How Manuel Medina, CEO of Outreach.io, Grows His Company at 20% a Week

And when you're really small, sort of, you know, these high risks actually make you stronger.

Do you want to impact the world and still turn a profit? Then you're in the right place. Welcome to Growth Everywhere. This is the show where you'll find real conversations with real entrepreneurs. They'll share everything from their biggest struggle to the exact strategies they use on a daily basis. So if you're ready for a value-packed interview, listen on. Here's your host, Eric Siu.

How many of you have experienced making a bad hire or had bad hires on your team? I personally lost over $840,000 on just one bad hire alone. So that's why I'm doing a free class called the 5 Secrets to Avoiding Bad Hires That Can Cost You $50,000+ Each. All you need to do is to text BADHIRE, spell it out, B-A-D-H-I-R-E to 33444. That's double 3, triple 4, and you'll be registered. I'll see you there. Hello everyone, and welcome to this week's edition of Growth Everywhere, where we interview entrepreneurs and bring you business and personal growth tips. Today we have Manny Medina, who's the CEO of Outreach.io. And Outreach is a tool that helps automate sales tasks and frees you to sell more. And I'm a happy user of Outreach, and I would highly recommend it to people that are in sales. Manny, how are you doing today?

I'm doing well. I'm doing well. How are you?

Good, good.

Thanks for joining us. We'd love to hear a little more about your background and how it got you to where you are in terms of outreach, and then we'll go from there.

Yeah, absolutely. So when we were— we had a previous startup that was in the recruiting space, and one of the things that we noticed was that in recruiting, it's very important to follow up, but to follow up and sound human every time you talk to a person. And recruiting is the business of matchmaking between 2 entities, an employer and a potential candidate. And you have to sound human, but you also have to be very diligent about, you know, being out there in the communication and following up. So we built a tool that allows recruiters to sort of scale that communication aspect and remain and retain that human touch. So as we were sort of building that out, we realized that this tool is actually more efficient in the sales realm, meaning you can now, as a salesperson, you can go out and touch as many leads as you can while sounding natural, while sounding genuine, and continue to follow up with those leads until they convert. And that's why— that was the impetus behind Outreach. As we sort of step back and look at the At the whole sequence of touches that you have to do for getting a lead or an inbound lead or an outbound lead all the way to conversion, you realize that it's all communication and it's all communication and automating that, those as much, as many pieces of that communication sequences are what's gonna differentiate a good team from the bad ones.

Got it. Okay. Yeah. And for us, I mean, follow-up has always been a pain, right? Even though we use tools like Boomerang and things like that to bring the emails back, you still forget to follow up. So I mean, with outreach, just from personal experience, You know, I've been able to get our SDR responses to, you know, 15%, which is pretty decent. And in some cases, I mean, when we do like these interview requests, you know, 35%, and in some cases even 96% too. So this is all a testament to Outreach and it's all about the follow-up. So appreciate what you guys are doing. Do you want to talk a little bit about the, you know, the team at Outreach? I think you guys have a unique perspective on that, right?

Yeah, so it's interesting. Thanks for asking that because we are at a core, we are a product team. And one of the things that we spend a lot of time going through are sort of the details of the day-to-day operation of our customers. And our customers, what we have found out is that every single sales team is unique in the way they do things. Some of them are very bent on using email and automation and hitting a lot of leads. Some others are very bent on being very manual and tactical and sort of using automation only when it makes sense. So, we endeavored to build a tool that sort of addresses both. And the only way you can do that is if you have a team that is absolutely dedicated to sort of product and user experience and make that the best. So, the team is actually comprised mostly of engineers. So, it was only later in our lifecycle that we brought on salespeople and that we brought on And then we sort of started growing the customer success piece. But at the end of the day, our team is mostly around sort of building a beautiful product and then being as responsive as we can to our customer needs. One of the things that we pride ourselves on is that we actually have 3 releases per week and most of the issues we resolve within hours. And it's mostly because our team is just super focused on making the tool the best tool out there.

Now, what does that mean exactly to have— what are the implications of doing 3 releases per week just from someone that doesn't have a product-focused background?

