gtm.ventures webinar - 100 leads, 10 closes

Hello everyone. This is the first of many webinars we're gonna do on a weekly basis. Me and Emiliano and our partner Sunny, which is watching, we're running a company called GTM Ventures. We created a system to bring an unholy amount of leads to B2B AI companies. Precisely the title of this one is 100 leads per month and you close 10. So Today I'm just going to share my screen through a couple of systems that you guys can implement. We're going to take questions at the end. The goal is just to teach you everything we know. Obviously it's hard to do that in less than 20 minutes, right? These systems, they took me more than 10 years to personally discover. I've been in sales for 15 years in total. I've managed 1,000 salespeople and Over the year, maybe I can show a quick glimpse of my LinkedIn, but I've started a bunch of agencies, right? My name is Charles Cormier, by the way. I'm CEO of the company. And I've tested like so many company concepts throughout the year, right? Like I've been running a lab, an experimental lab in which I test an offer with a product, right? You can go on my LinkedIn, but I started anything from call center to Google Ads agencies to Facebook Ads agencies. I came up with one conclusion around 2022, and that was that cold email was the shit, basically. It was so good, right? You could send a bunch of cold email, good cold emails, of course, personalized cold emails, and get a whole bunch of replies like no other channels would yield, right? Like LinkedIn outreach is limited to 20 connects a day. Calls obviously don't work, especially post-COVID, right? And ads, you need to pay a lot of money for something that's not so predictable. Same for SEO, AEO, right? It takes a very long time and normally we don't see the light of day on the other side. But I came down with this cold email system that would yield something for my clients. But something happened around 2022. You wouldn't see results anymore around 2022. Everything would go to spam. And at the same time I started a podcast. I was super curious, right? About the podcasting game. I've been listening to the OGs in podcasting like John Lee Dumas, Andrew Warner that I had on my podcast, by the way, throughout the years. And I was like, why don't I start my own podcast at the same time? I'm a sales guy. I combined the cold email with my podcasting approach and all of a sudden my emails wouldn't go to spam. Who would flag as spam a cold email asking you to come on their podcast, right? No one. So you get the best of both worlds. You get scale and you get acceptance to a $100 million offer, like Hormozi would say, which is a podcast invite because all humans want to be listened to. All humans, they love when you give them something before you ask them something. So what you get on the other side is an unholy amount of leads, right? So I created this system that brought me this calendar here. It's pretty insane. Like that's the end result, right? Like that you get here. It's a whole bunch of meetings. I'm getting anywhere from 10 to 15 a day and anywhere from 10 to 20% of that will convert into leads, right? So the goal today is to show you like how I got there. Why this is the holy grail, right? And how you could apply it on your end and try some stuff, right? So let's start with the basic, right? Like when I tell you like cold email stuff, what am I talking about here? Talking about mailboxes, right? Like in cold email, everything starts from the mailbox, right? So you need to warm up the mailboxes. You need to have a whole bunch of them. And you need to make sure that deliverability happens. Because if nothing delivers, then you're podcast invitation will go to spam, right? What does the podcast invitation look like? It looks like this here. So basically we create sequences on instantly.ai. This is a tool that will aggregate pretty much everything. And the campaigns look like this. The mailboxes, they don't sound like anything, but they're very technical, right? Like our mailboxes, we use our proprietary tool here at GTM Ventures to create these. It's a combination of Good old cPanel, SendGrid to send from SMTP. So SendGrid's API. We create all of these mailboxes at scale with aliases and with alt domains, we call them. So basically this one's for one of my podcasts, right? So for clients, we tend to buy 5 of them and create 20 bellboxes. That's 100 mailboxes in total. And all these mailboxes are warming. And if one is in danger, then the other one takes over, right? We also don't burn mailboxes. Like, that doesn't ever happen. The competition will use Outlook and Google mailboxes, which don't make any sense. They all go to shit sooner or later. After we're done creating this infra, like I was showing you here, we create emails that have authority, that are well-written, to invite people to our podcast, right? And our podcast, mine is called Founder Wisdom Podcast. It's for founders, obviously. I have another one that's called CEOism Podcast. I have one for VCs that's called VC Wisdom Podcast. One podcast per ICP. For my clients, it's usually just one podcast, right? But in my world, you need to target your ICP in a very, very precise fashion, right? So once you came up with the podcast name and the angle of the podcast, mine is specifically go-to-market and fundraising, which also happens to be what I do professionally, right? Like the services that I offer. You add the leads to the campaign. The leads, they come from all kinds of places, but Instantly, Apollo, LinkedIn scrapers, Clay, right? Like the leads come from various sources and we need to validate them because if the email is not valid and it bounces, then we kill the mailboxes and the whole operation goes to shit, right? So, We add all the leads here and then the sequence sends to these prospects. What you get next is a whole bunch of replies from these people seeking to be on the podcast, right? We've got a couple here. You can see the link here that the AI sent. So we create AIs for clients to reply to their messages and people Book a call on this link. It's a pre-interview link. It's 15 minutes. It's incredibly important. Why? Because at the same time that we're qualifying them for the podcast, we're qualifying them for business as well. We do both at the same time, and then we're pretty obsessive here at GTM Ventures about what questions you're asking