Landbase Targets Lead Gen with Go-to-Market Automation, Agentic AI

Agentic AI startup Landbase is courting channel partners as potential users and sellers of its go-to-market automation platform.

Landbase exited stealth mode in September with a haul of $12.5 million in venture capital seed funding. Business customers are signing up for its waitlist, but Landscape has already run its platform with multiple partners, including a technology advisor (TA) company. Landscape has developed use cases for the technology advisor channel, a space where entrepreneurs are seeking solutions for lead generation. In addition, Landbase has formed preliminary direct agreements resellers and technology advisors, and intends to eventually sign agreements with tech services distributors.

Landbase and Agentic AI

The company on Oct. 1 announced its GTM-1 Omni AI action model. The model, which differs from a large language model, automates the planning and execution of sales and marketing campaigns. The company is also offering automation for outbound campaigns, nurture campaigns and inbound. The model is operating off some 40 million sales interactions and campaigns not available on the public web.

Landbase's Daniel Saks

"That's really the secret sauce," said Landbase CEO and co-founder Daniel Saks. "It can optimize for the reward of generating a lead and understands the context of every business."

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People in the channel will know Saks as co-founder and former co-CEO of subscription commerce platform AppDirect. He has teamed up with a crew of AI, data science and B2B SaaS experts. Chief product officer Emily Zhang led product management for eBay and directed product for Carta, and chief data scientist Hua Gao directed machine learning for ZoomInfo.

Landbase's executives refer to the company as an "agentic AI" provider. Forbes describes that concept as "to artificial intelligence systems that possess a degree of autonomy and can act on their own to achieve specific goals." But don't think of Landbase as sales and marketing bots, Saks said.

"I think that makes things less human if you take a fake name like Alice and say she's your AI person. Especially in the channel, people want to do business with people they trust and who are human," he said.

An agentic system, on the other hand, would automate manual research companies have been conducting through a variety of software tools and data sources.

"If if you can harness that, you're going to change the game, versus just trying to replace one human with a machine, which I think is not so cool," Saks told Channel Futures.

Cary Tengler, who leads consultancy Channel Acuity and helped advise Landbase on how to work with channel partners, said Saks' team learned early on that they needed to offer more than an email campaign management tool, which many technology advisors are already offering. It would need to be omnichannel, and it would need to do more in the way of campaign management for go-to-market teams.

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Channel Acuity's Cary Tengler

"Let's face it; in the smaller organizations, that's likely to be a salesperson or a sales manager or somebody like that. Those people should be talking to clients, not sitting there trying to figure out which of the lead list they're going to send an email to or a text message to," Tengler told Channel Futures. "The more you can orchestrate on behalf of a sales professional, the better off you're going to be."

The solution comes in two tiers, with varying levels of features and support. Landbase is presently inviting select channel partners into its reseller model, which includes the option to earn residual commissions. Saks said Landbase intends to develop agreements with TSDs, including AppDirect.

Tech Advisors and Go-to-Market

AI-generated marketing tools and strategists represent the fourth most common go-to-market enhancement tech advisors are making, according to Channel Futures' Q2 partner survey. The second was obtaining lead generation from vendors and distributors, and the third was targeted customer engagement with existing accounts.

Related:Partners Face Wake-Up Call as Hardware Sales Flatline

Q. What go-to-market enhancements are you planning to make or have made in the past 6 months, to improve business outcomes? (Select up to three.)

Source: Channel Futures Q2 Market Outlook Survey

However, partners quarter after quarter most commonly say they are focusing on cross-selling new products and services into their existing customer base. Many of these companies are relatively small and migt not even employ marketing personnel.

Tech advisor leaders have predominantly relied on referrals, P2 Telecom's Bill Patchett said.

"It starts with people you know. Very, very few advisors are out there knocking on doors, especially the ones that are trying to grow their business like us. They're doing it through networking of some sort. And this is the best networking tool that I've ever been involved in," Patchett told Channel Futures.

Patchett said Saks approached him a year-and-a-half ago with a pitch for Landbase. P2, which works with both subagents and end-user customers, built its first campaign set and saw "extraordinary results," Patchett said.

"We've had big wins, and it's turned us into an outreach company where we've had zero success in the past," Patchett said. "I think advisors all try to use Constant Contact, Seamless.AI and HubSpot. It's easy to sign up for those companies and do your best to send out some informational type emails, but if they're not targeted to the right people, and you don't have the right messaging in it and you've got to manually touch it, you're going to get a 1-2% open rate."

Patchett said P2 has been seeing open rates between 40% and 90%. In one campaign, P2 targeted 300 non-producing partners with a short message about new products in its portfolio, including software as a service. Patchett said 83 phone calls resulted from that campaign over the course of December 2023.

P2's Bill Patchett

"That's when we knew we were on to something, and we had an 80% open rate at that time," he said. "It's incredible."

Saks said Landbase undertook a large machine-learning exercise to try to understand what types of campaigns succeed and fail. The firm found that 45% of outbound campaigns fail to generate leads. Part of Landbase's charter is to prevent companies from starting campaigns that are doomed to fail, Saks said. For example, partners with a trust score below 30 (scored on Landbase's website) ought not perform outbound until they've fine-tuned themselves.

"What we found is that there are things you can do to optimize your brand, and a lot of people in the channel don't even think about this. It's things like, case studies, white papers, relevant industry stories. It's managing your reputation online ... For channel advisors, there's been a standard playbook, and that playbook won't work in the future, and it's just hard," Saks told Channel Futures.

Q. How are you currently using generative AI within your business ? (Select all that apply)

Source: Channel Futures Q2 Market Outlook Survey

Future of Agentic AI

Saks said he anticipates agentic AI allowing partners to sell more services to their customers. While tech advisors commonly sourced managed IT and network services from vendors and earn resulting commissions, Saks said a new wave of professional services that will enter the channel.

Think legal, accounting and sales services that previously relied predominantly on manual human effort but will soon involve more automation and software.

"My view is that with agentic AI, you can take a business that was previously done with a human with low gross margin – therefore not a lot of dollars to go around the channel – and you can boost the gross profit. So these entire economies that didn't have the ability to pay a sales cost to the channel now should," Saks said.