AI Prospecting Replaces Volume with Signal

Machine-generated transcript from the episode video, cleaned for punctuation and names. Speaker labels are not included.

[0:00] Hi there. In this episode of the GTM Vault Podcast, I chat with Venki Pola, co-founder and CTO, OneShot AI, a cutting edge AI platform that's changing the game in B2B sales prospecting. Venki shares his journey from his early days in India to a successful career at Salesforce and the creation of OneShot AI. He discusses the AI solutions OneShot offers, the hurdles faced in building the platform, and the future of AI and sales. Without further ado, I want to get right into it. Venki, thanks so much for being here. Can you share your journey from starting as an intern in India to founding OneShot AI in San Francisco, and what were the pivotal moments in your... Sure, cool. Thanks for having me, Rick. Good question. I'll start with back in 2009. I think I did from 2009. Back in 2009 in India, 2009 was a kind of fran time, all the market is gone bad with all housing crash. So I basically graduated the right time when there is whole, everything is crash. It was like, I was struggling to get a job, to be

[1:10] honest. That time in India I worked as an intern, probably 60 bucks a month that I was getting. And then did computers. Actually did chemistry in Bachelor, chemistry Bachelor, and then did computers in Masters and came out of the college. Then the old R is there, started as an intern, then was kind of looking for old cold job, basically full-time. I was kind of prospecting for my work and I used to send of cold emails for work, and as you know, nobody actually responded. And I used to send more than 400 companies, at least for a period of couple of months, and nobody responded. Very, very few responded. Even they respond, they kind of shouted me, hell, just B, they kind of leave me alone, dip. So I was like, okay, cool, just a bit of a hope that at least there is going, one day going to respond. Out of that persistence I got one guy who responded after 3 months. He asked for an interview, went on third Saturday and then joined on Monday. It was very intense actually. When I first saw that, I play, okay, cool, it just worked, right? So then I started the company, joined the company, start up with d be, and then that be name, I worked there for 18 months. It was acquired by Salesforce after working for 18 months, and then I moved from, that was still in

[2:23] India, and after acquisition I moved from India to Bay Area to lead some of the projects. I grew up in the ladder from all the way to made to all the archit, like six, seven promotions in last 12, 13 years. And then I had that kind of inere, okay, cool, join my career, started my career at startup, I want to do something in the startup SP, and I've been building all the, basically gaining good knowledge working at all the great people in Salesforce. I took the plunge finally after 13 years then to start my own thing. Cool. Then I was looking for prospecting co-founders and then I met my co-founder Dam in the area when he was there, he met there, and then we started building together. It's actually been through completely a non idea, working together idea, then raise funds, then build a team. Now we are like three, four countries, the team is there in three, four countries, and we raise a seed round, two rounds basically, pre-seed and seed, and I come long way and making good slides and the Vue retention, everything. So it's been a pretty wild from. That's awesome, congratulations. Can you talk about some of the early challenges you faced when you first started prospecting for work and how those experiences shaped your approach to business and sales? Yeah, I

[3:34] think prospecting is all about your desperation, right? I mean, you wanted to get something out of thing and you going to, it's then it's very easy to kind of intimidate with what you want, right? Let's say if you want a job, keep on saying, hey, cool, this, you have a job, right? And if you're prospecting for work, hey, cool, Rick, I saw that you are looking at this and I do this, would you be interested? I think there's your personal desperation is one angle, and there is actually that everybody have their own needs. But when people receive lot of incumbents, lot of inbound, so many emails, you got to think from the receiver angle, what does it mean for them. So from your side you might think that's spray and pray, I just want to explain hundreds of people that V the same thing happened. Whether it's for business prospecting, whether it's for job prospecting, this what I see, spray and pray never works. You are just not spending enough time and the guy also not spend enough time on you thing, right? I would rather, so what I would just say is that enough research. What is your core skill set, what is your core value proposition? If you have looking for a job, it's basically selling yourself, right? And if you're selling your products, you're selling your, look for your core value proposition, look what does it mean

