How This Founder Built a LinkedIn Outbound Engine After 2 Successful Exits | LeanScale x Zayd Ali

Today we have Zayd Ali, founder, CEO of Valy. 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 Valy. 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. So I know you've had tremendous success at Valley already. You guys are growing so fast. We're seeing you everywhere. Um, you've raised a significant round of funding and you have some of the most premier advisors, CRO of Brex, SVP of sales from Rippling, 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. It's where your prospects and customers are living. So any way to optimize that is absolutely huge and impactful. Zayd, 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 Valy and the big problem that you're solving today.

Yeah, man, 100%. First off, stoked to be here. A little bit of background. So the, my journey started, I was 17, started this outbound agency idea with a buddy of mine, uh, really serendipitously. I think we initially connected on Snapchat or something. Um, and so anyways, we started this, started this business, uh, connecting financial advisors with, with potential clients. That ended up doing really well because it was right before COVID Um, 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. Um, 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, had a fund, right? So everybody was looking to raise. And anyways, exited that company in 2023. And sort of the, the genesis of Valley was saying a lot of what we did when we took the sort of old guard of LinkedIn automation tools 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? Um, if you think about what we did as humans, it was again researching, personalizing, scoring leads, prioritizing leads, uh, and all of that could be done by an AI-first, AI-native outbound tool. Um, and so that was really what precipitated Zayd Ali, the, the founding of Vaali. And you can think of Vaali as the AI SDR for LinkedIn or a clone of you that's prospecting on LinkedIn 24/7. Um, and when I think about the tool, it really does 5 things. Number 1, it finds high-intent leads for you. Number 2 is it's gonna research those leads across 60, 70 different data points, uh, across the individual, the company, the industry. 3, uh, it's gonna score them. So prioritize your highest ICP fits and your lowest fits. Uh, 4, craft messaging in your voice that's hyper-personal, hyper-relevant. And 5, send that out on LinkedIn autonomously on your behalf at scale so you can do anything else with your time. Um, so yeah, man, that's the company. And, uh, 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 firmographic attributes of an account you're going after. You don't have unlimited TAM. Like people think like, oh yeah, our market is, is, is massive. No, you have to really get scientific in order for that message to be, that messaging to be very relevant. 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. Um, building that into the platform itself, I think is huge.

100%. And I think it's also a, this 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, the, uh, Sales leaders need to have a reframe, right? Because like you mentioned, software companies have massive TAMs, but you can't just go blasting them anymore, right? These results have atrophied across the board when it comes to open rates and reply rates. And I think that old guard of outbound, which was sort of V1 of outbound, where you take a filter-based list, you enrich those contacts, throw it into an email or LinkedIn sequencer, and see booked meetings come out the bottom of that funnel. Those days are gone, right? And so we can talk about what value is today, the AI-first LinkedIn automation tool, um, 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 of outbound, right? Intent signals, warm outbound, moving into enrichment, research, qualification. And instead of sending 30,000 messages at the bottom of the funnel, uh, send 30 and book 10. 10 meetings because they're hyper-qualified, hyper-relevant. And that's really where the product is going. You're gonna start to see the, uh, the initial sort of seeds of that inside the tool today.

I love it. I love it. Well, let's hop in. I'd love for you to walk us through Valet and, and show us everything it can do.

So welcome to Valet. First thing we're gonna look at is Valet Studio. So I allude to Valet being this clone of you, right? That's prospecting on LinkedIn 24/7. 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 templated messages. Hi, first name. I saw you work at company name. Everything that Vaali sends is hyper-relevant. So number one is products. Drop in your website URL or your product URL, and Vaali is gonna spit out something that looks like this. It's gonna have a description of your business. It's gonna have your ICP definition, your core 4 value propositions, pain points, and proof points. You can edit any of these if you want to. You can add your own, but Valy will do the majority of the heavy lifting for you. Number 2, writing style, right? So with a lot of AI tools, you generally see that they will give you 4 vectors for how the thing is going to sound. It'll be casual, direct, formal, or funny, and all of them sound like AI A lot. And so, with Valli, we really give you this hyper-malleability through the form of dos 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 BDR. It's exactly what you're doing here. So I've told Valli, 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. I never use jargon and buzzwords. We also have templates up here, which is, this comes from what we've seen work really well selling into 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 Vaali template, what we use personally for our own sales accounts to book 250 meetings a month. Um, from there you can also put in a sequence. If you've seen, uh, a sequence that has sort of driven success, whether it be on email or another LinkedIn tool, paste that in here and Vaali will use that to derive 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, uh, and understands how to sell your product. Now, from there, you gotta think about how you wanna bring prospects in the door. One of our favorite features is going to be the website intent function. And so Vali's actually gonna be able to tell you exactly who is on your website, person-level website, uh, visitor identification. Uh, it's gonna be able to tell you what pages they viewed, and it's gonna be able to tell you, uh, their intent level, so the number of times they viewed 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? Vaali allows you to, one, uncover them, and then two, research personalized messaging and send that out at scale so you can action that full funnel. And we'll show you how to do that in just a the moment.

