CRO/CEO/CMO Founder's Roundtable - 8/25/26

Nice to see so many people. Thank you for joining, especially the people in Europe.

I love that.

That's a commitment. I am Suzanne Darmory. I am Chief Marketing Officer of The Agency. I've been both agency side and client side and worked— this is how I've crossed paths with so many people.

Take your time.

Check your work.

Okay. MF, can you go on mute? Okay, go ahead, Suzanne. Sorry.

Awesome.

So, and I run a boutique agency called The Agency. Our brand purpose is twofold. One is we help people turn into brands, and that could be anything from, you know, real estate agents to rappers, artists. And then we also help small to medium businesses, particularly in the Fairfield and Westchester area, turn into larger, more world-class brands. So that's what's been keeping me busy.

Awesome. So who has a— who has a question or tip or tactic or strategy they've been working on that either it's been SaaS or AI driven That they're trying to figure out, or they did and it was awesome, or it did and it didn't work out. You're like, I need help. I mean, trying to figure out a solution. Does anybody wanna raise their hand on the, the, the Zoom? Raise your hand. Chuck?

Yeah, honestly, I'm trying to figure out how to connect LinkedIn to, to like a chat model that can automate some of that work within LinkedIn. And I've heard that people do it, but I'm still like, okay, how do you do it?

Do you want, you want it to answer your chat message, your messages on LinkedIn?

No, I wanted to, you know, so we all kind of have like, like, you know, large environments, like you're, I think you're connected to like 30,000 people, right? And so out of those 30,000 people, how do you differentiate between the ones that are aligned with your business versus the ones that just clicked accept? Right? Because I think we all are victims of that. You get a connection request, you hit accept, and then you're like, okay, well, now how do we align these? And so I've seen folks and people say, oh, I've automated my LinkedIn where it kind of scrapes all that information and then points things to them. And I'm like, okay, well, how do you do that? And yeah, so that's been one of those challenges.

This is way up my alley. So you asked the right guy here. But So, if you don't have Sales Navigator on LinkedIn, you're not gonna be able to filter right. That's the first thing. There's like Octopus CRM, Linked Helper, uh, GoHighLevel, all these things that will automate your LinkedIn. And that would be first messages, second message endorsements, uh, messages in groups, uh, follows, scraping their, their data, scraping events to see what events they're going to. So that's what I do. That's what you should be looking at is tech like that, or a guy or girl or agency that does that for somebody. But that's exactly what I do. I'm not to throw a commercial in there, but, um, if you, you, if you can't, if you're doing things manually in LinkedIn for getting the door open, it's not a good idea. You just gotta do it the right way so it's not spammy and don't pitch slap. Um, and don't use it to automate your messaging back to people because they'll be like, wait, what? What? Why are you saying this to me? It's not— it's not good. AI is good for certain things, and automation is good for certain things, but it could be spotted a million miles a minute away if you're doing it in a very sloppy way. And I call that AI or automation slop. Does that answer your question? I'd be glad to talk to you offline about that. But yeah, there's ways, lots of ways of doing this the right way.

And he's so good at it. I'm gonna chime in because he's taught me how to use it to my advantage, and it's been, uh, It's the difference of having 5 extra meetings a week. So highly recommend connecting.

I'm getting 30, 40 meetings by doing automation. But again, it's about, hey Steve, I want to talk to you about this roundtable I'm doing. Like, I think even I had a conversation with you before this roundtable and said, hey, let's just talk first and see if it's a good fit. That conversation you have with somebody is the time that you learn about their business. Because it's prefaced around roundtable mastermind event or fireside chat that you might want them to be part of. Or you could just say, hey, I'm thinking about going to Dreamforce or inbound conference or that conference. What are your thoughts? Have you been to that, Tom? That's got— I did that for HubSpot. I had 6,000, 6,000, 4,000 messages go out from my 30,000, 600 meetings. I'm sorry, 600 responses, 40 meetings. I didn't even go to Inbound. Inbound was $3,000 just to go to HubSpot's conference. I'm like, I'm not doing that. It doesn't matter if you're going or not. You just ask your opinion of some— the opinion of somebody, something to someone else. Don't, don't sit there. It's business dating. It's dating. Slow your roll. Get to know somebody, court them a little bit, and ask them about themselves. Everybody loves to talk about themselves. Does that make sense, Jeff?

No, it does. And you offered, so I'm gonna take you up on it if you're willing to have a conversation outside of here.

What I do for a living.

I think that's the, you know, the biggest risk, right? We're all connected on LinkedIn. And I think LinkedIn is trying to get better because they realize spam has gotten out of control. I think they're trying to get better. And so that's like also a big risk, right? Is you don't wanna do something that automates things, which then flags it within LinkedIn, which then causes— so it's kind of this balance of You know, not being a huge technology person, like, how do you do that without putting yourself in a situation? Well, it's like the business.

It's like hiring someone to fix something, right? You know, you maybe could do this, but if you watch YouTube, but do you really want to, you really want to spend 4 hours to figure it out and then it breaks something? Now you have more problems. Like, I should have just hired someone that's expertise in this.

