Video Overview

In the #12 episode of “The B2B Outbound Marketing & Sales Automation Series”, Dancho spoke with the Co-founder and CEO of OneShot.ai, Gautam Rishi.

For the past 20 years, before launching OneShot.ai, Gautam worked in B2B Sales.

Oh, the experience and knowledge he possesses.

He built and managed some of the fastest-growing sales teams in the world, and today his primary role is being the Co-founder and CEO of OneShot.ai.

So, what are OneShot.ai best features? 

1. Instant suggestions. Make it personal in one click;
2. Data sources. Include any information source;
3. Multi channel. Send across any channel;
4. AI recommendations. Follow-up intelligence that nails your next best action and
5. AI templates. Build templates for any persona.

They offer three pricing plans:

1. OneShot Lite;
2. OneShot Pro and
3. OneShot Enterprise.

Check out their website here.

Click here for a 7-day free trial.

P.s. They even have a podcast, “The OneShot Podcast”.

STAY TUNED for more success stories, tips&tricks, and awesome tools in the B2B Outbound world!

Speakers

Interview Transcript

[00:00:07.870] – Dancho – Hello, everybody, and welcome to another episode on “The B2B Marketing and Sales Automation Tools”. I mean, by now, you know, we work really hard to find the latest tools in the latest automation hacks that could help your B2B outreach grow, and I really think that we found some really interesting. I mean, I have on the call Gautam, who is the CEO and c- founder of OneShot.ai. He has some really interesting story to tell. So, Gautam, first, welcome.

[00:00:32.690] – Gautam – Thank you, Dancho. Thank you for having me on. It’s a pleasure.

[00:00:36.050] – Dancho – Yeah. Well, for everybody out there, we already started some collaboration with Gautam and we really love their tool. And I thought that yeah, why don’t we use this opportunity to introduce it to the rest of our community. So Gautam, before we get into the details, perhaps a short introduction about who you are, what you do, so people will get the background idea.

[00:00:58.740] – Gautam – Yeah, cool, perfect. My name is Gautam, based in London. So before starting OneShot, my background is B2B sales. So for the last 20 years, that’s all I’ve done. So originally 2004, I was like a BDR for an American tech company called Empirix. We did software testing and for the last ten years I’ve been building and scaling sales teams in EMEA. So for Akamai, CloudBees, CD Networks. And typically I join it when the AMI regions about a million dollars, we scale them up to about 40 or $50,000,000. One thing that I’ve seen time and time again as we’ve scaled sales teams, when you hire new SDRs and AE’s and Enterprise AE’s, prospecting has become really difficult, everyone is using automation tools. People are sending the same message, buyers are getting frustrated. And one thing I’ve seen with highly successful sales teams, the top-performing sales people take time to personalize messaging. So they don’t just kind of spam the same people. And to personalize messaging takes time. So we thought with OneShot, how can we help sales people personalize at scale? So going away from the high activity to focus on high quality activity and the right activity, as well. And that’s why we built OneShop. So we’ve been used by thousands of sales reps to help them with their B2B outreach. And really at the core of all of this is how can we help personalize to each individual prospects, without changing the salesperson’s current workflow? Sales people don’t want to learn another sales tool. They want to be able to do this within the tools that already familiar with today. So that’s why we came up with OneShot. And yeah, it’s great to be here talking about it.

[00:03:00.530] – Dancho – Gautam, as we are an agency, I recall two or three years ago we were hired to actually do that customization for a client manually. So what we were actually having a spreadsheet, so you’re going to click the link, you’re going to scroll, search a bit about the guy, and provide one paragraph customization that later was used in the whole B2B sales process. So when I saw that OneShot.ai is out there on the market, I was like, well, time flies. A few years ago, we had to do everything manually, and now you’re really focused on that particular part. And how does the OneShot.ai fit in the big ecosystem? I mean, B2B sales is a huge ecosystem to work in, from databases, from verifications, from email, from LinkedIn, from copywriting tool, I saw several now that are emerging. So where is OneShot.ai position in the whole ecosystem?

