CRO CEO Founder s Roundtable Mastermind on every 2nd and 4th Tuesday of each month at 11am EST

We're just not going to let in 2,000—

this meeting is being recorded—

AIs. We're just going to let ours in and then we'll record it and then we'll post it on, uh, um, probably my YouTube channel just so we can get some of that out to the folks that didn't get to go. Let's see another Victor on our call today.

It's rare.

Listen, we can't, we can't have more than one Victor.

It's a problem when there's more than one, man.

Yeah, Victor's very territorial. It's twice, it's twice as good. Yeah, let's see, folks in. We got some guys that helped us put this together today as far as the, uh, inviting their, um connections on LinkedIn. So I'm going to be throwing out little thank-yous at the beginning. And, uh, Joseph right here is one of those guys, so we'll, we'll kind of do a little quick intro for him as well. Um, but this roundtable is around C-level, V-level people who want to learn more from each other, want to learn more best practices. It's not 'Hey, let me know what you do and pitch.' It's, 'Hey, let me know what you do, where you live, why you joined the roundtable, and here's two things that I learned in the last six months of— it worked really well or just bombed.' And either had to do with that strategy, tactic, partnership, technology, you know, just something that we can learn from. Because if you give two, I give two, that's you know, 10, 20 different ideas, tactics, and strategies or ideas. A think tank. This is what this is, a cohort. It's not, it's not a pitch fest. Or I used to do like everybody introduce himself and let's, let's tell us what you do and why you join and tell us like a 45-second pitch. What happened there, it became 45 minutes of pitches and we didn't learn anything from anybody. Except for like what they do. And then it just became no one, no one showed up again, you know, because from doing that way. So we'll basically get this going in a couple seconds, uh, a couple seconds here. Uh, is Steve in here? Steve Furman, he said he can't get in.

I don't see Steve yet, I don't believe.

I guess let me, uh, make sure Steve gets it because he's one of our is one of our main people doing this. One second. Oh boy, having problems today with this copy and paste. One second. What a group, guys.

If you can please do us a favor, if you can put your details in the chat while we're at it. So you can kind of share with other people when— where they can contact you after the call. We get a lot of people who want to reach out after our roundtables just to see what kind of more opportunities we can gain from this.

So, you know, I'm trying to see if we're having Steve here. One second, because he's one of our hosts. Sorry about the delay here. Yeah, go ahead and put your information. Don't just put your name, put your LinkedIn, your phone number, why you joined the roundtable. That would be helpful. And that way we kind of get that whole approach there. I'm just trying to respond to the gentleman that helped me put this together, and I can't paste it. Did you send it to Steve? Victor, I'm somewhere on my computer where I can't even paste anything. I don't know what's going on. I have to restart my computer. Hey guys, it's David. How you doing, David? David, good. Welcome. Are you able to do that, uh, Victor? Working on it right now. I think I might have two Zoom links one in the bottom and one in the top here. Yeah, I have two different links in here. This is not good.

Um, you're the coolest guy on the call with those shades, man.

Thanks. I have to tell you, I have a pretty raging eye infection, so I'm covering it up with my sunglasses, not trying to look cool. No, but you do look cool. I'll take that. Thank you.

Grossing us out.

Yeah. Do we have— is this the— Victor, is this the, um, which, which link do you have to get into this thing? Because I see two of them in this invite. It's confusing me. Is it the 317?

Uh, let's The one I joined was, let's see, yeah, 317. Yeah, it's not, um, okay.

Yeah, that was weird. Sorry guys, originally don't have a— sometimes I get two, two of these Zoom links in here, but we're gonna get started here now. Um, just want to make sure Steve was here as well. So again, this is more of a cohort roundtable, talk about what's working, what's not. There's probably a good half of you that have been on this call. There's a lot of new people here because I have Joe and other folks, Stephen, that have built this whole approach today with using their LinkedIn as well. So I'll start off. We're going to talk about best practices, tips, tactics, strategies. I'm Michael Filato. Um, I'm the CEO, founder of Full Throttle Filato Leads. I live in Orlando, two kids. The reason why I built these roundtables is there's not a lot of places, especially where you're working from home, to talk about, hey, what works, what doesn't. You know, I really did something well that I want to kind of pass on that could be repeatable and scalable for someone else, or I really did something bad and I don't want to do that again. Like, back when I started doing lead gen, I was using 15 different versions for a company called Techmate. Like, Enfilado 1 at Techmate, Enfilado 2 at Techmate. I was sending out through HubSpot tons of emails based on what I was doing. I was burning the domain of, of Techmate when I was a VP of sales, which I didn't— you know, I wasn't a demand gen guy at the time. I was learning things as we go. That was 4 or 5 years ago. Since then, I basically built a whole email, LinkedIn, roundtable, top of funnel, go-to-market strategy that's repeatable and scalable and producing 40 to 50 meetings a month sometimes. So that's the way to do it. My other tip would be is when you're doing these types of things, ask people to be part of something. Don't sell them, don't pitch slap them on email, don't pitch slap them on LinkedIn. Say, hey, I'm gonna be at this conference, Are you going to this conference? Like when I went to SASTR, which is a conference in, uh, uh, San Mateo, I sent out to my 30,000 connections, 6,000 of them, are you going to SASTR? I'm going to be there. I'd love to grab a cup of coffee. 600 responses from doing that because I'm like, I don't care if you're going or not going. I don't care if I'm going or not going. It's just a way for me to kind of get in front of you and say, hey, let's bring you back up to the top of my funnel because so many people have connections on LinkedIn. And they never monetize that or use that for friendship, use that for partner network. Okay, so those are 3 things you should really look at when you're looking at LinkedIn. Join groups on LinkedIn. There's 100 groups. Every time you join a group on LinkedIn, you can send free messages to them. You get inmails. Inmails cost money, but if you're on a, if you're on a group, you can send them for free. So those are 3 to 4 tips What I would probably want you guys to do is limit it down to 1 or 2. But again, make sure it's like who you are so we get a sense of why you're calling us and what you do. But keep it— don't— please keep it concise because we have what, how many people we got today? 49. So we can't do long intros for each one, but I am going to throw out a little bit of extra time to Steve Fuhrman and Joe because they did help me. I don't know if anybody else is on here that helped me build.

