Sales automation is the direct analogue of a proactive outbound sales team, acting at scale, but without all the overhead or frustration. Diplomat never gets tired, never gets frustrated, doesn't sleep, doesn't get sick, and doesn't take off work. Diplomat is the best sales "person" you haven't hired yet. Diplomat doesn't use mass mailings that crush your deliverability. There's no cadence or list management -- Diplomat just sells automatically, relentlessly, and efficiently to targeted prospects.
Marketing automation is not the same. Outbound marketing automation typically involves mass email blasts and the poor deliverability that comes with them. Inbound marketing automation and drip campaigns are for nurturing leads that are not yet necessarily ready to buy, putting your brand in a reactive state, hoping that when the time is right, the buyer will choose your offering.
The finer details of how Diplomat works with your sales team depend on the type of offering you have.
For scalable offerings like B2B SaaS, Diplomat automates the entire sales process, from outbound lead generation to closed won, automatically, at scale, with no human intervention. If a prospect requires something Diplomat can't yet provide, the deal can be forwarded to your account executives for closing at SDR rates.
For these scalable offerings, Diplomat can close by self-serve checkout, webhooks, or even traditional back-and-forth of contract PDFs.
For personalized offerings and consultancies like IT consulting or recruiting, more hands-on customization is usually required to close, far beyond outreach, contract review, and signing. For example, in IT consulting, there often must be sales engineers involved in gathering specifications and requirements for a proposal of what's to be built. For marketing agencies, your marketing advisors will typically want to customize a proposal, tailored to that client's exact needs. Standalone SDR automation is available for these kinds of offerings.
Diplomat has hundreds of millions of account, contact, and lead datapoints, from a variety of sources, including industry databases and other proprietary sources and methods. What data is used really varies from offering to offering.
Information from your sales team's emails and CRM are only necessary for preventing channel conflict and CAN-SPAM compliance (see below).
An SDR is a salesperson who focuses on outbound lead generation. They are responsible for finding and qualifying leads, and setting meetings (also known as sales qualified leads or SQLs) for account executives. They are typically paid a base salary and a commission for each meeting they set. Instead of acting as a full sales person, working start to finish on every single lead, they are focused on the top of the funnel, and are responsible for setting meetings for account executives. By focusing on a much smaller part of the sales process, they can become much more efficient at it.
The SDR's scope is typically limited to qualifying a lead for the following traits:
A lead which reaches this stage is called a sales qualified lead (SQL).
Automating this means your top account executives can spend more time selling and closing, and less time scouting for prospect data, building campaign lists, dealing with mail management tools, and other tasks that are everything other than building rapport and closing.
A sales qualified lead (SQL) simply means that a prospect has been qualified as a potential buyer for your offerings, using your existing standards for (1) minimum prospect size, (2) territory, (3) correct contact, and (4) willingness to sit for a meeting with an account executive (AE).
A closed-won opportunity means that the prospect has fully signed and executed a contract, and you have a deal ready to be serviced.
Diplomat may bring in both, depending on your plan.
During your application, you'll fill out some information describing your offerings, ideal customer profile, your sales team (if you have one), and your closing process.
After you're accepted, you'll be given a link to your Diplomat instance, where you can see how Diplomat is performing. You can also add links to any sales collateral that's not already public on your site, which Diplomat should be aware of to answer questions from prospects.
Results vary based on the product offering, but most see set meetings (also known as sales qualified leads or SQLs) within the first week of implementation.
Closings vary by product offering, and have ranged anywhere from 8 to 55 days.
For scalable offerings like B2B SaaS, Diplomat automates the entire sales process, from outbound lead generation to closed won, automatically, at scale, with no human intervention. If a prospect requires something Diplomat can't yet provide, the deal can be forwarded to your account executives for closing at SDR rates.
For personalized offerings and consultancies like IT consulting or recruiting, more hands-on customization may be required to close, far beyond outreach, contract review, and signing. For example, in IT consulting, there often must be sales engineers involved in gathering specifications and requirements for a proposal of what's to be built. For marketing agencies who seek to sign B2C clients, your marketing advisors will typically have to customize a proposal for the client. Standalone SDR automation is available for these kinds of offerings.