Yeah, so what that means is that you are setting up— in the development world, just like in the sales world, you have sort of a cadence of development. And what you try to do is you sort of try to bite big projects, but you also try to have intermediate releases for those big projects and interim releases of the large sort of undertakings. So having 3 releases a week, that means that the site literally gets updated 3 times a week. You may not see it, and what you will see is a little, you know, icon popping in the top saying, please refresh this page. What that means is that a new release of the software was put in, and it could be a bug fix, or it could be a feature. It could be like a little thing, like a lot of people request little nits in the template language, or in the way you track something else, or, you know, some icon is looking a little weird, and, you know, The ability to please those little requests go a long way. You know what I mean? If you come in and be like, you know, I wish that this thing was on the left and not on the right for these 5 reasons, we look at it and if it makes sense, we'll do it right away. You see what I mean? And that will leave you highly satisfied because now you feel like you have a hand at the product and the customers feel like they're very, very deeply bought in and part of sort of the team, if that makes sense.

Got it. No, I have to hand it to you. When I reached out to you guys, you guys were super responsive and the situation was even elevated all the way to you and you responded personally. So I think that personal touch definitely helps in terms of getting more advocates. So appreciate that.

Yeah, absolutely.

In terms of number of users today, I mean, where are you guys at today?

So we have over 180 orgs, meaning accounts, in our system. We grow that number about 20% every week. And it's a combination of about 80% outbound and 20% inbound. Funnily enough, we actually don't have a big marketing and that's why we flew under the radar for so long. We are mostly an outbound engine, but we get a lot of referrals from our own customers telling their friends that I'm using Outreach, et cetera.

It's funny. I just shot 2 people your way and they've been sending me emails raving about the product. So that's just testament to how good— I mean, till this year, I haven't heard of Outreach till just recently. Yeah, I think a lot of big things, I mean, 20% growth week over week is insane to me. So, I mean, what did you do exactly when you first started out to acquire, let's just say, your first 10 customers?

I did a number of things. So, my first step, I geek out a little bit on sort of prospecting tools. It's a thing that I sort of, you know, I spend a lot of time thinking about. So, my first move was to, after we got a— we went out and we of did a lot of LinkedIn prospecting. We used Toopher and others to sort of start guessing emails, et cetera. But then I met Jason from DataNice. And when I got DataNice, DataNice allowed me to do rougher cuts based on technology. So for instance, one of the things that stand out the most about Outreach is our ability to have bidirectional sync with Salesforce. What that means is that you can update Outreach can update any field within the lead or the account, etc., in Salesforce when something changes. So if you reply, I can go ahead and update the lead status and say Eric has replied, moving forward to the opportunity stage. So because of that, it allowed me to go in and sort of sort out like, you know, all the Pardot users because you know that if you have Pardot, you have Salesforce, and if you have Salesforce, you're probably a good customer for me. So I started using DataNice extensively and that allowed me to sort of be very targeted on the sales stack that a particular customer was was using and sort of make a pitch that accommodated that stack. So that was sort of my first big prospecting tool was actually DataNice. After that, there's a lot of people in the Bay Area that do prospecting for a living and the ability to sort of either buy lists or exchange lists or just hustle it out allowed me to sort of get a hold of a bunch of a bunch of really high-quality names and companies, etc., that sort of made the bulk of our outbound efforts. And going forward, we're trying to look for partnerships with people who do lead generation for a living because our products are relatively complementary. We're not in the lead gen space, but we provide tools for you to sort of grow your lead gen. So that's sort of how we're thinking going forward. We're going to grow our Yeah, that's so smart.

And I think this tool doesn't just apply for sales. I mean, it applies to people that are maybe even agencies out there that are looking to promote their content. Whatever it is that requires follow-up, I mean, this is it. So I think you've come up with a great name around it. But I don't think we've really outlined— we've kind of skidded around it, but what is the ultimate benefit of outreach, just so the audience is crystal clear on what it does?

