This AI Tool Could Disrupt Sales Forever

0:00 (logo whooshing) Today we have Christian Peverelli, founder, CEO of Outbond. So pumped for you to be here on The LeanScale Podcast today, Christian. Thank you for being here. Christian, you are absolutely changing the game for how B2B, Saas, and AI companies are finding their prospects, finding their leads, and doing it all in an agentic and simple way, and really, really stoked for what you're doing. And whenever we have a founder on, I love to just hear the story. What gave you the passion, and I call it courage, the start-out bond, and bring this into market? I love it. Anthony, what's up, man? I'm super stoked to be here, and hi to everyone watching.

0:45 Yeah, man, first of all, I love torture. I think anyone who's a startup founder, you gotta like a little bit of torture if you want to be in the game, 'cause we're playing long games here. We're playing the 10-year games every time, if not more. And so for me, I basically have a career path from where I spent the past 10 years building training founders and building companies, and I hit a frustration, which was that non-technical people couldn't really, it was difficult for them to build products. So this was when I was the director of an accelerator program based in LA, and that frustration actually led me to build

1:22 We Are No Code, which is kind of the previous company that I was building, teaching people how to build products with no-code tools that quickly evolved into building with AI, basically. And that fundamentally changed the way that I thought about tech, right? I fell in love with Lovable about a year ago and became kind of an early investor as well. Through that process, I basically realized that the big problem, and this was like before people really knew so much about Lovable, was no longer gonna be building products, but in distribution. And yeah, basically, you know, that's where I kind of shifted my energy into like solving the next problem.

2:04 Throughout my career, I was able to build like a very big following on YouTube, just creating videos for people to like, you know, inspire them like, hey, you can also do this if you're not technical. And I think I'm trying to do exactly the same thing for go-to-market engineers, right? I don't think that being able to build sophisticated outreach campaigns should require a team of 10 people. And I'm also not willing to sacrifice sophistication and complexity or let's say power for ease of use. So that's basically the mission we're going after, you know? And we've created a system of intelligence. That's what I call it. I love it.

2:43 Well, I'm really, really excited about what you're building, how you're building it. And absolutely, I think some of these platforms and tools have democratized the ability to create and develop and to do things that required either unbelievable experience or massive teams to pull off. I'm a big fan of Lovable as well. We use it quite a bit for building MVPs of things at lean scale and building up micro-apps for our customers. So I think some of these platforms have just made things that were impossible for us to do before possible. So I know you prepared a demo for us today. I'm really, really pumped to go through it

3:22 and see exactly how Outbound can work within a GTM team. - 100%, yeah. So I think the first thing I'd like to say is the way that I came to this build of Outbound was because customer discovery, I had like a whole basically like module around customer discovery, which is like, you know, ultimately the beginning of sales before you even build a product and it requires doing outreach, right? It requires finding people who are your ideal customers and having chats with them, right? And discovering what they need. And yeah, one of my students who's now my CTO called Aboudi, he basically joined my program and basically, you know, built a micro version

4:02 of an outreach tool, leveraging my know-how in terms of like the templates and all that with like a no-code like approach to it, which was leveraging an automation tool called Make and Air Table. And he was booking eight meetings a week on autopilot. And so I started looking into it and I kind of realized like, okay, like it seems like there's all these like old school tools and then there's one tool that's kind of doing a good job called Clay, but it requires like a whole agency. There's like a, you know, multimillion dollar agency model being built around it. And so that's when I realized like there's an opportunity

4:35 here and I'm gonna go after it basically. And so we spent the past 11 months building out, you know, out bond, which people are now calling the lovable for prospecting. Others are saying like the power of Clay with the ease of use of lovable, but ultimately like it's an honor to be able to be compared to either of those companies 'cause I'm a huge fan as well. And I just think that the power now can go into the hands of more people, right? Because I actually believe deeply that like great products should see the light of day and should be able to be put in front of their rightful customers who can see value from them.