Yes, Adam Rojas as well.

Adam Rojas on here too. These guys basically said, you know what, Michael, I want to help you grow this thing. Um, I have a business that aligns with your business. And so I want to introduce Steve. Um, there's a certified coach helping companies scale up. Steve, what kind of help, what kind of grabbed your attention to say, hey, let's do this, Michael?

Kind of what?

I'm sorry, what grabbed your attention with me to say like, let's do this roundtable? And why you wanted to kind of get you—

Honestly, man, I've been on LinkedIn since like inception, I think. Yeah, that long. I mean, I remember when my number was like under a million subscribers, so that's how they used to be in the URL, but I've not really ever monetized and I've not really tried. I've been giving good helpful tips and tricks and ideas and things to present myself as a thought leader, which I am in the industry because I have a lot of experience, but I've not really capitalized on it. So when I saw what you were doing and we met, I was like, oh, this is really a great way to get people together and help them. And I think the more you help other people, the more they're going to remember you and want to reciprocate that at the back end.

And this is a great thing for you guys to do as a partner program. Like, listen, hey, let's take both of our LinkedIn, put them together. Let's go do an event at a trade show. Let's do an event online. And you have some guy like me automate that or do it manually, which is not the best idea. But Steve and Michael together is way better than Steve or Michael doing this separately. Oh yeah, we put our arm around each other, go, hey, we don't compete. Even if we did compete a little bit, there's business I want to take and business he wants to take, or partnerships. Everybody has that 7 levels of separation or less now because of LinkedIn. I have over 30,000 connections, so I think Steve and I had over 2 or 300— over 200 or 3,000 of those. So, um, let's, uh, get Joe in here. Where's Joe? Joe, tell— yeah, just give us a little intro of what, what, uh, what you do and, and kind of why you kind of also did this with, with me. And what's it— what's— before, before we do that, Steve, can you give us a tip or tactic? So I want to make sure we get that. It's not just intros, but also like a tactic that you learned in the last 6 weeks, like that.

Yeah, yeah, I'm gonna give you, give you one I learned because of AI. Meet people where they want to be met at. So not everybody consumes information the same way by reading a blog. So I started adding an MP3 file, which is basically a podcast, you know, two people speaking back and forth, reading the blog. And I find a lot of people consume content audibly a lot better than they wanted to sit down and just read it. Especially sometimes blogs can, you know, be a lot of information.

Do that in email or LinkedIn? Like LinkedIn, it's very easy to do a voice note. That's, I like.

On YouTube?

No, on my website. So on my website, on my blog, under blogs, I have an MP3 file under my blog. I just posted a blog today and I just sent to my CMO the MP3 I made using AI 11 Labs, the podcast feature that it has. And it's pretty simple to do. It's pretty quick. But that's something I learned new that a lot of people are excited about listening to what I have to say instead of reading what I have to say. So meet people where they are.

Yep. That's a good idea. I mean, some people are on LinkedIn, some people are not, but if you go email, LinkedIn, and then events, you should be able to hit everybody that you want to hit because you're not just assuming that they're going to be.

Yeah.

And let me, let me, one other tip too is I, I don't just post on LinkedIn. I post on Facebook. You know, I do post on Instagram, even though I'm not a big Instagrammer. It's not really my market. I'm looking for lower mid-market. I'm a scaling up coach and AI certified, uh, chief AI officer as well. So my people are more in the LinkedIn, the business world, lower mid-market, uh, you know, $3 million to $20 million size companies.

Cool.

Joe?

Yeah, so just like who you are, what you do, and a little tip, and then We'll move it on to also Adam as well, who helped kind of build this roundtable. And then we're going to go into more tips and tactics around everybody. I'm just giving a little extra PR because these guys actually had me use their LinkedIn and my LinkedIn, and we built this together. This is not a one-man show. Go ahead, Joe.

If you let Adam Rojas talk, the meeting could be over before you know it.

Go ahead, Joe. All right.

Hey guys, Michael, thank you for the introduction. I'm never good at this. I never know exactly what to say. Been in sales enablement for forever.

I wish I had—

I just need to wash my—

I'm on a call, but I just need to wash my dishes.

Yeah.

Yep.

Sorry. But just please wash your dishes as you can. I know, right?

I was going to say something, but, you know, Let the dishes pile up every once in a while.

I know, right?

All right, I muted her. Sorry.

Go ahead.

That's all right.

No worries. If you've been in sales enablement or done anything on Zoom long enough, every one of us has seen something like that. Anyway, I'm not going to do a deep dive on myself. There's plenty out there on me. So I just want to say one thing. I'm interested in the AI aspect of what you're doing, Michael.