Yeah, I would say just to highlight that, you know, founder CEO 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 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 bots that are on your website versus somebody who's engaging with the content that shows a 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 gives 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 because somebody viewed the website, that they are this warm lead, right? They're immediately gonna be someone who's gonna respond to a highly personalized or even a templated message. But you also have to really think about the— it's the repeat visitors because single visitor, they may have gone to your website and qualified themselves out immediately. They may be the worst type of lead, right? Yeah, that's why they're actually— check. No, 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, terrible prospects for you. Or if they're coming back frequently and just haven't taken that next action, that's gonna actually signal somebody's ready to go. And that's why we're gonna have, yeah, frequency on the intent level, and then also focus focusing on high-intent pages like pricing, customer page, case study pages, 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 Bali AI, which is where the magic happens. So here, this probably looks relatively familiar. You can decide if you want to send a connection request or an in-mail message. For listeners who are really familiar with LinkedIn automation, this is a nice little tip trick for you. Valli can send about 500 connection requests per month, which is normal, but then 800 in-mails per month. Most people are like, how the hell do you do that? What Valli is focusing on When you click on InMail, it's gonna pull something called the open profiles in a list. And LinkedIn doesn't charge you to send open profiles in InMail. If you go to Sales Navigator and you click on 10 prospects, you're gonna see a couple that say open to InMail. And so when you upload a list into Valy, we're pulling the open profiles for InMails 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, uh, we are the only LinkedIn tool that does that automatically for you. Um, but from here, put in your campaign name, upload prospects. Again, you can do website visitors. We directly integrate with Sales Navigator, so you can bring a, uh, Sales Nav URL from that platform here. You can upload a CSV if you're building lead lists inside of Clay or Apollo. Uh, and then my personal favorite is going to be LinkedIn posts. And so Valy 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. 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, uh, our competitors' LinkedIn posts, uh, because chances are they're building sort of a knowledge graph on LinkedIn automation, AI sales tools, AI SDRs, and we want to make sure that we're in their inbox 'cause that's, again, great bottom-of-funnel intent signal. So, you can paste in as many posts as you'd like. Valet is going to fetch the 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 gonna 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 Valet to sell? Select a writing style. How do you want Valet to, to speak? Outreach language. Your Autopilot settings. Key point here: some people want Valet to go run, right? You want it to be this full autonomous AI SDR. Put Autopilot on, Valet will do the research, message gen, and message sending automatically. Other people prefer a human-in-the-loop approach. So keep Autopilot off. Invali is essentially gonna be your AI SDR intern. It's gonna do the research, it'll do the message gen, but it's gonna wait for you to press send. Um, and we'll go through an approval flow in just a moment as well.

No, and I, I, I think the distinction there, and let me, let me know your, um, use case advice on, on or off, you know, maybe a company like LeanScale. Our ICP and personas pretty limited. So we're looking at series ABC companies, usually CROs, and usually CROs where it's not their first 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 wanna do a campaign to directors of RevOps, you know, it doesn't matter when, where, what type of company, like 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 like tips, tricks, advice on let Valley do its thing or when human and loop makes sense.

Yeah, I think it's really, it comes down to the structure of the sales team and the sales organization. That you're operating in, so, and the how transactional the sale is. So with Valy, we're priced around $500 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 on autopilot, right? 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 at scale, right? Um, given the fact that our ACV is $6K. Now when it comes to some of our customers, right, think like a UiPath for example, they're gonna do an account-based marketing strategy. And so each of their reps, they're gonna have 20, 50, 60, 70 accounts. At that scale, it makes a lot more sense to use Valet as more of a copilot, right? Valet is gonna do all this research for you. Who's time to do it? And it's gonna do your first draft, right? Who wants to write the first draft? And then from there, the rep will spend an hour per day looking at the sequences Valet has teed up, making manual edits, looking at the justifications Valet has for why it's done certain things, and, and will work 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.

