https://www.listennotes.com/e/299caa58d93e445c99fea4ef71023538

What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the surf and sales podcast. I'm Scott Lease here with my good friend and co host Richard Harris. We are brought to you today by Win AI. Always be winning close more deals by making your funnel faster, smarter and smoother. They've got automated data capture, seamless CRM updates, AI generated emails and streamlining all your favorite sales tools in into one. That's Win AI. How's it going, Richard? How are you, man?

I'm good. But more importantly, how are you? Yesterday, for those who don't know, Scott actually had to miss a recording, but it's because the pipes burst going to his pool.

So yeah, I have a lot.

Are you above water? Are you back above water?

I'm, I'm above water. I have a lot of first world problems going on right now.

The pool, are you underwater because of the cost?

I haven't even got the bill yet. But the pool pump broke, the water main line broke and my sauna is having issues as well. So I've got the, the trifecta of first world household.

I really do, man. I think everybody listening is feeling really bad.

Yeah. Which is a bold face lie as it does, as it should be. They don't need to film. They should laugh. They should laugh with me. Slash at me. That's the vibrate.

Yes.

Yeah. We are coming to you live today with a man who is the head of sales over at Comsor and I, I, I'm gonna say this with some confidence. He might be the top ranked poster right now on LinkedIn According to the surfing sales rankings. It's Eric Ianello. Welcome to the show. My man. How are you?

What's up guys? How you doing?

We're good.

Pretty good, man. Tell everybody real quick what the heck is Comsor and what do you do over there? So they have some, some context if anybody.

Yeah, Consor is shit. It's the future, man. No, it's going to be. Essentially what we do is we generate warm intros for people to generate pipeline to progress deals and to most importantly, cherish relationships.

Yeah, we're a big, big fan of that. I've been on the record for a number of years now talking about how relationship led referrals and affiliate programs and stuff like that is the best way to prospect right now in 2025 and beyond. So let's go back to the shit posting. I don't want to start, I want to start there. I want to.

We're just going to kick open the door, aren't we?

Yeah, I want to start there. You know, after a certain period of time, people start to develop this, like, brand of what they Talk about on LinkedIn or whatever. Was there something that happened that just made you be like, you know what? I'm just gonna be that guy. I'm just gonna call out all the stuff I see all the time, and that's gonna be my main thing. I'm gonna sprinkle some actual, like, you know, educational nuggets.

Relevance, mostly.

I'm just gonna talk about everyone and everything. How did you. How did you come to that decision?

Man, I got kicked in the shins hard when the economy turned right. And that's kind of when I went to, like, the. What I'm doing ain't working, so I gotta switch it up a little bit. And what I noticed was when I started connecting with other people and started to actually talk to the people who promoted themselves, who were thought leaders and, you know, had the best and tips and all the shiny bells and whistles they were full of, and a lot of them couldn't tie their own shoes. And so it kind of made me think that I'm like, he's talking about.

He's talking about you, Richard.

I know I might.

Richard and I earned our hairline, baby. Yeah. No, it's. It's in the sense that a lot of it was kind of this facade that I was a little naive to when I was reading the content and jumping into the LinkedIn world, but trying to drive my own content, be a thought leader, and, man, the shoe didn't fit right. And so I started sprinkling some humor. And then I realized people were starting to feel the same ideas and the same kind of shared, you know, if. I always say, if you smell a fart, shit's coming. They were kind of, you know, marching to the same beat. So with that idea, I started to kind of dabble down, and the more conversations I had, the people were like, yeah, man, that was kind of. That was. Are they serious? I was like, okay, well, I'll say what we're all thinking. And it just capitalized, man. It's a freedom of thought, freedom of speech, and at the same time, it's a lot of fun. And at the end of the day, is all I care about.

Yeah, it's a lot more. I think it is a lot more fun. There's kind of three pillars of content in my mind. There's the educational stuff, there's the inspirational stuff, and then there's the entertainment side of things, and. And your style to me is skewed heavily on the entertainment style. Although now because of what you're doing, you're start. I'm seeing a change. You're starting to actually start on the education side of things. So what, what made you sort of look around at the landscape of sales and tech and be like, you know what, this warm intro, referral based, go to network type motion, near bound kind of motion. This is the thing. Because these other things, you don't feel as good about any. What was the tipping point for you?

