How This Founder Built a LinkedIn Outbound Engine After 2 Exits

0:00 Today we have Zayd Ali, founder, CEO of Valley. Zayd, thank you so much for being here. So excited, especially with your background, founder and exited two LinkedIn outbound agencies which serves as unbelievable inspiration for what you've built at Valley. Shows the intentionality of the platform too. I'm really excited to get in there because when you go through the platform, you can tell whoever built this has felt these problems at the deepest level and it just shows level of empathy you have for people trying to do the hard work of outbound and getting in front of prospects.

0:39 So I know you've had tremendous success at Valley already. You guys are growing so fast. We're seeing you everywhere. You've raised a significant round of funding and you have some of the most premier advisors. CRO of Brex, SVP of Sales from Ripling, SVP of go-to-market from Datadog. I mean an absolute powerhouse of people who believe in what you're building and I'm really excited to get this in front of our team at LeanScale and in front of our customers because everyone we're working with in B2B Tech, they're living on LinkedIn, they're prospecting on LinkedIn.

1:11 It's where your prospects and customers are living. So any way to optimize that is absolutely huge and impactful. Zaid, I would love whenever we do these, just giving a little bit more detail of that inspiration, background and what gave you, I call it the courage to start Valley and the big problem that you're solving today. Yeah, man. 100%. First off, still could be here. A little bit of background. So my journey started, I was 17, started this outbound agency with a buddy of mine, really serendipitously. I think we initially connected on Snapchat or something.

1:52 So anyways, we started this business connecting financial advisors with potential clients. That ended up doing really well because it was right before COVID and so financial advisors couldn't go to the golf course, they couldn't go to conferences, whatever, so they were looking for different ways to book appointments. So that company exited in 2021 and then essentially replicated the same playbook, LinkedIn Outbound Agency, but for emerging funds that were looking for LPs. And this was in 2022 when everybody and their mom had a fun, right? So everybody was

2:25 looking to raise. And anyways, exited that company in 2023. And sort of the genesis of Valley was saying a lot of what we did when we took the sort of old guard of LinkedIn automation tools, we layered on top services, right? And the services were research-based, personalizing the messaging, you name it. A lot of that could now be roped in into a single piece of software in a post-AI era, right? If you think about what we did as humans, it was again, researching, personalizing, scoring leads, prioritizing leads, and all of that could be done by an AI-first, AI-native outbound tool. And so that was really what precipitated the founding of Valley.

3:06 And you could think of Valley as the AISDR for LinkedIn or a clone of you that's prospecting on LinkedIn 24/7. And when I think about the tool, it really does five things. Number one, it finds high-intent leads for you. Number two is it's going to research those leads across 60, 70 different data points across the individual, the company, the industry. Three, it's going to score them, so prioritize your highest ICP fits and your lowest fits. Four, craft messaging in your voice that's hyper personal, hyper relevant. And five, send that out on LinkedIn autonomously on your

3:44 behalf at scale so you can do anything else with your time. So yeah, man, that's the company and stoked to show everybody here. Well, you've had such a great story. I'm super excited about that. And one of those jobs that I think is actually one of the most impactful and I think sometimes doesn't get enough attention is that ICP scoring. So looking for the right personas, looking for the right from a graphic attributes of an account you're going after. You don't have unlimited TAM. Like people think like, Oh yeah, our market is massive. No, you have to really get scientific in order for that message to be that messaging to be very relevant.

4:24 And I just think people don't have enough know how or the technology to do it at scale. So I'm really excited again, showing that, Hey, you've actually done this job before building that into the platform itself. I think it's huge 100%. And I think it's also a number one is the function of the tooling, right? Can tooling do a lot of that filtration for you? But I also think that the sales leaders need to have a reframe, right? Because like you mentioned, software companies, massive TAMs, but you can't just go blasting them anymore, right? These results

4:58 have actually freed across the board when it comes to open rates and reply rates. And I think that old guard about bound, which was sort of V one about bound where you take a filter based list, you enrich those contacts, throw it into an email or LinkedIn sequencer and see book meetings come at the bottom of that funnel. Those days are gone, right? And so we can talk about what value is today, the AI first links in automation tool. But really where we want to go in the future is how do we be this bundled all in one stack of what's required to win in V2 about bound, right? Intense signals,

