About
I lead Agentic Prospecting at Salesforce. Previously co-founded Bluebirds — an Agent that…
Articles by Rohan
Activity
12K followers
-
Rohan Punamia shared thisSharat Agadi has put together a great one-stop-shop on Account scoring with signals. Check it outRohan Punamia shared thisThe Comfort Zone is Where Growth Dies!! I had recently published about the importance of getting an ICP model accurate as the foundation for doubling your ASP and launching revenue growth! Today I'm publishing and detailed, practical guide: The ICP Scoring Playbook. → How to identify the right data attributes — deal size modeling, firmographics, distinctive characteristics, and intent signals → Five scoring methodologies compared — with tradeoffs for each → A ready-to-use LLM prompt structure that any team can use to score their accounts in minutes. Upload your data, run the prompt, get a tiered account list back. Works with Claude, ChatGPT, or any LLM — directly actionable → A two-pass approach that solves the batch percentile problem for large datasets → An honest vendor landscape across ZoomInfo, Apollo, Clay, Coresignal, D&B, Lusha, and more This is built from direct experience building ICP models across multiple B2B SaaS companies. I'm also building an interactive scoring model for teams to trial soon — a tool where you can adjust weights, visualize tier distributions, and maintain your ICP dynamically. Stay tuned for that. Link in the comments. It's free. If you're building or refining your ICP model and want a thought partner, my DMs are open. #RevOps #SalesStrategy #ICP #GTMStrategy #RevenueGrowth
-
Rohan Punamia shared thisOutbound isn’t dead, it just became more challenging in a sea of AI-driven noise. Today we’re announcing Prospecting Agent: the relaunch of Bluebirds, now built natively into Salesforce. The problem is simple: your next best prospect is hiding across Salesforce, past calls, email threads, intent signals, ZoomInfo, and the web. But reps don’t have time to research and stitch all that context together every day. Now, Prospecting Agent does it for them. It researches your Salesforce data, past conversations, the web, and approved third-party sources to deliver a silver platter of prioritized accounts and contacts. Every prospect comes with the “why now” reason and relevant messaging. Reps just review and execute – right from where they already do work, Salesforce and Slack. This is the product we always wanted Bluebirds to become. And joining Salesforce just 7 months ago lets us bring that same startup-built product to thousands of GTM teams – with Salesforce-native workflows, security, governance, and pricing. Salesforce customers, this isn’t “buy an agent and hope it works" for 3 reasons... 1) Prospecting Agent set up is entirely in natural language so there’s no learning curve. 2) Customers like Perk deployed in 2 weeks, and now Prospecting Agent is driving 60% of their North America outbound pipeline. 3) You’ll work directly with the same startup builders behind Bluebirds, now inside Salesforce, to shape the future of agentic selling together. If you’re responsible for outbound, I’d love your feedback on what we’ve built. Check out the demo video below to see it in action. And to turn this on, reach out to me or your AE.
-
Rohan Punamia shared thisIt’s been 2 months since the Bluebirds team joined Salesforce — time flies! Going from 8 to 80,000 people is not easy. Some of our team members, in true startup fashion, have never worked within a large tech company before. I’ve been so impressed with the caliber of Salesforce’s M&A, integration, and Sales Cloud team. Countless people supporting and checking in on us daily. To founders thinking of an exit — consider post acquisition life in your decision, it matters more than you think! Thank you to Jordyn Alessi Ashton Kripalani Andy Firestone Cynthia Ha Annie Welborn Brian O. Cordelia Hsiao Hannah Pagán, Esq. Kristin K. Nikhil M. Carli Stein Claire Oxley-Barnes Peter Banis Kris Billmaier MaryAnn Patel and so many more. Photo is our team celebrating with Backstreet Boys at The Sphere in Vegas. 🪩🕺
-
Rohan Punamia posted thisAny SDR / BDR leaders in my network want tickets to Pipeline Conference in Dallas next week? Have a few extra -- would love to give them out!
