How Influ2 Uses Contact-Level Ads to Power Outbound (Full Transcript)

[00:00:00] Speaker 1: I built Influ2 for myself. If you show ads to people before you call them, before you get in touch with them, it's just easier because they know who you are. Like, we built this product with an idea, it should work for us, it should work for our customers from day one. If it doesn't, we'll just close this business, we will not sell this stuff if it doesn't work for us. It's impossible to stay anonymous while you're using social networks, or Google, or, I mean, like any big platform that we use. You still need to tell who you are. We went from zero to 20 meetings booked a month in one month. Channels change all the time, right? So there is no bulletproof tactic that works forever. You have to reinvent your channel mix every year.

[00:00:40] Speaker 2: The big topic of, you know, every day in the modern world is AI. How do you think about AI's presence in marketing and advertising? Hey, everybody, it's Sam Jacobs. Welcome to another episode of Revenue Blindspots, powered by Otter.ai. It's a monthly podcast where we explore the pivotal moments in the careers of top revenue leaders. We're actually debuting this episode a little bit more frequently than once a month, because we know you want to hear it. But our focus is a deep dive into the blind spots that have shaped the leadership strategy and growth careers of the business world. So let's get into it. I'm Sam Jacobs, I'm the CEO of Otter.ai. We're the leadership strategy and growth careers of prominent go-to-market executives, uncovering lessons that can help the next generation of revenue executives. Today on the show, we're really excited to have my friend Dmitry Lisitsky. He's the CEO and co-founder of Influ2, the first contact-level ad platform for B2B. Prior to Influ2, he co-founded Global Logic, which was acquired by Hitachi for $9.4 billion in 2021. Dmitry holds an MBA from Columbia Business School. Dmitry, welcome to Revenue Blind Spots.

[00:01:50] Speaker 1: Thank you for having me.

[00:01:52] Speaker 2: We're excited to have you. So in your bio, I talked about what Influ2 does, the first contact-level ad platform for B2B. But tell us what that means in your words. Give us a little bit of background on the company. We want to make sure that people know about Influ2 and that they use Influ2.

[00:02:07] Speaker 1: Well, I think I built Influ2 for myself because back in Global Logic times, the company turned to be very big, but frankly, we could build this company without any marketing help. And that kept me unsettled. I was thinking what, like, because I have marketing background initially, and I was thinking, what could we do to make it work when you sell to large enterprises? And basically, that's how Influ2 emerged. And the idea was like, if you show ads to people before you call them, before you get in touch with them, it's just easier because they know who you are, right? So it's kind of much easier way to connect to people when you kind of build awareness among, like, target decision makers.

[00:02:48] Speaker 2: That makes perfect sense. How old is the company? Tell us a little bit about the growth journey.

[00:02:53] Speaker 1: Yeah, we launched eight years ago in 2017. Well, it's kind of eight years. It was crazy pandemic times. And then it was like, well, actually crazy in a good way because initially it was very scary, but then actually marketers had a lot of digital budgets that now became digital because offline debt. And they got a lot of new customers and then many of them churned afterwards because again, like, people didn't have time to implement anything. They just bought whatever was available. So it was kind of slow time for us and then kind of recovered and grow very quickly right now. So it's kind of back on growth trajectory.

[00:03:29] Speaker 2: Yeah, I feel like, I mean, just from what I know of you and the team at Influ2, I feel like 2025 has been a good year. Tell us a little bit about what you're seeing in the market. Are you seeing tailwinds? Are you seeing success? What's working for you right now from a go-to-market perspective? I'm just curious on how the year is going.

[00:03:49] Speaker 1: Yeah, this year is amazing because I think what happened for us is that marketers started challenging their marketing investment, especially, I think it happened like in 2023, 2024, when clearly the availability of funding became very limited and marketing teams had a lot of pressure in terms of like, can you prove what you're spending? Like, does it work, right? Which was great news for us because like we built this product with an idea, it should work for us, it should work for our customers from day one. And frankly, it was a moment for us when I told, okay, we need to figure it out if it works or doesn't. If it doesn't, we'll just close this business. We will not sell this stuff if it doesn't work for us, which was kind of connects to our blind spot conversation. Yeah, so there's great year for us and we're growing very quickly. And I think also, I think the big theme of the market is signal-based selling. So the idea is like, yes, you can personalize at scale, you can, you know, now with AI, you can target like millions of people if you want to. But then the question is like, what do you tell to those people? Like, and then signals is probably the only thing what can make you scale your GTM program, outbound GTM, still making meaningful and, you know, not just, you know, sending automated GPT prompts or whatever it is.

