7/14/2026 CRO/CEO/CMO Founder's Roundtable Mastermind “Revenue Pipeline Best Practices

Hello, hello. How you doing? Good morning.

Good morning. Good morning.

Hello.

We're just gonna get started here in a little bit. Just letting people in. Sit still. But while we're doing this, feel free to put your information in chat. Um, Ruji, what I do here is just kind of keep chat to Having here's what I do, here's why I'm here, your LinkedIn, your Calendly, why you came, all that stuff to go in there. The one thing I don't like is pitch slapping on video calls. So well, at least roundtables. So try to keep it about like how how do you help someone else using tech solutions? Strategies, all that type of stuff. So that's really what I'm trying to focus in on. It might be a small group today just because I didn't get a lot of time to put a lot of invites out for this week, but please feel free to put the invite for this thing on your wall, on your LinkedIn and other things, and Slack channels and stuff like that. It always, always helps to get more people on this thing. More people that we can introduce to each other, to each other's context. That's always a great thing. I'm just gonna throw my Fireflies in here.

It's not—

for some reason it's not going in. Let me check my calendar. Yeah, please put your information in chat there. Just gonna make sure this thing's gonna record. On my Fireflies. One sec. Okay, you should be joining the room. All right, so I am Michael Falato. I am the founder, CEO of Full Throttle Falato Leads. Now we're kind of calling ourselves a little bit different— GTM Full Throttle. Which means that we're doing more of an architecture approach on top of Funnel. And this roundtable is really geared towards executives in SaaS, AI, tech services, marketing, and so forth to talk about things that they've learned, things that they learned from mistakes or actually working together and something that actually worked. So those are the 2 things I like to talk about. So since we have a pretty small gathering today, we will probably do more of an intro style since we don't have 35 people to get through. So why don't we start with Steve, who actually helped me produce some roundtables in the past. Steve, tell us why you joined today and keep it to, you know, what have you learned in the last 8 weeks since AI is changing all the time and marketing is changing. What, what worked or what just kind of went, bam, I'm never doing that again?

Are you talking to me?

Are you talking? You talking to me?

You talking to me? Hi, I'm Steve Zhao. I'm the Executive Vice President at TD Synnex. We're a $60 billion distributor. And It's an interesting question. What I've learned in the last 8 weeks versus the last time we talked, Michael. So I would say this, you know, that landscape is quickly changing. I think the last couple of years going through the implementation, everybody rushing toward AI, is that we've seen a lot of experimentation and now everybody's trying to basically figure out, okay, how do we find out where the common goodness is in any of those implementations and what the— how do you execute across an enterprise? So For us at our company, we've done a lot of experimentation. And now we're beginning to try to bring it in to say, okay, how do we start maybe creating a library of AI bots that we've created, etc., that are commonly good to people in positions? So it is that probably is the biggest thing I've learned.

Uh-huh.

And then the last thing is maybe how do humans— at what point do you interface the humans in? to basically make sure that the CX is perfect.

So, and is there a particular tool that you like? And tell us a little bit about what TD does as well.

Sure. So we're, we're known for being the world's largest IT distributor. So basically, if you think about the US as an example, North America as an example, 52% of everything that runs through the IT reseller channel touches our hands. So we're top distributors for brands such as NVIDIA or HPE or Dell or AMD, etc. So in terms of your question, you know, right now we're experimenting with a few of the go-to-market ISVs, Gong, etc., Othello being one of them, and we're trying to figure out how to layer in that stack, especially since we're going through a go-to-market change at this moment.

And so you don't have a note-taker, or is that you're saying you don't have a note-taker now for your company, or you do?

Oh, we do, we do. We use Gong.

Gong.

Okay.

Oh, you use Gong. So what's the other thing you just said then?

Um, we're trying, uh, a lot. We're experimenting with a lot of other go-to-market ISVs. So Othello would be one of them. They're more of a role-playing type tool. So we're experimenting. Othello would be one that we've tried before or using. So we're experimenting with a bunch of different ones. But I just want to be careful which ones I talk about now, only because, you know, so valuable. Exactly.

Exactly. So you're basically having the salespeople instead of using up valuable executive time, cloning kind of executive style and playbook, and then having them roleplay with this type of software.

Yeah, Othello being one of them. Yes.

Yeah, I built, um, digital twin. It's called Delphi.ai for me, mostly for marketing. And hey, I don't want to answer every little question all every single time. And, or, or so what I, I did is I go to my daughter who helps me do some of this marketing stuff, like, talk to my twin so you don't have to ask me a question every 2 hours. And I thought that was kind of a way to kind of not role play, but like, hey, like what should I, what should I say? What you do, blah, blah, blah. And it has everything I ever talked about with Fireflies and calls and content and all that stuff. So I would, I would encourage you to check out thedelphi.ai. I actually set those up for my clients as well. But, um, interesting. Is there any question you have of the group? that you're trying to solve a problem, a solution, an idea that you can maybe bounce off all these minds in here?

Um, you know, when I got the invite and I was, uh, well, first off, say hi to your daughter for me. Great, great, great gal. You know, I had a chance to talk to her, um, in depth, uh, for a couple, more than a couple of times.

Um, thank you.