[00:03:53.150] – Gautam – Yeah, and I would say B2B sales tools is probably one of the most busy tools market there is today. And if you speak to 100 reps, they’ll probably have a hundred different tools they use from rep to rep, even within organizations. Where do we fit in? We fit in kind of across all of them. So we actually fit in across the entire sales tool stack. So what do I mean by that is we integrate with CRM systems by Salesforce, to understand what is your ideal customer profile look like? Who are your existing customers? Can we save leads? If you break down the sales prospecting journey or the sales journey, you kind of have a beginning, a middle, and an end. The beginning is from first contact, right. How do I find my initial first contact? Typically, that’s one of three ways. You either have it in your CRM system, like as an inbound lead, or you use LinkedIn and you’re finding people, or you use a date provider like a ZoomInfo or something. So the data providers are the date providers, the CRM are the CRMs. When you find that initial contact, typically the first thing people are doing is they’re either using LinkedIn to send a connection request or they’re using a data provider like ZoomInfo to find out say, okay, what’s this guy’s or girl’s email address…

[00:05:21.440] – Dancho – Contact information.

[00:05:23.450] – Gautam – And then they start that workflow, which is either we either send a sequence on Outreach or HubSpot, or we send them an individual email. So we work across all of those solutions. So whether you’re in Sales Navigator or LinkedIn, what we do is we can help personalize that connection request. If you decide you want to send a sequence, we also integrate with data providers so you can send a sequence, whether that’s … or outreach. Again, what we don’t want to do and where we don’t sit, we don’t sit as this mass automation tool. People don’t like the idea of their personal brand is LinkedIn. LinkedIn and social selling is becoming more and more important. So you don’t really want to create something that does like 500, 600 tasks on your behalf that you have no control over. Think about the kind of negative effect that might have on your personal brand. If you’re just like known this person is obviously spamming hundreds of people a day. So where we sit in is how can we help personalize connection requests? How can we help follow up on invites in a really highly personalized way? So one thing we do is how can we find latest news on companies? So if we’re targeting, let’s just say Barclays Bank, what we would do is we’ll automate a highly personalized message to send. So hey, I just read the news and we’ll look for the latest news articles for Barclays Bank. We can look and investigate within our CRM. Show me similar customers I have to Barclays, so we integrate with data prices. Hey, Barclays is a 200,000 employee finance customer in London. Show me similar accounts.

[00:07:09.300] – Dancho – Drop their names into the chat?

[00:07:11.590] – Gautam – Yes, exactly. We integrate and pull that messaging in. So we’ve looked at what are the highly successful sales people doing to get responses. They’re personalizing similar customers, they’re looking for latest news. They’re looking for personal connections that they may have with that person. And what we do is we automate all of that so you don’t have to do that research yourself, we bring that into play ourselves. And that’s where we see higher response rates. We’re working with customers who are seeing a 300% increase in response rates using OneShot.

[00:07:45.830] – Dancho – Nice. No, the more I’m listening to you, the more I’m bought into the story because we were always preaching that quality should supersede the quantity. Because even before the new algorithm of LinkedIn, which was in May or in June where they said no more 2000 outreach per month, let’s put it down to 100 per week or 400 per month. A lot of automation tools were facing a crisis because they were betting on quantity. The more you can send, the better. And BizzBee was really focusing on quality, because we knew that as with the email, the quality will always be better. Linkedin, it started being a spammy platform where people stopped looking at it. Generic message, hi, my name is Dancho, I sell X-Y-Z. Without trying to build a report, actually how you behave in the physical world, you actually switch and behave completely irrational in the digital. So looking at how to improve the quality over quantity should be every SDR focus. Because regardless whether you’re going to send 400 or 800, I would rather send 50, but to be really quality rather than actually going over the 2,000. How does this actually work in practice? How hard is to customize these paragraphs that you’re referring to and how accurate is it? Is it prone to mistake? Is it something like okay, you can damage your brand if you make a bad assumption. Is there any quality control that you can do before we actually do the outreach?

