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

Oh, good morning.

Good morning. This meeting is being recorded. Adam, how you doing?

Good, Michael.

How are you?

Good.

Hello, Tammy.

Welcome.

Hello, Carla.

Your, um, your background's reversed. Oh, you got— you gotta— you gotta reverse it for you, then it's right for us.

Thing is, is I do— I do do that, and it still comes through. But do you know what? I really appreciate that you told me, because I've sat through some, and people haven't told me, so Let me go off and sort that.

Let's see, just letting folks in and we'll get started here. There's some note takers coming in, uh, Victor, for sure. But let— they're coming in. Someone's called the homie. Should we let the homie into this round table? Who is this? The homie. I want to know who's the homie. Let's see who the homie is. So, homie the clown. Let's see how many people actually know what that is. Announce yourself, homie. Homie, don't play that. Yeah, homie, don't play that. Where's homie? Does he have his camera on?

Or she?

Could be a she, right?

How are we doing?

Does not have the camera. No, homie, you gotta come off camera. We gotta know who you are. We can't have you in here. Homie chanting.

It could just be a note taker.

Let's see, let's see. I guess they weren't in here. There's, there's two homies now. There's two homies. Okay, I think we got almost everybody. Yeah, we're getting there. We are getting it. So while we're getting ready here, we're going to start in a couple minutes. I want to throw out a couple thank-yous. Dr. Amir is one of our special guests that helped build the roundtable for today. What I mean by that is that there's some folks on here that will use their LinkedIn with my LinkedIn and other people's LinkedIn. And then this is why this particular roundtable has been growing like crazy, is that we kind of help bring new people that haven't met other people before, and it just multiplies. So, Dr. Amir, tell us a little bit. Why you decided to do this with me, and then just a little bit about yourself, just so everybody knows that we're not doing, like, intros and pitches or anything like that. But if I do call on you, please raise your hand on the Zoom and then just say, hey, I'm Michael, I do this. And what we want to do is kind of say 2 things or 1 thing that you learned over the last 6 months. Either from doing it right or doing it wrong, or something that you're trying to figure out. Like, I'm trying to figure out how to find a tool that does this, or I'm trying to get around this one situation that's a problem that I don't know how to do. So this is a sounding board. This is what this is. It's not a presentation or, or slide deck or any of that stuff. This is really meant to kind of help you guys give each other business or learn. So, also put your information in chat since we're not doing, like, pitches, but you can kind of tell us why you're here in the chat. And so people can reach out to you one-on-one as well. So, LinkedIn, phone number, email address, why you came to the roundtable in the chat, please. So, Dr. Amir, why don't you tell us a little bit about what you do and then, and then why you kind of thought this was a good idea to do this with me.

Yeah, first of all, thank you. And everybody say good morning. I said good evening because I live in Israel. Now it's evening time, so it's great. And I see that most of you are sitting with a sweatshirt of something hot while I sit with a t-shirt because it is very hot here. So you're more than welcome to come visit Israel and to be with the beautiful sunny days and not freezing in the cold of Boston, for example. I'm here in this roundtable because I saw your first time, my first meeting, my first event that was with you, I was very impressed by the way the structure and the purpose, the open discussion, the free to chat, a change of ideas, change of subject. That's something that caught my mind. And because I thought it's a great idea, I said, okay, how can I contribute to you? I open up my LinkedIn and spread it around to all my connection. What I do is that I work with, especially with tech companies, to help them escape commoditization and win through trust, fair price, and measurable growth. And that's my purpose, and that's the way that I do it with my unique business methodology.

Thanks, Dr. Amer. Appreciate you. Carla, I know Carla helped me as well. Carla, why don't you just kind of give a quick hello, why you did this, and then something you're trying to figure out or something that you learned in the last, you know, 2 months, 3 months.

Okay, sure. Yes. So I'm Carla from the UK. So yes, I'll let Michael go into my LinkedIn as well. And I learned a lot from that, actually, I learned, because I know there's a lot of contacts in there that we do target, we do talk to and things like that. But there is quite a few people on there probably that I can't— I don't speak to directly. But I would say that the feedback I got was really good and it actually enabled quite a lot of conversation. So that was a new eye-opener for me because we don't particularly do that in the UK unless it's, you know, you've just got somebody a bit younger in sales absolutely spamming for the sake of it because it was a bit more targeted. I found that it worked really well. So I'm a sales consultant and I do fractional sales director work. I've been building sales teams for a long time and the one thing I found quite recently that has been working for me in my business is actually just getting out and meeting people, going back to the old school of networking, shaking hands, talking to people, because I like the human side anyway. I prefer to speak to people in a room. I know I'm on a Zoom call with you now and I'm loving talking to you, but I was in a room with you, I'd be a lot happier.

Um, how about Michael? Michael Hoard? He's also, uh, one of— we have a lot of people helping this, this, this, this particular one. But, um, Michael, why don't you kind of do a brief, brief, and then we'll get Joe and Mitchell in here as well.

Yes, I, I'm here primarily because I reached out to Michael because he has the best name in the world, and I said I got to talk to Michael and see what it's all about. And then, uh, I jumped on the last call and really loved the conversation, and so said this is something I want to be part of. So I've been working with Michael to get as many people on these calls as possible because they really— a lot of benefit, a lot of different topics, a lot of different things you can learn and just kind of take home from this. You know, that's what did it for me. But something I learned, much like what Carlos said, is, you know, getting back out there. And there's nothing like shaking hands and just making introductions and talking to people. As much as you possibly can about what you do, you know, and you got to kind of get used to back to— and I got away from that for a while, but getting back into that kind of lit a fire back under me. And it's really exciting to get back into doing all this fractional work and meeting people that are doing some really cool things around the world, especially in this new AI world we live in. So I'm excited to be here.

Any particular AI tool or problem that you figured out or couldn't figure out that you want to bounce off the bounce off the group here.

So learn how to write prompts well.

I'll just leave it at that.

It doesn't matter what tool you're using. If you know how to write prompts correctly, you can do so much more than what you know is possible with anything from a ChatGPT to a DeepL to, um, I mean, you name it, you know, whatever, all the tools that are out there. But what I'm finding is the better you can write prompts, the more you can get the tools to do what you want and get it done well. So it saves you a lot of time to focus on what you do best.

Yeah, there's, um, if you talk to any of the ChatGPTs of the world and say, I'm looking for this tone, um, someone that's, uh, in 5th grade to understand what I'm trying to ask, I want an emotional, um, thoughtful, short A, B, and C comment. Oh yeah, exactly. It's like, that's how you have to talk to, to them.

My new favorite thing is to get it to act like a personality when crafting some of those, crafting that content, or just reviewing client work and client expectations. You know, act as this type of a person within an organization. It helps so much with understanding where the companies are coming from with their, with their needs. Which has really been a big help as well.

Thank you. Joe, how about you? Joe, tell us a little what you've learned in the last 6 months here that helped your company, or actually you learned not to do again.

I'm looking around the room, Michael. I'm assuming you mean me, Joe, right?

Yeah, Joe Silva.

