CRO CEO CMO Founder s Roundtable Mastermind 8 11 26

Hello.

Hello.

Hi.

How you doing? Just letting everybody in here, then we'll get started here in a couple of minutes.

Oh, I see some amazing faces already. Wow, this is quite a crew.

A lot of new people because of Suzanne.

I'm very excited.

Nice to see you, Suzanne. Thanks for the invite.

Good morning. Hey, Donnie.

Hey, Rich.

Hey, Ellie.

Hi, Susie. We have Ellis. That's amazing.

We can start here in a little bit. While we're waiting, feel free to put your information in the chat. Why you're here, how can we help you, your LinkedIn, your phone number, your email. Don't just put your LinkedIn and go, hi, because no one knows who you are at that point. This is where you kind of can be salesy in the chat, but we want to kind of stay on topic of of who can make us better on here. Learn, strategize, give tips, tactics, and strategies. Even like, I use this great AI and I use this great tip from Steve that I learned 2 years ago. That's what we're trying to do is really talk about tips, tactics, strategies. Not I do this and that's how we won, because that's great, but that should be done probably on a one-to-one with some folks that really are looking for your help versus having 35 pitches on here, which people would be like, you know what, I'm out of here. They're not gonna like it. So we're still letting people in, and we'll get started here in about 3 minutes. But while we're waiting, please put your information in chat.

And then—

And I think a lot of these people, at least my friends, my side, I think a lot of them may know each other. And if not, they absolutely should. Like Donnie, for example. Thank you for jumping on first.

Are you looking?

Yeah, I see lots of new faces here. This is, this is quite awesome. You've really pulled together, you know, really looks like a very diverse and robust group of talent.

Oh yeah. Yeah, it's fun watching everyone pop in too.

Yeah, there's—

if you look at here, we have Suzanne's people, my people. Um, I'm thinking there's, there's Laura on here as well that helped me build this as well. So there's like— this is like a partner approach of putting together a roundtable that's not just about, you know, who can we have on here and just do pitches. This is a roundtable of People that are very senior, especially in the agency world because of Suzanne's background. But, um, yeah, I think this is gonna be a really good— one of the better roundtables. We have a lot of note-takers waiting to get in, which we're not gonna be doing that. But if you guys wanna watch the video, because I'm recording it, we'll have it on LinkedIn. We'll— and we're gonna tag Suzanne and me, and then it'll be on YouTube as well. So just take it— keep that in mind that this is— You know, friends among friends, but we're just— this will actually be used in some social media as well. Are you letting people in, Suzanne?

I am not. I can't. I have not let anyone in.

If you can let the real people in, not the noise. Okay.

Who do we have left?

This is a lot of people coming in. This is probably one of the bigger—

Yes.

I don't think it's letting me let people in.

It's all you.

I made you, I made you a co-host.

This guy who thought he escaped the firing squad, the man—

we've got Dave who's self-muted. I like it. Thank you.

Yeah, but yeah, definitely put your, your information in chat. I'll put mine here so you guys can see if I want to I take my signature file and just put it in there. All the, all the roundtables that I do, that's, that means I do this for my clients as well in that link that I just put up. And that's, it's, it's on the Luma. So every Tuesday I do this roundtable. It's about sales roundtables, masterminds, go-to-market strategies, stuff like that. So feel free to join any of these, and we'll definitely get started here. I'm just trying to get everybody to get in here.

Yeah, first I would love to start with— because Donnie popped in first.

Yeah, go ahead, go ahead.

Um, I'm going to start with Donnie just because he's, he's the first one to chime in. Um, what's keeping you up at night right now, Donnie?

Oh, so much is keeping me up at night because, uh, I have to consider multiple ways to navigate this landscape. Being creative is quite often madness. So I have a company that focuses on helping brands and agencies tell stories through music, sound, and experience. That said, I'm one of these guys that often says yes and then just figures things out. I mean, I think we all kind of play in that sandbox sometimes. So I have an event this weekend coming up where it's basically a yacht rock themed pickleball event with vendors, music, DJs. It's really, it's a low lift coming from the outside looking in since my team has produced such like incredible experiences like Stranger Things: The Experience and The Beatles: Love and Dreams of Dolly at the Dolly Museum out in Tampa. So some remarkable things. So this is keeping me up at night because it's a project I'm doing with my wife. Additionally, I'm working on 2 films, scoring 2 films, and That is, there's a production happening in 2 weeks, so I need to be in the Carolinas for that. So, and then of course there's just the day job of just the agency grind of helping brands tell stories, not only executing and in the subjective landscape of helping them with campaigns or excellence.

Well, what was a tip or tactic or strategy? That's where I really wanna get to is like, Have you learned from either winning or losing that we can— you can bestow upon the group?

That's a great question. I mean, I, I think from every, um, you know, whether you—

I—

there's so much failure before you get a win in, in everything, um, but there's always something to learn. And I think the most valuable takeaway, hopefully, is the relationships that you that you build along the way. I'll tell you one thing. I know that a lot of people are populating the chat with AI, like what tools are we using? It's been a great assistant. It's been such a great time saver to lean into so many different AI models for building decks or, you know, or, you know, fleshing out initial business plans. because so much of what I do is on the pitch side of things.

Yeah.

