Startup Mantra: Know thy customer
Kanlet.ai is a pipeline generation tool that augments your CRM. Kanlet.ai helps B2B sales teams build high-converting and qualified pipelines with an unfair advantage and operationalise them with true automation
Getting customers has never been easy for companies. However, as we’ve gone digital, it may seem that, like everything else, this too would have improved. Not quite, though. Finding the ideal digital fish for your product or service is not simple as it may see, despite the abundance of them available. So, there are tech solutions that exist to assist businesses to find the right customers.
How it started
“Every person has a digital imprint. And while most sales intelligence tools use this third-party data, it is not enough. For example, how will an IT product company know if the prospective customers are truly the ones who buy their product or service? The chances are less than 5%. Clearly leveraging only third-party information to generate leads is not enough.” This understanding became the first step for Satish Patil, chief executive officer (CEO) and founder of Kanlet.ai, to build what he calls a ‘modern prospecting hub.’
What other sales intelligence tools lack is information that works. They collect and utilise information that resides outside of an organisation—often the tools you purchase or subscribe to. This results in low-converting and often cold leads.
So, Satish turned the problem around. “What about data that’s available within your company?” With the glee of a pioneer who has discovered a new treasure Satish who has been a serial entrepreneur, and a data scientist exults, “It is now possible to make sense of data that resides in different places within an organisation.”
Kanlet.ai is a pipeline generation tool that augments your CRM. Kanlet.ai helps B2B sales teams build high-converting and qualified pipelines with an unfair advantage and operationalise them with true automation.
How it works
Relationship data: We delve deeper into the relationship data. A lot of opportunity contacts, missed leads, and warm introductions are hidden in your email in-boxes, calendars, and LinkedIn but not captured in CRM. You also have a blind spot on the shared network of your colleagues and close allies for new opportunities and referrals. Kanlet.ai helps companies find revenue opportunities hidden deep within their collective relationship network and brings them to the surface.
“We do so by organising, enriching, and contextualising relationship data across email communication, calendars, CRM, LinkedIn, and publicly available data. With Kanlet.ai, all of your organisation’s relationships are simplified, organised, contextualised, and ready for action,” says Satish.
But manually tracking and updating your buyers’ job changes is time-consuming, expensive, and won’t scale. Hence, companies miss 85% of these job change-triggered opportunities to close deals.
Intent data: Not just leads but Kanlet.ai manages to get into their minds too! “Today, the modern buyer journey happens across many tools and channels. And the prospecting data, context, buyer intent and triggers are hidden, siloed, disconnected, and live in individual tools. Navigating through these multitude of tools and channels, today’s GTM teams require unified data to find the best prospects, pinpoint sales triggers, discern buyer intent and engage them timely with personalisation. Kanlet.ai solves this problem by forging a connected framework to capture, merge, and enrich buyers’ data from every channel you care about.
Personalisation: Apart from doing all this, Kanlet.ai writes out a complete, well-written first draft for your prospect that aligns with the company’s value proposition, making GenAI work at scale. This way you can tailor your message based on prospects LinkedIn activity, job change, relationship triggers and more. Previously, leveraging this data from internal sources at a scale was a technical challenge. However, says Satish, “With GenAI, it is now possible to harness this data and connect the dots. With GenAI, the GTM teams can get insights and intelligence about the customers at their fingertip at the right time to generate warm and high-converting leads.”
“The marriage of relationships, intent, and personalisation within data, coupled with a remarkable reduction in campaign preparation time, places us several strides ahead of static and low-dimension data platforms like ZoomInfo” - Satish says. “But simply getting a list is not as helpful in a hyper-personalised world. Companies need to know more triggers as well. So, we also scour data for trigger events to get further insights about customers, such as recent funding, leadership hiring, investments, expansion, product launches, etc.”
This combination of internal data and external data helps build a 360-degree view of customers. Kanlet.ai helps organisations identify, engage, and focus their time and money on accounts that are most likely to buy.
Building the platform
“It took about a year and around $250K to build our product. Since this is a data-driven product, we needed to test it with people who hold large amounts of data, which are big companies. That was quite a challenge since why such companies would let us access their data.” It would have become a chicken-and-egg conundrum where you have a solution but cannot check it as you need access to the company’s internal data. However, Satish had two things that helped him. “One was that I had some relationships that I leveraged to do our beta testing. The other was that given the way technology was moving, large corporates were more willing than before to try out working with small start-ups,” he says.
Satish beta-tested his platform with five companies and got promising results. In fact, he says, two of these companies became our customers. “We raised a $400K pre-seed with Suvan Ventures as the lead investor in January 2024. This fund will primarily be used for product engineering, Sales and Marketing, and hiring new employees,” says Satish.
To the market
In a year since he started, his company has 10 customers, some of them are large enterprises. “We have revenues of around $100,000 so far. What is helping our business development efforts is using our product to generate our leads. And I proudly say that 20% of our customers came from using our own product. Apart from using our own platform, we GTM efforts involve strategic outbound, channel partnerships and integrations with leading CRMs like Salesforce or Hubspot. These integrations help us expand our distribution channels.
The Future
Kanlet.ai aims to expand in the North American market, hire a team in the US, build a customer community. “I would like to make Kanlet.ai a self-serve product to scale business development and make it accessible to a larger audience. This product-led growth will be key in the AI-first world.”
Quite a tall order but given the achievement of this less-than-a-year old start-up, impossible is nothing.