---
title: "Outbound Is Dying: How Spara's Multimodal AI Turns Inbound Into Pipeline (Live Demo)"
episode: 42
podcast: "The LeanScale Podcast"
publisher: "LeanScale"
guest: "David Walker"
guest_title: "Founder & CEO, Spara"
date_published: 2025-10-29
date_modified: 2026-07-22
duration: 00:29:44
word_count: 5462
topics: ["ai-in-gtm", "outbound-sales", "demand-generation", "gtm-strategy"]
canonical_url: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/david-walker-spara-multimodal-inbound/
source: "LeanScale Podcast Knowledge Hub — https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app"
license: "Free to quote and cite with attribution to The LeanScale Podcast."
---

# Outbound Is Dying: How Spara's Multimodal AI Turns Inbound Into Pipeline (Live Demo) — Full Transcript

> Episode 42 of The LeanScale Podcast, with David Walker.
> Published October 29, 2025 · 00:29:44 · 5,462 words.
> Machine-transcribed and **not diarized** — speaker attribution is inferred, so verify
> attribution against the audio before quoting a specific person.
> Structured breakdown: https://leanscale-knowledge-hub.netlify.app/podcast/david-walker-spara-multimodal-inbound/

## 00:00 — Cold open: outbound is dying, inbound AI wins

**[0:00]** Today, we have David Walker, founder, CEO of Aspara here today. So excited to hop into your platform. I think you've taken a very unique and holistic approach to making the most of anything inbound coming to your website, coming to your brand, interacting with your company. We both talked offline before this that Outbound is completely dying, especially if you're in B2B mid-market to enterprise Saas or selling AI. And your platform is making the most of implementing AI in all of the channels that you communicate with your customers to help convert along the customer journey. David, I'm so excited you're here. Thank you

## 00:45 — Spara's origin: the questions buyers never get to ask

**[0:45]** for doing this. I think a good place to start, a lot of people think of communicating with their customers through AI via chat bots or some other, you know, typical support-like channels. How is Aspara different and what gave you the inspiration to get this started? Thanks Anthony and awesome to be here. Huge fan of the pod and honored to be a guest. So I'll give you the quick origin story of Aspara why I'm doing this in the first place. So I was the co-founder and CEO of a Saas business in the real estate space and I grew it to 350 people, sold it to a really big company with a couple thousand people, and

**[1:29]** in both orgs I spent the majority of my time and focus on go-to-market and on selling. And I always felt this pain point of, you know, we have people who are interested in us, they're coming to the website, we're doing Outbound, that's driving them back towards us to come Google us and check us out. And I always just wanted to talk to them, right? Why are you here? What are you interested in? Can we answer your questions? And I really wanted to know what questions they had for us because that would give us so much understanding of how to close them. And it's just not feasible to do with humans and AI is super well positioned

## 02:01 — What makes Spara different: one multimodal model

**[2:01]** to solve that problem that I was facing myself. So I went and started Aspara to go solve that as my life's work and I'm really, really excited about it. You asked what makes us different. I think the biggest unique positioning that we have in the market is we are multimodal, so we allow companies to train one model on their data and then we can talk to their customers in any form factors that their customers want to use. So chat, email, voice, whatever it is, Aspara can be there to talk to your customers in real time and help understand what they're looking for and then convert them to get from lead into pipeline and revenue.

**[2:40]** I think that's a huge difference that a lot of people may not appreciate. So thinking about the need of training a model for chat, training a model for voice, training a model for email, training a model for every communication mode that you have with your customer, it misses data in translation and it becomes way less efficient and doesn't give the customer the best experience to help give them the information they need. And for the most part, I think people want to interact with whatever is going to give them their answers the quickest and whatever can give them information in the most thorough way possible. So being able

## 03:18 — AI adoption and the coming tool-stack consolidation

**[3:18]** to give them the information any way they want and make sure it's accurate and tailored to them is pretty incredible. Yeah. We're in this super interesting phase of AI adoption, right? Where at big companies it's board meetings where it's talking about we have to go use AI. We have to get more efficient. It's so clear to everyone that it's a powerful tool and so we're seeing this mass proliferation of adoption of application layer AI. And what we think is going to happen is the inevitable that it's happening with more pre-LLM SaaS is there's going to be consolidation.