[00:09:20.410] – Gautam – Yeah, some good points and questions there. So we’ve built this, my background has always been building and scaling sales teams. I am a salesperson, my background is sales. So I kind of understand that sales persona quite well. What sales people don’t want is to learn another complicated tool. They don’t want to have to do loads of research, right? But they want to be successful. They want to build pipeline, they want to make commission. How we’ve built this, it’s seamless within their workflow. So I can show you a demo shortly. But what we do is within their workflow, within their LinkedIn activity, they just click on a profile that they would normally visit. Instead of manually connecting, they connect with OneShot. And we even automate that messaging. In terms of quality control, multiple things. We have our own AI engine that looks for the best type of messages to use on each individual person. If there are certain typos occasionally come in or the AI engine doesn’t work as well, you can always manually change it. Like with any system, there’s self-driving cars out there in the world, but you still want to have your hand on the wheel occasionally. And I think you touch on a good point, Dancho around quality over quantity. And actually, funny, the company name OneShot, why we came up with the name OneShot was actually if you have one shot to book a cold meeting. If your boss came up to you and said, hey, I’ll give you a million dollars if you get me a meeting with this account. The chances are you’re not going to be spamming that customer. If you had that on the line, you would spend time to research. You’ll have a tactical plan, you would write the best possible message you possibly could. And that’s why we came up with OneShot.

[00:11:15.610] – Dancho – Complete business intelligence on the business, on the employee, whether he likes cats or dogs, just before doing the outreach.

[00:11:21.550] – Gautam – Yeah, exactly.

[00:11:25.930] – Dancho – Gautam, I would really love if you could share a demo or share your screen and show how actually the tool can be used.

[00:11:31.730] – Gautam – Sure, let me share my screen. The whole way of working with OneShot, is I’m in LinkedIn Sales Navigator here and you’ll see the Chrome extension, right? The Chrome extension sits here and it’s seamless. We don’t appear if it’s not in there. Now, let’s take a normal workflow. Let’s say I want to contact someone. I’ll click on a profile before, I open the extension, I just scroll and you can do that as quickly as possible. Now, at this point, I can either send a connection request or a message, like an email message. Let’s say I want to connect. What we do is we’ll automatically look at personalized messaging without doing anything so we can see that this person has just recently moved companies. We can talk about their job title, we’ll even mention mutual connections. And again, you’ve seen I did absolutely nothing.

[00:12:24.960] – Dancho – Yeah, clicked a button.

[00:12:26.170] – Gautam – We have eight connections in common, and we’re mentioning those connections in common. If you just mention the names of those people psychologically, when people see that, they think that we know each other. We know in those same networks. We’re looking at locations where they’re based. I see you’re based in Brooklyn. How are you finding your time at Hypersize? These messages will keep going on and on and we’ll have lots of different options. So we’ll have different options for different styles. I’m not sure if you saw here. We can also allow sales reps to create their own template. So if you don’t like our messaging, what you can also do and what we see a lot of successful sales people do is create their own template. What works really well is if you have an upcoming event or webinar and say, Dancho, I am prospecting you, we’re both at a sales conference. I would message, I would have a template. Hey, I’m at … next week. Are you going to be there? It’d be great to connect. By just having that mutual event, what you’re saying? We’re seeing a really high response rate. The other key point to mention, just by personalizing your LinkedIn request, you’re going to significantly improve your chances of being accepted versus non personalization. People are getting 10, 20 invites a day and they’re just not getting accepted. So let me say I want to use one of these invites. Let’s say I click that, I click use. We also populate that message for you, so you don’t have to do anything. So I can just click send and we do two, three things here. We save that to your CRM and we create a follow-up. So let me just show you another person, if we click on another lead.

[00:14:06.370] – Dancho – But you still have the main control before you send the send button, you can add some tweaks before the message?

[00:14:13.720] – Gautam – Exactly, you’ve got it, right? And let’s just click on someone else. It comes up again, straight away with these connection requests. Sometimes as well, exactly to your point, you may say, actually, you know what? I don’t like using that, I want to change that. Or actually, I’ll use the basics of this and you can just add to it here, right. And I won’t say what the word testing is, but you get the gist. So that’s one key bit. It’s seamless personalization within the reps, the salesperson’s current workflow. That’s really important. You can manually change that personalization, plus you can create your own templates. Now, the next bit, which is the more interesting bit in my opinion is one thing that’s always been challenging within LinkedIn is being able to follow-up with a personalized note. Again, there’s, I call them bot based solutions, where they’ll just look and they’ll send a spam follow-up. Or when people get those, you connect with them and you get an immediate message, 2 seconds later. Everyone is annoyed by those things.