Where I'm pitching for new business. And sometimes you need just parameters for your team to kind of work within. So it's, what do I learn? I feel like every day is just, there's a learning experience if you're open to it. You know, you can't be so strong-willed and strong-headed to think that you know the best way. Uh, you never know.

The note-takers inside of this, like, yeah, that you do. I say, hey, can you re-engage Dave, Donnie with what we have, what I promised them? So that whole, like, even just to keep you organized, that whole note-takers changed my life, right?

Yeah, exactly.

I wanna, I want to introduce kind of like, before we go into each person's, you know, background stuff, I just want to thank Suzanne, um, and, and have her give her a little information of who she is. Obviously, I want to tell you about me a little bit, and then Laura is one of other folks that helped build this as well. So this is not pitchy, but this is the 3 people that kind of really made this happen today. As far as telling people what you do, it's great, but keep it really short. So we don't do commercials and keep— and, you know, put it in chat. But I'm Michael Falato. I'm the CEO founder of Full Throttle, Full Auto Lead, slash GTM Full Throttle. And I produce these roundtables and masterminds and podcasts so that people can interact, engage, learn from each other, and hopefully do business with each other. I teamed up with Suzanne and Lara to say, listen, you have a completely different audience than I have, and why don't we do things together where I help— we do a partner program and we use your LinkedIn and my LinkedIn and we help build business together. I do that for clients. To help build partnership programs and also use their LinkedIn to basically build their whole top of market. So using Claude coworker and LinkedIn automation email roundtables. Suzanne, go ahead real quick, and then we'll go with Laura, and then we're gonna open it back up to the group.

Thank you so much, Michael. It's such a pleasure to be here, and I'm looking around. There's so many people's faces I haven't seen in so long. It's so cool. Everybody's here in the same room. Ali and Ellis, I want you guys to meet at the end of this. So please connect. That is aside before I get into my own. I think you two, if you haven't met before, you absolutely should. And everybody else, please put your stuff in the LinkedIn. Yeah. On the chat. I'm Suzanne. A lot of you know me from either the ad world or the brand world. Started as a copywriter, made it up to the C-suite ad side, and then moved over brand side, made it up C-suite. Along the way, I started my own agency called The Agency, which for the last few years I have been focusing on growing and building brands. I work mostly with people who want to turn into brands and small to medium-sized businesses, particularly in the Fairfield and Westchester area, become bigger brands. So that's really where I lie. But I think I've worked or touched on anyone from the ad world except one of my college friends who's here. It's such a pleasure. Thank you, Julie.

And Suzanne, what, what did you learn from doing like this whole like LinkedIn joint roundtable approach, what it did to your to your, like, communication style with this particular approach?

It was amazing because I reconnected with so many people that I hadn't been in touch with for a while, and I've been so busy with meetings and catching up with people. So I think just the outreach and people wanting to be together, share their opinions, and sort of join forces as we all kind of sit in our own world or our own houses or our own studios, um, and just connecting together and getting, you know, people like this onto one call is phenomenal. I'm blown away.

Lara, why don't you do a quick intro and then tell us kind of what you saw from doing this together?

Yeah, it was a great discussion we had a few weeks ago. I'm so excited to see a few faces here today that I haven't seen in years. And in fact, Steve Olinsky, I think I was just looking at your LinkedIn. Like, it's been decades since we've crossed paths at Oracle. But anyway, good to see so many great people here. We did a convers— are you all getting feedback or is that just me?

Yeah, someone's speaker might be too loud or something. I'm getting feedback too.

Okay, it seemed to stop. Thank you. So yeah, so I've been leading go-to-market organizations since way back at Oracle for 8 years at the beginning of my career, built the demand growth engine at Microsoft for the Americas. That was an AI-native growth system before people were calling it that. And just love to hear the story. So what's— for me, we did a talk similar to this a few weeks ago. For me, what I love to hear is like really, you know, the stories. And I don't mean, you know, not in a salesy way, I sold to this person. But what I mean is how are we working with people to help them, you know, achieve more? And I just love— I've just got one person I'm working with right now who just took their dream job. And this is sort of their last, you know, they hope it'll be the last, you know, 10 years of their career. And they're talking about how, you know, business is running as a CFO in this new, you know, $3 billion organization and their impact on it. Those are the stories I love to hear. So looking forward to the conversation that comes out of this today.

Awesome.

And I should say, I started Hawksmoor AI. I launched back in April and we help with AI-native go-to-market systems. No surprise there. And so, but anyway, it's just, it's the people part of the conversation that really drives me.

Well, awesome. I'm glad to have you and Suzanne helping me build this today. So there is a raise hand thing on the bottom of Zoom so we can make sure that people that want to ask a question or give some— I would call it maybe a little TEDx talk, like, hey, I really learned something pretty cool by doing this with someone, or they taught me this. That's where the storytelling is what kind of grabs people. Right? So let's kind of go to some folks here that I haven't talked to in a while. And I want to reach out to Suzanne because we do have a decent amount of some big agency people on here too, which is nice to have because I don't always have some of these large agencies join. So, Suzanne, who do you want to pick on today?

I want to pick on Ellis. Sorry about that, but I got your time. So I think let's use it.

Well, thank you. Thank you. What would you like me to address?

What's a good tip, tactic, strategy that you learned in the last 6 months? Who do you work for? What do you do too?