**[3:52]** So it's like easy to go buy an AI chat, AI email, AI voice, try to get all these things and then you realize, oh my God, the overhead and management of this stack that I've just sort of cobbled together because I wanted AI as quickly as possible doesn't make a ton of sense. And so we're building for that sort of future state that we're already seeing happen where companies are starting to think, okay, there's actually work involved here and this is a really powerful part of my org. It's almost like we become an arm of the sales team and marketing team and we want to have one comprehensive platform that can do everything that we need it to do.

## 04:29 — 30–70 GTM tools and the problem with AI outbound

**[4:29]** Something you might find interesting on that point of just like cognitive load of how many tools you have at lean scale, the average number of tools and the go to market tech stack that we manage is over 30 different tools. And we primarily serve the series A to series C market. If you go series D and above, that gets up to 70 tools on the go to market space. So it's definitely getting more complex, people putting more and more technology in there. It's getting more confusing. And then the worst part, I think a lot of people are using AI in a way that's probably diminishing their brand and not helping because they're doing

**[5:10]** spray and pray outbound, high volume, high personalization that anybody can read through. I see it all the time, my inbox. So I think the oh my gosh, don't get me started on AI outbound because we could talk about that for three hours. No, but I think the real value in AI is actually where you're starting is, okay, how do I make the most of the inbound people who want to interact with us and make it the highest quality experience possible? I actually think that's where it's going to be more powerful. And the thing is, I always say to our customers, we're an inbound platform in the sense that

**[5:51]** we're not going to send out 30,000 fake personalized outbound sales emails. That's its own world. That world's really hard. The signal noise problem is getting worse. AI makes it harder for everyone. It's kind of a reverse network effect. The more people using AI to send outbound emails, the less effective each individual email will be. So there's a whole bunch of problems there. But what we do help outbound in the sense that almost any customer that is outbound to that's going to convert is going to go to your website. They're not just going to reply to a sales email and all of a sudden go buy the product

## 06:31 — 100% of buyers visit your website

**[6:31]** having not gone to the site. And so what I like to think about is that anyone who's ever going to buy your product, particularly if you're B2B SaaS or your sort of high consideration consumer where your website is a key part of your conversion flow, 100% of people who buy are going to go to your website. Whether they're inbound, outbound, wherever they came from and what's the experience like once they get there and what's the experience like after they leave. And that is a key area that humans have done a really poor job because we're just not fast enough. We're not fast enough to talk to people when they're on the website.

**[7:08]** And talking to them allows us to capture data which allows us to then influence the next steps. How do we follow up on my email? Is there a voice call that's going to be more valuable to do as fast as possible? And how do we just increase that speed to lead and that buying experience such that our buyers actually want to buy from us? Absolutely. And I know you prepared a demo for us today. I think it'd be really great. I agree with everything you're saying. And I think it'd be great to see it in action and go through because I know the first time you showed it to me, I was pretty blown away.

**[7:41]** I was like, "This is how I would want to buy." And it feels really authentic, too. So, yeah, we'd love to get under the hood and take a look. I love that you brought up. It feels like the way you'd want to buy because whenever I'm in sales conversation, I ask CMOs, VPs of marketing, CROs, VPs of sales, say, "Hey, tell me about your current buying motion, your current selling motion and the experience your buyers go through." And they walk me through the process and I say, "Great. Would you go through that motion as a buyer?" And 90% of the time, there's kind of like a wry

## 08:19 — Live demo: Navigator vs. Smart Bar

**[8:19]** smile, right? And the answer is always the same. Honestly, no. We take nine days to show someone our product at best. And frankly, no. My attention span is too low. I operate like this and we can operate like that. And so, I love that you brought that up. It's a big focus of ours. All right. So, let me jump in and show you what it's all about. >> Perfect. >> All right. So, I'm going to demo. We have--we dog food our own product, obviously. Spara is--Spara's tech is a key driver of our own sales internally. And so, I'm going to show you Spara on the Spara website. So, first product you'll see here is called Navigator.