All right, no problem. Joe's kind of common. Not as common as Michael, apparently. But first of all, I want to say Happy Veterans Day. I know, Michael, you obviously are one, and there's a few others in the room. So thank you very much for your service. I'm actually wearing my father's dog tags right now for remembrance of him on this day. But again, thank you. Can't be doing any of this without sacrifices from those before. So thank you, sir. What I learned is after COVID, everyone kind of shut down and the people that you really wanted to get in touch with went away because they realized the value of time. So what you really found, you had to be in the right rooms. With the right people. And Mike, when you started to put this together, and I know Steve had a piece of this as well for him, and drawing, really calling the right people to be in a room and managing to actually get a very high level of people he wanted to have conversations with, right? People he wanted, you knew you could bounce off ideas off of. From that, opportunities, other things would, would just simply germinate, would develop based on that. So, one of the things I learned is really exactly that is focus your time and attention in those spaces, right? Getting back out in front of people in face-to-face is fantastic, but we can't always do that, right? I know, obviously you're in England and it'd be lovely to take a quick jaunt over, but you know, that may not happen. However, with the beauty of technology, we can be in front of each other and still be able to connect at least at a high level. And this group really helps to facilitate that. So, again, I learned— thank you, Michael, for putting this together and doing that. And you helped me, us. So I figured obviously that made sense to do it back. And that reciprocity is where it pays off.

Yeah.

You notice, like, when we do these joint outreaches that all those people in your first connections, because that's who I hit to try to drive your first connections and my first connections and everybody else's first connections together. But the runoff of doing that is Steve, who you might have not talked to for 2 or 3 years, to say, hey man, I haven't talked to you. Thanks for the invite. So it's a reason to get in front of someone without selling them what you do. And you never know where they're at in the buying cycle of what you do or friendship and vice versa. So there's a reason to do this type of approach. And this roundtable that I do is great for my Legion. I have 10 to 15 Zoom calls every single day of people that might want to join the roundtable or might want to use me for, for my LinkedIn email or roundtable Legion that I do. And, um, it's much better than you doing it that way than saying, hey, I'm Michael and I do Legion and I want to talk to you about how this and that. It's all very self-sufficient when you do it that way, but if you're giving something versus asking for something, you'll get a lot of, a lot more, um, people responding to you. Mitch, why don't you kind of give us something that you've learned in the last 2 weeks, 2 months? And also Mitch and Steve and all those other guys are the ones kind of helping me grow this thing as well.

Yeah, sure.

So Mitch, I live here in Boulder, Colorado. I focus on hard tech, deep tech, clean tech, and often in very emerging industries. And what I like about what I found is, is, is, which is why I think the roundtable will be useful for me, and I'm focusing on trying to do one in with aerospace, especially here in Colorado with some VCs and folks who know the space very well, is, is going, which people are echoing already, is trying to get interactions, you know, directly in person, but offline to in person, I think has been, has been very, has been super helpful for me. And so I'm trying to figure out ways to, you know, augment that, that, that opportunity. And, and I think this, like, so that's why I'm exploring this roundtable with, with Michael. And so far, like, I have definitely invited and some of what what Michael was saying. He's like, hey, I haven't heard from you in a while. Has definitely happened, uh, with some of the outreach. But I did have a question since I haven't used it in the past, is, is— and we don't have to get into details, but anyone who knows Smartsheets, uh, helping out a friend, trying to figure out how to use— how to automate, uh, you know, or use Smartsheets for light CRM, that kind of sort of touchpoint kind of stuff.

But Ray Stevens raised his hand, um, so you guys can exchange information. There's also HubSpot as a free version for CRM that's pretty good that I use. That I used for about a year before I started paying for the starter version, which was $28 for like 2 or 3 users. But then HubSpot gets real expensive. So for some of us out here, I don't need more than that because I don't have like 20 salespeople. But It's got a couple of tips for that would be, um, don't use HubSpot for cold outreach because it gets real expensive. So figure out a way of doing that by either hiring a guy like me or someone else. But, you know, you want to get 20 to 30 domains when you're doing outreach on email, and you don't want to be sending more than 20 to 40 emails per day per inbox. So there's a, there's a really strict rule in a sense that you'll burn your domains. Never use your main domain, but you'll burn your new domains if you don't take care of them. Um, uh, Raina, who's also helped me here— where is she?

Right here.

Okay, go ahead, Raina.

Um, first, Michael and everyone else, happy Veterans Day. Thank you again from my— for me as well, thinking about all of you and all, all of the things and all the things that are happening in the world. So I appreciate you very, very much. I am Reina Gandhi. I am a leadership and career coach and speaker who focuses on women in corporate law firms, STEM fields, basically anything where women feel stuck in their careers and want to get unstuck because of limiting beliefs and, and in what I call the inner glass ceiling. So I've been working with Michael just for a few weeks now, and the number of people who have reached out, I'm almost overwhelmed. I'm like, I can't keep up. It's been so nice to just be able to reconnect with a bunch of people. Thank you for thinking of me. This is so great, you know. And so that has been really nice. I'm just still catching up on all the messaging. And something that I have learned is that I was just thinking about this morning is that I've only been doing this officially for 2 years, and building a business takes time, and seeing progress is very, very helpful. And I just— as the, the longer I do this, the more I realize that there are so many people out there who, one, need, need the service that I'm providing, and two, are in similar situations, which is why I love this idea of a roundtable, because I just the other day when we were talking, I think Michael, was that yesterday or the day before? We had another roundtable and I learned so much just in that conversation and made a connection and I'm gonna talk to him later today. So that's what this is all about.

Yeah.

So this is great. And I love that we have people from all over the world here on this call.

Yeah. The whole idea is to, is to help each other with business, not just be a bunch of solopreneurs. I, I think there's a mixture of. Companies here that are medium-sized too, not just like myself and Reyna and some other folks to where we're smaller companies but work with larger companies. So, um, who else was on here that I saw that, that was helping me? I—

oh, Alon, how you doing?

Good to see you, man.

Seriously, uh, I echo everything that, uh, that Reyna was saying. And I want to say a couple of things to everybody. First of all, you know, the sense of togetherness, don't underestimate that. We all kind of live in our own world, but to be here, just to be here with everybody, it's great. It's like a virtual hug for me personally. And I think everybody, or at least a lot of people, need that. So I'm thankful for that. And I also echo what Michael has been doing for my business. And Michael doesn't know it yet, but I'm going to talk to him again soon because we paused a little bit because I was a little overwhelmed and also because I learned it was a great first round, was a great learning experience. So Michael, we're definitely gonna be working again soon. You can bet on that. But the other thing I wanted to say is I, if anybody's interested, and by the way, I'm based in Atlanta, originally from Israel, and I'm doing sales consulting specifically for long sales cycles. In complicated relationships. So at least 5 people from each side of existing relationships, right? So we have a whole methodology that taps into the, the trust and the openness. So long-term, just FYI, and I shared a document overview in the chat. But what I would like to ask, if anybody's interested, that would be very helpful for me. We just released, so we are doing our consultancy based on emotional relevance in the corporate world of selling. And we just now finalized an online assessment tool for emotional relevance in the business world. If anybody is interested just to go through it, right, to take it, it will help me and get some feedback. Just, I don't know, private chat me or just reach out to me. That will be really helpful. Anybody, I'm happy to share it and just, you know, go through it and get some feedback. That'll be very helpful. I'm just happy to be here. So, Michael, thank you.

