platform are struggling to identify who is engaged with their company when dealing with larger accounts.

‘’We also do not have contact level reporting of who is actually engaged with our company, which can be challenging when engaging larger accounts.’’ - G2 Review.

6sense’s User Interface: Is It Easy To Use?

6sense’s platform does have a lot of functionality when it comes to automations, reporting, and marketing automations – and all of that comes with a slight learning curve for even seasoned sales professionals.

The software’s numerous features are packed into a rather clunky interface, which even satisfied customers of the platform are criticizing in their G2 reviews.

‘’What I dislike about 6sense Revenue AI for Marketing is that it can be complex to navigate initially, requiring a learning curve to fully leverage all its features.’’ - G2 Review.

When it comes to the platform’s automations with their orchestrations, customers of the platform also note that it has been more difficult for them than they originally suspected.

‘’Orchestrations and workflows with 6sense data were more difficult to implement than expected.’’ - G2 Review.

Rating: 5/10.

As reviewers have pointed out, you’d need to spend some time learning how the platform works so you can fully utilize its marketing and sales features.

In fact, when I opened their G2 profile, ‘’learning curve’’ and ‘’difficulty’’ were part of the 4 most common complaints of customers.

6sense’s Data Quality

6sense gives you access to buyer intent and engagement data with bonus predictive analytics into which stage of the buying journey your prospects are.

But just how accurate is this data?

I was able to find 6sense customers on G2 who have reported issues with the platform’s predictive analytics and intent data, which is described as ‘’directional, and not a crystal ball.’’

‘’From an intent perspective, it is not the end all be all or the crystal ball. It is directional. Also, I do find that the predictive model is generous. For example, if an account hits one of our campaign landing pages, it is suddenly in the 'purchase stage', and we often find that rarely means that an account is ready to send us a purchase order!’’ - G2 Review.

I also found some customers who complained about the tool’s data duplication issues, which has resulted in them having trouble with data reliability.

‘’Data can be a bit cumbersome, and we've had problems with data reliability and creation of duplicates.’’ - G2 Review.

On the positive side, there are customers of 6sense who have massively improved their sales pipeline by tapping into intent data, such as keywords and categories.

‘’6sense has been great in helping us identify segments based on key intent features such as keywords and categories. As a product marketer, it is really important we can identify the ICP and make sure the revenue org can clearly engage with their target accounts based on the topics and keywords they are searching for.’’ - G2 Review.

Rating: 7/10.

Despite 6sense’s negative reviews regarding their intent data inaccuracies and duplication issues, there are still some users who are satisfied with the tool’s keyword research intent data and other signals.

My problem with 6sense, similar to platforms like ZoomInfo, is that the tool’s visitor identification software reveals only companies and not individuals.

Good luck prospecting accounts like ‘’Microsoft’’ or ‘’Meta’’ landing on your website.

6sense’s Integrations

The platform integrates with various sales, marketing, and productivity platforms to centralize and maximize your existing sales tech stack so you can create more engaging campaigns with deeper insights.

The platform offers native integration with their partners: Outreach, Gong, Salesforce, and Salesloft, on top of their integrations with tools like Bombora for 3rd party intent signals.

You can also expect to sync your data with other productivity platforms, including LeanData for AI-powered insights and Reachdesk for perfectly-timed gifting to prospects.

However, customers of the platform have noted that integrating the tool with their existing systems has been challenging for them.

‘’Additionally, integrating it with existing systems can sometimes be challenging.’’ - G2 Review.

Rating: 7/10.

Despite 6sense’s native integrations, partnerships, and a whole bunch of other integrations that could already be in your sales stack – I gave the platform’s integrations a 7 instead of an 8 due to the difficulty of integrating some of the tools with 6sense.

6sense’s Customer Support

Even though 6sense does not disclose what customer support you can expect on its pricing page, I was able to get a good idea of the tool’s customer support from G2 reviews.

Users of 6sense are generally positive about the platform’s level of customer support, noting that they were assigned a customer success manager who has been helping them and responding quickly to their requests.

‘’Even though the tool can be quite daunting because of its depth, having a CSM that can help support us is so helpful. Definitely helpful to just send a quick note and get a response right away.’’ - G2 Review.

This positive perception has been confirmed by both mid-market and enterprise customers of the platform, claiming that they’ve had a good experience with customer support.

’We have had great customer support and feel like 6sense is always willing to dive in and collaborate to come up with new ideas or solutions we need.’’ - G2 Review.

Despite that, another Enterprise customer of 6sense mentions that the tool’s regular customer support can be a hit or miss with less product knowledge than their customer success team.

‘’Also, while 6Sense's customer success team is top-notch, their customer support is a bit more hit or miss. Some support reps are real product experts and zero in on solutions to issues quickly. Some… not so much.’’ - G2 Review.

Rating: 8/10.

Even though most users are satisfied with the level of customer support that they were provided on 6sense – it seems like some customer support reps do not have the necessary product knowledge to handle more complex issues.

6sense’s Pricing Model: Does It Provide A Good Value For Money?

6sense offers a free plan that provides:

  • 50 credits/month.
  • Buyer Discovery.
  • Contact & Company Data.
  • Alerts.
  • List Management.
  • Chrome Extension.

If you need more, you can upgrade to one of three plans:

Team: Includes everything in Free plus:

  • Technographics
  • Psychographics
  • Web, CRM, and SEP Apps
  • Add to CRM/SEP
  • Dashboards

Growth: Everything in Team plus:

  • 6sense Intent (Keywords)
  • 3rd Party Intent
  • Corporate Hierarchy
  • Prioritization Dashboards

Enterprise: Everything in Growth plus:

  • Predictive AI Model
  • AI Recommended Actions
  • CRM & MAP Activity

6sense doesn’t disclose prices on its website, so you’ll have to contact its sales for more details.

You can learn more about the platform’s pricing model from our in-depth 6sense pricing guide

However, Vendr also provides some helpful insights into 6sense’s pricing policy:

Customers are required to enter into a 2-year agreement with 6sense, a commitment that yields high retention. 

In addition, it's important to highlight that potential costs may arise due to usage/overages, upgrades, or downgrades.

Finally, according to Vendr’s data, the average 6sense contract value is $56,762/year.

Rating: 5/10.

The tool does not disclose its pricing, but we were able to find that 6sense is on the higher end of the pricing range when compared to other alternatives on the market.

I do like the fact that the platform has a free plan, but you’ll run out of the 50 credit allowance in a matter of days if not hours.

How Does 6sense Compare To Alternatives On The Market?


💡 Check out our in-depth comparison of 6sense vs. ZoomInfo, where we cover the 2 sales intelligence giants in more detail.

What Are Customers Saying About 6sense?

Throughout this 6sense review, I’ve been showing you some of the users’ opinions on the platform – but let’s dive a bit deeper.

TL;DR: 6sense boasts a highly responsive support team, good segmenting accuracy, and a configurable interface. Despite data, customers of the platform report issues with 6sense’s data exports, limited persona targeting and the cost of the software. 

Moreover, its persona targeting is highly limited compared to alternatives on the market. 

What users love about 6sense:

  • Good segmenting accuracy with an interface that can be customized.
  • Ability to view account engagement and gain insights into their current buying stage.
  • Highly responsive customer support team and excellent account management.

There were some restrictions in ways you could filter or parse out data for particular programs, which made it, at times, difficult to pull and analyze data. Though it was nice having an optimization team to help, it would've likely been more convenient if there were tools in the platform to help with optimization ideas so you didn't need to join a call when looking for optimization help. - G2 Review.

The export of segments to platforms such as Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads is limited, and getting lots of them for exporting more segments is really expensive. - G2 Review.

Common complaints about 6sense:

  • Persona targeting is described as limiting with no role or title-based matching.
  • Limited export of segments to platforms like Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads.
  • The platform has been described as expensive and not affordable for smaller businesses.

Considering the high degree of configurability for account and intent attributes, persona targeting is shockingly limiting, with no true role or title-based matching. Targeting enterprise companies based solely on persona makes for a lot of waste. Other tools are doing exact title matching and have been for a few years. We've had to purchase additional tools to help with this layer, which means we can't launch ads through 6sense either. - G2 Review.

Verdict: Is 6sense Really Worth It?

So far, I've rated 6sense:

  • Range of features: 8/10.
  • User interface and usability: 5/10.
  • Data quality: 7/10.
  • Integrations: 7/10.
  • Customer support: 8/10. 
  • Pricing model: 5/10.

Which gives me an average rating of 6.6/10 for 6sense.

To summarize:

6sense is the ideal choice if you:

✅ Are looking for good B2B intent data coverage, especially in the US region.

✅ Need a reliable marketing automation solution.

✅ Want a platform that can integrate with your advertising channels to create highly targeted campaigns. 

6sense isn’t the best option if you:

❌ Are looking for a more budget option, as 6sense is more expensive than some of the other alternatives on the market.

❌ Need more website visitor identification functionality, such as contact-level data.

❌ Need more first-party intent data to identify and reach out to warm prospects.

Looking For A 6sense Alternative?

Despite 6sense’s range of features, good range of integrations and a large library of B2B intent data, some customers are still finding faults with the product’s data quality, pricing model, and ease of use.

Enter Warmly (that’s us) – a signal-based revenue orchestration platform that provides a wide range of features designed to:

  • Capture warm leads that visited your website (first-party data).
  • Identify the hottest prospects from those visitors.
  • Automatically engage and nurture them, helping your sales reps to successfully convert them.

Let’s get a closer look at the functionality that makes Warmly an attractive alternative to 6sense for sales teams: 👇

Warmly Features

1. Identify Your Website Visitors

Warmly identifies your website visitors.

Our platform can identify both companies and the individual profiles that are browsing your website.

As a result, your reps can focus their efforts on the right stakeholders from the get-go.

With Warmly, you’ll get another ace up your sleeve.

Once it identifies website visitors, the platform proceeds to enrich each visitor with:

  • B2B data (email address, company name, phone number, industry, size, technographic, etc.).
  • First-party intent data (details of your visitors’ website sessions, such as visited pages, recurring visits, etc.).
  • Third-party intent data (insights into visitors’ entire digital buyer’s journey, including visits to competitors’ websites, job change intent, etc.).

This combination of first- and third-party intent data enables you to identify the leads that are most likely to buy right now as Warmly picks up the buying signals they’ve left throughout the web—on your website and beyond.

Your sales reps will be able to recognize who your hottest leads are right now and design tailored strategies for reaching out to them.

Why Is Intent Data Important?

Trying to sell a water bottle to someone who just walked out of their office isn’t the same as selling a water bottle to a runner who just finished a workout.

Understanding intent signals and recognizing them in time lets you:

  • Qualify and score leads with greater precision and easily identify the hottest leads.
  • Reach out when their interest level is at its peak.
  • Create a hyper-personalized approach for each lead based on the contextual insights you have at hand, like which pages they visited, what they searched for, etc. 

This helped Behavioral Signals shorten its sales cycle by 50-90% and source nearly $7M in its pipeline.

Platforms that omit intent data from their offering slow your lead generation efforts from the get-go, leaving you without one of the most powerful weapons in sales reps’ arsenals.

2. Build Targeted Lead lists With Coldly

We at Warmly have recently included a static B2B database, Coldly, to help users build highly targeted lead lists more efficiently.

Coldly holds data on 200M+ accounts and contacts worldwide, in addition to having more than 25 built-in B2B data filters and the option for creating customized filters to fit specific business needs and industries.

Moreover, since the data is refreshed daily, you can have peace of mind that all your essential B2B data is accurate, relevant, and up-to-date.

You can do anything from building contact lists to automatically enriching your CRM contacts without spending hours on this.

3. Streamline Sales Engagement Processes

Warmly’s automation features are by far one of the things most customers love about the platform.

Warmly uses intent signals it picks up to build complex workflows on top of them, enabling you to reach out to all the right leads at the best possible time.

It provides several automation features, including:

Orchestrator, which lets you automate email and LinkedIn outreach. The Orchestrator is highly configurable, meaning you can set up all the important parameters as you see fit, including:

  • The action that triggers the workflow (lead matching your ICP lands on your website or a website visitor comes back to your pricing page).
  • Filters that define which companies and individuals should be included in the workflow (these include everything from company size and industry to job position and seniority, etc.).
  • The course that the workflow should take (send a contextual email, a personalized LinkedIn DM, or a LinkedIn connection request).

This capability solves for time-to-lead, while SDRs can take over ones that respond and provide a personalized experience.

The AI-powered prospector prevents quality leads from falling through the cracks simply because you didn’t have a sales rep on hand.

Try it yourself 👇or watch it in action


💡Note: You will need to be on one of Warmly’s paid plans to gain access to AI Prospector. For ARC, the ROI was 200% over 6 months. 

AI Chat, which is an AI-driven chatbot that can be trained to:

  • Qualify leads.
  • Answer their questions.
  • Book meetings.
  • Offer relevant collaterals.
  • Engage leads.

Lead routing, which lets you set up real-time Slack notifications that will alert the adequate sales rep whenever a lead matching certain criteria lands on your website or takes a high-intent action.

The combination of these automation features ensures that:

  • Every high-value lead will be engaged.
  • Your sales reps will have more time to focus on things that matter than most rather than act as surveillance guards on your website 24/7.

4. Live Video Chat

Engaging your leads while they’re still hot can make the difference between a successfully closed deal and an opportunity that is forever lost.

With Warmly, you won’t have to worry about that, as its Live Video Chat feature lets you engage leads while they’re still visiting your website.

In the “Warm Calls” section of Warmly’s dashboard, your sales team can see who’s visiting your website right now and monitor their session in real-time.

Once you detect a high-intent lead based on Warmly’s insights or a visitor matching your ICP, you can engage them in a video chat immediately.

Alternatively, you can rely on automated lead routing to notify reps whenever a high-value lead ends on your website. 

This allows you to monitor their website interactions and hop on a call when they assess the time is right.

Try it out here:


Warmly Pricing

Similar to 6sense, Warmly offers a freemium plan.

On it, you can:

  • Reveal up to 500 companies and individuals visiting your website (in addition to essential and accurate data on each lead).
  • Set up ICP filters to quickly identify high-quality leads. 
  • Automate basic lead routing.

