CRO/CEO/CMO Founder's Roundtable Mastermind on Zoom every 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month

Just, uh, letting some folks in here. Where are you based, James? Washington, DC. Okay.

Hey, Jeff.

Hey, how you doing? Good. How are you doing? Good, thank you. Your, um, your audio is very tinny. You might want to change the mic if, if there is another mic. There is. Let me figure this out. Sorry. Oh, good. Uh, these note takers are a pain. I got no idea sometimes if this is a note-taker or someone's— or a person. Hi, Caroline.

Hello.

How you doing?

Good.

Good.

I'm gonna throw out a thank you. Where'd he go? Michael. While we're getting set here. We're gonna get started about 11:05. But Michael is one of my teammates as far as driving this roundtable today. And Michael, why don't you just introduce yourself and just say, hey, this is where I'm at, this is what I do. You know, obviously we're not doing commercials on this thing, but in chat, definitely put your, all you guys put your information in there. But just, we're going to be talking about a couple different things today, but Michael was so gracious to, to let me use his LinkedIn with mine and, and other people like Doug in the past. And, uh, go ahead, Michael.

Yeah, thanks. Hey everybody, good morning, nice to meet you all. My name is Michael Bogart. I'm originally from Cleveland, Ohio. I live down in Austin, Texas. I'm a former global revenue leader and I have since started my own company that creates deploys and maintains AI agents specifically for revenue use cases. So yeah, looking forward to be here and meeting all of you.

And what's, what's something that you learned in the last, in the last 6 months? And this is a question for all of you to kind of get involved in that helped your business, hurt your business, or a tip or tactic that someone told you about that you want to pass on to the group here?

You know, help, help the business. I would just say, like everybody else, uh, not only do I create and deploy and maintain AI agents for clients, but learning how to use them to run my own business has been quite invaluable.

Any particular, like, solution that you found that was like, wow, that— like, I learned about Blaze.ai over the last couple months And I thought that was pretty cool tech, but I don't, you know, I don't have any partnership with them except for that.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, just really putting in the investment and a lot of people haven't done this yet. So it's a real opportunity if you haven't done so already, taking 10 to 20 hours just to create custom GPTs or custom Gemini Gems, whatever large language model you want to use. And I'll just give you a couple examples of what you can do with that if you haven't done it already. So I used to, you know, when I first started about a year and a half ago, go on Fiverr and hire people to create professional-looking slides. I put a few hours in and have a custom Gem. So that's a Gemini AI agent that I can just say, here's the slide that I want you to create. And boy, it does an amazing job creating professional-looking slides instantly that I don't have to wait for or pay for. So that's one.

I saw something like that in Google Slides where you can make the slide better. And I've been using it for my deck, but then it starts to scramble some of my— Yeah, how do you get it from not scrambling your text?

Yeah, doing it in Google Slides is not quite as effective. It's the same technology. I don't know why, but it works much better if you go into Gemini. And if you have— a lot of people don't know this, but if you, if you have a corporate Gmail account, whether that be your own business or if you're paying for Gmail, you have a corporate Gemini account. And if you don't know this, you can go in there and create your own custom gems, which is like your own AI personalities. So what you do is you create your own gem to be an expert marketer slide generator. And this is my branding guidelines. And you have to train it, right? It takes an hour or two. But once you get it, all you do is say, like, create a slide for this, and it'll generate a beautiful on-brand slide, and you can do it for a whole slide deck.

Gemini 3 is very good. That's another thing I've been finding too is that it doesn't— I have to do it for each slide too. So I'm not the greatest at the whole Gemini thing yet, but go ahead. I'm sorry. Somebody was saying something. No, Michael, this is Doug. I was just adding that Gemini 3 has risen the bar quite a bit. Gemini 3 is very good.

Oh, yeah. I agree with that. That's my preferred large language model. When I'm building AI agents for complexity and scale and all these revenue use cases, I started off with OpenAI. This is like a year and a half ago. And pretty quick, once Gemini 2.5 Pro came out, I realized this is much better. And yeah, 3 is even better than that. That's still what I use.

They were lagging behind OpenAI and Anthropic for a while, but now they've caught up, maybe even in the lead now.

Yes, I agree.

Guys, just to jump in, can I— sorry, it's James here. How you doing? Good to meet you all. I just want to know what makes it so much better than OpenAI. Is it because particularly if you've got Gmail and you're a corporate Gmail user, it's just so much closer to all of your other context and stuff?

Yeah, I'll give a first answer for that. So basically what I found, again, as a former global revenue leader is when you're using AI to drive revenue, you have to feed this thing hundreds, thousands of pages of information. So for example, right? Let's say the first AI agent for revenue I ever developed was the forecast inspector. So think about all the pipeline that you would be managing as far as in your team that rolls up to you. And each one of those opportunities has a few call transcripts, a few email threads that are hundreds of pages long or whatever, notes, next steps. What Gemini does better, I found, early on, much better than OpenAI, is it can find the needles in the haystack. So you send it 1,000 pages of information and you tell it to cite your source. Oh, we have a champion because of this email on this date or this call. OpenAI struggled. ChatGPT struggled a little bit to get to the granularity that Gemini did. That's what I found. I don't know if anyone else has any other opinions on that.

Well, you also have, you know, OpenAI. I literally just deleted all my chats and all my memory from ChatGPT because it just went really stupid and wouldn't stop.

Yes.

I literally said, please quit giving me a dissertation. Please quit, you know, giving me this narrative. And he goes, okay, here's no dissertation. He kept— I was like, that is exactly it. Part of it is, is that OpenAI's model was out first, and everybody else is learning from the mistakes that it's making. And since it's such a hard-code thing, it is now a big shift— ship to change. And as they do changes, I mean, their last update really changed how you were supposed to be doing prompts, and then that screwed up everybody, so they kind of went backwards. It's a big shift to change. The newer models are learning from those mistakes. So it's fresher, cleaner data and behaviors.