5:30 warm out bounds, moving into enrichment research qualification. And instead of sending 30,000 messages at the bottom of the funnel, send 30 and book 10 meetings because they're hyper qualified, hyper relevant. And that's really where the product is going. You're to start to see the, the initial sort of seeds of that inside the tool today. I love it. I love it. Well, let's hop in. I was up for you to walk us through Valley and, and show us everything I can do. So welcome to Valley. First thing we're going to look at is Valley studio. So I alluded to Valley being this

6:03 clone of you, right? That's prospecting on LinkedIn 24 seven. Now, in order to do that, right, we need to learn who you are, what you sell, how you write, because we're not sending these template messages. High first name. I saw you working company name, everything that Valley sends us hyper relevant. So number one is products drop in your website URL or your product URL. And Valley is going to spit out something that looks like this. It's going to have a description of your business. It's going to have your ICP definition, your core value propositions, pain points, and per points. You can edit any of these if you want to. You can add your own,

6:40 but value will do the majority of the heavy lifting for you. Number two, writing style, right? So with a lot of AI tools, you generally see that they will give you four vectors for how the thing is going to sound. It'll be casual, direct, formal, or funny. And all of them sound like AI slop. And so with Valley, we really give you this hyper malleability through the form of do's and don'ts. Think of this as taking out a sticky note, jotting down notes on how you speak or how you write, and handing that to your newly hired VDR. It's exactly what you're doing

7:19 here. So I've told Valley, focus on X, Y, and Z. Have a casual bump in the follow up. Use these CTAs. Use LMK, stoked, grateful, some of the common words and phrases that I use. I take a very casual approach. Never use jargon and buzzwords. We also have templates up here, which comes from what we've seen work really well, selling in to product leaders, HR leaders, executives, directors across the hundreds of customers that we work with now. And then obviously everybody has access to using the Valley template, what we use personally for our own sales accounts to book 250 meetings a month. From there, you can also put in a sequence.

8:02 If you've seen a sequence that is sort of a driven success, whether it be on email or another LinkedIn tool, paste that in here and Valley will use that to drive inspiration. So you've got a lot of different gears and levers that you can play with here to make sure that the thing sounds like you and understands how to sell your product. Now, from there, you got to think about how you want to bring prospects in the door. One of our favorite features is going to be the website intent function. And so Valley is actually going to be able to tell you exactly who is on

8:31 your website, person level website visitor identification. It's going to be able to tell you what pages they view and it's going to be able to tell you their intent level. So the number of times they view the website. There are a number of these tools, and I alluded to this earlier, again, these point solutions, but the issue is bundling under one roof. And so for a lot of these website intent tools, you kind of heard like, what's the, what now? I know that I have somebody who viewed the website, but where do I go from there? Valley allows you to one, uncover them

9:03 and then to research personalized messaging and send it out at scale. So you can action that full funnel and we'll show you how to do that in just a moment. Yeah, I would say just to, just to highlight that, you know, founder, CEO of, of RB2B. That's probably the most famous one with this concept out there. He even said, Hey, our customers hit a wall because yes, we gave them this incredible intelligence, this incredible signal, but they just didn't know what to do with it after that. And I like how you have intent level just because somebody goes to your website doesn't necessarily

9:39 mean they're an inbound lead. So there's of that population of people coming to your website, who are people just like, I don't know, friends and family checking out a website or some random bot center on your website versus somebody who's engaging with the content that shows the level of intent. So bringing that in here and then having it teed up to be able to do something with it. That's what gets people the opportunity to actually drive an impact with this information. Completely agree. I think you bring up a really interesting point. People inherently think that

10:13 because somebody viewed the website, uh, that they are this warm lead, right? They're immediately going to be someone who's going to respond to, to a highly personalized or even a templated message. But you also have to really think about the, it's the repeat visitors because a single visitor, they may have gone to your website and qualify themselves out immediately. They may be the worst type of lead, right? So you have to actually check. Yeah, exactly. That's why they're not coming back. So just because you know who they are, they could be bottom of the barrel,

10:41 terrible prospects for you. Or if they're coming back frequently and just haven't taken that next action, that's going to actually signal somebody's ready to go. And that's why we're going to have, yeah, frequency on the intent level, and then also focusing on high intent pages like pricing, customer page, case study pages, uh, things of that nature. Very cool. Cool. All right. So now jumping into the fun bit campaign creation. So we've got two ways to do this. We offer traditional templated messaging. If you want to run that, I would say 2% of our customers use this. Most of the customers are using Valley AI, which is where the magic happens.