Yeah, exactly.

That's how I look at things. Um, I'm gonna, I'm gonna not do everything. I'm not gonna cut my grass. I don't enjoy it, and I'm gonna hire someone to do it because I know I could make a lot more money talking to people than doing labor. For me, I, I don't enjoy it. There's people that spend the whole day on Saturday and they're manicuring the lawn with a tweezer. Good for them. Bill, go ahead.

Yeah, I think I was gonna ask something completely different, but Chuck hit upon my ongoing hassle. I'm the kind of guy who fundamentally hates getting on social media and terrible at the follow-up and sharing. So this whole conversation just fascinated me. I'm starting to use GoHighLevel more and was talking with another consultant that I work with about, can you use it to help organize your communications on LinkedIn? And he warned that you post something from GoHighLevel that it's gonna get downrated by the algorithm, that, like, it can tell the difference between it coming from there and coming from me. I'm curious. To the— if, if that's what you've seen. And, and I'm really interested in automating what it— what should be automated, but still keep it human. So this, this is a topic that I, that I would love to talk more about.

GoHighLevel and Octopus and Copilot, a lot of them are doing automation from a central server, where the one that I use is I use it from different computers and I have different IP addresses. But the biggest thing, it mimics human behavior. So I privately labeled this solution because 800,000 people have it, and they're built every time so it doesn't get caught, you know, with the whole automation approach. So GoHighLevel is not an auto— a LinkedIn automation tool. It has a service inside of it. I have something that's just doing LinkedIn and just doing email. And I'd rather work with the best in the business so I don't open spam or I don't get something that's gonna kick me out on LinkedIn.

Right.

So, and then, so that's important. And then for, um, LinkedIn posts, which I do now too, I use Blaze.ai. And I learned from Blaze.ai, I learned it from someone on here on this roundtable. I'm like, I'm trying to post things. I don't enjoy posting things. I'm more of a one-to-one guy, but I want to have content out there constantly going. For $650, I'm not getting, you know, any type of— I don't even resell this yet, but I could post to 6 different social sites plus my WordPress, and it produces all the content. It's pretty good. It's not awesome. It looks a little bit AI-ish, but I still want to do that and post my own one-to-one, but I want to have a cadence of it, and that's what I use Blaze for. I, I, I use Copilot through, through Claude to connect all this other stuff like email, LinkedIn roundtables, and, and CRMs and HubSpot to, to keep me organized and also do some automation. So it's just knowing someone that you can trust and, and then a tech that you can trust. And do you wanna learn it yourself? Which I do because I sell it. But does everybody here want to do that and go, I'm this, but I'm trying to spend all my time doing that, and so I'm not really doing what I'm supposed to be doing, right? And that's what founder-led companies are doing too much. They're spending way too much time figuring everything out and not leading their company. So stop doing that and use your time to close your business or lead your company if that's what you do. But don't, don't do everything because AI is there. Figure out what's, what you can do that you can understand and move on. But someone's already failed enough that they're gonna be good at it. Does that answer your question, Bill?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, honestly, it's very much like how I pitch my services to others, but I don't like doing social media. It's the part I wanna automate away. Yeah. And so I just, I just wanna make sure I stay human. So it's like you said that, that there's stuff you automate and there's stuff that you do firsthand. So that's, that, you know, maybe Maybe I need to talk to you more.

Yeah, Blaze.ai. I mean, I just upload all my stuff. It's kind of like a digital twin, which I also have a digital twin of myself through, um, uh, Alpha— I think it's Alpha— no, it's not Alpha, it's called, uh, Delphi.ai. And just, you upload everything that you've done and all your videos and all your interviews and all your content, you know, on your website. It pulls all that from your digital brain to answer questions or post content. Again, with the whole posting content, I don't want to do that. It's very time-consuming, and I don't get 800 people liking my messages. I do better one-on-one, so I wouldn't want to spend time on that stuff. But I do want to post things that are more in here and in here, and doesn't mean I can't do that because I have automation going on my post. And so I would do everything you can that makes sense, but don't learn everything that now you're focusing on building your brand the whole time and not actually closing business.

Right.

Because I've done that. I was meeting with so many people every single day that were just, uh, never gonna buy my service, but they wanted to pick my brain. Great, but I still need to make revenue, guys. So do you. So be specific, but also be cognizant that your time is very valuable, just like theirs. The best question— I don't want— I want everybody to think about this. What is the best question you use when you get on a, a discovery call? Mine is, hey Bill, thanks for, thanks for booking time. What grabbed your attention to actually want to talk to me today?

Mm-hmm.

You know, so instead of saying, tell me what you do, Bill, I would love to figure this, figure out what you do, maybe there's some ways to work together. Very generic. Bill, thanks for booking time. I'm just curious kind of what, what grabbed your attention, what brought you to the table today to book me? Because that way you just shut up. I shut up and I listen. And again, if you talk all the time in your calls, then you're not listening and they're not learning. Right, right. So, David.

Yeah.