Yeah, the whole emotional relevance thing is like, like, I remember when I was a kid, well, like a teenager, and I, I was thanking my aunt for letting me stay at her house when I was visiting. And I said, thanks, Aunt Dolores. And I was running out, and my cousin says, turn around, give her a hug, and look her in the eye and say thank you. So it's, it's You know, a lot of talks about this, but anything in life, a lot of people just kind of say words and they don't really mean it. And if you look at someone, whether it's on video or in person, and really ask them how they're doing or what's going on, or I like asking a question like, what did you learn this week that you didn't learn last week? You know, something new. Like, I even asked that of my kids. Like, really ask a question and want the answer versus just saying something just to be polite. 'cause it comes off that way and then no one really wants to answer that. So that's kind of what Alain's, you know, basically teaching in the business world is part of it. But, um, I just noticed that that's missing a lot because people just ask a question because that's what they're taught as a salesperson. Like, there's a question like, what keeps you up at night? I mean, that's sales 101. If you ask that, you're gonna get like throw up. It's like, I always ask first questions like, Hey Steve, you booked a time with me. What, what brought you to the table? So like, what would grab your attention to even want to set up a call, you know? And they'll— and I'm not talking about what I do, how I help them, or anything, because I don't know anything yet. So that's the whole key thing is like, ask an open-ended question and you'll get open-ended, uh, answers back. When I do these automations And I say, hey, are you going to Dreamforce in February? I just wanted to see if you had any opinions on that conference. Is it something good that I should maybe think about? Those types of questions will get people responding back to you like, hey, I never went. Hey, it's a good show, but it's too expensive. Whatever it is, I'm just looking for the door to open so I can business date, which is like dating, but you got to get to know somebody before you kind of get further in the relationship. So think about when you're going on LinkedIn or email and asking a question that's a little bit less salesy and more opinion-based. Because I'm telling you, I have 15 Zoom calls every single day, and I'm exhausted. But I'm, I'm not gonna let this year kill me because this year has been tough, right? I started doing this and I got up to $80,000, $90,000 a month doing a repetitive, repeatable, and scalable service, not a software, because I don't build things like a software. But you can build a really nice, um, service solution if you're not— if you're a service-based company, by making sure you have a team of people that you can refer business to, not just make it, hey, I got 2 clients and that's all I can handle. But just think about that when you're trying to go do outreach. If you're selling in your email or LinkedIn so fast and you're telling people what you do, it's, it's me, me, me, I, I, I type stuff. It's not gonna work anymore. You know? And obviously there's a lot of people doing cold calls in the SDR space, like the kids that are doing SDR work. That's becoming kind of the thing that's— AI is kind of opening the door. So teach people how to sell and consult and strategize and close versus how to do admin and administrative stuff. Administrative stuff should Mostly be done by AI if you can, depending on what you do. Like, I use all automation and AI for outreach, but it's, it's what I write is what gets the response. And then teaming up with people like Mitchell and everybody else on here, like, hey, we're doing a roundtable together. We want you to be a guest, but first, can you book a time so we can talk about what your role would be on the roundtable? Which is, is it a good fit for both of us? That gets people to talk with you. So you should think about whether you do it with me or do it for yourself, come up with a podcast or roundtable, maybe a dinner or something, something experiential. I come from the sports marketing space, worked with the NFL, UFC, anything that's kind of going to have eye-to-eye either in person or on video, it's going to get you more of a relationship. So I just kind of wanted to throw that out there. Some things I've learned, you know, LinkedIn's great for that, but there obviously there's 150 activities you can do per day using your software bots before you kind of— it looks like, you know, you're using a bot and then they'll warn you. So just be careful on email or LinkedIn that you don't burn that type of stuff. Anybody have— anybody have a question so far that they want to kind of ask of the group?

Michael, can you hear?

Raise your hand and then we'll do that, or just go ahead and talk because I don't have everybody raising their hand. Hi, hi everyone. Hi, hi, my name is Michal, uh, Litchi Translations, and, um, this is my first time on the call, so I just wanted to know what, what is this call all about?

Yeah, heard people saying all kinds of things.

If you can—

what is the purpose? How Do we introduce ourselves, or how does it go? Yeah, it's, it's basically a— I don't know if you were on the beginning of this call, but it's basically a think-to-talk approach. Everybody talks about what they're— what's, what's worked or what hasn't worked for them in the last 6 months, or it could be a tool. Yeah, it's just a way to trade ideas, tips, tactics, and strategies. It's not there to like do— I used to do pitches Everybody, hey, introduce yourself, tell us what you— it was horrible idea. It was a really bad idea because that's all we did. And by the time you never wanted to come back because it was this bunch of people just trying to sell each other. So realistically, I learned Blaze.ai in the last month. Blaze.ai does like all the posting on all the different social networks, takes all my data and documents, videos, do it. So that's one thing I learned, and it wasn't too bad. It's like $700. Um, there's a website called beautiful.ai which builds websites from just stuff that you upload. I mean, there's that type of stuff that I would never know about because we're all kind of trading tips and tactics and strategies.

If you—

like, I'm a black belt Brazilian jiu-jitsu veteran or whatever, or salesperson, Every time I lose, I learn something. So if we can lose for other people and teach them what we shouldn't do or should do, that's not a bad thing. So that's what I really want to do on these things. It's like, hey, I did this, don't do it, or I did this and it worked, and I want to give you guys a tactic, a tip, a strategy, or an app that worked. Does that make sense? Uh, yeah, sure.

Okay, so I'm looking forward to hear what you've learned. Anyone learn something about the translation industry before I need to look for a new job? So I'd be happy to hear anything.

Where are you based? I'm based in Israel. Shalom. Shalom, shalom, everybody.

And Alon, not Alon, Amir introduced me to this meeting.

Well, Alon still said hi.

Hi, yeah.

Hi, everyone. Let's go to Lynn.

Hope so. Hi there. Thanks for this, Michael. Quick question. So we talk about 20 to 30 emails and 20, sorry, 20 to 30 domains and sending 20 emails out per day. When scammers go in like from banks or things like that, they change one slight letter.

Yeah.

Right. So it could be Bank of America, but the A is slightly different. How do you stop the spam folders picking that up as a potential spam? If you change your domain and say it's one or two letters changed, aren't the spam filters going to pick that up as a potential scammer?

Well, it's, it's, I'm not a, there's, there's no like real answer every day because it changes every day. But what I do is like do fullthrottlefulauto.com. Versus fullthrottlefulautoleads.com, right? So it's not changing a letter to spell it differently, it's just adding fullthrottlefulautousa.com, fullthrottlefulauto.us, fullthrottlefulauto.com— I'm sorry, fullthrottlefulautoleads.co. So there's, there's all these versions, and then when you're sending only 20, 20 or 30 emails a day You're not raising flags everywhere. It's these scammers that will change the word and use the logos in there of that Bank of America. And if you read, it's not even close to Bank of America half the time.

Yeah. Thank you.