You know, when I got the invite, I really wanted to basically learn from the rest of the leaders on here. If I had to focus on one thing that I'm working on now, you know, our business is pretty complex. We have multiple vendors coming in to create multiple solutions, and we don't occupy the space directly interfacing with the end user of the product. You know, we're basically dealing with the reseller that's a layer in between on one side and multiple vendors on the other side, right? So always very complex transactions. We do tens of thousands of them per day, you know, just to give you an example of that scale. You know, one of the things that I'm focusing on is, you know, what portion of the business could be fully digitized, almost an Amazon experience.

Yeah.

And so, like I said, I'm working on some of that. And not to say that I want to get rid of the salespeople because I believe the salespeople are valuable, But it's— I want to—

the ones that close.

Yeah. So I am the ones— I want to work out a flow that says, hey, look, when you want to talk to a human, this is the way you talk to a human when based upon what you're buying.

If you're buying a self-service type product.

Yeah, exactly.

I agree. It's like, this is a $5,000 a year thing. I'm not gonna put one of my $200,000 a year AEs on this, right?

Yeah, exactly. So I've come to the realization that it's not based upon a customer, but it's based upon the transaction, the customers. So basically, a big enterprise can be buying something very pedestrian, they don't need to talk to a person, right? A small IT reseller consultant can all of a sudden come across a big, complex opportunity, they're gonna need to talk to someone. It's the same experience that I go, Hey, you know, when I want to buy— when I want to buy toothpaste on Amazon, I'm not gonna talk to someone. If I wanted to buy web storage space, and maybe more complex things, I would really want to talk to someone. So yeah, how does that path move? So I'm interested in learning about some of that.

Especially think about computers, like even B2C. It's like, I have no clue. Like, some people have no clue what RAM is and terabytes and You know, what, what is there, separate graphics drivers? I would think all these, uh, Best Buys of the world would need stuff like that. Who do you guys compete with mostly? Is it mostly like, uh, Micro Ingram or Mike Tolyov?

Yes, it's, uh, it's— we compete with, uh, people like Ingram, uh, Arrow, CDW, you know, DNH. CDW is not a competitor, they're a client.

Okay. Yeah.

So let's be careful how you put that out in the world. Okay, Mike. They're a client of mine. Awesome.

Anybody have questions for Steve? Steve is probably one of the most senior guys on, on this call today as far as background and big companies. So this is a good chance to kind of pick his brain too. How about Luis? You have any questions for Steve? Or do you want to kind of go into like, who you are, what you do, and what, what you've learned in the last 6 months that can help the group?

No, I was, I was listening to Steve, and it's a great challenge, right? I mean, I've been, you know, with PTC for a very long time. It's a software company focused on industrial software, product lifecycle management. Then more recently in the last 4 years with the Nemetschek Group. Which is an architecture, engineering, construction group worldwide. Most recently, I was the CRO for Alplan, and we had a very similar challenge, right? So which was kind of how to build, how to provide the customer the experience that it wants to have, right? Which is a little bit of, you know, how do you provide them different touchpoints? So if somebody wants to talk to— because, for example, we would have very different types of buyers from large companies, large construction companies, architecture companies, like some of the biggest in the world, to smaller, you know, one-person, two-person architects, you know, ateliers or engineering companies. And to your point, somebody would just want to renew their subscription. They just could go online and do it, right? Somebody wants to buy something new or they want to expand or driving to different products, they need to talk to someone. Not everybody wants to do those things, right? Because it really, it really, you know, it has to do with buyer, you know, buyer profile, what people want to do. So the challenge to us was, and to be honest, we didn't solve it, we're working on how would we do it. So I'm not going to give you a solution. But what we were trying to do was to find a way to provide buyers different touchpoints so they have like different experiences, but have them converge to one point at the end. For example, one of the things that we were working on, a very simple one, is regardless of where you start and who you talk to, you could be talking to a sales rep or you could go directly to an online shopping experience, you would kind of execute the buy. So when you buy, you go through the cart. So that you would have, regardless of how you do it, we wouldn't send you a PO, anything like that. So you would have a different experience versus if you buy from a seller or the website. We're trying to get that done. The next step was also understanding how different cohorts behave and how different folks buy and mapping out what they do. And we actually went through some of that exercise in And it's amazing the number of iterations that people have. And it also helped us understand, you know, kind of dead ends in our buying experience. You know, people get behind a wall, then they go out and talk to somebody else and move from one place to another.

Yeah.

So I guess the answer, you know, thinking, you know, a little bit forward is try to create a system that lets everybody, you know, you know, start where they are, right?

Yeah.

And then acknowledging them and being able to map them in their journey and elegantly, right, which is the hard part, kind of steer them towards where you want them to be, but in a way that they perceive it as being what they want to do.

The choice.

Yeah, yeah. No, um, I love your comment about how do you do it elegantly. And look, full disclosure, You know, we've had incredible results. Like I said, we're the largest IT distributor. We just posted last quarter, we're up 30% year over year, so things are going pretty well. But at the same time, you know, we're trying to make sure we know that that buyer profile, like you said, is changing, and it's about choice, right?

Mm-hmm.

I mean, there are times I wanna talk to human, there's times I don't wanna talk to anybody, right? But how do you figure that out along my journey? We keep on talking about that hybrid approach of saying, well, we give you the human when you want, or our humans engage with you when you need to. But that's to your point, it's all over the board. How do you figure out that pathway to say that, okay, this is a formula to make it work perfectly, and to your point, elegantly. So it feels like, oh, you're not forcing me to talk to a bot, or you're not forcing me to not talk to a human, or you're forcing me to talk to a human. Or you're faking like it's a person.