[00:05:17] Speaker 2: Tell me about the user experience, the feedback or one complaint or one, you know, one comment about sort of person level marketing is that based on like ISPs and VPNs, that actually it's pretty hard to figure out like who a person is on the internet so that you can present the ad. But I bet you've built technology that helps improve the accuracy to your point about whether it works or not.

[00:05:43] Speaker 1: Yeah, definitely. Yeah, so our idea was like very simple. So it's impossible to stay anonymous while you're using social networks or Google, or I mean, like any big platforms that we use, even if you're crazy about your security, you still need to tell who you are. Some people don't, right? Some people just don't use any social networks, but like the fraction, it's very fractional. Exactly. Like we have to be there in some form, right? And then basically our idea was like, instead of trying to find some data somewhere on the internet and then, which was not very compliant as well, let's just tell platforms, please show ads to Sam if you know Sam. And then whenever you use LinkedIn, LinkedIn knows you, Sam. So. They sure do. Show ads to you, right? Awesome.

[00:06:31] Speaker 2: I mean, that's great. And I'm so excited that the company's doing well and I know it's been a journey. This show is about blind spots. And I think you wanted to talk about one of the blind spots from your time at Global Logic. So when we say revenue blind spots and things that you learn from, what is one of the biggest blind spots you faced in your revenue leadership career?

[00:06:51] Speaker 1: Just like many services companies, you get a lot of interest and you can basically build your business just by serving your customers very well and just these customers tell other customers or prospects, they become your customers and that's how you grow a business. And it does not really depend on macro environment, but in a good macro environment, I think IT services were growing like 30, 40% a year, which was like, if you compound this over like 20 years, it's a lot of growth, right? And then I think the challenge for me was like, we applied the same idea when we initially started in Flutoo. And I think like selling to friends or selling to your network was kind of good idea from product validation standpoint. So I think initially we had like, okay, we can target us to individuals, but like how would people use it, right? So the question is like, how do you use this thing that no one else used before? So it's kind of new technology, what is the best use case? So from that standpoint, it worked very well for us, but then it's not the GTM strategy, right? It's not how you scale stuff, right? Friends, unfortunately, I have a limited number of friends and friends of my friends is also a very limited number. So like, how do you make it work at scale? And unfortunately, I think we started thinking about how we scale our GTM when we almost ran out of money. So it's like, it was like product, like probably we were kind of happy with the product delivery at that moment. So I think we kind of consistently delivered what we promised and the quality of targeting was very good. But then it was like, okay, but how do you sell it? We still need to figure it out. And we, unfortunately, we ran out of Demos friends. So who should we sell to now?

[00:08:32] Speaker 2: So what did you do?

[00:08:34] Speaker 1: That was a very tough moment for us because we had to learn how to do outbound prospecting. And we basically read together with Dan, Dan as well. And we just read the book, Predictable Revenue.

[00:08:48] Speaker 2: Yeah, Predictable Revenue. Aaron Ross's favorite, famous book.

[00:08:52] Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. And we just read this book and tried to apply it because we just didn't have any other ideas and we were kind of about to run out of money. But also, like my idea was like, we must make Influtube work to help us. I mean, like if people don't pay attention to ads, then, or if our matching is not working, then I don't want to sell it, right? I don't want to lie to people. And, you know, like I need to prove it by using our product.

[00:09:19] Speaker 2: Right.

[00:09:20] Speaker 1: So we basically combined those two ideas together. So we tried to show ads to people who we tried to prospect and then in the same time, we're trying to figure out, okay, how prospecting works. And then, yeah, suddenly it worked. So I think we went from zero to 20 meetings booked a month in one month.

[00:09:37] Speaker 2: Oh, that's amazing.

[00:09:39] Speaker 1: Yeah, it was a breakthrough.

[00:09:41] Speaker 2: How big was the team at that time?

[00:09:43] Speaker 1: I think it was around 12 people.

[00:09:45] Speaker 2: Okay.

[00:09:46] Speaker 1: Not huge, but still need to get paid every month.

[00:09:50] Speaker 2: 2018, 2017, 2018?

[00:09:52] Speaker 1: Yeah, that was 2018.

