CEO CRO CMO COO and Founder s Roundtable 2026 01 27

All righty. This meeting is being recorded. Good morning, everybody. Good morning. Good morning. Hello. Hello. Hello. Just gonna let some folks in and then we'll get started here about 5 minutes.

Hello, Michael.

Hello, how you doing?

Good, really good. I like your— the, the, the intro. The video is really cool, the one that's dropping and building your name of your logo.

I can't see you, Walter. I just see like your, uh—

oh, hold on.

There you are.

My camera decided to go point upstairs.

Yeah, where is he talking from?

Yeah, hello, good morning, good afternoon, whatever you are.

Where are you, Walter?

I'm today in the freezing Chicago.

I'm from Chicago. Oh really? Yeah, I lived in Iowa Heights.

Oh, oh, okay. I mean the city city. Okay, I mean like, uh, 1600 South and 1800 West.

How cold is Chicago today?

Uh, let me tell you, this morning was 7, now it's 14.

Yeah, no thank you. That's, that's why I moved.

Well, I moved to, I moved to Hawaii first from Chicago, and then I moved to LA. I said, gosh, this is adorable, but then I didn't like the politics. And soon after I didn't like the politics in LA, I came back to Chicago, and I'm regretting it again.

Yeah, I think they have similar politics there.

Oh, let me tell you, I have a business in, in that is related to housing, and, and it's, it's in order to do anything about housing, you have to be in bed with every single council member of 52 districts.

Districts in Chicago?

In Chicago?

Yeah, yeah, Chicago is very cool.

If you don't get the support from them, you get nothing done.

Well, I wanted to thank some folks today while we're getting this going. David and Mir, who helped me put together this roundtable to get today. And David, why— why tell me— tell us— tell the group why you kind of decided to do this with us and how this is helping you and your top of funnel and just what you want to maybe talk about like that works or didn't work for you this last 12 months.

Hi, Michael. Thank you very much for the introduction. I think the main reason I helped you put it together is because I was personally touched by this initiative that you created. I am a strong believer in networking, in the power of community. I've already gained a few connections that I find valuable from attending this roundtable. I personally also learned a lot about how to work with AI mainly from the recent meetings, but I guess AI is the main topic right now and kind of spreading the word. That's my main motivation. Maybe I'll just tell about myself if that's okay. So I just came out of a company that I founded 10 years ago. Its name ESP team. It was a consultancy and a service integrator in the world of RPA, robotic process automation. I'm now working on a new business which is more local here to the north of the Netherlands. And right now I have, I'm free of interests as they say. I have nothing to request other than connecting people and spreading the good work that Michael is doing.

Thank you so much, man. I'm glad to have you here again. I think there was some other folks that helped me too that were on the call. Noah, you want to introduce yourself and just kind of give a tip or tactic that you learned in the last 6 months that you, that you saw like AI-wise or automation-wise or strategy?

Yeah, sure, Mike. Good to see you. Nice being on the, at the roundtable. Nice to meet everybody. Noah Pusey, President, CEO of Ripple Analytics. We track data. So, you know, in your sales process, really figure out how many touches it takes to close a deal. And we've done this over the years and we've never closed a deal after 6 touches. So I don't, I don't get on that 7th call anymore. I'll basically send an email to whatever prospect I'm talking with and say, it's been 6, you know, we've had 6 meetings, we've had 6 calls, 6 Zooms, whatever it has been, time to make a decision. And no problem if it's a no, but I've got to, you know, allocate my time to be as productive as I can be. And if I have thousands of data points that show we've never closed a deal after 6 touches, then why do the 7th?

What's the best message that you found that Like, for me, it's this whole roundtable approach to get people— I like to talk to me. It's like, hey, once you've been around table, but let's set up a call first to understand what you do and why you do it and see if it's a good fit. That's been a great lead gen approach for me. This is what I do, is the whole email, LinkedIn roundtables for companies and build their whole top of funnel. Um, I'm curious, like, what, what kind of strategies have you seen that work, that didn't work? And this is for everybody here, we're not doing sales pitches, but I'm giving these guys a little extra time because they took their LinkedIn and said, let's do this roundtable together and help me build it. So they— we're not doing pitching, but they're also getting a chance to talk sooner than everybody else. Just because if you're going to help like David and Noah and everybody else that used their LinkedIn, they're going to get extra time. So go ahead.

Yeah, I mean, I early on in the conversation, I asked what 3 core principles of leadership that they have adopted, whoever I'm talking with. And I can usually see if there's there's going to be any opportunity for collaboration based on those 3 principles. You know, people-oriented leadership is what I'm looking for. We assess— our platform assesses how well your workers co-work with each other. So, if you're people-oriented, then chances are there's reason to have a second, third, fourth discussion.

The best question I ask when I get on a call is like, So Steve, you booked the time with me. What, what brought you to the table? What got you interested to book a time? And just let them talk. So everybody put, put a question that you ask on the, on the, on your call, um, that helps us kind of get some information from people. Because pitch slapping on email or LinkedIn or getting on a Zoom call and just going, hey, this is what I do, here's how I do it, that's or slide death. You guys, a lot of people do that, and I'm like, you don't even know what's going on with them before you start talking about yourself. So I love that question, uh, asking like, what brought you to the roundtable? I'm sorry, what brought you on the call? What— to book me? And then on the table approach is asking them to be on it and then say, hey, before you come on, can you book a time? So those are the two things for me. That get people to show up. And then once they get— when they show up, either on the roundtable or on a one-to-one, I'm getting what I want to learn first so I don't sit there and pitch a lot of people, because people will not— they won't give you interest in working with you if that's all you talk about yourself. So if you guys can do that, make sure, um, you put your information in the chat, like why you're here too, like that That could be your little commercial on this roundtable, is put your information in chat, like what you— why you joined and something you're trying to do or what you do. Because we're not gonna want— we want to— we don't want everybody doing elevator pitches here. That's a good way. But don't just put your name and email address. You know, Walter has the best attitude for today, guys. I gotta give him a clap because he's just happy.