[00:15:23.830] – Dancho – We joke here at BizzBee, whether you’re going to pitch me at the invitation or whether you’re going to pitch me at the message after the invitation. And we’re like, is it going to be immediately or right after?

[00:15:36.670] – Gautam – You think about large enterprise customers where the buyers are probably being approached 500 times a day. So you’ve got to think about how can you stand out right? This multi channel prospecting, it’s cold calling, email, LinkedIn invites, social selling, trade shows. There’s multiple ways of doing things, but where we see a ton of results is the follow up. So let’s say here is we will create this again, our whole thing is, you’ll see here, now I go into my follow ups, we automatically can pull out when you have follow ups. So we change this based on days after an invite. Versus saying, hey, he’s just accepted or she’s just accepted, I’m going to immediately spam them, we give you the power. So let’s say here I go into Monday 27th, I’ve got 36 follow ups. We put this down to the rep. Now I can click follow up and we’ll do a few things here when I push follow up, we apply AI. So what we’re going to do here is we’re going to tell you if that person is connected, we can say, you can send them a message, you can send them an email or you can add them to a sequence. You can add them to a sequence using your favorite tools like Outreach. And again, now I can decide, do I want to follow up? Do I want to send them a message? And I can just continually go down each one. And what you’ll see here is we’ve got quite a high connection rate because of our high personalization. We see a really high connection rate, anywhere between 50% to 75%. Without personalization, it’s anywhere between like 20% and 30%. Let’s say here with this person, I’m connected. I’ve got an additional option here, engage with Lizzie’s activity. So what we’re doing is our AI engine saying, hey, actually this might be a good one to do and you can click on that and it will actually change their recent activity. And at this point I can claim like that, which is going to make it a lot easier for me to engage with. Here you can see, okay, this person is pending. But what we can see is an open profile. So that means I can send a free message. I don’t need to use an email credit. So what we’re doing is we’re creating this easy way to follow up with leads. Let’s say now I go to this person here, I want to follow up with them. Brilliant, I’m connected, now I want to send a message. What we’ll do is we’ll automate this messaging for you. We’ll even add in your sales pitch so we can look and we can change. We use AI to auto-generate the sales pitch for our companies. And at this point, let’s say I want to use it. We help sales people close deals. I’m happy with that message. I can click send and that message will now send. And that message is now sending and send. Follow up is closed. So it really gives me the opportunity to get through my follow up super quickly. And the response rate on follow ups on LinkedIn is way higher than email. Linkedin has response rates and acceptance rates on emails between like 8% to 15%. You compare that to email, which is around 1%. So just by following up on invites in a good personalized way at the right time means you’re going to almost increase your results by ten X compared to just normal email. So yeah, that’s a quick demo, it’s super easy, it’s a Chrome extension. You can go to OneShot.ai, download the extension you can get up and running. We’re seeing people setting up two, three new meetings the first day they use it, just with the invites.

[00:19:17.410] – Dancho – Nice, that’s really strong. I mean, we also use a mix of LinkedIn and email in our outreach process. And yeah, we actually give the clients to choose. Well, some clients just want to say, you know what, I want to rent an SDR, in which case everything is fully manual and in some case they are like, which is of course more expensive, while other cases, you know what, you can use as much automation as you want. And this OneShot.ai is really somewhere in between. Because when you use automation it’s like, hi, name. And we actually don’t try with the pitch strategy. We try with conversation starters in order to first get some response and then do the one on one chit-chat. While with the fully manual is really an SDR that can do a lot of personalization. Now OneShot can help in both cases. You can first do the paragraph and then do some automation or with the manual, just because we have to do this manual research, we can just with a click of a button at least speed up the efficiency of the SDR teams.

[00:20:21.790] – Gautam – Yes, exactly, it’s getting that balance right. And I probably hired maybe close to 100 SDRs in the last ten years. And you get two types sometimes. One type is they’re just aimlessly clicking send sequence, clicking send sequence. And then the other type is I’m going to spend half a day researching, sending out the highest personalized message I can. Both potentially get results, but you need somewhere in between. You need to still do the activity because you can come up with the best personalized message, but the person you’re targeting just won’t respond. They probably never responded to a cold email in their lives and they probably never will. So if you spend half a day prospecting that person with a personalized message, you won’t get a response. So what we do is we kind of create that halfway house, where personalization at scale within your workflow.

