For the next installment of this series, we sat down with Gautam Rishi, Co-Founder and CEO of OneShot.ai. OneShot.ai is the worlds first fully autonomous sales prospecting platform. The platform is able to self identify key prospects within your ICP and then use AI to autonomously prospect them with highly personalized messaging.
Before founding OneShot, Gautam was the VP of Sales (EMEA) for CloudBees and has built and led high-performing sales teams across various regions, including EMEA and globally, scaling revenue and implementing growth strategies in complex enterprise environment.
How do you see the future of sales technology evolving, and where does your product fit into that vision?
Over the past few years, we've seen rapid growth, especially with the AI boom, which helped us scale from $250K ARR to $1.8M in a short time. We've been focusing on this space and building solutions well ahead of the curve, gaining a deep understanding of the market. Our goal is to integrate AI into an SDR's workflow, allowing them to stay focused while seamlessly integrating with existing tools like Outreach, Salesloft, Apollo, Groove, and Gong. This streamlines manual processes such as lead identification, prospect research, and message personalization, ultimately saving time and improving results across the entire sales journey.
What problem are you solving and what inspired you to develop this particular sales tool?
The inspiration for building this tool came from my extensive experience in sales and scaling businesses. I started as an SDR in 2004 and have since built and managed multiple sales teams, including taking a company from $10M to $150M in ARR on zero-to-one enterprise sales. Around 2018-2019, I noticed a dramatic drop in response rates from outbound sales sequences, falling from 7% to 5%, and then to 3%.
This decline highlighted the need to improve outbound sales strategies by focusing on better account quality, more accurate targeting of the ideal customer profile (ICP), and aligning the right prospects with the right timing.
Outbound sales remained a powerful channel, but it became clear that to succeed, we needed to enhance how SDRs approached prospecting. The goal was never to replace SDRs with AI but to use AI to enable and empower them. We wanted to create a tool that would make outbound sales more effective, by helping SDRs focus on the most promising accounts and prospects.
How does your technology solve this problem?
Our technology solves the problem by automating the process of research and personalized messaging for your sales efforts. It begins by learning everything about your organization—your services, challenges, and target market—using multiple sources such as Crunchbase, LinkedIn, your website, Google News, and other publicly available platforms. This dynamic information is constantly updated to ensure accuracy and relevance.
Once it understands your company’s profile, it goes a step further to identify and learn about your target prospects, such as founders, CEOs, or CROs. It analyzes their publicly available data from sources like LinkedIn, social media, and relevant business filings, identifying their pain points and challenges. This information is then used to tailor messaging that resonates with their specific needs, ensuring outreach is personalized and impactful.
By automating and optimizing this research and messaging process, the platform significantly reduces manual effort while improving the quality and relevance of the outreach. It quickly gathers insights and delivers personalized, context-rich messages that speak directly to the concerns of each prospect, making your sales process more efficient and effective.
How does your technology differentiate itself from existing solutions in the market?
Our technology differentiates itself by focusing deeply on messaging quality rather than offering a broad, end-to-end AI platform. Many AI solutions in the market promise to handle everything from outreach to scheduling, often creating unrealistic expectations. These platforms can give the impression that users can sit back while meetings automatically fill their calendars. However, we recognize that sales development, particularly SDR (Sales Development Representative) work, is a challenging process that requires more than just automation.
The core of our differentiation lies in how we make the AI-generated content sound human. A key challenge with many AI-driven solutions is the inability to replicate natural, conversational language, often resulting in messages that feel robotic. To address this, we’ve built an advanced prompt system that allows users to customize language, learn from existing email patterns, and incorporate human feedback, making the content feel authentic. This human-in-the-loop approach ensures the messaging aligns with the user’s tone and style.
While other companies are trying to cover numerous areas with mediocre results, we’ve focused extensively on the research and messaging components. Our platform includes features like citation work and reference checks to ensure accurate, relevant messaging. This laser focus on quality, particularly in language and research, sets us apart from competitors who spread their efforts too thin across various functions.
In short, we prioritize doing a few things exceptionally well, rather than many things poorly, allowing us to deliver superior messaging solutions.
Finally, what advice would you give to sales teams or businesses considering adopting new technologies like yours to enhance their sales processes?
My advice for sales teams and businesses considering adopting new technologies to enhance their sales processes revolves around end-user adoption. In my experience, having spent 20 years in sales, the number one factor for success is ensuring the technology gets used consistently by your team. It's crucial to get the team involved early and ensure they like and understand the tool—simply purchasing it top-down without engagement can lead to failure. If users aren't regularly utilizing the technology, even if it initially looks exciting, it's ultimately a waste of money.
Moreover, as we navigate a significant shift with AI, once the hype dies down, AI-driven tools offer great potential to refine go-to-market (GTM) strategies. By leveraging these technologies, companies can categorize and target their total addressable market (TAM) more effectively, building tailored motions for tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3 accounts.
To ensure sustainable adoption, it's important to measure usage from day 1 and track how it evolves by day 30. This helps to identify if initial excitement translates into long-term value. Piloting new tools for a few weeks and analyzing consistent usage is key. If the end-users aren't fully embracing the tool, then it's a lost investment.
Visit https://www.oneshot.ai/ to learn more!