So long as you're already engaging in generally accepted sales practices, Diplomat requires no training. It's literally automating what you should already be doing with sales development representatives (SDRs) and account executives (AEs), and integrating them directly into your sales workflow. There's still plenty of documentation and support available for you to use though directly in the platform.
We do not use your email servers. Email server optimization is extremely complex nowadays and even a minor misconfiguration or minor improper practice can crush deliverabiity and engagement rates. For this reason, Diplomat sends emails from our servers instead.
Diplomat does send notifications to you via email for sales qualified leads (SQLs) and closed-won deals. You can manage these notifications in your account settings.
If your plan includes channel conflict (see below), Diplomat will also need access to your sales team's inbound email to prevent channel conflict. This is typically done via IMAP and is a one-time setup per team member.
The most common pitfall is when sales collateral and product documentation are not regularly maintained. The tell-tale symptoms are information in collateral or documentation that's outdated, contradictory, or insufficient (not really fleshed out yet). If you're in this situation, you'll know pretty quickly, as Diplomat provides enough outbound volume that there's a wave of questions from prospects that need to be answered. It's extremely important for you to answer these questions, as Diplomat cannot just make up fake answers about your offering. In the case of outdated or contradictory information in your collateral and documentation, updates will be required. For information that's not yet fleshed out at all, you only need to answer these questions once, as Diplomat will remember the answers any time similar questions are asked in the future. You can answer them in your documentation, or answer them directly in the platform, but they must be answered or Diplomat cannot magically know the answer and you may lose the lead.
This is similar to how an in-house sales team would treat these questions, but significantly more reliable. With a human team, they also cannot answer questions they don't know the answer to, so they would ask the appropriate department. Typically what happens then, is they forward that answer to the prospect, while it's left siloed in team chat or email, never added to collateral or documentation. Even if it is added, most on the rest of the sales team never see the answer.
While humans forget these answers over time, or miss out on updates because of information siloes or limited due diligence, Diplomat just needs the answer once and it never forgets. Diplomat is just significantly more reliable.
Diplomat automates the entire sales process, from outbound lead generation to fully closed won deals. It's like having a sales team that works 24/7, never gets frustrated, never gets bored, never gets tired, never gets sick, and never forgets a lead.
For enterprise clients, Diplomat has numerous integrations available, from CRMs to webhooks, to make sure that your sales team is always in the loop.
Yes. Diplomat can take in and process inbound leads from both structured formats like APIs and webhooks, as well as unstructured formats like email.
This is one of the core features of Diplomat. You don't have to manage any lists or cadences. Diplomat just automates it for you via targeted discussions with prospects.
For set meetings, Diplomat can integrate with any major calendar standard including Google Calendar and Outlook.
Certain plans also allow for integration with link-based scheduling tools like Calendly, so that Diplomat works out set meetings (also known as sales qualified leads or SQLs) with prospects and scheduled directly onto your calendar.
Yes. Diplomat can handle negotiations in multiple currencies.
At this time, we only accept payment for our own services in USD.
You can do this a few different ways. The easiest way is to send an email of the list to one of our sales agents asking for the list to be explicitly included. Either paste the list directly in the email body or attachments in common formats like TXT, CSV, or JSON work too. Diplomat will then add those prospects to your outreach list.
You can do this a few different ways. The easiest way is to send an email of the list to our compliance agents asking for the list to be excluded. Either paste the list directly in the email body or attachments in common formats like TXT, CSV, or JSON work too. Diplomat will then ignore those prospects on outreach. APIs are also available.
If your plan includes CRM integration, and you have a do-not-contact flag in your CRM on contacts or accounts, Diplomat can automatically respect that flag and not contact those prospects.
Channel conflict is when two sales channels are competing for the same customer. This takes many forms, especially in sales automation. Here are some examples:
This means that if you have an active sales team, at a minimum, Diplomat should integrate with your CRM. Diplomat may also need access to your sales teams' emails and other tools to prevent channel conflict. Diplomat then handles these with cooldowns, opt-outs, and other methods, so Diplomat isn't reaching out with your existing prospects, current clients, recent rejected leads, and other channel conflict scenarios.
