Walnut Launched To Help Remote Sales Teams Thrive
I don’t know what it is in Israel’s water, but the rate at which tech and innovations get churned out of this magical land is nothing short of amazing. Just when you would think that Israeli tech managed to disrupt all the industries- boom, another amazing innovation.
Case in point, Walnut, by serial founder and CEO Yoav Vilner, and software development extraordinaire CTO Danni Friedland.
I guess this is where I should put in my little disclaimer – I previously knew Yoav from my marketing circles, but to be fair- who doesn’t? When he was just 23, he founded Tel Aviv’s most prominent tech marketing company, and went onto being a founding CMO at a successful anti-bullying startup. All while mentoring in world class accelerators and writing for top U.S publications.
Anything he touches turns to gold, and once I heard of the launch of Walnut, I knew this had to be something special.
What Is Walnut?
The product enables customer-facing teams to dramatically perform better, by easily creating, personalizing and managing the sales demo experience, with no reliance on back-end teams such as R&D, developers, and designers, thereby saving everyone a ton of hassle.
By this point you might be thinking “so what?” But here’s the kicker: amongst numerous features, the Walnut platform allows sales teams to run product demos as a live experience even when offline, to maintain a fail-free demo experience.
It also allows users to add/remove product features before important calls; make simple edits for personalization purposes; and access analytics and insights as to what is a successful demo. It’s all right there for the sales representative. No need to ping team members from other departments before each sales call.
So long story short, Walnut equips sales teams with the tools and insights they need to perform exponentially better, with minimal effort, and a much higher conversion rate.
While writing this post, I asked Yoav, “Why the name ‘Walnut’?” I figured maybe it might have something to do with the way it looks like a brain or something. But the real reason is actually much cuter. Yoav responded saying, “We believe that out of all of the challenges B2B companies face, demonstrating the product is the toughest nut to crack.”
But Wait, There’s More
Walnut also announced that it raised $2.5M in seed from SV’s NFX, with an impressive lineup of participants: Avishay Abrahami, CEO at Wix; Joe Montana (football icon) and Michael Ma, partners at Liquid2; Matt Wyndowe, partner at Graph Ventures; Kenny Stone, co-founder at Plangrid (sold for $800M to Autodesk); Immad Akhund, former PT partner at YCombinator and current CEO at Mercury; and Alon Gamzu, CEO at RoundForest.
On why they made the investment in Walnut, Gigi Levy-Weiss, the managing partner at NFX, says “Besides having a great team, Walnut was appealing to us to invest in as they approach a big market and are solving a cross-vertical problem. Nearly every company has to face the challenges of demonstrating live products during sales calls. Now with the switch to remote sales, the product is seeing a surge in demand from early bird clients and the waiting list is growing every day.”
I can’t wait to see what the future has in store for Walnut. I have no doubt the company will do amazingly well, not only because of the leaders behind the innovative elements of the product, but also because of the timing of its release. With remote work being the new norm in this post pandemic world- Walnut is a godsend of a solution for sales teams worldwide.