And with that, doesn't that confuse your customers? I haven't had that problem with— as long as the domain doesn't look squirrely, you know what I mean? Full Throttle Full Auto versus Full Throttle Full Auto Leads, even though it's a long domain either way. I haven't had an issue, but it is what it is too, right? I mean, I, I don't, I don't, um, want to use— you would never want to use your main domain, and you never want to send out more than, you know, 40, 50 emails per day per domain. And you're going to have a database, you want to verify the emails that they, they're not going to bounce. And if they're spammy, people are going to hit spam. So there's, there's 25 things you need to do or not do to make sure that your emails get delivered and maintain that. Otherwise, your emails are never going to make it into the inbox. And that's why, that's why I use email, LinkedIn, and roundtables as a three-prong approach. Because if one thing's not working one day, then something else is going to work the next day. But really what comes down to it is, is getting people to get asking, giving them something of value. And a lot of times people do the podcast thing, which is not a horrible way of going, but podcasts could be you and me doing a Zoom, calling it a podcast, and that's going to get someone excited. I don't know. I really— for me, it's like you have to have a podcast that has an audience, that has professional— I mean, I'm a production guy in TV. If you don't have production value, which is great graphics and intros and advertisers. That's a lot more work. Roundtable takes me nothing. I get you guys on the call, we all talk. I don't have to really prep about— it's not all about me, it's everybody else talking about what's working for them. So I always think even if you have 6 people doing a roundtable and you do your own roundtable, build a roundtable around your business that would help other businesses. And if it's even weekly or, or bimonthly, Do it, you know, do something like that. You don't even need a full throttle to help you with that. But if you want to grow it like this, then you need to have outbound people, outbound messages to get people to show up. So I would always think about doing something that puts your name in front of people that's not self. It's that doesn't look like you're just doing it for yourself. And hopefully I don't come across as this is all about me because I don't— it's not. But I do like to get new business from doing this, and that's why one of the reasons why I do it.

Beth, thank you. So I want to follow up.

Thank you for calling on me. I wanted to follow up on what you had said, which is about making— I call it making a relationship deposit. So I want to give everybody an idea. I think one of the things people really struggle with is how do I get out of that commodity mode? And that is all about me and here's how what I do and here's how I can help you. I had a client who actually called me hair on fire. They were losing like 50% of their clients. It was massive. And I didn't know where he was coming from. I didn't know if it was widget to widget, apple to apple. Like, I had to understand. And he like spewed 13 different reasons why they were different. And I was like, that's great, but you can't say it to a prospect that way. So what we did and what you can do is think about all the different things you offer and create a checklist. And what we did is we created a checklist, and when they called back into these people, they said, now listen, some of these things are going to be really obvious, some of them are going to live in the gray area, and some of them are going to be really unknown to you. But we're finding a lot of clients, when they go to make an insurance claim, are getting denied. And so this checklist will give you the ability to kind of go back and look internally and figure out where you're at. So whenever I work with clients, I think about, well, what is it you're selling? And they always want to talk about the features and the benefits, and this is what they could do, and this is why they're great. That's all fantastic. You just can't say it that way. You have to have a conversation where you make a relationship deposit.

So, I used to be the feature function guy. You know, that's just the way I was. My manager's like, that's— you're selling features. Like, what do you do for them? Like, I don't know what you're talking about. It's like, I was just such a bonehead. One of the things I learned too is like, I use Fireflies as a note-taker. Always have a note-taker in your things. But when I started asking the note-taker to write me a summary of, of the conversation in an email format that I could write back to them thanking them for the meeting and next steps, oh my God, it did such a great job of the things, all the things we talked about. I changed some words so it doesn't look AI-generated, but I used to not like doing that because it was like a book report every time I had a call. If I have 10 to 15 of these a day, I can't keep up. But So Fireflies has Ask Fred, it's called, and it's just basic ChatGPT built in. So that was a really good thing I learned that in the last month. The other thing I learned was that a lot of these AI tools will not go into LinkedIn and pull their LinkedIn because it's gated. LinkedIn's gated because you have to log in. So I would just copy and paste all the content from their LinkedIn and put it in ChatGPT. And say, what's some great sales and business development questions I should ask this person in our discovery call? Oh my God. It was brilliant too because it was like, there's some questions here I don't know. I just, I don't know what I don't know. So I don't know if there's a better way of doing that on LinkedIn because it wouldn't pull, ChatGPT wouldn't pull from there. But I just, like I said, just did a copy and paste of the text. So I don't know if I could pronounce your name. How you say it?

Ujwala.

Ujwala.

You got it.

Where's that from?

India.

India. Welcome.

Well, thank you so much. So, Michael, I really want to appreciate this community. I have been— I've had a career in sales for over 15 years. I was the head of sales of a robotics startup in Silicon Valley that got acquired. And I have branched out and started my own company. This is of course a very exciting time if you're in sales, you know, whether you work for a big company or a startup, everyone's asking the same questions, like how do we make our processes more efficient? So I actually started building out, the vision here is to like have people tell us like what their budget is and then make recommendations on tools.

Based on that.

So I was part of Pavilion. I don't know if all of you are familiar with Pavilion. Yeah. And, you know, of course my company paid for the subscription, which I currently, since I'm on, you know, have my own business. So I have been looking for a community like this one where, you know, CROs, business owners get together, talk about sales efficient tools and exchange of ideas. So, I'm looking for collaborators at this point, but also, you know, want to thank you for putting together this community.

Thank you. I noticed that there's a lot of groups that I'm a part of, like, like that one you just mentioned, and they really frown upon you reaching out to their members. And for me, it's like, listen, I, I can build my own community here. I'm not— but I'm not going to do it the way they're doing it because that's a lot of work. A lot of education in them. They're charging $2,000, $3,000, $4,000, whatever group that is. But, um, you got to be able to reach out to people and network and possibly work with them. Otherwise, what's the point of just learning? I mean, my thing is learning, selling, consulting, strategizing with other folks, at least for me. So just be careful when you join other groups that there's not this thing where they get really upset if, like, uh, with reaching out to the members in a non-spammy way, and they feel like that's against the rules. So that's one thing that on this group, it's— we're here to help each other. Just don't spam them. But I'm not, you know, just— you got to be able to talk to people on this thing. So just be careful which ones you like, which ones you don't, and what the value is, because No one should impede your ability to make money.

Yeah, it's interesting. I think there's bravado as well. And I think for a lot of like people, they're like this idea of like a minimum viable community, right? Like you go out, you build a community, and then you figure out how to kind of make money from it. But it sounds like your approach is different because you already, you know, have a business and you're building a community around that. So that's That's fantastic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I mean, I made a group on LinkedIn and, you know, LinkedIn, there's a little workaround where if you're part of a group, you could send free in messages or free DMs. So that's a little trick for you guys. But, you know, there's a lot of— there's some groups that have a huge amount of people. There's some that don't. You got to have Sales Navigator when you're doing this type of stuff. If you try to do it with just LinkedIn, it's very hard to to use LinkedIn now without Sales Navigator. Sales Navigator is about a grand for the year. So just, I'm not, again, I'm not making money off of LinkedIn, uh, Sales Navigator. But if you, if you really want to do that, look at that. Look at people that you would sell, um, that are competitors or friendlies. And you can go in Sales Navigator, I want connections of like Mitch. Like, if Mitch and I didn't work together, I can go and still look at all of his connections, but it's a long-tail version of it versus Mitch putting his arm around me saying, let's do this together. But there's ways to go fish where people fish, as I call them, sales. Like, I see they're going to a LinkedIn event. I see they're going to a conference. I see that they're friends with Mitch. There's 3, 4 things there that tell me that they'd probably be a good fit if I refer to any of those things. But if I just sit there and use AI and go, hey, Michael, I see that you're a veteran and a scuba diver and that you're Jiu-Jitsu black belt and you're doing awesome, it just sounds fake. Sounds like you just read, you know, you had AI reading my profile and that's it. It's just not— think about where AI works and where it doesn't work because you sound like you just use that just to, just to like align with somebody. It looks like crap. Charlie, go ahead.

