Laurynas Pletkus, CEO & Co-Founder at Scale3C: “Today’s sales automation has led to digital sales exhaustion”

As part of our interviews with sales leaders, we ask them what advice they would give people thinking of entering the fields. Laurynas Pletkus, CEO & Co-Founder at Scale3C, told us that “sales are no longer a ‘talking and listening’ position but a digital, 360-degree expertise”. And that provides an excellent starting point for this interview.

Because Laurynas has certainly done more than just talk and listen. In a little over a decade, he has co-founded not just Scale3C but also 88 Tech. Together, he says, these have “grown to employ over 65 talented professionals”. Both companies specialize “in providing outsourcing services and developing custom software solutions, focusing on European and US markets”.

Despite this success, Laurynas continues to develop his skills. Since graduating from Vilnius University, where he earned a Bachelor’s degree in Political Science and International Relations, he has studied at Sciences Po Lyon through the Erasmus program and recently graduated from Turing College. Here, he gained expertise in Digital Marketing and Advertising, adding to a long list of certifications (including Lean Six Sigma White Belt).

But as this interview shows, he not only learns a lot but offers a lot for others to learn from him. Including the sales tool he just can’t live without…

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In your view, how has the role of CRM software evolved over the last decade or so? What major breakthroughs stand out for you?

I think the biggest change in the whole evolution of CRM software is that it’s not a standalone tool anymore but an integral part of the whole business development strategy within the company.

Tools like Pipedrive and HubSpot (just to name a couple) have become fully integrated solutions in the whole company representation and business development ecosystem. Today you can integrate CRM contact forms into your website, plug the successful form submission to Google Tag Manager and Google/Facebook Ads solutions to ensure you not only capture those leads but analyse carefully the source of new clients coming your way and make sure no data is leaked. This changed the game completely because it allows businesses to monitor the sales pipeline from the very beginning to finish, including marketing, lead generation and actual sales closure processes into one, streamlined sequence.

Additionally, as cold calling continues to show successful lead generation results, CRM solutions are now offering calling services, including phone number generation as well as full tracking of the cold calling process, again, fully incorporated into the overall business development process. This allows you to not only monitor the actual calling process but also share responsibilities on how you want to tackle a newly collected lead through your sales pipeline.

Lastly, some major CRM players like HubSpot is as well providing full sales funnel landing page template service, which allows to spin up sales-orientated websites efficiently and affordably, allowing businesses to have a one-stop business development shop at hand to keep the whole process unified across the board.

What is one sales tool you or your team can’t live without? And why is it so important?

It is quite tough to select just one tool and I would love to say it’s Pipedrive but instead, I think I would focus on Google Product Suite. Google provides a one-stop-shop for lead generation, tracking and communication tools which enables my sales team to drive tangible results.

The analytics and tracking part is covered by Google’s Tag Manager (before – Google Analytics & Google Tag Manager) and ensures you have full visibility of your digital sales funnel.

Communication is covered by GSuite and its recent Gemini AI integration. This allows me to spin up mailboxes with just a few clicks and enables Gemini text assistant to help craft meaningful and precise emails by my business development managers, ensuring that they also stay within our scripted presentation and branded, company-specific linguistic approach to emails.

Lead generation is enabled by Google Ads, one of the most popular and effective tools when it comes to marketing your product or service. We are utilizing Google Ads to capture B2B leads into our website and sales funnel landing pages to ensure we target very niche and specific customer persona.

To sum up the above suite and how it helps our sales process – we have Google Analytics set up with specific event tags configured which allows us to closely monitor traffic to our landing pages and measure the conversion rates on those sites. Our lead generation efforts are set on the Google Ads side to target specific user profiles and further analyse their path on our sites to ensure we always evolve our lead journeys to receive the best possible outcome. Lastly, this is improved by our GSuite accounts with enabled Gemini AI support to make sure we have streamlined way of communication with our newly acquired leads.

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What are some examples of AI being used in sales that stand out to you?

Just to name a few tools – Gemini, ChatGPT, DeepL, Suchmuch.ai – these progressive AI tools allow sales representatives to not only communicate in a multicultural environment utilising multiple languages but also produce meaningful messages in no time. Additionally, tools like suchmuch.ai allow the transfer of all of those important sales notes into an instant proposal or a legally binding document to ensure that an end-to-end sales journey takes less than 24 hours to complete.  