If you need more, there are four paid plans to choose from:

  1. Micro: Starts at $333/month when billed annually and adds unlimited seats, 5,000 monthly visitors revealed, first-party intent signals, alerts, and access to Warmly’s extensive database of B2B contact data.
  2. Starter: Starts at $12,000/year, everything in Micro, plus 10,000 monthly visitors, third-party signals, AI Chat, and CRM syncs.
  3. Business: Starts at $19,000/year for up to 10,000 visitors or $28,000/year for up to 75,000 visitors, everything in Starter, plus second-party signals, sales orchestration, and lead routing.
  4. Enterprise: Starts at $30,000/year, lets you identify a custom number of visitors, includes everything in Business, plus custom signals and warm calling.


How Does Warmly Compare to 6sense?

6sense is an excellent option for your business if you are looking for predictive analytics, keyword identification and site heatmaps.

Warmly, on the other hand, shines in finding and engaging prospects who are looking to buy and are likely to respond to your outreach.

Our platform might not have predictive analytics into where customers are in their buying journey or intent data from keywords, but we offer:

  • Website de-anonymization signals at the contact level.
  • Automated email retargeting.
  • Automated LinkedIn DMs retargeting.
  • Live session replays.
  • Chat video messaging so you can contact your prospects as they are browsing through your pages (e.g., pricing page).

Find Out Who Your Warmest Leads Are With Warmly

If you’re looking for a purely ABM platform with solid intent data, 6sense might be the way to go for your organization.

The platform’s capabilities of detecting buyer intent on your website are significantly limited compared to Warmly's, as they do not reveal contact-level information.

This limitation also affects 6sense’s marketing automations, which cannot be fine-tuned to engage only the warmest prospects—which your company is mostly interested in.

With Warmly, all that changes.

Our revenue orchestration platform helps you to identify website visitors (to the contact level), detect the hottest leads among them, and engage them via automated outreach sequences perfectly tailored to each lead.

You’ll be able to identify that Joe from Microsoft has been browsing your pricing page and then reach out to him on LinkedIn – or why not right on your pricing page with a chatbot or video chat?

If you want to be able to do that, then you can try Warmly for free to start building a steady, warm pipeline in minutes.

Or, book a demo with our team for a personalized tour of all of Warmly’s capabilities.

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AI Marketing Agents: Use Cases and Top Tools for 2025
AI Marketing Agents: Use Cases and Top Tools for 2025
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AI marketing agents are quickly becoming the secret weapon behind some of the smartest campaigns out there. 

When it comes to marketing agents, we're not just talking about tools that help.

We’re talking about AI that acts - analyzing data, building strategies, generating content, and making decisions in real time.

If that sounds futuristic, well… it kind of is. But the wild part? It’s already happening. 

Teams everywhere - from scrappy start-ups to enterprise giants - are starting to rely on AI agents to handle tasks that used to eat up hours. 

The kind of work that used to take a full team, such as automated campaign creation, real-time audience segmentation, and instant performance insights, is now being handled by intelligent, always-on digital assistants.

In this article, I’ll walk you through what AI marketing agents actually do, the most powerful ways they’re being used, and which tools are leading the charge. 

Let’s begin!

What Are AI Marketing Agents?

AI marketing agents are intelligent, task-oriented digital assistants powered by AI, designed to perform specific marketing functions autonomously or semi-autonomously. 

Unlike traditional marketing tools that require constant manual input, these agents can take action, make decisions, and even adapt their behavior based on real-time data and feedback.

Think of them as mini marketers built with code. 

They can write email sequences, A/B test landing pages, launch and optimize ad campaigns, track user behavior, and personalize customer experiences across channels. 

Some are designed for one specific job (like optimizing subject lines), while others operate as full-blown strategists, capable of managing entire workflows with minimal oversight.

What sets AI marketing agents apart from traditional marketing tools is their ability to learn and improve over time. 

They’re built on machine learning, large language models, and other smart tech, so they’re not just following a script. They’re constantly evolving based on what works and what doesn’t.

Today, they’ve already become more than just an isolated experiment. They’re mainstream. Marketing teams everywhere are treating them as an extension of their workforce.

How Are AI Marketing Agents Revolutionizing Marketing in 2025?

In 2025, AI marketing agents aren’t just helping marketers work faster. They’re actually changing the very nature of marketing.

We’re seeing a shift from reactive marketing to proactive, always-on engagement. 

AI agents can detect patterns, predict outcomes, and respond in real time - something no human team could do at scale. 

They enable hyper-personalization without burning out your content team. They reduce the guesswork in campaign planning. And they’re making it possible for smaller teams to compete with the big players.

From generating data-driven insights in seconds to running personalized ad campaigns across multiple platforms simultaneously, these agents are giving marketers superpowers. 

They’re freeing up human brains for strategy, creativity, and connection - the stuff that really moves the needle.

What Are the Different Types of AI Marketing Agents?

AI marketing agents come in different shapes and specialties. Here are a few of the most common types:

  • Content generation agents - These tools write blogs, ad copy, emails, social posts, and more. Some can even match brand voice and tone on the fly.
  • Email marketing agents - Think AI that manages your list, crafts personalized emails, optimizes subject lines, and analyzes open and click-through rates—all without constant oversight.
  • Ad optimization agents - These handle everything from bidding strategy to A/B testing creatives, using real-time performance data to boost ROI.
  • SEO agents - Tools that research keywords, optimize content, track rankings, and suggest on-page improvements automatically.
  • Analytics & insights agents - These turn raw data into meaningful insights, surfacing what’s working, what’s not, and what to do next.
  • Chat & customer support agents - AI-powered chatbots that go beyond scripted responses, delivering helpful, natural-sounding interactions across touchpoints.

Some platforms even offer multi-agent systems - basically a team of AI agents working together across tasks, communicating and sharing data to make smarter decisions as a unit.

Now that we have that covered, let’s look at the most common use cases for AI marketing agents today.

Top 9 Use Cases of AI Marketing Agents

AI marketing agents are being used across nearly every area of modern marketing, but some use cases really stand out in terms of impact, efficiency, and scalability. 

Let’s break down some of the most powerful applications today - the ones teams of all sizes are actively benefiting from.

1. AI Agents for Conversational Marketing & Customer Support 

Customer support used to mean live agents and long wait times. 

Now, AI marketing agents are powering conversational experiences that feel instant, human, and helpful, whether it's through chatbots, email responses, or voice interactions.

These agents can answer product questions, recommend solutions, upsell based on user history, and even troubleshoot basic issues 24/7. 

They’re not replacing your support team but enhancing it, handling the repetitive stuff so your human agents can focus on high-impact conversations.

These chatbots are even more handy when it comes to marketing.

Namely, for marketers, this is a goldmine. 

Every interaction is an opportunity to engage, delight, or convert. 

With AI agents integrated into your website, CRM, and messaging tools, you can turn support into a proactive channel that drives loyalty and sales.

Take Warmly’s AI Chat, for instance.

This chatbot agent is powered by an advanced NLP AI model that can be trained to perfectly fit your brand voice, business objectives, and its designated purpose.

You can train it on your relevant data to make sure it will maintain a consistent tone of voice while tackling a wide range of tasks, such as:

  • Engaging high-intent leads (e.g., leads that visit your pricing page and stay there more than 10s).
  • Qualifying leads by asking qualificatory questions (e.g., “What brings you here?”).
  • Offering relevant collaterals (e.g., a whitepaper on the impact of AI tools on marketing to leads who have visited the feature page of an AI-powered tool).
  • Answering their queries regarding pricing, features, or other relevant matters.
  • Booking meetings.
  • Looping in human SDRs when necessary.

Because it is powered by sophisticated AI, Warmly’s AI Chat can handle a much broader spectrum of actions than regular chatbots while ensuring that each lead interaction is contextual, relevant, and personalized.

The result?

Higher engagement, more booked meetings, and more closed deals.

2. AI Agents for Customer Journey Orchestration

This is where things start to feel like magic. 

AI agents can now orchestrate entire customer journeys - from the first touchpoint to post-sale engagement - automatically adapting to individual behavior at every step. 

It's like having a hyper-attentive and intelligent conductor directing each customer’s unique path through your funnel.

For example, if someone interacts with your website or engages with your content on LinkedIn, the agent might follow up with a retargeted email or LinkedIn DM.

Moreover, the agent personalizes each touchpoint based on every lead’s unique data and preferences, ensuring that the messaging will resonate with them.

Warmly and 11x’s AI SDR agents do exactly that.

These AI agents pick up the high-intent leads Warmly detects on your website and add them to hyper-personalized outreach campaigns via SMS, email, or LinkedIn.

They leverage the intent and B2B data Warmly has on each lead to personalize every message, going far beyond the usual first names and company names.

Instead, AI SDRs use more nuanced information, such as leads’ interactions with your website, research of competitors’ websites, etc., to craft compelling and engaging messaging.

This right here is next-level marketing automation

Rather than rigid funnels, you get fluid, intelligent experiences that guide leads forward based on real-time behavior. 

It’s a huge win for both marketers and customers - less friction, more value, higher open and response rates, and more qualified meetings.

3. AI Agents for Content Creation

One of the most popular and practical uses of AI marketing agents is content creation. 

These agents can research, draft, and optimize content across formats, including blog posts, newsletters, social captions, product descriptions, and more. 

They save marketers a massive amount of time while helping brands maintain a consistent voice and publishing rhythm.

But they’re not just spitting out generic text. 

Today’s content agents understand tone, structure, and audience intent. 

You can ask one to write a persuasive product intro for Gen Z buyers, and it will tailor the message accordingly. 

Some can even perform SEO research, integrating relevant keywords and optimizing content for search rankings without requiring input from multiple tools.

What makes this use case especially game-changing is how it shifts content from a bottleneck to a growth lever. 

Small teams no longer need to outsource or delay publishing schedules. 

AI agents can produce first drafts in literal minutes, freeing up human writers to refine, strategize, and focus on higher-level storytelling.

4. AI Agents for Campaign Personalization

Honestly speaking, real personalization at scale used to be a dream. 

Now, with AI marketing agents, it’s the default. 

These agents can segment audiences in real time, customize messaging based on user behavior, and adapt campaigns as customer data evolves. 

It’s like having a personal marketer for every contact in your database.

Warmly’s Orchestrator functions on that principle.

It monitors your website for high-intent leads that match your ICP criteria and includes them in tailored email and LinkedIn campaigns.

Let’s say someone visits your pricing page twice but doesn’t sign up. 

Warmly’s Orchestrator agent can recognize this intent and trigger a personalized email with a special offer, a case study, or an icebreaker message without you lifting a finger.

Learn how the Orchestrator helped a LinkedIn marketing agency, Straightin, get $10,000 in revenue in just 2 weeks.

It’s not just automated. It’s contextual and relevant, increasing the likelihood of conversion.

The beauty of this use case is in the blend of automation and intelligence. 

We’re moving beyond static drip sequences toward dynamic journeys that adapt to each user. 

That’s a massive leap forward for customer experience, and it's why companies using AI for personalization are seeing higher engagement and retention.

5. AI Agents for Ad Campaign Management

Running paid campaigns across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, and TikTok? 

That’s a full-time job unless you’ve got an AI ad agent doing the heavy lifting. 

These agents can create ad copy, select visuals, test variations, optimize bidding strategies, and monitor performance in real time.

Rather than reacting to ad fatigue or overspending days later, AI agents spot trends and pivot fast. 

They might pause underperforming ads automatically or shift budget toward top-performing creatives, all while keeping costs in check and ROI on the rise. 

Some even suggest new campaign angles based on historical performance and competitor data.

This use case is especially powerful for performance marketers juggling multiple platforms. 

AI agents act like your 24/7 campaign managers, always learning and optimizing. That means more wins, fewer wasted dollars, and a lot less stress.

6. AI Agents for Email Marketing Automation

Email has been around forever, but with AI agents running the show, it feels brand new. 

These agents don’t just schedule blasts; they tailor content, adjust send times, craft subject lines, and segment lists based on behavior, engagement, and lifecycle stage.

Imagine having an agent that knows exactly when to send a re-engagement email to a dormant lead or one that notices someone clicked your demo link but didn’t book, then follows up with a persuasive nudge. 

AI makes this kind of logic-driven engagement effortless and consistent.

What makes this use case stand out is its compounding effect. 

As agents collect more data over time, they get better at timing, tone, and targeting. 

That leads to higher open rates, more clicks, and better conversions. 

For marketers who rely on email to nurture leads or onboard customers, this is a no-brainer upgrade.

7. AI Agents for SEO Optimization

SEO is one of those marketing pillars that demands a million little tasks, such as keyword research, on-page optimization, internal linking, meta descriptions, content updates… the list goes on. 

AI SEO agents streamline all of it. They can audit your site, surface ranking opportunities, suggest improvements, and even generate optimized content based on search intent.

Some go even further by automatically analyzing your competitors, identifying keyword gaps, and recommending backlink strategies. 

The best ones even integrate with your CMS to push updates directly, turning what used to be a painstaking process into a near hands-free experience.

The real power here? These agents never stop. 

SEO isn't something you do once and walk away from—it’s ongoing. AI agents monitor fluctuations in rankings, adapt to algorithm updates, and fine-tune your marketing strategy in real time. 

That’s a level of consistency and speed that’s hard to match without a dedicated (and expensive) SEO team.

8. AI Agents for Social Media Management

Managing social media can feel like shouting into the void, and keeping up with trends, platforms, and algorithms is a job in itself. 

AI social agents help take back control. They can create post variations, suggest hashtags, schedule content at optimal times, and analyze performance across multiple channels.

But they’re more than just schedulers and auto-content generators. 

Many are now trained on specific tones and voices, so they can write on-brand captions and adapt messaging based on the platform (e.g., casual on TikTok, polished on LinkedIn). 

Some even monitor comments and DMs, surfacing the most important ones for human follow-up or responding instantly with helpful info.

This use case is especially great for lean teams that don’t have a dedicated social strategist. 