This is amazing.

You've got 50 people on here that are— we're all somehow connected. And if you don't think this works at the speed that he's put this together, I mean, this is amazing. It really is. And, and that's what draws me here. I'm not going to keep going on, but I am fascinated by everything that AI is and what it can be and, and just the Wild West that it is. And that's what's drawn me here, is your ability to get people here using AI, automating the process. Not perfect, but it, it's the most effective thing I've ever seen. So I'll leave it at that.

First, personally, I get 15 meetings every day, guys, because of Joe, Steve, me, because I'm doing these roundtables. And that's why I said, like, whether you do this with us or do it yourself, don't just sit there and go, I, I, I do, do this, this, this, this. It's, it's going to be way better to say, hey, let's get together at an event, talk to each other, put together your own roundtables. I can help you, or you can help yourself. I, you know, I— the whole idea is like, it is hard to get 50 people here. And if you look at some of these other ones like Alignable, which is a great business, but I don't want— I'm not ripping on life coaches or, or insurance sales or CPAs. But those are localized businesses of smaller companies. For me, I want to talk to people that have a company that is actually B2B and talking to someone, you know, small, medium, and large, not just a local business, because that's a different approach, you know, for what I'm looking for. But you guys can build your own cohort roundtable around your, your ICP or, or your persona. So Just keeping that in mind, it's a good way of just saying that, or podcasts. But I look at podcasts, if you don't have an audience, then you're just doing a conversation. So that's kind of a discovery call versus a podcast. So Adam, go ahead. Thanks so much, Michael.

So Adam Rojas with Bellmore Consulting. So I help founder-led companies who think they have a sales problem, but they actually have a sales process problem. So I pick up kind of where Michael leaves off. Say you can generate all the leads in the world that you want, but if you can't take them from the front door to the cash register, they really aren't anything more than just a lead. And so that's kind of who I work with. And so the, the idea of partnering with somebody like Michael is fantastic because we really do complement what each other does. And, uh, Joseph, you know, you, I think, help then with all of the tools and tricks and backend stuff. So it's a great little synergy we've got going on here.

So Adam, what's— this is the theme of the whole thing too, is what, um, something you learned in the last 6 weeks, like you saw a company that did A, and let's learn from that, you didn't, shouldn't do that, or B, they did something really awesome, or you did, and it turned into something that was gold because we don't, like, I'm a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, which means I did this for a long time and I've gotten tapped, beat up, and learned the whole thing. So same thing with sales, like you lose, you learn. So whether you win or lose, I need life learnings from each of you guys that we call on. I'm not gonna be able to call on everybody, but I need a life lesson of something that worked or didn't work.

Yeah, so I've got a client I've been working with for a few months now. They're a SaaS company and they would chase every single opportunity no matter what. And one of the things we built was a really solid qualification/disqualification process. So disqualifying an opportunity that really isn't a good fit for you early on in the process saves you a lot of time and energy rather than chasing a sale that's never going to happen.

Yeah, spend, spend your time efficiently. Um, I've done that even with some going after some people to do roundtables with that are not the right fit for who I'm going after, and I'm having these discovery calls with them. I'm like, why did I do this? You know, so to be busy is not always the— is the best approach.

You want to obviously say be intentional. I mean, Michael, you put this together intentionally. Yeah, you know, when we met at another networking group, we talked about doing it It was 100% planned out. Here's what we're going to do. Here's how we're going to do it. Here's what the result we expect to get. And, you know, it's not a salesy thing. We're not here to sell you guys on anything. It's, you know, to show you what is possible. And yeah, you know, I think it's fair. We're all out to grow our business, right? But at the same time, wouldn't it be nice to grow and scale your company and also be able to help people at the same time? I mean, to me, it's a win-win for everybody.

I mean, people charge for this stuff, right? They say like, you want to join the roundtable, it's $100 a month. You know, there's a, there's a pillar company, there's 100 cups of coffee, whatever it is. Some of them charge, some of them don't. You got to figure out what are you going to get either the most referrals or introductions to, and then how's it going to turn into money, and does it cost you money? For me, it's like, hopefully down the road I'll get an intro, or someone's gonna say, you know, Mike, I like what you did, let's work together. That's the same thing for everybody here, is put your information in chat, connect with people. And I've heard people like, hey, I just started working with Steve, I'm helping him fund his company, and I made a million dollars off that because I got equity. I say, hey, well, where's my cut? But no, you know, it's like, it's not my, it's not my place to kind of sit there and go, I want to charge people. So, um, Anybody have questions for Steve, Adam, me, or Joe about what we do and why we were doing this?

I was just going to comment that your ears look great for a black belt. They're a little bit cauliflower. I got a white belt, so yeah, maybe.

Just so you know, everybody that's on here, come off camera. This is, this is not a place to just listen. And if you want to be part of this, please come on camera.

I don't look—

Paul Dagle has something to say. I don't look too great, but, uh, all right, there we go, there we go.

You have a face for radio. You could still come. There's nothing I can say back to a black belt in jiu-jitsu, by the way. That's right. Good, good, good, good. Yeah. I don't want to follow. I'm watching, uh, Nathan Gard crackle here. So Nathan, give us two— tell us what you really do quick, and then what, what can we learn from you?

And then Paul Dagle will go after.

