CRO/CEO/CMO Founder's Roundtable Mastermind

type of clients. And so I work with a lot of companies that are bringing products to market, or they have a good, solid performing marketing team, but it's just not quite getting the results that they're looking for. I'm the person who comes in and helps align the marketing team strategy with company strategy, get products out the door and market ready, and help companies improve their efficiency and their revenue generation, their growth.

What have you found that either tech-wise or just business practice-wise that was a great idea or just something that failed miserably? Don't do it, guys.

Well, I think speaking as a veteran CMO, what I would say to everybody is everybody wants to understand what is the silver bullet that I can generate all kinds of revenue. And, you know, spur, you know, 30% CAGR? And the answer is there really isn't one. It's very customized for each scenario. It requires a lot of activity on a lot of different channels that's highly coordinated. I've done a lot of interviews for growth marketers hoping to hear what is the latest silver bullet, and I can tell you, don't waste your time on that. There isn't one. AI will help, but it'll never tell you, hey, do this one thing and you'll get rich. It's really a matter of understanding your market, understanding their pain, but more than anything, understanding yourself and the purpose of your company in a way that you can articulate the value to your target market. I see a lot of companies that cannot and do not do that. They're trying to sell themselves as everything to everybody. And if you ever try to do that, you will be nothing to nobody. So it pays very, very much to be very targeted, very, very focused, and pay attention to your customer.

Yeah, keep it simple. If you have to explain, like, way too long to figure out what you do, it's not going to come across well anywhere. I mean, even if you could say, I'm the Uber of this, even though you might— even if you don't like a particular company, make it relatable. And when you're pitching on LinkedIn and email, don't pitch, you know, say, hey, are you going to an event? I want to get your input on that. There's really a lot of things you should be doing that require just asking a simple opinion question, or are you going to be at this particular event or city?

The one thing you can do for everybody on the call, Almost everybody gets too technical regardless of your product or service when you try to describe it to your target market.

Yeah.

You have to speak to them in their voice, in the customer voice. You have to meet them where they are. If you make them do the work to understand how I would take the feature you just explained to me and apply it to my problem, they're not gonna do it.

You need to—

don't ask them to do the work. You need to do that translation work for them. Uh, you need to meet them where they are.

I'll actually show you guys a really quick screenshot of something I'm— work that I'm using for meetings. Um, let me do a real quick screen share here. There's a lot of note-takers in, in here. And what I found that I use is Fireflies. I'm not— I don't get paid to talk about them at all. They're growing pretty fast. But what I did, um, when it— after it records, it kind of sums up my whole meeting with this person like I just did. And I said, hey, it— they have a thing called Ask Fred, which is an AI inside of that, that note-taker. I said, write a recap email to remind her what we talked about last time. So this is what it came up with when I just showed this yesterday. It's like, so instead of going bullet point on what we talked about, what are next steps, and doing it from memory, or spending 30 minutes, 40 minutes on building something like this, I just— I just, again, I just get— I wake up in the middle of the night, go, wait, what if I just asked the AI inside this tech to do this for me? And it really comes up with a really nice summary of what we talked about without me Spinning. I'm not a great writer, so I use ChatGPT a lot. But this is— I don't know what, you know, AI this is built into Fireflies, but this is a great thing to kind of look at. And they— and like with this one, it actually kind of does it as well. You could share these notes with people, but I really like the whole Ask Fred, which is their AI.

So, hey Mike, yeah, it's 10-80-10. 10% your idea, 80% let AI do the bulk of it. And 10%, you got to make sure to humanize it.

Yeah.

Review it, read it, make sure it comes out as your voice. You know, if you're not actually their voice too, because I mean, if they—

people love to hear themselves talk or they want it. They said what I learned, like back when I was at Monster.com, my boss was saying, what I heard you say, Samantha, was— and she would say that all the time. And like, she just sounds so good at doing it. So repeating back what you just heard. That's kind of what this is doing, right? But when you're doing— my best question in a discovery call is, Steve, you know, what, what, what brought you to the table today? Like, what had you book a time with me to, to learn more? And I just shut up and they'll tell me, well, I'm doing this and I don't have enough leads and blah, blah, blah. I mean, I, I— what I basically do is open the door. I do email, LinkedIn, and these roundtables And I basically build all this go-to-market strategy so people can get leads. And I'm surrounded around signal data and event data. Like, hey, are you going to this event? Can I build an event for you? And that gets me 15 to 20 meetings every single day. I have 14 to 15 meetings today, tomorrow, and the next day. You know, find partners like I did with Steve and Doug and Mitchell where you say, hey, they're selling to the same people. Why shouldn't I create like some event with them and they get my LinkedIn and I get their LinkedIn and we're all win-win? It's the same thing when you go to an event, you say, you know what, let's take out our 10 best clients each, we take them to dinner. Got the only thing bad about that is you gotta go to the event, you probably need a booth, and then you're gonna have to spend $15,000 on liquor and food. So great, still great. Right. But how could you do this, you know, 2, 3 times a month without spending a lot of money? And that's where I kind of built this whole roundtable approach where I haven't really charged for it. I will be selling some like sponsorships on top of this at one point. But that's one thing I wanted to show you as well, is that whole approach on LinkedIn. I wanted to kind of throw a bone to Andrew Perry, who's on the call. Who is a really cool tech that I think I'm going to be working with. Andrew, are you there?

I'm here, Michael. How are you? Thank you.

Good. Andrew, tell me why you joined the roundtable today and something that you were hoping to learn from the group. Well, a little bit about myself.

