SalesTechStar Interview with Ran Oelgiesser, Co-founder and CEO of RightBound

RightBound’s co-founder, Ran Oelgiesser discusses the key trends leading to shifts in inbound and outbound sales processes while telling us more about RightBound’s startup journey:

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Hi Ran, we’d love to hear about your journey through the years…tell us more about Rightbound and what inspired the platform?

I’m originally a software developer, I’ve spent most of my career leading the business initiatives for my companies (my first company was acquired by Microsoft!) and building robust sales and marketing teams. My experience crafting sales funnels and outsmarting outbound lead generation brought me to realize the importance of: “inbounding” outbound Sales Development with autonomous prospecting and outreach.

RightBound was founded by two of us, Rotem Dafni and I. Rotem is based in Israel and is a cloud technology product expert. He was the first employee at Stratoscale, and an R&D lead at VMWare.

We were determined to enact a significant and impactful shift in outbound sales by building a real autonomous prospecting platform.

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How are you seeing sales prospecting practices and B2B sales processes change since the past year as the global pandemic shifted work and customer trends?

Maintaining a solid pipeline has become more challenging during the global pandemic. It’s been increasingly difficult to reach potential buyers, and this has become even more complex due to remote work. For example, buyer prospects working from home are less available because they no longer have their office landline in front of them. Gifts can no longer be sent because they aren’t at their office address, and the lack of physical in-person events and conferences meant losing a great source of inbound leads for sales teams.

Sales development teams had to adjust, and redirected their time and energy to attending lots of virtual events, joining new online communities, and sending virtual gifts – like Amazon gift cards – via email. Many had to adjust and start cold-calling potential customers directly to their mobile phone, shifting their call scripts and adjusting calling hours.

In what ways do you feel sales leaders and sales teams can further optimize their sales automation to scale efforts and results quickly?

Machines will never (and should never aim to) replace the human factor in sales development. However, sales leaders should reconsider how they deploy their teams’ resources. Current solutions are either automating – i.e. doing what a human is instructing them to do, or guiding – i.e. making recommendations to the sales rep.

A significant part of the prospecting process should be autonomous, driven by a machine that learns, optimizes, and takes actions beyond the capacity of a human sales rep.

This starts by replacing manual list building with an AI-based solution that learns target company profiles and personas. The solution can continuously mine data from multiple sources, gather companies and personas that best match the ideal customer profile, and enrich them with accurate contact information. With absolutely no advantage to manual research, dozens of hours can be spared per sales development representative (SDR) per week, not to mention the increased accuracy and access to more sources than you’d typically have.

What’s even more significant is the ability to optimize your sales playbook. It should not be one size fits all. The timing, channel, and content should be adjusted to maximize the chance of having the prospect engage or respond. AB testing and retroactive analysis is not enough. A data-driven AI solution that makes changes in real-time is what’s needed to truly make a difference.

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What are some salestech predictions that you have for the near-future? 

In the short term, salestech will have to become more autonomous on all levels. Sales reps are swamped with information and recommendations from AI-based solutions, and some of these are creating more noise than is actually beneficial. More decisions should be made autonomously – by smart AI algorithms – on behalf of the sales reps, to help them cope with the challenges they face.

In the longer term, we believe that all prospecting solutions will have to adjust. Increasing sales team capacity and outreach cannot be the only solution, as buyers are overwhelmed with the sales communications they currently receive, which actually creates diminishing returns for outbound sales teams. A new approach, one where sellers and buyers eventually work together, is going to dictate the prospecting tech of the future.