So speaking of questions, I had a question on questions. So I'm building it. I provide sales enablement services. So building all the sales collateral, playbooks, training, development, that for sales teams. And I'm building an outreach campaign and I'm curious, At a mid-tier company, so, you know, somebody in the $20 to $50 million range, what would a sales leader or CEO or some person put into the, you know, chat or Copilot asking about sales enablement? What type of questions would they ask? Because I want to build some content that's picking up on that questions and directing it towards me.

I just—

did anybody have any thoughts or resources to go to for that?

So a sales enablement, you want to target sales enablement people. So you want to figure out what questions to ask AI to explain.

Yeah, kind of. So these are companies that would not have a sales enablement person. They just have a sales leader. They might have a marketing person or 2 running campaigns, but they need somebody to take some of that stuff off or take it on to increase the performance. So I'm curious, what would a sales leader Put into chat to ask that question.

Some sales enablement societies out there and some revenue. And then like companies like, like organizations like Pavilion and the Revenue Society and all that stuff. But I'll, I'm gonna throw it out. I know people have their hands raised, but who could answer that question? Who wants to kind of add some, some—

I can give it a go very briefly to start with if you like.

Go ahead, Roger.

Thanks, Roger.

I'm working with one of my clients at the moment and they're building the sales team. So I'm fractional sort of CRO, Chief Growth Officer. And the first question I'm asking is how am I gonna put, they're gonna hire their first salesperson quite soon, an SDR. And I'm trying to put together an onboarding program and process that will include sales enablement and training and things like that. So I'm gonna work with like the commercial team and the CEO to sort of list all this stuff out and look at a reasonable onboarding program. So At the moment I'm doing it myself. So, but I will go out to, you know, asking what the prompt. Yeah, exactly. I was just about to answer that. So yeah, so my prompt, I mean, I've done the searches and my prompt would be sales training courses, right? Number one, sales training courses for an early stage SDR/BDM. What are the best ones? You know, what are the recommendations for sales training? What's the recommendation for an onboarding program? It's all that kind of stuff, you know, qualification methodologies, best sales methodologies, you know, structured sales training, those sorts of things.

I actually ask the AI what's the best question to ask you based on what I'm trying to figure out. Instead of trying to figure out what the prompt is, I ask them to help me with the prompt. And that's the best way of doing it. And act and talk to it like a 2-year-old. Like, I'm really trying to figure this out. Like, I need to know emotionally. Like, when I write an email, give me an emotional energy email that says this, that tells me that I'm a good choice for this, using a challenger customer approach as well. Make sure you list this out, have next steps, and that you— that I have an SOW attached in the message. I use my note taker Which is Fireflies, after every call I do and say, I need to follow up with this person, but I don't wanna spend 2 hours trying to write a nice email that sounds intelligent because I'm not very good at that. You know, I'm just more like, let's go, let's go, let's go, full throttle, full out, you know. So use your AI, especially the note takers, when you, when you do this. But when you're trying to get a prompt going and you don't know what to prompt it, ask the AI, how, how, how is the best way of asking this? To you, and then use 2 or 3 different ones. I like Gemini, Claude, and Chat is what I use. Baxter.

Thanks.

Can I say one other thing? It really depends on your organization's objectives, right? Like, if I'm building a CRM, I wanna know what are my business objectives? Are we looking at organic growth? Are we looking at new business? Are we looking at profitability? Are we looking at pipeline? Are we having sales quotas? How long is our sales cycle taking to close? Those are types of things that I would be kind of putting in as metrics and KPIs that you can measure against.

Yeah.

And then I always kind of copy someone's LinkedIn profile and say, I'm gonna be pitching this or conversation to that person. How, how was the best way of looking at it? Because there's, there's people buy different ways. Right? And you can also look at profiles and go, what kind of personality is this too? Because you don't want to have a playbook that say, here's how you sell this based on their title. Doesn't matter what you think they— how they buy. It matters how they— their, their personality is and how they buy. And there's things like, I have a company that's called GTM Heroes that I represent, and that's what they do. They look at the DISC profiles, um, and they connect like 16 different ways of looking at who you're selling to. Baxter, go ahead. I know you've been waiting.

Yeah, no worries. Thank you. This question might be primarily for Suzanne, but anyone that's been on both sides, client side as well as the agency side or the buyer side, I wanted to get— dig deeper into that thought process, that tension of you getting pitched all day from all different types of people that do very similar work. You're looking for distinctions. Maybe ultimately you're choosing for a particular reason. I just wanted to get into the mindset of the buyer when you're getting pitched all day. What is it that ultimately makes you move on a particular provider over another?

That's a great question. I think that it is— there are 2 different answers. One, the advertising side. Obviously, the client is external, so you have to do— there are different internal levels, plus you have external brand side, marketing side, which a few people on this call, I say, are. It's easier because it becomes from an internal. So approval isn't easier. So, and you also have to take factors in, is it a B2B, you know, target? Is it B2C? Is it a B2B2C? Like, where is the target, where that lays? But I think obviously at the end of the day, it's a matter of researching and conversations like this where we can share our, you know, information, what we've learned with others. And I think a lot of people, like, I've learned stuff. Michael's obviously learned stuff from here. from being here and having this mindshare with these leaders. So I hope— does that answer your question?