Yeah, so the outreach allows you to sort of put your cadence, define what your cadence of touches is going to be and put it in rails and sort of put it in a track and then see the performance of the cadence as a cadence, not as a series of templates. So when you want to sort of optimize and automate the number of touches that you're going to be doing with a particular set of prospects, outreach is by far the tool that gives you the most efficiency and B, it gives you the most insights. And mostly because the online A/B testing allows you to quickly determine how a template or a piece of language performs within the sequence. The second thing is that it allows you to see the differentiation between manual and automated emails, right? So if I'm able to— or manual and automated touches, for instance. So in Outreach, you can create a cadence of touches that includes both automated follow-ups and manual follow-ups such as, you know, go and connect with this person on LinkedIn, go send this person a tweet. Go and craft an email that inserts some pieces that are relatively new and relevant to the particular user set that you're talking to. So that has to be scientifically driven, meaning the effort that you put into creating a manual step has to prove with some kind of reply rate ROI, if it makes sense. So Outreach is the only tool that allows you both the entire full suite of automation And the ability to sort of measure the manual steps as part of your cadence. I know it's kind of long-winded, but I get excited when I talk about it.

No, totally makes sense. And I think for marketers, this is especially exciting because marketers are so used to using email autoresponders. So this is exactly like an email autoresponder, but just for outbound purposes where you can A/B test, everything's crystal clear, and you just have that automation. You're putting people through the funnel over and over until they respond. So again, for me, I mean, I've tried the other tools out there. There's nothing out there like this. I mean, it is a crowded space, so I think that is the differentiator. The fact that you guys have these features.

And it's getting— the interesting thing is it's getting more crowded by the day. When I was at SaaStr after I met you, a guy came up to me and said, are you from Outreach? And I was like, yeah. He was like, hi, I'm about to compete with you. I'm like, well, welcome to the space.

What company was that?

Seligy. Ah, got it.

Cool. So, wow, that's amazing. I didn't even know there's more players in this space. Okay, well, cool. You know, I mean, my testimonial is, you know, you guys are clearly ahead and I've tried the other ones. So good job there. So, you know, I wanted to ask you a question. I mean, you have an MBA from Harvard and, you know, a lot of people, you know, the Mark Cubans of the world, the Valley, they're like, yeah, you don't need an MBA, blah, blah, blah. So how has that MBA, especially from Harvard, helped out?

It has helped out in more ways than sort of what meets the eye. So, I mean, the reason why you go to a very good business school is not so much because of the knowledge per se. I mean, you will have access to top quality faculty and you will have a lot of exposure to other things that you may be interested in. But at the end of the day, you go there because it's a self-selecting pool of really interesting people. My class had not only bankers and consultants, just like any other class does, but it had a mayor of an Indian city.

Wow.

I was going to say city in India. It had a politician from Egypt. It just had a number of very, very fascinating people that sort of give you a broader perspective on the world. The second thing is that Harvard in particular sort of like takes a particular approach to the way that they teach, meaning that they put a lot of emphasis in leadership. And I know leadership sounds like a big, you know, kind of like wishy-washy kind of word, but they do put a lot of work into like, you know, how do you lead teams, kind of like, you know, what incentives look like, and a lot of things that are, you know, sometimes overseen as part of the core curriculum in an MBA program. So I think that the most important takeaway from going to HBS was sort of the connections and the experience of being there among very, very smart people. It gives you sort of a degree of humility that is hard to grasp outside of that environment, if it makes sense.

Got it. Cool. So it really is— I think it's the quality of the people and the network that really opens things up for you, right?

That's exactly right. That is precisely right.

Okay. It kind of reminds me of the SaaStr conference where I've actually never been to a conference where the quality of attendees was so high. So something similar to that.

It was ridiculously high. Like, I felt like I was among brethren. Like, I wish that the conference was 3 days just so that I can get to talk to every single person in that room. It was unbelievable. Like, I'm, you know, props to Max, Al Schröder, and Jason for putting it together. It was awesome.

Yeah, just so the audience knows, you guys should all go next year. I think it's gonna be either in March or February, whatever it is exactly. But yeah, that's not to be missed.

I was actually writing a little post that I'm— it's been delayed, but I was writing a little post how I actually met my, you know, my competition in flesh and bone there. So, I met Daniel Barber from Tout and we chatted and exchanged views on the market. I met Puyan from Persist and met Kyle from Salesloft. And these are real people with real problems and we're all in the same boat. And we're all trying to make the category a category. You know what I mean? Sales automation is still kind of nascent and it's very infant. So, and at the end of the day, we're all trying to sort of help the same customer type. You know, we're all here to help the salesperson be better. Each of us has a different approach to it. You know, Kyle is a very, you know, very smooth and very successful salesperson and, you know, he's very respected in the sales community and Tout has just been around for a while. So, you know, to see what each brings to the table was very, very interesting and telling. And sort of we'll also sort of give you a forecast on how the tools will evolve going forward.

