Agentic Outbound, End-to-End

Julia Nimchinski:

And welcome to the show! Ishant Sharma, founder and CEO of Cellex. Can’t wait to get into this demo. How are you doing?

ishansharma:

I’m doing really great, Julia, how are you doing? How’s the sessions been today? And also, dang, what a… what a demo, from our, past session, it was awesome. Nice job.

Julia Nimchinski:

Yeah, let’s set the stage for this one.

ishansharma:

Let’s do it, sweet. Great. So, yeah, let’s jump into it. So, I’m gonna be showing, let’s say around 3 things today. First, I’m gonna be talking through… the PDF, the panel, I’m gonna then be showing, like, a more of a live demo of what we’re showing, and then let’s go through the takeaways. So, maybe I’ll use a signpost from the last session.

If… last session with what Chris was showing is supposed to be showing an actual person on the call. We are building an agent that is meant to handle your entire team’s go-to-market, outbound, end-to-end. So this is specifically for calls and emails, and we call this, agent of ours Cellix, so why don’t I go ahead and share my screen?

Alrighty, and then I’m gonna hide this bookmark here. Alrighty. Are y’all able to see my screen?

Julia Nimchinski:

Yep.

ishansharma:

Sweet. So, yeah, so… Today we’re gonna be… we’re actually unveiling this today, it’s called Cellix, and think of it as an agentic virtual teammate that’s gonna handle your entire outbound end-to-end. So, let me first start with why you should care.

Well, every company over here, I’m sure, is a B2B company, and you need some ways to get customers, and Maybe unless you’re growing really fast, or PLG, you’re often gonna need to go to them yourself. And so, oftentimes that’s gonna help a lot if you do that through outbound.

And I’ll mention a slide that you guys may have seen posted about on LinkedIn, which is, how come all of these companies, Anthropic Clay, who are, you know, sales companies themselves, or you’re hacking together a sales SDR yourself on Claude, how come these companies themselves are hiring SDRs?

I don’t know, are we allowed to take comments or, like, sample answers from the… Audience, or is this just a one-way?

Julia Nimchinski:

At this point’s presentation… Okay. Yeah.

ishansharma:

Okay, that’s okay. So, I can maybe answer myself. So, a lot of the reason is because the issue today is not a lack of tooling. The issue today is really who is going to be using them.

And so, when you’re thinking about constructing your outbound, and trying to get results, oftentimes someone will just start and… They’ll send out their first campaign, and it’s gonna flop. So, who’s gonna be the one to iterate and test the campaigns end-to-end?

How are you gonna come up with new angles to figure out what’s the best way to actually approach the people in your market? How about creating a cohesive outreach strategy? So, you know, it’s one thing to send a message, but that’s only… probably the smallest sliver of outbound.

You want to create a nice schedule of outreach over, let’s say, a quarter, so you’re making sure you reach your goals. And there’s just a bunch of other annoying stuff that you have to deal with when you’re… when you have to do outbound, such as managing the infrastructure, learning a new tool, and more.

And I’ll even say, there’s a lot of companies that I know that have, like, 10, 20, 100 domains, and I think in the future, that kind of model is really gonna go away, because You’re fighting an uphill battle with spam providers, trying to get your emails to deliver.

You’re sending templated messages with the market is not really gonna respond to, and all of this means that you have to approach your outbound a different way. And so all of this stuff is within the context of what a go-to-market engineer or a very good SDR would do. And this is really what costs the money and actually solves the problem.

And that’s why, you know, these companies which have sales tooling are still hiring you know, these humans. And so, I don’t know if any of you all experience this sort of pain, of just having too many tools, you know, lots of ideas and no execution, low conversion rates, that’s something everyone is facing with.

and no iteration on strategy, but if you have any of these, you’re probably gonna be in the situation where you’re sending a bunch of different emails, and nothing is hitting. So, the main idea today is that agents can solve all of this, and yeah, and to give a background on Cellex.

Before I jump in, we were founded around 2023, but really in, our… the first version of our product was really just a bunch of AI automations, and, you know, an operator would handle them.

So that’s not necessarily a venture-backed business, that’s kind of more an AI-powered agency, but all of that changed in 2024 when agents were introduced, because all the stuff that a human operator, think of us as, like, a PhD SDR, would do, we could teach that all to an agent.