5:11 And that is becoming increasingly difficult in a world where like it's the, you know, eyeball, you know, economy basically. So yeah, man, I can't wait to show you the product a little bit. I'm just gonna hop right into it. - Yeah. - Is that what you want me to do next little demo? - Perfect, perfect. Yeah, and I think that I agree with you. Those are massive compliments to be compared to, to be compared to those companies, especially like right out the gate. So I think you're in really good company if that's what the comparisons are. - Yeah, I, you know, honestly, in the end of the day, like we're building our own thing

5:48 and it's very different from what other people are doing. And we're just super excited about that. And I would say just like lean into your own like issues because everyone, there's such a big market right now around this. I think that in the AI coding space, there's huge amount of competitions. We're starting to see some of the big winners. And I think that in the AI for sales, go to market, go out reach, there's still so much space. So I'm excited to kind of kick it off. So here we are inside of Outbound, my friends. And there are kind of different approaches you can use. I'll kind of run you through the big ones.

6:21 One is you basically describe the role of the person you're going after. So like marketing manager at the type of company or industry in specific area with excise. And you can just like search like that. The other thing you can do, which is actually like being blowing people away is like you just put in your website and it'll go and scrape your website. It'll build your ideal customer profile. It'll build out your persona. And then it'll convert that into a lead list. And the third one is like, we know exactly the companies we're going after, but we need to reach these very specific people who have a specific role in that company.

6:57 In that case, we just describe the role. And then we say at these companies and dump. And here you can dump about 50 names of companies. The final one is kind of like upload your own list and work from there. But for this use case, we're going to start off with this one. So let me just like, you know, click on this one. We could just add it here. I love how I'm like, I was like clicking on the wrong screen, on the recorded screen. So, you know, you can adapt anything you want here. Like, so let's just put product manager, just so you see that I'm not cheating here. But as soon as you upload, what happens is that it's going to bring you into the view

7:34 where you can see it breaking out into, on the left hand side, your sort of left nav experience. On the right hand side will eventually be your columns. And the AI basically is a full agentic system, multi agent who each use different models, especially based on what they do best. And it's going to break it down basically by understanding that criteria and then doing a full search and creating a preview list here. So it goes ahead, it goes out in prospects. Awesome, so now it's showing us here a lead list. It's found this number of people, the fit this criteria. Underneath, we see all of the criteria. And from here, you can kind of fine tune it.

8:18 So you can just, you know, you can adapt it. Okay, let's actually just go after people who have recently been hired or, you know, actually let's go after, you know, San Francisco as well. And as soon as you're ready with this list on this preview, you can import leads. So at that point, you basically are importing your leads and the AI is going to actually build out the table for you. And it's going to then import the leads inside of this table as well. And so you're gonna see them populate. There we go. And from here, there are a number of things we can do. On the left hand nav, we see that it's basically asking us, do we wanna enrich these contacts?

8:58 So like find email, so I'll say find email. For example, the goal is that once we have the actual prospects we're looking to go after, we need to do a number of things. Number one is find their like updated contact and verify that contact information. So we make sure we're contacting them correctly, right? So with work email, those checks you see on the left hand side, those are basically saying that those are validated as well. So we find the email, then we ping a verifier, we ping the server and check if they're actually valid emails. The next thing is probably gonna be something like research, right?

9:34 So we might wanna do some research around these individuals. You can do that also in one prompt. So let's do something like, okay, could you research these companies and determine, and I spell terribly, who their ideal-- - Check has ruined numbers, so that's okay. - Or exactly, yeah, I just do everything by voice right now. Customers are return and answer between three and five words.

10:13 Now this is basically a building research agents. So research of 25 companies in your imported list, yes, so it's one. It asks you questions when it's not sure of exactly what you mean. And it's easy to misinterpret my mess. But ultimately, it builds out inside of one of these columns a full research agent. Now one thing that for people will be quite impressive is the fact that this is a very sophisticated basically research agent builder that not only created the prompt here, and this is really based on best practice from the top GTMs in the market. It also built out the output schema, which is nerdy stuff that if you're not technical,

10:58 you don't really need to know, but it's important. Let's just put it that way. If you're an Uber nerd, you can even come in and go under the hood and adapt lots of stuff. But ultimately, it also shoots out the outcome. So if we look inside of one of these cells by double clicking it, we're gonna see success as the status whether it found it or not, then company name and then ideal customer and it returns it in exactly the format that I asked for. This type of sophisticated agent usually requires crazy skills, but now we allow you to do it in one prompt with AI. The cool thing is, let's say you don't need the status thing here.