Any good salesperson is able to highlight what's better about each offering. Diplomat can too. Diplomat is not a ratings or rankings tool -- it's sales automation. Diplomat uses your existing sales collateral to answer prospect concerns, focusing on the highlights of your offering.
As for outreach timing, Diplomat usually does not pursue the same lead at the exact same time for multiple competing vendors. When multiple competing vendors are hitting the same contact, our data shows that the prospect is more likely to opt-out or ignore all, rather than picking one of the many who are pitching them.
For scaled offerings like most B2B SaaS offerings:
| Gold | Platinum | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accounts (Companies) | Closed Won | Closed Won | All Connections |
| Contacts (with Email Address) | Closed Won | Closed Won | All Connections |
| Email Contents | Closed Won | Closed Won | All Connections |
| Opt-Out Requests | All | All | All |
For SDR automation, personalized services, and consultancies:
| Gold | Platinum | Enterprise | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Accounts (Companies) | Set Meetings | Set Meetings | All Connections |
| Contacts (with Email Address) | Set Meetings | Set Meetings | All Connections |
| Email Contents | Set Meetings | Set Meetings | All Connections |
| Opt-Out Requests | All | All | All |
This data is available for export by API, by sync to CRMs, and granularly by email as they happen.
Closed won are deals which have been fully signed and executed, and are ready to be serviced.
Set meetings, also known as sales qualified leads (SQLs), are those leads which have been set with an account executive (AE) for a meeting.
Connections are unique email addresses and chains that have been contacted by Diplomat, and responded either that they're interested or not. Connections do not include emails that have bounced, emails that have not been responded to, redirections/referrals, or other non-determinative responses. Connections also explicitly exclude opt-outs that may be required by applicable laws like CAN-SPAM, GDPR, and CCPA, as they are handled separately.
Opt-out requests are requests to not be contacted again, and are available for all plans. These are automatically processed by Diplomat, and can be ingested by your CRM or other systems via API or webhooks.
In general, there are a few different types of information and data:
Your confidential and semi-private data is not intermingled with anyone else's nor is it shared or made available for anyone else. It may be processed by generative AI, but it is not retained by such generative models for production to third parties. In other words, your pricing discounts are not going to leak publicly through AI.
Diplomat provides an API that dumps opt-outs that you can ingest, as well as supporting webhooks and integrations to auto-populate opt-outs in most major email platforms and CRMs.
Diplomat operates in compliance of GDPR, particularly via Recital 47.
CCPA is for consumers, not businesses. Diplomat is for automating sales of business-to-business (B2B) offerings only, not consumer offerings. Diplomat does not collect consumer data. As such, Diplomat is not subject to CCPA.
Yes. You can control who has access to your Diplomat account. Each of your sales team members have their own login to deal with channel conflict, and your management team can also log in to see how Diplomat is performing.
Exact pricing is market competitive depending on the offering. What works for a small SaaS application isn't the same that works for a giant enterprise ERP outfit, and it's not the same across all industries.
For most vendors, set meetings of sales qualified leads (SQLs) have a fixed rate benchmarked to 7% of first year annual contract value (ACV). This rate is billed whether your account executive (AE) closes or not, just as would be the case if you were running sales development representatives (SDRs) yourself. When Diplomat obtains a closed-won deal, there is a 30% commission on ACV. ACV is defined as the annualized net contract revenue for the first year of service starting from the first date of client payment. Implementation commitments and platform minimums also apply.
For example, a B2B SaaS company that provides advertising technology services to third party publishers might charge 10% of gross. If Diplomat signs a publishing portfolio that generates $200k USD gross ad revenue monthly, the commission paid to the ad tech company would be 10% of that, or $20k USD monthly in net revenue. Diplomat is baselined to 30% of net revenue, so the monthly rate would be $6k USD.
As another example, recruiting engagements typically charge the employer up to 20% of the first year's salary for a successful placement. So if an employer pays a recruited hire $150k USD, and the recruiting fee is $30k USD, then Diplomat is baselined to 30% of the recruiting fee, or $9k USD per candidate.