That's the—

that's right.

No, you gotta be very upfront, you know. It's like, this is not— this is not someone you're talking to, AI conversational bot. Just be upfront, you know.

Yep, yep. Um, it was nice to meet you, by the way. So thanks.

Thank you too.

Thanks.

Yeah, there's, there's also, um, there's also a place that I use I'm going to put this link in here. It's a partner of mine. I think this is the right link, but it's a way to kind of research the client, like an ABM approach. Like, how do you talk to them? How do you sell to them? What's their DISC profile? Um, not every— not the playbooks shouldn't be always the same for every single person.

Right.

Like when I was selling 10, 5 years ago, here's the playbook. The playbook cannot be the playbook for everybody you talk to. The playbook needs to be, how does the guy buy or the girl buy or how they consume? What are their interests? Where do they work? So there was this like more slow it down and be very, very specific. And so I teamed up with this friend of mine who was a CRO at my last company. So that's, if you guys wanna check that out, let me know. I'll set you up with a call with him, but it's a good guy.

Robert.

Um, I don't see who you're from on here. What you should put your last name and your company on your little signature there, but go ahead and tell us.

Absolutely. Hi, everyone. My name is Robert Woodard. I'm the founder of Consider This, and I focus on selling. So listening to the different, uh, leaders on the call, I'm here because, again, my goal is to hear as many thoughts as possible. I've been in the business for over 20 years and I focus on enterprise selling. So looking across CPG, looking across retail, looking across manufacturing, looking across QSR. And what I've seen is 70% of sellers, they don't hit their quotas. And so listening to some of the conversations is because of understanding what the buyer's looking for, what that engagement is. And so I've written a book. If you— I put my link in the chat. As well as my website, but it just released a book called Clear Selling System, and it really goes into the psychology of the buyer. So a lot of times we're looking at qualifications. Do we qualify the lead? Did we go through and do we build this kind of relationship? It really focuses on the buyer. And so it's a little bit different on the selling side, but it's really focused on ad tech, martech. I've worked at Uh, big agencies in a public group.

Why do you think 70% of people don't, don't hit their targets?

It's because they're, they're going through the process. They're, they're really qualified. It's, it's, it's more process than the actual— and selling the product versus on focus on the buyer at all. The buyer comes in at the end. You, you go in your, you go in your meetings, you're meeting with your, your CROs. Here's your quota, here's your target, here's the product, go and sell it, develop your leads. And none of that at that point, Mike, none of that is focused on the buyer at all. All of what I just said.

You like Challenger Customer or Customer— Challenger Customer, Challenger— what's the other one? Just Challenger.

Challenger Selling. There's MEDIC, there's all those. And they focus on little pieces. Challenger Selling focuses on going into something interesting. MEDIC focuses on qualifications. The CLEAR focuses on the colleges. Buyers go— there's a real fear of buying big enterprise, big enterprise solutions. If I mess up, you know, I had, for example, American Express was one of my top clients. You know, they were pretty clear. Robert, if I buy this from you and it fails, I'm going to give my entire team pink slips. Can I trust what you're saying?

No stress.

Right.

No stress. Like, don't BS me. Is it real or not? So it is building authentic relationships enough to say, you know what, this is a fit, this is not a fit.

Yeah.

But going through that process is a psychological process. So what I try to do is unpack the buyer needs, the buyer fears, the buyer concerns, identify all the stakeholders because there's probably about 5 to 10 of them. And then I back into, you know what, this makes sense, this works for you. This does not. And so accepting no as an answer is a real thing. And so, and that's where I think a lot of sellers are failing personally. I mean, they're really under stress to, here's your quota, it's $4 million, $8 million, $10 million. How are you doing? You got a pipeline call every other week. It's, you know, enterprise solutions take 6 to 8 months. At a minimum to, to really move through. You got MSA, you've got contracting, you got procurement, you got all these steps that most business leaders just don't focus on. They just focus on, did you have a meeting? Did you qualify? Did you run into BANT?

Did the deal move forward? I still believe BANT's a pretty good thing just to keep in your brain.

You know, it's good to keep in your brain as long as you understand that it is not the end thing. I mean, yeah, do you have the budget?

Yeah.

First of all, do you even know what they're looking for?

Yeah.

Is there—

well, the needs.

Yeah. And then the authority. And, you know, right now, because of the fear of making the wrong decision and messing up, which is a real thing, there are multiple stakeholders.

It's actually the indecision of not doing anything. That's the biggest thing.

Yes.

You're not closing.

And that— and the— and most— and, and you just touched on it. Most of the decisions at the end of the day Is to do nothing at all.

Yeah, yeah.

Let's go to— and then where do most salespeople fall back to? Most salespeople fall back to, well, let's just— let me lower the price.

Yes. Just let me drop the price. Yes, you commoditize your product. It's like they didn't ask for a price discount, they asked for value and out— an outcome. Can you—

I always ask like, what reservations in your mind before we hang up? So you're not, you're not going back after this call going I wish I would have said this or that. I'm like, you know, what's going through your head? Like, what's the pluses and minuses of the things that you're looking at?

Right.

And if I do, I never want to lead with a discount because then you're showing weakness as far as you're just cutting costs. So if you're going to take something out, there has to be levers, right? If I'm going to take this out and lower the cost to reach your budget, then I'm going to take out that you need, uh, to do, uh, You have to do at least 6 to 12 months versus 3 months. Yeah, so you have to do a give to get, otherwise you're just cheapening yourself, your product.