[4:45] for them. Think from the handle, am I reaching the right person, and what is the requirement that they may be having, what problem that they may be having, how can I fit my thing into the problem. Remember there's going to be a lot of people pitching the same thing to the same problem, and look for innovative ways. So I would say, right person, do enough research, are you giving enough messaging which is basically resonating, standing off from the p, and just keep on iterate the message. You don't get, maybe first message doesn't work, and try another one, different campaign, different copy structured. So actually the last time, what worked for me was initially when I was sending a lot of cold emails, I was just sending a GCT message, hey, look, this is my resume, do you have a job? But then I looked into, hey, what is my core specialization? Let's say I was working on a tech called GWD back then. I was specifically looking for jobs on the GWD tech, and then I was mentioning that, hey, Rohit, I saw that your company asked questions on this and this is where I found wi and lo, and I have been working on this for quite long and this is my kind of a proof for case studies, what, right? If you use a sales technology and crafting that basically help me, you get to, got it. Got it. Yeah, it sounds like you experienced

[5:55] this challenge very early on, and that inspired you to start OneShot down the line. Can you talk a little bit about some of the key problems you're solving for B2B sales teams? Yeah, so I would say currently we're heavily focused on outbound for B2B. If you take the whole go to market in general, there's a whole inbound strategy and outbound strategies, and as of the current state of the art we've been heavily focused on the outbound. And on outbound you can see the whole prospecting journey, whether it's finding the right buyers for your product, identifying the right buyer, what is the company, what is the right account meant for you, what is the right contact within the company, researching them, personalizing, creating content, reaching out them in email, LinkedIn, cold call, whatever you want, whatever the channel that they are available and where you wanted to prospect. Doing a whole journey right from finding the people all the way to outreaching them and the adjusting the campaigns based on the performance, one works, you under the work. So we have been into this outbound for almost couple of years and built a pretty robust platform around be identifying the right account, right contact, creating a right message, sending in the right channel and sending in the right time. Basically all those five

[7:08] things actually much near to get a successful outbound. So I would say that's where core value proposition, and if you are using, if any of you using any Outreach or Salesloft or Apollo as kind of your sales engagement platform, sequencing forer, you could use a platform to basically AI-ify your sequencing platform, please. That's awesome. Can you talk a little bit about how you guys are leveraging generative AI and automation for this process? Yeah, yeah. So let me just split this whole automation general. You have mundane tasks that you're going to do. If you take any job, doesn't matter whether you're SDR or BDR manager, even engineer, every job role or function has certain mundane tasks which you hate to do it, but you have to do it for this to make your job successful. And we automate that part specific to prospecting mundane, whether it's basically sniffing through bunch of applying the filters, going through each job title, each prospect, or going to their LinkedIn profile, going to their website. What you going to do if I'm prospecting Rick? First I need to identify Rick, next the is the right person to prospect at the first place out of

[8:19] millions of millions of profiles, that itself a bigger task. And then next thing is, okay, identify Rick, what should I, how should I, what is the reason for me to reach Rick? So I will go to your LinkedIn, I'll go to your website and I'll go to any podcast. Rick, I saw that you did a podcast with Wy, I found it interesting. I did more research, the more I research about you and your company, I found more points to resonate what I'm offering so that I can tie my value proposition to the. So identifying, whether it's identifying, whether it's researching, and using all the research material, putting them in a right channel, whether it's an email, LinkedIn, and cold call, how can you bring your personalized research still back to your value proposition, still relevant for the buyer, which is hyper customized to them, and you can do this at the scale. When I was doing 10, 15 years back for my job, I used to do manually one while the tech was not there. Now they're set certain things, the tech is much better than what a human can do, you better use it. That's on the automation side of things. When it comes to AI, I don't want to send any generic messages, right? Templated thing, hi first name, how are things going at your company, this what we do. The other, they know what now. If you, when the channels, email channels and LinkedIn channels, when they see the message is so