Hi everyone, I'm Charlie. Mike, thank you for having me here today. It's my first time. I actually had a follow-up question for you, Michael, about the multiple domains, which kind of bounces off what Lynn was asking, which I've always been curious about. Do you set up like redirects Like, I know we're not putting links. I know, I know, I know that it's not advised to put links into the email because that can set off the spam filters. Yeah, you don't want to have the domain in it because like when I'm, when I'm getting emails, I get emails from people all freaking day. I actually have like a whole inbox that's just like, I don't even pay attention to it anymore because it's so spammed out. But, um, like I do look for, is there a website associated with this domain? Like, is this a legit company? Like, do you set up redirects?

Yeah, all those domains are going to go to Full Throttle for a lot of leads. If it doesn't go anywhere, that's very suspicious.

Right, right. Okay.

That was my, my, like, and then, and then some, some of these solutions, there's an inbox that's conjoined of all the boxes, but for me, I mostly just forward all those, those holders, those email holders into my real email.

Right, right.

So it all goes into one inbox. And then, you know, I had— I started having my kids, who are teaching how to be like kind of like a sales development role, to look at all the comments and answer for me because I don't have— I don't have the— for that. Another trick too is use your kids, daughters, whatever, faces, especially if they're in school, or, or they're— or maybe one's a plumber or one's like I have a friend that works at Disney because I live in Orlando. She's never going to use her LinkedIn. So I use her face and say she's a marketing manager under Full Throttle. And I, I have 9,000 connections for her already. And I get business because I'm not going to hire 10 people to press buttons all day on LinkedIn and email where I can automate that. And I can just borrow someone's face. Verify, you want to verify your LinkedIn profile. Um, that requires a real person.

You know, that's actually like, I can't— well, I could, I could, but Charlie's not my legal name. But like, everyone knows me as Charlie because I've gone by Charlie since I was like 4. So I can't verify my profile because I don't have any legal documentation that says Charlie. So like, that's like, I would put, I would put like Charlie quotes. Yeah, like my legal name on it.

Then yeah, that should be able to get through LinkedIn.

So no one that knows me is just going to confuse all the people that know me. But what you touched on after that was kind of my next question. I was invited to this by 3 different people in my network, which is a testament to how, how closely we were already connected before I realized it. But I'm also curious because I've been, I've been really looking at and talked to a couple of people who have, you know, built really successful referral networks. Our business model is a collective, so we do I have, you know, a vendor network, a pool of talent that I pull for to build agile teams around the needs of our clients. But I've been, I'm just curious, like, how do you incentivize people to like, what's in it for the people who invited me? Because none of them are in this room.

Maruja, they are.

Maybe they are on a different, on a different day or a different week, but I'm just like, it seems like you very much have figured out a way to get people to, you know, use their, their speaker box to your advantage. And I'm just curious if you could talk a little bit about that because I think that—

Yeah, I came up with that in the last 12 months, I think. And like, wait, these people are solopreneurs. They probably don't have the $5K, $4K a month to hire me for their business. And they might only be able to handle 2 or 3 clients and then they're like, hey Michael, I don't, I can't use your automation. I'm too busy now. you know, so what I basically said to them is like, listen, let's use your LinkedIn, my LinkedIn, drive them into one place where we have other folks bringing their connections and we're all basically co-mingling our folks. Now what happens when your first connection, you can ask anybody here that, that used like Dr. Amir and Michael and Joe and Mitch is like all these first connections they had over the last 20 years. Start bubbling up to the top. And it's basically because I'm automating that. That would usually cost money. They need to figure out how to do it. And also we're giving them a service, the people that they're reaching out to, and they're getting back, hey, Joe, I haven't talked to you in a while. Like, Lynn also does this with me as well. There's runoff from doing this that's beneficial for them. I'm not charging them, but I'm using their LinkedIn. That's like, if you have members for your collective, Everybody should be helping grow that collective, you know. Um, if they don't have enough connections to help you, then for me it's not really that much value for me to do this with somebody for free, right? So I don't know if anybody else wants to kind of chime in there for why they did it with me, but I, I mean, I learned from doing this with other people when I first started, like Michael. Um, Hey, I hope you like using my, my LinkedIn stuff, but I got to tell you, I got like 15 calls from doing this. And I was like, really? That, that was a side product of what I did for you? And then my light bulb went off. Like, this is a win-win. I don't do it more than once, but it's a win-win for both sides. And it's really probably more beneficial for small businesses, people like me, that work with larger companies that have someone that has a Rolodex or LinkedIn connections that are good like Carla's. You know, it's like I had all these people on here that I worked with, Dr. Amir, Carla, Joe, Mitch. I've probably made 15 to 30 meetings from doing that. They gain something, they're inviting their crew on this. We're good. It's kind of just growing just by the nature of the beast. Does that answer your question, Charlie?

Yeah, it does. Thank you.

Yeah, but you should definitely try repeating that for the collective that you're doing. And, and, um, I mean, I'm thinking about also selling sponsorships on this where maybe someone puts, puts together a little 5-minute pitch in the beginning of it, and, and I charge maybe $1,000. I don't know. I don't really want to turn into too much of a commercial approach because then it takes away from just people want to show up, but, and then we could also turn this into a member-based thing where people pay a membership. I, I don't, I'm kind of against that too, but, you know, I'm hopefully I'll get a pay forward situation where people will actually refer business to me and they have. So, uh, Blair.

Hey guys.

Thank you so much for having me. This is also my first time here. Um, so fun fact about me, I was actually on the consulting team at LinkedIn that built out Sales Navigator. So hearing Michael talk about Sales Navigator is really interesting because I helped them build out the tool. And now I spend a good chunk of my time teaching people how to get around it because it's not— I personally don't think it's a very useful tool. It's a lot of money.

And it needs a lot of work still, but it's better than it does need quite a little, a lot of work.

But the native tool is really, really powerful if you know what you're looking for. The filters tool especially if you have a company that you know that you're targeting, the filters tool is incredibly powerful and they have added a ton to the filters. So if you haven't gone in and explored, like, go in, let's say you're targeting Tesla, go in, look at Tesla, go in, filter by all employees, and then go into all filters. If you haven't explored those all filters, you can filter by a whole ton now. You can filter by multiple titles. Just make sure that you separate the titles by capital OR. It has to be capitalized, otherwise it doesn't work. If you want to do a session with me, I can show you how to do that. Those tools are incredibly powerful. The native tool is huge. I get a lot of questions these days about the algorithm. So it changes a lot. Just know that Microsoft owns both LinkedIn and OpenAI, and when they bought OpenAI, they moved a lot from LinkedIn over to OpenAI, both in data and computing power and like physical butts in chairs. So there's like physically less people working at LinkedIn because they moved them over to OpenAI.