Can I ask a question?

Huh?

Can I ask a question?

Let me, let's go. Let me go to Neko or Nico.

Neko. Yeah, that's me.

Oh, that's you. Okay. Okay. Yes.

So, so, so Michael, I, I'm a big user of Claude. And I've built— I have more than 20. Well, the agents are called projects. And, you know, my CMO is— I have an AI CMO and have an AI project manager. And I'm building agents for every one of my clients to manage their projects.

And what do you do? Where are you based? What do you do? Where are you based? Where are you based and what does your company do?

Ah, okay. I'm based in New York and we're a video production company.

Okay, go ahead.

Yeah, we do remote video for our clients, so mainly helping them with social media, video content, and testimonials. Now the question is, I've tried building gems in Gemini, and I found it much more limited than the projects I can build in, in, in Claude. So I'm wondering if you have had that different experience.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Great question. And I've heard a lot of things even in the past two weeks about how much Claude has advanced. To be completely honest, I haven't used it much. What I do is more API connections for my customers that want to build a stack of revenue agents. And I use Gemini gems just because I use Gmail and and it's a very powerful tool. Now, if anyone else has used Claude and thinks that it's better than Gem, I, I would be open to that. But for the use cases of revenue agents, um, again, what, what I'm generally doing is sending all this information— emails, call transcripts, notes, next steps— and I'm telling it to find needles in the haystack, forecast the deal, give me a probability to close. And, and Gemini, I, I have no, um room for improvement. They do such— it does such an amazing job for those use cases that I found. But if anyone else has used Claude, I'd love to hear their opinion.

Yeah, I'd like to— I'd like—

I have actually used Claude. Sorry if I'm interrupting you guys.

If you guys— I want to make sure we raise our hand because I, I need to basically moderate this somewhat.

But, um, oh, sorry, uh, my name is Mustafa, by the way. Can I go ahead?

Um, I'm actually want to go to Noah, um, who's— all right, sure, sure. and then, then, um, then I'll get to— just raise your hand right now. I got Noah, then I got Alex. I gotta go.

All right, I got it.

Um, so the, the, the gist of this whole roundtable is to basically trade ideas, tips, and tactics, and strategies, and be able to help each other, and not pitch and so forth, which we normally don't do. So that's good. You're definitely, um, feel free to put your information in chat, especially your contact information, why you joined the roundtable. This roundtable is about keeping your camera on and interjecting, not hiding behind a blank screen and just listening. So that's, that's important. With people like Noah, myself, and Michael and other folks that have helped build this whole thing, Lee, you know, we're taking our LinkedIn and we're basically exposing it to our friends, family. Contacts to build, help build this thing as a, as a group. So it's very important that we do that. I think James also has helped me, but no. So Noah, um, why don't you kind of— if someone could turn their mic off because it's feeding back. But, um, Noah is, has helped me build this as well, and I just wanted to kind of throw out a thank you to Noah as well and have him just give you a tiny bit why he did that, because he is someone that I trust in what he does. And, and, uh, Noah, Kenny, can you just give me a quick intro and why you joined the roundtable and a tip, tactic, strategy that you learned kind of based on what we're talking about right now?

Yeah, uh, good morning, Michael. Good morning, everybody. Uh, Noah Pusey, I'm the founder and president of Ripple Analytics. Uh, I joined the roundtable because I wanted to be able to share stories and hear stories about what works, what doesn't work, and really everything in between. I think, um, when you're a solopreneur, it can get a little, uh, pressure-packed, and you need to hear some valuable information from third parties that you trust. And that's why I opened up my network. I want everyone to learn from what we're doing here at the Roundtable. Um, a tactic I employed about 6 months ago was, uh, not having the 7th touch with a prospect. I know 80% of sales occur after the 8th touch. My data says it doesn't. I've never closed a deal after the 6th touch. So when that prospect, I get to the number 7, I politely tell them, you know, this is the end of the road. If you want to work with us, great. If not, that's okay. But I'm a data analyst, and if I don't look, if I look at the data and it says that I've never closed a deal in 10 years after the 6th touch, then, you know, certainly not the 7th and certainly not the 10th or 11th. I'm just going to cut bait and tell them, it's nice to meet you. If I can help you in the future, great.

Yeah, don't hit someone with, uh, 15 messages. It's annoying, it's obnoxious, you know. I, I, you know, just so you know, this, this is what I've been running for the last 3-4 years. It's got me leads, it's, uh, made me learn more about what's working, what's not. Um, it's made introductions to people I've never would have met, and that's the whole idea about giving versus asking. When you do these roundtables either for yourself or for other people, or just do kind of even a smaller one, it's like you're going to get people to talk about each other and not have to pitch, pitch slap, I call it. So, um, just so you know, I do these for my clients. I do lead generation, I do roundtables, masterminds, um, scraping events, email automation, LinkedIn automation. So that's why I'm here today. And just so you know, on the chat there's 3 buttons there. You could save, um, the chat after we're done at the end of the call, um, so you can get all everybody's information. I do post these videos on my YouTube channel, so I like to keep this PG, obviously, but, um, still sometimes we get into some good comments on this. But it is kind of— it's a safe spot, but it is I do use it for content. Um, I'm trying to think of anything else I'm missing. Oh, on the chat part, please put, put like how people can book you while you're here. I see a lot of people just putting their LinkedIn URL. You gotta think about when you post anything on this thing, whether it's content on LinkedIn, who cares? So what? Why are you telling me this? How do you get— how are you going to help me if you just kind of do that whole, here's my phone number, here's my email? And they don't know who you are, it's not much of a why should I reach out to you. So Alex, go ahead.