[9:32] kind of templatized, they put the link in such a way, can put it to the spam. But because of the post, everything is unique for each person, you actually bypass this rules, that channel specific thing that report, but still you personalizing for Le what think that, okay, the guy some. So I would say automating the whole process, whether it's finding account, researching, and crafting the message and then customizing the scale, that's where we use are the automation. Got it, got it, got it. And in regards to the product development, can you elaborate on the technology stack and architecture behind OneShot? Yeah, so we use, on the tech standpoint, we use Monster, the back end, like a back end is the Node.js and front the JS, and then we use obviously the cloud, AWS. And when it comes to the AI stack, use, there an MLOps platform called PRS and like a TrueFoundry, and of those one helps you is that you can take any open source model. Actually even AWS has SageMaker. You take some of these open source models, put it in the ML platform and get this kind of an API and then train the data, customer data, into our own thing. That's on the open source models and

[10:45] then obviously you have closed-source models like OpenAI, Claude. I've seen very, very good results with Claude 3.5 Sonnet compared to 4o, it's very human return compared to that. And we use Bedrock as well, Bedrock expose some of these closed-source models an API. So all in all we use MLOps platform and then the open source models and closed-source models, then I want Claude for on day. That makes a lot of sense. And when we look at prospecting, we're seeing the growth of intent data coming onto the scene to complement our sales prospecting efforts. Can you talk a little bit about how sales teams can use tools like Clearbit, 6sense, Bombora, and G2 to boost their prospecting efforts? Yeah, so let's take step, what is prospecting? Basically I wanted to find some person and then outreach them. It's when you are outreaching somebody, let's say if I'm outreaching Rick, are you a cold person where you never had a problem in the first place? Because I see that you are kind of a little leader, I'm kind of guessing there the guy might be having this problem, I'm bing his P cold, right? If you have not shown any kind of

[11:55] interest in my business or maybe my category in my competition space, the space I'm in, you not show any interest, but I'm just reaching that's people. But there is a higher chance if the guy, the buyer, showed some interest in some form, you basically contact them at the right time at the right channel, there is a higher degree that you get the conscience. And that's pretty much what is intent, right? Intent is all about a buyer showed some form of intention on your space, on your business, in one way, right? So I would say the intents, there are three kinds of intent, the first party intent, second party, from third party. So I'll give you a view. A first party is like you come to my website and then let's say you browse my website and you did a form fill, leave search form, and then basically show interest. That's first party, you literally engage with me. And the second party, like you went to G2 and then doing something on my category or space, that's the second party. The third party is like in the Google I was searching for, I gave me all the latest AI prospecting platforms all there, I did in the search and the logo, and then the f article came, maybe TechCrunch article came, and then I didn't to TechCrunch and read that article. So you are not really engaging my business, but

[13:05] you are reading something relevant for my business, right? That's the third party. So you can leverage this different kinds of first party, second party, third party intent to know that Rick showed some interest, and using that intention you could use that in the outreach saying that, hey Rick, you may be interested in looking for prospecting solution by AI. And you don't have to say I saw that you read an article, you don't need to mention that part, but just say, you know the fact that the guy is looking for something in the AI thing, and if you put that in the message, whether it's email, whether it's a LinkedIn, you might think that, wow, one of those things where you have been shopping and somebody you at the same message, okay, that's cool. So there's a higher chance of the conversion with the intent, and you have first party, second party to leverage and then use different kind of strategies how you can make use that in the message. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. You've spoken about the impact of cold email on your career. What advice would you give to young professionals on the importance of persistence in effective outreach? Yeah, I would say from, for the sales, for the job, use case? Well, why don't we go with sales. Yeah, prospecting for sales,

[14:16] it's like I said, right, you got to get five things go, fire five elements, right? I'm just talking in the context of B2B sales in general, right? We have to identify the right account, we have to identify the right contact, we have to put right message, and you have to prospect them in the right channel, and then you have to hit them at the right time. This are like B, right account, right contact, right message, right channel at the right time. These are the five things, and then you have a technology for each of those which can facilitate, right? Obviously there are point solutions which does a small thing and you can do at a, I would say, non-scalable way, one a couple of contacts, but then you need some tech which does all these five things at the largest, where I can find thousands of people, where I can be thousands of messages generated the scale, I mean I can send thousands of messages whether it's email or LinkedIn and cold call. You need to find the right tech which does the personalization, relevancy, and the scale, and also the automation. So I would say the anger of the upcoming SDRs, so maybe whoever is doing prospecting in the AI world, leverage the tech. Whatever is commodity, you don't want to do a commodity, leave that to the technology, and there are a lot of areas that technology is not still good at it. You build that profile,