Oh, elevated energy.

I gotta tell you, everything is so bad that the best pill that you can take is to be happy. I'm serious, right?

I like it, I like it. What are you taking today? Because I need some.

Well, I think too, I said one is I don't give a damn and the other one is a happy pill.

Happy, okay. I'm— that's for real.

Saving the chat in Zoom doesn't happen automatically, so if you want to save the chat, hit— there is three dots on the top of the chat and you can click save chat.

Yeah, that's it.

But it's recording already. It's recording. Uh, oh, you know, I, I— can I say something openly for the— for everything you have discussed? Because I found very interesting things in legality. I'm trying to do automate everything, like a lot. And to the extent that I want all inbound and outbound calling all using AI, I found a couple of, uh, blocks. You cannot talk to— you cannot make phone calls to mobile phones. You can only make phone calls to business-to-business. So if anybody— I'm gonna put my info in the chat, I'll share it with everybody about how to automate you know, the communication with leads that you may have. If you have the leads already that they were opt-in, you can freely call them, have AI calling them. But if not, there is a rule in the TCPA, it's called, that is blocking you to anything other than, uh, a landline.

Yeah, that's a Telephone Consumer Protection Act, TCPA.

Correct.

Texting or calling someone that's not opted in is a big deal. But you can send out a cold email to people, um, but it has to be a reason why you do it and not do it more than once according to, um, TCPA. And then obviously, what's the GDPR? What's the GDPR?

And, uh, yeah, that one from Europe.

It's in Europe.

Yeah, yeah. So that one, so I just try to not do that too much, but I mean, I'm an American company. Like, I don't know how you're going to sue me from China, you know, whatever. Oh, go for it. There's a lot of, there's a lot of CRMs, Michael, that actually don't allow you to do it either. You have to have, you know, show it, like HubSpot, for example.

You have to like opt people in about 5 times before you can even send them an email, even if you're replying to one of their emails, which is quite—

I don't like HubSpot for cold. I mean, that's more for warm.

Yeah, I agree with that.

I know, I know how to send out cold emails using 30, 40 different domains and not do more than 20 emails. And then on LinkedIn, it's, you know, it shouldn't do more than 150 activities a day and it shouldn't look like automation. Otherwise you're going to get banned off LinkedIn.

There's programs out there like Buzz.ai where you can send up to 200, even 300 connections a day, messages and/or emails.

You can't do 200, 300 connections a day.

Not connections, um, messages rather.

So yeah, yeah, but yeah, and it's all automated. I don't sell Buzz, I just use it, you know, like 3 years ago. Yeah, yeah. But just, you know, when you look at that type stuff, um, just think about like, who do you want doing it? You want to do that all day, figure out what works, what doesn't? Or do you want to hire, uh, you know, a guy like Steve or Michael or whoever, or Walter, who are experts in different spaces? So So yeah, I'm just letting folks still in here. So if you can raise your hand in the, in the button-down raise hand question. And what I'd love to hear from some of your folks is a tip or tactic or strategy that has really helped your business or your client or hurt it. And the whole idea here is not to pitch about what you did for a client to help them. Um, I don't want to do a lot of pitches here just because it's, it's not the way I do this. And please don't mention the UN, right? Come up with something different. All right, Ray.

Hey, there's a real helpful hint I want to kind of give everyone that's on the beginning of this call, and everyone may appreciate this. I don't know how many of you guys are tired of bots joining these calls. And having to maintain them. There is a simple way to block all of them now, and I can look at instructions later on. But the other thing is, if you think about your tools for meeting records, there's a lot of tools out there you can actually record with technically, whether legal or not illegal, and not interrupt everyone in a meeting by having 30 note takers appear. I know, Michael, this is something you and I have talked about in the past.

Yeah, I just don't let them in and they peel off. Instead of ignore, what, what, how do you, uh, how do you do so they don't even get that far? So I had to buy, I had to buy 500 seats on Zoom because the note takers, even though I didn't let them in, they said that was, I was at maximum because I don't want to use the webinar Zoom, I want to just use a Zoom meeting room because I don't know, I just, it's confusing. So what, what do you do to stop that?

Well, there's two things. I'm going to talk about the other side first. It's a little easier is what tools are out there that you can actually use that aren't going to tie up anyone's meeting room on because I think everyone has that same issue. And one of the things you can actually do is start using tools like a Granola, which will record meeting notes. It's not 100%, it's not live and transcript, but you hit button at the end of the call and you can actually go back and queue it and pull your notes out of it. There's other tools that have actually started to be released that are actually starting to pull your chats. You know how we just talked about having to hit the 3 buttons and what other ways to get this? Not quite true 100%. Some of those other tools are actually able to visually detect that. So just by opening up the chat window and letting it run, it'll actually pull the notes out of it. And you can interact with those tools after you're done. So now you can actually figure out what's worth looking at and what's not worth looking at. But Granola is one of the newer ones that came out. And since we're talking about AI a little bit, that was one of the things I wanted to point in your direction.

You know, I just saw that Roger's on here who helped me build this last month of roundtables as well. I just want to kind of give a thank you to Roger and also have him kind of tell us why he also teamed up with me to do this before I get to Rajiv.

Yeah. Hi.

Hey, how you doing, Michael? Hi guys, guys and girls. Yeah, we connected on a WhatsApp group, a sort of a scale-up WhatsApp group that we're both on. And yeah, I'm a fractional sales leader having been through 5 SaaS scale-ups and exits over the last 20-odd years. So I'm keen to connect and I'm keen to network with people and Having learned a lot about software startups and scaleups and the mistakes that founders make, including myself, I have to admit at the beginning of my journey in entrepreneurship. So I'm just really keen now as an independent fractional to kind of, you know, learn from people out there, hear what's going well, hear what's working, hear what isn't working because it can be a little bit isolating on your own and going into clients.

What is working for you, Roger? What didn't work?