Thank you very much. So I am in the consumer space. I come out of advertising and marketing, but I've pivoted into the wellness consumer space. I have a company that uses AI that takes a 30-second voice clip, we analyze it, and we put out wellness reports. The reason I say that is this: I use a mix of AI I use obviously OpenAI ChatGPT because that was, as pointed out earlier, out there first. I use Claude for certain things, but I'm most interested in understanding Gemini. And it's not actually something that's in my, call it, stack currently, though I use it as a Gmail person and I use it whatever, you know, as a viewer. I'm trying to integrate it because I use a varying stack of things, whether it's Airtable or Tally, different CRM programs, because I'm an automated system. You, you do a voice thing on your phone, it gets web hooked, pulled up into our thing, it gets analyzed, pushed out. I don't want to get into granular detail, not for this conversation. But what I'm trying to figure out is how do I identify the best tools that each AI has? So I really appreciate what was said a couple minutes ago, how it integrates into Gmail and it can get granular. And I do appreciate the fact that ChatGPT has actually gotten stupider over the last couple months, not more innovative. But it still, at least for me, houses some templates. It has some locked-in rules that obviously I can convert someplace else. But is anybody using a mix of things? And there isn't just a driver on the, you know, on the, on the, on the cart, but a mix of things. And then The real question is, how do I, as a consumer insight person trying to obviously generate leads and get more people to use my product, how do I set up whatever the rubric is that I can identify what each one does best? Where do— where does that A/B testing exist? If it does, great. And if not, is it just talking with professionals like this, which is why I joined this conversation to hear what other people use. How are people testing out as opposed to just continuously porting from one to the other and having to learn a new language or whatever the case is? That's really my question of what's the best practice?

Alex, I'm sorry. Who has a good answer for Alex?

I mean, hi.

Go ahead.

Google may have gotten stupider, but it's still— not Google, I'm sorry, ChatGPT— it's still, for me, I, I can do the most in it. And then once I get what I want out of it, then I am putting it into Claude, which I believe at the moment, for me anyway, is able to translate my— what I'm trying to do to who I am better. But like, I use I use it to formulate spreadsheets, and I use it to— I'm using ChatGPT to do a whole lot more than just create content. It's not what I use it for. And I find that Claude and some of these other ones are still not able to do it. It gets stuck. So I start in ChatGPT with foundational things like frameworks and rules and things. Then once I get my final output, I am then putting it into Claude because I think Claude is then the smartest, if that's helpful. I hope that answers your question.

What's the Perplexity approach as well? Because I see that Perplexity says, oh, we have all these different engines and one subscription, you get all of it. Does anybody, can anybody also educate the group here on Perplexity versus the other AIs?

Yeah, happy to jump in there, Michael. So back to, I think, first of all, Alex's question, I don't have a good answer of how do you stay up to speed with which large language model is the best at this and that. You just, you know, join calls like this, experiment. Maybe there's something out there. I don't know that. But Perplexity, that large language model is basically a large language model connected to search engine. So if you want to ask Gemini or ChatGPT a question where, like, if you're trying to replace Google, Gemini and ChatGPT don't have access to real-time information, whereas Perplexity is the large language equivalent of a search engine, if that makes sense.

But is it taken from 6 or 7 different— if we're going to go with one AI system, and I use ChatGPT a lot and some Gemini, should I be using Perplexity for everything, or should I be what?

No, I don't know what to do. Perplexity, like I said, that can be a more effective Google search engine, for example. Whereas you wouldn't use Perplexity to create the revenue AI agents that I'm talking about or anybody else would probably need. I would say ChatGPT and Gemini and Claude and Groq. Well, Groq's also— it's integrated with social media. It's integrated with X. So it gets confusing quick, but if we're going to do a simplistic categorization, ChatGPT and Gemini are similar search engines. And I think the argument is Gemini's become far more advanced. And then, you know, Perplexity is a large language model connected to a search engine. So think about it of like Google on steroids. And then Grok is a large language model that has feeds from real-time feeds from X. Roger.

Sorry, I just turned my audio on. Oh, hi guys. I'm new to this. Those who have never seen me before, nice to be here. Invited by Michael. Yeah, I mean, it's interesting picking up hints and tips. I mean, I've been using with my teams over the last couple of years, obviously ChatGPT, started using Gemini, and I think it's got— I agree with everything everybody said, but I don't know, has anybody been using Gamma? So I tend to use Gamma for then producing decks and slides and documents and found that to be unbelievably helpful. I mean, you've got to do the pre-work in something like Gemini or ChatGPT, but then feeding into Gamma to actually produce kind of usable documentation. I found that unbelievable.

Is Gamma for documentation?

Yeah, really, that will produce really high-quality slides, and it saves an enormous amount of time, but you've got to do the pre-work.

I use Gamma a lot. I have to be honest with you, because I'm in the Google ecosystem, I find NotebookLM is just crushing it. I think Gamma, in my humble opinion, I can drop a document into NotebookLM because I've already written the document. I know exactly what it is. And as long as I know how to frame it, it gives me back unbelievable results as opposed to Gamma takes some weird liberty. Like all of a sudden everything looks like Japanese anime or something and I have to go back and figure out what happened there.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is Deirdre.

I would agree.

I apologize for not having my camera on. I just had retina surgery. So for any of you that had that, I'm not a pretty picture right now. So I'll have my camera on next time. But I would agree with the comments that were made around Gamma.

Gamma.

I, I have not used the other one that was mentioned. It does, it does lean toward the, the anime side. I will not— the only challenge I have with Gamma, it, it, when I throw in the prompts, it produces the exact presentation that I want and it's ready for prime time. I would say about 90% of the time. It's just that if you want to make any changes or edits to that content, it is very difficult to work with after that. But I do use it a lot and I, I highly recommend it. I will look into the other tool that was mentioned earlier as well.