I got back to, back to back layoff and it was one of those consecutive points. It was three in a row and it was literally, it was over the course of about 12 months. I had three layoffs in a row.

Where, I mean, I'm sorry, how recent?

I was like company wise. Let's go, babe.

No, no, no, no.

What, what year was this? Like when was this happening?

Last year. Last year.

Okay, so this recent. Okay.

I'm still, I'm still, yeah. Nursing my wounds.

Still got some, still got some scabs. They haven't started yet.

This whiskey bottle was full yesterday, let's put it that way. But it's in the idea that, you know, each time that I, you know, let's fell, you know, found myself in my ass, I turned to one thing and one thing only. My network, right? Whether it was posting or just connecting or tapping on my network and being like, hey, this is kind of, this is my ethos, my thought, blah, blah, blah, it was doing the work for me. I mean, of course you would put in your effort, putting your foot forward, but it was really, it was the captivation of like, hey, your network is your net worth. As cheesy as that is, man, I'll preach until the day I'm six feet under. And it was one of those things that no matter where I was and what situation I was, nothing changed. Like you see other principles and foundational rules and other outreach methods, those are all change. But the thing that stayed the same, the common denominator that come off foundation, which is how we connected. It's always that network. So again, I saw the commonality, the common denominator. I might as well start selling what I've been preaching, what I've relied on. So watching others come to fruition with it, it's, it's, it's been a full circle.

So I want to dig in a little bit. You know, we'll get, obviously get to the humor, but let's talk about that pain of a year ago. Yeah, you're going from job to job. Right. Because I think a lot of people are still going through it. I think many people have been through it.

Oh, yeah.

You know, and maybe you don't have enough distance, right? I don't know yet, because it sort of takes some perspective time for. For that to.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

What. After the first layoff, Right. By the third one, you kind of get a pattern down, like, because I've been through that, too.

Yeah.

But after that first one, what would you recommend to people who are doing this now? Like, they're going through their first layoff in a year, not their third within 12 months. Right. Where you have your pattern. Like, how did you even start to figure out what to do? And what. What. What were your steps to that?

I. At that point, I already had a fantastic mentor, Adam J. Right. Like, I. I love. I love to say he's the guy. He's been my rock. He's my foundation guy. He's been there to help coach me because he's been not necessarily the forefront of the ideas, but he's definitely seen a lot of momentum shifts and be able to help coach me through it. So with that idea, I. You know, here I go again. I leveraged my network. I asked what was working, what was happening with people, where were the fall points? What have they learned? How can I do it within my own?

That's what. So. So. So that was. So you go through this layoff, and you're like, you know what? I'm gonna get super vulnerable. I'm gonna start talking to people and see how they got through this.

Is that what I'm hearing? Oh, 100.

Okay. That's. That's.

That was actually the turn.

Think about. Right?

Yeah.

That was actually the turn of when I kind of shifted my. My content because I thought I was going to be the next. You know, I thought, yeah, yeah, I was going to be the next Scott beast, except way more handsome. So it was one of those ideas that. It was one of those ideas that I was like, hey, I need to go to people who have obviously been through this, have done this, and been successful through this, because I don't know what. I don't know. And. And the common denominator was be yourself. Go out and treat it like a sales cycle. If you get a rejection, it's the same thing as a mismessage who can move on to. And it was the same idea of, like, show up and show off and continue stretching through.

Yeah. So I'm gonna. I'm gonna Ask this qu. I know the answer. I think I know the answer because I had to go through this. You get laid off, you go through the couple of days or maybe a week of the emotional disappointment. Did you need to structure your day to get through the day? And what did you do? Because I have my version of what I did. But I always love to hear because you can't look for a job eight hours a day, it's really hard to do that psychologically. What did you do? Maybe you did, maybe you pulled it off.

No, I'm like a German shepherd. I always joke, man, if I don't have something to do, I'm digging holes in the back. And that entirety was actually what brought me to this world of like, this early stage startup that I live, breathe and die by. And that's because I started doing it on a fractional basis. I'm like, hey, I could do some outbound generation for you all because I was good at it. I just needed a roof over my head, constant check, whatever that may be. And I found work through fractional leadership, outbound gen. And so I was able to find the little side projects to keep me busy while I was looking. It also helped because, you know, I got a couple bucks at the same time, so.

Right.

I was able to keep the roof up in my head. So the stress levels kind of sequinated a little bit, but. But, but, yeah, structure was key.