11:18 So here, this probably looks relatively familiar. You can decide if you want to send a connection request or an in-mail message, uh, for listeners who are really familiar with links to automation. This is a nice little tip trick for you. Valley can send about 500 connection requests per month, which is normal, but then 800 emails per month. And most people are like, how the hell do you do that? What Valley is focusing on when you click on in-mail, it's going to pull something called the open profiles in a list and LinkedIn doesn't charge you to send open profiles and in-mail.

11:52 If you go to sales navigator and you click on 10 prospects, you're going to see a couple that say open to in-mail. And so when you upload a list into Valley, we're pulling the open profiles for in-mails and then routing the closed profiles to connection requests and follow-ups. So you can maximize your LinkedIn reach as efficiently as possible. As far as I'm aware, we are the only LinkedIn tool that does that automatically for you. But from here, put in your campaign name, upload prospects. Again, you can do website visitors. We directly integrate with sales

12:23 navigator so you can bring a sales nav URL from that platform here. You can upload a CSV if you're building lead lists inside of clay or Apollo. And then my personal favorite is going to be LinkedIn posts. And so Valley has the ability to pull the likers and commenters, so everyone who's engaged with a LinkedIn post. The idea here is if LinkedIn is pushing content to people about a specific topic or about a specific company, chances are LinkedIn has identified a signal that says, hey, this person is looking to learn more about this topic. Now, that person is building awareness.

13:02 They're probably in a buying cycle for that type of tool. They might be entering a buying cycle for that type of tool. And you should be getting those prospects. Those are amazing, bottom-of-funnel, warm leads. So for us, we go and scrape our competitors' LinkedIn posts because chances are they're building a sort of a knowledge graph on LinkedIn automation, AI sales tools, AISDRs, and we want to make sure that we're in their inbox because that's, again, a great bottom-of-funnel and 10-signal. So you can paste in as many posts as you'd like. Valley is going to fetch the

13:35 reactors and the commenters and then trigger that research, scoring, message generation, message sending workflow, which we'll look at in just a moment. But this campaign here for us has a 24% reply rate. So really powerful stuff there. But for the purpose of this demo, I'm just going to upload a CSV so we can move on to the next step of the workflow. Once you've added in prospects, you can select a product. So what do you want Valley to sell? Select a writing style. How do you want Valley to speak? Outreach language, your autopilot settings. Key point here, some people want Valley to go run, right? You want it to be this full, autonomous AISDR.

14:15 Put autopilot on. Valley will do the research, message gen, and message sending automatically. Other people prefer human-in-the-loop approach. So keep autopilot off. And Valley is essentially going to be your AISDR intern. It's going to do the research. It'll do the message gen, but it's going to wait for you to press send. And we'll go through an approval flow in just a moment as well. No, and I think the distinction there, and let me know your use case advice on or off. A company like Lean Scale, our ICP and personas are pretty limited. So we're looking at series ABC companies, usually CROs, and usually CROs where it's not their first

14:56 time being a CRO. So that's our ideal persona. So that's not a ton. You only get a couple shots at that persona to make it right. So for us, human-in-the-loop might make sense because we're sending a really, really small amount of campaigns to a really small amount of people. If we were to open that up a little bit and say like, "Hey, we want to do a campaign to directors of RevOps. It doesn't matter when, where, what type of company." If you open that up a little bit, autopilot's probably fine. But I don't know. I don't know if you have any tips, tricks, advice on let Valley do its thing or when human-in-the-loop makes sense.