With the right AI agent, you can stay active, relevant, and responsive without burning hours every week. 

Plus, it gives you real-time insights into what your audience actually cares about.

9. AI Agents for Lead Scoring and Qualification

Your pipeline is only as good as your leads. And AI agents can now qualify, score, and prioritize them better than most humans. 

These agents analyze behavioral data, firmographics, engagement history, and more to determine which leads are sales-ready and which need nurturing.

No more wasting time chasing cold leads. 

AI agents can flag high-intent prospects the moment they hit key triggers like visiting your pricing page, downloading a whitepaper, or opening multiple emails in a short time. 

They can also automatically assign leads to the right rep or segment, keeping your CRM squeaky clean and action-ready.

The best part? 

These agents aren’t just rule-based - they’re predictive. 

Over time, they learn what behaviors typically lead to a sale and get sharper at spotting them early. 

That means your sales team spends more time closing and less time guessing.

The 4 Best AI Marketing Agents on the Market in 2025

There’s no shortage of AI marketing tools out there, but not all of them function like true agents. 

The ones below don’t just give you data or spit out content - they take action, make decisions, and deliver results. 

So, let’s look at the four best AI marketing agents in 2025, each serving a unique use case.

1. Warmly – For AI-Powered B2B Lead Qualification & Customer Journey Orchestration

Warmly acts as your outbound SDR but smarter and faster. 

It identifies high-intent website visitors, qualifies them using detailed B2B and intent data, and instantly personalizes outreach - via email, LinkedIn, or AI Chat. 

It’s ideal for B2B teams looking to scale personalized sales outreach without scaling headcount.

In addition to its website traffic deanonymization,  AI-driven chatbot, SDR agents, and the Orchestrator, Warmly also offers:

Pricing

Warmly offers a free forever plan that allows you to reveal up to 500 monthly visitors, set up ICP filters to quickly identify high-quality leads, and automate basic lead routing.

If you need more, there are three tiers to choose from:

  1. Data Only: Starts at $499/mo when billed monthly or $4,000 when billed annually, lets you identify up to 5,000 monthly visitors, first-party intent signals, alerts, and access to Warmly’s B2B prospecting database.
  2. Business: Starts at $19,000/year for up to 10,000 visitors or $45,000/year for up to 75,000 visitors, everything in Data Only, plus third and second-party signals, sales orchestration, AI Chat, and lead routing.
  3. Enterprise: Custom pricing, custom number of visitors, everything in Business, plus custom signals and warm calling.

2. Jasper – For AI-Driven Content Creation

Jasper is your go-to AI agent for content production at scale. 

Whether you’re creating blog posts, product descriptions, or email copy, Jasper can generate on-brand content fast. 

Its workflows and brand voice memory make it perfect for marketers who want consistent messaging across multiple formats and channels.

Its key features include:

  • Brand Voice - Jasper lets you lock in your brand’s tone, style, and messaging guidelines so every piece of content it generates stays on-brand. 
  • SEO & Performance Mode - Integrated with tools like Surfer SEO and Grammarly, Jasper helps you create content that ranks and reads well. Its “Performance Mode” offers real-time suggestions to improve clarity, tone, SEO score, and conversion potential as you write.
  • AI image generation - Jasper includes options for creating compelling visuals to go with your content.

Pricing

Jasper.ai has 3 pricing plans:

  1. Creator: $49 month/seat (1 user only).
  2. Pro: $69 month/seat (up to 5 users).
  3. Business: Custom pricing.

Its Creator and Pro plans have 7-day trials, so you can try them on for size before subscribing.

3. Mutiny – For Website Personalization & CRO

Mutiny is a conversion-focused AI agent that personalizes your website content based on visitor segments. 

It automatically adjusts headlines, CTAs, and messaging depending on industry, size, or funnel stage. 

It’s perfect for SaaS and B2B companies trying to boost conversion rates without hand-coding every variation.

Some of its best features include:

  • No-code website personalization - Mutiny allows marketers to personalize website content (e.g., headlines, CTAs, and copy) based on firmographics, behavior, or campaign source for different visitor segments without touching code. 
  • Dynamic audience segmentation - Mutiny can identify who’s visiting your site and automatically group them into actionable segments like enterprise prospects, returning visitors, or high-intent leads. 
  • A/B testing & predictive analytics - Mutiny’s A/B testing engine lets you experiment with different variations and then uses AI-powered insights to predict which version will drive better results. 

Pricing

Mutiny doesn’t disclose prices.

You’ll have to book a demo or contact its team to get more details.

4. AdCreative.ai – For Automated Ad Creative Generation

AdCreative.ai is built for performance marketers who want high-converting ads without creative burnout. 

The AI generates ready-to-launch ad creatives and copy for Google, Meta, and other platforms, then refines them based on campaign performance. 

It’s a great choice for agencies or teams managing multiple paid campaigns.

Its key features are:

  • Generates ads at scale - AdCreative.ai automatically produces high-converting ad visuals and copy for platforms like Google, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Just input your product or campaign details, and the AI generates dozens of ready-to-launch ad variations in minutes—great for testing at scale without designer delays.
  • Performance-based scoring system - Each creative comes with a predictive performance score powered by AI, so you can prioritize the versions most likely to convert. 
  • Seamless integrations with ad platforms & CRMs - AdCreative.ai connects with tools like Google Ads, Meta Ads Manager, Zapier, and HubSpot, allowing you to push creatives directly to your campaigns or workflows. 

Pricing

AdCreative.ai has four pricing plans:

  1. Starter: Starting at $39 and going up to $189 depending on the number of ad downloads you want, includes 2 users and 1 brand, in addition to access to all the platform’s AI features.
  2. Professional: Starting at $249/mo and going up to $499/mo, includes 20 users, 3 brands, and access to Pro feature toolkit.
  3. Ultimate: Starting at $599/mo and going up to $1099/mo, includes 50 users and 10 brands.
  4. Enterprise: Custom pricing, has custom limits and advanced security features.

Next Steps: Automatically Engage with High-Intent Prospects on Your Website with Warmly’s AI Agents

By now, it’s clear that AI marketing agents aren’t just helpful assistants.

They’re proactive, intelligent operators that are reshaping how modern teams work, tackling everything from content creation and ad management to email automation and customer journey orchestration.

And when it comes to putting this power to work right now, Warmly is the tool that stands out. 

Its AI agents and chatbots are built to identify, qualify, and engage high-intent leads the moment they land on your site, keeping your pipeline moving while letting your team focus on closing deals.

So, if you’re ready to let your website work smarter - as your next ideal customer might already be there - you’ve got two easy next steps:

  1. Book a demo to see exactly how Warmly’s AI agents work in your flow, or
  2. Sign up for its free plan to start capturing high-value leads today with no strings attached.

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Best 10 UnifyGTM Alternatives & Competitors in 2025
Best 10 UnifyGTM Alternatives & Competitors in 2025
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Are you wondering if UnifyGTM is the right fit for your sales efforts or if you should look for an alternative solution?

We researched dozens of platforms, reviewed verified reviews on G2, and talked to sales and marketing leaders to build a list of the 10 best UnifyGTM alternatives in 2025.

This buyer guide covers each tool’s features, pricing, pros/cons, and use cases to help you make an informed decision.

Why Look For UnifyGTM Alternatives?

The lead generation platform has received praise for its ability to identify potential buyers, personalize outreach in email, and streamline your pipeline development.

Despite that, some users of the platform as well as our in-house experts have expressed concerns about the tool’s pricing model and identification capabilities. ⤵️

#1: The Pricing Model Does Not Fit The Budget Of Small Business Owners

The first drawback of UnifyGTM for us is how expensive it can get for small business owners.

A verified user review on G2 notes that their pricing model does not fit their budget and recommends the platform to include a lower budget option for smaller brands.

‘’The only major downside for me is the pricing. While it may be competitive with similar tools, as a small business owner, their pricing model doesn’t quite fit my budget. I would suggest offering a "small business tier" to make it more accessible for companies like mine.’’ - G2 Review.

#2: Limited Identification Features

The 2nd thing that we wanted to touch on was that UnifyGTM has limited functionality for de-anonymizing some visitors at the company level.

Even though the brand claims to offer personal-level de-anonymization, UnifyGTM can only do that through specially marked links via email. 

Our in-house experts believe that this is both inconsistent and prone to failure.

#3: Limited GTM Plays

Last but not least, UnifyGTM limits the number of Plays you can run within the platform in the Growth plan (2) and the channels you can use.

Unify’s Plays are crucial for prospecting, qualifying and reaching out to prospects so such a limited number of workflows will push some organizations to look for the more expensive plans.

What Are The Best UnifyGTM Alternatives In 2025?

Here are the best UnifyGTM alternatives out of the 30+ platforms that we took into consideration:

#1: Warmly: A signal-based revenue orchestration platform that combines several capabilities into one powerful lead-capturing and converting mechanism.

#2: 6sense: Identify surging accounts on your website that you can reach out to.

#3: ZoomInfo: End-to-end sales management.

#4: Albacross: Lead enrichment for businesses in Europe.

#5: Koala: Gain insight into product usage paired with intent signals to improve product adoption and upsell existing customers.

#6: Apollo.io: Get access to a large B2B database with emails and phone numbers of your ideal customers.

#7: Demandbase: Identify and target the right customers with the right message to support your account-based marketing.

#8: UpLead: Generate third-party verified B2B emails and mobile phone numbers of prospects in the market for your solution.

#9: Seamless AI: Find the contact information of any prospective buyer.

#10: Lusha: Identify the right decision-makers and then reach out to them.

#1: Warmly

Warmly offers the best alternative to UnifyGTM as it provides you with the most accurate, real-time, person-level de-anonymization data and signal tracking to help you identify your warmest leads and reach out to them immediately.

Disclaimer: Even though Warmly is our platform, we’ll aim to provide an unbiased perspective into why it is the best UnifyGTM alternative on the market in 2025.

Our signal-based revenue orchestration platform enables sales, marketing, and GTM teams to:

  • Capture buyer interest in real-time as they browse through your site.
  • Gain quality insights into prospective customers, allowing your sales reps to tailor their strategies accordingly.
  • Engage them while they’re still hot and successfully convert them.

Here are the features of Warmly that stand out against competitors like UnifyGTM:

Reveal High-Intent Accounts On Your Website

You can use Warmly’s website de-anonymization features for account-based strategies to make your prospecting game laser-precise.

We know that one of the crucial aspects of any ABM or targeted prospecting strategy is finding the accounts that are:

  • The best fit for your ICP.
  • Surging, i.e., showing the most interest in your or similar product or services, indicating they’re ready to buy.

With Warmly, you can easily identify those accounts by capturing them on your website.

Warmly helps you identify individual and company accounts visiting your web pages and proceeds to enrich them with:

  • B2B data, including contact data, firmographic, technographic, CRM data, etc., that lets you figure out whether they’re a match for your ICP and high-performing accounts.
  • First-party intent data, which helps you understand how likely they are to buy based on their interactions with your website (visited pages, time spent on each page, recurring visits, downloaded collaterals, etc.).
  • Second-party data by monitoring your prospects’ LinkedIn and help you find all of the relevant stakeholders of the company.
  • Third-party intent data, which shows you their readiness to buy by providing actionable insights into their entire digital buyer’s journey, including search history, visits to competitors’ websites, job change intent, etc.

Your team can recognize high-intent accounts from the start—both at the company and individual levels – allowing sales development representatives to focus their efforts on them while they’re still surging.

Orchestrate Sales & Marketing Workflows

Warmly helps you put various parts of your sales and marketing operations on autopilot, enabling your sales development representatives to focus on what matters most—making strategic decisions and converting high-value leads.

Our platform’s Orchestrator enables you to automate LinkedIn and email outreach, as well as CRM enrichment.

Setting up automation within the Orchestrator is easy:

Step #1: Define the trigger that’s going to set off the workflow (e.g. a lead that matches your ICP lands on your website or takes a specific high-intent action like visiting the pricing page more than once).

Step #2: Define your ICP and high-value leads so that the Orchestrator knows who to target (filters you can use include company size, industry, location, tech stack, an individual’s job position, and many more).

Step #3: Specify an action it should take, which can include:

  • Sending a LinkedIn request and/or personalized DM.
  • Sending a contextual email.
  • Syncing relevant data to your CRM to keep your records fresh and relevant.

💡 Unlike UnifyGTM, Warmly offers lead routing functionality that ensures each company and individual account is handled by the appropriate sales rep while their interest is at its peak.

For example, you can set up Slack notifications to alert the right rep when:

  • An ICP-matching account lands on your website.
  • Asks a high-intent question in the chatbot.
  • Takes other relevant action.

As a result, no quality lead will fall through the cracks ever again.

Finally, you can also leverage Warmly’s AI Chat which helps you automatically engage and qualify leads. The chatbot will make sure to:

  • Ask contextual, relevant questions.
  • Give correct answers and offer collateral based on the account’s interests and preferences.
  • Book meetings, and more.

Engage High-Ticket Accounts Live

Being able to detect surging accounts in real-time is good, but it won't do you much good unless you can pounce on them at the right time.

Warmly solves this issue by including a feature that lets you engage leads live – while they’re still browsing your website.

Reps can choose between two options:

  • Text chat, meaning they’ll replace the chatbot and talk to prospects themselves.
  • Video chat that lets you hop on a video call straight from Warmly.

This way, instead of booking meetings for who knows when and risking missing the opportunity to convert high-intent leads, you can chat them up while they’re still hot and close more deals effortlessly.

A Daily-Updated B2B Prospect Database: Coldly

Warmly lets you get access to Coldly, a database with 200M+ accounts and contacts that gives your sales team an excellent starting point for prospecting.

Coldly includes all the B2B data your sales reps need to make initial contact, including:

  • Validated emails.
  • Phone numbers.
  • LinkedIn profiles.

The database also provides 25+ B2B filters and customizable data filters that you can set up, enabling you to build highly targeted prospect lists in a few seconds.

Lastly, Coldly also has a browser extension that lets you scrape essential B2B contact data from any source on the web, including LinkedIn profiles, company websites, etc.