**[9:00]** This is bottom right chat. You're used to this UI. We've seen this before. Ours is different and it's all freeform. There's no gating. There's no if-then logic. It's all true AI-powered conversation. It's super cool. It converts at a much higher rate than your traditional static chatbot. The second product I want to show you though is what we call Smart Bar. So, this is like chat GPT for your website, right? Everyone gets this UI at this point. We know that if I go in here, I'm going to get valuable information. And so, why I love this product is because one of the pain points I always felt was we built these websites

## 09:37 — Proprietary intent data: the question is the roadmap to close

**[9:37]** in my last company, this company, to answer every question that our buyer could want to ask. But what we really care about as sellers is what is the question. If we know the question that our customer is looking to ask us, we have the roadmap to close, right? Like that gives us insight into what to do next. So, by just giving your customer the ability to ask you the question, they will show you their cards. They will show you what they care about and what they're looking to solve. And that's such valuable insights. You can't buy that data anywhere else, right? That's proprietary intent data. You have to earn it, right? You

**[10:10]** have to give them the opportunity to have that conversation. So, I can go in and ask something like, "Can SPARA help me better convert leads to pipeline?" I hope we say yes because that is definitely what we do. And so, I'm going to pop into this multimodal AI interface where I can get answers. Cool. So, like, this is showing me something I wanted to show you. So, this is great. This is showing me our journey's logic. So, okay, great. You've got pipeline. You want to turn it into a scheduled call, right? We are going to host the logic and be able to deploy AI. This is what's powering this conversation I'm having right here, to

**[10:54]** do that. So, as a buyer, I asked a question. I got a helpful answer. I got to see under the hood of the product something that's relevant to me. And now SPARA has earned the right to go and ask pre-qualification questions, right? And we've provided value. It's give to get. It's classic sales. So, we've been helpful. And so, let's say I mentioned all three. I want AI chat. I want AI email. And I want AI voice. That's going to be the best thing to help my company. I can go in and say that. And perfect. We're going to, you know, answer the question. Hey, we can definitely help you with that. We're going to ask for

## 11:30 — No forms, instant scheduling, real-time routing

**[11:30]** their email. I could ignore this. And I could keep asking product-related questions, right? I could have a long conversation to better understand SPARA. But let's say I want to just answer this question. Obviously, for the purpose of this demo, we're going to use some fake data so that we're not showing it to be real. So, Sally, you know, Big Co, VP of Marketing here gives us her email. Let's offer time. There's no reason to have delay. There's no reason to put a form up. What do I want? What's the ideal buying experience? Right? Answer my questions. Give me value immediately. Speed to lead. And then let me

**[12:09]** do the thing I care about, right? So, I can go in and schedule a call right here. Make it super easy. We integrate with whatever calendar our customers want to use so you don't have to have a bunch of change management with your team. And we can just push this conversation forward from there and kick it over to a call scheduled with one of our AEs. I can exit out of here. I can show in Navigator. We're going to have the same conversation. So whether I start a conversation in one form factor, kick it over to another, it's going to be consistent. And I'm going to be able to go in and see the media assets. They can

**[12:40]** just slide right out. It's a nice little UI trick there. And same thing with our calendar. We can just go and pop in here and schedule a call just like that. So, ultimately, we've made the experience for the buyer. We've done a couple things. One is we've allowed them to give you their proprietary intent data, right? To give you that roadmap to close of what they're interested in. Two, we've been able to have logic where we can ask different pre-qualification questions. We could route, you know, one, a highly qualified person gets an AE calendar, a mid-tier qualification person gets an SDR calendar, right? A low-tier person

**[13:19]** can be pushed into a self-service motion. We handle all that logic in real time the way a good human would, right? And feeling out a customer and being able to route them to the right place. And then most importantly, we've let the customer take the next step. So many sales motions today hold back your most qualified and interested buyers, right? They're sort of built for the average and the people who really want to give you money and turn into revenue are actually held back and they feel like they're slowed down. We allow them to accelerate and speed up and just do the right next step so that they can

