Oliverlist sends 2M+ emails a month and streamlines scheduling with seamless integrations from Nylas

The B2B sales platform leverages Nylas’ Email API and Calendar API to create a scalable experience for its users and launch product features faster.

Oliverlist is a sales engagement platform known as the “all-in-one B2B sales machine.” Powered by B2B outreach experts, Oliverlist’s goal is to help sales reps close more deals by generating qualified appointments with prospects. Reps receive new meeting requests in their calendars and only have to pay for qualified meetings, which are generated by highly personalized and impactful email prospecting campaigns. 

Using a four-step process, Oliverlist helps users achieve more qualified B2B sales meetings by:

1. Defining the audience and target of users’ campaigns
2. Validating a series of cold emails with AI-powered sentiment analysis
3. Prospecting potential new leads
4. Generating business meetings for salespeople 

As an automated prospecting tool, Oliverlist uses email to send automated outreach from sales reps’ own inboxes. The platform also connects to users’ calendars so new business meetings are sent directly to them.

Challenge:

To power fully automated prospecting, Oliverlist needed a way to directly connect to its users’ email and calendar data to prospect on behalf of sales reps. This meant offering a secure email and calendar integration with all major providers without having to rely on third-party software. 

However, Oliverlist soon realized that building a single point of integration with email and calendar providers is easier said than done. The company needed to limit the time and resources it would take its development team to build these features on their own while remedying slow sync speeds. 

On top of that, Oliverlist wanted to ensure it provided users with a seamless experience to natively perform tasks like email outreach and appointment bookings within its platform. Being able to scale users in its platform without disrupting this user experience was a main priority.

Finally, when it came to navigating security requirements like SOC-2 compliance and the Google OAuth verification process, Oliverlist was looking for a way to lower the high prices associated with these security requirements and leverage the expertise of a trusted advisor.

Solution:

To provide seamless email integration without needing its team to build it themselves, Oliverlist turned to Nylas’ Email API. Paul Bouché, Head of Sales at Oliverlist, noted that the decision to go with Nylas was an easy one as no other solution matched their unique use case as well.

“The reason why we chose Nylas in the first place for an email integration was because it would be way easier for us to use your API than building it ourselves, and we really needed to be able to deliver fast on the product side,” Bouché said.

Leveraging the Nylas Email API granted Oliverlist a single point of integration connecting its platform to all users’ inboxes, powering bi-directional email with 99.6% deliverability and allowing the platform to natively sync, send, and receive emails on behalf of Oliverlist’s users.

When it came to calendar integration, Oliverlist first turned to Calendly. However, using Calendly created a disjointed experience where Oliverlist’s users had to set up their own Calendly instance outside of the app and configure this with their own calendars. On top of that, the fact that changes made on the user’s calendar were not notified in Oliverlist via the Calendly API led to many appointments being canceled. The consequence of this was a revenue loss of 8% due to Calendly’s API not reflecting some changes.

To solve these pain points, Oliverlist decided to switch to the Nylas Calendar API to build a secure, seamless calendar integration and synchronization. Oliverlist users can now create and connect their agendas seamlessly to the Oliverlist platform to ensure appointments are set up properly, reducing cancellations and no-shows. “It was much easier for us to be able [to build] that from a single API,” Bouché noted.

Lastly, Oliverlist leveraged Nylas’ Express Security Review (ESR) to expedite the Google OAuth verification process for their application at a much lower price. Instead of tackling this confusing criteria on its own, Oliverlist relied on Nylas’ expertise to secure the best possible rate and timeline for verification.

Results:

Building email and calendar integration with Nylas drastically reduced the amount of time it would’ve taken if Oliverlist did so on their own. Nylas enabled Oliverlist to go to market significantly faster, empowering the company to:

• Launch email features 10x faster than planned
• Deploy calendar features 4x faster than planned

Oliverlist now sends around two million emails a month across its entire user base. Bouché credits this high user adoption to Nylas’ smooth authentication process.

Additionally, Oliverlist can now manage its security requirements more efficiently and cost-effectively. “The first time we needed to make our application verified [with Google], it was super long and painful. It took us almost four months,” Bouché noted. With Nylas, that process was cut in half.

In the future, Oliverlist hopes to explore Nylas’ scheduling frontend as a way of putting new features into production faster. The company also intends to leverage the optimization capabilities Nylas’ APIs provide, with specific interest in processing link tracking data to optimize the time emails are sent from its platform to reach more potential prospects for users.