All right, okay.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, I think, uh, what you guys had mentioned, um, we are a talent— we do, uh, two things. One, uh, help companies hire the best people with our search capabilities, and then we have a software we built over COVID because I was in the assessment industry for 20+ years and that was a very complicated, cumbersome process to get objective data for people to make the best people decisions within their employee ecosystem. And we thought we could build something better to fill those gap areas from what my company was selling plus our competitors. So, we put that into the market about 10 months ago. So, after beta testing and validating.

So—

What did you learn? A life lesson for us? Sure, a life lesson would be in that process, or just personally, it's like whatever, like we're founders, CROs, CEOs, what can you tell us that's going to help us, you know, either go ahead or not do the same thing that was bad?

Yeah, I think the biggest thing I learned is utilize AI nowadays. I guess I was kind of hesitant just because I'd heard about it and I'd known about it and I was, I have a background in sales versus tech, but I've always for the last 20 years sold technologies. And as you probably, or at least I heard somebody say, this is how you put this group together and you got 50 people on here, probably creating it through an AI of what you do and how it could benefit founders and business owners. And it puts together a great message and it fine-tunes it and you can tighten it and get your messaging across. So, for me, that was a life lesson I learned is to, even though ironically I was in technology, to utilize AI and how can I help my customers best and zero in on the buyers for them not to be a lead, but to actually help them in their business and how their employees can help drive that business and that there's actually cost there that within the employment ecosystem. So there's a life lesson most recently to lean in on the AI and, and helping that messaging.

Yeah, on the AI side, there's a, there's 4 or 5 major platforms.

You could even—

Victor's been really— Victor is my client success VP. He basically, basically had a relationship with ChatGPT. I think if they're It's going steady, but it's basically he talked to it like a relationship. Like, what can I do, honey?

Yep.

How can you, how can you help me?

That's right. But it's not just that. Like, I am, I work for this company that does lead gen. I'm trying to help a company that does HR benefits. Um, I need a compassionate verbal way to explain what they do and, and send out a 3-level email campaign. Uh, she has a background of this. I mean, you gotta like really— or you can even talk to— I started talking to ChatGPT. She goes, well, that sounds like a great idea. Like, like she's talking with inflection in her voice. Like, what the hell? Um, so think about— you can even talk to like a, like an AI boyfriend or girlfriend, but it's going to give you back exactly what you asked for if you ask for it like someone that doesn't— has no clue of what you're trying to do.

Have a conversation with it, and just like with anybody else, if you think it's full of crap, say, you know what, that doesn't really sound right, maybe you should rethink that. And you'd be surprised how you'll catch it if you pay attention sometimes, because it only knows what it knows, so it'll hallucinate sometimes.

So just be aware. You could tell if the pull from something— you could upload documents. If it repeats back to you like, so Michael, you want this? Yes, yes, go ahead. Don't let her repeat back, you know, 20 verbiages you just asked her to say. Yes.

Go ahead.

We'll go to Paul because Steve wanted to go to Paul. Then we'll go to Seth Rubin.

Great. Well, thank you. Two things real quick. Michael, how do you, how do you send out 600 messages to your LinkedIn first-level connections, letting them know about a speaking opportunity or in a convention that you're going to? So I said, I can stop you at 5, at so many a day, or our tools that we use.

The tools I use for LinkedIn, um, and I either do this for people or, or I tell— I give them a consultancy to actually help them do it. It's about 150 activities a day. But if I have me, Steve, um, Steve Loftus, Steve Fuhrman, Michael Filato, Victor, I could send out 150 per day per person.

Okay, no problem. Uh, second thing real quick is I've been spending quite a bit of money on Google SEO. And now Google SEO has changed everything. You know, it used to be that it used to go off the GMB, but now Google is really emphasizing their AI engine rather. And eventually, rather than the single line that you see for Google search, it's going to be the Google AI engine.

And that's going to be all they're all doing. It's like instead of going to Google, it's saying, This is an AI result, and then below it is the listing. So you're gonna, you're gonna have to start getting really good at why you're gonna be showing up in the AI, uh, in the AI, uh, response versus the personal.

And that's exactly my point, you know, because SEO, they've been saying it's gonna be dead. And, and, and it's really, it's really close to dead.

People just go to search engines. They don't go to search engines anymore. They go to Perplexity or Plex.it is another way to get there. They'll go to chat, they'll go to Claude, and they'll ask basically the same thing a search engine would have given you. You're now getting without the ads, but you can get with Perplexity the source of where it came from. So you can validate that data. If you're looking for advertisement, you know, I don't know what to tell you about Google anymore because I haven't used Google in I can't tell you how long.

Yeah, I, I, that's what I do one to one. If I know I want to go after Steve and now Steve's partnering with me. And now we're doing this.

That's a good—

that's a one-to-one, right? If I do—

well, ChatGPT and the others too also provide the sources. They, they have to. Yeah, there's always—

yeah, they are now. Now they are. But Perplexity was the first one to come out with it, and now they're all doing it, of course.

Well, yeah, to prevent a lawsuit, naturally.

Yeah.

I want to, uh, I see Steve came on here. Lufness. Steve's another partner of this conference today. That we used his LinkedIn and we basically introduced a lot of— introduction of a lot of his people. Steve, um, what's— tell me a little bit why you joined the roundtable, why you want to do it. But the biggest thing is, what did you learn in the last 6 months of something you should do or shouldn't do that could be tech-based, services-based, partner-based, whatever? Just help us not do something wrong or help us Engage is something that you did that worked really well.