Yeah, I mean, some of the things that didn't work. So I've tried a lot of stuff. I mean, I'm one for experimenting. So I've tried like AI agents, I've tried AI calls, I've tried these ultimate so-called automated services that make calls and connect you. And I'm not going to name names here, but they promise big and deliver really little. And some of the data tools as well to actually get the names and details of your ICP and key personas. That's a real weakness in our industry generally. And I ended up building some of my own API and AI tools to go and interrogate things like Companies House and what have you to pull back the data and then doing the hard yards on LinkedIn and Navigator to get information that has worked. And then I think we said on the last call, Michael, that the thing that my team, it's just making phone calls, you know, emails hit and miss, good for a warm-up, but we tended just to connect on telephones. And get hold of people and try and book discovery calls. But to the comment earlier on, I think it was from Noah, you know, there's only so many connections and so many times you can bother people until you're best off giving up. Not worth making a fool of yourself after 6, 7, 8 contacts. So yeah, you know, I've learned a lot and I think the landscape changes all the time. There are new tools coming to the fore all the time. But I tend to give them a try and listen from the guys out there what's actually working and not. So very keen to learn and hear other people's experiences.

Thank you.

If you're not talking, please mute if you're going to have background communication. Rajeev.

Yeah, thanks so much for the opportunity, Michael. It's always fun to be on one of these calls with Michael. I love Michael's fresh sense of humor and perspective. Like he has previously likened Networking to Dating, which I thought was a very future-facing, progressive idea. And I hope he continues that, you know, because I think that's what keeps networking memorable. Okay, but back to the question. First of all, Happy New Year. We made it.

Yay.

But to answer Michael's question, the thing that I found as a solution, maybe even an evergreen solution in 2026, is thought leadership. So one of the tactics that has worked for me is to essentially create a persona of thought leadership that you can do by creating quality content and having that content be listed in key media outlets like CNN News, Bloomberg, CNBC, ABC, and the like. And basically what happens when you do that is that that starts getting tracked not just by Google, but also by ChatGPT. And the ultimate goal is for ChatGPT to recommend you as the best of the best. Because as everyone knows, the entire world is using ChatGPT. ChatGPT is going to eclipse Google by some estimates as early as April 2026, and by some estimates September 2026. It's used by a billion people every week and 350 million people every day.

So the point is, how do you get— how do you get, um, in ChatGPT or any of these other ones, how do you make sure, like you are part of that.

Yeah. So in order to do that, you need to be kind of like this known face and you need to be in the media like all the time. Kind of like one example is Gary Vee, but that's like an extreme example. But similar to a Gary Vee or a Donnie Deutsch from yesteryear, you kind of need to be in the media like all the time, more or less attributed to your area of expertise. And they need to be like various sources touting the same thing that you're the expert on the area that you claim to have domain expertise on. So when you have all these sources all saying the same thing and all validating the same thing, the net result of that is that ChatGPT will start recommending you for that specific narrow area of work. So for example, if there are multiple news stories saying that Michael Follaru is like the most progressive voice in lead generation, guess what happens? When you look on ChatGPT for, Hey, who do I use for lead generation? There's a high likelihood that Michael Furlato and Full Throttle Leads will show up very prominently in that list. And that is the way as to how to orchestrate that.

Cool. Don't you have to add schema to your website so that the search engines use AEO and GEO to find you?

Yeah, I mean, that helps. But beyond that, you need an attribution from a very high domain authority website, hence the news outlets, because Usually it's either news outlets or government agencies have a very high domain authority. And when those high domain authority websites are kind of pointing to you, mentioning you explicitly by name or your company name, that's what the spiders are crawling and tracking and indexing on Google as well as on, you know, the search.

Michael, now I'm going to go search Michael. I'm stalking you, Michael.

You know, it's weird because it said I was the most handsome Legion guy.

There you go.

That's what I'm talking about.

I did.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he's got the muscle car to prove it too.

Just say Lance. Go ahead, Lance.

Yeah, thanks, Michael. I am— I keep wondering more and more, you know, when I got into this, I don't know, 25, 30 years ago, we used to phone people all the time.

And can you fix your camera so we can see your face?

Yeah.

Can you—

can you see me now?

Barely. Yeah. Fix your headroom. There you go. Hey, hold on, hold on. I'm a TV guy. I can't handle like this. This—

yeah, I got a stand-up desk, so sometimes I was standing and everything. Anyways, look, my quick point is just that we've created so much noise, right? We have so many digital tools now, so much availability to do, you know, broadcast so much volume at people. And, um, you know, in the early days I signed up for various subscriptions and I thought, this is valuable, this is valuable. And then, I realized, "Ah, there's too much." Everyone's got a newsletter now and everyone's got this and that. And it's like, "Pah!" And I spend most of my day now avoiding my phone and avoiding my email and trying to get away from all the noise. And I would imagine other people are probably in a similar kind of spot where they're like, "This is too much." So, what I do find great when I actually get a decision-maker on the phone, they usually just, or if I get them, even by email. They just say, "Here's my personal cell phone. Call me right away or call me in an hour. Call me tomorrow at—" But I think they're also broadcasting they don't want it to get lost in an email. They don't— we've established contact. Let's just make this as quick as possible. And I don't know. That's my thing moving forward right now is how do we sniper shot the communication as opposed to this kind of wall of You know, bots and bits and bits. You know, we've got bots talking to bots and it's exhausting.

I like when I ask them to book a time with me, I ask them for their phone number as a prerequisite to book me. So you want their email and phone number. Some people just ask for very little data. I'm like, ask, ask also why you're booking a call in that county. But I also put them in the WhatsApp, the phone number, and say, hey, just want to make sure we're still on for tomorrow. So now I have a 1-to-1 text communication because WhatsApp has a desktop version. I can— I don't have to just do it through iMessage, which I don't have a Mac, so I can't really do match those up. So WhatsApp, I started turning into my, my main communication platform besides email. Mitchell.