Well, just a little background. We've been around for about 35+ years as an ad agency with a very, very strong DNA. So my I have a lot of tips because I have a lot of years here to give tips. One, one tip is we got validation early on that the kind of work product that we were doing was terrific, and that our DNA and our approach was right, and we stuck with it for 35+ years, and we're still doing what we did from the standpoint of that early vision and that early understanding. We still do exactly the same thing.

What was it like? I want to be very specific when we talk about these things, like what can you help us learn?

I will be as— I'll try to be as specific as I can. We have a very strong view of a creative product, which is what we produce. That creative product has certain tenets for success that we believe in. And those tenets are things like staying close to the product, communicating with a surprise. And, and very often revealing truth. And in the process of revealing truth, we actually developed kind of our PR strategy because we just kept telling the truth and people were not so happy with some of the work that we did. Not everyone likes when you tell them the truth. And whether it was the pro-choice movement or Rudy Giuliani taking down an ad or whatever, Whatever happened, we were, we were patted on the back and we got tons of support and we stuck with that, those tenets, and we still have those tenets today and they still remain successful. And unfortunately, they still cause some controversy.

Thanks, Al. Jack Marshall, I would love to go to you and have people introduce yourself real quick and tell us A tip, tactic, strategy, or AI solution that you, you thought was really interesting that could help us learn? Because I, I learn about different tech every week, right? And I start using it. And so that's— it's because of this roundtable I, I get those ideas. So help us, help us learn.

Okay, I think I'm in a little bit different industry. My name's Jack Marshall, and I'm in the anti-fraud business, and, and we use AI To look at messages or emails or screenshots or anything and determine whether they're fraud or not. And we sell that to banks and they give it to their customers. So if you're a customer and you get an SMS message and you think it may be fraud, you can just take a screenshot and forward it to an email address and you'll get an answer back in less than a minute telling you whether it's fraud or not.

We have everybody mute, I guess, unless you're talking, because we're getting a lot of feedback today for some reason. Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry.

What's—

so yeah, yeah, more, more, less about the, just the product, but more about something tactically, strategically, or, or product-wise that you can help us. We'd love for you to introduce yourself and tell you— tell us what you do, which is great, but the whole idea here is to, is also help each other with, with something that we would never know about. That's something outside of what you do too, as well.

Oh boy, I'm not sure what I would know that you guys don't already know.

Well, you can't assume that I know anything, that's for sure.

You know, and I know that this is a lot of talking about go-to-market, and we're finding, you know, being in cybersecurity for a while, it's a really difficult market to penetrate. And that's one of the reasons I came to this, because I want to learn how to penetrate it because you talk to these chief information security officers and they're just so overwhelmed with everything. And there's so many products out there. It's a space that I think is overfunded. And so it's really hard to kind of cut through the noise and get to people. And, you know, the one thing we have had success doing is meeting people at little events. And, you know, we're not really having any success going to, you know, these big email lists and calling people and doing that type of SDR type lead generation. It just doesn't seem to work anymore for this market.

So the CISO approach, I'll give you a little background because I do that work and what seemed to work is they're very hard to get a hold of and they don't want to be on a roundtable or podcast too much. But so I had a, I had a really high-level CMO in that space, and she's like— and we basically said, listen, let's use Forrester, uh, or Gartner. It was Gartner. I'm sorry, Gartner CISO event. Say, hey Steve, we going to the Gartner event in Orlando next month? Would love to see if we can grab a cup of coffee and chat. So it was more kind of circling around an event and springboarding off of that for those CISOs. So if you got really people that are hard to to engage with, don't just try to network with them. See if— use some sort of event as a springboard is my suggestion for you.

Yeah, and we're, we're, we have, we have better luck when we go to these small kind of regional shows that are really focused around scams and fraud.

Yeah.

And we meet people and we can talk to them. Otherwise, it's the traditional approach of, you know, getting Zoom info and Sixth Sense and trying to contact these people. I just don't think that works. I'm not sure it ever did, to be honest, real well.

But yeah, you can't sell, you can't pitch, pitch slap, we call it. So let's go to Lisa. She has her hand up.

Hi, everybody. Jack, I also come from that industry as well. I pivoted into cinema, which is the company I'm building right now. So I just have a couple of tips around Just tactics that we could potentially discuss around how to, you know, move acquisition forward a little bit in this era of AI.

If you have—

I'm not gonna go into the spiel of my business, but it's in the chat if everybody wants to go and check it out there. I've also linked to my LinkedIn. So a couple of things. The first one is voice notes in LinkedIn. I found that that is a higher, higher, higher, like 80% higher conversion rate than just a traditional message, just follow up with voice notes. The other thing is I recently discovered a company called Roger AI. I'm not sure if anybody has heard of it. It is incredible. And I don't say that lightly because I have tested so many of these products. I come from the Silicon Valley space. I come from filmmaking. And it is— I just don't have the time to be an SDR and the CEO and the product manager and also, you know, build the airplane while it's flying. So Roger AI essentially takes— you have to have your markdown ready in terms of like what your brand messaging is, how to articulate it, make sure you've got your documentation in place. You ingest that into Roger AI. The website is called hireroger.com and essentially it operates as the smartest SDR you could possibly have and a level higher than that. So if you wanna check that out, go work with them. They're fantastic. This is not a promotion. I literally discovered them last week and I'm so impressed. I've already got 2 leads.