-
Rohan Punamia shared thisExciting preview of what's around the corner with Bluebirds + Salesforce! Prospecting is all about knowing who to target and why now. But it takes too long for reps to figure this out, because they have to swivel between dozens of data vendors, browser tabs, and point solutions. This is killing outbound productivity. Instead, reps should wake up every week to a curated list of the best contacts and accounts -- all ready-to-prospect right in Salesforce. Can't wait to roll this out soon! DM me if you're interested in joining our pilot.Rohan Punamia shared thisProspecting is painful. Here's how to fix it... Imagine: You're starting your day instantly knowing if a high-value prospect is ready to buy. Agentforce found those signals, tied them to their previous interactions with your company, and validated that they're ready for outreach—right now. This is prospecting in the agentic era. Here’s how Agentforce shifts the game: 📈 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝗼𝗿𝗶𝘁𝗶𝘇𝗲𝗱 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁: Start every day with a prioritized list of the best accounts and contacts, all based on real-time buying signals. 🧠 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝘅𝘁 𝗮𝘁 𝗮 𝗚𝗹𝗮𝗻𝗰𝗲: Agentforce mines your CRM, call transcripts, emails, and web activity to find high-value clues (e.g., recent hires, funding rounds, past intent) and explains why the lead is hot. 📩 𝗔𝘂𝘁𝗼𝗺𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗱 𝗢𝘂𝘁𝗿𝗲𝗮𝗰𝗵: It translates complex research into a personalized email draft, letting reps review and send, rather than spend hours building lists. 🤝 𝗘𝗻𝗱-𝘁𝗼-𝗘𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗮𝗴𝗲: The agent seamlessly moves from prospecting to inbound, greeting website visitors, answering questions, pitching products, and booking meetings. 🚀 𝗦𝗰𝗮𝗹𝗲 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻: Instruct your agent in natural language to research, find ideal contacts (even those not yet in your CRM), and take actions like drafting emails or pushing alerts to Slack. 💡 𝗡𝗼 𝗟𝗲𝗮𝗱 𝗟𝗲𝗳𝘁 𝗕𝗲𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗱: Autonomously follow up with prospects who abandon your site, using behavior-based personalization to turn missed opportunities into new leads. This is how Agentforce can cut up to 50% of prospecting busy work, giving your sellers a calendar full of qualified meetings so they can focus on closing. Watch the full Sales Keynote on Salesforce+: https://sforce.co/4nezlwX
-
Rohan Punamia shared thisThanks to Andy Wang and Finta for writing a bio on our founder journey!Rohan Punamia shared thisIt's a lot harder for startups to raise a Series A today. But when you have founder-market fit and traction, you have options. Rohan Punamia and Kunal Punera were growing Bluebirds month-over-month and had to make the tough decision of between taking a Series A term sheet or joining Salesforce. Here’s the untold story of how they: 🔹 Realized they were wasting their time with small business ideas that couldn’t get big 🔹 Got questioned by Michael Seibel in their Y Combinator interview “What the * are you guys doing?”, forcing some painful truths 🔹 Got into YC, raised a Seed round from Lightspeed, but growth stalled shortly after demo day 🔹 Turned around 18 months of no growth after learning a unique insight about the market 🔹 Made the tough decision between Series A and an acquisition offer Read or listen: https://lnkd.in/gegJqbr3
-
Rohan Punamia posted thisThere hasn’t been an IPO in this category since ZoomInfo, and there likely won’t be a $10B company in prospecting tech. The players in top-of-funnel prospecting tech aren’t close and tend to stall out between $50M and $150M in ARR. Yet every B2B company in the world wants more pipeline. And they’re all willing to pay for it. There’s unlimited demand. The hidden constraint in this market is buyer attention. It doesn’t matter how sophisticated the prospecting tech becomes or how many BDRs a company throws at their market. At some point, most companies hit the same ceiling: a finite number of buyers with tiny attention spans to consider “new tools,” while every one of their competitors is fighting for the same sliver of attention. On top of this, software is becoming easier to build, markets are becoming more competitive, but buyer attention isn’t expanding proportionately. So where does that leave us for prospecting tech: - Customers have unlimited demand for pipeline, which is the core value prop for most prospecting tech. - But buyer attention in their markets is capped, and competition for that attention keeps rising. - Prospecting tech companies are building a better mousetrap, but they’re in a zero-sum fight to capture that scarce buyer attention for their customers. I have yet to see a technology that increases buyer attention. That would be extremely compelling. Until then, this is my theory for why there won’t be a $10B company in this category.