Yeah, so thanks for having me here today. Nice to meet everybody. You know, in real life seems to be a big thing for some of my clients, and I've helped them with trade shows. Nobody's talked about trade shows, but some of the things that you've asked for about successes is actually the setup of a trade show. You know, like you, Michael, I think that presence and how you appear on Zoom calls is one thing, but how you appear in person, setting up a trade show booth, Many people just put the, the table in front and they sit behind it as if they're waiting for people to come and take and, and make a, a purchase at a trade show. So I turn that whole thing around. I invite people into my booth. I sit, I make sure that there are no chairs for the, my clients' salespeople, make sure if they wanna take a break, they do so outside of the, outside of the booth and have a, a very interactive session by bringing people into either play some type of a game or engage them with some type of a demo in the trade show booth. So that was just one of my pet peeves about trade shows and how I've overcome that.

Yeah, I used to get 80, 70, 80 cards without having the name Full Throttle at that time. And the whole idea is just ask people what they do, go by the snack, the snack table. Sometimes you can sit by the restroom where, you know, people are going to hit there and and just look at people's name tag and go, hey Steve, what do you do for Xerox? You know, versus, hey, can I talk to you for a second? It's going to put people on the edge. So don't get in front of the booth like you said, but also go where they're at. You know, don't just look like you're, you're gonna wait for someone to pass, especially if there's no, uh, volume in the, in the trade show or the hall. Why are you standing there? You know, you— or when you're at a, at the panel, wait in line a little bit, a couple, might be 3 or 4 people wanting to talk to the speaker, but you just said, I enjoyed this, I wanted to get your card, don't want to, you know, talk too, too fast or too, too much here because I know you're busy. That has got— that got me a $300,000 deal with Altel, uh, back in the day, just by going and talking to the person at the front. Um, Jurgen, Right.

I love this advice for a trade show. I've been in trade shows and not really knowing what to do and how to engage.

That was pretty good. One more thing for the trade shows. Before you go to the trade shows, download the attendee list, the speakers, and people you think that might come and say, hey, are you going to be at this show? I just want to see if we can meet, even if they're not going. You basically got the communication up. So go ahead. Absolutely. So I'm a people person.

I help organizations with change management. You change your business model, you adapt your strategy. How do you make sure people 2 or 3 layers down the line, the people in front of your customers, really know that and hear it and know how to apply it? That's what I do and I have done for corporate for decades. And I coach. Now, when I say I'm a coach is the thing I should not say when I want to engage with people because they run away. They think I want to fix them. They think there's something— I think something's wrong with them, or I discover that something's wrong with them. And the step forward with them is, what keeps you up at night? Like, if there's enough trust in the communication, in the relationship, in the dyad that we're having at the time, What does your business need? What are you worried about? And that is a nice entryway into the conversation that helps me understand where they're at and then build enough trust to move forward into, let's look at your situation and how you can grow out of it. What kind of appropriate step is according to you, appropriate, um, to go forward with?

Yeah, the one that— what keeps you up at night, I'll just warn you, as a guy that's been selling for 30 years, it's gonna, it's gonna trigger some people, you know, because that's like what we were taught like in '90s and early 2000s. So that's good, it's a good question. He's got to figure out how to ask it a little different because that was like a you know, coffee's for closers type thing, right? It's like you can't, you can't just make it look like you're asking a question because you want to sell somebody. And some people that are in marketing sales have been asked that question a lot.

So, so Michael, how do you get around this? Because I, I, I'm not selling anything, I want to know, right?

But it's— but then that's the next thing you say, and they also know that you're sales. So the whole thing is like, what, right, what What brought you to the table today? Why'd you book some time? I'm just curious. Like, I'd love to understand, like, what was going through your mind. Like, oh, I want to talk to Michael about this. So if you ask like that, laid back, versus, hey Steve, I saw you booked the time, what keeps you up at night? They'll be like, mother— you know, it's not gonna— it's not gonna work as well as you think it does. And I, I'm just saying that because I've been trained in all these different sales um, Ackermans, you know, Miller Heiman and all these other stuff, and Dale Carnegie. There's a lot of good and bad stuff in those things. You really got to understand, like, how to change with the times. And what, like, with AI, right? I'm gonna take AI, send a message out and say, oh, I see Roger works for this, he does this, and he, he was on the road team. Roger knows all this, this is on his LinkedIn. So how about you stop regurgitating his LinkedIn and looking like you're cute and going, how could I get in Roger's brain and heart with some sort of question or feed his ego? And that's why for me it's all about, you know, whoever I could say, listen, are you going to Inbound? I did this on for HubSpot. Are you going to Inbound in May? Um, would love to see what your thoughts are of that show. I might go there. I went to SaaStr. I had 4,000 messages go out, 600 messages reply, and 45 meetings. Wasn't going to inbound. Sent it to my first and second connections and made tons of meaning. It's not— you don't have to be all this tricky sales, you know, old school type of thing. I'm not saying what keeps you up at night is a horrible question. I'm just saying think of a way to say it more lackadaisical, less salesy, because that particular sentence is going to trigger a lot of people because they're used to that messaging over the last 20 years. Ian.

Sorry, I had to unmute. So, yeah, hey, I'm an immersive tech guy. So a lot of what I do is kind of future fit digital transformation. So I admit that I'm in that huddle. So a lot of stuff I've heard from everybody so far, hats off to, I think, you know, leveraging trade shows, gamification, engagement points that don't feel forced, that don't feel salesy, and also are frictionless. And I'll tie into my advice, but, you know, I've heard WhatsApp mentioned a couple times. I understand the regulation limitations of being able to call landlines versus cell phone. I think I see a lot of that workaround in WhatsApp. Almost everybody professionally has a WhatsApp desktop or phone. Getting people's WhatsApp information is readily available for those that make it public. So I think that is a good way to kind of drive natural engagement without having to find landlines to call that part. But my advice statement, I guess, as a, as a founder and kind of serial entrepreneurial entrepreneurs, don't build an app first. People don't want one more thing to have to download, to do, to grab, to lift, especially at a trade show. 99% of what an app can do, you can write paywalls around at a web application level, especially like what I've learned in WebXR. And we built an entire augmented reality application that has been nothing but friction. I mean, it's great and I'm glad we have it and brands want it for paywalled experiences. But the largest lesson I've learned that I'd love to pass on to you guys is, you know, figure out in this choose-your-own-adventure consumerism world where customers have everything at their fingertips at all now, like, what's your algorithm? Who's your end customer? Build for that specifically. Let the rest ripple out instead of trying to build an, an every one product. So yeah, app, app second, web first.