Can you name a startup in the sales tech space that has caught your attention (and why)?

Hard to select just one, but one to look out for is SuchMuch.AI. Currently, part of Tech Stars cohort in San Diego, founded by a serial Lithuanian entrepreneur Edmundas Balcikonis, SuchMuch.AI is a startup that leverages AI to increase productivity in how documents (including client contracts) and proposals are generated with the required information. Today’s world requires extremely fast turnaround in sales process. Leads are expecting proposals to come within 24 to 48 hours from when the details for the RFP were provided, which leads to a very short window of time to play around with copies of proposals as well as prepared contract templates for review. SuchMuch.AI is helping to solve this problem by introducing AI algorithms to generate those documents with the required details in no time.

Additionally, they support a fully collaborative model when it comes to document creation. As business development managers cannot handle the full proposal/contract template creation process and require multiple team members to ensure that all of the information is gathered and put into place, this is an amazing addition to an already solid product.

If I would briefly want to select another great startup to mention – this would be qwilr.com, a superior tool when it comes to pitch deck, proposal and payment collection process. This tool not only allows you to create dynamic, pristine-looking proposals but also includes upfront payments to the proposals themselves to easily collect cash for your proposed offering to a new or existing client.

Additionally, this tool has ready-made integrations with popular CRM, accounting and communication tools like HubSpot, PipeDrive, Slack and QuickBooks.

Related reading: Edmundas Balčikonis, Co-Founder and CEO of Such Much AI: “Sales is more about understanding people than mastering tools and techniques”

In your view, what role can technology play in providing a unified view of offline and online sales? How can it improve both worlds? What challenges can it tackle?

As tapped into this topic by advice to a newly starting salesperson, the gap between offline and online sales has shrunk in the past ten years.

This was done because of the way we can now identify and track leads across multiple verticals. This all starts with the tools we use – Google Tag Manager (Both event tracking and analytics), Social Media (e.g., LinkedIn), CRM (e.g., PipeDrive), Email/Phone solutions (E.g., Gmail, HubSpot or PipeDrive call systems), QR (QR codes may lead to specifically tailored sales funnels to track physical meetings during live events) and smart proposal/document solutions (e.g., SuchMuch.ai, Qwilr.com).

The current business development tech stack allows us to fully integrate an end-to-end sales journey, even if it starts with just a quick conversation over the phone or a face-to-face meeting during a conference. The acquired leads, once their journey has started, can be identified and tracked across the board until they are actually closed.

That said, technology is playing a vital role in connecting offline and online into one singular process, providing necessary support for business owners and business development professionals to ensure results are being met even when chaotic circumstances arise and one person is met physically, another over the phone and third – over a form filled out on a landing page.

What advice do you have for those wanting to start a career in sales?

The biggest evolution, to my mind, is that sales are no longer a “talking and listening” position but a digital, 360-degree expertise, which involves learning how to act physically as well as digitally within the space of expanding the business of the company you are working for.

Today’s business development expert has to understand how to strategize between sales automation processes and physical touchpoints. The start is to understand how automation (chat and social media bots, calendar schedulers, website forms, data scrapping and CRM) can support your day-to-day sales activities, especially to generate quality leads which you can push through your sales process towards closure. Next comes physical touchpoints – meetups, conferences, door-to-door and cold calling which keeps you, as a sales expert, evolving on your body and spoken language skills. Today’s sales automation has led to digital sales exhaustion, which means that you cannot just rely on bots trying to capture leads and close those leads afterwards.

Having said that, the name of the game today is being a multi-verse, 360-degree business development manager who can excel both digitally and physically to ensure maximum success potential in closing the deals your company is after.

To sum it all up, as a new entry-level salesperson I would focus on setting up your lead/sales automation processes first, and spin up all of the systems to ensure that you are capturing the potential digitally. Once that is done, I would scout for physical touch points (conferences, events and meetups) to keep your body and tongue sharp, which will come in handy not only in “sales hunting” at those venues but also when the time comes to close those digitally acquired potential customers.