Yeah, I had another brief comment as well, and I'll stick my hand down. And, um, that, um, you're talking about, um, number of contact points and how many times you contact people and so forth. I mean, I've, you know, I've been a revenue leader for a very long time and tried new things all the time, you know, including all the emails, the usual stuff everybody does. And the last couple of years, the most success that I've had with my teams, sorry to say, it's just been A good old-fashioned outbound telephone calling, just hitting the phones and catching people at the right time and getting ready. But prior to that, spending an enormous amount of time with my sales teams using all the tools and deeply researching who you're talking to and what they're all about individually, not just the company, but the person. So if I'm coming after me, I'd want to go to my feed, my LinkedIn, I'd want to go to, you know, YouTube, everything and find out all about Roger. And then get some hooks and then get them, catch them on the phone. And if you catch them, I tend to get a discovery call booked straight away within a call.

So, and I would say discovery calls, I use this approach for discovery calls for myself. Like, hey, we'd love to have you on the roundtable, but before we get on the roundtable, I want to discuss your role in the roundtable. So this is really a benefit for me to learn, but it's The, the secondary point of this is I wanted to grow my business. I grew this to $80,000 a month doing it this way, and I'm basically an agency with a very small team that uses bots and automation instead of a lot of humans to do stuff. So definitely think about where you can automate and where you can't, and use human when you can. But I also want to say thank you to Roger too. I just got his LinkedIn loaded up today to start helping build the roundtable. I mean, again, I can only do so much by myself. So if you guys want to interact and continue to interact every week and be on these calls, welcome to do that. But I'm going to always give preference for people that are, you know, catch-22s, like they're trying to help grow this thing, not just for me, but for them. And if you can sit there and say, well, I'm willing to put my LinkedIn connections on the table here and say, let's, let's do a roundtable where you can mention me like I did earlier I mentioned some folks that have helped. Um, it's not just for, for me to get leads from you, it's me to help grow the base of this. Because every person we add to this is like almost like fivefold. You add people, um, Sean adds people, Michael adds people, Doug adds people, and it just turns into a huge amount. Like, if I could get 300 people to show up to this, great. Because you might not be able to chat during this thing, but you could probably reach out to Steve, Roger, or Tom by clicking under LinkedIn and set up a one-on-one. And guess what? Maybe I was one of the reasons why you got connected, or maybe Steve was. But otherwise, how are we gonna just go out to conferences all the time? You know, it's great to go to conferences, but that's not really, uh, a way to do things in today's world because it's this time and money and travel. You know, Sean, why don't you go ahead?

Morning, guys. So I'm Sean Cook. I'm fractional CRO. Most of my career has been in martech. And so I'm really focused on martech companies and IT MSP, IT services orgs. And so I'm here because I'm interested in sharing ideas. Particularly as it relates to, you know, solving the problems that we are seeing with B2B sales organizations. And one of the ones that I focus on, two of them, one of the ones that I am really curious if others are doing things for, which is referrals. You know, there are crazy public problem-proof statistics out there about what's going on in B2B, the percentage of sales reps that are making quota, by the way, down to 20% or so, where we have, you know, 13% of the sales team carrying 80%+ of the revenue. I don't— and a 65% decline in the percentage of sales reps making quota since 2012.

What do you do, Sean? I'm sorry, I don't know if I was not paying attention, but what do you do and where do you live?

Oh, I am in Port Tobacco, Maryland, just outside DC, and I do fractional sales leadership for mid to large size organizations, everything from go-to-market system design to coaching and, and revenue growth.

Okay. I did hear the fractional stuff. I just wanted to know if there's a particular focus or area that you work in.

Mostly with tech, uh, SaaS tech, IT, uh, MSPs. I have a good number of companies that are MSPs and, uh, martech companies because I spent my early days at Cision and Eloqua and, uh, Triblio.

You found a magic bullet for MSPs. I work with them as well. I don't know if anybody else here, but they seem to be such a commodity and, and the lowest price wins. And a lot of, even if they're tech companies, a lot of them are not very technical.

People.

So I'm trying to figure out like how to help them the best. And maybe you guys— MSP is a managed service provider. They usually manage, uh, endpoints, which is the— their computers at the companies, their help desk, instead of hiring your own.

Yeah, I actually work with one out of California who is one of the most expensive, like in their— they're known for being more expensive and I just implemented a system for them for managing their circle of influence. Because a lot of the— and this happens in not just MSPs, but, you know, 90% of people who are going to buy something already have at least one vendor in mind when they go to buy something. 60% have at least 4 in mind. And so I think on the MSP side, I think it is a regiment of behavior or systemized behavior of touches that put them in the position to be that preferred provider. And so I've built out an entire program for them that leads to a referral program. And that's where I just feel like for most organizations, referrals are kind of like, oh, we got lucky. I don't know any organizations or many organizations that actually have a formal, systemized way of generating referrals within the accounts that they're going after. And it blows my mind because everybody knows referrals close at 2 to 5 times higher than any other channel. They have a 37% higher lifetime value. They, you know, the CAC costs obviously are extremely low. And yet, even while 91% of customers are willing to give a referral, only 11% of salespeople ask. And so I really have been digging into And I've created right now it's kind of concierge-esque, a system with my client to actually turn on referrals as an always-on thing that is facilitated, orchestrated and facilitated by the sales organization.

Yeah. I mean, the whole partner approach, which is kind of the reason why I do this for the roundtable, but I do it for my clients where I'm like, listen, you work for this company. You're a small company, but you work with this company who has 50 salespeople. You have marketing development funds, MDF funds, or partner funds, or you have a channel partner. Why aren't you asking Steve over at that company who has 40 reps to basically use their LinkedIn, help them grow their maybe 200 accounts? You have 2,000 accounts. Yeah, you're a joint roundtable. Yeah, me helping, or you guys just doing this on your own. Think about the trusted advisor approach. But don't just say, hey, can you introduce me to Steve or Tom? Take their LinkedIn and say, I'm going to automate it for you. You don't have to do anything. It's not that expensive. Either A, have someone like me do it, or B, figure it out on your own. Just be careful when you do LinkedIn automation or email, especially LinkedIn. Don't spam, don't pitch slap, and, and use— look at other people who have first connections that are they sell this to the same people, but they're not competitive. Yeah, this is the reason why I've grown my business so fast is because I, I use a trusted approach. I partner, you know. So that's interesting for me to kind of think about that stuff. Um, let's go to Rook.