Awesome. Thank you so much, man. Let's see here. Let me go to the next person. Um, and if I lower your hand, like I— on Walter, I just want to make sure everybody gets a chance. So I'm not gonna— I gotta make sure everybody gets a chance to talk today. So Jason.

Yeah, hi, thanks for having me. Um, two different things. Number one, I did some reflection of 2025 and what's one thing I want to do differently. And so this giant broad thing was be curious. I found a lot of times when I didn't get the results I want is because I was some way stubborn as opposed to being flexible, fluid, and curious as opposed to what the possibilities could be. Um, I also sort of want to riff off of what people are saying. I'm very curious about people's thoughts about not so much once people are in the chair, but getting people into that chair online or in person. I find that decision makers are so sick of being pitch slapped, they're really kind of deaf to anything that people have to say. And I think sometimes the challenge is, is we're solving a problem that they don't even know they have. So the way I'm going about it is trying to position myself as a thought leader and lead that way and show them and educate them through that way. But I'd just be curious to have people riff off of that, of how do you get the bum in the seat that you can talk to? Because once I get them there, I'm pretty good. It's getting them into that seat that I find more challenging.

Who wants to answer that question?

I can.

I'm actually like the client that you'd be pitching to. A lot of you guys seem like you are actually looking for these clients. A lot of times is if you're hammering emails, texts, in-persons, calendar reminders, you're actually turning people off and there's major abandonment to it. I think it's really important to understand their industry, their pain points, what they need prior to talking to them. My biggest pain point when you guys come after me as a CMO is you don't even know my business. You don't even know my pain point, and you're asking for a conversation before you even entered it. I think you have to do some reconnaissance before you actually go after the client.

Yeah, I would, I would say too, like, I think a lot of what you need to do is think about who you want to reach out to that leadership. Like, for example, for us, we're targeting CFOs and our CEO is the one that's reaching out to them. He has a background as a CFO. He knows, he knows like what it's like to be a CFO. And we're inviting them to a roundtable to talk about issues that matter to them, right? With him as a leader. I think that's a much better way of reaching out to like, you know, C-level, executive-level type folks.

And Ian, what do you do?

I am the executive VP for strategy for a company called VerifyFirst.

Okay. What do they do?

They're a background screening company. Background screening, drug screening, verifications. Also, we have two other companies I'm involved with, but mostly with VF.

And what drove you to come to the roundtable today? Like, what were you hoping to try to learn or actually give a tip for?

Um, I've been a couple times. I just really like hearing the different ideas that, you know, everyone's talking about and kind of learning like I'm trying to figure out what I don't know. So I can get better at what I do. But my whole life is really around building strategies for these companies, or even, you know, tactics that we can use to accelerate growth. That's, that's all I think about.

Awesome. Well, I would personally love to chat with you after this and see if there's some ways, but let's go to Joel. Okay.

Yeah, just wanted to kind of jump on, uh, Jess's comment about doing the research for your buyers. Um, one thing that I like to do when I'm reaching out, um, uh, virtually is inviting them to do like a virtual coffee chat. Um, and that kind of having no mention of a sales. Um, just, it's like, oh, I want to get to know your business, learn more, you know, see how we can support each other. And so A lot of times the conversations, I let them do the talking, um, asking them questions. It's like, oh, so what's going on? You know, what's, uh, what problems are you facing? And I kind of listen and let them continue talking because people love to talk about themselves. I think it's one of the most basics of psychology when it comes to sales and letting them, uh, explain to you their pain points to you. Um, and if you've done some research beforehand, you already know, you know, some things that you can, you know, ask them or see what they're doing already. To see if you actually can support them or help them out in any specific forms. And if nothing else, you know, you got someone that may be able to introduce you to someone else, uh, down the road. So I just kind of wanted to throw that out there. That's how I do it. If there's—

with that virtual coffee, I was doing that a lot, but then some people started getting— I felt like they're getting turned up with a virtual coffee reference. But I mean, that's just a matter of opinion on some people. And then One thing I learned was the whole calendar thing. I said, can I, you know, here's my calendar, so you could book a virtual coffee meeting. And it became aggravating for some of these CROs, especially like alpha male, or alpha female, where they're like, why am I filling out crap for you? So that's vernacular of, hey, here's my calendar, or can we, can I get yours?

So I usually like to ask for theirs too, Mike. So that's good.

Yeah, so that's a good way. And also so you can put— maybe move something around. Like, mine's always— I have 15 Zoom calls a day. So if you ask, you take mine, you're not going to find a spot. It might even get turned off. So I'd rather move, move someone around that I think is a really good lead. And so the whole way you ask things is, is important because it's— to me, think of this as dating. It's business dating. You know, you got to make a good first impression, show up on time, you know, don't look like you have a hat on backwards and a hoodie and you're looking like you're scruffy all day. It's, it's, you know, so anyways, Jonathan.

Yeah, I was just wanting to piggyback on what Joel and Jess said. You just actually helped with my lead-in about it being like a date. I get you guys trying to sell me. I do fractional CMO work and head of marketing work and consulting for a lot of stuff. And I get stuff every single day about stuff like that. But when someone just asks me, hey, you want to have a Zoom call or a virtual happy hour where we just kick it and talk about things, it's great. But when you come at me where it's SMS, email, marketing, on my LinkedIn, I know your friend, all this, and you've never said one thing, I've never met you in my life. It's like dating. It's like walking into a bar. You meet someone, whether it's a man or woman, you walk up to them and go, I'm an amazing guy. I'm really great. I'm rich. You don't have to work, but if you want to work, you can work. Oh, you can have a dog.