I've been in digital for a long time, about 20 years, and marketing about that same amount of time as well. Formerly a teacher turned marketer, which inevitably is the same thing, I've learned. But yeah, we're a paid media demand gen agency, to put quite simply. And honestly, I think what I'm looking to get out of this is just to hear the conversation, how it flows, and just to meet, you know, meet some new folks to see what you know, the Firefly thing, you know, if I could learn one thing today, that would be it. I've seen it used on me. Now, just to thank you for the screen share. So, you know, just sharing of the ideas among other leaders in our industry or others. So, thank you for the invite.

Yeah, glad to have you. I mean, Blaze.ai, I got, um, told about, about 2 weeks ago, 3 weeks ago. That's posting on my site, on Facebook, um, on LinkedIn, on X. I mean, that was a really cool thing I learned, um, Blaze.ai. I don't know who told me that, but again, I would never know about this stuff. I mean, someone was looking for a way to— I don't want to post all these different posts every week and And that's my job. I want to talk to people and sell. So that's why I built my service to kind of do what people shouldn't do, right? And automate what you can and humanize, like as Steve was saying, what you, what you shouldn't automate, which is response. This is dating, whether you want to believe it or not. This is business dating. So don't, don't come on too strong and don't make it like you're just cutting and pasting. That's what a lot of SDRs have done to get leads. And to be honest with you, you want to use SDRs more and teach them how to sell. Sales development reps, those are like the lead gen kids. You know, don't, don't just have them press buttons all day and say this is, this is a sales job.

It's not.

They burn out.

Um, so there's also, uh, two other ones that are really good. Fathom for note-taking. Yeah. It's got a really good engine in AI to ask questions of, especially if you got static data. And also the, the other thing you were just talking about, um, what was that you just mentioned? The second one you just learned?

Uh, Blaze.ai, right?

And, and that's used for, for what?

That's— I'mma, I'll bring it up here real quick.

This—

yeah, sparked something in my head. I wanted to tell you about another one that was really good.

I don't want to spark anything in your head because you're, you're a Marine that you might kind of start doing Don't worry, it's Halloween.

It's a good time.

I've used a lot of these and otter.ai is another good one.

Yeah, otter is good.

You know, even Google Meet has like built-in.

I remember Social Pilot is another good like posting platform.

So like this, this blaze.ai one is basically, you You build your brand, they basically— you connect it to your LinkedIn, to your Google, to your, uh, um, YouTube, and it put in a post— what if you load up all your documents and starts creating posts?

Yeah, you schedule it.

Yeah, this is what— let's see, I think this is what it posts for me today. Uh, let's see. I mean, I— it's not like awesome awesome, but it's pretty good, you know. I mean, I, I just don't have the time to, uh, to do all these posts, you know. I have 32,000 connections. But I think this is the one that they did earlier. Yeah, this one right here. Foolproofing business growth and adopting lead gen technologies. Automation isn't a luxury, blah blah blah. You know, they put this thing here, it's kind of like it zooms in And, you know, again, it's not, it's not something I would write all day long, but it's good.

I don't know if it's like perfect, but yeah, just keep the human in the loop, man. Nothing wrong with that at all.

What do you think? I don't know if you know this, Steve, but I like my own post because I know that LinkedIn looks at like, if it doesn't get any likes at all, then it's— I just posted this, I mean, Blaze did just a couple minutes ago, but You don't try and make content that, that the clients are looking for.

So I try to write to my audience like Doug was saying, you know, what problems am I solving for the people that I'm trying to work with?

Yeah.

Because they don't really care about anything else except for what's in it for them.

Yeah. What's in it for me? Fair.

You know?

Yeah. When you write the emails or LinkedIn or whatever, like, who cares? So what? Why you tell me this? And how does this affect my job? If you can't talk to here or here, it's, it's a waste of time. So, um, I would definitely do that. I mean, LinkedIn should, should be automated. I know a lot of, you know, you're not supposed to do too much automation on LinkedIn, but, um, I would definitely use LinkedIn for communication that's human, right? And you can automate that, but think about Don't repeat, "I see that you worked here and you have a great career. You are magnificent." That sounds shitty. You know, it does. It doesn't sound real. Say, "Hey Andrew, I see that you're in marketing. Are you going to HubSpot's conference in June? I just wanted to see if you had any opinion about the conference." You know, that's an opinion question, has nothing to do— you're not selling yourself, but what you're doing is you're opening the door. Right? Make a list of every show that you would go to and, and then scrape the list, the hashtags of, of the people that are going. And then the rest of it, guess who would, should go and ask them if they're going. Again, you don't need a, you don't need an attendee list really to decide if you want to reference that show. You don't even need to go to the show. I did this for HubSpot and I had 4,000 messages go out. I had 650 responses and 55 meetings. Didn't go to HubSpot, the inbound conference. I mean, I wanted to, I just— it's a lot of time and money just to fly across the country. And then, you know, if you think about a show, if you don't have 50 meetings set up or 10, now you're going to go around and say, hey David, what do you do? Hey Michelle, what do you do? You're basically You're fishing, you have no clue where that bait's landing. I wanna know that I have 15 meetings of people I wanna talk to. So, I mean, I did that for the HR Gardner conference that's in Orlando today. And so I went down there and met with a company that does learning management system and he was the chief business officer. I mean, that's a pretty good way of you getting actually a face-to-face. And all I did is met him at the coffee shop. Gardner's about $5,000 to attend. So really start looking at whether you use me or someone else in this, on this platform here, why should they care? And that's— and they, and they're going to be at a conference, they're going there, they have the why. You just got to figure out why, um, they, they can figure out why is it, right? They're going, but you don't know why they are going. So that's kind of what I wanted to kind of point out. Anybody have any questions so far?