Earlier we would do it.

Yeah, I like those types of approach. I just got into Claude Cowork as well.

Yes.

Where I tie in my calendar, my email, everything that I've ever learned. It does that, and then it ties in, and then it gives me what I need to do. And then I said I even have it connected to HubSpot saying, what am I missing here? I wanna try to get some of these warm leads going. So I would definitely suggest anybody that needs help with Claude Coworker to start looking at that, or I can help you with that, or any— I'm sure there's folks on here that know Claude Coworker as well. Aubin, is that how you pronounce it?

You're on mute.

Sorry for my voice. I have spoken all day, been working all day. I'm in 2 places because there's this in front of me, if you can see it, the whole camera, and then I have the laptop. I'm in 2 places essentially.

That's okay. So what's your tip or tactic and what do you do?

Yeah.

So I'm the founder and CTO of my company. We, there's a team of 3. We built a case management system that handles its own email system and it's got a built-in AI inside essentially. So it starts from the customer's websites to the email system, case management, all built on this. Let's not focus on the product itself, because that's not what you're asking for. My advice was about AI itself. People have this all-or-nothing mindset about AI solutions. It's either the solution AI, you use AI for everything, or you don't use AI at all. I've heard a lot of people saying that you can build software with AI. But that's like saying you can build a house, a building with soft— with basic knowledge of construction because software solutions can be as simple as a calculator or you can have something as complex as a whole Google.

Yeah.

Google is a software solution. So there's levels to what you're using. So People missell these solutions because they're trying to make money fast. That's why it's very important.

You gotta, you gotta know how to orchestrate and, and teach what you want out of AI. Otherwise, you're just throwing AI slop out there. Let's go to Ramesh.

Mike, thank you for inviting me for this roundtable. Really a pleasure to be here with all of you. quick background, and I want to share a maybe a lesson that I learned and I practice. My background is in technology. I'm a technologist with financial services and management consulting background, done a lot of new business around data analytics, AI, and I run a small company now called Green Catapult Advisory and Incubator Studio, which means that I have to basically have to find deals for different products across different markets, across different segments constantly. And I'm looking at efficient ways to run my go-to-market, if that makes sense. One of the things I also, being an introvert and falling into sales and loving it, one of the things I learned over the years, I don't like to compete. I like to— so I, you know, maybe it comes from being an introvert. I always think about the defensive driving when the cars drive and nobody else is around the clusters. And I use that in my approach to go to market as well as targeting. And I call it one shot to kill. So if you can find a way to engage outreach in, in our current AI-driven world, being human can be your edge. In a lot of different ways, you know, I'm— so I like to go contrarian in a lot of different approaches. And, you know, using this approach, you know, you can be more effective in your engagement as well as targeting.

Well, thanks for— I really agree with you on what you're saying, and I loved what you were saying, Jack, too, about the human part of it. The idea that you know the way that we did marketing for so many years, and I I counseled CROs on you know your SDR should do this, and this is what's happening at this stage. And that's it's just changed so fundamentally, right? And it's like we need to get back to being really human, and both you know how we work with people and in our engagement. And that's that's where I see that you know that's where I win. But the companies that I'm working with, that's That's where it's happening. It's not happening through this mass outreach, you know, scaled AI. So I love your point about being human.

If you look at AI and outreach and you say, oh, I see you worked for this company, you did this, it— you're trying to align with somebody that you haven't even earned a relationship with. So be careful how you use AI. Just for even for things that I do, I don't use AI to try to come up with all this sweet little specific messaging. My whole thing is just asking them about a roundtable or conference that's coming up, or invite them like you guys came to this roundtable with a trusted source like Suzanne and Lara. Those are the things that work. Otherwise, you guys would not be here. So think about when you're pitching or trying to meet people, how do you want to be approached? It's the same thing as dating, the same thing as in business dating. Get to know somebody before you just tell them And throw up on them about what you do, because nobody cares yet about who you are and what you do yet. And they'll do that once you get to know them. So I'm gonna go to Malcolm and then Donna.

Get it? Thank you. So I run a fractional CRO practice. My clients are AI and SaaS founders who know that they've got a revenue problem, but they aren't ready to hire a full-time CRO. to actually, you know, be dedicated towards that particular challenge. And I would say my best practice would be founders are, especially at the time when they're tired of being the founder seller and they're at a point where they think they can actually scale up, is that the founders are, they've got all of their book of business in the CRM. They're pushing and are hiring people saying, hey, look, we've got leads, I've got relationships, you could basically be an extension of me, and we should be able to kind of take this and grow at this exponential level. And what ends up happening in most cases is that the pipeline isn't actually what it says it is, but from the founder's perspective, they think that's gold. And so the sales rep comes in, is realizing like a lot of these leads are dead ends. they're not necessarily as well thought out or as far along as they need to be. And you end up having the challenge of the founder thinking that they hired the wrong person. The seller is like, hey, look, there isn't a lot, you know, there isn't a lot of juice with the squeeze that I'm putting here. And everybody's really at this, um, at loggerheads amongst themselves trying to figure out who's responsible for what. And from my perspective, what I bring to the table is, having that founder do a true ICP analysis and clearing out that CRM. Like, let's really be honest about what's going on in the CRM, determine what's real, what isn't real.