100%. Yep. So from there, uh, you can select your time of day, your days of the week. One trick that we've seen for in-mail campaigns: send messages on Sunday. They perform, uh, 20-25% better than during the week, which is a really interesting stat that we've seen. Across all inMails that we've sent. And we send about a million messages a month through the product across all our customers. So it's a really interesting dataset to see inMails 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, more 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 like to start to get back into a productive mode, uh, 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. Um, and so we've seen this across the gamut. It doesn't matter who you're targeting, from, uh, somebody in construction tech to somebody in marketing tech, from an intern to a senior-level exec. There just seems to be a boost in activity, uh, 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 gonna do 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 unlimited 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 1,000 leads into Valy. You're then gonna say, Valy, 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, 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 Valet is actually gonna pull quotes from a company article, a press release, newsletter, blog, a podcast, YouTube video, and it's gonna 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. But from there, you're just gonna click Create, and then Valet's gonna 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 gonna surface those messages here in your approvals folder. So you can think of this as your proverbial drafts folder. Um, 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 to each of these prospects. Now, all of mine are low because I've already approved all of my high fits for the day. But if you click on a tag, you'll also see why Bali 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. Bali will pull it up, and you can take a peek at what we have in this window as well. Number 1, 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 Vaali helps teams like Archetype break through the noise and connect with ideal 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 in Entrepreneur. Would 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, dashes 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 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 Valy has 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 gonna see a prospect score here, slightly more deeper, deep dive into ICP fit score, perceived problem intensity, relevance, likely to respond, and overall score. So you can see, again, prioritize your outreach to the top 10% versus shooting, it's like 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 Vale has 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, sequences for the day. You'll see all of your positive replies, really all your replies, come into the inbox tab here. Valy's 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 end-to-end. This one here, this is the post-engager campaign I was referring to earlier. 24% reply rate, and we have about a 50% positive reply rate on total replies. But traditional LinkedIn cold in-mails, 2% is the industry average. DALL-E's 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, like, that's what you get when you combine the best outbound channel. We know email is, is having a difficult moment right now, so LinkedIn is going to be where a lot of prospecting should be occurring, uh, with personal and relevant messaging. Messaging that feels unique, that feels one-to-one, that feels like you've invested time into the prospect, uh, with the right people and scale. And Valyze is really 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, uh, or I run a large sales organization, how do I manage this on from an admin level. Toggle on 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 your clients, you can immediately log in. The messages tab now becomes a unibox 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. Valy's 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. So yeah, that's Valy, and I will pop pause there.

Yeah, Zayd, 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 100 million in-mails than a million requests. Like your whole account's gonna get shut down. So you have to be really, really intentional and where knowing your ICP, knowing that you're targeting the lowest hanging fruit for, for 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 dial 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 them messaging that actually makes sense to them, showing that, you know, show me that you know 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. You 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, just Salesloft, Apollo. Where would you say Valy is different? And then, I mean, I could see a world where you would still have both solutions.

For sure. So, I think that there are a couple ways to sort of answer the question. And I like to go 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 gonna be a lot of differentiation between what Valy is being able to offer versus is what an Outreach or Salesloft can. Now, under the hood, how is Vale able to power this and why can't Outreach or Apollo or Salesloft, whoever you wanna insert there in terms of your V1 of outbound tech. Two main pieces are gonna 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 gonna be relevance. 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, "Hi, first name, I saw you work at company name, come buy my thing," it is so abundantly clear today that that person sent it to 100,000 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, 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 Bally is making sure that we can bolster those three key tenets of the product. So that's ultimately the biggest differentiation. Second is gonna be we're fully LinkedIn-focused. You've got a lot of automation there. Outreach Apollo, you really have a lot of manual LinkedIn steps. But there's definitely room in a sales organization for both, right? We only do LinkedIn, we're only gonna do LinkedIn, we wanna be the best in the world at that channel. Outreach Apollo, Salesloft, Instantly, they're gonna be fantastic for email, right? 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 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 1,000 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. Cause you 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, 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 zero dollar 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 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. So I think what you're investing in and just dominating that channel, really compelling mission to be on. So appreciate that, man. Zayd, I just want to say thank you. Thanks for walking us through.

Yeah.

Your experience is incredible. It's showing up in your product and it's showing up in how you're approaching the problem and what your vision is for Valy. So I think last thing is just if people are interested, I'm sure they can go to your website 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, zayd@joinvalley.co. Uh, text, call, if that's better, 202-538-9649. I give every prospect, every customer a personal sell. Uh, call anytime, day or night, 24/7.

That is brave. I love it. All right, I'm probably gonna put in the description of the video too, so that way you get lots of messages coming in.

Do it.

Um, Zayd, thanks again. Appreciate all you're doing, and as you continue to grow the product, we'd love to have you back, and we can't wait to see what you do next.

Thanks so much, Matt. This was awesome. Really appreciate it.