But what was your day routine? So, like, I'm getting really specific.

Wake up, drink. No, I'm just kidding. No, you can't tell.

Richard is all about the tactics. He wants to.

Well, I feel like people who are.

Going, the detailing guy, he's the detail guy.

People who are going through this want to know, like, what could I do so that I'm not alone, Right?

So I treat it like a sales process in the sense that I'd have my prospecting list, right? The companies I'm looking to get in with, I'd have my ICP Personas within it, who I need to reach out to, what type of information, what type of, you know, fun facts. The facts, the cracks, the impacts that I would actually serve to, that being me as a product that I'm selling. And then what's my approach? Everyone's using the same outreach method. So I would do something a little different. I would send selfie. No, not selfies. I would send videos of myself. I'd send videos of myself, like one minute beyond the resume. Kind of scared, like, hey, my name is Eric. I'm a redneck that's based out of Boise. And I would narrate that and try to just paint myself away from the thousand other applicants, then move on to the ones that I had in pipe of the conversations I did have. Right. And so then I would start focusing points around the already established interviews or the conversations that may have, or any pending points of, of of leverage that I needed to exercise. And then you go out and just grind, man.

I just.

Simple as that.

Did you grind it eight hours a day or were you like, you know what, I can only do this for like 9 to 1 and then I got to go like hang out with my, my kid or my wife.

Yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't know. I don't, I don't. It wasn't like a 9 to 5. I didn't treat it like that. Yeah, I mean it would certainly be like I would put in a couple hours, right. Maybe go shoot the. To your point, right? Because it's dark, man. It's dark. It's a rejection on a different level. I will say that. You know how much time and again.

Just because again, I want to come back to community, right? Because that's. Yeah, all three of us are about that. How much did you consider your time on LinkedIn during this time as part of your job search? Even if it was just connecting with people, right. Giving advice to other people, writing, posting, commenting. Because I want people to understand it's not just using LinkedIn for talking to the recruiter and help me find a job, in my opinion.

Yeah, yeah. I was like a 13 year old on Snapchat, man. I was, I was flipping addicted and in all the right ways because I knew where the success value was. I saw the light at the end of the tunnel, right? But it was one of those exploratory points of like, I'm also finding myself through this professional adventure or whatever you want to call it. But it really was like, hey man, you know, foots on pavement. Who are you going to be? Are you going to be the one that's looking for the sympathy, the empathy and the kind of handouts, or are you going to be the one that earns it and shows up and show off and then give it, give that adventure a middle finger? Like, look what I just became. Like, that's the kind of ideology that I came with it.

So I love it. Thank you. Thank you for letting me sort of grill and drill on you for that one.

So put me in the hot seat, baby. That's what I'm here For, but for.

For somebody that is working for a company and a platform that is all about this referral based kind of intros and stuff. Tell me what it's been like kind of eating, eating your own dog food, so to speak. I mean, you're the first head of sales hire that, that they've ever made to my knowledge. You're the one who's kind of evangelizing things on the sales side. Booking meetings, closing deals, presumably. Like, what is it actually like instituting this methodology from the beginning.

It's so, it's awesome. It's rewarding. I love selling a product that obviously the market wants, it needs and that people are adaptable to where it is. It's shocking also because where people are compliant or maybe I should say complacent on the idea of hey, this shit ain't broken, there's single digit success rates that they're not looking to go out. And course correct is where the shocking kind of points is. So I have conversations with, you know, sales leaders like ourselves who are like, oh yeah, I love my 5% connect. I got a meeting yesterday and I'm like, what the, are you serious? You know, and that's the shocking aspect of things. And so a lot of it, yeah, it's fulfilling. It's, it's, it's great. I love being able to come in and, and bring into the same fruition points that I've been succeeded through. But most of it's shocking, man. Most of it shocking.

Yeah, the, the, the shock is, it sounds like the shock for you is so much about inertia.

Yeah.

What, what can you talk to about some of the, the impact and the results? Because the reason I'm asking this question is because if you're a founding AE or a founding head of sales or just a founder.

Yeah, yeah.