Mm-hmm.

Cut the, cut the chaff, get to the real. And at that point, Mm-hmm. when you have a sales rep coming in, the sales rep is more geared for success. They're not dealing with these inflated numbers and inflated expectations. Everybody else is working from a more realistic perspective. Which in turn means that chances are you're going to have more success and you're going to have more momentum as opposed to dealing with what we thought was going to be success and is really just, you know, expectation and hope.

I would also suggest that you look at your LinkedIn because I used to sell to CHROs, which I don't do anymore. So I got rid of all those connections because I'm at 30,000, which is the max on LinkedIn. So, but if you do have a couple different industry careers that you, you've done and you wanna make sure that you're focused in on what you're doing, especially if you're getting up there on the numbers, there's tools to, to get rid of some of the connections and go for ones that are very specific to who cares, so what, and what do you do care about you versus, hey, I, I met you 20 years ago and I don't even remember how I met you. So let's go to that.

Right.

Everybody, thanks for having me here this morning. So I, my background is probably a little bit different than a lot of folks in here. I'm not creative, so to speak. I have spent many years in the agency world, but it was really on the project management side, on the operations side, trying to figure things out and make them run smoothly. And that's where I feel like AI is often brought in and people hope that it's a whole solution for an entire process. And actually what AI is really good at is the task level. So even what Malcolm was mentioning about trying to figure out the pipeline and, and really doing a proper analysis, you know, AI would be great if you fed into it a model of, you know, here, here's the clients that we have system— systematically been successful with, not only in the pitches and, and bringing them on board, but, you know, long-term lifecycle success. And here are the clients we're pitching, and then really gauge that so that you can, you can have that model run on a regular cadence. You can then remove the emotional lean. We all have an emotional lean, things we hope will happen. And then, you know, the likelihood Might be a little different than our hopes and aspirations. And that's where AI can really be very helpful is, you know, looking at that pipeline or looking at some of the other tasks we have to do. But I would encourage, and I'm sure it doesn't take a lot of encouragement for this crowd, to not take out the very human aspect and the creative aspect, because otherwise what you get is very standard.

Yeah.

And it's not unique. And that's the part that really needs to come through no matter what you're doing, whether it's, you know, solving problems for, you know, clients on an operational level, making sure that they can get an edge, you know, on their profit margins versus their competitors. You know, there's a lot of very good uses for AI, but it's gotta be part of a larger process that involves human, often involves some automation.

Yeah, take, take, ask AI to take out any AI triggers and tell exactly how you want to speak. The way you prompt AI is like, hey, I need something that's emotional, that uses a challenger sales maybe approach, and I need this make sense that it ties in almost like a 4-year-old could read it and understand it. If you ask, if you write it to like that, you're going to get back what you want more than saying I need a 3 program-specific messaging for an email campaign. It's junk. It's, it's your pitching. There's no AI tool that's gonna think like you do, not yet at least. And so you really gotta figure out how to go to market. I think Suzanne was telling me there's a Jennifer from Paris.

I had to put you on the spot. You're calling in from Paris.

Where is she?

I'm here.

Thanks, Suzanne.

You're welcome.

Yes, Paris, the heat box.

Bonjour. Hello.

Hello. Hello, everyone.

Yeah.

So tell us a little bit about what you do and then a lesson learned strategy-wise, program-wise, person-wise, or even like AI-wise.

So Jennifer, I did drop a hello in the chat. I've worked agency side and brand side. Currently working for myself, I work with kind of startups and emerging brands, creative and creative strategy, and then I build a team according to kind of whatever the ask is. I think, you know, I think it is just a bit overwhelming in the sense of all the options that are out there. I think right now I'm concentrating on kind of the best resources to learn about AI, um, so it can get beyond kind of the, the slop. Um, and so I'd be curious to know some of the, the resources that people are finding. I've, um, the one that kind of comes up is, um, Section, and then, um, section.com. They have kind of a lot of different courses that are interesting. I'm starting to tap into that. Um, and then I recently just on kind of some breaks, I listen, search for some podcasts, and I'll find it and put it in here. Someone was just talking about using it much more of like putting in so much information and then having AI ask you all of the hard questions. So then you're doing the thinking, you're doing the critical ideas and brainstorming and developing ideas, but having AI be be either the resource or the person or the one that's asking you questions. So you're doing the thinking, not AI, but it's really pushing boundaries that way. So I thought that was just an interesting approach that I came across recently.

I would actually even double up on that and say there's a digital twin that most people are building of themselves. I just put mine in there, and it loads up everything that you have built and talked about, your interviews, your writing, And then I'm like, this is great for people that wanna know more about what I do, and I can't answer them. It might be small questions. Then I go, I have my daughter working for me who's 22, just got outta college, and she's asking me questions every hour. And I'm going, I can't, I can't train her. But I, and I thought, why don't I use a digital twin for onboarding, either for someone that's an employee or someone that's joining my, or gonna be a client? So think about how you could duplicate yourself. There's people at SaaStr, which is another tech company that does events, and they built all these agentic twins of themselves, and they remember a lot more than they could remember or I can remember. So Delphi's— I don't get anything for doing this, but Delphi is a pretty good way to kind of build your digital twin. That's a really cool tech that I would suggest people look at. Ali, go ahead.