them, right? The quality of your questions will determine your destiny and your bank account, basically, right? Like. Bad questions yields bad answers, and it's pretty much everything when it comes to qualifying people. So I asked them who their ICP is. I asked them about their MRR. This is one of my favorite questions here. Why? Because first, they're willing to share their MRR. It shows that they're transparent. They're willing to show their numbers and grow, right? But right after here, I'm asking them, what's your expected MRR? Which is telling me that they're growth-minded and that they're excited to go to the next level, right? There's a bunch of lifestyle entrepreneurs out there that don't want to grow. That's not for me. That's not for us, right? Like business is not going to happen. But you can ask any qualifying question that would be good for business. So for example, today I had an AI company that certifies chief AI officers, right? So first you ask them if they have a chief AI officer to the CEO of the company, right? Then You ask them if they care about AI, if AI, they are dedicating a strong part of their budget to it, right? And is it urgent and so forth so that we can band qualify them? So we're not only qualifying them for the podcast, like all these calls here, they're sales calls, right? Like these are, I don't view them as podcasts. I view them as sales calls. Of course it's good content, but we don't create podcasts for fun. On here for content, for bullshit, for subscribers, and for pie in the sky stuff, right? Like we create podcasts for cash. I have a sales background. My number one skill as a CEO is like creating systems and being energy efficient. And there's no better system that I've created over the years. There's nothing I'd rather spend my time on than talking to all these people and converting them not only for sales, but also for partnerships or for investors, right? So this is incredibly scalable. This is incredibly powerful stuff that we're doing here. This is the link here. They fill in this information and then they get translated into the calendar here, or transferred, should I say. These are the 15-minute calls here that are in my calendar. Then I do the pre-interview with them. I'm asking them some Similar questions. I reiterate on these answers. I'm asking more questions about their answers, and I'm qualifying them again for the podcast and the sales calls that inevitably comes after the podcast. I'm going to get to that. But if they're qualified, I'm taking this 15 minutes here, and I'm pressing find a time, and I'm finding a time, and I'm stretching it to a 30-minute call, which is the official podcast. Right? And then I book it. Once I do the podcast, the podcast is still going to be about GTM, fundraising, growth. I'm still qualifying them as we go, right? So it's a beautiful system. So every day I'm getting pre-interviews. I love pre-interviews because in like 6 minutes I can know if they're good or not. If they're not good, I'm not leaving them empty-handed. I'm actually asking them like, hey, do you want to go on another show of mine, which is Spark Tank show, it's 5 founders pitching 5 VCs, for example, or Sales Tank, which is another one of my shows, right? So I'm not leaving them empty-handed, but I'm like, hey, let's not spend 30 minutes together. I don't think this is worth my time or yours, matter of fact, right? And also, this is qualifying people for my podcast. If you want to have a visual on my podcast, by the way, It looks like this here. It's a YouTube channel. The podcast is streamed on LinkedIn. It's streamed on X, which is the destinations I recommend through StreamYard, the tool that we're using right now as we speak. And just to finish off on the podcast, right? So this guy, for example, I'm going to have the podcast with him and then 5 minutes before the time is over for the pod, I'm going to be like, hey, You told me this on the podcast. You told me this in the questions, right? Like you obviously have a need for GTM and for scaling your system. Should we book a follow-up call and talk about like the, an actual system that could scale your leads to 10 a month, from 10 a month to 100 a month, right? And just make sure that you're not always like running after leads or you're not struggling at the end of the month to know like who you're going to close, right? Like this is the system we designed to them. So the pitch comes like in the last 5 minutes and then I just drag and drop them. So I get like a very high acceptance rate from the podcast to the follow-up call because I qualified them so much, right? And by this time we spent 45 minutes together. We're friends basically. So this guy, for example, is an example of a pod, right? That converted to that. So it's a follow-up call. It's a follow-up call and then we're going to fully talk about implementing that system on the call. I gave them 45 minutes. Now they give me 30 minutes of their time and it's up to them to listen, right? And see if I can have something for them. My close rate on these will be 10 to 20%, right? On our website, we have a page to calculate like the full ROI and we have like a full funnel showing you what that looks like. So everything that I told you about, right, today, You can go on this link, by the way. It's in service and podcast lead gen. The number of invites I sent, how many convert into interested replies, the pre-interviews, right? Probably 50% conversion rate. How much convert into book podcasts? So there's like an 80% qualification rate of like pre-interviews to podcasts. And then from podcasts to sales conversation, probably Here in this example, we have like a 50%-ish conversion rate. My conversion rate is 80% there. So all of these steps can be tweaked and increased with time. It's pretty exponential. And that is equal to 12 clients a month. And that is equal to $37K MRR added per month is probably what we're doing here. There's the ROI, right? Because we cost something as an agency, but you guys can check it out and do the math here. Without further ado, I'll just stop talking. I'll have Emiliano on stage. Maybe Emiliano, you can relate your experience because you were a customer of mine and then I onboarded you as a partner because you were so good. And maybe you can share also like other case study and also your— how you would understand the system and pitch it to prospects.