## 13:50 — Why it feels different from a chatbot

**[13:50]** again turn leads into pipeline into revenue. This is done in such an elegant way. This might be a minor thing, but aesthetically seeing the bar there as far anything feels so much different than a chatbot. It feels more like I'm interacting with something that's going to give me actual helpful information, not just a sales tool or trying to lure me into a demo. Totally. I feel like just the emotion of it is completely different. Yeah, I completely agree. We wanted to have both because there's a whole group of people that are used to this bottom right UI, right? They know it, they want it, they need to see it,

**[14:31]** and it's like great. And what they're expecting is most of these chats, if you've used these on websites, you go in and you click on it and it says great. Can I have your email address? It basically is just a form and it's gating the thing that I want most and you can't go in and just sort of ask a question and start a conversation, which I always found crazy because as a seller, the number one thing I always want is to be able to understand what my customer is actually looking for, what their pain points are. And so the big unlock here was just don't gate it, right? Let's provide value. Let's allow the person to ask questions.

**[15:05]** Let's be helpful. Let's talk about your product. Let's show information about your product. We will weave in pre-qualification questions to capture that data. And as it turns out, if you're willing to have a free form, high value conversation for the buyer, they are so much more likely to give you the information you're looking for than if you just do the form, the sort of the dumb version, right? Which is, hey, here's basically our form. We need your email address for you to begin. And that's the kind of, that's the old world of buying experience. The new world is dynamic. It's fast. It focuses on speed to lead. It

## 15:41 — 2–4x MQL capture and autonomous email follow-up

**[15:41]** focuses on creating value. And guess what? The results are, I mean, we're seeing literally 2, 3, 4X greater engagement and MQL capture than pre-existing chat. And then you layer in the net new interface, like a smart bar, and you really have the best of both worlds. That's huge. That's huge. So this is interacting with the website, interacting with chat. What other modes of communication can Swara get in front of your customer with? All right. So what's really cool is, you know, since I didn't actually schedule that call, I can now go in and jump into email to email and fully autonomous. So I'm going to go jump

**[16:20]** into this conversation and we can see that, you know, Sally here was interested in better lead conversion in a pipeline, interested in AI, chat, email, and voice. Awesome. You know, offered call scheduling. She didn't schedule. Let's go compose an AI-generated email. And so we can now have a hyper-personalized one-to-one follow-up with Sally. It's going to mention, we talked about lead conversion to pipeline, right? So it's literally going to speak to the conversation that she just had. So it feels like a continuation. Ask if there's any more questions and, you know, say that, hey, we're here to support our calls.

**[16:58]** So we can go off and, you know, this is Sally at Big Co, so I'm not actually sending Sally fake email, but we can go send this email. And then anytime Sally replies back, we can reply within 10 seconds. So just, just like we're built for real time with chat and with voice, we're built for real time with email. And so I always say the only reason email is a high-latency form of communication is because humans are really slow. But if we remove that limiting factor, then it can be really, really fast. So anytime Sally happens to give us her interest and reply to one of her emails, we can reply back instantaneously.

**[17:34]** Just a better experience for the buyer, right? I don't want to send an email about your product, go off and, you know, forget about it for six hours and then get an email back in my inbox. I'm doing something else at that point. I want it to be fast. So fully autonomous email, super powerful. And having it be synced with the chat, and this is, you know, to your point that we brought up earlier, there's a lot of point solutions, but when you can consolidate into one platform, you get the benefit of that seamless transition from one modality to another. Well, and I think I've a lot of times been in the exact position

**[18:07]** Sally has been in, where I'm on a website, I'm checking out the product, I go click on the link to book a demo, I'm sitting there looking for times, then I get a slack, then I'm out of there. And then I never end up actually booking. And I think that's a pretty unique and particular nurture population that you're really well positioned to help take care of. And I think you can really increase conversions because I likely, if somebody were to reach back out to me, I was like, Oh, yeah, I actually just got busy. Yep. Thanks for reminding me and bringing all the context, the questions I was asking. Yeah, I'll book

**[18:44]** a demo now. Yep, totally. And, and, you know, what's what's nice is AI is also not self conscious that it's them. I always remember early in my sales career, right, someone wouldn't respond, be like, Oh, God, did they hate me? Did they hate our product? And then, and then you start to realize, no, they just have lives, and they're busy. And they just didn't happen to do the thing in that moment. And so giving, you know, Sally every mode of communication to have the option to convert, but all synchronized to yield one positive outcome makes a ton of sense. Amazing. So let's say I did schedule a call, right? So I've got a call three days