Another thing, don't lead with— don't lead with a demo.

No, I don't.

I don't show—

Everyone wants to get a demo.

Don't pitch slap. Don't— and on LinkedIn, don't connect with someone and say, hey, I, uh, I, I do this and I can save you probably 30%. We work with ExxonMobil and this. Who cares? You're pitch slapping. So that's why if you look at how I got you guys on this call is to create community and trust.

Yes.

Hopefully one day you guys will say, you know, Michael's a great guy, I should help him.

Yes.

Still waiting for that, guys.

Come on.

But, uh, um, especially Chuck. I'm just kidding. Um, but, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's lead with giving and it's just like, don't ask for something in return. But if you You know, pay people if they do refer business. Even if you help them, like, say, listen, thanks, man, I'm gonna give you 10, 20% of the revenue here on the first month or first year, whatever. People will help. And then I also say, build your own podcast, do your own roundtables, you know, or help me build this. Just like some of the folks here, they've used their LinkedIn and we built this up. Chuck, why don't you go ahead and, and chime in about What grabbed your attention to come. I know you've been here a couple times, and tell people real quickly what you do. But the biggest thing here is kind of, kind of how what Steve started out with— what did he learn, what is he trying to learn, or what is— what worked and didn't work, you know? That's like life lessons so that we can make this discussion more about helping each other versus, you know, pitching what we do a little bit too much.

Yeah, no, I appreciate it. And, and yeah, I have been on a few times, and You know, I think the, the biggest thing is just the, the networking aspect of what you're putting together and having conversations outside of, of this setting with folks, because I think that's, that's the biggest benefit of it all, right? That human connection to advance our own individual interests, right? So how do I help you? You help me. And that's why I've built a business. I mean, for me, we, we are consulting or advisory company. We work on 2 sides of the fence. We have enterprise. And then we also have partners, which is very interesting because what Robert was just talking about, you know, in the partner side, we have to work with a bunch of salespeople that they're wondering why they can't get their deals advanced. But as an advisor, we're looking at the client saying, well, none of what you are promoting aligns with anything the customer even asked for. So yeah, you have a solution, but Where is it dotted line to what they're even asking for? And, and, you know, I think where there's a good intersection and great opportunities for folks that can have genuine conversations with customers, because I do think you're right too in the buyer's hesitation, but the buyer's hesitation is based on their own internal fear. If you can pull out of them, what do they really need this for? I was just on a call this morning with very, very large HVAC conglomerate that, you know, He directs all the decisions, and what he's said now is that I keep getting requests to do projects, and none of the projects ever come to me with a desired outcome. I said, yeah, because it just keeps people busy in procurement, right? People keep their, their funnel churning in procurement, and they go, I got this project and this RFP and that RFP. And what we've said to a lot of sales folks that are on our partner side or the enterprise throw out your RFP because where is your RFP even aligned to what your technology group is asking for? 90% of the time it's not. It's AI-generated, AI response, AI evaluation just to get to the next meeting. So why don't we bypass all of that and evaluate your vendors for who you want, bring them in, have a conversation, a genuine conversation about what it is that you're asking for. And I think the biggest thing that I've seen with salespeople in my time And today working with partners, they are so petrified of asking questions, petrified of asking the tough question because they're afraid of the answer they're going to get. It's like when you were a kid.

A lot of people ask questions, but they don't follow up on the question, which is a really bad interview. It's like, they'll go to like, what keeps you up at night and ask stupid questions, you get stupid answers.

Listen, or they're asking closed-ended questions, right? You can't get anywhere with a yes/no question.

I was able to do this. Would you be able to sign up next month? So your trial closes. I mean, that's like 1997.

Come on.

Yeah. Yeah. It's, it's an interesting, you know, because I think everybody wants like the, you know, we've become a little bit of a society, right? So you just, you put anything into your chat or LLM and all of a sudden an answer pops up, right? And so we're almost training ourselves for quick responses to everything. And this isn't a quick response, right? If you're buying something that's going to cost millions, you better really have a good process. But somebody's got to come in and question that process because I think again where, you know, then vendors bought— companies buy things and then 3 years later they're looking for another provider of the same exact thing because they didn't get the outcome that they desired the first time. Well, why don't we stop that and fix it?

I think about like how you guys go to market here. I mean, I'm looking at some of your LinkedIn profiles. Give some sort of like power statement, right? I am an expert. I produce repeatable, scalable, right? That's telling— I'm not putting VP of Sales at full throttle, right? Who cares? What is full throttle? But this is a little bit, and then I go into a little bit about my personal background. People remember that I'm a black belt in jiu-jitsu or I played the saxophone or whatever it is. So you gotta put that, and then there's a way to kind of put like a, a separate these links and go book a meeting. There's a way to change your pronouns and put what you want in there. So there's all these little tricks, right, that people are not doing, or they put their company and they just put founder and, and it just says lead generation. You know, I just try to make it a little bit more about what I do, how I help versus Just putting that I closed 30 deals and made $5 million, right? And the other thing I would say is huge is get your— get everybody that you ever talked to and worked with to give you a referral. That builds up your social selling index. So there's a lot of things on LinkedIn that no one is doing. And I did actually a class for this a couple weeks ago for free. Just like, guys, Ladies, think about if you came to someone's LinkedIn profile, do they have the LinkedIn generic background? What does that tell you? They don't care. If you don't take care of yourself, your hair, your hygiene, your profile, what does that tell other people about your business? So just think about that whole thing. Um, lighting. You know, I have 2 lights right here. I was a TV production guy. Professional background or a nice background like Chuck has, you know. Um, just think about like how you, how you come across. And I'm not trying to preach, I'm just saying this is what I do for a living. This is what I was in the Air Force for. This is what I did at TV stations, is branding the presence of a person. It's the same thing with, with this. If you look gray, if you look green, you know, your lighting was— it's gonna make you a little nauseous subconsciously. So, um, let's go with, um, Charles Hughes.