Great, thank you. No, I'm glad to be here. And I think everyone or most of the people here we've met through the podcast, right? Either via Charles or Sunny and And I myself also went through that process and saw the magic, and hence I'm sticking with it as I'm seeing so good results, right? So yeah, long story short, I'm founder CEO of Raíz. We are a Techstars portfolio company that focuses on hospitality, fine hospitality, and started collaborating with Charles last year. And as mentioned, we saw the magic of the system in action. So I want to share a bit more of the results that we've seen and also the results that we've been able to get to partners both across fundraising and sales. And what we've understood is that many people as us and as yourselves, be it founders or investors, we are tackling similar challenges, right? Sales or funding, those are the most common bottlenecks. And the key piece to unlock these are relationships. And this is what the system has allowed us to really crack, right? So this is an unfair advantage to unlock business relationships at scale. So I'm gonna quickly present my screen here and want to show you a bit of the results that we've been able to get and are we talking about. So you're seeing the engine behind the conversations, right? So Charles just went through the motions. I think he made it look a bit simpler than it is, but there's a lot of technology behind that, right? And the way that we were able to make these results happen, right, such as, yeah, $16 million in term sheets, a lot of conversations with NASDAQ-listed companies also. Podcast appearances and guests on his shows. This is all through the refinement of the systems that Charles just mentioned before, right? And just to drive the story home, and I'm sure you've got it, but the podcast is the leverage, right? So everyone can run cold email outbound, but if we match it with a podcast element, that's where the magic happens, right? So this is where we're seeing the really overlap and the results in terms of open rates, reply rates, and all the way to conversion because it's a different kind of conversation and of authority that you have once you're speaking with your prospects. So hopefully a few of you that are already almost on board will experiment the power of this, but you'll see how the conversation shifts between trying to sell someone and beg someone towards you actually qualifying them for your podcast, right? So even If you're raising capital, which I have, you're then in another position with the investors that you're raising from, or if you're selling to a high-end hospitality lead, in my case, again, you have much more credibility and we're able to help you refine that and really work through the infrastructure, not only on the cold email outbound, but also on the website, on the StreamYard, on the YouTube angle so that you basically can jump in and have these conversations. I mean, this is a real calendar. Many of you know Sunny, he's been having like, yeah, 20, 18 meetings a day. We don't expect you to have that volume if you don't want to, right? So it's, uh, don't get scared. It's not necessarily that that's gonna happen, but the potential is there, right? So we've seen this system in action. Of course, the offer has to be sensible and it has to be attractive, and we'll help you fine-tune that. Of course, you have to have solid fundamentals But if you're raising, we can help you get in front of investors in volume, right? This is some of the partners that we've worked with quite successfully in terms of leads, conversations, and even term sheets, right? If you are selling, we can help you refine the angle in terms of your ICP, your show, how you would do it. I think one important thing that we've been seeing with a recent customer is Not being afraid of getting the ball rolling because you don't have to have the podcast play and everything ready before you start shooting invites, right? So we can work as we go. The emails warm up, the conversations start flowing, the pre-interviews start flowing. Again, we can help you set that up and that filter and even take some of the pre-interview calls with you if you so wish. But that can start building up as the momentum and your ideal guests start coming through until you have all the infrastructure ready to really host your podcast, right? So no need to be afraid in terms of having everything ready and pristine before jumping in, because as Charles mentioned, it's not about becoming Joe Rogan. If you want, again, we can also help you make it happen, but it's not about that, right? It's more about creating qualified conversations. that will turn into business results and a calendar such as this, right? So yeah, that's what we wanted to share, all the process. I'm gonna share as well here because again, this is not for everyone, right? We know who this works for, we know who it doesn't work for. I think plenty of the people that are here, it does work for that. That's why you were invited, right? So we'd love to have a scope and alignment call to really understand which ICP you're after, how we can attach this, attack this either on the raising side or the selling side or even both. So I'm gonna drop here my link on that, but we've built a system that compounds. We've experimented ourselves and we're looking forward for you to see it in action too. That's it on my end. I think we would open for Q&A and would love to have the conversation.