And that’s essentially what Cellex is today, which is what we’re Releasing and excited to present. So, let’s jump into, one end-to-end example. So… I’ll start with here. Are you able to see my screen for the Figma? Maybe, Julia, you can confirm? Okay, great. So… Let me try to zoom in a little bit. Okay, great.

So, this is how Cellix looks, and the first way that I’m gonna tell you how this is different than your normal Outreach I.O. or Apollo software is what we call Lix, the Language Interface Experience. So that’s where Cellix come from, Cell and Lix. That means that you can talk to Cellex directly in plain English.

And this is not just limited to the software itself. You can talk to it in Slack, you can talk to it in email. And honestly, our customers, they don’t even log on even once a week. I… some of our customers have never even logged on, they just talk directly from Slack.

And that’s amazing, because, you know, it’s not like a dashboard like Outreach.io, where, you know, a seller has to log on every day. The agent is doing work in the background with you, and it’ll come to you when it asks questions.

So I’m gonna demonstrate more of that, but… We’re gonna show the app interface so you can actually, see what’s going on, and we’re gonna tell Cellix to get a very high-level task, right? So, hey Celix, create a 3-month outbound plan for me, and actually launch one campaign for selling Cellix.

So, you can start off with a query like this, and this is when Cellex will make a plan. On it, let me lock in a plan before I build anything, and… it will create a plan to go target this. So, once you approve this, this is what we call is now the long horizon. Cellex is gonna go and do its own task with you, and it’ll check in when needed.

After we click approve, Sellix takes the wheel. So, on the right side, you’ll see a workspace open up, and Cellex has all the tools it needs to do what an SDR or a go-to-market engineer’s gonna do. So, even before you send one message, it’s starting to come up with a few different ideas. And so, here’s a few different examples that it came up with.

And, we’ll jump into one. Day one wingman. Okay. Target founders hiring their first growth hire and position sellix to 10x the new hire, while they focus on unscalable work like conferences, like this one. This is where your sellers should be.

That actually sounds like a pretty good angle that a founder could respond to, and… that’s how you want to do your campaigns. You can’t just say, hey, buy my stuff. You want to have a reason to approach someone. So, Cellix has populated, the idea board, and The next thing it’s gonna do is it’s gonna create a few segments.

So, in our supervisor, which is a sub-agent, it creates a bunch of different segments. And so, let’s look at one that was pre-populated for this idea. Founders hiring their first growth hire. So, Cellix, has all… like, think of this as a clay table that, you know, the agent is operating.

So, it comes with a pre-vetted list of a bunch of different, prospects, it also shows the company, and the most important for this angle is, are they hiring for their first GTM role? So… because Cellix has all of the tools it needs to enrich its prospects, it adds two other crucial questions. Number one, are they a B2B company?

So that’s a deal-breaker for us, and, you know, Celex can add that enrichment, and, you know, can filter out some prospects. And second. Let’s pull an actual description from the hiring post Which we can save later and use in the campaign. So, again, I’ll take a quick pause right here.

All this stuff is not like, you know, you have an SDR, like, logging into Clay and, like, you know, adding, like, a column and enriching stuff. The agent is using multi-step thinking to be able to do all this stuff end-to-end. So, now that we got a pretty good list locked, it’s rescored, and awesome.

You can see, like, the first person on the top, very high score, they’re hiring for a GTM role, they’re a B2B company, and we have a description of their job. Great. So now we have an idea and a segment, and all of this is just pre-planning work and outbound.

Again, this is what, like, you know, Anthropic or Clay, that’s why they’re hiring these SDRs. This is the work that perhaps some of them would be doing. We got our ID and segment, we’re gonna ship this off to a worker agent to actually execute it.

So, let me show you about sequence writing, because, again, Cellex does everything end-to-end, even the writing. And here we can see it’s getting started on a four-step sequence. One LinkedIn, one email, one LinkedIn, one email.

And it’ll actually send this, you know, you don’t have to sit around the computer and click send, but it’s writing the sequence. And a common problem with AI-generated outreach is there’s a lot of slop in it, right? So, maybe you see M dashes, or maybe it uses the word, like, revolutionize.

You know, that’s common with any sort of AI outreach tool that you use. So, Cellex actually detects this. As you can see, you know, hi first name, came across your profile and was super impressed. We help companies revolutionize their outbound. It’s kind of imprecise language, that’s not… that’s gonna get marked as spam.