It, it is kind of twofold. One is the, yeah, I look at companies that I'm helping and I ask about their standard operating procedures because there's too much of this SOS going on, shiny object syndrome. And if you don't have your standard operating procedures ducks in a row, you're, it's just gonna add chaos. So we all look for the silver bullet. And if you go straight to that, so what's going to happen is you're going to automate chaos is the term I would use. By the way, Michael, I'm also a black belt, but I'm a black belt in Six Sigma. You kick my butt, that's for sure. But getting back to this, if you don't have those SOPs around people, process, technology, data, and even management, you're just going to automate chaos. So that's what I've been seeing. And I see some of the companies I'm working with their data is not in order to do anything with AI. So that's one of the biggest lessons.

You just described like half my work. Yeah, that's—

I just wanted to thank Steve also. Hey, what, Michael?

I want to jump in on that though.

What do you—

can you describe a little bit more about—

just raise your hand on the chat so we can kind of make sure, but go ahead.

Sorry, I didn't mean to hijack, but I'm just curious a little bit more about What do you mean by their, their data isn't in shape or whatever phrase you used?

Their data house is not in order. Part of it is they don't. So I look at things from the go-to-market perspective and you've got silos of data. You might have your marketing stack has some level of data and then you might have some, if you even capture it in the CRM, you might have some of the sales data. I kid you not, I was working with a company and one of the sales reps I was with, he was tracking everything in a paper notebook and I said, well, what He opened the trunk and in the trunk was a box with paper notebooks, right? So I'm saying there's a lot of data that is not being captured anywhere. And what can you do then? You have sales reps running around, they're not tracking data in a CRM, or you have the disparate systems that are not integrated. So it's one of the basic things that I would try to help a company do is try to get those together. And it all starts with what is the dashboard you need and what's the data to feed that. That's where I usually start.

Gaps and normalization issues all day.

Hey guys, make sure we kind of do the hand raise because otherwise it's going to get— Steve, it's one of those things back at look at the company. If it's not in your CRM, it didn't happen. You know what? I have my own company and everything goes into to HubSpot, but I don't have to worry about someone yelling at me now. But yeah, but if you're going to have a company with more than a couple salespeople, it's— you got to document stuff because you can't assume that someone's going to be around the whole time and then you're lost. Dan Ricks was the one next that had his hand raised. Then we'll go to Rajiv and then AJ.

Yeah, I just wanted to say a big thank you, Michael, to you and Victor and those who all put this on. I'm now seeing a person on my screen, Steve Loftness, that I haven't seen since 2006.

Oh, we hit him.

So Steve, good to see you again. We— he mentioned black belt in Six Sigma.

Me too.

We both worked together at CheckFree Fiserv back in the day, big global financial services firm. And it's great to see you, Steve.

Six Sigma is a methodology. I know I've heard this over the last 30 years of my life, but can you Give us a 10-second version of what a Six Sigma is.

Well, the methodology is DMAIC: define, measure, analyze, improve, control. It's just a circular methodology for continuing to define a problem within your organization, measure that problem, analyze how to fix it, make those improvements, and then control that, and then circle around it. I think it started, Steve, if I'm right, by General Electric back in the day.

Is it still pretty relevant? What's the—

I think it is.

I mean, I'm an IT guy, but even in even in the implementation of technology and process improvement, I'm always looking for ways to help companies as Steve is.

Drew William Deming was the guy.

In Japan.

Yep.

In Japan. My grandfather worked with him while he was— so like my grandfather was setting up the whole Japanese banking system after World War II, and he was working with Deming to actually create all the manufacturing protocols.

We would need you to raise your hand. Okay, buddy. Rajiv.

Awesome. Thank you for putting this together, Michael, and for all of your collaborators. I'd love to be a future collaborator. Just saying, Michael.

The—

so as far as, you know, to— and also thank you for sending out the calendar invite with the Eventbrite, with the Zoom link, because the Eventbrite, I just like couldn't find the Zoom link. So thank you for—

yeah, I figured out how to find it. Eventbrite is very confusing. But the Google Calendar is a mess to do a series. So yeah, I'll try to do— be better at that. But I, I went into a hell of trying to do a series on Google, and then everybody's like, take me off this list. I'm like, this is not what I want as an email guide.

I know, I know, that's annoying.

That's annoying.

Yeah, but, but real quick, just to kind of like contribute to, uh, the question raised earlier. So what I found is, and is that if If AI likes you, Google likes you. So essentially, like, in fact, this is what we are finding with clients. If when we're getting AI to recommend clients for certain things, they're immediately showing up as number one on Google page one, oftentimes dislodging.gov websites as well as other super high domain authority websites as well. So I would just kind of like urge everyone to focus your attention on getting AI to be your BFF and for it to see your content as such, because that is going to help you to soar up. And obviously when things shift to an AI search only interface, as we're beginning to see now, because the trends tell us that LLMs are going to overtake Google in 2026. Some predict that as early 2026, like April 2026. Some predict even September 2026. But the point is it's going to be in 2026. That is just next year. So it's literally around the corner on that front. And yeah, so if anyone needs any help with, you know, getting AI to like your content, let me know, because that's something that we've begun to do very successfully.