11:36 Well, you could just delete this column, right? So we've built this in a way where you don't have to deal with all the complexity, but if you want to nerd out, you can go under the hood and go super hardcore. So we have things like, you know, you can bring your own, you can bring your own APIs, you can, you know, shoot leads into a table via web hook. You know, there's just a huge number of things you can do. You have a lot of control, but you can do awesome sophisticated things without having, you know, a degree in GTM basically. So that's kind of like some of the stuff in this qualification. So it's like, okay, could you qualify these leads for me?

12:23 My, oh, let's just leave it at that. And I know that you guys are probably gonna say, well, for qualification, we probably need more information. So basically it's, it knows that. So it's like, okay, cool. I need some more like information about your customers. So it's like, do you have a website or domain? You can like upload. So that's one thing we could do. Let's say, yes, lean scale.com. Is it .com? .team, .team, .team, excellent. A little bit of promo thrown in there, lean scale.team. And basically it will send out an agent to go out and basically scrape Anthony's website. Sorry, Anthony. And, you know, convert all the information

13:09 that it's finding into files. This is where it gets exciting because one big thing when you build an infrastructure like this, that's agentic is that you can provide it with context that it's able to then use for everything that you're doing. And that's why we've seen a lot of success with people just putting in the website, being like, build me a lead list. 'Cause it identifies it. It's like, hey, I think these are the people you're going after, is that correct? And if it is, it'll basically, you know, and you can fine tune it if you want. But if it is, then it'll basically build a list based on what it's figured out.

13:45 And for most people, this AI is way better at you at creating ICPs and personas. So, however, if you're more sophisticated, obviously I would say, you know, you could take a different route as well. And these files basically are being written out now. So we can see that, you know, you guys are AI driven, go to market operations and revenue operations consulting firms specialize in B2B SaaS startups. And it basically breaks down everything about you guys that it can use as context. So when it's then, and it's only doing that right now to be able to qualify these leads against this. It's also created your actual ICP.

14:23 So, high growth B2B startups, series A, series B, you need to have a bit of money if you want to work with LeanScale. They don't work for free. User personas, VP of RevOps, and then some also equivalent job roles. And yeah, it basically uses all of that as context to do things like copywriting, to do things like, you know, the qualification that we've just done. So here we see that these qualify terribly, incredibly cold because they're product managers. So, you know, but we can actually go ahead and check out what is done here. So this is no like, oh, we just kind of tried to see if it matched. No, no, this is an in-depth qualification agent

15:06 based on the prompts of the best GTM engineers in the world that basically is multi criteria. So if we look at this, like qualification based on company type, based on funding stage, based on company size, based on revenue range, like it goes hardcore and it basically uses what we figured out as like the context of what you do, Anthony, as a way to do that. - Well, I like how it creates a non-scoring model and point system and built out that whole mechanism, which is usually like a couple of week project for a marketing ops team to do, all in one prompt. - Exactly. And it shoots out these, these don't actually cost any credits

15:47 and you could just delete the ones you don't actually need to see inside of this view. But yeah, you know, out of a hundred, these are all terrible leads for you. Maybe we should have just used that, you know, we should have gone after the RevOps people in this example, just so you would have some actual leads leaving this demo, but yeah. Then after that, it's like, hey, can you copy rights? You know, write them a message. You can have full control over the message writing. You can also go back and forth with the AI being like, hey, like, you know, make it more casual. Or in the first line, could you mention their ICP

16:24 that we like did research about here, right? So it's like, maybe it's like, hey, you know, if Anthony were to do outreach, he might say, hey, wondering if you're looking for more and then input, you know, ideal customer profile. We probably would want it in a slightly different format here, but it would be a good way to show, okay, this person kind of understands what I'm going after. And yeah, then you just plug it. We basically, you can integrate with many platforms. One of them is instantly, if you want to send them out, you know, you can plug them in and it just basically is going to send out those personalized messages.