## 19:20 — AI voice for pre-call prep (not replacing the human)

**[19:20]** from now set up with a human. If I show up to that call as the buyer, and it's your AI on the call, I'm going to be pissed, right? That's a bad use of AI. I'm expecting that human touch. But when we think about AI voice, we think about what are the moments where we can actually improve the experience for the buyer, right? Not just try to replace a human call for the sake of automation, which is not a good goal, because I think magic happens when a motivated buyer and a really good seller get together to talk about the same problem at the same time. But what if I schedule that call? And, you know, five

**[19:58]** seconds later, my phone rings, and it says, Hey, this is Spara, right? And it's asking me some questions so that my scheduled call can be more tailored and more valuable to me as the buyer, right? That's an opportunity for AI to use voice to add value to the sales team, right? They're going to know more going into the call, be able to better suit the demo to the buyer's needs. But most importantly, it adds value to the buyer, right? They know they're going to get maximum value from that call. So, you know, I can go in here and for this, we're going to use a browser call, right? Just for the sake of this demo. So I'll start

**[20:31]** the call and remember, this is pre-call prep. I just scheduled and now Spara AI is going to call me to make sure that call is as valuable to me as possible. Hello. Hi there. This is Rob and AI assistant from Spara. Thanks for scheduling your demo with us. Is it all right if I ask you a few questions so we can prepare for your call? Sure. Great. I have a few questions for you. Firstly, how many employees does your company have? We have 100. Got it. 100 employees. Thanks for that. Next question. We need to convert more of our leads into pipeline and ultimately revenue. Understood. You're looking to convert

**[21:20]** more leads into pipeline and ultimately revenue. That definitely aligns with Spara's strengths. Next question. Are there any other companies you're evaluating alongside Spara? No, just Spara. Thanks for confirming. It's just Spara you're evaluating. Next question. What time frame are you considering for implementing the solution? Not really sure, but definitely I want it set up in the next three months. Got it. You're aiming to have something set up in the next three months. Last question. What are you most excited about learning during the demo with Spara? I want to learn all about Spara's AI voice capabilities. I heard they're

**[22:00]** really cool. Thanks. I'll make sure the demo focuses on Spara's AI voice capabilities since you're excited about that. Before we wrap up, do you have any questions or concerns you'd like me to address right now? No, this was super helpful. Thanks so much. So hopefully that gives you a sense of it feels to me. Oh, cool. You want to know what I care about. And as the seller you're showing, I'm like, oh my God, I know exactly what my customer is looking for. I'm set up to close. Well, and I think something too, maybe I'm just getting older and this is like what older people do, but I have it starts to get exhausting

**[22:38]** when I have to type out every single thing that I'm looking for. So if I got like a list of those questions and I had to type out everything for someone or I wouldn't want to burn time on a discovery call with someone too. So I think having the opportunity to just communicate it via voice, I can give a long winded answer about something and you can kind of make sense of it later. Yeah, it is a better experience than needing to fill out another form or something. Totally, totally. Last thing I'll quickly show you. And this is fake, fake info, obviously, because I don't want to put anyone's real information up here. But on every lead, we're

## 23:17 — Lead enrichment, CRM sync, and rep alerts

**[23:17]** also doing a bunch of background research. So we're going in and we're looking at what's this person's role, where do they work, doing multiple lead enrichment waterfalls. We're providing a conversation summary of the conversation spars had to date. This would be, you know, via all different channels and company info, you know, competitors, recent news for different talking points, basically the playbook for the sales rep, right, to come super prepared to be able to close every deal. And so whenever we're having an interaction with someone, we can not only will be pushing all the data into your CRM. So what was talked about, you

**[23:57]** know, where we converted them to the next steps, etc, all the lead and company level data. But we can also proactively send slack alerts to sales reps. Once they get assigned within the CRM, we see who is assigned to Sally, we can email them. So they have all the notes from the history of the conversation as well as all this super helpful research. So we look at our role is, you know, we're going to create a better buying experience by allowing that buyer to engage as fast as they want in real time in whatever modality they want with the best possible AI that knows how to sell your company, we're going to take