Yeah, more specifically, when you said— and you mentioned the B2B part, which feels very different than B2C, at least that's been my experience. They're looking at the, you know, social proof in a certain amount differently, you know. And if you have a name like a McKinsey or something like that, it's easy to sell consultancy. But for a small independent one like myself, Breaking through the noise and getting to that level to have those conversations, uh, it's a difficult, uh, hurdle to jump over. And I'm just trying to figure out ways by understanding the human behavior side on the buyer side.

Yeah, that's a very— let's set up time because that's a— you and I could spend an hour or two talking about that. I mean, it's very interesting when you get to the buyer side because that's, you know, we think of our view is how do we sell to the buyer. The buyer's is very different than ours. So the perspective is, is different. You know, we could, I could have that conversation. And Yasmin, I think, could too, because she's been, she's been both as well. So we have a few people here who have, who have flipped agency to brand.

Okay, great.

If I could add one little thing from my experience being on the buying side of this, that sometimes it's been very random that I have a free moment where my mind is not moving on to the next 5 meetings I have the rest of the day. And that just happens to be the moment. So the way I translate that when I'm on the other side is to say that, that consistency of outreach and follow-up makes you that much more likely to put it out there at the moment when they come up for air and actually have the mental space to take it in. But I can't tell you how many times the person I reached out to just happened to be the one who had sent me the email that day. And that's You know, somewhat it, it, that, that can make me unhappy as much as give me insight because it is a little bit random.

Thank you.

Yeah, I could jump in on that as well. Hi guys, Crystal. So I spent 12 years on the media agency side before I switched to the brand side. And I would echo that sometimes there are a gazillion meetings and invites a day. So sometimes that is very true what Bill just said about catching you at the right moment. But I know you were asking more from like a consultancy basis, but from an evaluating platforms basis and products, I would say that especially in the digital media landscape, I mean, a lot of times there are a lot of different providers that can do similar things. So I think where possible and when the use case exists, showing the strategic uniqueness not just like the price efficiency differential, but like how your product is actually differentiated and could help, right? From a media mix standpoint, from a content standpoint, etc., to address the business challenges that a brand might have in a given year, in a given quarter. That definitely helps from the buy side in making the case as to why. And sometimes when, you know, it's not 100% unique, but, you know, that human element of having the relationship where 2 things are created semi-equal, where one might win beyond kind of holds, co-commitments, and reasons why other things win. But that always helps as well.

Let's go to Pete.

Hey there.

Good morning, everyone. This is my first call with you guys. Hello to everyone. And I almost didn't make it. I have a customer who's getting nervous about their book launch, and I almost had to Pull out of this, but I'm glad to be here.

We're—

we all spend a lot of time on LinkedIn, I know, and I just want to caution people about these tools is that you can get banned from LinkedIn. They're super, super sensitive to that. And someone else in the chat said they had been banned for a couple of days. They give you a couple of warnings and then they pull the plug from you. So if, you know, Michael knows the secret, definitely reach out to him. My own experience is that If you get Sales Navigator, I've been told that they're a little bit more accepting to you, you know, because they understand that's going on. I use Dripify. It warms up. So any tool you use, you really scrutinize if they're LinkedIn safe, what they do. That warm-up period is really important. So like, I would say like 5 more, you know, likes per week and it really goes like that.

Look at Dripify or these other platforms. They're A lot of them are web-based, Chrome-based, or, um, add-ons. You got to be careful. It could— like LinkedIn looks— has AI, it looks at all this stuff now. So if it looks like a human behavior and if you're not loading it onto your— as an extension, you're much more safer. This is why I use what I use.

Yeah.

But Dripify and all these other ones are decent platforms. It's just, it's all coming out of one server a lot of time, or you're using a proxy server, which is Then it gets, gets notified that that's a proxy versus a real computer.

So the workaround for me, Michael, is that as soon as— so this is just to reach out for contacts. As soon as the invitation is accepted, I jump in. So it's human as soon as that automation is done. So I take over the conversation. I don't allow it to do the conversation because—

Oh, no. You should never do that. But I'm just saying even that can get you in trouble if you get people going like, this guy's spamming me with the first message. So people go— people will go too far too fast, and then they'll do the same, the same motions every single day. That's a telltale sign of AI. So you gotta, you gotta, you gotta have a solution that mixes in, hey, I'm doing likes, I'm doing comments, I'm doing invites, I'm sending in-mails, I'm opening things to also endorse. I've been doing these endorsements, like I'm endorsing someone's CRM skill. And I didn't like doing that because I thought it was kind of—

yeah. What do you know about their skills though? That's a question they're probably asking.

