Will Allred
Co-founder and COO
Lavender
Will Allred is co-founder and COO of Lavender, the sales-email coaching product that scores and rewrites drafts so outbound feels like a one-to-one conversation. A career SDR and sales leader, he built Lavender around the belief that most cold email fails because writers do not know the customer — and that CTAs should start conversations, not force calendar links.
SDR craft before the product
Allred came up writing and leading sales development, learning that feature dumps read like marketing even when a human hit send. In a Mixmax interview his advice to first-time SDRs was simple: "know your stuff, and know the needs of your customers." Lavender can edit for clarity, he warned, but if the draft is only "I'm great, and check out all the features," the scores will stay bad — and should.
Building Lavender as a writing coach
Lavender sits beside the draft, scoring tone, length, personalization, and readability, then suggesting rewrites. The product thesis is coaching at send-time so every outbound email shows homework: "Hey, I've done a little bit of my homework, I have a general sense of understanding of what's going on and problems you might be facing. And I think I can actually help." That is the bar Allred sets for quality email.
CTAs that start conversations
On Mixmax he redefined the cold-email call to action: marketers taught conversion CTAs, but "Sales is a one-to-one conversation." Better asks include whether they use a tool like yours today, whether the problem is a priority, or whether making it easy would elevate priority — questions aimed at dialogue, not a booked meeting on the first touch.
On tough conversations while scaling
Asked about career challenges he half-joked "Can I just stop at 'Lavender'?" then named the personal muscle he still trains: pushing into tougher conversations with curiosity rather than assuming malice. "I've never come out of a tough conversation worse off than I entered into it." The through-line is sales craft encoded in software — empathy and homework first, conversion second.