Michael, thank you for the invite earlier today. Welcome everyone. Lee Levitt, running an organization called the Acceleror Group, consulting around go-to-market, mostly enablement and CRO activities. Also recently published a book called The Second Meeting, which is a sales fable, and just about to publish a book called Together We Win, which is a manuscript discussing how to actually change how people sell so that sales is of service to the buyer as opposed to being of service to the number. And I'm consulting with sales organizations now about how to do that. When you give up the number, you give up control, you actually get better results.

So tell us about a tip or tactic or strategy. I just want to make sure we kind of focus in on, on more about what you know Yeah, teach us. Yeah, the product right now.

Thanks, Michael. I'm, I'm long-winded, so I'm getting there. So, uh, over 1,000 times in my career I've seen people, um, um, run scripts— never works. A couple hundred times I've seen people be authentic— always works, always works. And so putting in, as Laura said earlier, you know, if you're a real person, people will respond. If you're reading from a script, people don't respond. It doesn't matter whether you're in SDR 2 days into your first job. And I'm actually coaching someone that called me on his second day over a year ago. And now he's done tremendously well because he was authentic. And the great thing about AI, and I'm building an AI sales coach at jackthesalescoach.ai, the great thing about AI is it can help a seller to be better prepared. The bad thing is it could feed them stuff to, to parrot to a customer without actually them, uh, taking it on board and making it real. So, uh, I'm, I'm all in on Claude. I spend 40, 50 hours a week, uh, interacting with Claude, and if I'm not a human being with prospects, I got no shot. So biggest learning is help sales, whether you're in marketing or field enablement or management, help your salespeople be real.

Awesome.

And be authentic.

Thanks, Lee. How about Ziad Khan?

You're on mute.

Thank you very much, Mike. I'm very privileged to be here at such a high-profile house. I'm probably the most low-profile person here. I have 2 things to say. One is an experience I want to share And the other one is a paradoxical situation, which—

I just want to make sure we— just so everybody knows, we got a lot of people on this.

Very quick. Very quick.

Yes.

First thing is that, of course, ladies here are very young, but men, some of the men may remember the '80s PC experience. When PC was introduced, there was a lot of panic and a lot of chaos, and we thought that everybody will die and PC will take over. all the jobs and all. Then we saw World Wide Web coming in and now we see AI and we see the same panic and same everything. I would request everyone to use AI as a technology and as a tool. Don't build anything around it. Don't build definitely your thought process around AI. Use AI to elevate or execute your thought process. That's my experience and my request to you. Second thing is a paradoxical situation. Many of you are consultants and agencies, and we all are facing a new model coming in here. And the paradox is they tell you that if you don't already make a lot of money, we cannot help you make more money. So how do you deal with that situation? They all, you know, When you're filling the questionnaire, you're talking to them, they ask you how much money you make. If you don't make enough money, they do not want to work with you or engage with you. Of course, agencies and consultants know what is behind that. How do we deal with that? Thank you very much.

Thank you. Ann Sullivan.

Thanks so much for inviting me here today. Michael, I hope you're feeling better because I know we were supposed to talk last Friday.

Thank you.

Yeah.

So anyway, so thank you for being here. I just wanted to add 2 cents to the AI conversation. The other thing that we had a challenge with was kind of making that assumption that of adoption of how people were gonna adopt the product that we have. And we were actually basically wrong on that assumption because we realized that people have different habits now as far as saving digital media and how they do things with their digital media. today. Long story short, using AI for research and educational purposes to help educate your customer, potential customers with content that kind of gives them why, you know, saving digital media in a certain way or creating digital portfolios, which is what we help students and professionals do through our platform. And educating schools or educating employers and educating the families and the professionals that we work with, with content. We use different types of— so we use everything from ChatGPT to Gemini as well as Claude. And sometimes we give them the same prompts and see what they all come out with. The other thing that we've done is taken content that maybe Claude gives to us, which is always pretty good, you know, after You know, a couple of rounds usually with Claude, and then we take what the answer was in Claude and put it into another AI, whether it be, you know, there's a million of them out there, and a lot of people have given even more of them that are beneficial. But you can get even more content, more deep and deeper with it. And again, I think authenticity is critical. But when you're talking about content, you wanna make sure its accuracy is there. And things like that for educational purposes. But I think helping to educate the why, it really has made things more efficient for us and increased our revenue significantly by getting educational content, not just sales kind of going out and trying to sell. Obviously, you wanna educate around it, and then they— that's how the sales have actually come in more for us, especially here.

Cool.

Thank you. Laura.

One I want to make sure people think about is we talk about digital twins and the different tools that we use. And a lot of— hear a lot of people, like to your point, Anne, about using the different tools. We want to set ourselves up for success when using AI. And I obviously strongly encourage people— I've had everything set up in Claude. I forget who said just a minute ago that, oh, yeah, I use Claude 40, 50 hours a week. I'm with you. And, um, but you want to be able to have flexibility, especially as things change. Like, I think— I don't know for sure— I think that Google's probably going to come out with something big in, you know, in the next quarter or so. I don't know, don't—

but my—

I want to be ready for it if it does, or, you know, if suddenly— so my point is that you want to build a digital operating system, um, when you use AI.