No, I've got an idea here though. I use a thing called Jia, and Jia is— I can share my screen in a sec as well, but basically it's sort of the note-takers that you guys have been talking about as well. But what it does is it takes your transcript and it writes your LinkedIn posts based on what you've spoken about. So it gives you 3 LinkedIn posts per call that you've had. So if Michael, to your point, you've gone and spoken to now these people that are like, what are you going to get out of this conference? And like, The HubSpot one, for example, those could then become your LinkedIn posts because then you're educating the rest of your group. But LinkedIn has come out with, or like someone else who works on LinkedIn has come out with a study recently, I think last week on how LinkedIn is starting to push out posts. And what they're doing now is they push out to your initial, like your first-degree connections first, depending on the response from those, then it goes to second. Depending on the response from those, then it goes to the rest. So that's, that's the new way that LinkedIn is, is pushing out as of the last couple of months.

Yeah. Thank you. Thanks for, for chiming in. Please, this is for everybody so we could do this in a sequence. Please raise your hand and then also be on camera too. But those are great tips. Beth.

So I kind of want to add on to what you said and what Doug said, which is your buyers today do not care about what you sell. I I give this example, like if your prospect is here on a mountaintop and your outcome is over here, this is known as Death Valley. They absolutely do not want to take a risk. And so what you are selling is actually the information you have in your head, the experiences. So like what questions should they be asking? What mistakes might they be making? What things are they overlooking? What's changing in the environment? They're so busy. They have a full-time job, but you do this every day, so you just know things. So I just thought what, what Doug said about the, you know, easy button, that's what everybody wants.

Doesn't exist.

Yeah, I definitely get Calendly or HubSpot. Make it simple for someone to book. But I learned this also. Here's my Calendly. People get pissy about that. You want to ask them, hey, do you have a calendar or can I send you mine? Here it is. If you could book something. But if you just say, here's my calendar, I want to sell you, you know, they get, they get a little agitated that you're asking them to fill out this form to book a time with you and you want to have a sales call with them. So think about— and I actually got to get— I kind of now relate to that because I was like, what do you mean? I'm giving you my calendar. But you know what, I don't necessarily want to, uh, fill that out all the time. And don't have 15 questions for them to book a call. Like, how much ARR are you doing? What's your, what's your total addressable market? You know, as I ask, please share something with me that's going to help me prepare for this meeting. That's what I ask of mine. And I make sure I get a phone number and an email. And well, the email address would be already included, but I want a phone number, I want a title, and I want why did you book the call. Because do you have no clue, like why they booked the call, you're going to get on the call and go, um, so you booked the call, so how can I help? That's not a good way to start a call. It's like, I saw that you— that Steve Fuhrman sends you a message and, uh, you worked with him in the past. Um, so were you calling about— were you— you're asking about the roundtable, right? So that's— at least I have an idea of what the call is. Donna?

So yeah, a couple things. Um, number one, I just think the—

wait, wait, wait, what? So we said we know what people do. What do you do and where, and where do you live?

So I am based in Atlanta, Georgia, and I am a fractional or virtual information security officer and AI governance and data privacy. So I'm listening to the discussion about AI and, and using it and note taking, and I just kind of want— I put something in the chat. I use AI, but I have a disclosure that I send out with it. So if you're using an AI for note taking and you're talking about confidential stuff, and then the AI is taking the notes, and then you're using an AI to post, you know, stuff of the summary, the AI doesn't know. All right. So you, you have to have some rules for yourself before, you know, of what you're going to apply. So I'm really hesitant to use some of the AI note takers. I, I, I, the, the letter disclosure letter that I, that I did. So I, I just, I put that in there, but I recently used AI because I did a tabletop exercise for a client. It was a ransomware we simulated to see how would the organization respond. So I had my slides, I had the notes, I was able to put that in there, but I didn't put in anybody's name. I didn't put anybody's title. I didn't put any tool names in. I didn't put anything that could uniquely identify that client. So I'd really caution you, like, as you're using these tools, functionality is great, and yeah, it might be really easy, but It only takes one person to like let the dog, let the cat out of the bag, and something that's highly sensitive can get out there and you're going to tank your small business that way because if it's attributed back to you, you're dead. All right, so just please be careful.

Can I ask a follow-up question to that too? Because I'm curious how to, in the case that you are utilizing AI for things like project tracking, right? Like I don't work in a field where there's necessarily a ton of like data privacy for the stuff that I'm generally saving for projects, but I can see in a lot of fields where there's going to be, you know, personally identifiable information or like HIPAA compliance, things like that. Is there, because all of these LLMs are open source for the most part, if you're hosting that locally, does that eliminate a lot of the security? I'm asking because it sounds like you do like AI governance to a large degree as part of what you do.

So I was going back and forth. There was actually a security conference last week. You know, we were talking about if it's a local LLM, you know, what's the risk of that? Yeah, I am hyper risk-averse. All right. So unless I have written it myself, because The NSA could say, hey, put a backdoor in for us, or this one could put a backdoor, or hey, there's a call home, or there's, you know, with the update, this is actually how several security incidents happen, is there was a trusted connection to an update, you know, or something where there is, there is a vulnerability and it might be low, but there is. All right, so just when I'm doing a report and I handle sensitive information, I do the report in pieces. So, like, I did have a participants list, you know, in this exercise. I did have names of the tools. I stripped all of that stuff out, and then I added it back into the final report manually, you know, just— but I tried to structure the document so that the sensitive stuff was all in one section, and then I could just paste that.

