Walnut CEO Yov Wilner is interviewed

In his early twenties, Yov Villaner ran a business that became the largest company providing growth marketing activities for technology companies in Israel, Manhattan and London, gaining 600 clients and expanding to dozens of employees worldwide.

After seven years as CEO, he became the founding CMO of a successful anti-bullying SaaS startup.

Since 2015, she has worked as a consultant and mentor to hundreds of startups. Yov Villaner was named “Tech Marketer to Watch” by Forbes in 2017, and he has been advising startups on Accelerators with Yahoo, Google, Amazon, Microsoft and the United Nations (UN).

Currently, he is the CEO of the trending startup Walnut, which you may have heard about, as it has been acclaimed in the media as “Top 3 Startups to See in 2022”, “Europe’s Best Startups”, “Hunt’s Products of the Week”. , “Top 50 Startups to Work” and more.

Walnut’s goal is to revolutionize the sales demo industry with its codeless platform that allows B2B companies to fully customize, optimize and manage their sales demos.

He has also written guest columns for CNBC, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Entrepreneur, Inc, Adweek, and The Next Web.

1. What inspired you to make walnuts? Why “Walnut?” Choose a name?

The name Walnut stands for the fact that showing your product in a demo is the hardest nut crack!

I created the company after running a 600-client marketing company almost a decade ago, where I noticed that most technology companies spend millions of dollars to get a chance to test their products – and often there are some failures.

My CTO, Danny, was on both the startup and enterprise side, where he first saw the problem of breaking the demo. We knew then and there that it was a time of revolution.

2. As a CEO, what is the most important lesson you learned from starting Walnut?

Things can happen fast, so be prepared! I knew we were going to solve a big pain point with this platform, but I had no idea it would grow so fast. We’ve only been in this business for 1.5 years, and we’ve already paved the way for a completely new landscape in technology, created a new division, and gained recognition from every major outlet.

3. Why do you believe product demos are the next big thing in B2B sales?

I believe that in a few years, people will make fun of the way you used to display your products. B2C sales have been extensively upgraded in recent years, where everything can be personalized and automated and you don’t actually have to talk to a sales representative. B2B sales fell behind when this happened, but now it’s catching on.

4. How does Walnut want to capture their sales experience for B2B companies through a game-changer, interactive demo?

Walnut’s platform is the first to allow technology companies to easily create, customize and analyze their entire sales process by emphasizing product demos.

Using an uninterrupted screen capturing process for your SaaS products and our overall team collaboration functions, using a 100% codeless editor (imagine Wix’s website editor), sales teams can ultimately sell better. It also sets the stage for product-led growth, as you can embed walnuts in your digital resource.

5. Shortly after your recent 35 million Series B funding round, you announced a new version of your platform, Walnut for the Team. Tell us a little about this, and what have you changed?

Walnuts were something that the market aspired to for teams.

More than 100+ technology companies have embraced Walnut as an integral part of their sales funnel, and we’ve realized that the time has come for them to do better as a team: collaborate, edit together, automatically create demos together and analyze together.

6. What has been the biggest success of Walnut since its launch?

It’s hard to pick a success, but I’d be comfortable to say that we have one of the strongest teams I’ve ever seen in a startup, and that’s something I’m very proud of.

Other successes will be that we have been acclaimed in various publications and media outlets, raised our seed A and B funding rounds in our first year, and have even been mentioned several times on Gartner’s blog.

7. What advice would you give to companies that are struggling to provide a positive sales experience to their customers?

Make everything personal and reliable! Boring, generic SaaS products that are forced to break during a live demo will provide a terrifying experience. Instead, create a personalized, fast, and non-stop process that will enjoy your specific possibilities.

8. What’s next for walnuts?

A lot has to be counted. Let’s set another interview for next year and see!