So I actually worked, I actually worked with Jeff Weiner at Warner Brothers, who was the chairman and the president of LinkedIn.

Awesome.

Yeah. There's also the, if they, if they posted on LinkedIn recently, that's also a good, uh, statute of are they active? Because not everybody's active on LinkedIn.

Less so these days because the algorithm changed. What they're looking for now is comments. And there are ways that you can see that algorithm changes are coming. So for example, I knew that an algorithm change was coming to deprioritize the number of times a week that you were posting because suddenly you could see impressions on comments. And I went, oh, okay, they're gonna start really prioritizing comments. So what's interesting now is that I've gotten comments go way more viral than actual posts. So if you're like, I'm someone who is not into posting at all, go in and comment multiple times a day. I just had a comment this week that had, has like 20,000 impressions. So comments are where it's at right now. Um, if you can get yourself to comment multiple times a day, that's where it's at. If you can get yourself to post 4 times a week, that's totally fine. It used to be like 7 days a week or like multiple times a day. That's no longer a thing. So, and like my content is like not structured at all. It's literally just like a brain dump into like my notes app. So it doesn't have to be a structured thing at all. Comments are where it's at. One tip that I have seen, so I work in mostly PR media communications and a lot on LinkedIn, and I still consult with them. One thing I will say, I would— there's a bit of stuff in the, the comments I also can't verify because Blair is my middle name and not my legal name, so they won't let me verify. But also, there was a question about whether or not you should verify. It is not— it's like recommended. But there's no actual, like, from the LinkedIn side, there's no actual, like, benefit on the platform. So they won't push your content any further. They won't promote your content in any way. They won't promote your profile in any way. So there's no tangible benefit to doing it. It is a data collection mechanism. So while they say it's highly recommended, they're not actually doing anything to, like, boost your profile, boost your content.

But it also tells someone that it's not a bot or or a fake profile, which helps.

It does in that sense, but they can also look at your profile and see how active you are.

Yeah.

And, and you, you have other ways of doing that, right? So if you have like the premium badge or if you got like a, you know, a LinkedIn top voice badge or something like that, right? So there are other ways of doing that if you can't verify, like I can't, or like try that.

Yeah, I, I do automation on, on comments and I say, thanks for sharing, Steve. Don't know if you're going to this conference, but I'm actually doing a roundtable. So all that person's friends that commented see that I have a roundtable. But LinkedIn is actually limited. After a certain amount of comments, they won't let you comment anymore on posts.

Interesting.

I don't know if it's a day or a weekly thing, but mine's timed out at a certain amount of comments because I have 29,000 connections, so I don't really want to add connections because they limit it to 30,000. But, um, comments was really going well, but you also got to make sure that you don't just put spam on someone else's wall too.

Yeah, they're also looking for, um, comment threads. So they're looking for how deep within— so not just like comments straight down, but like how deep within the thread a comment gets. That shows them value. And there was one other thing about comments and now it's gone. I'm sure it'll come back.

Yeah. How about getting out of LinkedIn jail? Because I know some people have gotten in trouble, not me, because that's what I do for a living. That would not be good. But how do you— I mean, there's a lot of back and forth with their customer service people and it's sometimes really hard. Do you have any tips for people to stay out of or get out of? That situation?

I mean, a lot of times it's just a waiting game. Like, they'll put you in LinkedIn jail for like a certain period of time. One, don't be a bot. So like, if you're acting like a bot, stop acting like a bot and just don't do that. Again, it's hard. LinkedIn is the only platform that I know of that like doesn't have an active customer service team that you can reach out to and be like, hey, I wasn't actually being a bot, so please let me out. Um, so it's really tough. I don't have any good advice for that, unfortunately.

Okay.

Um, the other thing that I've seen, at least for our clients that are going really well, and this doesn't have anything to do with LinkedIn, but I will say LinkedIn, the, the, the social media platforms inherently are very selfish cuz they want your, your time, they want your energy, they want you to stay on the platform. One thing I've noticed is that they used to deprioritize, um, putting links in posts. And so we had to start putting like links in the comments and, you know, things like that. They're not doing that anymore. So feel free to start putting links back in your posts. If you want to do that.

How about hashtags?

Don't bother with hashtags. If you put enough keywords in your posts, you don't need hashtags at all whatsoever. And you'll find that, like, if you search for hashtags now in the search function, there's, like, next to nothing in there anymore. So I wouldn't use them. I wouldn't bother. In general, what I've seen just happen to do really, really well they, they want you to be using everything. So, um, they've just added like a scroll to your background. Use the scroll. I am working for multiple companies, so use the scroll. Use every single feature that you possibly can. If you—

and your tagline is important too. Like, don't just put VP of Sales. Yeah, Next Wave, put VP of Sales. I help customers do this. I'm a patty Scoop, you know, make, make it interesting about who you are. Not, don't just put just your title. That's, that's really a bad idea.

Yeah.

I always think of those as places for people to get to know me and ask and like conversation starters. Right. So like my dog unfortunately passed, but like I did put dog mom at one point and I know there's been some posts that have gone viral about like, I won't hire somebody that, that'll put dog mom. And I'm like, wow, you sound really fun at parties. But like that is a conversation starter because then someone else might be a dog mom and go, well, I also own a dog, so like send me pics of your dog, right? So like, and then like I always list my school because then like go Trojan, the Trojan network is strong. And then someone will reach out and be like, go Trojans, right? So like that is an, your profile is an active place. Fill it with as many conversation starters as you possibly can. My profile is full to the brim. And so I recommend that you use everything that it gives you. It also gives you the ability to do events. So do events. I do LinkedIn Lives all the time. It gives you the ability to start a newsletter, start a newsletter, or follow newsletters, or like it wants you to use everything that you can.

Just remember the LinkedIn stuff that you do event-wise. I could scrape every event and take and find out who those people are and then use that against So it's good for me, but I don't use the LinkedIn events as much. I use Eventbrite to register because I can hit more people outside of LinkedIn and in LinkedIn. But the LinkedIn events is good. I just wish there's a way to— because I do this twice a month, I want— I don't want to have to do it every 2 weeks. I could— I have not figured out a way to keep it going on LinkedIn as an event without having to recreate it every 2 weeks. Maybe I see people do it, I don't know, and I ask them how to do it and they won't answer me.

So I do it fresh every time. So I do like a new LinkedIn Live. I wish I could do it every day. I try to do them once every week or once every couple.

LinkedIn Live is you only can ask questions on chat, right? Yeah, for this, that's why I use Zoom.

I don't want—

I want this to be more two versus reading and talking. So for me, LinkedIn Live is good, but it also doesn't give me this back and forth on video.

Sure.

So yeah, I'm gonna go to, uh, to, to Ray, cause we're almost outta time here. Ray, go ahead, buddy.

Just had a couple of quick questions.

I seen the live group.

I'm just curious if anyone's actually played with the, um, the APIs that are now available off the LinkedIn to actually bring in their contact list and even to schedule some of the calls like we were just talking about, Mike, that If anyone here has actually had the opportunity to— I play on the back end side of these, of LinkedIn scraping, scraping LinkedIn security.