You can have a puppy.

I'm a great lover. We do this. Want to get married?

What are they gonna do? They're gonna cruise. I use that same language on all these calls. I'm like, business state. So you, you regurgitated definitely everything I preach every day. Every day.

So, I mean, that's just what I wanted to add on to it.

Yeah. Um, how about Bill Harper?

Hey everybody. So I spend my days, I own an advertising agency and I spend my days growing growth-minded businesses. So. The development of strategy and story and how they implement it and what channels they choose is what I spend most of my time with. A couple of things just that I've noticed. The first one that a lot of businesses miss is the need for simplicity. You take a look at Volvo, they only sell safety. You take a look at Porsche, they only sell performance. And businesses have a tendency to do what I refer to as buffet thinking. You know, if you want a really great steak, you're going to go to a steak restaurant. You're not going to go to a place that says, well, I've got something for everybody because you realize that while they may have a lot of variety, none of it is going to be very strong. So being able to have one message is one thing. The second is leveraging social media as a way to give your knowledge away. I think people are terrified to share what they know for fear that if I've explained it, then people won't want to hire me to be able to do it. And nothing could be further from the truth. In the last 2 years, I had somebody challenge me to go on TikTok. I've now got 170,000 followers and we've generated nearly $7 million in net new business just off TikTok alone, simply by sharing what we know. And all of it is Scooby Snack-sized insights. You know, here's, here's, uh, in my instance, of course I'm talking about marketing and sales, but you know, here's Dollar Shave Club's video. Let's break down why this works. Here's what the strategy was. Here's how they stayed on point with messaging. Here's how that happened. And then every couple of things that I've done, whether it's on LinkedIn or it's on that channel or others, is an opportunity to book a call if you are interested in figuring out how to do that. Once they book the call, that first 30-minute call that I have with them, I say nothing about our agency. The entire time that we're talking, it is nothing more than solving or identifying where are you guys at this point? What things are you up against? To solve this, you might try this. Have you guys worked that? Where are you in that journey? By the time we're done with the first call, there's already a request for the second. And the second now is what's the process that you would use to get to a place where you would solve that problem on our behalf? The lead is already warm if it's coming in from the social media platform because they've seen the kind of thing that we're talking about. By the time you get there, you're clearly not selling yourself. If you have to say anything about your business in that first 30-minute call, the game is that you've lost. So that first 30-minute thing is, is let me show you how much value I can give to you about your circumstance. By the end of that call, if you've done that, they're now in a position to say, I so appreciate what it is that you've done for me. Would you, you know, what would be a next step? Well, the next step is still not to work together. The next step is to talk about what the process would be if we work together. By the time you're done with that third call. Now, see, most salespeople are like, whoa, whoa, whoa. Or business owners are like, that's way too long. That's way too long. No, it's not. That will outperform any lead gen effort, any nonsense AI outreach crap all day long. And I just— I find it incredible that this isn't more a part of what's being chosen.

Pick your platform of choice. Emotional connection, you know, or mental connection. Just like a TEDx talk. They don't start off with, here's who I am and everything about themselves. They say, Here's a story about Tim, and, you know, he was a kid that did this, and then we had this. And see, they draw you in emotionally or mentally, and then, and then they're, then they're trying to figure out how to help you. And there's a lot of that challenger sales approach where, so tell me about your, you know, asking questions. Tell me about your, your department, like how you doing leads now, or tech, your tech stack, asking about what they do now so that when you try to figure it out, you can reference back that you heard them. "What I heard you say, Steve." That's a really good repeatable sentence back to somebody because everybody wants to be heard.

See, and I like to drop even down faster than that. I like it to be, "Tell me what you're struggling with right now. Let's make the most out of this 30 minutes. Here's what we're struggling with. Have you tried this and this, or are you at this point?" What I'm showing them is how well I understand the circumstance and the situation. It's always solve, solve, solve.

If you say, tell me what you're struggling with the most too fast, to me it's like going too, too fast in a date.

You know, it's interesting. I haven't had—

you got no one that asks that.

I haven't had that response that same way. The most of the time, and again, perhaps it's because of how they're coming inbound. Most of the time the thing is, is this is really interesting what you're saying. I'm not sure how that applies to me. It's like, okay, why don't you tell me where you think you guys are strong or weak, and they're diving right into the, into their problem. So perhaps it's also a part of how they're coming at it.

But the shorthand way and the way you, the way you just asked that was a little different. Yeah. And, and I, I was a much, that was a much smoother way to ask that.

My, my, my last comment and then I'll drop off is, you know, the, the thing that I have sort of written down on a post-it next to me is Talking about yourself works as well at a cocktail party as it does in— or works as well in marketing and sales as it does at a cocktail party, right? The more you talk about yourself, the more you're going to be standing by yourself. Anyway, thanks for the opportunity.

I appreciate it. Thanks, Bill. Glad to meet you. And just a little, a little like word of advice on Zoom calls like this. If you look at like Santos, he has Santos Gonzalez. And then Live Human AI, I have Michael Filato, Full Throttle. Like, Bill, I mean, you got a great name, but put another— a dash and say, I do this, or here's the agency I own. This is your place to be seen while you're listening. You might as well put more than just your first and last name. Mike Adams. Thanks, Mike.

Great to hear, Bill. So I'm Mike. I love to go to networking events, meet people, and the first question I always ask them is what is the best introduction I could make for you? Because everyone loves an introduction. So instead of people pitch-slapping each other all the time, which we've heard a lot about today, it's not about telling people what you do in the hope that they might be a customer because no one's a potential customer right away. Instead of that, think of everyone you meet as a potential introducer who could introduce you to a potential customer. So don't pitch-slap them at all. You're not selling to them. You're trying to help them saying, Hey, I would love to make an introduction for you. Tell me what is the best introduction I could make for you. So then they see you're a helper, you're trying to help them. And in return, it's likely they're going to ask you the same thing. What introduction can I make for you? And I think that's a completely different way of looking at the whole game when you meet someone new, whether it's on a Zoom call or in person, it's always trying to make an introduction for someone else. And what I've realized, I've been to more than 1,000 networking events. I was a bit crazy going to 15 events a week. And I realized that the best way to elevate your personal brand and your reputation is to always try to help someone else saying, what introduction could I make for you? And I think that's, that's, you know, something we could all focus on. Yeah. Yeah.