[00:09:54] Speaker 2: What happened after that? So you went to 20 meetings booked. Did you have the sales team necessary to close those meetings or were you on the phone?

[00:10:00] Speaker 1: Yeah, that was me and Dan basically, yeah. Yeah. So I think at the same time we hired our first AE. So I think we hired our first SDR, I think it was around September, I think August 2018. And then we hired our first AE in December.

[00:10:17] Speaker 2: Awesome. So tell me, you know, when you think about what you learned from that experience, and particularly, I mean, right now in the market, to your point about signal-based selling, a lot of people are saying outbound is dead. You used outbound plus Influe 2 to book 20 meetings a month from a standing start of zero. So when you think about the art of outbound, you know, what needs to come together in today's world in order to get somebody's attention so that you can get a meeting and get a response?

[00:10:51] Speaker 1: I think many people confuse channels and products, right? So I think, like, these are kind of broader concepts, so let me explain. So I think channels change all the time, right? So, like, it used to be, you used to, you know, dial people 20 years ago and it worked. A lot of people did it very well. And actually, in some forms, this form of call calling still exists and works very well if you do it right. Then we tried, like, there was a time when, like, email worked amazingly well. You could have huge nurture program and that would generate leads for you. Or then you could do personalization and then how sales engagement tools emerged and then you need to do it on a personalized level, but then same idea of email marketing or email prospecting. Then we had social, like, LinkedIn and that kind of stuff. So I think channels change and, unfortunately, it's impossible to find the right mix of, like, how you approach people, because people, like, it shifts all the time and, unfortunately, there's no bulletproof tactic that works forever. You have to reinvent your channel mix every year and, basically, Influ2 is a part of this mix. Unfortunately, we don't solve prospecting 100%. We can amplify this, but we're just an element of this bigger mix of how you approach people. And then the second huge element is, like, what do you say to people? I think many people, especially, like, when they think of startups, they have engineering background and, for engineers, what do you say that doesn't feel it matters? Like, yeah, we have amazing product, use it. But it is this, like, five words that you tell to people and that clicks in their brain is not scalable. It's like you need to find it again and again for every new product, every new thing you come up to the market. And it's pure art. It's impossible to learn this or, you know, copy this from anyone else. You need to reinvent this. And this is, like, pure, I would say, creativity, right? So that's where the main thing. And then you want to do it as early as possible in your development of your startup.

[00:12:54] Speaker 2: To your point about reinventing your channel mix every year, how do you feel about, like, new, almost, like, consumer-focused B2C social media channels, like TikTok or Instagram? Like, do you view, is your world, because you're still, to your point, Influe2 is one part of the mix, but it's not the only part. And there's some perspectives that, you know, that Facebook, LinkedIn, not LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok are more interesting B2B channels than people give them credit for because that is where the new generation of managers are spending their time. What do you advise clients when they're implementing Influe2? Is it still primarily LinkedIn or are you looking at a broader mix constantly?

[00:13:38] Speaker 1: Yeah, this is 100% true. Actually, what most marketers don't understand is that it's the same brain when you work and when you don't work, right? When you spend time, it's the same human, right? And people don't shift, like, okay, I'm at work, so I don't pay attention to Facebook anymore. And actually, it was like a fun fact when we launched, it was only meta. So actually, we solved this problem for our customers because we had channels like media channels. So currently, we work with meta, LinkedIn, Google, including Google search as well, Bing, Amazon. So we have this broad mix. The only thing that we still kind of not sure about is TikTok, but I think TikTok will be part of our mix at some moments. And surprisingly, meta assets work often better than LinkedIn, right? Because people spend time there, actually spend time there, and they don't spend time there, kind of trying to be present at LinkedIn, but it's a job for them. It's like, they need to work hard. It's the sweat when they're on LinkedIn. And they enjoy spending time on Instagram. And that's what we see across media usage of our targets.

[00:14:51] Speaker 2: What last topic, and I really appreciate your time today. So thanks for joining us. But the big topic of, you know, every day in the modern world is AI. How do you think about AI's presence in marketing and advertising? How is Influe2 using AI? Give us some of your thoughts on both how you're incorporating it into your product and also how you see it changing the marketing landscape.

[00:15:17] Speaker 1: Well, I think for us and from product standpoint, I think, well, first we are AI first company, as though it's not very visible because the reason why we exist is because we use machine learning to solve the problems that other people could not solve. So I think contact level advertising, contact level engagements is impossible without some version of machine learning technology, which doesn't count as AI anymore. It was AI five years ago, not the AI anymore.