It does seem like it opens the door. They're like, hey, they're like, thanks. And they probably just click the button. I'm like, hey, no problem. By the way, I'm doing a podcast. I think you might be a good fit. So for me, if it works, I'm not going to question it. I wasn't a big fan of it, but it works. But that's not my main thing. You gotta— anything in life, you go too far left, too far right, You know, too far, uh, working out and not working on yourself, working on your mind. I mean, just everything in life has to be moderation.

Yeah, for sure, for sure. And you definitely know what you're doing because there's a reason we're all on this webinar. Like, somehow you got it out.

You guys, I wouldn't have 50 to 80 people showing up if I didn't do this right.

My question really now is that, after that little preamble, is that I think that all of us are trying to avoid this hamster wheel of the content marketing, like I do a lot of content marketing and I know that it is a real headache to do authentic, valuable content on a regular basis. And so that's something I've just been really trying to focus on. And I don't know if anyone has any secrets or tips or anything, but in this world of AI, I use AI, you know, I have an operating system that helps me do the follow-ups, as you mentioned, the sales scripts and whatnot and the follow-ups to that. Just, I need the contract or I need that. But as it relates to the human contact, you know, that's what differentiates us from a lot of other people, like how we connect with these people. So it— I still think that that's the best way to go.

I think a lot of people will try to engage on, on the LinkedIn or email and have a discussion. Why are you doing that? Like, like, say, hey, I, I love, I love what you're saying here, but let's get on a quick 15-minute call just to kind of dive a little deeper into this, you know. The whole idea is don't just continue to go on that same platform. That's— it's like when somebody texts me, I'm not having a 45-minute text conversation with you. I could have done it in 2 minutes. Yeah, a little bit of a generation thing. I'm 55. I'm not gonna sit there and, and, and ask you how your day is all day long. It's just—

Right.

Again, it goes back to like business dating is dating. So think about how do you get to know someone really? You talk to them. Like me and Suzanne have gotten a really good reputation with each other just from talking face to face on video. We've never met yet, but I trust her. She trusts me, right? That's what kind of helps. Yeah.

Great. Who else?

Thank you. Thanks for the invite.

No worries.

Appreciate it.

Who else wants to chime in here? I'm gonna call on somebody if I don't— someone's raised their hand that hasn't talked. I'm gonna call on Yasmin.

Hi, Michael. Any specific question you have?

Or— It's either a question you might have or just some tip or tactic or strategy or AI tool that you're getting into right now that you love.

I think like any marketer out there, I do love cloud.

Yeah, I love that.

Yeah. But what my biggest challenge is really more on the agentic AI side of things, not necessarily for my marketing use, but for— I work for Orange Theory Fitness. And it's a franchisee model. And it's based on, of course, booking a class, you know, lead management, your typical lead management, booking a class, and then all the relevant funnel around it. So we are working on actually implementing agentic AI solution. So I think like as the marketers out there, I would love to learn your experience going through that development with the technology teams, especially what I know and am experiencing right now. The development of agentic solution is very different than other martech solutions. It's not It's not like you're— there is a SaaS solution out there and you're signing up and onboarding and, you know, working with technology teams. It's really more about the guidelines, right? The branding and how you're going to— how the consumers are going to experience it and so on. So that would be something in my mind right now, what I would love to learn from my peers. Uh, what they went through if they had this experience.

Are you doing more B2B or, or B2C only?

B2C only.

So you guys don't market at all to like corporations about getting their employees in the Orange Fitness?

Uh, we, we do that. There is like a corporate component to it, corporate sales piece to it, but it's, it is different than B2B. We don't necessarily have a B2B area where we go after corporations.

Okay, so who wants to answer Yasmin's question?

I might have something useful to offer, specific on the tools and trying to use them effectively, because in the past year I've been trying to ramp into it a lot more and What has been helpful to me is to recognize that the AI is a junior employee, basically. So you build your process to both teach it well and give it context and QA what's coming out the other side, because it will do amazing, awesome things and then it'll just go off the rails at some point. So it's a process answer of make sure you build your process well to be checking its work. I don't know if that helps, if that's what you're really looking for. I've, I've been digging, digging deep into AI recently. I could probably talk for hours, but I don't wanna go there now.

Okay.

I also can offer her an answer.

Yeah.

If you could let— also let us know where you're from and what you do, just so we can have context. That'd be awesome.

Thanks.

Sure. Absolutely. So my name is Brandy Cohn. I am a licensed social worker, but also like a business specialist. Um, living in New York. And I've helped many businesses, nonprofits launch as well as, um, redirect bankruptcy to a successful exit. Um, and what I feel like I, from my experience of what I believe in that I think can help you is that I feel like every business has a core drive. Like when Orangetheory came on the market, what were they really hoping to create for the world? And why did they believe that that was of use to anyone? And to kind of dig into the very basics of that drive and then use that drive to guide direction because AI is just a tool that will take you from point A to point B, but it will not tell you where is A and where is B.

Mm-hmm.

And that needs to be driven by the core will of the company. Like whoever founded it or whatever, what it stands for, that needs to be the A where you're starting from. And that why will be point B. So what is your company trying to accomplish for whom and why? And that should guide your marketing because you can have the best AI with the best marketing if it's not coming from the heart of the company. it like can fall flat on its face. And if it's— if it is very resonant with the company's desire and drive, it will find the people who need it in a much more efficient way.