You can ask AI to take out any names. You don't need to do it manually.

Well, you just gave it the names though. Do you understand?

The names have already been given.

The names are already given. If you put them in there to the AI, you just gave the names to the AI.

And I don't even think you have to submit it.

Just two quick suggestions in this. A, you should have either your own LLM that you host yourself in either AWS or Gearbest Security, or you should pay the extra money for the siloed versions of, let's say, Chat Enterprise, which will give you your own siloed data repository.

That's like Azure GPT and stuff like that.

Yeah.

So you would get your own repository. Also with the Fathoms and the note-takers.

Like we were a little rushed.

In New Jersey, I don't have to tell you I'm recording.

Who was, can you guys mute, who was? He has that background.

Yeah, but if you're dealing with people like, I don't know, some of you live in different states than New Jersey, I'm sure. I would need to at least get your permission. So on my Fathom, I have it ask permission before a meeting. Are you okay if we record this meeting? And then they have, then it's got timestamp, date stamp, and their IP address.

And originally on these types of calls that I record, this is kind of a group, you know, you're talking in front of a bunch of people, but when you're talking to a prospect client, or doing a workshop, that's— I don't ever personally post stuff from that unless I make it, um, take out the names. That's just kind of a— that's like a one-to-one that you— that people kind of think that you're not going to be put— putting it out there. Mike, what do you got? Where you from? What are you doing? What's something you learned?

All right, so I'm Mike Ward. I'm from Rhode Island, so I'm up northeast. I'm a B2B growth consultant working with early to growth stage startups, Series A, Series B type startups. The one thing I learned is a lot about this AI stuff that I want to bring to the table, which is a little bit less sophisticated than what we've been just talking about. But indicators that you're using AI that have come up that shocked me this week in a conversation I had with someone. If you're familiar with the MDAC, which is that longer dash. That was something in particular that I've always used in my writing, just normally.

What is— I don't know what that is. What is it?

So if you like, for example, it's the longer hyphen. So there's a, there's a, there's a, there's the hyphen, which is a dash. Then there's an end, there's an end dash, en dash, which is slightly longer. Then there's an em dash, em dash, which is even longer. Apparently, those are telltale signs you're using AI is because it always defaults to the em dash when you put a dash in. Now what I found interesting as well is if you use the Google workspace to do your work, like, I'm on Google platform. So I use Google Docs all the time. It always defaults to that em dash, which I never had an issue with because that's what I've always used. Secondly, double spacing.

How about double space that they that I see like ChatGPT put emojis too.

That's another thing that, that woman literally told me the other day, like you have telltale signs. The emojis was one. I always take those out when I use ChatGPT. The em dash I never was concerned about. And then also double spacing after a period.

Hmm.

Is this now a telltale sign that you're using AI?

They have AI checkers you can run your documents through and some of them pick up.

I have a couple of them I use.

Um, put those in that— the, the ones that are good for that.

The one that I use—

Grammarly's got a good one.

Which one did you say?

Grammarly.

Yeah, I use Grammarly. Grammarly is pretty good. ZeroGPT is another one I use. That one's a little bit more— that one's a little bit more sophisticated than Grammarly. It picks up on more of the, the tone of what you're writing. And the other one is GPT Zero, but they don't always pick up the double spacing. That was something Like, I mean, I'm old. Like, I was taught to double space after a period, you know? And it's like, that now is a telltale sign that it's, it's GPT.

You're supposed to do one space now? Is that—

yeah. And, and it's funny because my kids always change. My kids always make fun of me when I'm like, you didn't double space after period. And they're like, we were taught not to. And I think that might be one of the reasons why. But those are like telltale signs now. So if you're If you use the tools, or if even if you don't, just be careful of your writing and your responding when you do use the tools, because it could be, if you have someone more sophisticated on the other end, they could be saying, oh, this person is generating this stuff with AI, they're not real.

Yeah. And just a quick reminder before I go to Simone, if you look at my, my name, I said Michael Filato slash Full Throttle, or Beth has email revenue. Make— put, put your first and last name in these little windows, and either your company or what you do. Too many people have just one name, or not their whole name, or, or not what company this is. People are staring at you for an hour on here, so take, take advantage when you're on these roundtables to kind of brand yourself a little bit. Put something in the background like I have, where you have your company name. You know, it— those you can get on Fiverr for like $5, or you can even probably ask ChatGPT to make you a background now. I mean, these I had to pay for back in the day, but I think you could probably do those for free now. Simone.

You're right. Hello everyone, I'm Simone Benroma. I'm from Tunisia, North Africa, and I work for a Canadian company, entertainment industry finally, because I'm done with the cybersecurity technology, etc. So now it's entertainment. I have a question for Donna. About the security of the AI tools that take notes. In fact, currently we're using Fred Fireflies and we are controlling the access and we use it only to review the notes and what happened during the meeting so we can summarize the needs of the clients and properly respond to the clients. We do control access, so Are we secure or not? And also, I have a follow-up on what Mike said. In fact, I use custom GPTs and I put that em dash and emojis in the instructions, and I noticed that it respected. So they don't really write me something with the em dash, neither the emojis that we don't use that are not branded.