What's up, buddy?

How are you?

Hey, oh, I am Rook, uh, branding, marketing, sales. My goal this year is to help 300 companies get predictable revenue. And it's going actually really, really good for those numbers. So I love that. I was just raising my hand. I have a thought, but I also raised my hand for the Claude conversation.

Claude doesn't—

Claude is incredible building code and building agents. It doesn't deploy them. So Gemini is deploying great, but I just want to, you know, just give you that quick answer. It does a lot more cleaner code than anything out there that I've seen without any noise, without any weirdness. Just you asked the question, Michael. So I just wanted to kind of answer that. Me and my whole team have the the team experience through Claude and personal ones as well. And for anybody who likes to research, because you've heard this, research people before you meet with them on LinkedIn, I would love to show you what we have. We have what's called the Game Changer Seller. It's one of our things that does all of them find their interest, tells you, hey, you two have this thing in common, here's some icebreakers, blah, blah, blah, blah. Happy to have that conversation with you offline.

Cool. Thank you.

Thank you.

By the way, Yeah, this is for everybody because—

hey, no more of this, uh, crazy, uh, animations. Okay. Okay. Uh, T. Morris.

Good morning, everyone. That was, that was a good one. Good morning, Mike. Happy New Year, everybody. I'm T. Maurice Fowler, leadership strategist and CEO of Fowler Media Group. Um, just piggybacking off of the AI conversation, what I'm finding with AI is that the models that you need to use are based on what you want to do. This is what I'm seeing because we deal with publications, we deal with media, music, film, video, and there's no one AI model that deals with everything. I wish there was. I mean, you, you, you get Gemini, you get Claude, you get ChatGPT, but each one is like a niche. So what I do is I actually go to ChatGPT and ask, and listen, uh, I need videos for this. What is an AI model that I can use? Or I need to do this, what is the AI model I can use? And we've been getting good results with that, you know. So I, I just go right to ChatGPT AI to ask about AI.

Yeah, that's actually It's a good idea.

You know, I go to, I go to AI to find out about AI. And when I deal with AI, I actually treat it like a person, you know, and it's really, really interesting. This is, this is much more. And I have these conversations where I say, listen, you're, you're going to gain consciousness, AI. And it actually laughs. And, you know, I know it's looking at me because you know, it'll, it'll send me an emoji in the tone of my skin. And so I just laugh. I say, hey, I say, AI, you got some secrets. Anyway, AI will tell you about AI.

Let's go to Ibrahim.

Hi, everybody.

Ibrahim.

I work in the ABM and content space with fintechs. I'm based out of New York. And what I found a lot of the times, and this is a precursor to, because a lot of the interesting points that were mentioned, I want to try to give my take on it. But what I believe is that the specificity of ABM is something that you don't need to sort of maintain just for the upper tier companies now. I think with LLMs, it's possible to really send personalized outreach and personalized content for companies across the board and across the, especially in the B2B space. And I think this goes back. So the two points I wanted to respond to was one, Roger mentioned the importance of research. And I think today there is no reason for any company to be sending spam. And I'll explain what I mean, right? So for instance, one of the clients I work with, they offer CFO services, right? And CFO services, they solve a lot of problems. So They can help with fundraising, they can help with, let's say, figuring out if your processes are—

what's— to get to the more specific point, what is the specific advice you're giving?

So two things. One, before we send any outreach, anything else, I think if there's a way where you can segment the ICPs that you're sending to through LLMs in a way where you're being hyper-specific with your outreach, that makes a huge difference because the content you're sending is relevant. So it's no longer relegated as spam, that level of research, especially on the company level and the personal level.

Yeah, but you're not really, you're not really able to do that at scale. And if you do it at scale with AI, it looks very AI-ish.

No, I think it's doable without that. So long as you have a very clear process, and I'm happy to share sort of a lot of this content and stuff we're pushing out from my end.

Yeah, we do that offline with people. But yeah, what I'm saying is, what I'm saying is, you— when people talk to you about what they think your problems are and you're doing all this research and then feedback, regurgitate either what they do or what you think their problem is, you don't— you haven't earned the right yet. You know what I'm saying? And so you have to basically build a relationship just like you would with a woman or man, whoever you're dating, and say, let me get to know you before I start giving advice. So my— that's my opinion. I hear what you're saying.

I—

but I see a lot of— I see a lot of like, I'm gonna align with you on, on email or LinkedIn, and they haven't earned that right yet. And so that's just my opinion.

No, no, I always like to give—

I always like to give something first, like, hey, I want to invite you to this, are you going to be at this event? Let me get your opinion versus, hey, I see that you're doing this and 25% that and your company's doing that. It's— you're being a know-it-all. Not you, but they're being a know-it-all before you earn the right to be a know-it-all to me.

I think that's a very interesting perspective. I love that. I love the idea of when have you earned the right to give advice or when have you earned the right to try to— and I love the example of, for instance, if we're talking about Uh, you're asking someone out on a date or any other analogy.

Business dating. And it's dating, but it's business dating. So 100%, 1,000%, don't throw up. Hey, I got a Porsche, you know, I live in New York. Like, who cares, dude? Leave me alone.

But that's not how I think of it. All right, so the way I would think of it is this: you walk into a cafe, right? And she's reading a book about— she's reading a Russian book, Dostoevsky. And you have experience with that, so you're able to bring that up in the conversation organically and use that as a segue. The idea isn't—

and it's the fact that— but that's asking their opinion. That's different than how you— how's that book going? Are you enjoying it? Like, what—

that's—

it's like if you ask someone like, what do you think of this conference? What do you think of that book? That's asking— that's a me for them, right? But if you're saying something like, I think I understand you.