But you go gray and green and then you pick me?

Is that—

am I supposed to read into that?

And, and, and the hat. Here, I'll take the hat off. How's that?

You got an army hat?

It is.

All right.

Thank you, sir.

Hey, no problem. And, and so, um, I'm probably the oddball here. I'm the operations guy. Never been in marketing.

We can't talk to you. Just go.

Operations guy for what?

For what do you do?

So I, I work on field service delivery organizations. Fuel?

Anything where you—

field or fields? Fields?

No. Well, sometimes they get in a fetal position after the customer lights into them, but other than that, it's usually field.

I'm saying— are you saying fuel? Like Fuel or field?

Field. F-I-E-L-D.

Okay.

Field.

Okay. So operation field or sales field?

No, no.

Operations.

Okay, go ahead.

So anytime you think you have somebody that goes to a customer site, whether it's a Walmart or Rite Aid— well, not too many Rite Aids left, but it used to be.

Yeah, I haven't seen Rite Aid in a long time.

These are the guys that go support the technology infrastructure. And I've been in this business for over 25 years, all the way from a supervisor at Wiltel going way back. I've been a chief operating officer at a, uh, technology firm and a law firm just to see how it would work out there. My main purpose for being here is, like I said, I'm not the marketing guy, I'm not the sales guy, but as a one-man shop, I am now the marketing guy and sales guy. So I'm here to learn as much as possible. And, uh, what I found working over the past, uh, few months as I've launched this is one Uh, not knowing anything about the marketing and sales makes me a little fearless because I'm like, why should I be scared to try it? Everybody said it would work. I'll go give it a shot. Uh, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't.

If you fail, you lose, right? Just like, you know, from being in the military, like, you lose or you learn.

Yeah, but the thing I learned in the military, if you're going to fail, fail fast.

Yeah, that's true. But I'm saying there's a lesson. The next thing Yeah, just there's other ways to learn faster by not always, as a founder, not doing everything yourself. That's the biggest thing I find that I'm like, I'm not cutting my grass. That's not a good use of my time. I'm not gonna learn Claude co-work right now. I want to, but the thing is I want to get revenue first. So there's all these things that you can get like, doo doo doo. Ooh, squirrel, squirrel, squirrel. But go ahead.

Sorry.

No, no, that's fine. And that's where most of my focus has been on is Getting the brand out there, getting my face out there, my thoughts out there, and trying to develop the network. And again, the one thing with my particular clients, because I'm looking more at those, those founder-led, even some private equity, smaller companies, $15 to $75 million, the audience with them is tough to get at times. They're not prowling on LinkedIn. They're not responding very well.

Private equity people or their companies?

The companies. I'm saving the private equity pool for the next phase of the business.

Yeah.

Let me know if you find a way to get into private equity, because if I could talk to one private equity person that has 30 portfolio companies, that'd be great. And they would actually say, do this. But I never— they never, like, not force, but they don't really always guide them to do this. So you got our money. We got people in there and that's going to run the way it is. I'm like, if I put all that money in, I would want to have a little more control over what's going to be done. But let me know if you find— because private equity has always been something I've been trying to figure out. Like, how do I get in and have one client with 30 portfolio companies?

Exactly. That's why I want it to be the next phase. But I need to build up some good case studies where I can go to them and say, look, here's what I've accomplished. Here's what I can do for these companies. These are the exact profile you're going after. Let me be your go-to guy when you start, uh, even if it's just the evaluation and the assessment pieces of it. So that's why I'm saying that's my next step, because generally when you're being, you know, all of you guys are doing enterprise. I, I don't hit enterprise. One, um, what I do doesn't really scale at that level. Two, the sales cycle is longer.

I don't, I don't, I don't think everybody does enterprise here. I mean, we do small, medium businesses, sometimes semi-large. I call them light enterprise, but I wouldn't, I wouldn't categorize— I mean, Steve's obviously at a huge company, but, um, personally for me, I'm not gonna speak for everybody, mine's more probably the 150 to 500 range. I mean, if, if you work at, at, um, HP, you're not going to hire a go-to-market. You're going to have that built. You're not— And I probably couldn't cover just the, uh, legality and the 90-day wait to get paid. You know, exactly.

The one thing I have found that's working when it comes to AI and technology, I have 2 use cases for it. One internally for running the business. I use GPT, I use Claude for different purposes, different functions. I'm using HubSpot for my CRM. And again, without the background on the ins and outs, I actually have Claude managing it for me. So now it's just like having somebody that's keeping it all current and up to date. He goes in, checks my—

I wanna dig down in that cuz I use, I use ChatGPT, I'm gonna chat and I use HubSpot and there's some things connected in the hub, right? HubSpot. How, how, how is, I know that there's like a co— not a coworker, but it, it ranges up on what you're doing in a day. Do you have something else connected from Claude to HubSpot that's doing something special?

