We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Marco Dell’olio a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Marco, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Let’s start big picture – what are some of biggest trends you are seeing in your industry?

We all received sales emails or outreach emails. Keep one of those in your mind.

I’ve been building sales tech for the past 10 years and the single mantra until the recent days was “scale” and it’s different declination like, “personalization at scale”, but this really was a nice description for templated emails.

Businesses grew billions with that strategy. Grab a list of customers feed it to to the template Hello #{first_name}. Profit.

Now going back to your sales email, can you tell that is a standard templated email with your name on it? So do other millions of people every day. Trough the years we built an incredible resilience to this attempt to catch our attention and what used to work simply doesn’t work anymore.

So what? We are going back to at building well crafted, well thought emails or at least who want a chance to connect thats what they are doing. And LLMs or more commercially AI are providing a ton of value in this sense.

At Zinnia no long ago we used to have an unfiltered Calendly link where you were able to book a demo, good for the ego but not really effective. We were booking around 40 demos a week most of them unqualified but the demand we were intercepting was: “Nothing works anymore for my team, our email are not getting opened or replied to”. Same story over and over.

But those were also people that wanted an other mass email blast solution with the AI tag on it. We decided we didn’t want to play that game, simply because we know it wouldn’t solve the problem.

The role of a BDR is disappearing and more qualified and competent Account Executive are getting empowered with the tools to improve and speedup their work without fully automate it.

Marco, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

I’m Marco Dell’Olio born and raised in Rome, Italy.
Started my career in a pseudo governmental agency doing admin work. Since I never liked that job I was spending my time figuring out how to not work and that led me to learn programming and automation which eventually became my career. Love took me to the US, and having part of the family based in the South and Atlanta having a direct flight to Rome would grant me to know being disowned by my relatives.

In Atlanta I got into the Startup world first at SalesLoft then Calendly and finally my first company as a founder, OrderNerd which eventually got acquired by PopMenu.

Rob Foreman one of the CoFounder of SalesLoft introduce me to my current CoFounder Lauren Goodell where a 15 minutes conversation turned into a 2 hours white-boarding session.

Together we are building Zinnia, a CoPilot for account executives. As mentioned previously the world of email templates is over. Account executives are back at doing research, learning, collecting resources and crafting compelling messages, with the right content at the right time. We are building a set of tools that will allow Account Executives to do what they already do but faster. And we enabling every company to have their Account Executives to perform like the best in class with a set of best practice to follow to close their deal successfully and learning and effective methodology in the meantime.
We want AEs to be successful at what they do.

How’d you build such a strong reputation within your market?

Our personal reputation.

When a a company is so small, you are really selling the people, more specifically the founders.
Both Lauren and I always put business integrity and reputation before everything. We slowly built our legacy company by company we worked on and people with work and spoke with.

We were also able to build our story with our decisions. Everything we did in life was a precursor that led us to build what we are doing. We both grew in tech companies, building and selling sales tech software, we both founded companies previously and at this point we are able to bring consistency and trust and what we are doing based on our tracked records.

Conversations about M&A are often focused on multibillion dollar transactions – but M&A can be an important part of a small or medium business owner’s journey. We’d love to hear about your experience with selling businesses.

For my previous business everything happened so serendipitously.

We had this customer 30 minutes away in Woodstock GA. Their ON table broke on a friday night so one of us drove 25 miles away on a Friday at 10pm to get it replaced. They wouldn’t believe we did it.
The next day the CEO of one of the most successful restaurant tech Startup walked in that restaurant and he asked the owner about the Ordernerd, the product and the team. They spoke so highly of us that the CEO reached out and the rest is history.

The lesson for me was, let your customers speak for you. Focus all your energy in making sure they get that extra mile and they will be your first cheerleaders. With other costumers, investors and everybody out there.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://getzinnia.ai
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marcodellolio/