Oh boy, 2023 was quite the year.
And yeah, we may have a few more gray hairs on our heads since last New Year’s, but we have a lot to show for them as well.
In a year that hit the SaaS sales industry hard, Walnut succeeded in helping sales teams meet their goals and achieve their dreams.
Whether it was by allowing them to provide prospects with full-funnel demos, boosting our product to provide salespeople with crucial deal intel, or sharing consistent classic art memes in our Walnut Museum (clearly our most important accomplishment), our team was hard at work trying to ensure salespeople had everything they needed to succeed.
So as we look back at the last year, we feel humbled and proud to have been given this opportunity. We hustled hard and accomplished some of our biggest and nuttiest dreams.
Let’s recount some of our favorite achievements.
Walnut’s impact
We saved the world from 6 million minutes of bad demos.
If you listen closely, you’ll hear the world healing. That’s because we helped save it from 6 million minutes of boring, generic, and buggy sales demos in 2023.
Just for reference, 6 million minutes is nearly 11 and a half years or 137 months or 360 million seconds.
That’s a lot of time preventing prospects of some of the world’s largest software companies from looking glassy-eyed and bored while sellers fight with their demo environments.
Every minute of 2023, 3 Walnut demos were enjoyed.
On average, 3 Walnut demos were played by sellers and prospects each minute of last year.
That means that the exact minute that Gwyneth Paltrow won her ski collision trial, somewhere else in the world 3 sales teams were winning their deals. And the exact moment that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce fell in love, 3 prospects were enjoying a simplified sales process.
Ok, we know that’s not really how this math works, but you get the point.
We helped sales teams speed up time-to-value by up to 300%.
High up on many sales leaders’ lists of 2023 New Year’s resolutions was the goal to speed up their teams’ time to value.
Well, time to cross that sh*t off and consider it done.
Walnut customers like Colortokens found that they could speed up their time-to-value by 2-3x with interactive demos. That’s like being able to binge the entire Succession series in 13 hours instead of 40.
With those extra 27 hours, you can listen to this entire playlist of the 500 greatest songs of all time… or um, spend time with your family and friends I guess.
60 sales processes were personalized with Walnut each day.
Walnut customers created an average of 60 Walnut templates per day.
That means that on average, each morning SaaS prospects woke up to a world that had 60 new personalized sales processes in it. They probably woke up with a smile on their faces, the sun gently warming their rooms, while someone served them breakfast in bed.
Because that’s the future we are fighting for.
We revolutionized SaaS sales by introducing the full-funnel demo experience.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you probably heard about our full-funnel demo report that found that prospects by and large want short, interactive demos throughout the funnel.
And no, it doesn’t matter what your old-timey, hard-assed, used-to-be-a-top-seller-50-years-ago LinkedIn connection Bob says, you can no longer expect prospects to put up with just one generic hour-long demo that runs through all your features. Today’s prospects will not handle that.
Instead, in 2023 Walnut users used 26% of the millions of demos they made to build awareness, 18% before and after the live call, 41% for the live demo call itself, and 14% for post-sales and product onboarding purposes.
The new way to sell software has taken off and will not stop until SaaS sales stops sucking.
Company accomplishments
We worked really hard and are so honored that our work has been recognized by some of the biggest names in the biz.
LinkedIn top startup
For the second year in a row, Walnut was named one of LinkedIn’s top startups based in Israel. And we happen to care a lot about what LinkedIn thinks about us.
LinkedIn chooses companies based on employment growth, engagement on the platform, job interest, and attraction of top talent.
WIRED Magazine’s hottest startup
No big deal, but WIRED thinks we’re hot.
Oh, not like that! We were just super pumped to be included in their list of hottest startups for 2023.
Accel’s Euroscape top cloud companies
We were also proud to be included in Accel’s annual Euroscape report for the second year in a row, and listed as one of the top 100 EU and Israel companies valued at less than $1B.
Hopefully we won’t be listed there next year because we will have evolved into the unicorns we always saw ourselves to be.
Dun’s 100 top startups to work for
Dun dun dun *dramatic music*
We’ve gone and Dun it once again. We were so excited to have made it onto Dun’s 100 top startups to work for for the second year in a row.
Lots of G2 awards
And gee, did we make some noise on G2, too. (See what we did there?)
Among our awards: “High Performer for Enterprises,” “Best Estimated ROI,” “Momentum Leaders,” and “Users Love Us.”
Company growth
In our 3rd year of existence, we continued to mature grow and blossom into the Walnut we aim to be.
We hired our first CRO.
Catie Ivey joined Walnut as its first CRO after leading Enterprise Sales at Pendo.io and heading revenue teams at SalesForce and Marketo.
She brought with her loads of experience and deep knowledge of the industry. We’re just nuts about her.
We rebranded.
Haaaaave you met Fred?
We introduced the world to our brand new brand and our best friend Fred. If you haven’t yet, watch this:
Our Walnut 3.0 release also included some exciting new features, like an updated user experience, sped-up demo creation, simplified demo customization flow, and more.
We released over 70 new features.
It wouldn’t be a yearly recap without showing off all the amazing new features we added to our product.
Our dev and product teams worked their butts off to make some killer improvements to our interactive demo platform. But to be mindful of your time, we will just let you check them all out in our 2023 product recap.
We released 2 new product capabilities.
Speaking of features, our product took on new challenges and grew some wings.
Walnut Ace, which helps sales teams sell more effectively, was launched in February and took Product Hunt by storm, winning top product of the day.
Ace focused on making sales more efficient for sellers by allowing them to craft convincing demo pitches faster by integrating OpenAI, to share the perfect demo without leaving Gmail, to receive Slack alerts the moment someone views a demo, to collaborate on demo building in real-time, and more.
Deal Intel was released in December, just in time for the holidays. Because we knew exactly what salespeople asked Santa for.
Besides improving our integrations with Salesforce and allowing sales leaders to track the demo data in the context of all the rest of their data, Deal Intel also introduced sellers to our Deal page, which allowed them to track their demo engagement based on deals.
What’s next?
If you think all this was impressive, you better look out for 2024.
Our upcoming year will have loads of exciting surprises and updates, as we continue to improve the way software is sold by generating killer demos.
Will we continue to make far too many ridiculous memes? Yeah, probably. But will we do that instead of working on real stuff because it’s way too much fun?
Um, yeah, probably we will.
But the point is, we will also continue driving forward and building a product that sales teams can use to win more deals faster and prospects can enjoy to improve the buying experience.
Because we won’t stop until SaaS sales stops sucking.
If you haven’t yet, click ‘Get Started’ to book a time to see how our demo platform can improve your day, your month, or even your year.
