81% of Buyers Already Chose Before Your First Call — Braydan Young, SlashExperts

81% of Buyers Already Chose Before Your First Call
What if the most powerful salesperson in your company is not on your payroll? What if they are already a customer?
That is the premise behind SlashExperts, the peer conversation platform built by Braydan Young, co-founder of Sendoso, the corporate gifting company that raised over $152 million, scaled to 20,000 customers, and became a category-defining business backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. After nearly a decade building one of the most recognized names in B2B sales technology, Braydan walked away, not because he had to, but because he saw a problem he could not stop thinking about.
In Episode 212 of the Localization Fireside Chat, Braydan joins host Robin Ayoub for a conversation about trust, peer validation, and why the traditional sales funnel is quietly breaking down.
From a Starbucks Cease-and-Desist to $152 Million
Braydan did not set out to build a gifting empire. In 2015, while working in B2B sales in San Francisco, he and a friend started sending Starbucks gift cards to prospects in exchange for meetings. The experiment worked so well that Starbucks noticed, and sent a cease-and-desist letter. Rather than shut down, Braydan flew to Starbucks headquarters, pitched the concept, and turned a legal threat into a partnership.
That pivot became CoffeeSender, which evolved into Sendoso, a platform that lets companies send personalized gifts, direct mail, and branded items directly from within their CRM. By integrating gifting into Salesforce, HubSpot, and other tools, Sendoso gave sales and marketing teams a measurable, scalable way to build human connection at scale.
The company grew from 50 employees to over 1,000 during COVID, as every company in the world suddenly needed a way to reach remote employees and buyers. Sendoso raised $40 million in Series B funding in 2020, followed by a $100 million Series C led by SoftBank in 2021, bringing total funding to over $152 million.
The Hard Years: Scaling, Layoffs, and Staying Human
Growth at that speed comes with a cost. When market conditions shifted in 2022 and the directive changed from growth at all costs to profitability, Sendoso had to make difficult decisions. Braydan speaks candidly about conducting individual phone calls with each of the 200 employees laid off in the first round, rejecting the industry norm of locking people out of their computers via email.
His view is simple: if you have to let people go, be human enough to do it in person or as close to it as possible. That philosophy shaped how he thinks about company building, and it carried directly into how he operates SlashExperts today.
The Problem That Would Not Let Him Go
Even at peak growth, Braydan noticed something at Sendoso. Prospects would visit the website, read case studies, browse the product pages, and then disappear. They were not clicking the demo button. They were going into communities, posting questions, and asking other users what tools they recommended.
The insight was clear. Buyers do not want to talk to sales first. They want to talk to someone already using the product. Research confirms it: 81% of B2B buyers have already chosen their preferred vendor before their first sales conversation, and 77% engage with non-sales personnel from their preferred vendor before any formal discussions begin.
SlashExperts was built to solve that problem at scale. The platform connects prospective buyers directly with a company’s happiest customers, on demand, with automated booking, CRM integration, AI-powered matching, and full attribution tracking. In Braydan’s words, it takes the reference call from the very end of the sales cycle and puts it at the beginning.
What Peer Validation Does to Pipeline
The results SlashExperts is seeing are not just anecdotal. When prospects have a peer conversation before or during a sales cycle, deals close faster. The company is also seeing deal sizes run approximately 10% larger, a finding that surprised even the team. The reason is straightforward: when a prospect talks to an existing customer, pricing comes up naturally. Customers tend to share a ballpark of what they pay, and that anchors the negotiation in a way that works in the vendor’s favor.
The platform tracks every interaction, from page views to booked calls to closed deals, giving revenue teams data they have never had before on what peer conversations are actually worth.
The Localization Industry Angle
Host Robin Ayoub, with over 30 years in the global language services industry, brought the conversation into a world Braydan had not yet explored. Language service providers face a version of this problem acutely. Enterprise buyers spend 12 to 18 months evaluating translation and localization vendors. The services are difficult to differentiate on paper. The most persuasive tool a sales team can offer is a reference call with a satisfied client, but that process is entirely manual, unscalable, and untracked.
Braydan’s response was immediate: the peer validation model fits that problem precisely, particularly the ability to offer not two or three references but an entire page of verified customers, filterable by title, industry, and company size, that a prospect can book directly without ever going through a sales rep.
Building Differently This Time
At SlashExperts, Braydan operates by a clear rule: before hiring anyone, exhaust every other option first. Can a software tool solve the problem? Can AI handle it? Can a contractor cover it? Only if the answer to all three is no does the company hire. He brought his founding engineering team from Sendoso with him, keeping the core lean and experienced, and has scaled go-to-market with two salespeople supported by a full stack of automation tools.
The result is a company that passed 100 customers faster than expected, raised $2 million in seed funding from Social Leverage, Touring Capital, and Veridical Ventures, and is building with the patience and precision that comes from having already done it once at scale.
For the Founders in the Room
Braydan’s advice to year-one founders is practical and earned. Entrepreneurship is lonely even when you have a co-founder and investors. Organize your day. Write down your ten tasks. Never stop selling, regardless of how large your team grows. And keep your first 20 customers close, because those are the people who believed before there was anything to believe in.
Watch or Listen
Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/_sJjgBl5cYU | Listen on Simplecast: https://localization-fireside-chat.simplecast.com/episodes/81-of-buyers-already-chose-before-your-first-call-braydan-young-slashexperts | Connect with Braydan Young on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/braydanyoung/ | Visit SlashExperts: https://slashexperts.com/ | Connect with Robin Ayoub: https://robinayoub.blog | Book a call with Robin: https://calendly.com/robin-ayoub/30min | N49Networks: https://n49networks.com