So, what Cellix does is it actually will send an interrupt message in Slack, it’s connected through Slack. Before I finalize the copy, hey Ishan, do we, do we only focus on, you know, sequences, or do we also do list building as well? And now, a human, such as myself, can respond from Slack. No, we do both.

We do list building, we do sending, we do managing the infrastructure. Here’s the full product guide, I can even drop in a PDF.

And, the best, this is taken, it’s ingested the file, and… the message will get rewritten, so… now this looks like a much better message, and that’s where I think, you know, some people say, you know, stop hiring humans, automate everything.

The best insights are really gonna come from the mouth of a person, whether that’s a sales rep who learned something from the market, or a founder. So you do want Celix interrupting you and asking you questions where needed, because that’s really what’s going to make your copy a lot more pointed. Great!

Well, this copy looks way better, and it’s basically ready to launch. So, here we have an end-to-end sequence, you know, hey Kieran, notice midship is hiring a founding GTM to stand outbound end-to-end. Again, that was from the hiring description we did research on earlier. That’s usually when Outbound starts eating a week.

We run the whole motion, list to inbox to replies, plus the inboxes and deliverability. So, your new hire ships pipeline instead of writing tools. Open and connecting. That’s a pretty solid message, and you can even see it use some of this research that we pulled earlier. And so, we’re good to go, and let’s launch this thing. Boom.

So, the typical campaign on Cellix is actually extremely, focused. We actually did launch this campaign live, and so you can see that there’s 33 sends and, 3 demos, and yeah, that’s not high volume, but that’s that idea of a micro-campaign. You want to have a very specific angle. And 33 cents with 3 demos is a 9% demo rate.

Most of the industry is fighting for a 9% reply rate, right? And so, that’s the idea. Once you’re not focusing on the execution, you can send out multiple of these in parallel. So, great. We have our three demos set. The final step. So, here’s our sub-agent, the secretary.

It will actually, if you remember at the beginning, we had to create a whole plan for the quarter. Cellex will go ahead and mark this week as complete. It launched a campaign. And then it will actually use the extra ideas that we came up with to come up for week 2. through weeks two and onwards.

And so, Celix, overall end-to-end, you have this supervisor who’s coming up with ideas, you have this worker who’s executing stuff. And you have a secretary who’s even doing the planning.

And now, in this state, Celix can work with a go-to-market operator, for example, who can really, realistically entire… run your entire company’s outbound with just one person. And yeah, and so, we do have some real results from theirs. We have Tencode.

Just as a highlight, you know, this is not necessarily, like, a crazy big name, but that’s actually… I actually like that even better. These are small teams who sell to big companies, and we’re able to deliver real ROI for them. This is Tencode. They sell to Fortune 500 companies for death benefits.

And they signed one of their largest deals in company history, like a Fortune 10 company, from a deal sourced directly from Cellex. And Cellex paid for itself for 2-3 years, and again, this is not pipeline, this is, like, actual closed one.

So, this is awesome, and… All of this is possible through a mix of agent and operators that we have that… Do outbound tasks on the long horizon, end-to-end.

So if you go into… I just put this graph, you know, if you go to something like Cloud Opus, you say, hey, you type in the query that we put in Cellix, it’s probably gonna work for two steps before it asks you something. This is, what we’ve been building, it can work across multiple steps and over multiple weeks to help you end-to-end.

So, that’s it for Cellix. If you have an idea, like, we just launched this literally today, and so, if you have a campaign or your company can use a go-to-market engineer, please go ahead and email me, you know, ehan at sellscale.com, or submit a form, and we’d be happy to help on your first campaign idea on us.

Julia Nimchinski:

That’s fantastic. Congrats, Ishan, with the launch, and we have a couple of questions from the audience, if you don’t mind addressing them.

ishansharma:

I love the questions, let’s do it.

Julia Nimchinski:

So, the first one is a question around differentiation. Obviously, you showcased it, but folks are asking, how is it different from other AI SDRs, like, in the space? All name names.

ishansharma:

I am very, very glad you got that… you asked that question, because we have a whole section on our website. So, the main thing that you’re going to know is that… I’ll tell you the whole story, too, since I was here since, you know, 2022, building this company. In 2022, what you had is a bunch of these AI SDR companies.