This way, your team will have both accurate contact data at their fingertips and the right tools to pick up buyer intent signals and set up workflows on top of them.

Warmly’s Integrations

Currently, Warmly integrates with a wide range of platforms, including:

  • OpenAI.
  • Slack.
  • Apollo.
  • Outreach.
  • Demandbase.
  • 6sense.
  • Clearbit.
  • People Data Labs.
  • And more.

In addition to deep integrations with several lead intelligence and sales platforms, Warmly provides a Warm Bundle—partner discounts for over 25 sales, marketing, and GTM tools.

This way, you can access many relevant tools and combine them with Warmly at a fraction of their usual price.

What Is The Difference Between Warmly & UnifyGTM?

The biggest difference between Warmly and UnifyGTM comes down to data quality:

  • Warmly does person-level de-anonymization from any source. Our platform also quality checks all of our data and signals using 10+ data providers. 
  • UnifyGTM claims to offer personal-level de-anonymization but can only do that through specially marked links via email. As we already mentioned, we believe this to be both inconsistent and prone to failure.

Warmly sets the standard for de-anonymization of data quality for the industry. 

In fact, we invest over $1M per year on data providers and pass the return on that investment directly to our customers.

When comparing UnifyGTM directly versus Warmly, we can see that UnifyGTM lacks the following features:

  • Access to different intent signals, such as contact level website de-anonymization, third-party research, and LinkedIn monitoring intent signals.
  • Access to different retargeting automations other than email, including LinkedIn DM retargeting, AI-powered customizable chatbots and Ad retargeting automations.
  • The ability to send leads to the right salesperson automatically and automatically notify them via Slack with a high-intent lead is active on your website.
  • A way to instantly engage with your highest intent leads with Warmly’s AI chat, as well as the ability to create a human-to-human connection through video chat on your site.
  • Access to a cold contact database, including emails, LinkedIn profiles, and phone numbers.
  • Access to live session replays.
  • A free email and LinkedIn database that comes with a <1% bounce rate.
  • A Bombora integration that lets you proactively reach out to your warm leads and track who’s researching terms relevant to your product and brand and get in front of them before your competitors do.
  • Access to advanced lead routing and round robin.

Pricing

Unlike UnifyGTM, Warmly has a free forever plan that lets you:

  • Identify up to 500 people and companies visiting your website per month.
  • Pinpoint leads that fit your ICP.
  • Set up automated lead routing via Slack notifications.

To access Warmly’s advanced features, you’d need to be on one of the 4 paid plans:

  • Micro: Starts at $4,000/year for 5,000 warm leads per month, and gives you access to 1st party person level web visitor de-anonymization, real-time alerts and exports, and unlimited access to Coldly’s contact data.
  • Starter: Starts at $12,000/year for 10,000 warm leads per month, and adds access to 3rd party intent signals (Bombora), AI chat, CRM sync & integrations, and dedicated onboarding.
  • Business: Starts at $22,000 for 25,000 warm leads per month, and adds access to 2nd party intent signals (LinkedIn monitoring), lead routing, and access to the platform’s full-funnel orchestration (AI-powered outreach via Email, LinkedIn, Chatbot, and Ads).
  • Enterprise: Starts at $30,000 for custom warm leads per month, and adds access to custom intent signals, and warm calling.

➡️ Warmly offers unlimited seats at every plan, making it ideal for larger sales teams.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate website visitor identification at both company and individual levels.

✅ Reveals who your hottest leads are right now.

✅ Personalized lead generation and outreach workflows.

✅ Real-time monitoring of visitors’ web sessions with options to engage them via an AI chat or video call.

✅ Transparent pricing model – even at the Enterprise level.

✅ Good range of integrations.

❌ The platform offers annual plans only, unlike UnifyGTM which has a monthly plan.

#2: 6sense

Best for: Identifying surging accounts on your website that you can reach out to.

Similar to: ZoomInfo.

6sense is an AI-powered ABM platform that combines B2B data with intent signals to automate your ABM workflows.

The platform makes a good alternative to UnifyGTM with its ability to identify the accounts that are most likely to buy so your sales reps can react in time.

Features

  • The platform tracks 65M+ companies, 600M+ buyer profiles, and 35K+ technologies.
  • 6sense detects website intent and connects it with the rest of the prospect’s customer journey online so you can recognize leads most likely to convert based on their level of intent.
  • AI-powered predictive analytics helps you predict customers’ future behavior so your sales team can prioritize high-intent leads in advance.

Standout Feature: Dynamic Audience Building

6sense provides 80+ segmentation filters that let you quickly define your ICP and identify the accounts that best fit it.

The software combines proprietary data with your CRM data and the intent signals it picked up to create detailed account lists that enable you to prioritize high-value accounts.

6sense then dynamically adjusts account lists by moving accounts to different audience segments based on relevant real-time factors such as changes in their buying stage, annual revenue, and the keywords they are researching.

Pricing

6sense has a free plan that provides access to 50 credits/month, Buyer Discovery features, access to contact and company data, alerts, and list management functionality with a Chrome extension.

To get more out of the platform, you’d need to be on one of their 3 paid plans:

  • Team: Custom pricing, which adds technographics, psychographics, access to Web, CRM, and SEP Apps, the ability to add to CRM/SEP, and dashboards.
  • Growth: Custom pricing, which adds 6sense intent (keywords), 3rd party intent, corporate hierarchy, and the tool’s prioritization dashboards.
  • Enterprise: Custom pricing, which adds the platform’s predictive AI model, AI recommended actions, and CRM & MAP activity.

6sense doesn’t disclose prices on its website, so you’ll have to contact its sales for more details.

Even though 6sense does not disclose its pricing on the website, Vendr claims that the average 6sense contract value is $123,711 per year out of the 65 deals they have handled for them.

💡 You can check out our in-depth 6sense pricing guide, which covers the platform’s pricing structure in more detail and aims to answer if the tool is worth the cost.

Pros & Cons

✅ Has advertising capabilities, letting you build targeting and retargeting campaigns based on its intent data.

✅ Insightful and actionable data.

✅ Dynamic audience building with 80+ segmentation filters.

❌ Doesn’t identify individual accounts.

❌ The platform can get expensive, which is why some sales teams have been looking for 6sense alternatives.

#3: ZoomInfo

Best for: End-to-end sales management.

Similar to: 6sense.

Zoominfo offers an all-in-one sales platform that is known for its massive B2B database paired with a wide range of sales and marketing-oriented features.

As such, it’s a good UnifyGTM alternative for businesses looking for a static B2B database first and foremost that gives access to automated multichannel sales workflows.

Features

  • Massive B2B database with over 260M professional and 100M company profiles and 135M verified phone numbers.
  • Automated multichannel sales workflows (such as cold email or cold calling campaigns) triggered by specific buying signals from your prospects.
  • Predictive modelling lets you define and update your ICP, keeping it fresh and relevant based on past won and lost deals and other critical data.

Standout Feature: Ad Targeting

ZoomInfo’s Ad targeting lets you create automated ad campaigns using more than 300 intent signals and company attributes, including ideal accounts and prospects with buying intent signals.

The platform helps you ensure that your ads are displayed to all the right accounts across all relevant channels.

Pricing 

ZoomInfo has separate plans for sales, marketing, and talent teams.

Even though no prices are disclosed, we tried to dig as much information in our ZoomInfo pricing guide to help you figure out if the tool’s pricing model works for you.

To summarize, ZoomInfo’s pricing model depends on the:

  • Features and functionality you need.
  • Number of licenses.
  • Credit usage.

Pros & Cons

✅ Excellent B2B data coverage, especially regarding US-based phone numbers.

✅ Wide range of features for handling various sales operations.

✅ Ad targeting functionality that helps you remarket to high-intent leads who visit your website.

❌ The platform can get expensive.

❌ Limited website visitor identification functionality, which is why some brands have been looking for ZoomInfo alternatives.

#4: Albacross

Best for: Lead enrichment for businesses in Europe.

Similar to: Warmly.

Albacross is a data enrichment platform that reveals companies visiting your EU website and enriches them with B2B and first-party intent data.

The platform is a viable alternative to UnifyGTM if you’re looking for a more affordable (yet not as powerful) lead enrichment solution geared toward EU-based prospecting.

Features

  • Identifies company-level website visitors and enriches them with first-party intent data.
  • Intent-data-driven ad retargeting helps you display the right ads to the right audience. 
  • Real-time alerts on Slack, Microsoft Teams, CRM, or email when customers who fit your ICP visit your website.

Standout Feature: Auto-Engage

Albacross lets you automatically engage your high-intent leads on LinkedIn or email.

The platform’s AI-powered segmentation looks at behavior, engagement, and offsite activity to automatically group prospects based on how likely they are to convert.

Pricing 

Albacross has two paid plans:

  • Self-service: €79 per month when billed annually, which includes up to 100 identified companies, visitor activity, and LinkedIn Ads integration.
  • Growth: Custom price to identify unlimited companies, which adds API integrations, and dedicated customer success.

Pros & Cons

✅ Intent-data-driven ad retargeting on LinkedIn Ads.

✅ Customers of the platform agree that the platform is user-friendly.

✅ Auto-engage functionality on LinkedIn and email.

❌ Reveals only company visitors.

❌ Poor CRM integrations.

#5: Koala

Best for: Gaining insight into product usage paired with intent signals to improve product adoption and up-sell existing customers.

Similar to: Warmly, 6sense.

Koala is a website visitor identification tool that makes it suitable for boosting product engagement and driving cross- and up-selling opportunities rather than traditional lead generation.

The platform makes a viable alternative to UnifyGTM if you’re more interested in cross-selling and up-selling your existing customers.

Features

  • Reveals website visitors and enriches them with first-party intent data.
  • Automated ICP scoring enables you to identify and prioritize heating accounts that best fit your ICP. 
  • Tracks product usage data and translates it to actionable insights so you can monitor your customers’ product journeys and detect important milestones in real-time.

Standout Feature: Intent Analytics

Koala’s intent analytics helps you learn what intent converts best on your website – whether it’s your case studies, pricing page, or feature pages.

The platform’s AI-powered Content Reports analyze intent and conversion, and will automatically suggest new signals for you as the tool classifies the content that leads to conversion.

Pricing 

Koala offers a free plan for up to 3 seats that lets you reveal up to 250 accounts and get access to the tool’s standard integrations.

To access the platform’s advanced features, you’d need to be on one of their 2 paid plans:

  • Growth: $750/month when billed annually, which adds 10k Clearbit reveals per month, custom AI agents, 1 CRM connection, and unlimited accounts.
  • Business: Custom pricing, which adds custom licenses, custom Clearbit limits, lead scoring, and content reports.

Pros & Cons

✅ You can track product usage and translate it into actionable insights.

✅ Automated lead scoring.

✅ You can integrate with multiple CRMs.

❌ No third-party intent data, which is why some brands have been looking for Koala alternatives.

❌ No live engagement features.

#6: Apollo.io

Best for: Getting access to a large B2B database with emails and phone numbers of your ideal customers.

Similar to: Warmly, 6sense.

Apollo.io is a sales intelligence platform that helps businesses uncover leads quickly and access their verified email addresses. 

The platform is a good alternative to UnifyGTM with its accurate B2B database of over 275 million contacts and 73 million companies.

Features

  • Living Data Network that uses AI to provide intelligent recommendations on high-value leads based on past prospecting activities. 
  • Signal-based prospecting combines demographic and behavioral signals to find leads actively researching products or services. 
  • Conduct precise searches for leads and companies using over 65 filters, including contact title, job function, and industry.

Standout Feature: Sales Engagement

Apollo.io helps you automate your outbound by creating multi-step sequences with the power of AI.

The platform also helps you create and test AI-generated emails in your sequences with data from its database.

Pricing

Apollo io offers a free plan with 10,000 monthly credits, two active sequences, five mobile credits, and 10 export credits per month. 

You can also select from the three paid plans: 

  • Basic plan: $49 per user per month, which adds job change notifications, buying intent over 6 topics, and intent filters.
  • Professional plan: $79 per user per month, which adds 120,000 credits per year, no sequence limits, and uncapped sending limits with SendGrid.
  • Organization plan: $119 per user per month, which adds buying intent over 12 intent topics, AI-assisted email writing, and call transcriptions.

Pros & Cons

✅ The buyer intent feature identifies companies actively searching for similar services. 

✅ The free tier lets you find a significant number of valid emails per month, making it accessible for small businesses. 

✅ Sequence automations that help you engage prospects.

❌ Sometimes, errors occur when pushing contacts to CRM, according to G2 reviews. 

❌ The platform can get expensive for larger teams.

#7: Demandbase

Best for: Identifying and targeting the right customers with the right message to support your account-based marketing.

Similar to: Warmly, 6sense.

Demandbase is a solution for ABM teams, boasting a wide range of features designed for sales, marketing, and advertising departments.

It’s a viable UnifyGTM alternative for enterprise companies looking to retarget prospects at scale with relevant messages and provide leads with a tailored website experience.

Features

  • Account-based marketing orchestration enables you to create customizable workflows aimed at specific accounts/audience segments.
  • Ad targeting options help sales and marketing teams display personalized ads to high-value accounts.
  • Real-time website personalization leverages intent and B2B data to provide each target account with a tailored web experience, including everything from messaging and images to offers and CTAs.

Standout Feature: Actionable Sales Insights

Demandbase helps you close more deals by knowing who is ready to buy and when to reach out with deep account insights.

The platform helps you prioritize accounts in your territory using insights from weekly email snapshots that highlight engaged prospects and account activity.

Pricing

Demandbase does not include its pricing, so you’d have to contact their team to get a quote.

➡️ The only thing revealed on its website is that its pricing model includes a platform fee that covers all the essential services and a flat user fee that scales according to your needs.

Pros & Cons

✅ Targeted B2B advertising and retargeting.

✅ Full suite of ABM tools, including account insights, intent data, and personalized campaign orchestration.

✅ Sales insights that your team can use to prioritize accounts.

❌ The platform has a steep learning curve, according to G2 reviews.

❌ On the higher end in terms of pricing.

#8: UpLead

Best for: Generating third-party verified B2B emails and mobile phone numbers of prospects in the market for your solution.