We also offer bulk volume discounts for vendors who have a track record of consistently servicing a large number of leads. Discount breakpoints are at $6m and $24m ARR.
Some offerings are billed on different baselines. For example, publishers selling IAB format direct advertising sales are historically around 8-12% CLTV (not first year ACV). Any higher and you'd just be better off selling the inventory programmatically.
Payments are due net 30 from the end of the month in which the revenue is collected. If your clients have the option of paying annually with a discount, the full commission is due net 30 from the time payment is collected, not prorated monthly.
So long as the credit or refund is issued in good faith, in full, and within 90 days of the incident warranting the credit or refund, commissions will be adjusted accordingly. If the commission has already been paid to us, the next statement will reflect a credit on the applicable commission amount.
So long as the chargeback is investigated in good faith, and contested if it's warranted (or accepted if not), commissions will be adjusted accordingly. If the commission has already been paid to us, the next statement will reflect a credit on the applicable commission amount.
Due to the nature of having to train and implement a prospecting universe, as well as obtain intent data for each client, Diplomat does not offer a free trial.
We do however include multiple guarantees on our performance.
There's an initial deposit covering 3 months to get started, followed by minimum monthly billing, subject to the guarantees on your plan. The deposit is credited to those first months of service. After the initial deposit and ramp-up period, you're billed monthly.
For offerings with average MRR per client under $1k, ramp time may be stretched to 6 months, as significantly more volume may be necessary to ramp up the pipeline.
Think of it as being the next generation of hiring sales people. If you hired a human to do sales, you'd pay them a base salary and commission for the first couple months with little or no productivity while you trained them and got them up to speed. You'd probably pay them weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly. Unlike humans who typically take 3-6 months to train and ramp up though, Diplomat typically starts producing sales qualified leads (SQLs) in its first week.
Diplomat has rolling deposit requirements to secure payment. In turn, Diplomat also includes guarantees on closed-won volume and/or set meeting (SQL) attendance. The volumes vary by plan, but if we don't meet the guaranteed minimums, we'll credit or even refund you the pro-rata difference. We've never had to pay out on this guarantee, but it provides you that piece of mind.
Diplomat directly provides sales qualified leads (SQLs) and closed-won opportunities. Pricing is benchmarked against the cost of hiring a sales team to do the same work manually, but without any wasted management time, office space, training time, sales support, and other overhead costs associated with hiring a sales team. Diplomat also accomplishes this while also providing leads at full scale in days rather than months or years. To calculate the ROI, you would compare the cost of using Diplomat to the cost of hiring a sales team to do the same work manually, and then compare the results.
Even further, while stable and successful companies are frequently benchmarked to 30% or less of net revenue as their cost of sales, some companies are far above this. Diplomat effectively caps the cost of sales at 30% of net revenue (or less), so if your cost of sales is currently above 30%, you can immediately save money while growing revenue by using Diplomat.
Diplomat is built and maintained by Goliath Dynamics Inc., a Florida corporation in the United States of America. We're fully remote from the inception of the company, and our team is distributed across the world.
Goliath Dynamics Inc. was founded in January of 2024 by David Loschiavo, who entered sales automation back in 2013. The first precursor used last-generation NLP technologies and closed over $1m in sales in its first year. The technology today is significantly more advanced, and continues to improve every day.
David Loschiavo is a polymath, autodidact, software engineer, and licensed US patent attorney with over 20 years of business experience across software engineering, sales automation, product development, and the practice of law.
He really moves mountains in business, and can move mountains for you too.
Automation has always been a significant threat to the status quo for employees since the industrial revolution started in the 1760s. But this time, it's different. Today's advances in technology are a greater threat than ever to many. Companies are increasingly using AI and automation to replace entire classes of employees who never even contemplated that their job could be replaced. It was only a matter of time before it got out that some companies have seen employees attempt to sabotage automation efforts.
Look at the CEO of Duolingo, Luis von Ahn, who has been very vocal about how he "did not expect the blowback", as increasingly more employees were sabotaging the AI efforts at the company.
The companies implementing AI very successfully often don't want everyone to know about it.