17:00 Anthony, we have seen a rise of like, basically positive responses from kind of like a classic one to 2% all the way up to like 10%. And the reason for that is that this allows you to build campaigns that are like sophisticated so quickly that now you can write, create these micro campaigns that are super targeted. And that's how we get out of this whole world of like spammy emails. It's by creating things that are super relevant to the right people at the right time, right? And that just turns out, if you don't spam people, a lot of people answer and if you're actually targeting them with something they're interested in,

17:40 instead of, you know, some random offer that you're blasting to everyone, you get really good results. So yeah, that's pretty much a short demo. I could go into way nerdier stuff, but I'm sure that, you know, we don't want to get too, too much into it. - No, I think this is great. I think one, it highlights the ease of use. And I had a couple of questions, if we can hop back in. - Oh, cool. - I think, yes, there's so much, I'll just call it AI slot that hits my inbox, hits, you know, my LinkedIn feed. And I'm always looking for ways to like combat that. And I think the way to do it is to get more data, better fine tune data,

18:24 and then have a sophisticated way of reaching out 'cause I can't tell you how many times I get the, "Hey, I read your post on LinkedIn by my product." Like I can't read another one of those. So one of, what are some of the biggest intent use cases that you're seeing your product used for to help get in that timely information? Something like, yes, it is relevant to reach out right now. - Absolutely. So that basically is when we get into signals, right? And there's a bunch of signals built into this all the way from the fact that we build the lists with sort of like, you know, with live data. So we're not just using like a database. This is like live data.

19:12 And we can, you know, we then know things like this person has recently changed jobs, right? So relevance happens when you, you know, or get back into the strategic seat, right? What do I mean by that? Well, if someone, for example, who's responsible of RevOps has recently started their job as, you know, head of RevOps, you know that there's certain, you know, 30, 60, 90 day priorities that they want to get done. And so relevance happens when you're able to get to those people at the right time, right? And there are a bunch of different sort of, you know, signals that you can use in building a list, but then also in the research itself.

19:54 I was telling you this off screen earlier, one of our customers basically has a company that helps people, you know, convert more people post event or, you know, events. And, you know, he just basically built a list of his ideal prospects. And then he went and created a research agent that determined how many, you know, events these individuals or these companies were running over the past year. And then he was able to segment for those who had more than, you know, three to 10 a year, for example. And that allowed him to then, you know, have a much more, you know, in depth, like a much better pitch to those people and to avoid going after people

20:33 who like don't really run online events and where this would be less relevant to them. But, you know, there's lots of actual, like I could, you know, and probably I'll drop for you a whole list of the different, you know, criteria you can search for. You can, you know, search for growth, you know, there's company filters around growth of specific departments. So that can be a very good signal that people are looking to improve X, Y, or Z, right? They're hiring people in the cybersecurity unit. You know that there's, you know, probably they're focusing a little bit on that aspect of things in their business. There's also research agents, right?

21:11 They can do the job. So like you can go and basically figure out and do research about, you know, if they're a public company, like what did they, it's called a, what is it? It's a 10K, something like that. I'm not American, but basically, yeah. So the 10K, it basically outlines what they're trying to focus on for the upcoming year. And if you, and I think this is the biggest thing people get wrong about signals in general. They always want to mention the signal. It's like, hey, I saw that you posted about this, that. It's like, why don't you just, you know, like, you don't have to tell people that you know that they're currently hiring.

21:50 They know that it's not, you know, and it doesn't impress them that you've figured that out. But it does qualify them as a more relevant lead to go after. So I think that's one of the big things that's happening, especially like for more sophisticated people who do these kind of like signal based campaigns is to always think that you have to have the signal inside your messaging. The truth is a lot of people are finding incredible value in just good old value emails, but just targeted to the right people who are in like, who are showing the right intent. But basically our tool allows you to bring in any of these signals.