So what I do is, is every morning about 5:00 AM, Claude will go in, it'll go back, look at my last 24 hours worth of emails. It'll go look at my last 24 activity, uh, 24 hours of activity on LinkedIn, and it'll identify updates with existing contacts. They'll look at, say, oh, this is somebody new, let me put Michael in here. And they'll categorize them based on the conversation. Then I get a summary each morning that says, hey, here's the 4 actions I took. I ignored these emails because they're just marketing. You can delete them whenever you want, or they don't pertain to you. Um, hey, by the way, you said last week you were going to reach out to Robert, and I haven't seen that email go out yet. And here's another reminder to get it done.

And then did you do that? Did you make that from scratch? Because I know, I think Claude asked me if I wanted to, to hand off tasks, or, or what was it, a particular button you pressed to do that?

I just told Claude, hey, I've got CRM, I want you to manage it for me. Here's the information I want to see in there. Claude came back and said, hey, these 3 things you want, like one thing was in there with the contacts was a last updated email. It wasn't available at the contact level. It said, would you like me to add that as a custom field?

Okay.

Yes. That's really been the biggest time saver for me, And then I'll do research on companies. You know, I just had a company yesterday that I was looking at as a potential prospect, and they brought up all the research. I validated against some of the things I had and said, you know what, on the surface, this looks like a good client to spend some time— potential client to spend time with. However, here's the 3 red flags to look at. Now I can take that and say, you know what, put it on hold or disqualify it. And then I'll go to the really high-quality ones, and it'll, you know, gives me a lot of good advice on that. So that's, that's how I use it internally. Then the second phase of it will be the— one of my offerings is an operational execution assessment and building tools with AI that they can— the customer can fill out the form, AI will parse it out and say, hey, based on your offerings, I have a proprietary system I use based on your operating system. Here's the 4 things you need to look at immediately. Here's the things they're doing really well. So I can give them some immediate feedback and come up with a quick turnaround on the game plan. And one of the things we've talked a lot with the salespeople, uh, on some other meetings I'm in was, as you use AI, what used to take you 20 hours takes you 4. So how do you justify the cost? Well, I don't bill hourly. I bill on an outcome.

Yeah, KPI. Like, here's this— like, the plumber spent 20 years fixing something, he knows how to do it, he spent 5 minutes, but you're not paying him for, for the 5 minutes he, he turned that wrench.

It's just knowing which wrench to use on which knob to turn.

Yep.

Yeah, yeah.

So, so that's the way I'm using the technology piece of it. Uh, the other reason I'm on this call is I don't pretend to be everything to everybody, but I hate to say, hey, Danica, I'm sorry, I can't help you and just leave it at that. What I'd rather say is, hey, look, I've noticed there's a gap in your marketing system. Let me introduce you to somebody.

Yeah.

And then have a network that I could pass them off to. Again, I think that helps with the trust and the reliability and more importantly, the integrity of, yeah, I'll fix your marketing program for you. Then I go to Claude, help me fix this marketing program because I don't know what I'm doing.

Who—

how did you figure— how did you find this today?

This group?

Yeah.

Um, I, I got a, a notice from you in an email about a roundtable that was coming up.

Okay.

And I can't remember which one it was. It was probably about 6, 8 weeks ago.

Okay.

And so I registered for it again because I'm trying to learn. This is, this is really more educational for me than anything. Um, I really enjoyed that one. I, I couldn't find the raise my hand button on the chat screen. I've used Zoom for years, so I was pretty quiet on that one. But, um, so, and I've started coming to— I've signed up for a couple of what you got going on there. I really like the interaction between the people. Um, it's, it's packaged in a way that, you know, an operations guy can understand. You know, every now and then I have to write down an acronym and go ask.

Well, I'll post this on LinkedIn and YouTube so you can watch it again. But let's go to JP. And thanks for your service, Charles.

Yeah, no problem.

Thank you. Hey, good to meet you all, folks. Very interesting conversation. So the way I found out about the meeting was I got your invite, Michael. And, you know, I tried to get on at exactly 11 o'clock my time, and then I had to go through an entire process to register for it. So I finally made it like 5 minutes late, but I did make it. Very interesting conversation. I'm a solopreneur, so I kind of, you know, identify more with Charles when it comes to, you know, AI and how to use it. And actually, I must say that Charles is very sophisticated in the ways he uses Claude to interface with his HubSpot. So yeah, I can learn a lot from you, Charles.

Yeah, you don't, you don't look like the guy that's gonna tell us all the tech.

Yeah, well, you know, and I've— and I— if you look at my resume, I'm an IT technology guy, which is laughable. Um, I'm nuts and bolts, not bits and bytes. But, uh, I was told to be a good mathematician, your first thing is you got to be lazy. And I'm finding out with a lot of stuff with AI, the lazier you are, the more it'll do for you.