[00:21:19.930] – Dancho – I think it’s really useful. I mean, the website, OneShot.ai, I’ll leave it at the bottom of the video. Is there any free version that people could actually give it a try so they can see how it works?

[00:21:33.460] – Gautam – Yeah, absolutely. So you can download it, get running with it for free immediately. It’s a two-week free trial. You can send as many messages as you want. Linkedin typically bought in this process around 100 invites a week or whatever, 400 a month. We actually keep track of the invites you send as well. So we actually have in a really easy way. We’ll show you how you’ve sent 20 invites this week or 50 invites this week. Yeah, get using it for free for two weeks, and then typically we see follow ups happening a week after. So that two week period you get to send some follow up and see what your results are.

[00:22:10.160] – Dancho – I see. Yeah. I mean, I meant either duration of free trial or with a limited capacity where you can send only unlimited invitations because usually people really tend to like, let me give it a try. A day or two, even two weeks is even too much if you ask me…

[00:22:29.590] – Gautam – You can have a shorter one, if you want.

[00:22:36.990] – Dancho – How is actually OneShot.ai open for partnerships or for collaborations? I mean, as a software, as a service, does it have any white label or affiliate or referral programs?

[00:22:49.110] – Gautam – Yeah, absolutely. So we are open to all partnerships. We’re a high growth start up. We’re in a heavy customer acquisition mode, so people are looking to partner with us from a sales or resell perspective. We’re completely open to that. We also have a referral system in place. So we’ve priced this in a way that most of our customers are actually individual sales people, expensing back the license on behalf of their company every month. We priced it at $19 a month. It’s easily enough, most people are expensing it to their company. If you refer five or ten people, we have referral systems in place as well, where we can actually look at reimbursing with dollars or Amazon gift vouchers.

[00:23:39.050] – Dancho – I see. But $20 is not a lot of money for an SDR. I mean, if in a whole month it saves you at least 1 hour from your time, you’re already in benefit. And if it saves you this in a month, then it’s really useful to have regardless whether the company will cover your cost or not. Even from my own pocket for that amount of money, I know that ,what I need to do in 8 hours, I can do it in six and then I have the rest of the 2 hours for me personally.

[00:24:10.070] – Gautam – Yeah. We kind of prices at a point where we feel everyone should be using OneShot. And we don’t want price to be a barrier, we feel that prospects deserve a level of personalization as well. So, yeah, if you do the math, it’s like stats. To say one cold meeting books cost $500. How people have worked out that math is to say a fully loaded US based SDR, maybe it’s like $50,000 a year, including overheads. And their targets are typically ten meetings a month. So if you work out the cost of a fully loaded SDR minus devided by how much it costs, about $500 a month, $500 a meeting. Hey, even if you built one new meeting with us, which you typically will in the first week, it’s paid for itself like five times, ten times over. And this is excluding the one to 2 hours of time-saving as well, per week.

[00:25:11.850] – Dancho – And one last question for me personally, I mean, how is the software handled for agencies, where one SDR actually needs to handle more than one LinkedIn campaign? Usually it’s two or three, but still, can they actually switch between or they need separate account for each LinkedIn profile. How do you actually sort that out?

[00:25:31.050] – Gautam – Yeah, so it’s one profile that we work on. So if you have agencies, you can kind of just use one OneShot profile and that goes across all of your LinkedIn accounts. So you don’t need multiple licenses.

[00:25:45.950] – Dancho – Wait, so with one license, you can go across multiple profiles?

[00:25:50.690] – Gautam – Yeah.

[00:25:51.890] – Dancho – That’s even cheaper than… In BizzBee we have like some SDR handle one LinkedIn profile, but we have two, three. So you’re actually tying it to the seat so that person is going to pay for the subscription and then they can use it for multiple accounts, they can log out, they can log in with another LinkedIn.

[00:26:11.880] – Gautam – Exactly. Whatever they do in LinkedIn, we just sit across their browser, their machine, and that’s it. But you’re giving me ideas now, maybe we need to charge more.