Customers really liked the idea of an AI agent AI handling your pipeline. And so, there were a lot of companies that were able to grow really quickly, and sign on customers for year-long contracts, etc.

But really, if you thought about the tech in 2022, I don’t know if you all, you know, use GPT then, lots of hallucinations, and the whole concept of agents didn’t even exist, you know? So, these AI SDRs are really more like GPT with automations on top of them, like a Zapier, for example. And I’ll tell you exactly how it works.

You get page 1 of Apollo. there’s, like, 20 prospects on it, you scrape each prospect, and then you put your value props, and you can write the prompt yourself. It’s like, hey, here’s a prospect, here’s companies, details about my company, please generate an email, and then they have sending automation on the background.

So that’s on AISDR, you know, that’s just like a… automation with, Zapier, and it’s all hooked together. So what we’re building is really more agentic end-to-end. We also really take pride in a lot of the outcomes, so again, we are very ROI positive.

And the thing I’ll leave you with is if you ever sign on with AISDR, you really are going to be the agent. Like, you have to log into the platform, you have to define the search, you have to click run, versus you tell a high-level go to Sellix, and it will actually come to you in Slack and say, hey, by the way, do I have this right?

So it’s a much different product architecture, but, you know, the industry’s been kind of tainted with these AISDR names, so we don’t want to call ourselves But, yeah, hopefully that helps, and, you know, we have a whole section on that over here.

Julia Nimchinski:

Next, painful question is, how do you ensure deliverability?

ishansharma:

Yeah, I think that’s a great question. That’s exactly what Cellex does. So, you know, we have… I’ll approach this from a few angles. So, number one is a conceptual angle, which is, how does deliverability not work?

Delivery doesn’t work when you send out a bunch of templated messages, and I’ll literally tell you the action of when delivery doesn’t work. It’s when someone gets your email and they click spam. And either on LinkedIn, you’re gonna get marked as flagged, or on email, if you click spam, your domain is gonna get nuked. So… that’s the general idea.

So, the first way we contact back that, it’s not even with tech, it’s just reach out with people with an angle. So, in the demo you saw, I’m gonna reach out to people who are hiring. The email delivered is actually pretty useful, and so even I read my emails, I don’t mark them as spam, and that’s one way.

But second, we also have a ton of outbound infrastructure in our app itself. We have parallel domains. We don’t need, like, 100. Our customers get away with just 10 because, you know, we’re sending these micro campaigns. We also have some warming and stuff built in.

And even on something like LinkedIn, we’ll make sure to very properly manage everything. But yeah, we have never even gotten once an email from a SELIX that we sent out, which is very surprising, saying, remove me from your list, because everyone is always very researched, personalized, and that’s how we ensure maximum deliverability.

Julia Nimchinski:

Super impressive, and last question before we wrap this up, how often are you A-B testing, and on what sample size?

ishansharma:

Yeah, that’s a good question. So, I’ll pull up a live example, for that campaign we actually… I showed a demo of. The main idea is we’re A-B testing on every single, outreach, and the idea of an agent is that it can produce a bunch of different copies, so let me show you an example for this campaign itself.

I’m gonna jump into one of the steps, okay? So, this is the first LinkedIn message. If you look, different messages are gonna have different acceptance rates, and Cellix will automatically create a bunch of different approaches. And, test them. So, for example, solution-based.

We handle the outbound grind so your GTM leads can focus on what you hired them for. Unscalable stuff. 33% people sent. accepted this one versus the top one, it looks like, was here. Curious on your thoughts on letting AI outbound while your GTM lead focus on strategy. Worth discussing.

That sounds a little bit more softer and a little bit more feedback-based, so, you know, the winner is definitely this one, and perhaps now I can deactivate this one. But Cellex does all that A-B testing built in for every single campaign.

Julia Nimchinski:

Super impressive, Sean. What’s the best next step? Is there a PLG to this? Like, how can we test it?

ishansharma:

Yeah, my… I always like, if you have a dream campaign idea. Let us know which is… what… what an unscalable micro-campaign you want to run with us. Bring it to us, we’ll get it done on us, and yeah, happy to, get your email… like, here, I’ll put my email, eShawn at salescale.com, or just sign up on our site, and, we’d love to run a campaign for you.

Julia Nimchinski:

Amazing. Thank you so much.

ishansharma:

Awesome, Al, thank you all very much.