What's the question, Ray? What's the question?

Is anyone actually familiar with the APIs to LinkedIn that are available for contact management? And if anyone's playing with the newest changes to them through their other tools?

I have, I have a tool that scrapes scrapes everything on LinkedIn almost. So I don't use LinkedIn tools inside of LinkedIn. I use an automation tool to pull contacts from LinkedIn. So I don't know the API from LinkedIn at all. I just use— if there is anyone, that's what I'm looking for, just to find out if anyone's out there that wants to connect with me. Yeah. All right. Please reach out to Ray if you have any answers for him. Pamela.

I, first time here. Accountability Pays is my company. I put my information in the chat, but I wanted to share with you something I just discovered, which is the 2025 B2B Thought Leadership Impact Report, which talks about Invisible Influence: Unlocking the Power of Hidden Buyers. And it's a very robust article. I put it in the chat, but talking about more than 40% of B2B deals stall because of internal misalignment with buyer groups, and a major cause is hidden buyers, internal stakeholders who significantly influence business purchases, even if they're not the primary user, and they do look for thought leadership. So I've, I'm looking at my own strategy for reaching leaders. I want to be seen as a thought leader around the profitable value of measuring and managing the value of discretionary effort. And I've built tools and processes, and I'm looking for strategic partners that do the parts that I don't do, and even people who do what I do, because what I'd like to do is get that out there. I'm working to make leaders better leaders.

Yeah, please put your information if you have it in the chat. Also, I'm probably going to let this call go a little over the hour just because I don't have anything after, if you want to stay on. But if you want to save the chat notes, there's a button that says— that has 3 little buttons and says more. That's a way to basically download all that text. Anthony.

Ah, hello everyone, Anthony Draper from the UK. I'm a growth coach and consultant. You asked at the very beginning in terms of what have I learned over the last kind of 6 months, 2 weeks, whatever it is.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, so if I take my military days, I mean, it's all about teamwork, of course it is. But one of the things I realized that, you know, from, from the military is to be successful in an organization You need to be— you need to have great leadership which empowers people, and it needs to be built around the customer journey. Um, one of the things I've learned over the last couple of weeks is that it's okay to outgrow your own clients, because sometimes what I find is, is that when you work with clients, uh, yes, you want them to grow, yes, you want them to, to go down what are the— whatever the ascension path is that you're trying to take them down, but sometimes they don't go quick enough. And sometimes that's okay for them, but that might not be okay for how you want— how quickly you're wanting to grow your business services and scale accordingly. So if that is the case, then you fire them, you know, you let them go accordingly, but you fire them. And that's okay because you're also on a journey as well. So when you're trying to grow your business, you're trying to help your clients, but what you'll realize as you start to move forwards is that they won't be necessarily moving at the same pace as you. So therefore it's okay to fire them and fit and, and what I would say, take away from that, what the lessons learned. And then onwards and upwards.

Yeah, there's a lot of scope creep too with some of these clients that, that they, they basically bring you on, you tell them what the scope is and then they have you doing 15 other things. And sometimes it's even the ones that beat you up on price. So I would say definitely don't keep clients that drive you nuts, stress you out, and also want more than what, what you're offered in, in that, in that scope, because you laid that out at the beginning of, uh, of your meeting, of your, of your partnership, you know. So that's right. I mean, I've had, I've had a job most, I've had a job most of my life, and I'm like, if I lose this job, I'm screwed, no health insurance, blah blah blah, right? When you have 15, 20, 30 clients like I do, if I lose one, I don't want to, but sometimes I do, you know. Sometimes this is not a good fit, you know.

Well, I was just going to link there, Michael, quickly, because, you know, when you were in the military, uh, you had a battle plan, you know, and you stuck to it, and there was no scope creep because you couldn't afford to scope creep. Yeah, okay, there was agility on the, on the, on the field if you needed to be, but in essence, you stuck to the Plan. So get those statements of works in, whatever it may be.

I would also recommend— let me get us on these Zoom calls— is to look at my name slash my company. I put my company name in my, in my, my square. Like, a lot of folks just have first name or last name but not what they do. Anytime you're on a Zoom call in a group setting, put down I'm a coach or, or, or my title or my company. Next to your name because you're sitting here for an hour. Sometimes, no, sometimes you don't even chat, right? But at least have that as, as a way to kind of get your name out there. Uh, Lance?

Yeah, hi Michael. Uh, I had a couple questions. Um, Blair, howdy, that was on the call. I'm not sure if she's still on, but I was curious about— I don't know if you guys have seen Clay. It's like a data enrichment tool. And I was just kind of curious, you know, that versus like Sales Nav, because they're pulling a lot of times from similar data. And, but my, I've been working with it for off and on for about 6 weeks, and someone told me that sometimes Clay, or there's a few other programs like that, their delay is sometimes a week or two. So if new data hits LinkedIn, it doesn't always scrape it immediately. So I don't know, it's just thrown out if Blair's still on the call.

Clay is very difficult. Very— you need almost like a clay expert to set up clay.

Yeah, you need a teenager with a lot of spare time.

Yeah.

I, I use more common things like, are you going to this event? I want to invite you to this event.

Yeah.

Something that's more about them, experiential. But if I say, hey, I see that you won this and your 8K is that, and it's pulling all this information. It kind of— it looks more like AI than it should. And again, clay is— the clay was hot a year ago. Clay's a lot less hot, um, just because it's very time-consuming to work with. And then there's platforms that are trying to mimic what clay does but do it where you don't have to figure it out. Clay's— I don't know how to describe it, but it's just—

I—

oh yeah, it's murder.

I'm a technical guy and I don't know how to use it.

Yeah, it feels like 30 engineers got together to fix a problem that really didn't exist, but they made it worse. You really can slice the onion 4 million times. The other thing, I just want to add a couple points. One was LinkedIn, I read in the algorithm, if you have comments in the first 90 minutes, there's a greater chance it'll cycle your post higher in the rankings. So that first 90 minutes, I've seen people do posting parties. They get together, 10 people, they all make a comment, then they all post on each other's posts, you know, to add fresh comments.

Yeah, so just, just there's groups like that actually.

I—

someone just told me about that in the last 2 weeks, that they, they have a group that they will, um, like their post and comment, and it basically helps the algorithm. Yeah, that's not a bad idea. I mean, I don't think my posts are, are that much commented on. I'm like, man, I wish I could figure this out. It's probably— we should do something like that where you help each other. I also just started a WhatsApp group too where we could do— but it's— WhatsApp seems to be— if you're— if people are going to be chatting back and forth, could be very, um, noisy.

Noisy. Yeah, yeah.

But I mean, it could be something on a call like this, Michael, where we take like 10 or 12 or 15 minutes, you know, however many people you have, everyone makes a post and then we, we throw the URL into the chat, and then whoever wants to can go and comment on that, right?

Um, yeah, let's do that going forward. Let's do, uh, yeah, we'll just put it as, as a comment. Please, you know, please make a— I'll make sure I, I outline that in the beginning of the call because I think that's an awesome idea actually, because again, that was just brought up to me like 2 or 3 weeks ago. I'm like, huh, someone has thought like, how can we be as a group, help each other on LinkedIn.

