With RightBound, AI Drives Sales Development
Announcing our investment in RightBound
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Sales development has come of age, from being an artisanal craft a decade or so ago to a rigorous discipline supported by workflow tools and analytics more recently. But the advances in this evolution have only made it harder for the sales development professionals (SDRs or BDRs) as they are overwhelmed with tools for research, outreach, workflow, and performance analytics. It is like the driver of a car having so many gauges and control panels that they cannot see the road ahead and enjoy the drive. Indeed, several surveys show that most SDRs spend the vast majority of their time doing grunt research, heuristics-based outreach, and manual data entry, and very little time actually engaging with prospects and understanding their pain points. This results not only in low productivity, but also in decreased morale. Sure there are tools that aim to ease some of this pain, but nothing that fundamentally changes the way they work.
Until now! We’re excited to announce our investment in RightBound, a company that is building an autonomous platform for B2B sales. RightBound finds new leads for its customers and transforms the inefficient and manual routines (including research, prospecting and outreach) into a data-driven, autonomous process. RightBound searches across hundreds of data sources, uses semi-supervised machine learning to find and target new prospects, customizes content and cadences on an individual basis, and continually optimizes the engine based on performance data. In other words, while other tools in this space are like navigation systems to help aid the driver, RightBound is like an autonomous vehicle. RightBound frees up SDRs’ bandwidth to focus on what they do best, which is to engage with their customers and understand their pain points.
Although sales development is a data-rich environment, with extremely granular data available for targeting, customization and performance, it is not humanly possible for SDRs to utilize this data and adapt their workflows. In fact, many SDRs that we spoke with use heuristics and tribal wisdoms like “don’t reach out to a marketing executive during lunch” or “videos work better than a white paper for HR folks.” RightBound takes control of this process. Not only can the RightBound machine find new leads and optimize and hyper-segment by thousands of attributes; being a closed-loop system, it can also learn from the performance data, react instantaneously, and improve over time with every sale and every new customer.
The pain points of sales development are apparent to many of our companies. When it comes to RightBound, we were pleasantly surprised by the breadth of industries, sales motions, and company growth rates of its customers. They range from a new high-growth, venture-backed startup to a 25+ year-old market-leading company; from a few thousand ACV sale to a six-figure ACV sale. Across the spectrum, RightBound has been able to deliver value to its customers in terms of new leads and better deal conversion rates. For instance, RightBound helped Moveworks increase scheduled demos by 40% and WiseStamp find 10k+ net new targets within months. It is, therefore, no surprise that the customer feedback we received for RightBound was among the most positive we have ever seen for a B2B company.
Beyond the rave reviews that we received from RightBound’s customers, one theme that was constantly recurring was that the team knows the space extremely well and is very customer-focused. In fact, one prospective customer said that the conversation with the RightBound team was “one of the most engaging conversations [she] had ever had with a vendor.” Such a degree of customer orientation stems from the backgrounds of the co-founders, Ran Oelgiesser (CEO) and Rotem Dafni (CTO), who each spent 20 years building and scaling B2B products across a variety of companies and are embedding customer focus in RightBound’s culture.
We couldn’t be more excited to lead RightBound’s Series A round. Our firm has a history of investing in companies that use AI to augment human ability — be it in construction, supply chain, market research or, as in RightBound’s case, in helping companies find and reach their customers faster and more effectively. We’re thrilled to see what lies ahead!