For forever almost. The, the core struggle is like, how do I get from zero to a million bucks? If I can get to a million dollars of revenue, then I'm onto something and we can do all sorts of different things from there. And a lot of founders don't like sales and don't like selling. They're, they've never done it. They're not going to cold call their way to it. They don't necessarily want to email their way to it. Like I've been telling them for years now, this is a way, this is a path here to go zero to million. You don't actually even have to hire salespeople if you don't want to. If you can leverage these networks the right way. Can you talk a little bit like.

Yep.

About the speed of, you know, pipeline growth and conversion rates and sales cycle length and this type of stuff without giving away like intimate.

No, no, no. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I understand. I mean this is definitely, it's definitely not my first rodeo trying to go from a founder led to a sales LED motion. I think the hardest construct for that flip, and I'll talk it kind of in reverse statue is, is letting go of responsibilities. And I think that's going to be kind of one of these ideas of if you hired somebody to do a job, let them do the job. And that's been the great kind of brevity, let's call it that this opportunity with comsor and working with Mac has given me comparatively to other endeavors that I've experienced before. Now when we talk about success rate, we're implementing the idea of replicating early adopters into a repeatable process, be it through the replication of icp, be it the replication of the sales process, of where they've seen fallouts and of that idea where I found it interesting is the kind of baseline that we had or I had walking in, right. We had an idea, right. Everybody in sales can benefit from comsor. Well, too much data is bad data, right. So we had to narrow that down, test, reiterate, go back to the drawing board. And so having that ability has well, reduced my hairline. But it's giving me a lot more insight into how we're going. Not only going to go from 0 to 1, but but then 1 to 15 and then from 15 to 35 and then from 35 to 50. Well, 25 to 50, but you get my points. So that idea of the, of the trailing ripple effects have been kind of the foundation. Well, the driving ideas. So originally when we came in, right. We did it through a Go to Network Motion that Go to Network Motion has a high, high conversion rate. It was about 70% through that being constructed through a cold outbound comparatively to a warm intro. That 70% had a 45 conversion rate to actual pipeline. Then the actual pipeline converted down to about a 30% close rate. Now we're talking about the actual tangible metrics that we can go and improve based on fallout structures and where we can actually see what points we need to address.

That's, that's keeping in mind also it's a less painful process for all parties involved. Oh yeah, you're not going through the. Well, especially nowadays like the, the call reluctance, fear. Yeah, the. But do you think that seven Sequences and stuff like that. Yeah. It's a better experience for everybody.

There's the same level of call reluctance for that rep who's never done this before, where they're uncomfortable calling someone they know almost more than they're uncomfortable calling a stranger. Like we're in the circle.

Like we're in the circle in general. There's never been more call reluctance in my lifetime than right now for anything. To use the phone for anything. When was the last time you called one of your friends out of the blue?

I was about to say, for just like a mundane point. And then there's also that security aspect, the iPhone. I could silence any foreign numbers.

Yes. I try to call you up, but he never picks up. So.

Exactly.

Exactly that block.

But it's me.

We can't do me.

You know me.

I'm busy. I'm in the middle of stuff. And that. And that's the. That's the reality for prospects. But on the. On the seller side, like, you got. You got people who have come up in a sales world where cold calling doesn't work. They grew up in a way where they're not on the phone as much.

Yeah.

Then you know what I mean? It's just like, it's. Ask your kids, Richard, go pick up the phone and call some strangers. Even to the idea, if I said that to my kids, they would look at me like I'm insane.

It's even to the idea of predictable revenue. Right. Which is baseline on KPIs, equaling outputs or inputs equaling outputs. We don't have that susceptibility anymore.

Right.

We can't put in 100 contacts, put in 100 dials, expect one meeting that'll have a 30 conversion, which will have. It doesn't have that same process anymore.

And so people broke down a little bit. Yeah, yeah.

And so people are realizing that they need to adopt a power dialer or a parallel dialer and, like, hit a wider net. Let me get 450 dials. It's like, okay, what am I actually doing in this. In this outreach? And so to your point, right, Even to the reluctance of, like, the nuance of calling, yes, that is absolute. But then also to the process of building that relationship, building that rapport, which is about 20%, if not 40% of the first conversation piece in a cold call. I'm trying to build trust with you, Richard. I'm cold calling you, man. Like, I'm a good person. Take a meeting with me. Skip the line and get an intro. Right. Like, that's that's not arguing that it doesn't work. Oh, I'm arguing with people listening. I'm, I'm arguing.

