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Years ago, Will Allred and William Ballance were creating a technology platform called Dirter to apply personality and communication psychology to marketing campaigns. Just as Dirter was on his way to market, the pandemic hit — and marketing budgets stalled. With a week to go before the funding round, Allred and Balance retooled their technology to work inside Gmail on what they thought would be a shorter path to a dirtier startup.
But consumers liked the repackaged product — and so did investors. So Dirter became Lavender, an AI-powered sales email training platform.
Lavender integrates with email providers to provide context to a sales prospect and suggest ways to improve messaging to get a response. Demonstrating that there is money in the idea, the company announced that it has raised $13.2 million in a Series A round led by Signia Venture Partners and a seed round led by Signia from CapitalX, Position Ventures and various angel investors. .
“By combining deep learning on email data with communication and behavioral psychology, the Lavender AI text assistant identifies and implements ways to increase response rates,” Balan told TechCrunch in an email interview. “In the current climate, teams have to do more with less. Even if the sales team shrinks due to layoffs, teams use lavender to make every rep more productive and efficient.
The lavender product is made up of three different components. Sales Email Coach, “Personalization Assistant” and email information and training portal. The email tools present research material (e.g. news and updates, funding statistics, job listings, events, tweets, etc.) to recipients and can automatically generate drafts from that research (à la ChatGPT), or simply generate a few bullet points for an existing email. Line. As written by email, Lavender records in real-time, indicating improvements in specific areas.
The Lavender Analytics dashboard shows high-level details about emails, including inbound rates and potential areas of concern. Image Credits: Lavender
Writing a “better email” is a four-step process – research, create, edit and learn – and our product helps with all four. “Instead of automating it, we help users write effective, personalized emails faster. AI works alongside them but doesn’t replace them.”
The aforementioned Lavender Learning Portal collects and analyzes email activity, revealing areas that need improvement. Admins using Lavender can see which email templates are performing better than others, as well as metrics like individual email results, open rates, response rates, and writing time.
Lavender finds “at-risk” representatives who need additional support or training to achieve specific goals. That’s not a feature that will please every agent, especially those who are concerned about their own processes and privacy. But the balance issue is a net good when the sale of a company is at risk.
“Sales teams have become too focused on optimizing for efficiency and automation. This forced optimization has made buyers feel bad about salespeople, because they feel like they’re just numbers,” he said. “Sales needs to go back to real relationships — not automation and spam.” Lavender makes real personalized emails for our users faster.
While Lavender isn’t the only organization to implement automation for its marketing and sales development department, it’s certainly benefiting from a period of overall growth. According to data from Ascend 2 and research partners, by 2022, 69% of marketers say their entire customer journey is partially or mostly automated, while 9% say it’s fully automated. The same report shows that one-third – 31% – of marketing professionals plan to purchase a marketing automation solution in the next 12 months.
Lavender’s competitors include Sellscale, which similarly uses generative AI to write marketing emails, and marketing automation startup Clavio, which received a major investment from Shopify last August. (Balance sees Jasper and Regine as competitors; both use text-generating AI to craft marketing copy.) Lavender has a respectable customer base, however, totaling around 11,000 vendors, including Twilio, Segment, Sendoso, Sharebite and Clari.
“We built it for two more years before raising venture capital,” Ballance said, declining to answer questions about recurring revenue. “Lavender has the capital to continue to build in the current market.
The Lavender team recently grew to 16 employees, up from six in Q4 2022. Balance says the startup — which has raised a total of $14.2 million — will continue to expand and fill “key roles” throughout the rest of the year.
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