And I'd also like to throw out to I've known RG for a while. Like, there's a lot of bad actors, um, that will try to ruin you. And it's a little bit more probably in like when you're locally and someone doesn't like what the food you're doing. But there's obviously people that can write stuff about you, and he helps clear that stuff up. Um, and I think there's a, a path for people that need to get people that are trying to be a little bit negative about them for no reason. So I had that Someone wrote like he spams people and it wasn't someone I ever worked with. The Google took it off for me when I asked them, was this Google review? But I mean, people try to be little bullies behind keyboards.

Yeah.

So that's what he does as well. But AJ, go ahead.

I just want to build on that. So I'm again, just a quick intro. AJ Bham, CEO and co-founder of Varo. My company makes video content searchable and useful for brands and retailers. So we provide e-commerce tools with video site search and then shopping experiences. So we're building agents and copilots for commerce. And what I wanted to share with you, I just put a link in the chat. So just to build on what was just said about LLMs and SEO. So this is a great article. It's a very in-depth, read about how LLM is going to transform SEO. And we're actually now building— so we do video. And as you can imagine, in the shopping world with Gen Z starting and ending their shopping experiences, video is a big play. And it's a big play now with LLMs as well. So we're actually building now what we're calling it GEO. So generative engine optimization. So the word SEO is now leading into GEO. So just wanted to share that article.

What is— sorry, what does GEO stand for?

Generative Engine Optimization. So it really ties to LLMs, right? Which are all based on generative AI.

The new SEO, basically.

Yeah. So this article is a very in-depth read and we're literally building this for our customers. So when a shopper is saying, hey, show me the top 10 Nike shoes We want to be able to surface video reviews on top of the page. So we work with— we just landed contracts with Walgreens, AutoZone, and most recently even TikTok Shop is using us to capture and leverage video reviews for 500,000 merchants. So this is a huge play and we're actually gearing up our own platform and video content is going to be huge because video increases brand trust. So just wanted to put that out there for reading. It's a great 40-page article when you get time or you're on a long flight, or if it's a good read, just FYI.

Thank you, Steve. Go ahead, Steve.

On that, uh, GPT-5, supposedly the architecture of that one is actually not going to recreate the search wheel, so it is actually going to go back to search using Google, etc. So SEO isn't quite dead.

Anybody else have any feedback there real quick?

My SEO has been going downhill lately. I was doing really well about a month ago, but it's been going downhill ever since because I think of the GEO as AJ has, has, has said.

And have you, have you done about Google AdWords? Does anyone have any background there? Then let Greg go. All right, Greg, go ahead.

One of the things that we discovered as far back as 2013 is that when you added video to a piece of content, you not only increase the likelihood that people would read the content, you also increased the percentage that would then go on and become leads. We've leveraged that lately because it turns out in Google, you know, AI overviews, one of the three sources that pop up is YouTube, the other two being YouTube, Wikipedia, and Reddit, but those tend to be the sources of content that AI overviews will feature more often than not versus content from other places. So again, to the extent that you can create video that answers a question or provides the most interesting answer in a certain area or category or topic, you know, you are leveraging what seems to still be working 12 years later.

Anybody else? Chris Field.

Hey, I just wanted to— can everybody hear me?

First off, yep, yep.

I raised my hand because I wanted to give my input before I introduce myself and bring up my tip or whatever. It could shift the topic. I wanted to make sure that everybody has given their input because this AI conversation is incredibly important in the landscape that we're in right now today. So I didn't want to derail the AI, but if I can do my intro and give my tip or tactic that I've learned. It's a different pathway and it's going to shift the conversation to a different thing because I think it's insightful and people are going to respond to it.

Oh, good.

Okay. My name is Chris Field. I'm a marketing consultant and a fractional CMO, and I specialize in brand strategy and go-to-market planning for my clients. And one of the things that I've seen heavily not just the past 6 weeks, but over the past 6 months to a year, that's going on right now is a severe cultural shift in how we go about marketing and doing, creating, you know, revenue streams through awareness and interest. Because I specialize, my kind of micro specialization is content marketing and thought leadership. And one of the things that I've seen is very effective right now is leaning into the cultural business shifts of what are the trending concerns that people are having right now. And if you think about bringing revenue to a company and converting leads, you're not selling to automation and companies, you're selling to people. So the people, human communications, the stakeholders, when you convert your leads and your prospects, the stakeholders' concerns are really about how they're going to be a contributor to their company. So something that I found is very effective is actually leaning into the negativity right now about job security and the fear that people are having because of the economy, because of changing different business practices, because of different political things that are going on in our country right now. A lot of people are worried about how they're going to be secure in their job. So when you're selling, when I work with my clients about creating content and thought leadership, instead of needs and speeds and differentiation and how you're best in this market, I have been finding a lot of success in leaning into generating a lot of content to convert leads that's around ease of use and solving pain points and how our product or our service can make you not only a contributor, but in a leadership role, be a critical contributor to your company and become a champion there to really secure that you're bringing in what's solving the pain point to your company so that not only are you converting leads and bringing in revenue, but our product by selling into you or our service by selling into you is going to make you a champion and really solidify your role at your company. This has become successful in the stakeholders and we're making a lot of sales this way by pinging on this human concern. Does that all make sense?

Yep. Victor, why don't you give your two cents and what you've learned in the last two weeks, three weeks?