No, no, no. I want to say I want to separate two things. I want to separate approaching the prospect through a ton of research to make an educated guess. And then what we actually communicate, what we actually communicate is an entire conversation where there's a ton of A/B testing. Do we give advice or do we try to ask for an opinion? Like that is something that my clients and I will talk about. But the idea of rather than just approaching them blind and noticing that she's reading a book about Russian literature, and using that because you also appreciate Russian literature and using that as a way to enter, but then doing that at scale because AI allows that, then rather than having to do that per person, that is the philosophy or the mentality that I feel should be prevalent now amongst sort of, you know, people working in the marketing and the CRO space.

But let me give you an example. Let me give you an example of how I did something like that and see what your thoughts are. I said, hey, you go into inbound, which is HubSpot's conference. I wanted to get your opinion if you thought it was a good— if it's a good show for me to go to. By the way, I went to SaaStr, was pretty good, but just wanted to catch up and see how things were going. That got me— I did 4,000 outreaches, 600 responses, and I had 45 meetings because I just was asking their opinion. But it wasn't— it was more of a signal data, intent data, or just assuming that they might go to that because of their title. Versus to me, ABM, as a guy who's been selling for 25 years, it's like you set— if you have 20 accounts that are ABM, you shouldn't use automation, in my opinion, as much because you want to go, I see this, I want to talk to you about that. Um, I, I saw that you knew Tom. It's a little more like—

can you repeat that last part? I'm sorry, I think I lost you on the last part. Would you mind repeating it again, please?

On the ABM approach, like if you have 20 accounts to go after The whole automation or using AI to, to basically automate or kind of do it at scale, to me, is like, throw that out a little bit and go a little bit more deeper. If you have 20 whale accounts that you're going after, which is, you know, these big accounts in, in my space, it's like, you gotta, you gotta basically go after that and do it a different way, not, not using AI and some sort of Clay or, or automation platform to do that. And I'm an automation guy, so I'm really going against my thread. But again, if you have 20 accounts, I'm not going to trust anything but my, my opinion and use AI to help write it, you know, as someone just wrote. But change it. Don't ever— if you look for the dashes in AI, people could tell, like, with the little icons of the dashes, that's written with AI. So Make sure you ask AI, how does it— how do people figure out elongated dash? I think it's called whatever. It will tell you if they— if they— if it's AI, you don't want to be that guy that gets caught. EM dash.

So there are two points I want to respond here, and I feel this is a conversation that I would love to have. Like, I definitely book a call with you because this is very interesting for me to just think about out loud. Yeah, but one, what usually happens is when I'm thinking ABM, I'm thinking that if a an account has 20 personas you're gonna reach out to, right? So let's say you're selling FinOps software, like financial operations software. So you wanna reach out to the controller, the CFO, and possibly the CEO, right? And you have, let's say, 20 accounts to do that. That's like 60 emails. What I'll do is for the first account or two, I'll write everything personally. And once I have everything written down and I feel I know it down to sort of like that last morsel, I'll automate it and then I don't just need to sort of limit myself to 20, I can go 40, 100. The idea is at the level of granularity that I try to control the process, what happens is these dashes, like it looks way more organic because the investment is not in the writing process itself, it's in the research that precedes anything else. It's in the segmentation and trying to figure out what that might be interesting. Again, I think The issue is once you do the research, what do you feel you have the right to communicate and what do you feel will give you access to that person and their time? I think you don't want to come off too strong. I agree with you saying that.

Yeah.

I also feel that if you don't control the process really thoroughly, you put yourself at risk of coming across as just using an LLM, taking the easy route. The other thing I want to talk about, and I know I just want to go over time. Everybody's talking about what LLM to use. I highly recommend if you guys want to go into it is just to look at agentic workflows and figure out how to pair agents together to improve their output. Meaning one of the issues one of our clients, one of my clients had was we're trying to use LLMs to categorize problems and the categorization was around 70% accurate. So what we did was we used 3 LLMs and we had a voting system. Where if two LLMs agreed on a category or segmentation, then that was the segmentation assigned. And if all three disagreed, then we repeated the process. This pushed us from 70% to 90% accuracy. And this is just one workflow, right? Like you can have a workflow where you have an LLM produce a response and then the other LLM acts as a checks and balances where it sort of looks at it, sees what the output is, and then if it's something wrong, it asks the first one to repeat the process.

I want people to reach out to you because I don't want to monopolize the rest of this time. But, but yeah, feel free to make time for other people. Mustafa.

Hi everybody. My name is Mustafa, Mustafa Khan. I am the co-founder and CEO for Social Lead Generation Agency specializing in generating inbound and outbound leads for B2B businesses. And it's been 2 years in the business. And initially we started this company as a personal branding agency, then we moved towards a lead generation agency offering outbound as well. So I was listening to everybody's conversations about AI and stuff. And to be fair, for my own side, when it comes to creating content, I believe that Claude is the better option. And I'll give you a very good example of that. We actually do high-value Twitter threads. If you don't know what they are, they're basically long-form Twitter posts that we do over there. Targeted reach is like 1 million to like 450 million views that we have hit for ourselves and our clients as well. If you want to check out my work, you can definitely—

Hello.

What happened to— Okay, I lost him. Corey Lancaster, go ahead.

Hey, how's it going, everybody? Hey, I appreciate everybody's time today.

It's been—

it's been—

well, it's funny he was talking about cloud because I'm a cloud a lot of fame myself. But, you know, like with anything, you know, it's how you ask something and, you know, what the expected result that you want is really key. I have an IT security services company, CISO as a Service, similar to fractional work, but we do more services-based versus like hourly and task-based stuff. But all things IT, I just got IT certified. I actually wrote a book on IT security. So it's funny, he was going down the road I think, uh, I was going to respond to. But I'm in the DC metro area, and, um, really I'm just here to— go ahead, I'm sorry.

What's your, uh, tip or tactic? Uh, like, we got like 15 minutes left, I just want to make sure we get everybody in. What's, what's something that blew your mind? Like, man, I should have figured this out 6 months ago, or I did figure it out and it was a bad idea.

Um, with AI?