Absolutely. Yeah, you know, I got to be careful it doesn't become a distraction for me because it's, you know, so easy to have it become a distraction because sometimes I'm like playing around with Claude Cowork and try to get it to do things that I don't like to do all the time. Like, for example, I subscribe to Forbes magazine and to MIT Sloan Management magazines and stuff like that, and I just don't have the time to read all these articles. So I have Claude Cowork actually go out once a week to read the articles for me, write an executive summary, and then create a LinkedIn post about an article that I find interesting. So Claude does that automatically for me. But it could do so many more things to make my life easier. And I haven't figured that out yet. I just got to spend the time on it and I just, I don't have the time. So that's a challenge. Um, but I've been using AI for like years now. Uh, I've, I, I use ChatGPT and Claude. Claude is my favorite. I use ChatGPT for, uh, visuals right now. They're, it's really good to create visuals. I have also created my own GPTs. One of the things I've done is I created a GPT to basically create a, uh, to review businesses, to create a, um, you know, a like an annual report on businesses. that I want to know, learn more about, that I— and then I ask the GPT to create engagement strategies for me to engage with these businesses. Kind of, it goes, it does an entire internet web search on a business, and then it figures out, okay, these are the challenges that these businesses may have. And based on what you do, these are possible engagement angles that you can take with the owners or the executives.

with that particular business.

So I've done that. And, you know, in my work as a strategic and execution advisor, right now my clients are all software development companies. You know, I spent like over 30 years in the high-tech business, and, you know, my ideal client profile is therefore a technology company. As I said, they're all in the software development business. They all have AI capabilities that they are trying to bring to market. And one of the challenges I help these businesses with is that they're all led by engineers, software developers, and software developers typically don't know how to talk technology to non-technical people, right? So they need help with from a go-to-market perspective, and I provide a lot of help on that.

Where are you based?

I'm based in Massachusetts.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah. And then none of— well, you know, I only have one, uh, company I work with that is based out of Massachusetts. The others are Texas, West Coast, and, and so on. So, um, but yeah, that's, uh, in a nutshell, uh, what I do here. So I want to take up— I don't want to take up all the air, but, uh, any questions, uh, be, uh, be happy to, uh, Thanks, JP.

Let's see, we got about 13 minutes left. Let's just get through some other folks here. Danica, and then I think we got just Muhammad, right? Those 2 are the only ones that haven't spoke yet, right?

Okay, I'll take a stab. Hi, I'm Danica Lewis. Nice to meet you guys. I'm really excited to be on these calls. I've joined quite a few of them, so thank you for inviting me always. But for me, I work at a company And I work in an area that's very niche. So we have a proprietary AI that we use from a company standpoint, which is good because it has consistency in messaging, consistency in value proposition, consistency in positioning, things like that. Helps us respond to our RFPs. But for my areas, I work for Sodexo. Sodexo is very well known for like catering and food and housekeeping and retail. I work in biomedical engineering. It's a very different world. People don't know that Sodexo works in biomedical engineering. It's a very different skill set, obviously. So what I'm looking at doing and learning from you guys is I manage marketing, right? I'm a director of marketing, but I also integrate with operations. I work with the sales force, I work with the customers. So I've been trying to understand AI and like building those personas, understanding the client, right? How can I— Utilize the AI component versus the human component? Where can I have that nice transition, kind of like you guys were saying, and look at the customer journey? When does it need to speak to a human? You know, when does it— when can AI send out some of the key messages?

You could actually ask AI about AI. Just think about that too.

Yeah, no, that's a really good point.

Yeah, because if you're gonna ask people how to do this, how this— like, I was trying to figure out Claude Cowork, and if I'm gonna sit there and take up my CRO's my former CRO's time. He got me started a little bit, but I, I learned everything just by watching the YouTube or asking AI and say, tell me how to do this. If we don't start taking, taking that step to do things, nothing's gonna ever get done. And then we're gonna be using someone like Charles, like, Charles, can you show me how you— Charles, you know, he has to work on revenue ideas for his company. So I would definitely suggest doing that because I— you don't think about using AI to help you use AI.

But yeah, no, it's, it's a really good point.

And then a lot of people are always, always saying like, I need to— I'm fixing to get, getting ready. No, just do it. You know, it's either you do or you don't. There's no try, as Yoda would say, you know. And the third thing I always hear is like, I'm waiting for the right time to launch this, or I'm I'm in stealth mode. Stealth mode should always be, hey, here's what I'm working on, just to keep— and then I'm building a thought leadership roundtable around this, around this industry or idea. And I would love for you to have some subject matter expertise or just be one of the people in the roundtable. You don't have to have anything completely baked. You don't have to have anything, even a minimum viable product, MVP. You start talking about your ideas, build momentum. Momentum builds momentum. It's just like my jiu-jitsu.

Like, I was the queen of the MVP.

Right.

And so I launched my services and my products.

Just like martial arts or working out. Like, I need to get in shape to get to— so I can go lift weight. No, you need to lift weight or you need to do jiu-jitsu to get better in shape. So think about you, you lose, you learn by doing what you're what you're trying to figure out. And the only way you're going to do that is you lose and learn.

Absolutely. No, I appreciate that.

So, um, let's go to Mohammed, and then we'll, we'll give some couple minutes back in, in the day.

Yeah, uh, thank you all. Uh, the reason I'm here is I'm an ex-private equity investor, so I've been 20 years in private equity. Before that, I used to work in engineering and in with Schlumberger, Exxon, and Procter Gamble.

Right.