That's kind of what a lot of these folks on the call did. Like, like Dr. So it's like, I don't want you to do this one by one by one. So by growing this thing, we, we automate other people's LinkedIn like we did with Noah and so forth and everybody else. And Roger is like, how could I— how could you intro this roundtable where we're not pitching or selling? But, uh, can I— can we use your LinkedIn and my LinkedIn? And we have 4 other people like Noah and Roger and Dr. Axel that are doing this. So there's, there's ways to do this whole intro thing with, with bots and automation, but it has to be— it has to be look authentic. Dr. Axel, I wanted to thank you.

Yeah, the only issue is it's not always clear what introduction people are specifically looking for. I meet lots of salespeople and ask them, oh, what introduction can I make for you? And they say, oh, we're looking for any startup founder in any industry who could use my service. No, that's useless, right? So you have to be super specific because the more niche and specific you are, the easier it is for an introducer to look through their network to find just the right person to introduce. And so I think, you know, it's our challenge for all of us to try to refine our ideal customer profile, our ICP, to be as specific and niche as possible. And that will go a long way when people say, hey, what interest can I make for you? Be super specific. And I think, you know, that's something we can all learn to improve.

Thanks, Michael. Dr. Axel, thank you for helping with the LinkedIn. I saw you got on here. You were looking for the Zoom link, but tell us why you joined the roundtable and helped out the roundtable and and how this has been working for you so far.

Well, I haven't been on the roundtable before. So thank you for allowing me to be here. I hope you can hear me. And I'm sorry that I'm a little late because I couldn't find the, the link. What I like about events like this and opportunities like this is to tell people who join the call to say, hey, one of the people, if you're looking for something like that, is a is me like a catalyst. I've been for 20 years in business working with other people in the context of helping them make the right connection to the right thing that they're needing. And then on top of that, using a podcast where I'm inviting people that are tangential, basically kind of close to what I'm doing, but not exactly the same. And what happens over and over and over and over and over again is that somebody either volunteers that they have kind of an issue, a problem or something like that, or they have a need, or they think I might be the right person to help them. And what ultimately happens more often than not is that I know who the right person would be to help them.

I want to—

let me say one last thing, Mike. It kind of goes in the same direction to what Mike was saying earlier is what comes around goes around and vice versa. Right. The appreciation, I think, is actually the differentiator to all the tools and all the lead generation that is out there. And that's why I like to actually see people that have their camera on and engage with them. Yeah.

If you're going to come on, on the roundtables and have your camera on, be ready to engage. I mean, I usually start kicking people out of the roundtables if they're just sitting there and not have a camera on. Um, so I also wanted to introduce Dr. Axel as someone that, uh, was in the German Air Force and the United States Air Force and flew, I think, F-117s. Is that where you flew? F-111. F-111. So this guy is a, is a stud flying jets going Mach 5, 6, 7. I mean, it's pretty good. If you ever get a chance to have a good story with him, get, get on a call with him. So, Michael Sealy.

Hey, thanks, Michael. Really enjoying this conversation a lot. Bill Harper, that was amazing. All the stuff you said, I took a lot of notes on that. I've been finding on discovery calls, really lowering the pressure by saying the purpose of the call is to see if this is the right fit for you. If not, I may be able to refer you to, to someone who might be able to help you. And that just really disarms people. And I actually mean it, it's genuine. And then if something doesn't work, I'll actually refer them to someone in my network. And if it's, if that's a good fit, and I, I find that the conversations just flow much better if I start by just disarming them by literally saying like, the purpose of the call is to see if this is the right fit. If not, I may be able to refer you to someone else if that's helpful. So, just wanted to share that. Another thing, ScoreApp. I don't— not affiliated at all, but it's called ScoreApp. It's an AI-powered tool where you put people through a quiz. It's like a quiz funnel. Pop that on your website. It's really cheap. They have tons of templates, and it's a way to engage people. And it's actually— you can give them some free knowledge and things, and people really like the quizzes. People love taking quizzes. Another engagement tool there.

So thanks. Does anyone ever use Raya, R-A-Y-A, for networking? I got turned on to that yesterday as a way to meet other folks that are higher-level folks. And it's a way to— it's invite-only. R-A-Y-A. It's a— it's an app on your, on your phone, I think. So I don't think it's a website, but I just signed up for that. But you have to know someone to get in. So if everybody knows anything about that or wants to try to get in, let me know because I'm trying to get in. Santos.

All right, uh, hello everyone. Uh, hopefully you can hear me. It looks like I froze on my side. Um, I'm actually going to check out that Ray app. That, that looks actually very interesting. Um, hello, I'm the CEO at Live Human AI. Um, we've been in the AI space for almost 3, a little over 3.5 years now. We work in an enterprise environment. I really joined this call to get an understanding and make some connections, but more importantly, you know, typically for anybody on the sales front of things, I've been a sales leader for the past 25 years in an enterprise space. And, you know, just from some of these calls, you know, I'm already hearing things that just can kind of, one, inspire, number one, but two, also give you, you know, when you're on calls on an ongoing basis, sometimes there's that one thing that you pick up during the week that can really kind of just help kind of change the conversation and not be as mundane in a sense. You know, I look at myself as a resource. I'm a big open book. We've launched thousands of voice AI campaigns. So sometimes when people have ideas or thoughts about what will work and what didn't, you know, we have a lot of data around that right now. So I love to kind of share those things. We really focus on more of that kind of human touch. We look at ourselves as more of like the Google pay-per-click of voice AI, where it's not about just building out a script and sending it to market. It's more about the different A/B testing and the data segmentation and how do we convert at a better rate and making sure that we really do a lot of optimization. And that's really what it takes when we look at the data. So it's nice to meet everybody. And then when we talk about some of the you know, the, the trade shows and different things like that and how to connect. And when you do have a meeting and kind of how to disarm people, um, or just make the conversation a little bit smooth. But I think, you know, helping people, helping to get an idea of what people understand or what they think the best use case is for your product or service, um, and let them kind of figure or at least explain what that is, that helps a lot, um, for me and my staff. Because a lot of people have different use cases or different problems or different challenges, just like a lot of people on this call. So I think identifying that in the beginning and helping cater that conversation is great. But I think this is awesome, Michael, and thanks for allowing me to join.