[00:15:44] Speaker 2: Exactly.

[00:15:45] Speaker 1: But from Gen AI standpoint, I think Gen AI is amazing when you need to make sense of stuff. So, and we use, currently we're rolling out a new capability that actually helps salespeople make sense of what's happening with marketing, right? So they used to, like only best salespeople could understand, okay, if someone clicked on your ad, what it means, like from sales standpoint. Now we will be able to scale it and then Gen AI will explain salespeople, okay, that means this guy is interested in this topic, talk to him. I think the wrong way to think about Gen AI is like, hey, you can scale your stuff without thinking how it works because you can scale very bad stuff, right? So which is not working, you just create a lot of noise. I think when you use Gen AI properly, then you can empower humans to operate more efficiently and then clearly you can do more stuff in very different things, including like prospecting and content creation and a lot of stuff, but I don't see AI replacing humans yet. I think, especially in terms of sales, like humans still prefer to talk to humans when it comes to active sales process past the research phase. And like, it's impossible to trust the machine yet. Again, like maybe it will change, but this is what we're seeing right now. So we kind of still think of like more about AI empowering humans and replacing.

[00:17:11] Speaker 2: Yeah, I agree with that 100%. At the same time, there are some jobs that feel like they're gonna be replaced by AI. How do you feel about the SDR function, at this point?

[00:17:22] Speaker 1: Well, we are hiring, we are hiring. So that tells a lot. You're hiring? Yeah, we're hiring SDRs. I think, again, like even for prospecting, ultimately it's like you want, the reason why people pay attention to sales development outreach or sales call calls, you expect to see a human on the other end, right? And then if there is like a robot impersonating human, like you lack, there's no connection and you just, people turn off, right? So I think from like a search standpoint, there's a lot of, Gartner talks about this a lot, that people prefer to stay anonymous and talk to robots when you need to do research and find the best tool and all this, you know, generative model optimization, that kind of stuff, it becomes very important because instead of going to a website, they will probably ask Chattopadhyay or whatever they use to find out what's the best IBM tool in the market. On the other hand, when they wanna kind of engage and try, they want to see a human and have a conversation and ask stuff. And yes, I think robot can answer this or AI can answer all these questions, but somehow it's like having a human-to-human conversation is important, right? So, and that relates to sales development as well. So I think, I don't see how an amazing AI, and actually we've never seen the case among our customers when like huge program of AI scaled sales development work better than the best sales development people in that organization. Yeah. Maybe you'll see it one day, but still not seeing this yet.

[00:19:02] Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, Dmitry, it's been amazing having you on the show. The last thing that we like to do before we let you go is take some of your ideas and share them with the world. That could be books that you've read, that could be podcasts you've listened to, that could be things that have inspired you, music that you love. When you, you know, what would you wanna share with the audience that have influenced you, you know, in recent weeks and months?

[00:19:30] Speaker 1: Well, this is dumb, but I listened to Chopin, the concerto number one, yesterday, and I was like, I really love it, I really love it. It's like, it's not what you listen while you work out or, you know, like it's clearly not the best music, probably want to like turn off and... See, my light turned off as well, yeah. You probably want to turn off like from any social media and then just listen to this piece, but this is amazing.

[00:20:02] Speaker 2: Okay, I love it. Any books or any like classic business advice that you, you know, that has inspired you?

[00:20:10] Speaker 1: Well, again, like from book standpoint, my favorite book right now is American Nations. So this book is actually about like the genesis of different groups of people who came here and how the dynamics between them. And it's not one nation, actually there are 11 nations that are still kind of traceable, visible in different cultural perspective. So that's my favorite books right now.

[00:20:37] Speaker 2: I love it. Dmitry, if folks wanna get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to contact you? Maybe they wanna purchase in-flu-2 or get a demo.

[00:20:46] Speaker 1: Yeah, well, I'm on LinkedIn, so I try to read it as like at least a couple of day, every other day. So happy to connect with anyone.

[00:20:54] Speaker 2: Awesome, thanks for being our guest on Revenue Blindspots. Thanks to Otter.ai for hosting the show and Dmitry, thanks for all your support of Pavilion over the years.

[00:21:03] Speaker 1: Thank you, it was a pleasure.