-
Rohan Punamia shared thisToday I’m so excited to announce that Salesforce has agreed to acquire Bluebirds, and together we’re doubling down on Agentic prospecting! From the early days of Bluebirds, Kunal Punera and I saw that outbound prospecting was getting harder, despite teams adding tool after tool. We always believed AI should simplify life, not complicate it, and built Bluebirds around this core idea. Bluebirds became the prospecting platform that reps never log into. Our Agents work behind the scenes to surface the best accounts and contacts directly into Salesforce, allowing reps to stay focused on selling. Joining Salesforce takes this ethos to the next level, enabling us to deliver an even more seamless, Agent-driven prospecting experience inside the CRM trusted by 150,000+ teams worldwide. To every one of our customers – thank you. Your feedback, support, and encouragement directly shaped the platform we built. Many of you took a chance on us, and I’m grateful we had the opportunity to deliver. To our incredible team – I'm so proud of what we've accomplished as a lean, ambitious, and scrappy group of 8 people. Your extreme ownership and focus impressed customers who often thought we were 20x larger than we are. And most importantly, we’ve had a blast along the way. To our investors -- Alex Kayyal Ivan Zhou Jared Friedman Ramy Adeeb Samit Kalra Aneel Ranadive Sabrina Hahn Eric Liu Godard Abel and many others -- thank you for believing in Kunal and I from day one. Your support and mentorship made Bluebirds a reality. There are countless others to thank – it truly takes a village to build a startup. I deeply believe that Bluebirds reflects the collective wisdom, ideas, and insights from every conversation we’ve had along the way. I can’t wait for the next chapter of Bluebirds to begin, and to move even faster towards the vision we’ve always believed in! 🐦🐦🐦 🚀🚀🚀
-
Rohan Punamia posted thisWhat if it was the AE's job to generate demand? Today, good AEs disqualify prospects in discovery when there's no compelling "why now," to protect their time. This is called "pipeline prioritization." But this means the entire sales team is constantly focused on low hanging fruit that's ready to convert, rather than cultivating and nurturing potential buyers. It puts all the onus on marketing to generate demand and nurture. Instead, what if you framed your Salesforce Opp stages around the buyer journey. Stage 1: Why do anything differently? -> Run strong discovery, highlight pain, and get the champion to agree that status quo cannot persist. Stage 2: Why us? -> Demo your product, show why you're uniquely differentiated to solve the problem. Stage 3: Why now? -> Explicit conversation on timing, build the business case, and close the deal. Your reps will spend more time pushing opps through stage 1 and 2. Yes, many will fall flat on stage 3. But there's a massive benefit: Your company will develop a vast market full of champions that know about your product and want to buy when timing is right for them. This translates to: - Higher yield on C/L resurrection - More inbound "boomerangs" - Stronger word of mouth as they tell peers All of which drives much lower CAC. Nobody does this because their SFDC analysis and Board will ask about the drop-offs on S1 and S2 pipeline and push the team to fix it, thinking that's the problem. But what if we're all missing the forrest for the trees?
Rohan Punamia commented on a post
4d
That's an insane story and jump!
Rohan Punamia replied to a comment
3w
Tyler Phillips Some more than others, but I also don't think of "Claude for Sales" as just a chatbot either.
The market is moving towards custom harnesses that get work done for you. Invoking via chat is one interaction model.
A poor execution of Claude for Sales might just be a chatbot. But I've yet to see a leading Sales harness that reliably does GTM work for reps. And to me this opportunity is similar to the companies I shared above.
-
Rohan Punamia reacted on thisRohan Punamia reacted on thisNowadays, I'm seeing less of "You're absolutely right" and more of "You're right". Is this a me problem or just cost-cutting from Claude? I find my self esteem to be in a precarious spot.
-
Rohan Punamia reacted on thisRohan Punamia reacted on thisOne of our students just sued the ACT. And won. This story is crazy. This awesome kid came to Leland after scoring a 19 on his ACT. He had high hopes for college and knew his 19 wouldn't cut it. So we found him an amazing ACT tutor and they got to work. After months of working together he went in to take the test again and scored... a 34 🤯 Not believing this was possible, the ACT cancelled his score. A 15 point jump, in their view, had to be fraud of some form. Honestly, I don't blame them. That's an insane jump. So their family took the ACT to court, and because the Leland tutor had detailed logs of them working together AND ample evidence of other massive score increases in other clients, they won. The score was reinstated recently, just in time for college applications. So awesome. Countless amazing stories like this happening with Leland customers and experts every week. If you have a kid applying to college or taking the ACT, reach out. Happy to shoot you the profile of this incredible tutor or find someone to help you navigate this process.