Let's go to Larry.

Well, thanks, Michael. My name is Larry Keating. I'm from Toronto, Canada. I run 2 companies. One's cybersecurity, NPC Data Guard, and the other is a representative for technology companies. A lot of this and a lot of what I'm hearing— I've been involved in AI for, I hate to admit it, 40 years. We used to call them expert systems back in the late '70s and '80s. A lot of it depends on the license level that you're buying. I'm hearing a lot about it being a junior employee. Bill, with great respect, my AIs work like a PhD right at my side. And depending on how you adopt and use those license levels into your organization, into your work, whether you're 1 or, you know, 100,000, really, really curates the outcome. When you're using a high-level integrated system that's using RAG and a bunch of other tools to get out, it almost becomes a truth engine and reduces a lot of hallucinations. So be very careful about what level you're engaging AI at in licensing. Free is good. I mean, it's probably unprecedented in technology release, the amount of value we can get out of the free tools currently available. But when you get up to proper licensing and proper integration, there's a whole different level of experience that you worry a lot less about, not just how you're interacting with it. Michael, I appreciate your comment about asking it for better prompting. Once these are properly curated into and linked to your information, it'll start offering the alternative answers and the alternative avenues of problem solving. I can be in mine and I sometimes forget which company I'm asking the question for, but now my AI engines will come back and say, is this for Keating or is it for NPC? Because I think it's for NPC. And when you get to that level, then you're, you're killing it at that level. So just a thought there.

It definitely gets to know you is, is a good thing. You just got— I just try, I try to start using one platform more than any other if I can. But sometimes I know that Claude doesn't do good design. But if you go to Claude Design, then it does better. It's like you gotta, you kinda gotta just get to know what works and what doesn't, you know? Go ahead.

Yeah, well, one comment then, just to trailer this. I know Copilot came out of the gate pretty slow in level of intelligence and effectiveness, but what Microsoft have recently done— not more recently, but is more evident— is it's acting more like a router now than it is their own actual AI engine. If you go into Copilot, a paid version, open it up and look at it, you can select Claude, OpenAI, Gemini. You can select You know, not just one, but a few engines, which it will route your problem or question to the proper engine. So all of this level will reduce your hallucination and improve your, your output.

Oh yes, another thing to think about too is when you, when you ask a question of AI, make sure they say, don't just give me fluff and make me feel good. You gotta, you gotta tell how you, how you want to talk to you. I noticed that too. Because like if you look at ChatGPT, it just reinforces everything. It's like you're just, you're just saying everything's great. That's, you're losing the quality of what you're giving me. Mike, Michael.

Yeah.

Hi, Michael Seeley here. I'm an executive and business coach. Love attending these events, hearing about all the, all the challenges. I was thinking for the pipeline in terms of AI automation. Yes, absolutely do that. But to Brandy's point, which I really loved, Is identify your big fish, kind of like divide things into 2 categories, 2 buckets. Like, you get really good at the automations and LinkedIn through Michael Falato's services. I think they're great. Do that plus also analog, just personally pick like a list of like a hit list or like big fish that you want to go after and spend your time just analog manually. Trying to converse with them. That's thoughts for me today.

So yeah, like I'll when I multitask or I'm on waiting at appointment or whatever it is, I'll look at what people's comments are about something. Okay, you just took a new job, but instead of automating my comments, which I've done in the past, I kind of felt like that was just disingenuous. Trying to say congrats and then get into some kind of message. I don't even know what the post was about, right? And even AI might assume. So I, I'm very— because that's visible. So if you're going to do stuff on like comedy, what I do is say, if I see someone took a new job, put congrats, I'm actually looking for people for my podcast. I would love to see if this was a good fit. So then there are other people on that will see that, that I do this, build that, you know, build that up.

It works.

But I don't feel like that one. I don't feel like automating because I, I don't wanna look like a jackass.

Ivan.

Yeah. Hi, Michael. First time here. So thanks for the invitation. I'm, I'm a business coach. I've been doing that since 2004. I work internationally and I grew up in the corporate world. That's that out the way.

You're from New York, right?

Sorry?

You have that New York accent, right?

Yeah, right. I live in the UK and I'm from South Africa. So we'll put everybody to rest right there. What I do, there's a couple of things just to raise a point here, really. So somebody said something a while back and it was actually own the playbook and rent the tech. So I don't get hung up on the technology. So I've created some documents and I've asked AI to help me create those documents, i.e., who am I, what do I do. I have a separate document that says this is my client, these are the avatars, this is the kind of person, all of that, which a good marketing person would do. And then I have voice, so brand voice. I took all the stuff that I was really good at and I remember reading some stuff and I went, bloody hell, that's really good. Who wrote that? And then you go, oh, it was me. And then you chuck that in a document. And you say, this is my voice. So now you end up with these 3 documents and all you have to do is upload them every time you change platform. So I like Perplexity, which is quite a useful tool, perplexity.ai. And it's also useful when kind of digging around a little bit, trying to find out who a prospect is. So I'll give you a little trade secret that I use. And like Larry, I've been involved in this for a long, long time. I grew up in the automation world, and I remember a thing called fuzzy logic is what we used to play with. And anyway, so what I do is, for example, like in this room here where we have a lot of people, I would save the chat. I would then go to AI. It knows who I am. I would then say, actually, look at these people, figure out who they are, and then rank them in terms of Prospect, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10 for me and connections on a scale of 1 to 10 for me. And podcasts, you know, on a scale of 1 to 10, give me a list. It's awesome.