15:35 Yeah, I think it comes down to the structure of the sales team and the sales organization that you're operating in and how transactional the sale is. So at Valley, we're priced around 500 bucks a month. Now we can target people from entry-level SDRs who want to pay this out of pocket all the way up to your SVP of sales who's going to buy this for the whole org. So we have 30 seats and we run everything in autopilot. We want to get in front of our target market. Again, we want to make sure they're personalized messaging, but we need to operate that scale, given the fact that our ACB is 6K. Now, when it comes to some of our customers,

16:12 think like a UI path, for example, they're going to do an account-based marketing strategy. So each of their reps, they're going to have 20, 50, 60, 70 accounts. At that scale, it makes a lot more sense to use Valley as more of a copilot. Valley's going to do all this research for you. Who's time to do it? And it's going to do your first draft. Who wants to write the first draft? And then from there, the rep will spend an hour per day looking at the sequences Valley has teed up, making manual edits, looking at the justifications Valley has for why it's done certain things. And we'll work

16:45 with the tool to then get, albeit a better message out the door, but because they have to, right? They don't have this unlimited scale and it's worth the additional investment of time to get something slightly better out the door for them. So totally agree with you. It really just depends on the structure of the sales org. Yeah, it makes sense, but great that it's flexible and you can do either way. A hundred percent. Yep. So from there, you can select your time of day, your days of the week. One trick that we've seen for email campaigns, send messages on Sunday. They perform

17:19 20, 25% better than during the week, which is a really interesting stat that we've seen across all emails that we've sent. And we send about a million messages a month through the product across all the customers. So it's a really interesting dataset to see emails are consistently opened and replied to on Sundays more frequently. Are there any personas where that's extra relevant to? Is it like more executive or junior, any, anything in particular or just across the board? Yeah, I think it has to do with sort of the LinkedIn user base. People will generally

17:51 like to start to get back into a productive mode Sunday evening and they'll scroll through LinkedIn because they still get to sort of scroll on a social media feed, but it feels professional. That's why I think people are on LinkedIn frequently on Sundays. And so we've seen this across the gamut. It doesn't matter who you're targeting from somebody in construction tech to somebody in marketing tech from a intern to a senior level exec. There just seems to be a boost in activity on Sundays. Well, I'm stealing that tip. So thanks for sharing. Yeah, man. Of course. Of course. Cool. All right. So from here, what you're going to do

18:25 is go to the research library. It's the last part of campaign creation. It's my favorite part of the product. Essentially what Valley's asking you here is if you had a limited time in your day, what research would you do manually prior to generating or drafting a message to your prospects? So let's say you just uploaded a thousand leads into Valley. You're then going to say, Valley, I want you to go and scrape the entire digital presence of the prospect. I want you to scrape the entire digital presence of the company. I want you to look at hiring trends, financial performance, the leadership team changes, fundraising history on Crunchbase,

19:02 customer reviews on G2, industry headwinds and tailwinds, competitive analysis. My favorites are always recent news, press releases and blogs and newsletters. This is where Valley is actually going to pull quotes from a company article, a press release newsletter blog, a podcast, YouTube video, and it's going to mention that in the message and tie it back to why it's reaching out, it creates this beautiful message for the prospect, hyper-relevant, hyper-targeted.

19:32 But from there, you're just going to click create and then Valley's going to go behind the scenes and start to triangulate. The prospect data that it found, the product info that you gave it, and the writing style information that it has. It's then going to surface those messages here in your approvals folder. So you can think of this as your proverbial drafts folder. Most reps are in here every morning. They'll see all of their custom messages here. They'll also see the ICP fit score that Valley has designated. See each of these prospects. Now all of mine are low because

20:06 I've already approved all of my high fits for the day. But if you click on a tag, you'll also see why Valley has defined someone as low, medium, or high. And then if you want to get a message out to a specific person, you can obviously look them up. Valley will pull it up and you can take a peek at what we have in this window as well. Number one, you're seeing a message here. Hey Jason, notice your recent Forbes article on quote breaking through artificial walls really resonated with me and how Valley helps teams like archetype break through the noise and connect with ideal