Interesting, interesting. Yeah. I don't know. I just, I was kind of blown away from it. I mean, you walked by and we just met. I mean, that's totally random. And you walk by, people are talking about churn. So yeah, I think it's good learnings for everyone. I mean, you're getting ideas even from the competition too. So that's amazing. How often does that happen, right?

Exactly, exactly, exactly.

Right. So backtracking a little bit to kind of the beginning of Outreach. I mean, can you tell us about one big struggle you faced while growing the business?

Oh yeah. So unequivocally, the biggest struggle was getting reply detection right. And that's a technical challenge and I'm going to try to make it not as boring, but the reply detection is a bit of a challenge because— so there's 2 ways to do it. You can do it the way Yesware and Sototau do it, which is you have to rely on a pixel being open for you to detect the email coming back to you. The other way to do it is— and there are some shortcomings in the way you do that because sometimes the pixel doesn't get open. And if it doesn't get open, then you don't detect the reply, et cetera. And the browsers, especially Gmail, is getting very, very aggressive around not displaying images. And that prevents the pixel to trigger. The other way to do it is to actually go to the server, meaning you authenticate into your server with Outreach the same way you would use your phone to authenticate. And that's what was really hard in general for us because email uses a protocol called IMAP, and IMAP has been around forever. It's probably as old as the internet, the email protocol. And Gmail has taken it in one direction, and Microsoft Exchange with Outlook has taken it into a completely different direction, creating what it is. It's actually 2 different protocols. And the problem with the IMAP protocol is that it's asynchronous, meaning it's IMAP. Email itself is a document with a header, a footer, and bodies, and a bunch of other header information that can come to you in any order. So it's not that you can open up in raw form, you can open up an email and the email will always display the same way that it was, the way it displays in your email client.

Hmm.

To a computer, it will look like a bunch of stuff that just came in randomly. So for you to interpret that email and recognize that email as a reply to a previous email, you have to be able to parse it relatively quickly without getting confused on what the header or footer information is. I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's sort of the basic challenge of reply detection.

Kind of makes sense. I don't have a technical background, but I kind of get what you're saying. So at least if a non-technical guy kind of gets what you're getting at, then I think it's okay.

Awesome. So it took us about 6 months to get that to work just right, and we had to code it 3 times. So the first time we tried to assume that all the emails are the same, that was wrong. The second time we assumed that the emails weren't the same and that got us a little further ahead. But then the third piece was that email encoding, meaning the character in the emails itself that determines whether this is a reply or not, changes from one service to the other. And that took us a while to get right. So now we are probably the only service out there with the probable exception of RelateIQ. That has, you know, we probably miss 1 out of, you know, 5,000 replies in terms of reply detection. And, you know, it gets better every time we catch another one that gets through.

So what about the industry average? I mean, okay, you guys are 1 out of 5,000, right? What is the typical average for the other guys?

I don't know, to be frank. We like to estimate that the other guys are missing about 10 to 20% of their replies.

Huh.

And that's mostly because whenever we have an account that we're trying to land and they're using either Yesware or ToutApp, the main complaint is that, is that they're not able to automate follow-ups because the follow-ups are liable to slip through the cracks. And follow-up automation is one of those things that you either do it or you don't. I mean, there's no such thing as halfway automation because if you have to check emails to see if they reply or not, then you have to check every single email to check if they reply or not. You see what I mean? And that prevents you from scaling.

And I hate that.

Yeah, exactly. Because you never know whether the reply was caught or not. And that's just like, that gives you an uneasy feeling in your stomach that it's just not cool.

Got it.

Okay.

So now I definitely understand. I mean, you guys are ahead, or it seems that you guys have this automation down because it sounds like you guys have beaten the technical challenge. You guys are ahead of the curve there. So my question would be in terms of hiring a technical team, I mean, what are some secrets you can share around building such a strong team?