[00:26:25.450] – Dancho – Yeah, actually, I thought that it’s based on LinkedIn profile, so if an SDR uses three LinkedIn profiles, they need to take three licenses because the license is tied to that particular LinkedIn profile. And another question was that we will use Sales Navigator. But does it support non Sales Navigator outreach?

[00:26:43.910] – Gautam – Absolutely. So we work across normal standard LinkedIn and Sales Navigator as well.

[00:26:49.880] – Dancho – I see, because all the campaigns that we run are with Sales Navigator. But I know that there are people that does the outreach without the Sales Navigator.

[00:26:57.600] – Gautam – Yeah, I think without kind of like going into OneShot sales pitch, we really spent a lot of time focused on how we can work with salespeople in their workflow. And actually a salesperson’s workflow is across LinkedIn and Sales Navigator. People might be on LinkedIn to read all their latest posts and see what news is going on. And they may send a connection request from there. They may be in Sales Navigator and they may be doing specific lead lists or account lists. You’ll see, most we actually have probably a 50/50 split of where invites are sent from across Sales Navigator and LinkedIn, because ultimately, I don’t know you today, you’ve probably been in both platforms today, right?

[00:27:44.270] – Dancho – Yeah, true. I thought that because with Sales Navigator, you have the more advanced filters to laser focus the targets on multiple criteria. It helps a lot when you do an outreach campaign. And the last question I had was that where is OneShot.ai headed? I mean, what’s the plan for late 2021 or 2022?

[00:28:07.070] – Gautam – Sure, yeah. So where we see the biggest problem in sales today is there’s no visibility into what prospecting channels are effective across what persona. We all have our kind of gut feel this type of position likes this type of message, but it’s kind of in here, and that changes from one rep to another. So think of like OneShot as being this kind of system of intelligence across all of your prospecting activity. So the ability to see what prospecting activity works with any specific prospect, whether that’s a LinkedIn invite, a cold call, what the message should be. So it’s really applying this intelligence across all of your prospecting channels. So a good example is think about Google Analytics for your website. You know, where all of your traffic is coming from, what’s converting… This doesn’t exist for prospecting today. We already have this system built today where we know what’s your acceptance rate across what persona, who’s responding to what email, what reps are successful with what channel, and how does that tie back to the individual and the company? Where are we seeing our best response rates? So where we sit because we’re a browser extension, we see across all prospecting activity. So, again, reps like to work in multiple different ways. And how we work today will be different, how we work next week or the week after or next year. So, again, what we provide is that level of intelligence of what works and what doesn’t work. So, yeah, we’re really excited about that. And we have some more kind of products and features coming out that are going to further accelerate this.

[00:29:52.300] – Dancho – So you are the numbers guy. Metrics and actually understanding the metrics into business logic and business decisions. It’s like, okay, based on data, we can confirm that this channel works better than this, or this message actually yields better responses.

[00:30:07.580] – Gautam – Exactly. So it’s that visibility metrics and insight. So it’s like, okay, great, we have all of this data, but tell me what to do. It’s almost between a sequence. There’s what we call micro activity. So you send stage one of the sequence and stage two of the sequence. But actually there’s quite a lot happening between them in terms of number of opens, right. So they may have nine opens between that. So actually, what we’ll do is we’ll pause that sequence automatically and say, hey, don’t send stage two of this sequence. Instead, follow up with this activity because you’re much more likely to get a response. We’re focused on helping sales people with making those decisions based on data.

[00:30:50.270] – Dancho – Nice. That’s actually quite inspiring. So I can’t wait for the next update on 2022 and actually see how OneShot.ai is progressing. Gautam, I think that we’re finishing with this episode, we are running out of time. I really wanted to thank you for coming on the show, and for everybody else that are listening I mean, OneShot,ai have a look at it. There will be links at the bottom and give it a try. What’s the worst case that it can be? You can try it for two weeks and you don’t like it and that’s it. But what’s the best thing that could happen? Is that within two weeks you can actually close the client and think wow, if I manage to do this in two weeks then I should actually consider it on a more serious level. And maybe that’s what Gautam is trying to do here. Create a free trial, give it a try, you see the results for yourself, and then make the decision whether you want to continue using it as a tool or not. Gautam, thank you again for coming to the show and for the rest of the listeners, have a great day, guys and we talk soon.

[00:31:55.130] – Gautam – Thank you.