[15:28] let's say for example I want to do social selling. I want to use some technology which builds my profile base in LinkedIn, then start posting content in LinkedIn, so basically be the voice in that. Let's say I cannot send voice notes in LinkedIn. Let's say if you and me connected, Rick, in your LinkedIn, and if I wanted to send a voice note, I have the turn on the microphone on the mobile app, I cannot automate, and it's very effective. So this is what I would say, anything that there's a technology that does better than you, leverage that, or what you can do, use it, whether it's a video prospecting, whether it's kind of customized follow-up, whether it's some other channel which is not see automatable, go use there for the. How do you balance your roles as a technical leader, product developer, and business strategist? What skills do you find most crucial for managing these responsibilities? Yeah, each role requires a different kind of set. If you see, I'm like hardcore engineer background itself, for work more than a decade. Now with the enterprise there's a lot of leverages there, you have managers, you GTM people. Now with your own startup

[16:37] you got to wear multiple hats. I would say each role has its, requires its own different kind of unique mindset. For example, if you're engineer background, you want to build something long-term solutions which are scalable, perform, and highly customizable, but then you are, it's going to take a longer time to build. But if you had a product own building the mindset, you wanted to ship something quicker to get the feedback and then iterate on top of it. So each has different, I would say, mindset, each for other role. I think depends on, when you are especially wearing multiple hats, depends on the situation. I would ask yourself, okay, what role I should be playing to get the best for the company. Sometimes I optimize for product and then it's actually not good for the engineering set of things, basically still an impact for the company. So what's the problem that is mostly hurting, whether it's getting a new customers, whether it's retentions, whether it's on driving more adoption, whatever it is, take that problem where you should basically put enough solutions and then basically go hard on that kind of mindset and then go from and make sure everybody align, watch. I want to segue into the future of AI and

[17:47] sales. What do you think are some of the trends you see and how you envision the evolution of AI impacting GTM strategies? Yeah, and the future is all, I would say, agent, right? Agent AI. You can see a lot of buzzer on it, like H C Andes keep right about a lot about the agents. Well, so basically agents is all about doing the things for you with the decision making autonomy, autonomy decision making, doing the things for you. If you take a traditional SaaS applications, you want to perform a task, you go there, user interface, and then you put some filters and keep button, right? It's basically output. But being with agents, it's more outcome based stuff. So if I want to launch a campaign, just go do it. If it is easy, do it so easy, if it's hard, do it hard, I don't care, but just get it done. So the future of AI, whether it's a GTM or maybe any other job role, it's going to be completely agentic, which actually the full end to end project for you with an autonomy of making the decisions right for your business, and then

[18:55] along the way, obviously the tech, it doesn't exist as of now. It's the evolution that I can think of, and if you can see, they could be like co-pilots where the AI tools help you to do your job with your inputs. I'm want to give certain inputs and you does something and then you going to review and then you're going to give some feedback. It's like a regular manager and then like an IC kind of, so that gets better and better over of time, and then these AI models, maybe these AI solutions, can get them smarter and become that's the things for you. That's what I kind of see. And especially for prospecting, where I would think of is that this is at least beyond that, where you can, your systems, whether it's your C system, the sales engagement platform, and we understand the patterns, what is a good customer look like, what is a bad customer look like, what is a good B look like, what's working, what's not working, and then basically creating campaigns autonomously. These are the people who change the jobs, because I've seen success from your SE and need launch the campaign by itself on your behalf, right? Maybe you can come back, I've done that, every, all the work, whether it's scaring a campaign, finding the people, getting the content copy. I say, hey, can you please come on you. So I'm kind of thinking in future every SaaS user