Similar to: Apollo.ai.

UpLead is a B2B lead generation platform built for sales and marketing professionals looking for a reliable and efficient way to connect with high-quality prospects. 

The platform makes up to be a viable UnifyGTM alternative, as it guarantees a 95% accuracy rate, ensuring the leads are legitimate and reliable.

Features

  • Provides access to a comprehensive database of over 160 million business leads from a wide range of industries and company sizes.    
  • The prospect accuracy level is supported by continuous data updates and verification processes. 
  • Uses over 50 customizable filters, like company size, industry, location, job title, and more, to refine your search and identify qualified leads that match your ideal buyer persona. 

Standout Feature: Control Your Expenses

As budgeting issues have been a concern with UnifyGTM’s customer base, we decided to include the fact that UpLead allows you to control your expenses by choosing which emails to download.

The way it works is that accept-all and catch-all emails are flagged, and if emails are downloaded, no charges are incurred. 

Pricing

UpLead lets you start with a 7-day free trial and grab five credits to evaluate the platform’s capabilities. 

After that, you’d need to be on one of the tool’s three paid plans: 

  • Essentials: $99 per month for 170 credits, which adds a CRM integration. 
  • Plus: $199 per month for 400 credits, which adds data enrichment, email pattern intel, technographic, and advanced filters.
  • Professional: Custom pricing, which adds buyer intent data, access to all search filters, and advanced CRM integrations with full API access.

Pros & Cons

✅ Smooth integration with CRM systems, like HubSpot, allows for efficient data management and follow-up. 

✅ Credits are not used when an email is found to be invalid. 

✅ Pricing is not based on user seats and you can control your spending of credits.

❌ The difficulty of amending queries midway through the search process requires you to recreate searches from scratch, according to G2 reviews.

❌ Data enrichment and buyer intent data are reserved for the more expensive plans of the platform.

#9: Seamless AI

Best for: Finding the contact information of any prospective buyer.

Similar to: UpLead, Apollo.ai.

Seamless AI offers an AI-powered B2B data provider with an extensive database of 1.3 million contacts and 120+ million companies. 

The tool is a viable alternative to UnifyGTM for marketing and sales teams looking for accurate, verified contact data and integrates with their existing B2B sales workflows.

Features

  • Uses AI to research and verify millions of B2B phone numbers, emails, and direct dials of people and companies in real-time.
  • Identify and engage with read-to-buy leads at the right time and channel – with 12,000+ topics and industries to choose from.
  • Track key contacts' job transitions for timely outreach and relationship building with the platform’s Job Changes feature.

Standout Feature: Seamless AI Autopilot

Seamless AI’s Autopilot feature automatically curates a list of prospects based on your ideal customer persona (ICP) and selected criteria within minutes.

The platform lets you build and filter lists of prospects based on specific criteria for targeting the most relevant contacts.

Pricing

Seamless.AI offers a free plan with 50 credits that lets you test out the platform at no cost.

The platform then offers 2 paid plans: Pro and Enterprise with custom pricing, which adds a free admin seat, and more premium integrations.

Pros & Cons

✅ The search feature is fast and accurate.

✅ Cost-effective solution for small and medium-sized businesses, according to G2 reviews.

✅ Seamless AI Autopilot that helps you find contacts that fit your ICP in minutes.

❌ Lack of customization options to narrow down specific leads. 

❌ Too many of the core functionalities of the platform are required to be paid for separately as an add-on (e.g., data enrichment, autopilot, job change notifications, etc.)

#10: Lusha

Best for: Identifying the right decision-makers and then reaching out to them.

Similar to: Warmly, ZoomInfo.

Lusha offers a sales solution for B2B teams looking to improve their prospecting efforts by providing them with accurate and up-to-date company and contact data. 

The platform adheres to GDPR and CCPA privacy standards, which means that user data is handled securely. It also facilitates data privacy with certifications like ISO 27701.

Features

  • Analyzes behavioral signals to identify prospects most likely to buy your products or services, so your outreach can be targeted to their needs.
  • Real-time alerts about job changes within target companies so your team can stay informed about potential decision-makers who are open to engaging with new vendors. 
  • Sophisticated search filters that include industry, revenue, employee count, and more, that let you build highly targeted contact lists quickly. You can then export these lists directly to your CRM.

Standout Feature: Personalized AI Recommendations

With Lusha, your team will automatically receive daily AI-generated prospect lists to help you prioritize and streamline your outreach efforts.

For example, the platform will recommend prospective companies that have recently raised funding and might be looking for a solution like yours.

Pricing

Lusha offers a free plan that lets you try out the tool by getting 50 emails and five phone numbers per month.

Apart from this, the platform offers three paid plans: 

  • Pro plan: Starts from $37.45/month when billed annually for 3 seats with 1,920 emails and 480 phone numbers per year with team management features and intent signals (up to 5 topics). 
  • Premium plan: Starts from $59.95/month when billed annually for 5 seats with 3,840 emails and 960 phone numbers, which adds more advanced team management features and a 20% discount on phone credits. 
  • Scale plan: Custom pricing, which adds a free manager seat, SSO, and more intent signals.

Pros & Cons

✅ Intent targeting enhances the prospecting experiences and improves lead acquisition success rates.

✅ You can create separate contact lists and export data simplifying the sharing of information across the teams. 

✅ Personalized AI recommendations so you can stay on top of the latest hot prospects to look out for.

❌ Lack of a mobile app, unlike some of its competitors.

❌ Some users report some of the data to be outdated and incorrect – and can greatly vary from industry or region.

Next Steps: Find out who is on your website and engage them in real-time with Warmly

With UnifyGTM and its alternatives, organizations will often have problems like limited identification functionalities, an expensive pricing model, and limited free usage.

But what if we tell you there’s a platform that can minimize these drawbacks to a minimum while providing you with fast ROI?

Warmly gives you information about all the prospects that come to your website and helps you nurture and convert them into paying customers.

When the data comes from your own website, the possibility of it being wrong is comparatively less.


But Warmly is not a platform that just reveals anonymous website visitors or provides access to leads to go after. 

Our revenue orchestration platform does much more:

  • Website Intent Signals: You can identify potential buyers by tracking their interactions with your website and get insights into their interest level, allowing for timely and targeted outreach.
  • Coldly Contact Database: Access a wide range of accurate prospect contact details directly from the Coldly database, helping you reach out to the right people.
  • Meeting Scheduling: Simplify your meeting process with automatic scheduling that removes the back-and-forth, ensuring a frictionless booking experience.
  • Inbound Chat: Engage website visitors in real-time with intelligent chat features designed to convert inbound traffic into meaningful leads.
  • The ability to send leads to the right salesperson automatically and notify them via Slack with a high-intent lead is active on your website.
  • A Bombora integration that helps you proactively reach out to your warm leads and track who’s researching terms relevant to your product and brand and get in front of them before your competitors do.
  • AI Prospector: Automate the search for high-potential prospects using AI-driven technology, ensuring your sales team focuses on the right opportunities.

You can sign up for Warmly’s free plan and discover first-hand how it can fill your pipeline with qualified leads, or book a live demo to see it in action first.

AI GTM: Top Use Cases, Software, & Examples
AI GTM: Top Use Cases, Software, & Examples
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What you are thinking right now is true – GTM teams have been leveraging the latest AI tools and strategies to level up their sales motion.

Sales, marketing, and GTM teams use AI to book more meetings, identify opportunities they did not know existed before and do what was thought impossible before – personalization at scale.

In this article, I’ll show you how GTM teams are using AI in 2025, going over the 10 most popular use cases I’ve seen work in the industry, as well as 5 examples of real companies getting real results.

But first, let’s start with the basics: 👇

How is AI being used in GTM in 2025?

Artificial intelligence is being used by GTM teams to save time and boost productivity by automating tasks (such as reaching out to prospects), personalizing outreach or the website altogether, and identifying revenue opportunities.

The technology enables businesses to make more data-driven decisions and helps you prioritize the leads and opportunities that matter – with targeted outreach and personalized experiences.

➡️ The way our GTM team has structured our sales workflow at Warmly is that we use AI for cold and lukewarm leads so our humans can focus on the ‘’hot’’ leads.

How is AI transforming GTM?

AI is revolutionizing GTM operations by introducing a concept that was believed to be fiction just a few years ago: automation and personalization at scale.

GTM teams can better optimize their resource allocation, such as enabling their human sales team to work on the high-intent leads, instead of spending hours on manual cold outreach.

What are the advantages of using AI in your GTM strategy?

The main benefits of using AI in your GTM strategy include:

  • Saving time from manual work so your GTM team would have done themselves, either way, such as researching prospects or preparing for calls.
  • Working non-stop for you, instead of 9-5, such as AI chatbots, which we will discuss later. This will allow you to capture the right timing as well.

  • Getting data-driven insights, such as internal information from your CRM, to predict lead behavior.
  • Saving money from having to hire more sales reps to reach out to more prospects or do more manual work.
  • Personalization at scale: AI technology enables personalized outreach and customer experiences (e.g., seeing a tailored version of your website) at scale.

Top 10 use cases of AI in GTM with the best tool for each

Now that we’ve got the fundamentals out of the window, I’d like to walk you through the top AI use cases for GTM teams that I’ve seen work best in the industry:

#1: Reach out to prospects who visit your website automatically

Your team can use AI-powered GTM software to reach out to your warm prospects who visit your website on autopilot.

Here’s a workflow that we have been working on with 11x’s AI sales agents to create:

Instead of your GTM team manually reaching out to prospects after identifying them with visitor identification software like Warmly, 11x’s AI SDR uses Warmly’s warm prospect data to prioritise contacts based on intent signals, such as:

  • Website activity (e.g., visited your pricing page).
  • Chatbot interactions.
  • Research intent.
  • Email engagement.
  • Recorded activity in your sales CRM.

And then automatically reach out to them on your behalf.

Here’s how the process looks with our partnership with 11x:

  • Warmly de-anonymizes your website visitors (both organizations and specific people within that company so the outreach can be more targeted).
  • Our software filters leads based on intent signals and any existing segmentation rules that you’ve set up in your account.
  • The prospects are then funnelled to the best-fit outreach path based on their intent.

➡️ We prefer using this workflow for the warm leads, not cold or hot leads.

Warm leads are showing some intent signals, but they are not ready to buy yet, which is why we prefer using 11x’s sales agents to do automatic LinkedIn and email outreach in high volumes.

This workflow can also be customized. You can use segments to narrow down your leads to people who’ve fulfilled specific intent signals.

For example, you can create an AI SDR campaign for leads who have researched your competitors or prospects who have already interacted with your website’s AI chat.

Our partnership with 11x does not aim to create a spammy AI sales agent that would just bombard your prospects with emails.

➡️ Our AI sales agent has built-in quality checks to ensure that every message you send out is effective, compliant, and aligned with your brand voice.

Your GTM team will be able to focus on nurturing high-priority leads by leaving the legwork to 11x’s AI SDRs.

Book a demo to find out more about this sales workflow that can book you meetings with qualified leads on autopilot using intent data.

#2: Set up an AI chat on your website to engage with visitors

Another AI use case for GTM teams is to set up an AI-powered sales chat that can engage with high-intent and target accounts visiting your website.

The good thing about these AI-powered chatbots is that you can customize (no-code) how you want them to interact and in what scenarios they should engage with visitors.

For example, Warmly’s AI chat for GTM teams can be customized to run:

  • For specific target audiences (e.g., company size <1,000).
  • With a condition, such as prospects being on the Pricing page.
  • The specific message you want it to start with, and then the routing rules.

The goal of the AI-powered sales chat is to answer commonly asked questions and to either try to book meetings or route to a human sales agent.

But our AI sales chat is not just another chatbot from the dozens of chatbots in the market that you hear about.

It can automatically scrape the website information of your accounts and combine that with metadata across your systems to construct personalized chat messages to your prospects.

#3: Go after leads that aren’t visiting your site but are showing research intent

One of my personal favourite AI use cases for GTM is its ability to automatically go after leads that aren’t visiting your site but are showing research intent.

Here’s how you can do that with Warmly’s Bombora integration:

1️⃣ Specify up to 10 research topics you want to target, such as product keywords, pain points, competitors, etc.

2️⃣ Filter by audience (ICP), such as sales directors, demand gen leaders, etc.

3️⃣ Based on your filters, Warmly finds your leads and pushes those leads to your CRM

4️⃣ Connect those segmented leads to LinkedIn Ad Retargeting Tools: Build 1:1 ads that target these leads showing interest (i.e., research intent).

This will help you max out your sales opportunities by targeting lukewarm leads who are shopping around for solutions like yours, but are not aware of your product.

➡️ We also like to combine that workflow with Warmly’s automatic email outreach.

Warmly makes it easy to get your product in front of people who are actively researching topics related to your brand. 

In 2025, it’s important to start warming up those leads and jump in with stronger messaging when they’re showing even warmer signals.

You can check out the LinkedIn post for this GTM workflow, where we showcased how to do that in video format.

#4: Get up to speed on opportunities with sales forecasting

AI-powered sales forecasting utilizes machine learning (ML) algorithms to analyze large sets of data to identify patterns and trends that can help your sales team predict future sales performance. 

Sales tools like Gong AI leverage a variety of signals to help your sales team predict which customers are likely to convert.

The way it works is that the platform uses 300+ unique signals within your CRM data and customer interactions to help you create accurate deal and sales forecasts.

These tools can also alert your GTM team when a deal is close to being lost and highlight potential causes to help your human sales team address them on time.

Gong also provides you with an AI-powered sales projection based on the probability of the leads closing, so you can keep track of your target for the quarter.

#5: Researching prospects before reaching out to them

Another AI use case for GTM teams is the ability to scale account research for your team so they can send relevant messages.

There are tools like UnifyGTM that have an AI sales agent, which can scrape your prospects’ websites, browse the Internet, and pull CRM data to help you learn more about your leads.

The sales tool automatically triggers research when a buyer or company meets specific criteria that your sales team has set.

It then goes on to scrape their website, search the web, and analyze data to learn more about the prospect.