Thanks, Santos. I just put in a link for Silicon Slopes for next week. It's in Utah. There's like— I got a link for free tickets. It's supposed to be like 20,000 to 30,000 people out there. So it's like the Silicon Valley, uh, in California, but it's in Utah once a year. I've never been to it, but a lot of people I know that are pretty successful or big names are going to it. And there's some pretty big names like, like, uh, as CEOs and founders of big tech companies going to it. So I put that in there. Um, and then I also threw a little information about my daughter Faith, who's been working with me for 4 years. Uh, she's graduating college and If you guys know any of any sales or SDR jobs, I need her to get out of the full throttle game for a little bit and get her feet wet without daddy. Um, because, you know, obviously kids don't listen to their parents. So anyways, uh, Mark, we got about 3 minutes and then we're gonna have to cut it short. So, uh, all right, thanks, Michael.

Pleasure, pleasure to see everybody. Great conversations, everyone. And, you know, Mitchell, good to see you. Great insight on the trade shows again. My name is Mark Dean. I'm the co-founder at LegalBreeze. It's a generative platform for lawyers. Basically, we're obviously been pivoting a little bit here and building our brand as the first, you know, ethical search engine for lawyers, which is, you know, in law, it's important to be ethical, right? And have the right information with the hallucination effect that you get from some of the other platforms. We have a backend that actually is— we're patent pending. We have a patent file. To hopefully provide the opportunity to, you know, provide that ethical insight. So, been 30+ years. It looks—

tell us a little bit. I mean, this is interesting. I actually— App Orchid, I basically helped you kind of go through all the different documents for the corporate lawyers in AI before AI was really hot. What do you guys— what was that called, Michael? App Orchid. Okay. Yeah, it's out of Austin. So what you guys, what do you guys do for lawyers? Yeah. Yeah.

So we provide the platform. So in terms of saving productivity, you know, we can save lawyers up to 3 or 4 hours a week doing research, document reviews, redlining, document preparation. So you prompt it, you put it in, boom, it's going to give it to you. And the key differentiation here is that it's ethical, right? We've spent a lot of time. My other co-founder, he's a lawyer. He's been a partner at a big law firm, you know, for 20+ years as well. So we're trying to develop this process. We initially started out as a practice management light suite, you know, similar to providing the opportunity for lawyers to, you know, track insights. We have integration with Stripe. You can do all that practice management stuff. So, you know, just listening to what you guys are saying, you know, we're— I know we don't have time today, but talking about building brand, is where we're at now because we pivoted a couple of times. As you know, in the startup world, you have to do that sometimes. But we're now on this, on this mission to really save time and energy for lawyers. So the more, more hours lawyers have, the more money they can make, the more clients they can help.

What? Yeah, what a, what a time suck. You know, all these contracts, especially when I was in bigger corporation selling, you spend a month in legal, 2 months in legal. It's like So yeah, I, uh, Lords are everywhere, baby.

You know, you gotta, you gotta love them, man. But, uh, but one thing that I will say, I heard earlier, you know, the whole thing, you know, like I said, I've ran large tech sales and customer success organizations. And one of the things that I have found, and I do consulting now with some of the, some of the AI startups out of Silicon Valley. And one of the things that I always try to tell people is you have to go in and understand the prep, the readiness for an organization to drive change or whatever your product is. Because at the end of the day, this is all about change. And it's amazing when you think about when you talk to founders, you talk to leaders about how prepared are your— is your organization to go in this direction? You'll find that many of them will go like, oh, well, hey, I never really thought about— well, you know, we change all the time, but how intentional are you about change? So my last thing is when you're talking to your potential prospects or your future customers, you know, engage them first about their organization readiness for change. So thanks, Mike, for the opportunity to connect with as many people as I can.

Appreciate you.

Have a nice rest of your week.

We're going to have to jump here, but there's a couple of— I got a paid media roundtable I'm doing for one of my clients that you guys could come if you just send me a message if you want to be invited to that. As long as you don't compete with that company. Um, and then obviously next week is that, um, Silicon Slopes thing that I'm a part of. I'm helping them build their attendee, and, and they also have trade show booths there. So, um, let me know if that's something that you want. Link— I put the link in the chat. There's those three buttons, and, and, you know, book, book a time. Uh, I'm sorry, book copy that messaging and so you have everybody's information. If you do want to help build this roundtable and you do want to on a continuous basis be on here and chat, then I kind of, especially if you're a smaller company like me, I kind of require you to use your LinkedIn to help build it. It's only fair if I'm giving that and people like Noah and other folks that have done this with me, Uh, where's Joseph? Uh, where's my other guys that were doing this? My brain is fried. I've been doing it, Michael. Roger. Hey, Roger. Um, just looking at all the names on here, it's, it's a lot of people's headshots. But, you know, please reach out to me to help me build this. Um, and then I'll see if you ever need someone. One of the other reasons why I do this is because I like to get referrals. Like, hey Michael, I know someone that needs Top of Funnel. Also help other people on this call the same way. Give each other— at least try to give each other at least 10% of the gross. That's what I do, you know. Help each other, help them, pay it forward. God bless. Talk to you in 2 weeks.

Cheers, guys.

Nice meeting you all. Bye.