22:31 So anything that's possible, you could bring into your, you know, outbound campaign. And I think that's kind of another big thing that I want to like illustrate. What you're seeing here and what we're actually building and where this is going is gonna be as simple as like you input your website or you say who you're going after and it basically, there are just two touch points where it asks you, hey, is this lead list good? Yes, no, or we can adapt it. Do you like this copy? Yes, no. And everything else is handled by basically automatically figuring out the plays, the best plays to go after based on what your company is, the products,

23:12 you know, and what you're trying to service. And that's where I call it a system of intelligence because there are just things that you can do when you're AI first, like we are, versus what most companies are, which is slap amazing AI on top of your product. It's just fundamentally a huge shift. So any company that built their infrastructure pre-AI is either having to rebuild their entire infrastructure or products that have from the ground up infrastructures and architectures built for AI or not, you know. And so that's kind of one thing that I think will be a lot more obvious in the coming months as we continue to release amazing features

23:57 and make it both, you know, easy to use and also allow people to have that awesome complexity. That's amazing. No, I think there's a huge difference between AI native and throwing on some chat bots or, you know, GPT plugins, I think it's just fundamentally different. That makes a ton of sense on intent. I've recently, personal experience, I'm in the process of moving. We just sold our house or getting a new house. And I don't know what tools these moving companies and other ones are using, but I have definitely been targeted. And I was like, this is such a good use of intent. They saw that my house was sold. They obviously know I'm going to be moving.

24:46 So now I have like a few moving companies that reached out. So I just think intent and timely messaging has to be the future of your outreach. And I agree, you don't have to let them know. They're not letting me know that, oh, I can, you know, they don't, we're not wasting a bunch of messaging and letting me know that I sold my house and I'm moving. They're just saying, we know you need. And when you're thinking about your emails, you only have so much real estate. So if you're like wasting that real estate on, I saw your LinkedIn post, I'm really inspired. You know that I don't really mean this. Like you just wasted so much time

25:24 where you could have been baking in your company value instead, but it's still the right person to reach out to, like you mentioned. - Oh man, Anthony, you're singing in my ears right now because I think there's like this problem, this massive problem people are not talking about where it's like on one end you have these like sales people and these RevOps people who really understand selling, really understand the customer, really know what they're going for, but lack the technical skills to kind of execute on those things. And then you have like the GTMEs and you have like these like nerdier, like people who know how to use the tools,

26:02 but have no idea about like sales and like angles and like what is gonna work, what's not like playbooks. And I think that one of the biggest things that maybe I don't emphasize enough is the fact that if you give the power of basically execution in these like sophisticated systems like we're giving them, it now gives the power to like an AE to be able to basically crush it because they understand the angles, they understand the strategy and they can build very creative and sophisticated campaigns around the specific needs of their company. And I think that's what kind of changes the game. Now, you'll tell me not everyone wants to like learn tech

26:46 and I would argue like that's fine, but like honestly, most people are gonna be forced into it. So might as well be kind of at the forefront of that and then just select tools that like allow you to explore your creativity 'cause I think that's what people hate. What I hated and this whole journey starts from me not being a tech person, hating my life 'cause I need to pay a bunch of money to get a product built, then doing like outreach, having to pay more for that. And I just believe that like if you empower people who have the motivation, who have the know-how to actually do technical things, that combo between strategy and tech

27:23 is just an absolute game changer, especially in the AI era. So that's what excites me and like gets me to like wake up every day it's like knowing the like, oh man like, and then I look like at the faces of AEs as DR managers like RevOps people like who start using it and like it's similar to like AI coding where it's like, oh, I can actually do this. It like gives them that realization that there's actually that spark they need to like engage into some learning, you know? 'Cause it's too easy to just lay, sit back and be like, you know what? I'm just not technical and I was the first guy to do that. So I can't, you know, judge anyone