So you—

there are lots of ways to— there's a pretty standard way to build an operating system, but there's a lot out there about it. And I'm happy to share. It's not consulting for me.

It's—

I'll give any of this away for free to just be helpful. But you want to set up an operating system. And so you have a standard approach that every time that you go and ask questions or try to begin a project, move your files instead of having your skills all in one AI tool or one LLM, move them to GitHub as Markdown files so that way you can access them from any LLM and you're ready when things change. So that's my tip I wanted to make sure that you all have.

There's a lot of stuff that I'm doing that I'm feeling I'm getting unorganized because I'm using 4 different engines and I don't know where I asked what engine what. It's, it's, there's like almost information overload. Olivia.

Hello everybody, it's very nice to meet you. First, I want to start off by saying, Michael, thank you very much for inviting me to this roundtable event. It's really exciting to hear many people from different walks of life and different kinds of industries speak. It's very nice to meet all of you. Because we were talking so much about AI and kind of about like, you know, what we gathered over the years while working in our industries, I'll share— I'll start off quickly by sharing my thoughts with this. I am starting to learn about AI and I've been using it for research and things like that. The way I see it, I listen to one side where they people say AI is it can be a very powerful tool to help you with research, like what everybody else was talking about. It can help with many things. However, in sort of a way, just in my view, I see it as a double-edged sword. Is it could be a powerful tool that can become very handy for all kinds of businesses and products. However, I wouldn't solely use AI as a crutch to lean on. You know, don't lose your creativity. Keep, you know, keep doing what you're doing because ultimately anybody who comes up with a great business idea for any industry they're in, ultimately it comes from you, the creator. And so maybe you can use AI as a tool to assist you in what you need help with. But especially I myself, because I'm from a creative field, I would never solely rely on AI to do my work for me. I would just use it as assistance if I needed assistance in certain areas. So I use it very sparingly. I, I am starting to learn how to use AI in this day and age as a tool sparingly, on call as needed, when needed, not doing the job for me, so to speak.

Awesome.

Richard.

Thanks. I'm a little bit different from the people in this group.

I'm a geek, right?

And I'm involved with the AI world, and I've learned that most people don't understand AI. There's 2 pieces to it. One is the application. It's the Claude, it's the ChatGPT, and on. But the important part isn't the application. It's the information underneath that application. It's what you trained it to be, the knowledge that you've taught it. It's like a 2-year-old, right? 2-year-olds don't know anything. You have to teach them how to walk, how to talk, how to dress. AI is the same. You have to teach it to do what you are. Everybody that I've heard today uses AI, and it's based on information somebody else has put in. And it may or may not be tailored to your business. All right, so you have to teach it what your business is, and then it can learn from that. Um, I've written a whole set of videos on Agentic Retail Operations. It's in my YouTube channel. Uh, there's like 10 different, uh, videos there, and it just shows you how to build that out.

Okay.

So, um, so I'm learning the advertising side of it. I've built an application on this, a full retail model, and I'm learning how to, how to sell. So you guys are my teachers.

Thanks, Richard.

Suzanne?

Yes. So I've decided to do a 1-minute roundtable, and I'd love for the people who have not spoken yet to talk about what they love the most, what's made the biggest difference. So I'm going to start with Rich.

We just got Rich. We're on Chuck now.

We're on Chuck. All right.

I'm sorry, Suzanne, what was your question?

The question was, I'm gonna do 1 minute, like, give us a 1-minute answer or less roundtable. What is the tool or product or tip that has really made your year incredible?

Oh, wow, that's actually an interesting question. Made my year incredible. Wow, that's a loaded question. Great question. I would say definitely that the use of AI has been helpful in doing tasks for work. But I have found that you can, you can get yourself into an AI ditch if you let yourself because you'll just spend 50 hours a week on AI. And then at the end of the week, you go, what productive business tasks did I actually do? Did I generate more revenue this week or not? And I think there's, you know, I fell victim to it for a while of just burying my head in AI and trying to create these things. And I think the one thing that circles back to, and I think Anne mentioned it, is education leads to trust and trust leads to sales. And if you want to grow your business, you better earn the trust of your prospect really quickly because if you don't, it's not gonna happen. You're not gonna get it.

How about you, Ryan? 1 minute.

Oh, so, for us, I run a field marketing organization on the health insurance side of the business. So anything you can dream of in the health insurance, we do it. And we're using some more practical AI tools. Like, we use an AI call coach for all of our agents. And on our retail side, that's like 80 captive agents, we saw a 50— we went from about a 25% close rate to about a 50% close rate. So just because we used AI to be the call coach, and then each agent gets a scorecard within 1 minute of hanging up that tells them what they did good, what they did bad, what the email follow-up should be to continue to build that trust with the consumer. So we've seen a way, way higher, you know, policy capture rate using AI.

Is there a particular AI that you like? Besides the one for your call center?

We use a lot of Claude, and then we're using some Gemini. We use the G Suite for the backbone of our email and everything. I will say that Gemini is probably the slowest one, but that's something that we're training to get caught up to some of the other engines that we use.

You know what, Gemini, I actually made this for For, uh, Suzanne is really doing good on these 3D animations I'm doing for my client.

Yeah, it was cool.

Yeah, so like, I'm a fan.

I'll be posting.