But you could also, what I do in Fireflies because I, it's my note taker. I say now you have the whole conversation versus just the chat because the chat doesn't know that much, right? But if I use Fireflies or any type of note taker, which is what I use. You should always be doing it on your one-to-ones and, and your one-to-minis. I say, tell me what I missed, tell me what I need to know, tell me who I should follow up. Um, I also made a digital twin of myself, which I just put it in chat using a thing called, uh, Delphi. And that takes everything that you'd ever learned and makes you visible and be able to answer questions when you're not awake.

Hmm.

But I, what I realized was, is that's also good for onboarding for your clients. You can make a separate onboarding one. Or, hey, how do I onboard a new employee? Yeah, yeah, all those things take a lot of time.

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing that I remember is you have to— so what I do is I have a chat with AI, we interact, we have this little chat, and then I say, okay, knowing what we have as an outcome of this chat, what would the prompt look like to get us here if I had to do it again? And then it'll give me a prompt. Because now it knows what good looks like because it can't discern good or bad. You have to tell it what good looks like. Yeah, I know a lot of people forget that.

I know Daniel who's on this call, who's my Director of Client Success, is very prompt driven. He'll basically say, here, how do you want me to have this so that you could prompt what you need to get out of it? So having a guy like Daniel and think about What is the process? What do you want to get to? And reverse logic that is something that's really good too. Lee.

Hey, everybody. Lee Pomerantz. I'm a certified Chief AI Officer. My agency does consulting for AI enablement. If you're stuck or struggling, love to have a conversation with you. I'm going to bring it way down to low tech on just an experience I had this week as a marketer where I just went, wow, that's cool. So I've been trying to make an appointment with a doctor's office and I keep getting— it just rings and rings and rings and I don't know if they're busy or whatever.

Frustrating.

Yeah, frustrating, right? So after one of the calls, I got a text message back. So it knew what number I called in from. It sent me a text message and it said, hey, sorry we missed your call. If you want to set up an appointment or, you know, give me a bunch of options and, you know, interact with it, you know, by text or whatever. And I was just like, perfect.

That's cool.

Anything that just, anything that just removes the friction of your clients trying to do business with you was, it was just stellar.

So, you know what system that was?

No, I don't. And there's, and there's lots of them out there and they're, you know, plumbers and electricians. You know, there's a lot of, you know, people in the service industry.

Those solopreneurs need that because you can't be AWOL for 8 hours a day and then get— you reach back. Like, I've been trying to get on my boat mechanic for 2 days. I want to kill him, you know. But you got to have something like what you're saying. And I had that happen to me a couple times, and they're like texting back, and I'm like, perfect. Yeah, simple.

Yeah, exactly. So just low-key, you know, make it easy. As I said, remove the friction and, uh, Make it easier for people to, to connect with you. Meet them where they are. So that's my 2 cents today.

Thanks for coming back, Lee. We got about 5 more minutes before I have to close this up.

I got it. I got a quick question, Michael. It's back to Yasmin. I have not used Zoom in forever, and I could not find the hand thing. It's been driving me crazy for the last, like, 10 minutes.

So it's right on the bottom or right by share. Or React, there's a raise hand button. There's just, it's like this. But if you're on the web version of Zoom, I don't know.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I don't know where it's at, but Yasmin brought something up about brand colors and I wanted to go back to that and I wanted to have her go a little deeper into that question.

Yeah.

I don't remember. Why don't you restate or have one of you guys, one of you ladies restate that. The brand.

Brand voice. So, like, how I think as you develop an agentic solution, right, you want to make sure that the solution has your brand voice. So, so you build the constitution around your brand guidelines and so on. So I'm learning this as I build. I mean, I've been very familiar with AI machine learning all my career, But agentic AI is a different world. It's really training, right? Going back to preparing the constitution and all the guidelines, all the rules around it, what the agent can do and what it cannot do. It also needs to be very authentic to the brand.

Okay.

It's not only about brand colors or, you know, responding based on the brand OS, but also needs to be authentic to the brand. So in this machine world, I was just curious, like, how, first of all, the technical execution is very different than other martech solution implementations. So how everyone is working towards that. And now the other piece, how do they make sure that it's not a tech solution, it's the, it's a marketing Marketing's baby as well because it is a reflection extension of the brand.

Okay. No, I was just— I wanted to verify the brand part, if it was like the visual aspects or the tone aspects. So that's what I was trying to do.

Okay.