Oh, man. My, my stuff has more along the lines, and this will take off the subject of AI and just some of the items we've been speaking of, mostly the email domains, mailing mailboxes and deliverability, which has been pretty hectic out there. If you've had any experience trying to land your emails into inboxes and not into spam or let them bounce, there's certainly different tools out there like Mailforge who are pretty good that I've noticed. You know, if you learn to warm those up through Apollo or any other apparatus like that, you'll do pretty, pretty good. You know, trust the process. It's gonna be like a good month before you can launch out large amounts of emails, or larger amounts, I should say. But never rely on just sending from one domain, one mailbox. That's basically what I've learned in the past couple weeks, that it's a patience game, really.

And touches, I used to do 7 touches, man. Now it's 15, 18 touches, and at different points, you know, LinkedIn, Facebook, email. Instagram, social media. You got to kind of hit people at different angles.

I would definitely recommend, especially on LinkedIn, don't touch them more than 2 times, 3 times.

Yeah, just a few times.

You get annoying, you will get banned. You will get your likes, you will get annoyed, you annoy, you get your people to unfollow you, unconnect with you. Should be something, hey, I want to connect with you. Hey, I'm going to be at an event. I want to invite you to event. And then third thing should be, hey, just checking in. Are you going to go to that event or did you register? That's the three things we do every time for our clients. You go into, hey, just bring this back to the top of your mailbox. Hope you're doing well. Don't do that. You're going to ruin your email or LinkedIn that way. Don't, don't assume like that your business is so important that you're bringing it back to their inbox. Um, there's a lot of message— hope this email finds you well— that's AI-driven. Think about if you get an email or LinkedIn or roundtable or any type of event or any type of message and go, would this irritate me? Is this, is this spam? And then you'll basically say, you know what, maybe I shouldn't do that. You can always run it by Michael and Victor and go, you know, we're copyright experts as far as getting people to book a meeting or book book a roundtable or be engaged. Anytime it looks AI-generated or you're talking about, we help companies reduce their, their revenue, um, churn by 50%, we've done this for A, B, and C, would love to have a call with you— that's a sales, that's a sales marketing email. It's gonna, it's gonna get in spam. Your domain's gonna get bumped from that, and then you're also— your LinkedIn reputation or your LinkedIn profile could get temporarily hosed for that. So make it about them.

Adam, I, I think that's a, that's a, it's a great conversation. And one of the ones I see so many small businesses struggle with is what's the, what's the necessary, uh, contact method, contact ratio for me to get in front of my prospects? Um, oftentimes it's like, well, I've sent them 2 messages and they're not interested, so you know, that's the end of the ballgame. And that works if you're selling a $5 item. But if you're selling a high-ticket item, you've got to have a solid contact strategy that hits them in a variety of modalities— email, LinkedIn, pick up the phone and call them. Hell, I even have some clients who use snail mail because we get so few things of quality in snail mail that, you know, if you actually get something that's halfway decent, it entices you to react. And the other thing I would say to that is the larger the ticket item or the larger the company you're going after, the more number of touchpoints you've got to hit before you get in front of somebody. I think those are— it's a great discussion and it's one that so many people just don't they don't have the ability to, to have a solid strategy around what that looks like.

Think about when you get a message. Does this annoy you? Is it too much? Is it too much about them? Is it something that's going to help? It's like, it's— use that common sense of, I got no idea who I am, would I like this message? Okay, that's one thing. But just because you do or don't like this message— I'm going to contradict myself. Doesn't mean that someone else won't. But if you make it like, hey, I want to meet you at an event, I saw you speaking at an event, I saw that you attended an event on the— like LinkedIn has a lot of LinkedIn events— or I want to invite you to a podcast or roundtable, that's more about them. I really find the whole thing of intent data, signal data, is people that are active, not necessarily intent data that you get, you buy. That's all it does to tell you, you know, Hewlett-Packard's interested in social marketing.

Who?

That doesn't tell me who it is. Diana, we've got about 9 minutes too, so just be like—

Thanks for letting me jump on here. My name is Diana Trepto. I am a CEO, blogger, enterprise architect, also paralegal background, and just kind of jumping in on the conversation with different clients that I've worked on. Regarding SEO, until it's absolutely dead, it's still not dead. And one of the things that I find a lot of businesses underutilize, even businesses that don't have physical places of business, is they're not using Google, their Google Business Profiles real well. That actually is technically a search engine that if you keep creating kind of updates that kind of let people in your area know what you're about, what you're doing, what's going on, that actually can help with the SEO. It's very much underutilized. The other thing too is to help also with AI plus SEO is very few businesses actually jump into the deep end of creating blogs within their site. That is, video is very important. I love that that was discussed, but it is so important to actually utilize and kind of create kind of a cadence of some sort with your blogging to help with the SEO as well as with the AI generation because it's going to pick up on that and then There was a few other things, but I appreciate you letting me come in today.

How is it like if I do a video post either on LinkedIn or on YouTube, is it picking up the transcript and using that for SEO or any other type of?