-
Rohan Punamia liked thisRohan Punamia liked thisToday, we're launching Monaco into General Availability. We onboarded several hundred hypergrowth startups during our beta. The results are staggering: The average customer added 16 percentage points to their month-over-month revenue growth rate. The average customer tripled their monthly meeting volume. With today's release, Monaco is now the most advanced AI sales platform in the world. Monaco customers have an unfair competitive advantage.
-
Rohan Punamia reacted on thisRohan Punamia reacted on thisThere are spikes in our lifetime. This is one of them. 👻 💜 Still remember the day Jay left LinkedIn to build Casper. Derek Gibbs coming into our lives months into moving to NYC.. Not a ton of words to describe the emotion today. Proud, excited, proud?! s/o to The Information breaking the story this morning.
-
Rohan Punamia reacted on thisRohan Punamia reacted on thisProud to announce that Casper Studios is being acquired by Ode with Anthropic! We started Casper as a curiosity. We wanted to learn about AI and see how we can use the technology to help companies, people, and ourselves. It’s since turned into something more. Our ambition has grown. And that is why we’re being acquired by Ode! Ode is the joint venture started earlier this year with Anthropic, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, Sequoia Capital, and others, led by Chris Taylor and Eddie Siegel. We’ve looked up to Chris and Eddie since we started Casper. Chris and I would trade notes about AI services. I always admired their energy; they are some of the best technical folks I’ve met. We joked that we should maybe join forces at some point. Can’t believe that’s now happening. What’s the high-level thesis on the partnership? Ode is acquiring Casper to expand its ability to support clients’ AI transformation from end to end. Ode goes deep on its clients’ top AI priorities, building production-grade applications for an organization’s hardest AI challenges. Casper goes broad, helping deploy AI across teams and repeatable workflows, mainly on harnesses like Claude Chat, Code, and Cowork. Following the acquisition, Ode will be able to address more of the customer opportunity without moving away from the complex, custom work at the core of its business. Thank you so much to the Casper team, all our clients, and all the supporters in our audience who have connected us with people and helped our company reach this milestone. It feels like the constraints have now been lifted. The future is quite literally unbounded in terms of opportunity. So excited about what comes next.
-
Rohan Punamia liked thisRohan Punamia liked thisSignals are overrated. And I'll explain it with how outbound works like finding product-market fit. Well, first off, you don't find product-market fit. It finds you. After founding my own company (and failing to find PMF) and building products at Apollo.io (some with PMF and some without), I can confidently say whoever I thought was going to find value in our product and who actually did is always different. The same happens with outbound. Oftentimes, you don't know who will respond. You need to launch multiple experiments, see who responds, and double down on those. Yet, using signals means you are prescribing a very specific way your customers show intent intent for your product - and oftentimes that is wrong just like thinking who will love your product. Second off, launch early and often. One thing I learned building zero to one is you don't know anything until you launch and people use it (or don't). And the longer you take to launch, the farther away you are from PMF. The beautiful part about launching is that is opens up luck surface area, meaning the market can find you. It's impossible to underscore how important this is. Same goes for outbound sales campaigns. You could spend hours, days, and maybe weeks building out the perfect list and messaging. Yet, you launch with crickets. It's important to get a campaign live and let the market tell you (in the form of email activity, website visits, etc.) who wants what you are offering and why. This is how you open up luck surface area. This generally is how I have been thinking about building our product at Apollo. Yes, we offer signals, AI research, scoring etc. But, my recommendation for most of our users is always: launch a campaign early with a general idea of your ideal customer profile and let the market tell you who to focus on. That's how you find PMF in our own outbound motion. With a tight feedback loop. Not an image in your head of who your customer is and a bunch of prompts. More on this soon with what we're launching at Apollo.io!
Experience & Education
Volunteer Experience
-
President
UC Berkeley Sigma Eta PI
- 3 years 5 months
UC Berkeley's Co-Ed Entrepreneurship Fraternity
Past Roles: VP External -
Senior Advisor
Net Impact Berkeley
- 2 years 10 months
Social Impact Consulting Club
Past Roles: VP External, Project Manager
Recommendations received
2 people have recommended Rohan
Join now to viewOther similar profiles
Explore more posts
Explore top content on LinkedIn
Find curated posts and insights for relevant topics all in one place.
View top content