So Donna, can you answer that?

So I haven't done a review of Fireflies, but I can tell you that the governance that the EU AI Act says that they need to document, you know, how these things are secured. You know, what are the model cards? You know, what's the, what's the architecture of it?

What are the policies?

What is it sharing here? Nothing. They should disclose all that stuff. So You know, that, that's the kind of stuff that you want to ask. You know, any AI, like I said, I used to use Grammarly and I, you know, stopped using it because like it's kind of like a note taker. If you're talking, if you're using it to correct, hey, here's my proposal to buy, you know, this company, this merger and acquisition thing that I'm working on, you just get that to someone. If you haven't reviewed, you know, where that, data goes and who it's shared with, you might have a problem. So I generally start with no, like don't share. And then I introduce AI, like, so I don't like note takers in my meetings.

I love them. If I don't have them, I'm screwed.

I don't want them. Like I said, I— Here's the thing here, Michael.

I'm there with you, man. I'm there with you. I panic when it's not there.

You're a CISO, I'm a sales guy, true and true. I need it. I don't remember yesterday. So if I don't have that, I'm done. I'm toast now. I didn't like getting them at first because we had gone 5 years ago. I'm like, so you're going to listen to my call and tell me how shitty I am? Thanks, VP of Sales. You know what I'm saying? I didn't like it.

Well, again, it's going to be you and somebody else in that conversation, you know? And if, let's say you're doing with an M&A, you know, proposal or something for a company.

Yeah.

You know, I mean, and well, sorry, Michael, because there's not just you in this conversation. You've got to kind of like, no, no, that's what the client's, you know, preferences are.

And I always turn it off. I always turn it off if they ask. Raquel.

Yeah. Yep. But did I start with no? Like, to answer the question, I haven't done an assessment. On Fireflies, but my, my default is no, is, is don't use it.

Thank you. But check.

Thank you, Donna.

Thank you. Raquel, you're on mute. Raquel, you're on mute. Let's go to Brenda.

Hi everyone, how are you? I just popped something in the message there. I'm coming to New York on the 8th of November to launch my very first book on Times Square up on the billboards. So if any of you are around there, let me know. I am an emotional intelligence coach. I'm also a motivational speaker. I work with a lot of companies to turn their human dynamics around. But I have two tips, Michael, just to add to some of the stuff you were given there. So I thought it was very helpful. I have LinkedIn Navigator. That's fed by Octopus. And I have a little message that goes out to the people I've selected. And my message, just in terms of how I do my sort of outward messages, are just very honest, very raw, very short. And so I'm probably the opposite of AI, I reckon. I said, I loved your profile and I want to expand more in your region. How can we talk? And what I've learned, folks, is that actually video is much more personable. I was putting little messages in, I was getting no feedback. Once I put my sizzle reel in there, I've had loads of conversations. I've actually got a leadership program to run in Edinburgh in November for a company in Italy out of that little personal touch. And another just quick easy thing for you all to do in terms of a background, just take a picture of your business card, save it as a JPEG Load it into your laptop and add that as your background.

Yeah, that's a good way. Or you could just put your logo. But I, I would say that, um, I love your profile sounds very like generic. I'm not being like ripping on what you're saying there, but personally, I, when I do an invite, I don't, I don't put anything in the invite.

Okay.

And then once they accept it, then I was, I'll say something back. I'll invite them to something versus just giving them a compliment. You got to ask a question to open the door. If you just compliment them, to me, it's— you're not gonna— you're not gonna get that. But, and then if you put your sizzle reel in there, now you're selling too soon. So just think about that. You might— that might work, but it's— it's—

it's—

you can't even get flagged. I mean, I do LinkedIn automation, like you use Octopus. I use something like that much— I like it a lot better because I used— I used to use Octopus. But always make it about what can you do for them versus Here's what I do. Let's go to Gabe.

Hey, Michael. Good to see you again, buddy. How are you?

Good.

Good.

So, yeah, so I am on the other side of Michael's business. So we do cold calling. We do 11 million cold calls. We have 175 physical human SDRs doing outbound. One of the things we've tested this year and is going really well is an app that we've co-created. So this is self-serving a little bit, but it's because it works. And it's to what Brett had just said, it's adding video and voice notes in our DMs on LinkedIn. Now that's completely free and able to be done on a phone, but it's impossible to do it on a desktop. And with 175 reps on my sales floor, I don't want them sitting on their iPhones and Androids all day long trying to prospect on their phone. So we've co-created this tool and it brings voice and video notes natively in your LinkedIn DMs.

Nice.

Now, where I see this is that, you know, Michael has amazing automation to start conversations, but as a second stream to bring you into it from a human perspective, really to bridge that gap and take your voice and video to the next level. I'm going to give you one story that happened literally today. The guy that is the editor-in-chief of Entrepreneur Magazine, you may have heard of him, may not. His name is Jason Pfeiffer. I asked him to be on my podcast when he connected with me on LinkedIn. He's got 200 50,000 followers on LinkedIn? And he said no, he was too busy. And then I made a nice little video that was hyper-personalized to him, explaining to him exactly why I want him on the show, sent it to him in 2 clicks of a button, took me 30 seconds to do it. And his response is, let's do the show next week. So that definitely cuts through the noise and it's an added layer to Michael's automation. And if you want any questions on it, let me know.