The sales agent then combines contact, LinkedIn, and CRM data to help your team personalize the messaging to each prospect.

Alternatively, there are AI tools like Clay that research each prospect in-depth and then let you ask the AI agent questions about the prospects, such as whether they are hiring at the moment.

For example, something I’m always keen on knowing is whether my prospects are hiring at the moment, which signals to me that they have a budget to spend.

#6: Personalizing outreach

Another AI use case for GTM teams is personalizing your outreach, on either email or LinkedIn.

For example, a tool like 6sense combines its 6sense Signalverse data, 6AI, and your organization’s content library to automate and tailor email workflows at scale.

The software lets your GTM team personalize cold or warm emails being sent out with information, such as:

  • The lead’ company, industry, or job.
  • Insights from the prospect’s LinkedIn account.
  • Specific keywords that the tool has figured out that the prospect is interested in (e.g., visitor identification software).

6sense’s AI sales agent helps your GTM team generate and then sends emails that are personalized to your leads using the tool's out-of-the-box agent playbooks.

➡️ What stands out to me about 6sense is that it also improves your email deliverability by utilizing custom sending domains and contact validation rules.

#7: Send personalized video messages to your prospects

Seasoned GTM leaders know the effectiveness of video messages, especially when you’re trying to show your prospects how they can level up their game with your solution.

With the introduction of AI-powered tools like Vidyard, your GTM team can scale personalized video outreach to boost both productivity and reply rates from prospects.

Vidyard lets your GTM team create and send AI-generated video messages to leads even when they're not available to record in person.

The way it works is that your human team creates a custom AI Avatar by recording a 90-second training video or selecting from a library of stock Avatars.

The platform then generates a script, which can be written manually or created using Vidyard's AI-powered script generator.

The AI Avatar records the video, which can be personalized with your lead data.

Videos can then be created and shared with your prospects directly from browser extensions or integrated sales tools, such as Apollo, Salesloft, and Outreach.

#8: Personalize your website to your leads

AI is now capable of personalizing your prospect’s website experiences in real-time by displaying dynamic content and customized landing pages based on user behavior. 

This kind of personalization can improve user experience, increase time spent on-site, and generate more pipeline by making every visitor see a different version of your website.

The technology achieves this by analyzing your website visitors’ buying intent and engagement levels on your website, so every visitor sees content that aligns with their interests.

➡️ For GTM teams, this can mean dynamically adjusting case studies and offers to match industry-specific use cases.

A software I know that can do this is Demandbase, which leverages buying intent and B2B data to provide each target account with a tailored web experience, including messaging, images, offers and CTAs.

The platform provides you with a no-code landing page editor, where you can select how you want to customize your website.

#9: Generate landing pages for different B2B ICPs

One overlooked AI use case in 2025 for GTM teams is using AI to generate landing pages for different ICPs and product use cases.

Instead of constantly requesting developer resources for generating landing pages for the different target personas and use cases, you can speed up the process with a tool like Landingi.

Landingi offers an AI Landing Page builder that lets you design and optimize landing pages.

The platform enables GTM leaders to create professional landing pages without coding skills.

Landingi also has built-in analytics and A/B testing tools, which can track your visitors’ behavior and optimize the effectiveness of your ABM campaigns.

#10: Analyzing sales conversations

Lastly, your GTM team can leverage a tool like Fireflies to analyze sales conversations that your sales team was a part of.

Note-taking apps are usually utilized to take meeting notes and to come back to them with questions about how the meeting went.

I’ve noticed that they can also be used to:

  • Transcribe and summarize sales meetings across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams.
  • Create notes that highlight key moments (e.g., pain points of your customers).
  • Generate meeting summaries with analysis on next steps, tasks, and questions asked by the leads.
  • Detect buyer sentiment, identify talk-to-listen ratio, recognize critical topics, and measure your sales team’s performance during sales conversations.

Fireflies AI also comes with an out-of-the-box analytics platform where your GTM team can see questions asked and get access to topic insights.

5 examples of companies (successfully) utilizing AI in their GTM campaigns

Here are examples of 5 GTM teams that successfully utilized AI to improve their bottom line and/or operations: 👇

#1: Kandji booked 2 qualified meetings in 8 minutes of setting up Warmly’s AI Chat

Kandji, a device management platform for Apple devices, decided to give Warmly’s AI chat a chance so it can detect ICP-fit visitors on their website and engage with them.

The AI Chat accurately identified prospects' companies and generated personalized messages, and then initiated conversations that led to meeting bookings.

Our system then notified their sales team on Slack when the prospects engaged with the AI chatbot so they could take over the conversation in real-time.

The results: Kandji started booking qualified sales meetings within 8 minutes of setting up our AI-powered sales chat for website visitors.

Here’s how the chat transcript looked before the human sales reps took over:

#2: Composing personalized emails at scale: Gong x Verse

Verse AI’s GTM team used Gong Engage to compose personalized emails at scale to improve sales velocity and shorten sales cycles.

Before using the platform, Verse was relying on tools that provided them with limited visibility into their sales pipeline and customer engagement.

Their GTM team leveraged Gong's insights to refine their content and campaigns, basing their strategies on accurate customer interaction data rather than intuition.

Results: After Verse decided to give Gong a chance, they achieved better alignment and collaboration among sales, marketing, and customer success teams.

The platform achieved a 76% increase in revenue from closed-won deals and experienced 25% greater forecast accuracy due to improved visibility into its pipeline and customer interactions.

#3: Prospect prioritization and engagement - Premikati x Warmly

Premikati was facing an issue that a lot of GTM teams can relate to: It was generating website traffic, but was not able to efficiently capture and nurture the prospects.

The company was struggling with accurate attribution, meaning its GTM team couldn’t figure out which of their efforts and strategies were driving value.

After Premikati deployed Warmly, they were able to tackle several issues at once:

  • Identify its website visitors, providing the GTM team with a rich pool of potential leads.
  • Automatically recognize the visitors most likely to convert based on on-site signals, like pages visited, and off-site signals, like research intent.
  • Orchestrate the entire outreach process using Warmly’s Orchestrator, which automatically adds leads with the highest scores in adequate sequences based on the criteria that Premikati’s team sets up.

Results: Premikati was able to maximize its ROI by building a steady pipeline of warm leads with Warmly’s AI-driven functionality.

The AI-powered prospector prevents quality leads from falling through the cracks simply because you didn’t have a sales rep on hand.

Try it yourself 👇or watch it in action



The company also utilized Warmly’s AI Chat, which allowed their team to auto-book meetings with qualified prospects.

Listen to the full interview here:

"If Warmly goes away, we quit." - Michael Buczynski, VP of Marketing at Premikati

#4: Inbound lead enrichment: OpenAI x Clay

OpenAI’s GTM team implemented Clay to scale their sales motion, particularly for inbound lead enrichment and sales team support.

Clay helped OpenAI, which needs no introduction, to more than double their enrichment coverage from a low 40% to a high 80%, enabling better lead scoring, routing, and response.

The AI giant used Clay's AI research agent to automate and scale custom GTM research, mimicking the process of their best sales representatives.

Clay's Salesforce package allowed OpenAI's GTM staff to perform on-demand data enrichment directly within their sales CRM to maintain consistent adoption across teams.

Results: Clay’s flexibility enabled OpenAI to rapidly iterate on enrichment strategies, support various use cases across different teams, and maintain a strong data foundation for growth.

#5: ZoomInfo x Seismic

Seismic, a sales enablement platform, was looking to enhance its GTM’s productivity and personalization efforts using AI.

The platform implemented ZoomInfo Copilot to leverage its AI-driven prospecting insights and integrated it into its existing tech stack.

Copilot's AI chatbot and access to ZoomInfo's data helped Seismic craft specific, personalized messages that led to quicker responses from prospects.

Results: Seismic's GTM team attributed 39% of active pipelines to opportunities identified or influenced by signals from ZoomInfo, and they also reported a 54% increase in productivity and saved 11.5 hours per week.

Next Steps: Set Up Powerful GTM Workflows Inside of Warmly

AI use in GTM, sales, and marketing isn’t just the future like it used to be a few years ago—it’s the present.

I believe that the GTM teams that will be thriving in the ABM 2.0 era would be the ones best using artificial intelligence to identify opportunities, engage leads while they are hot, and answer questions as they arise.

The organizations shown above have already proven that AI-powered strategies lead to higher engagement, better lead conversions, and return on investment.

With Warmly, you can automate lead identification, engagement, and outreach, ensuring no high-value prospect falls through the cracks.

From intent-based lead scoring that helps prioritize the most promising accounts to automated personalized outreach and AI-powered chatbots that engage visitors in real-time, Warmly equips your Go-To-Market team with AI capabilities to streamline operations and maximize ROI.

If you’re looking for a revenue orchestration platform that offers:

  • A way to instantly engage with your highest intent prospects with Warmly’s AI chat.
  • A platform that works in real-time and can automatically notify the right salesperson as soon as an ICP lead shows buying intent, so they can act immediately.
  • The ability to create a human-to-human connection with any high-intent web visitor through video chat right on your site.
  • A free email and LinkedIn database that comes with a <1% bounce rate.
  • A Bombora integration that lets you proactively reach out to your warm leads and track who’s researching terms relevant to your product and brand, and get in front of them before your competitors do.

Then you can sign up for Warmly’s free plan or book a demo today and see how Warmly can transform your sales workflows with AI. 

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Best 8 Clearbit Alternatives & Competitors in 2025 [Updated March]
Best 8 Clearbit Alternatives & Competitors in 2025 [Updated March]
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Looking for Clearbit alternatives?

Clearbit used to be one of the biggest and most respected names out there when it comes to quality B2B data - until they got acquired by HubSpot and became Breeze Intelligence.

If you’re on HubSpot, this is great news.

If you’re not, and you’re using some other CRM (Salesforce, for example), then you’re likely to find that Clearbit isn’t your ideal solution going forward, and it's time to start looking for an alternative.

This article will help you through that exact process. We’re going to dive into eight powerful Clearbit competitors that you can use to fuel your omnichannel sales and marketing playbook.

Why Consider An Alternative to Clearbit? 

Clearbit has long been one of the best data providers in the game.

But data has been commoditized, and there are now many solutions with better data (6sense, for example) that also offer sales engagement functionality.

Clearbit has never pursued this area, meaning you’ve always had to connect it to an existing tech stack, making it more of a developer-focused tool.

Recently, they were acquired by HubSpot, which is a double-edged sword.

For HubSpot users, this is great. It means you get your CRM enriched (once the integration process is through) and connect Clearbits data to a software tool that can actually execute playbooks.

For anyone using any other CRM (95% of the market), this essentially means Clearbit is no longer a viable solution. 

While, right now, Clearbit still integrates with CRMs like Salesforce, logic dictates that they’ll neglect such connections in favor of improving the Clearbit > HubSpot link.

What are the Top Clearbit Alternatives & Competitors?

The best Clearbit alternatives are: Warmly, Zoominfo and Demandbase.

1. Warmly

Warmly offers the best alternative to Clearbit (now Breeze Intelligence) in 2025 with our signal-based revenue orchestration platform that provides a wide range of features designed to:

  • Capture warm leads that visited your website (first-party data).
  • Identify the hottest prospects from those visitors.
  • Automatically engage and nurture them, helping your sales reps to successfully convert them.

Let’s get a closer look at the functionality that makes Warmly an attractive option for sales teams: 👇

Feature #1: Identify Your Website Visitors

Similarly to Clearbit, Warmly identifies companies and individuals visiting your website in real-time.

Since your website is one of the most important parts of your lead generation funnel, capturing and engaging all leads it generates is of pivotal importance if you’re looking to build a steady pipeline of warm leads.

All it takes is adding a snippet of Warmly’s code to your website to start revealing warm leads visiting it.

You can monitor your leads’ web sessions in real-time to see exactly how they interact with your website.

➡️ This can help you pinpoint whether your website is optimized for conversions or if it needs improvements.

But that’s not everything.

Every identified visitor will be enriched with granular B2B data, providing your sales team with all the information they need to:

  • Pinpoint leads that best fit your ICP.
  • Tailor their outreach to each lead for optimal results.

The B2B prospect data Warmly reveals includes:

  • Company data (company name, location, size, etc.).
  • Technographics (software tools and technology the company predominantly uses).
  • Demographics (individual names, email addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, job roles, etc.).
  • CRM data (past interactions with your reps, former champions within that account, etc.). 

Feature #2: Reveal Buyer Intent 

While knowing who visits your website and gaining insight into relevant B2B information gives you a nice competitive advantage, I believe that it’s still not enough to ensure the best possible results from your sales efforts.

This is why Warmly tracks and captures buyer intent data, in addition to basic B2B data, enabling your sales reps to find which of your leads is most likely to convert now.

Warmly collects several types of intent signals:

  1. First-party intent: This includes intent signals leads left in your owned channels, such as website visits, the specific pages they visited, time spent on high-intent pages, recurring visits, etc.
  2. Second-party signals: These come from monitoring LinkedIn for things like job changes and openings, new funding rounds, etc.
  3. Third-party intent: This includes the intent signals your leads left across the web, such as web searches that include keywords relevant to your product, visits to competitors’ websites or interactions with their ads, etc.

Warmly provides a granular and comprehensive view of your leads’ buyer intent, enabling you to:

  • Score and qualify leads with greater precision.
  • Identify the highest-value leads among them.
  • Engage leads precisely when they’re most likely to convert, boosting your chances of success.

Feature #3: Automate Your Sales Process

In addition to helping your SDRs identify high-quality leads from the get-go, Warmly lets you leverage the intent signals it picks up to create comprehensive sales workflows.

It has several automation tools that let you set things like LinkedIn and email outreach or lead routing on autopilot.

Firstly, there’s the Orchestrator, which enables you to streamline LinkedIn and email outreach.

Here’s how it works:

  • Set up the action that triggers the automated sequence (e.g., a visitor matching your ICP lands on your website).
  • Define the criteria the prospects need to meet to be targeted (e.g., company size, industry, individual job role).
  • Specify the frequency at which you want the workflows to run and the maximum number of people targeted in a single account.
  • Decide what action you want the Orchestrator to take (e.g., sending a contextual email, personalized LinkedIn DM, or connection request).