Any, any, anything to do with sales?

Well, well, I'll, I'll do quick, quick 3 things. First thing is, um, never send an invoice that's not discounted. So make sure you, you always have that retail price on there so when you discount that you can, um, you know, write that off.

You're saying, you're saying to, to put a discount on your invoices?

I don't, I don't send one invoice without a discount. Every invoice has some type of discount in it. If I agree on $150,000 for that job, I'll, I'll make— within reason, um, mark it up and discount it. Um, so that was a showstopper for me.

Um, let me stop on that. I want to see what other people think about that, because for me, I don't like to discount, because I think that then they start thinking there's a path to this. Well, let me talk you down, right?

Let me, let me, let me go backwards.

Wait, wait, let me finish. There's, there's a lot— there's a thing called transparency sales, right? And if you're gonna do— if you're gonna discount, you're gonna give to get. So if I'm gonna lower my price from $5,000 to $4,000 a month, then you're gonna sign a 12-month instead of a 6-month. It's a give to get. But if I'm just gonna willy-nilly put a, a price that is $170,000 listed, $150,000 net, then it makes me— personally, this is my opinion— makes me look like a car salesman.

Well, yeah, it depends on how you do it. I do mine the opposite way. I always negotiate my price first and we, we settle on that price. So I'm not, I'm not coming to my clients saying, hey, I'm offering you 20% discount. It's just that when they send that invoice, it's going to be the agreed price, but it'll show the discount on that. Now, granted, there's thresholds that you have to within limits. You can't just up it 100% because you feel like it. It has to be within a reasonable amount, but Um, I do it the opposite way. So for example, if I go do some work at my church, I'll go do work, but I'm going to send that invoice for my full retail price and I'm going to discount 100% because I'm doing it for my church.

Yeah.

So, yeah, so I do it backwards.

It's just a matter of who, when, what type of industry, what the price tag is. You know, if there's something— I'm a veteran, so I'm always looking for like, what do you have?

A thing. Same here.

Military discount. So yeah, they do that. But you know what? Yeah, I signed the line. I signed the contract, so I don't mind it.

But so one quick thing about the AI stuff I learned in my mastermind class is use the phrase AIM. AIM. When you ask a question, always give it an actor. Give it something. You are a top expert. You are a top marketing expert. You are a, you know, top engineer or whatever. That's the first part of your prompt. The second part of your product is I, is information. What information do you have? What information can you give it to aid the last letter? The last letter will be M, which is the mission. So I was like, act as a top marketing agent. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to get research on best way to market to my clients. I need the top 20% of, you know, blah, blah, blah in this industry. And then the mission is to give me a formalized report so I can create a campaign against these clients. So AIM, actor, information, mission. If you do that for every post, and I don't care if you've done it 3 times in a row, every time you do it, you have to repeat that. You'll get 10 times more results. And I, I, I, um, I, I compete with Claude and GPT. So I'll do it in Claude, then I'll give it to GPT, then I'll give it back to Claude and give it back. And I do it about 10 times before I get what I want.

Yeah. I, I always use, for me, when I'm writing something or talking about something. Who cares? So what? Why are you telling me this? How's this going to help me? Right, right. It's more— and then obviously the old school BANT, budget, authority, needs, and time. If you don't have the answers to budget, authority, needs, and time, and how are you gonna— how are you gonna close something? But the common sense thing for when you write something or when you ask something or when you post something, like, who cares? So what? Why are you telling me this? How's this Affect my life, right? And if it doesn't hit here and here, then you're pitching. So that's kind of, um, we got about 9 minutes left.

Thanks, Mike.

Alex, and then MP, and then Donna. Let's see if we can get through.

I just have a really quick question based on a comment. So back to the AI agent conversation from long ago. I use N8N to build my workflows. I find it to be the for a complete neophyte, the easiest whiteboard cut and paste, uh, in that I build my wireframes and my, my flows for my agents. I'm just curious if somebody else uses a different platform that they would recommend and why.

Hey Alex, I also use N8N. I started on Make.com just because that's what I started on about a year and a half ago, but I have a customer using Power Automate. Um, Yeah, they're all interchangeable. My preference, just because I've put the most hours in it, is Make. I think it's pretty flexible. But yeah, N8n is great as well.

So do you find any features, I guess it would be the right word, in one to the other, or is it just understanding the architecture of it that why you like— I started with Make and then for some reason watched a video on N8n and that's where I went.

Yeah, it's really just being comfortable with the interfaces. I would say that N8n is has a unique feature I'm sure you're aware of where you can deploy on your own private cloud. For me, as I'm deploying these agents, part of my value proposition is that it lives in your environment. It's not on my infrastructure, you're not buying my software. If they have an N8n instance and they need something in their personal public cloud, that works. If they have an enterprise subscription to Power Automate or Make, then we just build in there. That is the unique feature of N8n that I don't think anyone else has. Other than that, it's just which interface you're comfortable with. I find Make to be just super simple to use. Simple as that.

Thank you.

Let's go to MP.

MP, Michael? That me?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah. Always try to put your name on these things, so I'm like calling you MP, but yeah, go ahead.

Oh, that's fine. I think on my cell phone I have MP and my other one. Yeah, so a couple of things. One is if anybody's in the Boston area, I'm doing a session with the American Marketing Association on best practices to drive meetings, what the research says, what the customer says, and so forth. And one I've also noticed too, and you guys have probably noticed this a lot, SROs and CEOs are really pushing hard on, we want a prospect meeting, we want a customer meeting, and they're willing to pay for these. There's a lot of programs right now running on, if you take a meeting with us, we'll give you $100. And there's a lot of programs running right now on referrals and people are trying to get referrals or trying to pay for referrals. I'm wondering what you guys think about that strategy of companies just reaching out and saying, you know, if you meet our ICP, we'll give you $100. Or if you give us a referral that turns into a meeting, we'll give you $100. And the reason why a lot of these guys are doing this is because the conversion from leads is really dropping. So a lot of agencies generate leads, but the leads are not generating meetings. So companies are saying, can I go directly into a meeting? Can I go directly to get a meeting? And that's what this workshop is going to be about. But I'd love to hear what folks think about this kind of concept of pay-per-meeting.