Yeah, there's, there's, that's a good point about what, what Gabe does or what I do or thinking about use people like Gabe does. I don't hire a bunch of SDRs. There's still a need for them, but teach them how to be more personal and be more human. A lot of the SDRs when I was doing this in HR tech were clicking buttons and doing HubSpot messages and cut and paste, and they're gonna get burned out, right? And then you see a lot of SDRs getting laid off right now. And use an AI. That's— you can't just use AI for human-based stuff. And then obviously, if you can use someone like, like Gabe or anyone else that has, uh, guns for hire versus adding all that infrastructure, I, I would say it's a good idea. Raquel, did you get your, your mute to fix? You're still— we still can't hear you. Let's go to Lance.

There it is. Sorry, I was muted there. A couple things. One, going back for, uh, a few minutes ago, the legal thing. Um, I was talking to a lawyer a few weeks back in Maine, and she went, hey, are you recording this call? And I said yes. And she said, you needed to tell me at the beginning. She got really irate about it. So then I started to put in my, um, on-screen, uh, name —recording. So, I told her, look, it's up there now. And I've had other lawyers go, hey, you're recording? I'm like, yeah, I actually told you. Anyways, this weird little ripple. But some lawyers got really sort of went right up their nose. The second point was just talking about outbound, you know, when you're trying to get a message. The most popular one I've ever used on LinkedIn, email, whatever. And I've been doing this for years. My lead question is, hey, can I bounce something off you? That's it, full stop. Almost everyone goes, what do you need, right? And then I go for the pitch, right? But it's shocking. Like, we ran some LinkedIn campaigns a couple years ago, and I remember on Friday at noon sending out this over the weekend, hey, can I bounce something off you? By Monday morning, we had over 600 responses saying, can I help? What do you need? And it was like, this is the worst question ever because now we got 600 leads to, you know, A lot of them went nowhere, but it created 600 unique conversations in a weekend. But anyways, that's all. I just want to throw that in there.

I threw in what I, what I put in, and you probably— most you guys kind of got a message on this, how you got on the roundtable. But for me, that's not a bad question, Lance, but I— like, someone that's been doing this for a while, it just screams like, what, what are you trying— what are you trying to sell me? Um, but if it works, absolutely. But if it works It doesn't matter what I think. It matters what the analytics and what your sales and what you do. But I just, you know, for me, I like doing this for hundreds of clients. I, I just want to make it something about them, something that's opinion-based or something about location-based or looking at something that they've done in the past, whether go to event, their speaker somewhere, or there they might be attending something. It's like, how do I align with, with someone and then open a door and not pitch because there's a lot of pitch slapping, especially on LinkedIn, which will get your LinkedIn flagged. And then it says, are you using automation? So I don't have ever had that happen to me because I use automation and I don't pitch slap for my clients.

So, well, I wouldn't disagree. I mean, the next thing is the second message is like, hey, we were looking, you know, depending on how you, if you go for the juggler too quick, as you know, like it's a put off, but it's like, hey, we had this white paper on, or, you know, you could start with a lead magnet or something after that, right?

But again, with the white paper, Lance, what, what do they know about you that they think that I should read your white paper off the bat? You know what I'm saying? I'm like, I'm not trying to bag on what you're doing.

Oh no, no, no.

Yeah, I'm saying as long as it's people, as long as it's white papers and like—

yeah, yeah, no, but again, again, if it's a targeted lead list that you actually do have some, you know, you don't want to spam people. Nobody appreciates that, right? So as long as you're on target with this person, probably could be a prospect. And, you know, anyways, that's the nuance.

You definitely want to think about how can you create something like this? Like, this is not like me being a rocket science doing a roundtable, just me getting enough messages out, work with other people to do this with, right? So start being your own creator of your own events instead of paying other people to be at their events. You know, or do both. But this is not that hard to start. You can just do like 10 people a month to join a little executive roundtable that's going to help their business and your business. But I used to do intros the whole time here. You know how horrible that roundtable was? Hi, my name is Michael Filato. I do this, I live here. And then we went around the whole group and it was horrible, and people were coming back. And now I just say, listen, let's just talk about what people want to talk about. And open up the floor. Tell us 2 things that you learned that were great or not good, you know, or some tool. And this is where I learned about Blaze and Fireflies and all these other things that I have no clue, that I would never have heard about. Michelle Childs, I'm sorry, go ahead.

That's okay. Thanks for having me, guys. Michelle Childs from Illinois. I work for Sandler, and Sandler is a data-driven performance-based company that's really in some of your worlds that I know the gentleman that just mentioned he had like 175 salespeople may make sense on the enterprise side. And what I do, most of our clients bring us in because of some KPI that is hurting them right now, some pain point like this, you know, roundtable is for maximizing pipeline and revenue growth. Other of you may be individuals and We have a franchise side of the business as well, but ultimately it's about communication skills and having adult-to-adult conversations and being able to control those conversations. So one thing, Michael, you mentioned it in your— when you have somebody sign the email and give that reason or what, what would make our conversation more valuable? Sandler, I don't know if any of you have maybe heard of an upfront contract. So that's really setting the framework. And I see Doug nodding his head. Yep. Setting the framework for the call and what's the agenda, what's the time, why are we here? And then what's that outcome? I hear a lot of you guys talking about what I call follow-up purgatory. And a lot of times if you're presenting a solution without finding that pain point first and they have that proposal, they have what they need, they have no need for us. Be it us trying to sell something or get them on a call or get them to be on our podcast or whatever it may be. They already have all the information they need. So really just taking a step back, slowing down, setting that agenda up front and really making it clear as to why we're there in the first place and what that next step is.