The Orchestrator will then ensure that all the leads matching the criteria you defined are adequately engaged, taking notice that every email or message is personalized and contextual.

Learn more about how it works:

Secondly, there’s the AI Chat, Warmly’s AI-powered chatbot that engages with your prospects in real-time.

Warmly’s AI Chat can handle a wide range of actions, including:

  • Automatically engaging and qualifying leads.
  • Offering relevant collaterals.
  • Answering questions.
  • Booking meetings, etc.

The chatbot is powered by our tool’s generative AI, which can be trained to maintain a consistent brand tone across chats while ensuring that every interaction with each lead is contextual, relevant, and human-like. 

Finally, Warmly lets you automate lead routing, as your sales reps will be notified in Slack the second a high-intent lead or visitor matching your ICP lands on your website.

This significantly reduces the time to lead, improving your chances of converting them.

Feature #4: Live Engagement With Warm Video Chatting

Having the option to engage leads while their interest in your product is at its highest could be the make or break between converting them and losing them for good.

Warmly’s live video chat option was designed with this in mind, allowing sales reps to engage leads in live, one-to-one meetings while they’re still on your website.

When you go to the “Warm Call” section of Warmly’s dashboard, you’ll see a detailed overview of all your website visitors right now, with the option of monitoring each prospect’s website session and uncovering intent insights simply by clicking on their name.

Once your sales reps assess that the time is right based on website session insights and other intent signals, they can easily initiate a call and do what they do best.

Feature #5: A Daily-Updated B2B Prospect Database: Coldly

Warmly lets you access Coldly, which is a database with 200M+ accounts and contacts that gives your sales team an excellent starting point for prospecting.

Coldly includes all the B2B data your sales reps need to make initial contact, including:

  • Validated emails.
  • Phone numbers.
  • LinkedIn profiles.

Our database also provides 25+ B2B filters and customizable data filters that you can set up, enabling your sales team to build highly targeted prospect lists in a few seconds.

Coldly also has a browser extension that lets you scrape essential B2B contact data from any source on the web, including LinkedIn profiles, company websites, etc.

This way, your team will have both accurate contact data at their fingertips and the right tools to pick up buyer intent signals and set up workflows on top of them.

Warmly Pricing

Similar to Clearbit, Warmly offers a freemium plan.

On it, you can:

  • Reveal up to 500 companies and individuals visiting your website (in addition to essential and accurate data on each lead).
  • Set up ICP filters to quickly identify high-quality leads. 
  • Automate basic lead routing.

If you need more, there are four paid plans to choose from:

  1. Micro: Starts at $333/month when billed annually and adds unlimited seats, 5,000 monthly visitors revealed, first-party intent signals, alerts, and access to Warmly’s extensive database of B2B contact data.
  2. Starter: Starts at $12,000/year, everything in Micro, plus 10,000 monthly visitors, third-party signals, AI Chat, and CRM syncs.
  3. Business: Starts at $19,000/year for up to 10,000 visitors or $28,000/year for up to 75,000 visitors, everything in Starter, plus second-party signals, sales orchestration, and lead routing.
  4. Enterprise: Starts at $30,000/year, lets you identify a custom number of visitors, includes everything in Business, plus custom signals and warm calling.

Pros & Cons

✅ Accurate website visitor identification at both company and individual levels.

✅ Reveals who your hottest leads are right now.

✅ Personalized lead generation and outreach workflows.

✅ Real-time monitoring of visitors’ web sessions with options to engage them via an AI chat or video call.

✅ Transparent pricing model – even at the Business plan level.

✅ Good range of integrations.

❌ You'd have to be on Warmly's Enterprise plan to access Warm Calling.


2. ZoomInfo 

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ZoomInfo is one of the most widely used and all-encompassing GTM software solutions.

Not only do they compete with Clearbit in terms of contact data and sales intelligence, but they also have advertising, lead routing, and website chat functionality.

Why Choose ZoomInfo Over Clearbit?

The main reason to choose ZoomInfo is its breadth.

Of all of the Clearbit alternatives covered here, ZoomInfo does the most.

For example, if you’re already using ZoomInfo’s MarketingOS for account-based ads or web form enrichment, it makes sense to add on their contact data module.

This limits the number of vendors you’re paying but also means there is no need to sort any integrations since everything comes from the same supplier.

Main Drawbacks of ZoomInfo

ZoomInfo’s breadth is also its biggest weakness.

First, solutions that offer such scale are almost always expensive, and ZoomInfo is no exception. You’ll be paying six figures for a full ABM stack.

The other major drawback is a lack of focus.

ZoomInfo has primarily expanded its service offering through acquisitions. They aren’t really focused on building a best-in-class product. 

Rather, their goal appears to be to continue increasing ACV through the acquisition of new bolt-on features that they can then upsell to existing customers.

ZoomInfo Pricing 

ZoomInfo doesn’t advertise pricing, but we know from conversations with customers who’ve moved over to Warmly that you’ll pay at least $40k annually for workflows and $100k+ for a full GTM tech stack.


3. Demandbase 

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Demandbase is the grandfather of the ABM space. They, like ZoomInfo, have a broad offering.

Why Choose Demandbase Over Clearbit?

Demandbase’s big strength is buying committee identification. 

In the world of B2B sales, you’re often dealing with more than one stakeholder and decision maker.

The person interacting with your content may or may not be one of them. Demandbase helps you uncover the rest and enriches your existing data with a solid contact database.

Compared to Clearbit, it's a more robust tool with much more workflow functionality, making it more suitable for account-based marketing and sales sequences.

Main Drawbacks of Demandbase

Demandbase, like the other full-stack ABM solutions, is expensive. 

It’s a little cheaper than ZoomInfo but more expensive than Clearbit. Then again, you’re getting more products for your money.

Advertising functionality isn’t as strong with Demandbase. 

They came up on account intelligence and bolted on advertising through an acquisition later. Their ad offering is fine, but there are better solutions for this, such as 6sense.

They also rely heavily on bidstream data for buying intent signals, which is generally not as reliable as other sources (Warmly uses Bombora’s intent data, for example).

Demandbase Pricing

Pricing for Demandbase is built on a per-customer basis.

Anecdotally, however, we can say that Demandbase is generally cheaper (but less robust and user-friendly) than 6sense and ZoomInfo, though you’ll still be paying into the high five figures.


4. Apollo.io 

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Apollo.io is another big name in the contact data category.

They came up on best-in-class data and have been growing quickly while expanding their offering toward an all-in-one solution.

In my opinion, they’re a seriously good contender, at least for email data.

Why Choose Apollo.io Over Clearbit?

Apollo.io has a lot of functionality to offer.

They’ve got best-in-class data, have some prospecting and engagement functionality, and website intent enrichment.

A few years back, Apollo.io was just a data solution—and one of the best in the field. Recently, they’ve grown super quickly and have become somewhat of a ZoomInfo (but more user-friendly).

A unique feature for Apollo.io is AI email writing, which you can use to respond to more basic prospect communications. This can significantly increase your response speed, helping your reps resolve objections while improving your speed to lead.

Main Drawbacks of Apollo.io

While Apollo.io has moved beyond just data and into sequencing, their sequencing functionality isn’t as good as, say, Outreach or SalesLoft (best-in-class tools for sales engagement).

Intent data isn’t as good as 6sense or Bombora, and B2B phone data is better from ZoomInfo or Seamless.AI.

B2B email contact data is where Apollo.io excels.

Apollo.io Pricing

Apollo.io is refreshingly upfront with its pricing model (which is probably a big part of why they’ve grown so quickly).

You’ll pay $49 per user per month for their Basic plan, or up that to $79 a month for the Professional plan with higher credit limits.

They also have a usable free plan, and you can get started without talking to a sales rep (another growth lever).


5. 6sense 

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6sense is another ABM platform with a seriously strong data offering.

In fact, they’re one of the data sources we use here at Warmly to power our account-based orchestration platform.

Why Choose 6sense Over Clearbit?

6sense runs the gamut from account intelligence to B2B advertising, helping ABM teams reap the full benefits of an account-based marketing motion.

Account intelligence, though, is 6sense’s biggest strength.

The idea here is that 6sense provides insights into how prospects interact with competitor websites to give a better idea of the level of intent shown and where they are in the buying funnel.

They also have one of the best advertising offerings in the market, with their own demand-side platform (DSP) empowering personalized ads for an omnichannel approach.

Main Drawbacks of 6sense

You’ve probably already gathered that 6sense is expensive. For end-to-end orchestration, you’re looking at $120k+.

As such, 6sense is more focused on the enterprise market, meaning it's not really a suitable solution for SMEs or startup sales.

It also requires a lot of time and resources at the implementation stage. Again, fine for larger organizations; not so much for the small business.

6sense Pricing

6sense builds custom packages based on your specific needs, but budget for at least $100k a year for a full ABM setup.


6. Lusha 

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Lusha was a big name in the B2B data space a few years back, though they seem to have fallen off the map a little bit since they raised their Series B back in 2021 and started moving upmarket.

Why Choose Lusha Over Clearbit?

Reports are that, compared to Clearbit, Lusha is a lot easier to use and much easier to set up. 

They, too, have been expanding their offering outside of data and now have some prospecting, enrichment, and intelligence functionality.

One cool feature that Lusha offers—and Warmly does, too—is job change alerts. If a stakeholder at a current customer jumps ship, you’ll be notified and can use that relationship as a warm lead of sorts and open up a conversation.

Main Drawbacks of Lusha

Like Clearbit, Lusha is more about the data side of the equation than actual sales execution. 

If your problem with Clearbit is that it doesn’t give you any playbooks to actually do anything with the data, then Lusha probably isn’t your solution.

Lusha Pricing

Lusha has a free plan, but it's seriously limited and best thought of as a trial.

From there, you’ll pay $29 per user per month and upward.

7. Seamless.AI 

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Seamless.AI is one of the best sales tools and data providers out there.

We use it ourselves. The data is some of the best around, and pricing is pretty reasonable.

Why Choose Seamless.AI Over Clearbit?

Seamless.AI has been around since 2014, and just about everyone in the space reports that their data is incredibly accurate.

For phone numbers, they’re unbeatable and certainly a great alternative to Apollo.io.

Their standout feature, though, is Autopilot. It’s an automated list-building solution to help feed an outbound sales pipeline.

Main Drawbacks of Seamless.AI

The biggest drawback of Seamless.AI is that they don’t have an API. They’re kind of behind on the “integrate with everyone” thing that is becoming an industry standard.

This makes them quite limited for anyone looking to create their own bespoke tech stack.

For example, you can’t integrate Seamless.AI with Clay, Warmly, or Coupler to unify data sources and automate sales workflows off of.

Seamless.AI Pricing

Seamless.AI doesn’t outwardly advertise pricing, but we know as customers that they are seriously affordable.

They also offer a (limited) free plan for those who want to give it a spin first.


8. Cognism 

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Cognism is another solid solution for phone numbers, particularly B2B numbers.

Why Choose Cognism Over Clearbit?

Cognism is kind of like Apollo.io, except they’re based in Europe.

So, if you’re looking for an all-in-one solution as an alternative to Clearbit, but Apollo.io doesn’t work for you because you’re targeting European companies, Cognism is probably a good option.

Main Drawbacks of Cognism

Some customers report minor usability issues with Cognism, along with a few complaints about data accuracy.

They also don’t offer a free plan or even appear to provide a free trial.

Cognism Pricing

No pricing information at all is available for Cognism. You have to fill in a form and speak to a sales rep.

Find Out Who Your Warmest Leads Are With Warmly & Engage Them

While Clearbit (now Breeze Intelligence) provides a solid range of features for sales teams using HubSpot, especially those looking for a good B2B prospecting platform, the platform’s data reliability is still under question and lacks integrations with non-HubSpot products.

The platform’s capabilities of detecting buyer intent on your website at the contact level are also significantly limited compared to Warmly's.

With Warmly, all that changes.

Our revenue orchestration solution enables you to identify website visitors, detect the hottest leads among them, and engage them via automated outreach sequences perfectly tailored to each lead.

Want to know for sure if Warmly is a good match for your sales team?

Try Warmly for free and start building a steady, warm pipeline in minutes.

Or, book a demo with our team for a personalized tour of all of Warmly’s capabilities.

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Startup Sales: A Founder’s Comprehensive Guide To Building A Repeatable Go-To-Market Motion (2024)

Startup Sales: A Founder’s Comprehensive Guide To Building A Repeatable Go-To-Market Motion (2024)

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Maximus Greenwald

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.

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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's New Rules For Bulk Email Senders

Google and Yahoo's New Rules For Bulk Email Senders

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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.

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Source: warmly.ai

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.

We Reviewed 8 Best Qualified Alternatives & Competitors [2025]

We Reviewed 8 Best Qualified Alternatives & Competitors [2025]

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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

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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.

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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.


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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.


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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.


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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."

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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.


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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:

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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.

The Power of Category Design: Capturing 76% of Market Value

The Power of Category Design: Capturing 76% of Market Value

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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.

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‎Image Source

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

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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.

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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.

Step-By-Step Framework for Achieving Product Market Fit

Step-By-Step Framework for Achieving Product Market Fit

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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.

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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.

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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?"

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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.

Week 1 in Y-Combinator: Hello, World and & YC Bootcamp

Week 1 in Y-Combinator: Hello, World and & YC Bootcamp

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Maximus Greenwald

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.

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Co-founder crew hiking in Boulder during Techstars. Left to right: Carina, me, Val, and Alan
         

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!

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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.

Week 2 in Y-Combinator: Left Google to start a startup — What it’s like in Y Combinator

Week 2 in Y-Combinator: Left Google to start a startup — What it’s like in Y Combinator

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Carina Boo

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!

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Team Warmly! We have some amazing people on the team!
         

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]

Week 3 in Y-Combinator: Three Things YC has changed our minds on

Week 3 in Y-Combinator: Three Things YC has changed our minds on

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Val Yermakova

Here are three assumptions we had invalidated by YC.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

Week 4 in Y-Combinator: You’re not moving fast enough if things aren’t breaking

Week 4 in Y-Combinator: You’re not moving fast enough if things aren’t breaking

Time to read

Alan Zhao

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?