I'm like, I, I'm just trying to sort of, you know, bring, bring it back to the, to that point of like how much easier, where's the call, reluctance, et cetera, et cetera. So, so what? So, so now let's, let's bring in our. Everybody's favorite topic. Right? Can you leverage AI with this go to network thing?

Man, that's a great question. Where are your ethics behind it? I say no, but again, people are looking for mainstream quick.

You know, I'm curious as to why you say no.

So my why is because I want to cherish the relationship. I want to. The. The point of a warm intro or a referral in whatever capacity, potato, potato. Is that I am taking the trust and relationship that you've built with that prospect and I'm going to leverage it to hopefully get an introduction. If I'm doing that at Mass through AI, I'm severing that point that I'm then leveraging.

But now let's look at it differently. I'm not suggesting you use AI to do the outbound effort for you. I'm wondering, can the AI help you with strategizing who to go after in your network? Right. How do you.

So we have, we have adopted that point and I don't want to plug COMSOR into this and. But if I do, you're welcome to.

We don't give a. Like.

Yeah. Hell yeah.

Okay.

So COMSOR literally automates all the nuance of that in that it manually scrapes or automatically scrapes the entire network so it could show you not only who you're connected to to, but how well you're connected to. So it shows the strength of relationship.

Right.

So where that, where that practical application of AI I think is in the mundane points that doesn't leverage relationships. Now to the point where you can't replace with AI is that point of human interaction.

Right? So now, Scott, I'm going to put it back on you because, you know, you think that AI should be able to do all this because we don't need the humans, don't need to talk to humans anymore. Right? Isn't that your philosophy?

Well, what I'm saying is all of that is going to happen whether I want it to happen or believe in it or not. And to be clear, I don't want it to happen. Just to be clear.

Okay.

I just think it is going to happen. I'M not the only one, by the way. A couple days ago, Goldman Sachs put out a report that says by 2033, 300 million jobs in the global economy will be displaced and gone.

Poof.

Because of AI and automation and robotics. For context, there's 346 million Americans in the country right now. So you're talking about damn near every American's job disappearing because of AI and robotics.

I'm so glad to be older than you so I can retire.

You might not have to. You might have to deal with it. You might not have to. Have to deal with it. So do I think that I should. Should be a part of, like, this intro and referral process? Absolutely not. I think it's disgusting to think about how do I automate all of my relationships. I have 119,000 followers right now. What am I going to do? Put an automation in that that sends a note saying hello to Everybody, like every 30 days to all 119,000 followers of mine to try to leverage relationships to get something. That's absolutely going to happen, by the way. People are probably already doing that.

It already can.

I'm just. I'm not gonna do it. I don't like it. Should it be a part of it? No. Will it be a part of it? Yes. 100. Because not everybody has the same, you know, viewpoint advantage point on these things.

To Tarek's point, where's your, you know, where's your ethics? Right? So.

But it's the same thing with, like, this robo dialing, right? Like that's so popular, right? Like Congress already came out and is putting bans on it. So you can't do B2B sales on a robo dial aspect of things. So then it kind of.

You can't have an AI piece on it. You can't have an AI.

Yeah, Robo AI. Yep, yep. You can't. You can't leverage that as a source of pipeline generation is, I think, what the specification is. Don't. Don't quote me on this for whoever's viewing. I'm not a lawyer.

Guess who they wrote an exception for them. Oh, yeah, sure. No, I know they did. I. I know they do because that's what they do all the time. Yeah, right. And there will be certain industries that are allowed to do it. It's. It's interesting.

There are so many gray areas. That's why I'm like, don't. Don't shoot the messengers. That's what my interpretation is. But to Scott's point, right, like, there already are Platforms out there that can automate it within clay, within your LinkedIn and all these things that. Yeah, but to what means and what end? Right? We're just repeating the same process, going, oh, I'm not gonna bang on this. Yeah, yeah, it's the same freaking thing. It's just, you know, rinse and repeated. So, you know, it's. I see in it where it becomes a report. Reciprocate. I can't even say the word anymore. I'm getting so worked up. It's the reciprocated process to where we're going to hit this fall point, hit that rock bottom, go back to the beginning and go, oh, my bad. Like, I think. I think that's where we're gonna hit. And.

Yeah, I can see that when we, on some level, we. We've hit that place recently with email.

I feel like we have.

Whoops, we killed it. This. We had this thing that was working and now we killed it.