[20:07] 11 should become like a manager. The application does the work for you and you are just a manager, come back and see, approve like a boss and reject like a boss, and if you're rejecting, give the feedback and then get the AI learn from it, and think like classic manager. And I see kind of thing is what I'm kind of. It sounds like this is going to increase the productivity of every person and there won't be a need for as many people on the sales team. It's going to be effective and efficiency. Yeah, I would say. And how do you see OneShot evolving? Can you talk a little bit about the next steps, the next major milestones for you guys? Yeah, our goal is to personalize every interaction that your buyer is having with your business through the buyer journey. If you take the buyer journey, there is awareness phase, there is a concentration phase, and then going to make, eventually make some decision of picking some vendor. And your buyers, sometimes I send a cold email and you just don't convert from a cold email, and then you might see a LinkedIn ad from me, then you say, I remember this D, I remember this one, then you see something else. So it's a consistent series of go to market actions that your business doing to convert your buyer,

[21:19] and your buyer might not convert for one channel, but they're going to see, there going to be impressions, and they're going to keep remember you across all the GTM activities. And we wanted to basically this whole interaction from your business to the buyer across all the go to market channels, whether it's outbound channels, whether it's inbound channels, and whether it's a long form content, whether it's a short form content, whether it's a video or audio or text, multimodal, multi-channel, personalized your journey, the buyer journey, personal buy. That's our end goal, and today, V, we are, is completely done that for outbound across all the one channel with the email and cold call, we crack the code, and we basically continuous expanding to more, more long way to work out. Phenomenal. It sounds like the future is already here and just not evenly distributed yet. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's in pretty good success. Is there any success stories you can share with us? Yeah, so we work bunch of customers, actually have studies and le as well. Some customers benefited ability to scale outbound campaigns without, I would say, lower budget, and launching multiple campaigns and without compromising the quality of on the hyper

[22:29] cost manage. And so basically there is a scale at which what you could be at a lower cost, we have seen that. And some customers actually benefited from the quality of the outreach which result in conversions, and we have seen the response rate, response rate all the five, six percentage, you see pretty broader spectrum, one person is to, and depends on the maturity of the business. If you're a pure startup which you have not done outbound in your life and you still testing, every testing, for them the value proposition here is, am I able to put my voice out to multiple buyers out there which is part of my larger ecosystem on the go to market journey. And some customers will actually get a personalized outbound and get higher response rates leading to the opportunities created. You seen a wide spectrum of conversions plus the efficiency. It's great. One final question I have is, what key advice would you give to aspiring founders looking to build and scale their own startups in the tech industry? Yeah, so I would say, how high conviction in the problem that you're solving. It's very easy to kind of distract by multiple reasons,

[23:38] right? There's going to be new competitor come, and there going be, it's going to be hard to raise funds, and maybe it's going to get hardy employees, and maybe they, whatever you're going to get challenges along the way. The only thing that stick to you is how closely you associate turn to the problem that you solved. If you're genuinely obsessed with the problem that you solve and you fundamentally believe in it and you have seen it and you got conviction, if you yourself got the conviction, then it's all about how do I plant my conviction to other people, whether it's my co-founder, whether it's my employees, whether it's my investors, whether it's that. So it all starts from you, and along the way there's going to be bumpy door, ups and downs, might get customers, you might get customers, but if you fundamentally believe in to more customers, more users, and decide. And I say ideal customer profile is very, very important. I mean, your TAM could be so big, but you might not solve it, but you might not solve for the entire TAM, right, on the map, but that's your end goal, not star, but from your entire TAM pick your ICP, put more filters. For example, for me, anybody who does outbound, or within outbound, anybody who's using certain platforms, or within this, anybody who's

[24:51] doing a high, larger volume of scale. So I would say pick ICP, narrow down, broader and better, and that gives you even 1,000 companies to prospect, 100 companies to prospect, then you have a clear focus. Talk to them, put your product in front of more of them, get feedback and build out of it. I think long story short, it's all about high conviction and keep doing it. Venki, thanks so much for being on the GTM Vault Podcast. Thanks, Rick, thanks for having me. I really enjoyed the chat and thanks for all the thoughtful questions. To all our viewers out there, if you're ready to start boosting your sales prospecting, go to oneshot.ai and check out the platform. Thank you.