Yeah, I'm just gonna bring everyone on stage here. You can decide if you want to ask a question. We have Mark, Arlene, Gary, Max, John. Any questions from everything that we've discussed? They don't need to put the camera, but yeah, if you wanna drop them in the chat or drop them here, we can cover them live on this call.

No questions.

No questions, all clear. Uh, Gary, Mark, Arlene, Fernanda, John, any questions? Or— because this is pretty complex, right? This has a lot of moving pieces. So I mean, it may be a lot to take in, but you know, like, to sum it up, um, if you've tried CELS before, if you've seen like how difficult it is to Get a prospect to accept your call, especially if you're selling to enterprise, for example, or people that are already successful or busy. This system is like the holy grail, right? Because you give them an excuse to accept the first call while they would never accept it otherwise, right? So any questions or should we close this off? I think John's there as well.

Hey, hey, can you hear me there, Charles?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What up, John?

Hey, good, good to see you, man. It's been a while.

How you been? A long time. Yeah, yeah, came back from a retreat, right? Emiliano was there actually in Oaxaca and, uh, had all kinds of insights. Uh, what about you, man?

Uh, I'm just, you know, doing the normal grind, but I'm switching markets. I'm going up— I was in SMB, um, and now I'm going to mid-market enterprise. And I'm actually, uh, we've been building out our cold campaign for emails, but now we're And I've been— I've already done like 40 podcasts, um, uh, from everything I learned from you. And I started like 3 years ago, you know, and but I never implemented it. So now I'm like, oh, I gotta get this damn thing done 3 years later. And it's working. Like, I can get access, and I have 22,000 contacts on LinkedIn in my niche.

Wow.

So, uh, yeah, anyone who's listening, like, I mean, Charles knows this stuff, uh, very well, and I've been trying to replicate it. I'm close, but I mean, it's— he's got the experience. Like, the one thing about the, the pre-warm-up calls, just, uh, phenomenal. I know another version of that too is when you book that second meeting, that other— and Charles, one thing you can test out too, that second meeting is how are we going to market the podcast? So you're gonna set up a marketing podcast, you know, a call, because then they get engaged as well.