20:34 prospects. We're getting over 15% reply rates for similar teams, turning cold outreach to actual conversations, and automating a lot of manual processes you mentioned an entrepreneur. We'd love to chat if you're open to exploring. So we're seeing a couple things here, right? Number one is my writing style. Lowercase letters dashed instead of commas, weird punctuation. It's exactly what I would do if I was sending this manually. Two, the relevance. It's pulling not just LinkedIn data, but it's pulling a Forbes article that it saw he was quoted on. Plus an entrepreneur article

21:06 and a couple other pieces of information. It's pulling quotes. It's tying it back into something relevant. Fantastic message. You can also click on this justification toggle to see exactly why values generated a message in the way that it has. So understanding its brain, you could regenerate, edit the message, give value feedback. You're also going to see a prospect score here, slightly more deeper as a deep dive into ICP fit score, perceived problem intensity, relevance likely to respond in an overall score. So you can see again prioritize your outreach to the top 10%

21:42 versus shooting fish in a barrel. And then lastly, the prospect summary. This is a gold mine for sales reps. A consolidated one pager of all of the research values conducted on this guy. So we can see current role overview, key insights, fundraising history of the business, competitive analysis, recent activity, published articles and contributions. Yeah, a lot of good stuff here. That's incredible. Awesome. So once you've gone through and approved, let's say 20 sequences, 50 sequences for the day, you'll see all of your positive replies or really all your replies

22:19 come into the inbox tab here. Valleys automatically going to triage those into interested, might be interested, not interested for you. So you don't have to dig through your inbox, focus on the people who are actually engaging, people who are actually interested. And then you can also track overall results here in the campaigns tab. And so we can see some of the campaigns that I've run sort of end to end. This one here, this is the post-engager campaign I was referring to earlier. 24% reply rate. We have about a 50% positive reply rate on total replies. But traditional LinkedIn cold

22:56 in-mails. 2% is the industry average. Valleys operating at 12x here, about 8x here. And then you've got a messaging campaign, which pertains to connection requests and follow-ups. I've got about a 65% acceptance rate and a 52% reply rate. So we're operating at about 5x industry averages across the board. And I always like to tie a bow and say that that's what you get when you combine the best outbound channel. We know email is having a difficult moment right now. So LinkedIn is going to be where a lot of prospecting should be occurring with personal and relevant messaging

23:32 that feels unique, that feels one-to-one, that feels like you've invested time into the prospect with the right people and scale. And Valleys are the only tool that's going to combine all four under a single roof. The last thing I'll mention is the admin functionalities. And so a lot of people will ask, okay, hey, I run an agency or I run a large sales organization. How do I manage this from an admin level? Toggle an admin view. And the first thing you're going to see is the ability to log in to all of the seats connected into your workspace. So any of your reps, any of

24:08 your clients, you can immediately log in. The messages tab now becomes a unibucks for all of the connected accounts. So you can run replies, approvals across the entire workspace. One person can manage the work of 30 SDRs. You can select a user here if you wanted to specifically see one person's inbox. Valleys loading thousands of conversations right now. So it may take a second. Campaigns, same thing. You can run campaigns across the entire workspace. We make it very, very simple to understand what's going on across your full agency or that large sales organization.

24:46 So yeah, that's Valley. And I will pause there. Yeah, Zay, thank you so much. This is so, so powerful. And like I said at the beginning, it's just you can tell, oh, you actually did this job before you had to perform on LinkedIn. And so a lot of the feature sets that you pull in here. And I think the reason why LinkedIn is an interesting channel too is because it does have those guardrails and limits. You can't just go out and send a hundred million emails and a million requests. Like your whole account is going to get shut down. So you have to be really,

25:23 really intentional and where knowing your ICP, knowing that you're targeting the lowest hanging fruit or, or whatever your product or service is, and then starting to reach out to those people. That's why there's a, there's a cost to not getting that work dialed in. Like you're really, you only have a few bullets to use and you're wasting them. If you're not aiming all of your efforts towards people who have a high propensity to buy and are actually in your ICP and then giving the messaging that actually makes sense to them showing that, you know, show me that you know

25:59 me, show me that you've done some level of effort and research. So that's where, you know, other outreach tools, outbound tools, I think kind of missed the mark because yeah, you can load up a big list, but you have to be really careful about, you only have a few shots at reaching out to these people. He could just totally burn it. So I think some people, if they're not hyper in the weeds with this type of stuff, like you and I are, they may think, oh, this is really cool, but it's similar to like an outreach, a sales loft, Apollo. Where, where would you say Valley is different? And then,