Yeah, so I come up— like, if you guys saw the video of While You're in the Waiting Room, that's on Gemini for free. It's like, I used to pay hundreds of dollars for animation built. And if you just do a little something something for a friend or, or something that you're trying to pitch and say Here's a little video of your logo spinning around and doing some cool music that just shows you just one step further. You know, we got about 6 minutes left and I have to jump to the next meeting in about 5 minutes. So let's, let's— I think we should have maybe one more person go and then Suzanne and Laura and I will close it out. I want to go with the bus. hair that's been quiet. Julie, we gotta, we gotta go with the story behind the hair because it's—

That's the best hair, hands down, since college.

Yeah.

Wow.

Wow.

Hi, everybody.

I'm Julie Grandshaw. Very pleased to be here. Thank you so much, Suzanne, for inviting me. I actually am very different from all of you. I do operations, business transformation, a lot with ERP systems and implementations. So Tip, trick, tactic.

For me, it's—

I agree with everything I've heard here today. Really building relationships has been key with me, especially in business transformation. Getting somebody to trust you, respect your opinions is really key. And then AI has been my best friend because I spend a lot of time helping companies map out their current state processes, identifying gaps, pain points, And then building solutions to help them get to that future state. And I use AI to really help me navigate all of that. That's it.

Is there a particular tip or strategy or AI tool you're like, man, that was really good? Like, for me, like, was that Delphi.ai, which just made a digital twin, or using my Fireflies to actually take hours off of me recapping a call? are using Whisper to write instead of type because I hate typing.

Yeah.

So I'm like, wow. And I learned it from here for doing a roundtable.

Yeah.

So one of my consultancies that I work for, that I partner with, they use Okta. So Okta is kind of a project management type tool that captures all meeting minutes, puts everything into a repository, and then I can take that tool and help build out process flows, process mapping. I'll put it in the chat. I'll put it in the chat for you, Michael. And then you guys can have a look at that.

I mean, again, these, these guys connect with each other off of this thing and give each other tips and tactics. Everything else, not to interrupt, or refer business to each other and give each other referral bonus or commission. This is, this is, this is a great way to work together. Go ahead.

I'm sorry.

No, that's all I've had.

I had my 1 minute.

I had my 1 minute.

Press it, Julie.

Well, I will close this out. You close this out and Laura will close this out. Just, hey, please, you know, think of us, everybody on this call, about what we do and how we do it and why we do it and try to help each other. We are not going to get to everybody every call just because it would be too much to basically do that. We are not going to do any more. I will not open any more hands raised right now. We are closing out. But we are doing this weekly. Now, so please feel free if you have a big connection ratio on your LinkedIn where you have 20, 15, 20,000, reach out to me and maybe we can figure out somehow to integrate that into like into this like we did for Lauren Suzanne. But yeah, again, I'm, I'm a go-to-market strategist. I would love to have any type of referrals. This is the reason why I do these roundtables and just to be selfish about it. But I really wanted to help other people to pay it forward. So, Suzanne, close us out, and then Laura will close us out.

I mean, this was like Christmas morning to me as a grown-up, like seeing Julie. We, we used to work at Pizzeria Uno in college. Oh, no, actually Hard Rock. Sorry, Hard Rock Cafe. Hard Rock Cafe. I'm sorry. And that's how— that was our origin story. But seeing so many people who have such great, you know, comments, such tools, like, The advice. I wish we had more time for everybody. So if you can come back on the 25th, I will be moderating, co-moderating that again with Michael. There were so many people, like, I wanted to ask Rich stuff, and I want to ask Ali, and I want to ask Kelly. There's so many more people, and David, like, that we did not— were able to touch on. So I think please come back, and I will pick on you then. And this has been such a pleasure. Thank you, Michael.

Thank you, Lara.

Thank you, everyone. I think it's all been said, right? So I enjoyed the hour with you, and it's a lot to take out of your day. So, um, wish you good afternoon, good day, the rest of your day, or evening for those of you who have joined us from Europe.

And then, um, if you guys want the chat, right next to, to the, uh, everybody's chat, uh, there's 3 buttons, 3 dots. That, that's how you can save the chat if you want to use that and be able to get back to people's LinkedIn and stuff like that. I will be posting this on my LinkedIn. It'll be hosted on YouTube. But yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll be able to do this every week. And so feel free to join again. Also feel free to post this Luma link and say, hey, I, I'm gonna be on this roundtable. Would love to invite everybody in my network. The more people, the better, right? Again, the— but I wanna say going forward, we wanna really keep this to specific ideas and tips and tactics versus I love AI. Like, give me examples, like a TEDx talk. I saw this happen, and this, this is what came out of it. I had a really good call today with just people talking to me about tell, tell me a story versus just the AI is either great or not great, you know, because I use these tips and tools I just gave you. I would never know that if people just said, hey, AI is great. There's specific things that do really cool things and how you use them. And that's how we're gonna learn from each other. And then obviously the, the byproduct of this is, hey, I saw Tony on here. I saw Richard, David, whatever. Let's help each other. You know, we gotta really work on, on developing our, our referral skills so we can help each other because that's always gonna come better. than just going cold, cold outreach. Take it from a guy that does outreach. You really got to figure out what you're going to give before you ask something. God bless you, everybody, and I'll see you next Tuesday. Hopefully you guys can sign up. All right, bye.

Bye, guys.

Thank you.