What do you do, Lulu?

Um, well, I work a lot more with the, the visual part because I work a lot with the design. So we have a lot of our stuff when we're working with UDS, with, um, universal design systems. So it's kind of like those are working off of repos. So how to work fully off of repos. But we are also, when we're developing a lot of— so I work on products. I work sometimes with the marketing team, but we build the repos differently for them so that they can pull from the market, for marketing can pull from them. But we're also working a lot with IDEs. So we're working with like Devin and like Windsurf.

Mm-hmm.

So we are building very differently than marketing is building, but they're also playing a lot now with like Devin stuff now to like build differently. So cool. And build with Claude code as well.

So awesome. Jeff.

Yeah, I had a, something struck me with the loading of the brand, brand information and colors. One of the 2 things. One, we've had pretty good— my name is Jeff McClellan. I run Purple— I'm CEO of Purple Crayon Brand. We're a digital branding creative strategy go-to-market agency. One of the things that we do with that has been super helpful with, in particular, Claude and the AI models learning us, because that's the key. The key is having them learn your voice, because if you don't go back in and say, no, I didn't say it that way, I say it this way, we do for every client, We create a brand manifesto and then everything kind of flows off that brand manifesto. Somebody talked about the heart and soul of the brand. That's where that comes. The emotion comes out of that. Then tactically behind it, we do a brand brief. And within the brand brief, we'll put things like their guidelines and things like that. And it kind of learns that. But from that point on, when we ask for strategic recommendations based on a thought we have, we use AI to disprove to disprove our theories, not to create our theories, if that makes sense. Um, and then the other thing that it has been very helpful for us is we have a large retailer, uh, called Boscoff's, a big retailer in the Northeast, kind of like a baby Kohl's. Um, but somehow or another, we stumbled into the, uh, medical tech world and medical device world in breast cancer and oncology, which is unbelievably working on something that really matters. But in dealing with the— that side of the world and new business after this one client, we did some some great work for that we got attention for, we're then talking to other clients and want to expand it. They talk in terms I've never heard of in my career. I haven't been in a medical agency. I haven't been in a medical, you know, medical media agency. So having to learn their language really fast, we've used basics where ChatGPT comes in, but then we take that and we throw it into Claude. But it's been very informative in helping us discern a client's code and the client's how they talk. So that's been very helpful to us for outbound communications in new business. And then on the new business listing, somebody talked about priority accounts versus the other. What we tend to do is an 80/20 rule. We have, you know, 100% of our list. 80% of it is just ongoing, constant, trying to build a funnel and build a pipeline. 20% of those though, on every month, we take 4 or 5 of those and try to provide an idea to spark a conversation. of maybe something they're thinking about or something they haven't thought about. So I just wanted to throw those out there. This conversation has been great. You guys are all super informative. I learned a ton.

Thank you. Awesome.

Thanks.

Thanks to be— nice to have you back, Jeff.

Thank you.

Yes. I'm going to close it out with Suzanne.

Congratulations, Suzanne.

Oh, thank you so much. It's so sweet. I haven't seen you since.

But yeah, thank you everybody for making it today. Um, I have to jump on a call here, but, um, if you want to reach out to anybody that chatted, there's a chat button here over there, and there's 3 buttons, and that's how you can save the chat. So that's an easy way of doing this. If you ever want to do your own Roundtable Masterminds podcast, go to Market Strategies. I do this for my— for a living, obviously, so I would love to help you. Like when it's— when I do this for me and stuff like that, it's really more about what I'm trying to accomplish. So I think you should look at these things that I do and it's great. But if you really want something that's dialed in, then that's when Suzanne and I get kind of our hands dirty and really try to understand what's working, what's not. Suzanne, go ahead and close us out.

I mean, thank you everyone for coming. It was great to see so many faces and what an interesting conversation we had today. It was very different than the last one. So what I love most about being part of this room is just that it could go in any direction, right? We had planned one thing and it just went in a completely different— and I love the conversation. I am going to try a bunch of the tools that were mentioned and looking forward to connecting with a few of these people on the call after this call.

That might be a good fireside chat, what tools we've checked out.

Yes.

Yeah, I'm, uh, I'm, I, I at least 3 to 4 of these things, Delphi, Blaze. I mean, all these other platforms I've learned.

Dripify. Yeah, it's few.

Dripify. Yeah, Dripify.

Yeah, I don't use Dripify, but I'm saying I learned from these roundtables. Like, I don't have every tool in my brain, and some people really have some. They found other things, and it's like I'd rather not fail six weeks. I'd rather learn from someone else's.

Yeah.

Knowledge. But thanks again for making time. I'll post this, this video on my— on YouTube and also on LinkedIn. I'll— I'm gonna be tagging Suzanne and I. I don't tag everybody just because I don't have the reason. I wish I could find a place that does all the tagging. Alright.

The next thing.

Yeah. Take care, everybody.

Cheers.

Thank you.

Thanks, guys. Thank you very much. Have a great day, everyone.

Bye.

Bye.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Bye. Bye, Suzanne.