Distrobird triples sales productivity by helping B2B teams manage all their sales workflows in one place

With the Nylas Email API, the Distrobird platform supports a core sales communications channel 4x faster using a third of the resources

Distrobird is a compound startup that aggregates the different workflows sales teams need across channels (email, phone, SMS, forms, etc) to provide a unified go-to-market platform that significantly increases productivity, and reduces the sheer number of sales tools reps have to juggle on a daily basis. 

In its mission to reduce the complexity and overhead of the traditional sales tech stack, the product team at Distrobird quickly realized that in-app support for email communications would be imperative to ensure revenue teams could manage the entire sales lifecycle in a single platform.  

Challenge: Unifying disparate communications channels 

Distrobird began as an SMS communications solution designed to help reps deliver short-form, synchronous messages to their customers. But Taiwo Oyeniyi, Distrobird’s Chief Technology Officer, knew that sales teams relied on a variety of tools and channels to engage prospects. “Our customers loved our intuitive, scalable SMS offering,” explains Oyeniyi. “Almost immediately, they began to ask us to expand our channel support to offer email and voice.” 

To support omnichannel sales campaigns, Distrobird’s customers would need to select separate vendors for each channel and build resource-intensive, custom integrations to ensure a seamless experience for both the sales rep and their prospects. “Each custom integration that your company builds is an added cost for your business. Instead of buying different technologies to do similar things, we thought: Why not create a platform that helps sales reps manage and track all customer interactions in a single place?” 

Solution: Selecting a fast and reliable contextual email API

Finding a solution that would unlock embedded email capabilities was easier said than done. “When we built our cloud-based phone product, we found hundreds of voice APIs that met our exact needs and allowed us to launch quickly. But when we got to email, we first only came across transactional email APIs that didn’t satisfy our use case for bi-directional, conversational email,” says Oyeniyi. 

Transactional APIs are great for mass, one-way communication (such as product updates or marketing offers) but they rely on third-party IPs to deliver messages. Contextual APIs, on the other hand, connect directly to users’ inboxes, allowing for seamless send and receive capabilities directly within an application. 

After briefly considering a time-intensive in-house build, Distrobird’s product team discovered Nylas. “Once we found Nylas, we didn’t consider any other product. A contextual email API was a perfect fit for our use case, giving sales reps direct access to their personal email inbox. Nylas gave us universal connectivity across all of our customers’ email service providers, including Microsoft and Google.” 

Results: Distrobird launches its email integration 4x faster 

The team used the Nylas Email API to build a single view of email conversations within its platform. “The integration took under a week to get to 80% completion, easily 4x faster than us building from scratch,” remarks Oyeniyi. “With Nylas, we launched our email capabilities using a third of the resources we would have needed in a custom build, allowing us to refocus on launching other business-critical features.” 

Using Distrobird, sales reps can view customer communications across email, SMS, and voice in a single, chat-like view. This view replaces cluttered, siloed inboxes and gives sales teams the information they need to effectively engage customers. Reps can work together as a team on inbound inquiries and automatically assign messages to the right reps based on context, expertise, or seniority.   

These features and more in the Distrobird platform are designed to help reps stay organized and cut up to 10-15 hours of manual administrative tasks from their workweek, tripling sales productivity. 

Additionally, working with Nylas expedited the time it took to ensure compliance with Google’s Cloud Application Security Assessment (CASA). “It was great to have [Nylas] as a trusted partner to help us secure our Google security verification. Working with our account team is awesome, it feels like they are always looking out for our emails.” 

Moving forward, Distrobird intends to further expand its channel support by building meeting scheduling capabilities with the Nylas Calendar API. “We see sales teams increasingly relying on scheduling tools to manage meetings and follow up with leads faster. We’d like to bring that channel into our platform to save our customers from having to acquire yet another disparate SaaS tool.”