26:43 I mean, I could see a world where you would still have both solutions. For sure. So I think that there are a couple of ways to sort of answer the question. And I like to go from, from the bottom up, right? Let's look at the bottom of the funnel. If we take a look at these response rates, right, there's clearly going to be a lot of differentiation between what Valley's being able to offer versus what an outreach or sales loft can. Now, under the hood, how is Valley able to power this and why can't outreach or Apollo or sales loft, whoever you want to insert there in terms of your V1 of outbound tech.

27:12 Two main pieces are going to be signal, intent, research layered on top, leading to a message that does two things, right? When you think about the prospect receiving the message, you want them to feel, number one, it's very clear why you reached out to me versus somebody next door. That's going to be relevance. Um, and two is the, you want them to feel like they've been invested into, right? It cannot feel one to many sending a message. That's high first name. I saw you work at company name, come by my thing. It is so abundantly clear today that that person sent it to a hundred

27:45 thousand people that month. But when you get a message that has a quote from a Spotify podcast that you just did or a webinar that you did last week, it's very clear that it is a one-to-one message. And so to get that prospect in that sort of frame of mind where they feel relevant and they feel invested into, you need signal, you need intent, and you need research. And that's really where we spend 90% of our development time at Valley is making sure that we can bolster those three key tenants of the product. Um, so that's ultimately the biggest differentiation.

28:16 Second is going to be we're fully LinkedIn focused. We've got a lot of automation there, uh, outreach Apollo. You really have a lot of manual LinkedIn steps. Um, but there's definitely room in a, in a sales organization for both, right? We only do LinkedIn. We're only going to do LinkedIn. We want to be the best in the world at that channel. Um, outreach Apollo sales loft instantly. They're going to be fantastic for email, right? Uh, you can absolutely run email campaigns there. And the last thing I'll mention, you talked about how you really only have limited shots on

28:46 goal when it comes to, to LinkedIn. And a lot of people see that as a knock to the channel, but I think when relating it to the future of sales, I think it's a phenomenal thing because when everybody has a thousand messages that they can send per month, what are the gears and levers available to sellers to improve results? Well, you can only really do two things, improve your acceptance rate or improve your reply rate because he can't just send more messages. And what's the way to do that? Well, improve the relevance of your prospects or improve the relevance of your messaging or do both. And so when you start to see that compound over time,

29:22 you now have a much better world for both buyers and sellers where they're receiving the right message at the right time from the right person versus email where you have this infinite scalability of 0.1% reply rates. Uh, cause there is $0 marginal cost to sending that next message where LinkedIn isn't the case. Uh, so yeah, anyways, hopefully that helps answer the question. That absolutely does. And I have the same view. Sometimes those constraints are absolute blessings because it forces you to do something better. Um, so I just, that's why I think LinkedIn

29:52 is, it's the best channel for us by far, like nothing even comes close. So we're absolutely living on LinkedIn and I don't see that changing anytime soon. Um, so I think what you're investing in and just dominating that channel, um, really compelling mission to be on. So I just, I just want to say thank you. Thanks for walking us through. Um, yeah, your experience is incredible. It's showing up in your product and it's showing up in, in how you're approaching the problem and what your vision is for Valley. So I think last thing is just if people are interested, I'm sure

30:28 they can go to your website and, and, and get engaged that way. But, um, anything else you want to leave listeners with or, um, best way to get connected with you and your team? Yeah. 100%. Um, obviously the website posting content on LinkedIn consistently, feel free to email me directly. Zade@joinbally.co, uh, text call. That's better. 202-538-9649. I give every prospect, every customer, my personal cell, uh, call anytime day or night, 24/7. That is brave. I love it. All right. I'm probably going to put in the description of the video too. So that way you get a lots of messages coming in. Say thanks again. Appreciate all you're doing.

31:06 And as you continue to grow, the product would love to have you back and we can't wait to see what you do next. Thanks so much, man. This was awesome. Really appreciate it.