Sleek Customer Story: Bella AI
In the rapidly evolving world of B2B sales, the quest to improve the efficacy of outreach is never-ending. Enter Bella, a groundbreaking AI sales teammate designed to transform how businesses engage with prospects and manage their sales pipelines.
Bella offers Sales executives support in researching their target prospects and accounts, crafting customised interactions—all with the goal of maximising engagement and conversion rates.
We had the opportunity to sit down with Co-Founder Danilo Podrascanin, to get his insights on running a start up and why they’ve chosen to partner with Sleek.
Could you tell us a bit about your business?
Danilo: It’s becoming increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd in B2B sales. Buyers now expect sales reps to go beyond just order taking and become insightful trusted advisors that can help them achieve their goals, accelerate their career and provide an individualised sales experience at every step.
However, current Sales Engagement Platforms that dominate how sales reps do their outreach achieve the exact opposite, they inundate prospects with spammy, templated messages that break trust and don’t give sales reps the opportunity to individualise experiences. Even the new AI tools coming onto the market seem to be focussed on gimmicky “personalisations” rather than communicating unique perspectives based on research.
That’s why we developed Bella. With Bella, you provide a list of companies or prospects you want to target, Bella will then conduct in-depth research on them, uncovering strategic selling insights and crafting individualised value propositions that can be communicated via LinkedIn, email and via cold call guidance/scripts, without the hours of manual research or one-size-fits-all messaging. Bella elevates every engagement with insight, at scale.
What was your inspiration to take the leap and start Bella?
Danilo: With the release of ChatGPT, Max (my co-founder) and I started a custom generative AI application development business, developing “ChatGPT” apps for clients. When our referral partners’ leads began drying up we developed an internal application to take back control of our pipeline. That internal application was the first version of Bella.
With Bella 1.0, we were initially doing some basic research on prospects through their LinkedIn profile and using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model to generate “ChatGPT” application ideas relevant to their role and business that we would send via email to business owners and collect their thoughts. It was an instant success, we had more leads than we knew what to do with. At this point we realised that if it could work for us, it could work for others and we made a full pivot to creating a company centred around the application of generative AI to outbound sales.
What are your superpowers as entrepreneurs?
Danilo: Max has this amazing ability to very quickly navigate, learn and understand complex technical concepts in a short period of time – I’ve seen him go from zero knowledge on something, to then building a world-class technological capability that puts us ahead of our competition in just two weeks. As for myself, I’m not sure about superpowers, but what I can say for certain is that I work hard, I make sacrifices (not just the easy ones) and love working with and helping people.
What advice would you give to other business owners about managing their company registration, accounting, bookkeeping, compliance etc?
Danilo: Don’t let it be a bottleneck to moving forward, as founders you can’t do everything yourself and you probably don’t know the optimum path forward. Don’t try do everything yourself, ask for help and be patient. Consult with experts, like Sleek.
Why did you choose Sleek as a service partner?
Danilo: I initially reached out to a couple of other providers, Sleek was hands down the most impressive off the bat. Their responses were timely, they knew their stuff, our jobs to be done as founders and they instantly began adding value from the first interaction — which is a core value of ours and something that we live by.
What’s been the highlight of working with Sleek?
Danilo: It’s been an absolutely hassle free experience the whole way through. Sleek has done all the legwork for us enabling us to focus on what’s most important: our customers and our product. 10/10 reliability rating. The highlight is without a doubt the people and how they treated us. Oh, and of course the round of beers we shared with the team to celebrate becoming an Antler portfolio company. For these reasons and more I couldn’t recommend Sleek enough!