I think the first secret is that our co-founders are developers. So, we have 4 co-founders out of which 2 are developers and the other one is Andrew, who is our product guy. And he understands development to a very deep level. And I'm a former developer, so I can sort of get what they're doing. So, I think that's sort of the DNA of a company is made of the co-founders. You see what I mean?

Yeah.

So, you can see the companies are sort of an extension of what the co-founder is. If you look at Salesloft, for instance, Salesloft Cadence is a— you can potentially say that it's sort of like an outgrowth of Kyle. You see what I mean? Like, it involves everything that a salesperson is supposed to be doing, mostly because he has a process down in his head and he's just putting it out in software. You see what I mean?

Interesting.

Whereas for us, you know, we bit the technical challenge first because that's the kind of people we are. And we got it down pat into a level in which you can now ram, you know, 10,000 leads and, you know, we'll miss one reply. out of the entire set. You see what I mean? So that was kind of like the impetus for that drive that makes us different. Okay.

Now do you think— okay, so I mean, you guys are technical, all technical to a point. So my question to you would be, for any type of co-founders, how technical should they get? Where should they stop learning and then focus on the other areas?

Yeah, no, that's a really good question. So I would say that my— so let me take a detour before I answer that question. So my second MBA was was when I worked at Amazon. So, I was one of the first few employees in a group called Amazon Web Services.

Nice.

And back then, when the cloud was not a thing, but it was a crazy idea that Bezos had that, you know, people— he was getting panned by the press. The press was telling him to stick to books and DVDs and toys and things like that. And, you know, this cloud services is crazy talk. So, it was a very small group. And that reported directly to Bezos on a weekly basis. And, you know, we would go up and talk to him about challenges around scalability and Elasticsearch and race conditions in this particular part of the problem. And what I noticed is that, you know, if you think that Bezos is a great CEO, the way that he manages his team is he had a deep understanding of the details of a problem. So he never glossed over of like, you know, what is working, what isn't working. He had— whenever there was a problem that was significant enough for the company, he would have the engineering team working on that problem report directly to him until the problem was solved. And he wanted to know the specific details as to the way that they were architecting the software to solve that particular problem. So to answer your question, I think that if you— I think part of leadership is to be both Um, detail-oriented without being micromanager, but you have to understand the details. You have to understand what makes your customers tick. You have to make it— you have to understand, you know, what makes your software tick, and you have to understand what makes your team tick. And then you have to understand the strategy overall. You see what I mean? So it's not easy, but you have to do it.

Got it. Now, my understanding is Bezos did not have an engineering background. Is that wrong?

That is absolutely right. He did not have an engineering background. Huh.

Okay.

But he had But he was a trader. And one of the interesting things about Bezos is that his decisions look very much like a buy or sell decision. So, for him, a no decision on an open item was a sell decision. You see what I mean? You're never buying or— you're never not doing anything. You're always buying or selling. You're either pro or con. So not executing on something, that means that whatever that something is happening is right and you're betting on it. You see what I mean?

Got it.

So it's a really different mindset in terms of leadership, but you have to be able to, especially in tech and especially in high-growth companies, you have to be able to understand both the details of your software and the details of your customers.

Okay. Makes sense. That's helpful. Okay. So one of the questions I had, was there A point in time where the company was on the brink of failure?

Not on the— I mean, we're all on the brink of failure at some point, right? Especially when we're small. I'm a huge fan of Nassim Taleb, and I don't know if you read his book Antifragile or his previous ones, The Black Swan.

I've not.

But one of the things that he— one of the points that he makes is that when you're really small, Sort of these high risks actually make you stronger. So, you're never on the brink of failure, if you will. You see what I mean? We had to raise from angels last year and that took a while and it felt a little weird sometimes and it felt a little scary sometimes because we never know whether we're going to get funding and we're still working on reply detection and the product is not out because we're still working on reply detection and I have to go out and talk to more angels to get a bit more money. But then it gets, you know, then you learn how to do it well, and then it doesn't become a problem anymore, and then becomes the thing that you do, you know what I mean? So when you're small and you're scrappy and you sort of have an eye on the goal, you're never on the brink of failure per se. If you're not solving a customer problem, that's a different story, right? But if you are convinced that you're solving a big problem and you're, you know, bent to solve it, you'll find a way around, you know, quote unquote failure, and you'll move forward.