So since my private equity days, I decided to switch from being an investor to become actually a builder. That's a very rare move in my world. Nobody would do that, actually. The reason is I do believe in how technology is going to shape the investment space, private capital markets and private equity markets. And that's what I'm focusing on building. So to answer why I'm here, I think that while people like us, builders or people who are trying to build something meaningful, believe in the product and you have to believe in the product, you have to believe in the vision. For me, it's very basic. It boils down to your go-to-market strategy and your ability to convert. Otherwise, even the best of the best of products you're building and, you know, with all modesty, I think we're building something unique and something very very actually powerful. I believe our breaking point is going to be our ability to go to market. So what I'm doing here, I'm actually trying to learn from you guys the way you think, the way you operate. I think Michael and Charles had an exchange about how people in private equity think and operate.

That's what I wanted to ask you.

Yeah, let me be blunt and direct. Totally different words. I mean, what you think is the priority for them is something that is totally irrelevant. Not a single private equity person running a deal team, not even an operating partner on the opco side, on the operating partner side, would actually wake up in the morning and say, how I'm going to improve the go-to-market. They, they, they bypass that. That's a black box that somebody else is assigned to. It's what you call by design or managed by objectives, as we say, MBOs. So they focus on, I want to increase revenue because I want to reach an EBITDA of, let's say, X. So how can I increase the revenue, reduce the cost, and all of the mechanics pertaining to reducing the cost and growing the sales? And if it becomes a marketing or a sales thing, somebody else will have to deal with that. And they don't, they don't really would go into that detail. And for me, if I go back in my career, that's an area I would have loved to learn more about. And I'm doing that now. Also, it's about delegation.

I just think when you throw— it's like the VCs or investors, like the smaller the VC, right? He's going to want vested interest for those or private equity or family, family, what they call family offices. They're gonna care, but they don't sometimes— they don't care about the details. They'll go, 1 out of 10 companies are gonna succeed. But to me, that's like you're not acting like you don't give a shit enough to think about how should— how can I take this and use my team or his mind and help this company? Because otherwise I'm gonna lose my money.

VCs and private equity are totally different. VCs play the numbers and probability game. VCs, they go in with 30, 40 portfolio companies or investees, especially under their web. Yeah, and they knowingly that 80% is gonna fail, 90%, the 10% is going to barely make their money back, and 10% are gonna get their money in. It's called the numbers game. Now, private equity don't do that. Private equity, they— there's no, not a single person in private equity runs 30 up to you know, 30 opcos. It's mainly 8, and usually only one person who decides that. And that person, they're not active on LinkedIn. You know, they don't even have authority to actually comment or speak on LinkedIn. They don't want to engage on LinkedIn. They usually have a, you know, their investor relationship, IR or marketing people doing that for them. And they're very busy and they have a carried interest. You know, they're driven by carry. Carry converts them from being what you call prince, you know, agents to become principals. That's the whole game. You know, they are principals, they are owners. If they don't behave their owners, they're I mean they're gone. But anyway, so PE people they behave differently, and they have this approach that you know many things are petty, many things are trivial. Let somebody else deal with that. I'll deal with something else. I'll deal with the valuation. I'll deal with the exit. I'll deal with the investment banks, I'll deal with, you know, etc., hiring and firing CEOs, that's what they do. Now, for me, back to what I've learned, I've learned quite a lot here, okay? So first of all, there's lots of noise, and if you talk to 50 people, 50 people will give you different stories of the same thing. So for me, I want to focus on learning, and it's all about learning. So I want to learn as much as I can about go-to-market strategies, using tools, for example, recently, 3 weeks back, I asked the question here on this forum and we talked about Clay or Instantly. So now I went with Instantly and now guess what? Claude runs my Instantly. As Charles mentioned HubSpot, Instantly can be run a full campaign on Claude. Tell Claude what to do and it will do things for you. So I'm learning. Okay. The only thing that I learned and maybe this differs you know, depending if you're funded or you're bootstrapped. I'm bootstrapped, meaning I'm not seeking funds. I don't want to be funded, okay, for a reason. So now since I'm bootstrapped with my team and my co-workers or co-founders, we want to do everything ourselves, okay? We would definitely love to hire a go-to-market expert maybe one year from now if we, if we reach that point. But currently I want to do everything myself along with my colleagues, and we're learning everything. And you don't learn if you don't take a risk and you don't actually try things. AI is all about trying. Let me give you just one thing before— I know the time is rushing us.

Yeah, I gotta jump here. I got another roundtable starting in 2 minutes.

Okay, so quickly, 6 months back— I mean, forget cowork and all of that— 6 months back, I was dealing with, uh, what you call coders. They charge a lot of money. It's very expensive. It's actually— we're talking about hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now I can do my own code. Like, I can— there's nothing I cannot do, even coding. Not, not, you know, like coding, and even like parsing and LangFuse and LangChain and, you know, Llama, LlamaParse or whatever. So humans are very, very, you know, we are different people. Humans can learn very fast, and I think this is our superpower. And that's probably the takeaway I would share with everybody.

Learn.

Just try and learn.

Yep. Lose and learn, but learn— lose fast. Gotta go, guys. Thanks. Please post the Luma links on your round, on your pod, uh, on your, uh, LinkedIn wall so that we can keep— every 2 weeks I do this, every 2nd and 4th Tuesday at dinner. On the Luma links that I sent out earlier, there's tons of different ones I do for clients. And then I'm doing one in 2 minutes for, for a company that does paid media. So if you ever want to understand what paid media is and how to do it It's a group session like this with an expert that's in baby, not me, because I don't, I don't know enough about it. So, all right, God bless. Take care.