What's the, what's the question you, I mean, I, I told you guys what I use, what, What would you put it in the, in the calendar so that you can make sure that you understand why there is a, a call set?

Are you asking me, Michael?

Yeah, I'm asking you, Michelle. Like what, what do you like that question or do you have a better question?

Oh, I'll have to think about that. I think for, for me, my upfront contract never changes from call to call outside of the agenda. It's, you know, hey, thanks for your time. I have us down for 30 minutes. Is that still good for you? Yes, no. Here's what I hope to accomplish in our call. So I think if you put in something like, it sounds like you are struggling to maximize your pipeline, or you have issues with bottom of funnel or deals slipping quarter to quarter. You could put that in there. And then at the end, basically I say, you know, we'll have a conversation, we'll have a dialogue back and forth, and we'll decide together what the next steps are. If it makes sense for us to continue on a conversation, put more time on our calendar, that's great. If not, that's okay too. We can, we can part as friends. But it really allows that— it eliminates that mutual mystification of someone being surprised as far as what's going to happen next. They know what that order is going to be, and if they're on a sales call, they know at some point you're going to talk about decision makers, about budget, and about closing that sale. It's not like, oh boy, here comes the close, and everybody gets uncomfortable.

I really like You know, help, help me, uh, prepare for this call. Please share any information that would help.

Yeah, I think for your world that makes perfect sense, and it gives you something to put in your agenda to, to carry that call forward.

Yeah, I don't— I actually, I don't put an agenda before the call because I want it to flow freely, but there's a plus and minus to that. And Sanders are great, you know, sales strategy company, consulting company.

Yeah, and I don't mean agenda when you are reaching back out, just when you get them when you're in front of them, like stating why you're there.

Yeah. Kyle, go ahead, Kyle.

Hi everyone, Kyle Harbaugh with Chief Go Officers. So what I do, I work with a lot of professional service-based businesses. I specialize in law firms. My, my partner specializes in financial firms, so financial advisory firms, CPA firms. I've really enjoyed this conversation, Michelle. What you, you brought up was, was really good. I appreciate it. What I like to have in my Calendly, one, like you said, Michael, if they're asking about my annual recurring revenue or headcount or whatever, those are all just turnoffs. I'm like, I actually canceled the call. I canceled a call. I wanted to talk to this person and I got in there and there was like 15 questions deep and they're like, What's your ARR? What's this? What's that? I just said, we're, you know, it doesn't make sense to talk anymore. But what I like to ask for is I say, I have a wide network. Who would you like an introduction to? And then that way they can freely put up their hand and say, I would like to talk to this type of person. And then I know they have that type of need. Maybe I can help them. Like I can fill that need or I know somebody I can introduce them to. So that's a way I like to, to approach that question or that issue. The other thing I wanted to quickly bring up, we've built two AI systems from the ground up, and you have to be careful with this information and understand how things get passed and in what environment. You, what, what environment is safe or not safe. And, and so I think this is a really valuable conversation that a lot of people need to think through is just like, what is, what is, you know, safe information to put out there? And the best practice is just don't give it to it in the first place. If you can, before you put in your notes, scrub out all the names. And, you know, and then give it the notes and say, you know, can you summarize this for me for a follow-up email or something like that? And then go back in and place the names as appropriate or whatever other sensitive information. That, that's very helpful. Thanks, Kyle.

I want to go to Guy Rubin real quick, who's a good friend of mine, and he has a master approach to, to really help him with some pipeline stuff and Guy, what did you have? What have you learned? Tell us a little bit of what you do and what you learned in the last 2 months that really helped you. Okay, well, hi everyone.

My name is Guy Rubin. I was the founder of a business called Ebsta and CEO of that business. I recently sold the company to a larger company called Fulcast about 8 weeks ago. That business has also acquired Atrium. Last week or two weeks ago, we announced the acquisition of CopyAI as well. They're doing a bit of a roll-up in this space we call go-to-market. If you're asking me about my learns over the last few weeks, I've just got back from Vienna. I was at the HG Capital Growth Summit, and every single one of the portfolio companies is moving to a consumption-based pricing model. There was a lot of data and stats showing the organizations that are moving more to consumption-based are growing faster. That was a really interesting takeaway for me. The AI adoption isn't slowing down. Everyone is moving in that direction, but people are getting very— people take a lot longer than we'd expect to self-serve or to activate particular agents. So if you've got 150 agents in your portfolio and in your service that you offer, expecting customers just to self-serve and activate those, it takes a lot longer than that. And, you know, so one at a time, even though you might be, you know, fully okay with what you're doing.

Guy, I know, like, from being in enterprise, that consumption base is hard. You can't predict the amount of money you're going to spend. And a lot of CFOs or founders don't want to do that just because they, they need to know what their, their budget is. So what, what's your thoughts on that? Because I'm not—