Oops, now it's limping. Now it's like, oh, I love you. No, it's okay. Come on, come on. You know.

Yeah. Look, I. Look, I'm older than both of you, and I can remember when we didn't include emails as part of your outbound prospecting efforts.

That was me, too.

Right?

Yeah.

Like they didn't care because they couldn't track it in a machine.

Yeah, right. And.

And it actually worked better. Like, ridiculously better in terms of. You sent out 20 emails, you get four or five people to respond. It was so much easier. It was like getting a piece of real mail in the mail. You know, I think we're. I think who we had the other day said we got to go back to. Oh, what's his name? Who's Rebellion? Scott.

I was just thinking of Dale.

Talking about Dale.

Yeah. Crumpled letter. Yeah, Dale's crumpled letter approach. Right. I. I'm still willing to bet that's better than everything else, you know, but.

You can't track it where the KPI is. Richard, come on.

I don't. I don't know. Well, you know, that's how I justify.

My job on this.

Right? You use Sendoso, resend a bunch of crumpled letters to Sendoso.

There you go.

And then they send them out for you. Right. So look at all these sponsors we're going to go after today. Yeah, we're hitting them all up.

So they're getting, they're getting lots of clicks for free out of this.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Where do you go? Where do. Where do you go now? So how do you Scale what you do is it. If you don't want to use the AI and, and automations, which I commend you.

Yeah.

Or how do you, how do you expand?

You scale what you growth.

You're adding people and adding the people that you add need to have networks.

Yep.

Buddy, I got Scott, I got some scentsy candles I need to sell you and then I need you to sell to your friends downstream.

Ready?

I mean you guys talk about it a lot, right? It's that incentivization of what's in it for me. Right. So we obviously want to make sure that we complement the network that we invite in to participate in said outreach or you know, whatever you call it to then want to, you know, expand it.

Right.

We invite Scott in. Scott makes a couple extra bucks for the fact that, you know, that meeting held or whatever that motion may be. Guess what? He's going to go knock on Richard's story going, guess what, I just made some passive income because I'm sitting back and comsource poking in some, some pipeline through my network. You might want to check this out. Boom. Now comsource network just multiplied by Richard's upteen thousand connections and then so on, so forth. Then you can scale that network in the sense that you can start scoring it. So now I'm not looking at the mass quantity of it, but the actual quality. Who am I?

Yeah, that's definitely something that is coming next is the scoring of the network and the strength of the connection. I agree with you.

Stand by, baby. No, it's one of those ideas that it's the same ideology that people are, are basically preaching that they're doing right now. Like, oh, we're only doing one to one email sample. What you're doing is, is that you're claiming the one to one after the 400 that you sent to get that one. So rather than doing that, we're doing a reverse engineer of going great. You've got 119,000. 2,000 of those are in my ICP. Let's just focus on that. 2,000.

Yeah.

Now my conversions go up. So I'm scaling conversions rather than the latter. So two different points of that.

I love that. That's definitely where it needs to go. And somewhere lurking in the shadows, I'm.

Talking conserve so hard right now, like LinkedIn.

Somewhere lurking in the shadows is a LinkedIn killer. Somebody's coming after him.

I just want to know, Scott, on a scale of 1 to 10 and you can't choose a 7, right? Because that's the cop out.

I didn't know that. Seven to cop out.

Yes. Because it's not too egotistical. Yeah, I always do that. You either gotta choose a 6 or an 8. Right.

I always thought 5 was the cop out.

I was thinking the same thing. I was like middle tier cop out. Yeah. But I digress.

All right, so, so my question is, how frustrated are you that this is all the stuff you've been preaching for three years and you didn't build something?

Oh, pretty frustrated, of course. Yeah. You know, what are you gonna do? Some people are bolder than others. I'm a little bit of a chicken, you know.

Ah, come on.

No, I'm just, I take, I take calculated risk. I take calculated risk, but not, not, not big enough apparently, you know, I.

Mean, there are ways to go to capitalize off it, right? Like the same ideology. Just because one did it doesn't mean 15 others can capitalize on it. There's still a market for that.

I was gonna say it's not saturated yet, Scott.

Yeah, yeah, it's still green.

There you go.

Jump on in. Basically, let me tell you, I, I.

I think about it more often than, than you guys would even believe. Yeah.

Oh, I'm sure, I'm sure.