Yeah, I love that. Yeah, let's add that to your funnel, Emiliano, even like who's gonna share what, right? So no, I dig that for sure. Um, maybe one part we didn't talk a lot about is like after the podcast, right? Like, John, do you have like a funnel after the pod? Like what happens to make sure you actually close The guests into clients?

Um, I, I not formalized, but my VA helps with it. Um, and we built out like a LinkedIn CRM, our own, that, um, so we can track everyone that we're doing outreach to and we can then hit them up because we know when they're actively engaged on LinkedIn on something. So we use Claude against our LinkedIn CRM to find out, hey, they're talking about this, then ping them with email and a DM. To see if we can get them on the podcast. So super relevant, intent-based.

I love that. Yeah, you, you have me thinking. Uh, yeah, there's definitely like, um, the— from the lists, you know, that we built for clients initially, like your LinkedIn network, we can just like export that full batch, right? And export people you're already in touch with and just like reach out to your existing contacts for your first podcast because Sometimes when clients launch a podcast, right, Emiliano, like the zero-to-one phase, like finding the first guest so that we can convince other guests to come on, that part might be a bit frisky, right? So usually asking people you know, CEOs or founders you already know to come on is a great funnel. Hey guys, this webinar is ending in 3 minutes. Any other questions we should cover before we— Emiliano, anything?

Or any example of any ICP or any skepticism around it working? I know it can be hard to wrap your head around, but it definitely makes sense. Yeah. One thing on the follow-up process, and we've also mastered that, and Sunny has really good automations around that. Basically, we also give you the tools in terms of AI and note-takers, etc., that allow you to then extract the meaning and the most valuable things and provide value, right? So I think one key thing in terms of this angle is that we are matching the engine to give first, right? So the full philosophy is provide a spotlight, give first, And then you'll see how it's very easily reciprocated and it's very natural to then have a sales conversation because you're actually helping them solve something that they've told you that they need, right? So, Yes. Yes, you'll see the magic in action, but we leverage both the human angle, human psychology, but also technology to help accelerate this and automate it. And just make it, make it work very streamlined.

Yeah. This system, guys, is so good that like leads that I get from AEO or SEO or referrals, I prefer the podcast leads nowadays to these because I start the prequalification process so early that I know that when I step on a follow-up call with them, we're warmed up. They already know about my service, right? VS AEO, they might have checked like a couple of pages and impulsively sent something and they're comparing my solution to others, right? So it's also such a different quality of lead in your full scheme. Even if you're still doing SEO ads and all of that, it's still a super intriguing quality of lead, right? And something that is predictable, right? Like I think the dream as a business owner is to have optionality, right? And which is like all these meetings in my calendar. Like when I look at all of these meetings, I'm seeing options, you know, I'm seeing like, oh, I can choose who I'm actually going to work with, right? I can choose who's going to buy from me. I'm not going to work with someone that is energy consuming and just doesn't get it, right? I can choose. And the other dream as a business owner is to have full control on that system, right? So if I feel like I'm doing too much, which I am nowadays, like to be frank, like 10, 15 leads me and Sunny are doing a day, I can slow it down. And by the way, I won't slow my cash down because I can just ask more qualifying questions on this interview link to make sure I get a higher quality of leads so that I get less, but I get higher quality at the end of the day, right? This system is like full control. If we want more results to feed our other sales rep, we can just add more mailboxes, create more campaign, add more contacts. It's a fully scalable system, right? So guys, with this, maybe we can have Sunny to close this off. Sunny, any parting words?

No, none.

I think you guys did a great job.

And yeah, I guess just the main thing is just book that some time with Emiliano and we can talk to you guys about next steps.

Yeah.

Yeah, most of you already have an offer or a scope that Charles and/or Sunny sent. I can help take that forward with the link I sent here on the Calendly, and I know we did speak about a sweetener there for attending the webinar, so make sure to mention that and I will move forward.

Thank you guys. Thank you all for tuning in. That was the first