27:59 for being in that position. All I'm saying is that like, it doesn't have to be that way anymore. - Yeah, no, I'm really excited for the day and you know, this is an excellent example of it where the right people have access to the right tools. One last question that's platform related. So once you have everything, you mentioned great integration with Instantly. You have native sequencing within the platform as well. So once you have your list, you can really start reaching out to them. Writing some great messaging, not bad AI slot messaging, but like getting the right messaging to the right person. - Yeah, so the answer to the first one is that right now

28:44 we have integrations with sort of Instantly for email and then HeyReach. We're building out some more integrations for people who already have these platforms. Usually when we talk about sort of RevOps people, they are already doing this. But yes, we're definitely building out sequencing ourselves as well so that people wouldn't have to, and that's another big thing. Like if we look at the market, honestly, they use Sales Nav to build a list, then they shoot it into a tool like Apollo to do like enrichment, then they might have two other enrichment platforms, then they might have a verification platform. Then they would take each account

29:24 and put them into chat GPT to do the deep research with the special prompt that they crafted. We basically put all of that under one with like a fair credit system. And again, like this is based on the best practice from the best GTMs who get the best results with their campaigns. So we've combined the technical side with also the great tech all under one hood. And then it scales as you do, right? If you're not seeing results, it's cheap 'cause you're not using so much. And as soon as you start seeing results, like here's the longer term vision. This is a system of intelligence. So as soon as a campaign starts seeing positive

30:04 sort of responses, this will have the intelligence to go and find lookalike audiences of people who match exactly who you're going after. And you wake up in the morning while you're drinking your coffee and it's like, hey, we found 57 people who fit perfectly based on who's responding positively to this campaign. Would you like to add them to this campaign? And you just say yes. 'Cause frankly, let's get back to selling, right? That's what I truly believe. - Well, I'm really excited for the vision, Christian and really excited for what you put together so far. Christian, I'm so excited about what you've built,

30:39 what you're building, what the future and the vision is. I think everything you've done so far is gonna really enable people to just market to the best of their ability, sell to the best of their ability. And I love that it's completely AI native. So I know it's gonna give you flexibility to be creative and create things that we're probably not even thinking about right now. Christian, what's the best way for people to get their hands on out bond or get connected with you and start experiencing the platform for themselves? - Absolutely, yeah. So, well, first of all, outbond.ai is where you can find the platform.

31:20 Also, if you're looking to get in touch with me, LinkedIn is a good place. So if you can spell my last name, Christian Peverelli, then you can find me. Shouldn't be too, too difficult, but yeah. And the last thing I'd say is that you're a team of people who are looking to implement this. We're at a phase right now where we can help on the onboarding process because our success is your success. And so yeah, we're super stoked. But I wanted to thank you and the whole Lean Scale team as well because I've been watching you guys' videos for a while now and you do a fantastic job of really bringing to light some of the important learnings

31:58 that people have and helping other teams benefit from the best practices that are happening in the market. And for me, that's like, again, that's like giving back. So thanks for what you do, man. - Yeah, I really appreciate that. And absolutely, it's a pleasure to do it. It's all of the stuff I wish I knew when I was an operator in a startup. I ran RevOps for three, VC-backed companies, high growth expectations, high pressure, high stakes. And I was completely underarmed with lack of information, lack of technology, what works, what doesn't work. And the space moves so fast. There's so many new tools, so many new approaches,

32:38 and the market changes their response so quickly. So we're really excited about the work we're doing on the podcast and our content and the work we do with our customers. But what really gives us a lot of relevance is all of the new tech and getting people connected with the best tools to scale their GTM. So thanks for what you're building. Thanks for what you're doing. And as you continue to build, we'd love to have you back. And I can't wait to see what you guys do next. - For sure, yeah, I'm stoked. I even get impressed by this product as I'm building. I'm like, "What, it can do that?" And I also love that we're basically like building companies

33:18 because of our own past traumas, right? Like, "Oh man, I was underarmed. I was not technical, and I wish I could do this." Yeah, it's really awesome. And I think that I see a lot of paths in what you do. So yeah, great joining and I'll be back. I appreciate you, man. - Amazing, appreciate you, Christian. Thank you. Take care. Bye.