We get, we're getting towards the end of the show. We want to say thanks once again to our sponsor, Win AI Check them out. W I N n dot A I Usually at this point in the show, Eric, we say, how can we be helpful to you? Do you have any questions for us? So we turn it over to you.

Where do you see the market going in the sense of the need of an outbound versus a near bound motion? Do you see outbound being something that companies can capitalize on for the next 5, 10, 15 years? Or is it a slowly decaying method?

Great, great, great, great, great question, Juicy question. Lots of debates around this. I'll go first since I can see thinking, yes, I see it slowly decaying. I don't think that anybody can really make a sensible argument against that based on all the data that's out there 15 years from now. It's very difficult for me to imagine anybody is just like cold prospecting the way that we've historically thought of it. Sending cold emails and making cold calls and stuff like that. That's very difficult for me to imagine 10 years out. I don't, I don't think it's lasting that long, even five years. This is like the tipping point for me, you know, I think it will be a slow decay Faster in some industries, faster in some segments, slower in others. But, but the five year timeline, I can see people still clinging to the old tried and true methods, slowly decaying, leaning more into other stuff over the next five years, 10 to 15 years. I, I think that outbound sales as we've known it will not look the way that it does at all. What do you think, Richard?

I, I think yes. And I think we're, to a certain degree, we're just exchanging buzzwords, we're just exchanging outbound with one mental mindset. As you're describing being one certain bound as this other thing. When.

Yeah.

When in reality nearbound really is outbound, it's just a better process. That person still doesn't, you know, if, if I go to Scott to get him to introduce me to Eric, it's still cold to Eric.

Yeah.

As a receiver of the, of the, of the request. Right. So I think we're just changing buzzwords. But I think the def. I think you said it, Scott. The definition of outbound will be a very different definition because we will have become more comfortable with this near bound approach. Right. I think the one thing where I think some level of cold outbound will always exist is a, in that SMB market. Right. If you're selling to real estate agents or your Yelp or something like that, you're still going to have to call that solo store owner. Right. To a degree. Now you can get smarter with the technology, you can get smarter with some introductions and stuff like that. But I think there will always be a very small element of the SMB world. I also think as something totally new occurs, people will gravitate. Like if, if you bring out, you know, some new technology. Right. There is a way that you're still going to cold outbound while also still doing near bound. But again, to Scott's point, five years from now is the tipping point. I think there's a little bit of time left and certainly in tenure. Like I'm looking at it from our kids perspective. So in 10 years, my oldest is 26, almost 27. My youngest will be 25, 24. So it'll be interesting in 10 years. What that's like 15 years it's gone. Yeah, I think traditional cold outbound feels that way.

Yeah.

You know, you know, it's just interesting on how, how you see all that stuff, you know, Riley, I had a conversation with Riley, my oldest, last week. Like he doesn't check his emails and it's driving me nuts. And I said, okay, I understand you don't check emails, but the rest of the world does. And you need to get with the program until the rest of the world changes too, you know, because he's, you know, he's got all this school stuff going on. Like, now he'll email within the school platform to his teachers, but he won't go check his Gmail account. Meanwhile, Scott is going to. To the USC film thing this summer. Like, well, have you heard from him? I don't know. I'm gonna check my email. Like, what? You know.

I even went and cleaned.

I even went and helped clean and unsubscribe a bunch of stuff out of his inbox so he could start getting to inbox zero. So.

That. That lasted stuck.

Yeah, we'll see. I need to go check.

So, Eric, other than following you on, on LinkedIn and, and listening to the comedy as well as a little bit of education, where, where can people find you? How can they get a hold of you if they want to learn more about Comsor and go to network stuff?

Man, I'm on LinkedIn. I'm a solo kind of person. I don't have social media. It's not like that. But if they're ever out in Boise, knock on my door. That's how we do it.

Easy. Idaho in the house.

Yeah, if you happen to be in Portugal in October, we'd love to see you there.

That's a long way from. From Boise.

I think they make planes, though. I think they have planes to fly to Boise.

Yeah, maybe they do.

Actually, that's debatable. Our flights, we have maybe like five terminals in our. In our central hub, so it's debatable, but I'm sure, I'm sure we can hop, skip, and jump over there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, everybody, we want to thank Eric ianiello, head of sales at comsor and thank you all for listening. We'll see you next time on another episode of the Surf and Sales podcast.

Bye, everybody.