So with SEO with YouTube, it's actually so since YouTube got bought out by Google, the transcript, as long as you're clicking into I'm trying to think of the button. I apologize. It's been a while since I've uploaded in there. There is a button that says to confirm or allow for the caption. That is kind of reading into the Google, but all of it is data. All of it is getting digitized in regards to the words that are coming out. So there is a read that's happening within Google and also creating clear messaging in your titles is huge to help it pick up as well. And then the messaging that occurs, if you can get friends and stuff to comment on the video, all of that actually helps. Getting noticed in regards to picking the video up within SEO. It's like you want to, like some of the different other people that are in this space that I've been listening to and following, they actually will kind of create like, it's weird, but it helps them get attracted. So they'll like own 5 different domains and they'll actually use the different domains and the different companies with the employees they might have under there to comment within others to help with the general, the generation within the SEO to get found. And it works like primo, and it always funnels back to one of their 5. It doesn't matter who gets—

yeah, if you want to, if you want to also increase your outreach on LinkedIn, use your sister, daughter, mother, cousin who doesn't work in your space and doesn't need it. Maybe she works at Disney or whatever, like here. And I use their LinkedIn profile, so I have 10 different profiles of people that are marketing managers for me, but I'm using their LinkedIn and they're real people. So it's not against the terms of service of basically they're fake people. So that's a, that's a little trick. Uh, Jenny.

Thank you.

And I'll keep it brief and change it up just a little bit from the conversation. I'm Jenny Arake. I'm the founder and CEO of iRise Careers. I was referred today by Adam Rojas, my fellow GHCC friend. Thank you. Uh, my business is an HR consulting and career services expert firm. We work with individuals, businesses, schools, and communities. And the one thing I've learned over the last few weeks is as much as AI is necessary to win these days, it's also really important to stand out to the human component of things in business, especially with sales. So in the people business, it's a bit different than what I've heard some of you all speak about today. And in the people business, people buy from people that they like. So yes, I use AI in all of my outreach efforts. Yes, I use AI in a lot of what I'm doing every day. I do I literally talk to my ChatGPT every day as if it's a partner, but it's really humanizing things as well. So on the business side, I've implemented AI ATSs that are now in the news for filtering out people due to ageism. So helping companies understand how to implement AI smart in their companies to help them hire the best people. And then on the individual side, helping them beat the bots. So to speak, so using AI to help them have a competitive advantage, but also making sure that they stand out as a human and don't look like everybody else on paper.

Thanks, Jenny. Austin.

I'm from Scotland, so I've been really interested to listen to a lot of this because we're seeing over from the pond. Two things I would just like to add in AI, go listen to the Diaries of a CEO, Stephen Bartlett and Simon Sinek, and he'll tell you about the humanity we're all looking, craving for around this. Second point, as of this week, I've had 700 emails come into my spam filter. You guys got to get much, much more building that audience and give us some reason to respond to you because I'm in the AI and IT industry and all I want to do is strip that mail out. So you really got to do a better job of making sure it's relevant to us because the volume is just killing us.

Intentional. That's what I keep saying. I say AI with intent and email marketing and An outreach with intent.

Yeah, go listen, go listen to that one about the, the Stephen Sinek one. It's a huge thing. Jenny, go listen to that. It's got so much about why we buy from people. We love, we love the inconsistency of people who make mistakes, who, who, how we rectify things. That is why we're going to not defeat AI, but we're going to make ourselves clearer that we're, we're still relevant.

And that's— and that, to be honest with you, not to Steve's and other Steve and, and, and Joseph and, and all the people that help me do this—

when you're at—

when you're giving something away that provides value, this is valuable to everybody. We're not charging for it. Do this for people in your space, whether you use me or not, or, or just do it. Let's go out to have a lunch each month. Build a little community, because the community is going to be not about you selling, it's going to be you about helping each other. But make sure that community has the right people in it, because I've gone to these like breakfast things and it's like, I don't sell to B2C companies, I don't want to go to these events. So I create my own event of people I want to talk to. Then I enlist Steve and Steve and Joe and everybody else, you know, like let's get them part of this. And Chad, and so anyways, let's get to, uh, Lion, and then we gotta, we gotta jump. Yeah, so Lion 5 PCA Academy, the only thing I want to say, because people is the biggest thing, is always remember that it's lonely at the top.

The top, it's lonelier at the laptop. So grab someone in the community, do some live lives and collaborate together.

You're just so you know, you're Your video behind me, which is awesome of me, uh, it's slowing down your computer massively and, and you're, and you're echoing. So, um, you might want to see what's going on there with your bandwidth. It's acting crazy. But like, we heard what you said and thank you. That's—

I like this.

It's lonely at the top, especially the laptop. Guys, we should use that one. I know Rajiv loves that one, right, Rajiv? Yeah.

So yeah, guys, save the chat.

We're going to post this on, uh, on YouTube in the next couple days here, and you can watch it there and pass along. This event, this roundtable, is meant for all your friends to come that are CEOs, CEOs, CMOs, COOs. It's really for executives, this particular one. Um, does not have to be— obviously we don't have Fortune 500 companies on here, but they're welcome. But it's really more, hey, SMBs, light enterprise, enterprise companies for trade tips, tactics, and strategy. I talked to someone that has 3,000 reports to him at Google last week from doing this, and he's going to be hanging his own shingle at one point. And, and this is, you know, it was a great thing, but you never know who's going to help you and where they're at in life and that they're going to— if there's a way for you to help them get their life started. Even though they've got a great resume. There's ways to give to get or pay it forward, you know. And the perfect example is that is Adam, Steve, and Steve on here, and, and Joe, you know. We did this, I helped them out, they helped me out, and maybe at one point there's ways for us to refer business, you know. There wasn't a transaction money-wise today, but there's ways for us to help each other, guys. And so Peace out, love and help, and, uh, be safe out there, okay?

Thank you all for coming.

Thanks, guys.