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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.

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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]

Week 5 in Y-Combinator: Things we did that didn’t scale

Week 5 in Y-Combinator: Things we did that didn’t scale

Time to read

Maximus Greenwald

What’s the origin of “Do Things That Don’t Scale”?

The quote actually originates from YC founder and legend Paul Graham. Paul Graham is famous for his startup essays and the one entitled “Do Things That Don’t Scale” is really worth the read.

In the article Paul describes how founders believe that they either will take off immediately, or not at all. But that’s not how it really works. In reality, you have to “take off” in different phases — from 0 to 1, from 1 to 10 and from 10 to 1,000. When you’re going from the 0 to 1 phase of figuring shit out, Paul says, you need to make things work for 1 customer. In doing so you should do things for that 1 customer that would never work for 10 customers or 1,000 customers.

This week in our Group Office Hours, our YC partners reminded us that the program was almost halfway over and Demo Day was just around the corner. They encouraged us to identify big unknowns that could be preventing us from reaching our goals, and solving them in the hackiest way possible. So we took the leap and tried three this week.

1. Spreadsheeting a feature

With our engineering team focused on scaling our backend this past week, I was shit out of luck on getting new features in the hands of users. One of the biggest ways we think we can add value to our users is by pushing the industry towards warm intros instead of cold outreach. Cold outreach in our minds is like throwing darts into the universe — you have to get real lucky to hit something and make a new sale. To that end, if we can help businesses move towards warm intros by thinking about their customers as a network, this will allow them to leverage those customers for new opportunities as opposed to cold outreach.

Many customers have told us they’d love to know which companies they could get warm intros to given the network they have. We realized we could create an easily searchable database (and recommendations) for just this using our algorithms — but it would have to wait until we could build it out in a few weeks. Channeling my inner Paul Graham, I thought about how I could do something that didn’t scale to get feedback on the effectiveness of the feature. So what did I do? “Spreadsheeted” the feature!

I decided to download my own LinkedIn Connections (to people who worked at companies that I could warm intro our customers to) and stick them in a spreadsheet. Then in the heart of our product (on the job changes tab) I added a single line of text

“Want more warm leads? Click here to view prospects”!

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Adding a simple string to our product

And it went directly to a spreadsheet!

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The spreadsheet we gave to customers.

Yes, in a live, functioning product. I immediately could start using it in a sales call and explain the desired effect.

The result? In less than 24 hours we had over 10 customers requesting intros.

2. Adding a direct line to the CEO

Customer feedback is the core of what makes Warmly better. The more interactions with our customers, the more likely we are to find product market fit and iterate towards a big meaningful business. If I don’t talk to 5 people a day about our product, I doubt I’ll be able to deeply understand the B2B sales & customer success worlds (due to my lack of experience in B2B). I decided to add my personal cell phone number in our product so that folks could literally reach out and text me any time. Yep — morning, noon or night. Feedback welcome. This might not be sustainable at 1,000 customers, but in the meantime I’m patiently waiting by the phone, doing something that doesn’t scale, hoping that a customer reaches out so I can learn more about what I can do to help them. Do you have questions / feedback about our business? Call me!

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The result? Well actually no one has called me yet. But 2 customer have said they thought it was cool that they could.

3. Every customer deserves tender love & care

I set aside time this week to directly and personally connect with each of our customers. Since we set up shared Slack channels with each customer to massively reduce onboarding time and barriers for communication, it’s been easy to reach out in an authentic way (highly recommend!). The team and I realized that connecting via email with written text certainly wasn’t the best way to form a close relationship with our customers. We had already added images and jokes to our job change notification report emails but we still didn’t feel close to our customers. But what about the medium of video? With the rise of at home work, I’ve been delighted by the authenticity of seeing real people’s homes, interruptions by their kids, or even the occasional “hey I need to make lunch while we talk, hope that’s cool!”

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Sending a video note to our customer Retool!

So that’s why I decided to record a selfie video for each of our customers letting them know how much they mean to us as a baby startup and how grateful we are for their continued business, support, and trust. And it really is true — we’d be nowhere without them.

The result? Happy customers who loved the gesture.…. And Carina (our CTO) reminded me after the fact that I need to smile next time before I start recording otherwise I’ll have just a grumpy starting face!

This week I realized how helpful it can be to do things that don’t scale. I won’t always be able to record personal customer videos. I won’t always be able to text with any customers. And I certainly won’t be able to stick random spreadsheets into our product (our CPO Val would kill me!). But nevertheless, while the product is nascent, the business just getting started, and the lack of learnings the biggest obstacle to our success, we’re willing to do whatever it takes to answer the hardest questions and explore opportunities that could lead to exponential growth.

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Team Warmly! We have some amazing people on the team!
         

What happened in Week 4 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Alan Zhao’s post Week 4 in Y Combinator.

. . .

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

Week 6 in Y-Combinator: Accelerator-ing while Remote

Week 6 in Y-Combinator: Accelerator-ing while Remote

Time to read

Val Yermakova

The Old Normal: In-Person Working

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January — May

Since day 1 of the whole cofounding team working together, we have had:

Daily (M-Sat)

Daily standup

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Weekly

Weekly mental health checkin

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During this time there are a variety of things we can do. The process for this has been iterated upon. The ‘basic’ check-in we do is fill out a sheet on 6 different parameters and rate our personal satisfaction with each parameter from 1–10. Then we go around and share our ratings.

I’m also incredibly passionate about Non-Violent Communication, Conscious Leadership, and Authentic Relating so often times I will create a workshop for the team to go through. Some examples are in my blog, valy.space. But most of them I’ve yet to make time to document properly.

Weekly team gratitudes
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During this time each team member takes a turn sitting in the “hot seat” while other people share a gratitude they have for them for something they did that week. At the end of each person’s turn, we bring our hands together and make a noise of their choosing — my “movement” is a ninja-style HIYAH!, Carina’s is a chicken noise and Alan forces us to beatbox. I won’t tell you what Max does, that’s top secret. Each new Warmly member creates their own noise that we use to honor the end of their gratitude.

Weekly team learning retrospective

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Here we reflect back on the week and write about all the things we learned. There’s never enough time for everyone to share everything they learned — it’s insane! We learn an astonishing amount over the course of a week.

Weekly team bonding
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Fun time! Each person takes a turn planning a team bonding event. We’ve done everything from learning how to draw, to kicking butt Wushu, to playing Jackbox, to yelling at each other over codenames.

Weekly personal time
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From January to May, we were working 7 days a week with only 8am-1pm on Sundays devoted to personal time.

Once we finished Techstars and hit May, this became too much and we were feeling the burnout.

May

For the month of May, we decided to take every Saturday and Sunday off.

The New Normal: Remote Working

June — Present

Then YC started in June and we added Saturday back into our schedules, but we still protect Sundays.

Because of COVID, we decided to shift the company to remote — at least until the world opens back up again. This means that our small but mighty team has dispersed across North America and our process has to account for 3 different timezones (ET, PST, HST). People in Hawaii are waking up at 4am while New Yorkers get to rise and shine at 10am.

To account for the lack of in-person interaction but also the zoom-fatigue, we’ve increased our opportunities for bonding but decreased the time of each event.

Today our process is:

Daily (M-F)

  • Stand-up

Weekly

  • Learning retrospective
  • Team lunch (NEW)
  • Team gratitudes
  • External gratitudes (NEW)

We added this in order to acknowledge all the external people who have been helping us along our journey. It really takes a village to make a startup.

Biweekly

  • Mental health check-in (NOW BIWEEKLY)
  • Team bonding (NOW BIWEEKLY)
  • Process retrospective (NEW)

During this time we discuss if there is anything about our process that needs improving. It’s time for people to discuss timezone issues, request to have fewer meetings, request more meetings, etc.

  • Market learning (NEW)

Absolutely essential. We are building a product for Customer Success and Salespeople and it is imperative that we maintain a consistent pulse on what these communities are discussing and feel are their most pressing issues. We are all responsible for finding an article, white paper, podcast, or blog post about a specific topic, ingesting that content and then teaching the rest of the team about what we learned.

Our team event calendar (where all 15 people attend)

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This processes, while ever-evolving to our current needs, help us stay a well-oiled machine and keep us accountable for maintaining an equitable and inspiring team culture.

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Team Warmly! We have some amazing people on the team!
         

What happened in Week 5 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Max Greenwald’s post Week 5 in Y Combinator.

. . .

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

Week 7 in Y-Combinator: Scaling Trust

Week 7 in Y-Combinator: Scaling Trust

Time to read

Alan Zhao

We tier up all the job changes we automatically detect into layers of cross validation. For the top tier, detected job changes that are validated by our system’s internal checks as 100% correct, we automatically pass through to our customer. For the bottom tier, ones our system isn’t confident about, we run a final pass through our QA team.

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While we’re constantly building and improving our automated data pipelines, we’ve found that having a set of human eyes is invaluable for catching edge cases. Each edge case lends itself to an insight. And each insight can inform incremental system level improvements that start to matter at scale. Our QA team is the final guard rail to catch the car before it swerves off the cliff into a sea of bad data.

QA Challenges We’ve Faced

As our customer base grows, so does our quality assurance team.

Unlike scaling software infrastructure, scaling a QA team comes with its own set of unique challenges. How do we onboard new QA members quickly? How do we ensure consistent output and accuracy? What happens when suddenly, overnight, the number of contacts we need to monitor increases 5 fold, and half our QA team isn’t available or is on religious holiday?

The most important of these scaling questions, the one that far eclipses the rest, is how do we establish trust?

Trust that a person is honest, that they will be available, that they will do what they say, that they act with our intentions in mind.

In the beginning trust was much easier to build because we were few (the QA team were people I knew I could trust: myself and my cofounder Carina). Then our needs outpaced our ability so we added a few more. But we could still meet with and get to know each person in the team and listen to their concerns and challenges. 

Scaling Trust

At some point though as Warmly grew, I realized I needed to start hiring QA managers, in addition to more QA folks. I went from knowing everyone, to knowing OF everyone, to not knowing what many of the members looked like. At a certain point it became impossible to keep track of everyone.

We started to see a slip in our data’s quality. New hires were making careless mistakes. They approved job changes that were clearly incorrect, even though everyone was trained on and used the same guidelines.

When we pointed out the mistakes to the managers to let their team know, it didn’t always stick. The members would correct their mistakes. Then a week would go by, and the same mistakes would crop up again.

For the earliest QA members (now managers), we interacted with them on a regular basis and got to know each other more personally. They understood Warmly’s mission and what we were trying to accomplish. In turn we got to know their own life goals. We built a relationship, and we established trust. We really enjoyed working with one another and they knew they were part of the family.

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When we introduced layers of management, it allowed us to plan and coordinate in much larger groups. But it also prevented us from extending the human connection and empathy with the QA folks we were not interacting with regularly.

We realized we couldn’t replicate these interactions with everyone, but we could try something else; write them a letter. We could try to unite the QA team under our company’s shared vision, explaining to them why the work they’re doing is so important, and inspire them to take the shared ownership of quality.

And for those of you who are curious, below I’m sharing the exact letter we now send each new member of the QA team on their first day at Warmly. While it’s still early, we’ve already seen a lift in data quality, but more importantly, trust.

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A letter to Warmly’s finest

To the good people of Warmly QA,

All of you have been working hard, and we notice and appreciate the dedication. Thank you for your diligence and willingness to push through. Thank you for your positive attitude. And thank you for being a source of inspiration for the rest of the team.

I’d like to share with you all a bit about Warmly and how your work is contributing to changing the world.

Warmly’s Mission Statement

“Re-imagine the world of business through deeper connections”

What exactly does Warmly do?

In the simplest explanation, we help companies detect when their customers change jobs.

Why is this important for our customer?

Say, for example, one of our customers, Coca Cola, has a customer who moved from Google to Uber. Coca Cola wants to know about the job change ASAP so that they can find a new replacement advocate at Google or otherwise risk losing Google as a customer. At the same time, Coca Cola sales team wants to know about the job change so they can sell Coca Cola’s product to the new company, Uber, through the customer who just joined Uber.

Selling through a former customer has a 70% chance of conversion vs. cold outreach (throwing darts into the universe), which has only a 5% chance of conversion. It’s much easier to sell your product to someone who is already familiar and likes your product, just like it is much easier to work with someone who you are already familiar with and like working with!

How you are essential

The most crucial part of Warmly’s vision is realized through the work you all do. Every single contact you are able to find and every person you successfully detect as a job change is one more node that is added to the internal graph to build the customer network.

In the beginning the goal might look impossible. The QA team started with Carina, Carol, Emily and I searching google for people who might have changed jobs. It was slow but we never compromised on quality because we knew that high quality, accurate data was the only way we could win.

And we were right. Although we’re still a young budding startup, we’re growing fast. Because we are able to get the data back faster and more accurate than anyone else, we’ve received tons of positive emails from customers thanking Warmly for all the warm intros they were able to get.

Your efforts are being noticed from small startups like ours, to large, 500+ person companies. Customers across every industry are starting to look to Warmly, for warm intros to their future customers. And now that our QA team is growing, one job change detected will soon become 10,000, and one day, millions.

Our plan is to break into the world’s leading companies to revolutionize how sales is done across industries and geographies. People should not be sold products by salespeople, they should be referred products by their trusted friends, friends who want to advocate for a product they like and believe in. Warmly enables this to happen.

I’m not alone in being grateful for the amazing work you all are doing. It’s a hard road ahead, and at times stressful. But we’ll be with you each and every step of the way.

So on behalf of everyone here at Warmly,: Max, Val, Carina, Zack, Amanda, Emily, Brandon, Carol, Grant, Natalie, Sanil, Shahpar and myself, thank you again.

You are part of the family now and I hope you will see it as such. We rise and fall together.

Let’s go make a dent in the universe.

Warmly,

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Sending you all our ❤️

What happened in Week 7 of Y Combinator?

Check out my cofounder Val Yermakova’s post Week 6 in Y Combinator.

. . .

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

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