Less Prospecting, More Selling
Last Updated: By TRUiC Team
As any marketing professional knows, lead generation can be extremely time-consuming. Even after scouring prospects’ websites, LinkedIn profiles, etc., finding ideal potential customers is often a hit-or-miss affair.
Truebase’s AI-based platform saves lots of time by searching for sales leads not just through online profiles but also websites, job descriptions, and news based on the criteria you select. It also can craft custom messages for outreach across channels. This is the company’s origin story.
A Tedious and Time-Consuming Process
Truebase is founder Wissam Tabbara’s fourth startup. The idea for his latest company sprang from challenges he faced in previous roles.
“I've been involved in startups for the last at least 15, 20 years of my career, and I always found myself doing one of three things,” he says. “I'm either looking for new talent to join the team or [trying to find] new customers or investors. And I found myself most of the time on LinkedIn. running Boolean searches and clicking [endlessly].” He thought he might have been doing something wrong but discovered that others were experiencing the same struggles.
“It's very time-consuming to acquire new customers,” Wissam says. “To run a prospecting journey properly, you have to discover accounts, qualify them, and then enrich the contacts and personalize the messages to the content and engage with them. To do this properly, it's around 10 minutes per lead. There are teams that are tasked to do 10,000 leads. So to do that properly is very time-consuming. It's a human-bound process. And to make this worse, it's usually done by sales development representatives or [inside-sales-type] positions.”
Finding Quality Leads, but Faster
The good news was that as a technologist, Wissam saw an opportunity to automate this process. “I began developing solutions to streamline these tasks,” he says. “To validate my idea, I embarked on a customer discovery journey, which confirmed that many others were grappling with the same challenges. Recognizing this widespread need and equipped with a viable solution, I knew the time was ripe for Truebase, a platform designed to accelerate the B2B prospecting process and help revenue teams book more demos efficiently.”
One of the things Truebase does is to help sales teams initiate the right conversations with the right prospects. “Having the right conversations is really a big part of growing the business properly,” he says.
The problem is that most of the people hired to do this type of work are entry-level. But that’s ultimately counter-productive because while they may only last on the job for a year or so due to the tedious nature of the job, it can take several months to onboard them.
Truebase addresses this problem through AI and automation. For example, in seconds, it can scrape entire websites for information about prospective customers. It can also write personalized messages to those people after researching their LinkedIn profiles and online footprints, using generative AI and lots of proprietary data. Plus, the company’s platform emphasizes real-time verification of data so you don’t approach someone with stale information, which is embarrassing and won’t impress them.
Craft Your Pitch Early; Start With the Problem
Wissam says that founders looking for funding should start crafting their pitch decks six to nine months in advance.
“This is crucial because it includes your traction slide, which showcases your startup's progress and achievements,” he says. “Creating this early pushes you to focus on achieving key metrics that will form your narrative. It helps to prioritize your work and aligns your team with the story you want to tell investors. The process of securing funds is not just about presenting what you've done.”
Wissam also advises early-stage entrepreneurs to begin by identifying the problem they want to solve. Make sure it’s a pain point that actually exists for a large number of people. Otherwise, you’ll find yourself barking up the wrong tree.
“Most people start with the solution, and they end up [with] a solution looking for a problem,” he says. “So, my advice would be to start with the problem and be very flexible with the solution.”
Product-Market Fit
As far as goals for the company, for now, Wissam is focused primarily on expanding its client base.
“I heard this from other entrepreneurs who have done this before, but they say every now and then you land into a big problem where you have stars aligned, and you have everything you need to make this happen,” he says. “And I feel this is where I am with Truebase. We really landed on a big problem, and I think we have a front seat on the new generation of how we're solving it. So we're approaching more and more product-market fit from what we've seen. So at this point, we are all about going to the next level and putting this in the hands of more and more people.”