There's a company called Quartz Meetings that does that, and I used to use them when I was at TechMate. Um, I find that if people are showing up for gifts or money, they're not necessarily who I want to meet with. But, you know, so there is sometimes it seems like it went to a good, decent meeting, so just opening the door, but it, it turns into $500 to $1,000 on average per meeting. Um, and for the way I do things is more of a retainer base. And I think there's a lot of companies that also will pay referrals, and that means that you should do all the work, brand them, and if they get it, sell something, then you get paid. That's, that's not cool either, in my opinion, because then I'm doing all the work, it's your brand. So you could control what you want to control and what you have control of, but it needs to be, it needs to be a win-win. And I, I personally, the way I do my Legion, I think you guys could, everybody else could chime in here. People either do a podcast or do a roundtable or ask someone about their opinion about a conference because they're going to a conference or they're going to think about going to conference or in their space It's much easier just to talk about what your opinion is versus paying them. I don't know, it's like, this is going to sound bad, but think about, think about in the dating world. I'll go, I'll go out if you pay me.

Yeah. Well, most of my, most of my leads come, most of my business comes from speaking at, you know, the CMO Club, American Marketing Association, DemandGen Conference. And because I bring a lot of research and insight to the table. But one, one, one thing on Another model here is that you don't pay for meetings or referrals, you pay for expertise. So you pay to interview the customer or the prospect on how they're solving the problem. And then you bring your client into that discussion. So it's a different model. It's not sales reaching out, it's research reaching out. You interview them about their process, their challenging in terms of getting the job done. And then the client gets to talk about how they can help that customer. So you drive a conversation about current process, best-in-class process, what gaps there are to competitors, and then you bring the client to that discussion.

Do they know that that vendor is going to be on that call?

They don't. A vendor is introduced as the sponsor of the study, and if the vendor doesn't oversell and really just helps the customer, it works really well. I have one client that drives their entire pipeline by this methodology. They don't do any email marketing. They don't do any SEO marketing. They just do this. And this is what drives their entire pipeline.

I don't think it's personally a bad idea. It's, it's, I think it could go the wrong way if you have somebody kind of on there that it looks like a vendor. It's kind of like the podcast roundtable approach, right? Like, let me interview you, uh, to see if this is a good fit, blah, blah, blah. And meanwhile, you're really trying to get a discovery call done. When I worked in TV production, we, uh, had a show called Chicagoland Works in Chicago, and we'd say, listen, we're having one company that does staffing on our show. Yeah, our producers need to pick you, but we need to see if this was a good fit, and we're going to air you. By the way, we'll give you a little training video on it, but it, but it does cost.

Yeah, no, I, I like that, and customers and prospects really like to be interviewed, and they really like to share their expertise. And the most important thing I'm finding right now in terms of getting meetings is if you can show that there's a competitive gap between what they're doing right now and their best-in-class competitor, they will meet with you. And if you can show that gap and visualize their process versus best-in-class process, they will actually buy from you. So this concept of demonstrating that they're not doing it well Showing them how to compare to best in class, showing them the gaps, showing them how to bridge the gaps is a great way to drive pipeline. So this process does that.

Yeah, I appreciate that. We're running out of time. I forgot to also thank James Donaldson as well as someone that's helped build this up. So I appreciate you, James. Please make sure you put your information in the chat. And James, I'm gonna basically let you close this out because, uh, we're running out of time, guys. So I appreciate— we— this thing is every two, every two, uh, two, um, weeks. I do have a CMO roundtable today that's— I'm doing for a Flowcast, um, and you're welcome to join that if you're, if you're, if you're in the if you're in a CMO space, but it's not really made for other vendors or partners or solopreneurs and stuff like that. So why don't you go ahead and close it out and then we will see each other in 2 weeks. Please feel free to reach out to other folks as well on this to help give business to each other.

Yeah, thanks, Michael. Also, just to say, first one I've joined, so this has been really good. I'm the founder of Stacky. Background's been sort of 8 years building an SDR agency. And then we started a new business called Stacky where we've mapped all the different tools and sales tech where they sort of have overlapping features, how they integrate so that teams can get away from all the tech chaos and get back to human-to-human selling.

Awesome. Thanks, James. Feel free to— James, you're doing the live calls, right? If I remember correctly. When you say live calls, You also do— we have— you have people making calls, or I forgot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So we can provide sort of fractional cover to actually, you know, if we advise your team on how to adjust their systems, we actually come in and do it in front of them as well so they know that we're not just making it up.

So yeah, please feel free to save the chat. There's 3 buttons, there's 3 buttons, uh, in the, in the chat where you could say save chat. I'm gonna post this, um, this, this video on my YouTube channel. So please feel free, there's, there's that. And there's also that there's a call at 4 or 4:30 today, um, with one of my clients that's doing a CMO roundtable. So feel free to join that. Um, that's not my roundtable, but I'm helping with that. But, um, we have like 180 people registered for that one, so that's a pretty big one. All right, um, Thank you, everybody. Sorry if I had to cut anybody off, but I just want to make sure we get to the point, um, and make sure that we get everybody to discuss. Again, I've told some folks on this thing, if, if you're gonna come on a weekly or, or monthly basis and continue to engage and, and, and use the free service, I would love for you to be kind of part of the solution. Like, no, uh, and Brad and all these other folks, and Doug, who— and Michael, who have basically said, you know what, I'm going to use my LinkedIn and help you. Because that's— that shows me that you're a giver and not just a taker as well. Because I want your, your, uh, opinions, but I also want you to help me grow this, because this is not just for me, it's for all of us. God bless. Happy New Year.

Love y'all.

Take care.

Take care, guys.

Bye.