yeah, it's a really valid point and, and one of the biggest pushbacks. Um, ultimately what we need to do as, uh, as leaders in this space is, is align what we— the services that we provide to the value that we deliver. Um, and so, um, the way people have tackled some of these challenges around consumption-based pricing is, is moving to things like buckets. So you might have a kind of a small, medium, and large bucket, and you might be able to tell the customer, look, you pretty much fall into this medium bucket, and we're only ever going to charge you, you know, any more money if we deliver outsized value. And so things like that tend to get them a lot more comfortable. But again, it moves the challenge from getting a signature signed to actually getting the customer activated and using them and getting value from what you're delivering. I've been involved in all sorts of businesses, in particular, the payment world has a real challenge with getting customers signed up is one thing, but actually getting them using the platform to run their payments through could take a year, and sometimes the customers never get activated. It moves that challenge even further down the road. Those that are old enough and got enough gray hair like me will remember the days where we were selling enterprise deals and CapEx deals. Then we moved to kind of this SaaS model where, you know, customers were paying over a much longer period of time, and eventually we'd make more money out of them. That was the theory. Now we're moving to this idea of consumption where much more of the, the customers are even more in charge, and they ultimately— we need to, to make sure we're delivering that. They're really only paying us at the point where they're getting the real value. Now, a lot of businesses have got kind of a a hybrid model at the moment. Maybe you've got a platform fee, maybe there's still some legacy kind of SaaS revenue streams that are still relevant. But if you don't already have an element of consumption-based pricing in your product, in your go-to-market motion, you might want to start thinking about it.

Thanks, Guy. Mike Horne is—

Can I add something? Sorry, can I add something? Yes, sure. Yes, one thing. I heard very carefully about what we spoke about the pricing issue. And there is one big mistake that we all do. And this is connected also to the way that we present ourselves. We all speak about value, but value is not defined. It's, it's a soft term and it depends on the circumstances. Therefore, because I'm for more than 4 decades in the sales arena and pricing, there is a different approach that can fit better and businesses can earn much more money by thinking differently. We all think the same, but we need to flip the way that we are doing business. And instead of value, speak about contribution. Contribution, it's a monetized term that it is well defined, that includes your ethical behavior, the KPI and other stuff. So it's a long story, but make it short, change the way that you think. Change the way that you create your solution, change the way that you present your solution and charge more money. Yeah.

If you look at the challenger customer or challenger sale, which is a lot, a lot, a lot of based on, hey, I can teach you how to save money. You're spending $8 million, like you have an $80,000 solution. That's— you want to solve problems, pains, obviously. That's so— that's one that's very popular in enterprise sales. That's where I come from. I mean, obviously what I'm doing now is not always enterprise. I'm helping probably growth companies grow faster just because it's, it's a lot of those bigger companies already have infrastructures. And we're about time right now. Anybody want to make a last point that has not gone yet to kind of introduce himself and just and say hi and maybe give us one tip that's worked really well for them? Otherwise, we'll talk in 2 weeks.

I'm happy to do so if you'll have me.

Yeah, David, go ahead.

Hey, so I know it's not— my name is David Childs. I am an account executive for an exhibit house, SWX Global. So nothing exciting. We just build exhibits. But because of that, I've had a lot of experience on the front end, like full cycle sales, how to stand out to people in a way that implies trust without them actually knowing you. And like, it's literally been like the last 6 months months of my life trying to figure out how to do that on LinkedIn. But it's like anything that breeds familiarity for them upfront or the assumption of familiarity is really what I'll lean on. Like I'll come in and like 3, 4, or 5 of their posts all at the same time so that they see my name in the list of contacts that are in their list of notifications. Then I'll send the request to connect, make a note for an hour later, send them a message and just be like, hey, listen, you know, you looked really interesting. I had a couple questions for you. And, you know, it's not any one thing that's gonna, that's gonna work for everybody. And I haven't found a way to necessarily automate that process.

But a lot of them, you could actually automate that, David. I do that. But yeah, don't do that manually.

You know, when they're, when it's an important enough connection, because I'm typically looking at like Fortune 100s or Fortune 500s at the furthest out.

You should always be very specific about, but yeah, anything after that, you got to say, okay, how can I I go for tier 2 and tier 3 with some sort of things that make your life easier. That's what I'm here to learn, my friend.

Give me a ring.

But, um, yeah, everybody, thank you so much for making time. Um, again, if you ever want to team up with me to do this and you have at least probably 4 or 5,000 connections, then I could definitely team up with you and do it. If you want to obviously bring me a client or bring Mitchell, Clyde, or anyone else on this call, we share— there's a button that says right by your name in the chat, 3 buttons that you could save your chat like that. This— I do post these videos of— on YouTube and LinkedIn of our roundtables because we usually talk about tips and tricks that people want to hear, but they couldn't join all the time. And yeah, just let's help each other pay it forward. I mean, I do these for free because I want to get my name out there. Obviously, it's— I'm a nice guy, but I, you know, I do want to— I do want to grow my business. And I appreciate everybody that's kind of helped us. And, and, um, you know, just, just, uh, try to help each other out and, uh, give leads to each other, give advice. I mean, worst thing that you learn here is another tip and trick. And that's what I— that's why I've kept this whole thing about tactics and strategies, because it changes every time we do this. We're not going to sit there and do a— we do these— I see people do these things and they bring out a deck, and it's like, I do— I, I can't pay attention to it. I have no, no attention span for it anymore. So, you know, engage your audience with this. Use this roundtable mastermind as a way for you to get leads, whether you use me to build that or you do it yourself. Podcasts are great, but if you don't have a podcast audience it's— you're going to say, hey, I'm going to do a Zoom call and we're going to— we got 10 people that they're going to watch it. It's going to look very junior. So think about if you're actually doing a podcast and trying to use that as a, a sales magnet or marketing magnet, you're going to have to build it out, make it look like a professional production. I mean, my background's TV, so if the more you make it look like something that would be on TV with letter, letterboxes and streaming and graphics, it's gonna look nice. So God bless everybody, and we'll talk in 2 weeks. Cool.

Thank you so much, everyone. Have a lovely day. Thank you. Bye-bye.