Okay.

I don't know if that sort of made sense.

So, you talked about taking a little more— talking about taking big risks when you're small and things like that. I mean, can you give us an example? Yeah.

So, when we— and again, it goes back to the reply detection. So, we went out and we coded the platform and reply detection was kind of working. And we signed up a few test customers and it worked kind of sometimes and sometimes it didn't work. And then Gordon, our co-founder, came in and was like, look, guys, we're not going to be able to fix it unless we step back and recode the whole thing from scratch, and that's going to take 2 months.

Wow.

And we barely had 2 months of runway at that point. And we're like, all right, let's do it. So, we pulled the product from beta testers and we're like, sorry, guys, we need to make a major improvement here. So, we'll get back to you in 2 months. That was pretty scary. But if you have a solid team that trusts each other and you believe that what Gordon and Seiho was going to do was going to work out just right, you sort of go with it. And then as a CEO, your job is to make sure that the team is funded and fed and happy and looking in the same direction.

Okay. So, I'm struggling to understand this, right? So, you had to shut the product down for 2 months and you had 2 months of runway left. So, you have 2 months to rebuild it. At the 2-month mark, I mean, did you just magically turn the switch on and then cash flow started flowing again? What happened exactly?

No, no. So, you continue. I mean, the moment you make that decision, you continue to fundraise. So, we were sort of rolling fundraising, talking to angels, fundraising a little bit, talking to angels, fundraising a little bit, just keeping a few months ahead of payroll. It's very relatively straightforward to get angel money here in Silicon Valley. So you do it and you keep the company sort of funded, but you tell everybody that you have a particular goal in mind, right? So you fundraise and you say, look, you guys, product is ready, commercially available. We're going to start getting customers and going to show you all this traction. All of a sudden you have to go back and be like, no, product was not ready and it's not commercially available. And by the way, can you write us another check?

So did you tell the team? I mean, were you like, hey guys, we need to redo the product, but there's only 2 months of cash in the bank, or did you keep the 2 months of cash in the bank to yourselves as co-founders?

No, you sort of keep— I mean, no, I'm a big fan of disclosure. So, I told, you know, we all knew where we stand in our cash position. But on the other hand, like, it's a fairly, you know, good time to be fundraising. So, we were never sort of afraid that we're gonna be running out of cash. Worst come to worst, we just take a salary, you know, a bit of a salary cut and carry on. So, it wasn't— again, when you're small and you're nimble, you can take, you know, this kind of risks don't impact you as much. You know, if we had a 100-people company and we had 2 months of runway and we don't have product-market fit, you're screwed.

You see what I mean?

Yeah. But if you have, you know, 5 people in the company and you are— you have product-market fit, but you don't know— but you have— but your product is not quite there yet, you know what I mean? And that's the beauty of having, you know, a bunch of perfectionists in the room is that, you know, it's not gonna be there and our customers are not gonna be super excited about. That's a word that we use a lot. We don't want happy customers, we want excited customers. So if reply detection is not quite working the way we think and we think that there is a better way to do it, we're going to go ahead and bite that bullet. And that was a big decision. So let's go back, let's retool. It's not even a customer-facing feature. Reply detection is not something you come and see and be like, wow, look how pretty your reply detection is. No, it's something that sort of lives with you. So, we took that risk and I just, at that point, we're like, all right, guys, I'll be back in 2 months with cash. You know what I mean? So, let's continue doing what we're doing and it's going to be all right.

Cool. Yeah. There's not one moment where I feel like you would be scared in a situation like that. And I think in some situations, a lot of co-founders would be freaking out. So, I think that's one thing I've kind of noticed just from your demeanor.

Yeah. I sound a lot more secure than I am actually.

Cool. All right. So, what's one piece of advice you'd give to your 25-year-old self?

That's a really good question. Surround yourself with good people will be my one good piece of advice. Start looking for potential co-founders early in your career. When I was 25 years old, Where was I when I was 25 years old? I was fresh from earning a master's in computer science and sort of decided to take a turn and go do banking for a while and sort of chase the money and the glamour of New York City and the banking life. I would've told myself, don't fall for that. You're not one of them. You are a technologist. You thrive in in building product and being surrounded by very passionate people, go for that. So finding yourself instead of chasing the glitter and the glamour is, you know, very important when you're in that age.