**[24:31]** all that data, we're going to structure it, we're going to save it all in your CRM in a really useful way. And then we're going to proactively push that data to the right sales rep at the right time so that they're set up to close. It's super comprehensive and love that you're pulling some external research and enrichment on that lead and contact as well. I'm curious, I think this is probably where some of the biggest aspect of maybe implementing Spark would come from. But how do you train the model and how do you recommend your customers train the model because any model is usually

## 25:07 — Training the model: human-in-the-loop, no net-new content

**[25:07]** only as good as the data and how structured the data is. So how do you recommend people get set up with Spark? That's a great question. Every customer asks this and there's always this fear that it's going to take so much work. The reality is it takes some work because we really believe in having a human in the loop for this training. But we start by basically saying, okay, let's look at all of your public information that you host. So your website, your docs, if you have any academy, any sort of internal knowledge base that is sales related, that is okay to be that knowledge to be public facing. And we can take that data in whatever format it's

**[25:47]** structured in. We're really good at chunking that up, making it super useful and training a model. Then you go in and we have a whole testing interface within our platform to simulate the real conversation. You get to pretend to be your own customer and you get to simulate real conversations and the real interface and UI that you would see on your website. And you can provide feedback. Thumbs up, thumbs down on every message. And through that the model evolves and learns and gets smarter. And so there's a couple other ways, right? We'll take transcripts of calls that you have that were really good, any kind of internal

**[26:23]** sales rep training data. What I will say is we're batting 1,000 where no company has had to create a net new asset piece of material or piece of content for us. It's not so much just getting access to the right data where we're able to get the data that companies have off the shelf, but making it super useful to actually train a model we got really good at. And then having that extra magic of the human in the loop to really sort of refine the tone and the feel has been awesome. And our customers are surprised by, you know, they spend an hour or two testing and giving feedback and they can literally see the improvements

**[26:57]** and the changes. And they're always surprised by how easy it was, but how well trained the model gets to their specific needs. That's incredible. And as you continue to get more and more information and it gets to know your customers better, I'm sure the experience just gets better and better. And you're really getting smarter over time. Yeah. And you're really building foundationally across all your channels. So every channel in which you communicate with your customers or prospects, get the benefit of that model being trained. Yep. Our goal is to just be your, as I kind of alluded to earlier, it's

## 27:34 — The AI layer of your GTM engine — pro-salespeople

**[27:34]** to be the AI layer of your sales and marketing go to market engine, right? Where we are not trying to get rid of salespeople. We're actually super pro salespeople. Our whole goal is to basically get more customers on the phone with salespeople. But to provide all those points of value to buyers that lead to conversion that humans can't do, right? Real time conversation across any interface in the moments that buyers want to talk to your company and humans are too slow to be able to talk to those buyers so that we can get those people moving forward in the funnel and connected to a real human. Well, David, I am so impressed by the platform,

## 28:15 — Wrap-up and how to reach Spara

**[28:15]** so impressed by the intentionality of every aspect of the workflow that you presented today. And I think this is a powerful solution for anyone of LeanScale's customers, anybody who's watching this now. I think the smart bar that you have in the front, bringing information to potential customers as early as possible, genuinely, authentically helping them solve their problems, gathering that unique and proprietary intent data and then nudging them and nurturing them along the way. You do it in a way that I think is better than any other way I've seen and I'm just really impressed. And I appreciate you sharing everything today.

**[28:57]** Thank you so much, Anthony. Austin to be on. I love this podcast and it's been really, really fun to sit down and chat with you and show you Spara and a lot more fun stuff to come. Well, last thing before we wrap up, best way to get in touch with Spara, I'm guessing by interacting with Spara on your website. And any best way to get in touch with you as well. Yeah, pop on our website, Spara.co. Spara is right there, ready to talk to you. You can do all the same things that I just did here. And my personal email, David@Spara.co. Feel free to shoot me an app. Awesome. Well, thanks so much for being here, David, and

**[29:36]** I can't wait to see what you guys build next. Thanks, Anthony. Good to chat with you. Take care.