I like that. You know, that's something I really noticed. I mean, especially growing up in an Asian community, it's all about making money and becoming a doctor or doing finance or being a lawyer. So I can totally see where that is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was, I was always concerned with doing something my parents would be proud about. And You know, when I started my company, my parents didn't even know what I did. So, yeah.

I know how that feels. Cool, man. So, what's one productivity hack you can share with the audience?

Let me think. I think following up on the spot is a productivity hack that— so, instead of setting yourself calendar reminders, figure out a way to set— Figure out a way for you to do the follow-up when it's hot and it's in your hand. I've never seen calendar reminders work well when you're trying to do a follow-up. So either book a time in the day to follow up on your emails or get yourself a tool like Outreach or SelfLove or Tout or any of those to follow up on your emails. The conversion on a follow-up email is like 3 times as high As one email, even when it's an inbound or an intro or somebody you actually know. And that's just because people are busy and your inbox starts looking more like Twitter than a proper inbox.

Right. And you guys have some numbers around that, right? I think Andrew from your team said it takes what, at least 6 follow-ups?

Yeah. So it takes— and we have seen that 5 to 6, so between 5 to 6 follow-ups to get the proper reply rate. Anecdotally, I get a lot of intros, right? Because people know me and they're like, oh, you should try it out. I know the founder, you know, go talk to him. So I get a lot of intros like that. And the moment I get an intro from somebody, from a warm handover from somebody that I know, it still takes about 4 touches to get about 75 reply rates. 4 touches. And these are people who are introducing me warm to somebody they know. And it still takes a while.

Yeah.

So, you know, you can only extrapolate on how, you know, how worse it starts getting for people that you know less and people who are you going cold. Wow.

So you put them right into a funnel when that happens, right? Because it's happening so much now, right?

Exactly. Everybody goes into— everybody goes into a sequence because otherwise, you know, we're all liable to forget.

Got it. Okay, that's awesome. Okay, what's one must-read book you'd recommend to everyone?

Oh my gosh, that's a great question. Mike Weinberg. I forget the book that he wrote, but I do remember his name.

Okay.

Let me look him up real quick. The thing is, it was a sales book that sort of changed my life and how I think about sales. And one of the things that he mentioned in the book, and I'm pretty sure it's Mike Weinger, I'm gonna have to look it up, is that when you are pitching somebody, like if you really believe in your product and you really believe that you're solving a problem, whenever you talk to a customer on the phone, be it cold or be it from an appointment that you're setting, the mindset that you need to be is be a doctor. You're coming in to diagnose and to see if you can help and how you can help and sort of prescribe the right medicine. And that changes— I don't think I'm a natural salesperson. salesperson, but I do think that I'm a natural, you know, I'm naturally good at helping people. And that alone has carried the day in terms of like, you know, helping me, you know, get my mind around sales and being a good salesperson. Okay.

Is that book called New Sales Simplified?

Exactly. Yep. That one.

Okay. Got it. That's a 5-star, I mean, 5-star average. It's not even 4.5 stars. So 199 customer reviews, 5 stars. We'll put that in the show notes, but great recommendation. I just bought it with one click right now.

It is old school and it was written God knows how long ago, but it is as true as it comes. It was refreshing. Perfect.

Yeah, I love it. I love this. It looks interesting. It says 2012, so I'm assuming that they're just refreshing it every now and then?

Yeah, pretty much.

Okay.

I think the book— I mean, the book itself was written longer than that. Got it.

Okay. So, Manny, what's the best way for people to find you online?

Find me on either LinkedIn or Twitter. It's the easiest way to get a hold of me. I'm not a media, I'm not a sort of like a social media junkie, but I do, I'm pretty responsive. Or manny@outreach.

Outreach.io, right?

Yep, outreach.io.

All right, perfect. Manny, thanks so much for joining us. I think there's a lot of insight and I think a lot of people are gonna be testing sales automation in the coming years. So definitely everyone, there's a free trial for Outreach. Make sure you check it out, especially if you're a marketer or a salesperson, you have to check it out.

Awesome. Thank you so much for your time, Eric.

All right, thanks Manny.

Bye.

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