So that's gaming the algorithm a bit.

Yeah, just make sure if you're on the one in 2 weeks, you remind me to not forget you.

Awesome. Thanks again.

Thanks, Adam Black. If you could come off camera and go ahead. Is he there? Adam? All right, uh, Stan, sorry. Okay, you there, Adam?

Yes, I am. I'm trying to go off camera. I'm not sure how to do that. Give me a second. Uh, very sorry, folks. Ah, does that work? Can you see me?

No, I just said ask to start, uh, camera. I just clicked the button, but go ahead. I'm terrible.

Hey, I don't want to waste time just by looking at my ugly face, so I'll just do it vocally. My name is Adam Black. I'm the CEO of Cycling Batteries Corporation. We're an extremely disruptive hardware and technology company that makes e-bike batteries and batteries for e-mobility. Unlike every other battery in the world, our battery charges in 12 minutes, which means you can charge your transport by walking into a Starbucks exactly the same way as you charge your phone. We are looking for a Chief Marketing— Chief Revenue Officer for international global scaling. There's a 400 million unit market and every single person with those e-bikes is going to need a new battery. Why not buy the fastest charging one? Anybody who likes— I see JC is nodding. Thank you for that. Sorry, Kanthi is nodding. Thank you for that. If anybody's interested, cyclingbatteries.com, adam@cyclingbatteries.com. Like I said, all the stuff that you guys are talking about with social media promotion, You're all experts in this. I'm building a technology company and looking for people who know what you're talking about to do what you're doing for us. So if that's of interest, please get in touch. And please don't be expecting any money. We're in bootstrap mode and we're raising funds, which gives you a wonderful opportunity to introduce your friends to us so they can make a million making the world better. That's it. Pitch over.

Thanks, Stan.

Go ahead. Thanks. I just wanted to comment about your your thought about scope creep. A long time ago, a program manager at Hughes Aircraft Company told me there's no such thing as a fixed price contract because of scope creep. Everybody's going to do scope creep. You have somebody in the room taking down the notes and making that a change order. And there you go. There's no such thing as a fixed price contract.

You know, I was like, listen, I'm an automation expert. That's what I do. I'm not an agency gonna come up with all these marketing ideas. And guess what? Now I'm a marketing agency as well because they're hiring me not just for my automation, but ideas and ideation and consultancy. So I changed what I offer because if I don't, then I'm not gonna be getting clients, I don't think, you know? I added LinkedIn and roundtables to my email offering. So you got to adjust with the times and compete. Yeah. So I, I do a lot more for the same price, but you're not—

that's not— that's different than scope creep. That's different than— in my mind, that's different from scope creep. You're trying to—

you—

the goal is to make the customer or prospect think that you're as concerned with solving their problems as they are.

Yeah.

Okay.

What do you do?

Just so people know what you do as well.

I'm a, uh, it's funny, I'm, I'm a doer. I'm not a coach. I'm a, I'm a CEO, VP of sales and marketing, uh, fractional or not. I help companies generate what I do well is generate revenue and in the shortest possible time as direct. And it's funny, I'm, somebody said I'm a CEO or VP of sales who picks up the phone and willing to pick up the phone and likes picking up the phone by that.

Thank you.

Yeah.

Richard, when I went through IBM sales school, I was the number one salesman in the class and the president of the class. I still have blue suits, but not that blue suit, but there you go.

Richard, I saw you had a comment in the chat to me. What you want to add?

Yes, Michael. First, thanks for putting this together. Back earlier, you were making a comment about getting individuals to answer a question, engage with you, etc. And I've written 3 books and the last one is on this very topic. And it's called 100 Proven Ways to Acquire and Keep Clients for Life. And doing firsthand interviews with several hundred people, what people are really pissed off about and what they really don't enjoy is when a salesperson calls them and all the salesperson wants to do is tell their story. What people are looking for is for somebody to let them tell them your story. They want to be able to share their story with you. So questions that you ask really delves deep into their psyche, that finally I've met an individual that is not all about themselves and all about their features and their benefits. You mentioned that in another comment, but rather they're really interested in who I am, why I am, and what I'm all about. For several years, I was general sales manager for Rolls-Royce in the United States. And we never asked anybody when they came into the dealership or even online, or they'd reach out to the manufacturing, rep when we were building up a bespoke car for them. We taught all of the guys, all my GSMs across the country. You never get into the story of Rolls-Royce, et cetera. When people came in and they wanted to have a conversation, your first question is, why do you want to buy a Rolls-Royce? And you always got the whole story about how I worked my butt off and I got to where I got to be. And now that I've gotten there, I want to reward myself. And when you get to the end of that story, you pretty much realize the only thing left now is price and color.

Yeah. It's, get, get the TEDx, like the TEDx talk going, right? Tell 'em the story, hook 'em, and then you got them to talk about anything that you want to talk about.

Yeah. There's really 4 things that people are looking for today, and everybody thinks about product and technology and frictionless and, uh, which is all wonderful commentary. But what people are really looking for is 4 things. They're looking for a sales organization and a sales rep that's kind, thoughtful, caring, and empathetic.

And what do you do? What do you do now, Richard? I'm, I think you might have said it, but I, I heard Rolls-Royce and I just started thinking about Rolls-Royce.

So you went off and took a drive on me. Okay. I got it.

I bought the new Corvette and that's fun.

Oh, well, that's where, that's good for you. That's good. It's, now I'm chairman of a Weilman Consulting Group and we do consulting, a lot of consulting in a variety of different industries, primarily on how to elevate the client and customer experience to facilitate growth. We've worked with a lot of NFL teams, companies large and small, both here in the US and other parts of the world. I speak at conferences, many times a year on that particular topic. And I also have an online university for financial services. I have about 7,000 advisors online every month taking courses.

Awesome.

On exactly that, how to build relationships. People today don't want to buy anything. And at our core, we're a research-based consulting firm. That's, I sold, I co-founded the Robb Report and I sold that, sold my Rolls-Royce dealerships and I was pretty much done. And people began to call me and said, would you come and tell us how you did all that? Which is how I started in the consulting business, which was not my first thought. But I think that what really resonates with me is that people today don't want to buy anything. They're looking to establish a relationship with the individual with whom they are, shall we say, having a conversation. And if they build a relationship with you, you mentioned trust earlier, it was a great comment you made. You're exactly right. And the way people get to trust you is you open a relationship with them and you do that and it moves the needle. We also support over about 100 luxury brands on research and what affluent high net worth people are looking for.

I mean, you gotta, you gotta, when you write stuff or talk about stuff, like you gotta think about what they're thinking in their head. Who cares? So what? Why are you telling me this? How does this help me keep my job or help feed my family? So you gotta think of here and here. Otherwise you're gonna, be something like, I haven't— people come on a call, this is what we do. I'm like, you didn't ask me what I do and you have no clue what you're talking about. And then you're— you sound like you never had a sales course in your life. And it's not really about sales, it's about having a regular conversation, right? It's called this— it's, it's, it's business dating. If you really think about what dating is, it's business dating. It's just like, if you're gonna try to find the love of your life, you have to go around and not be selfish. It's the same thing with business. You know, you got to be invested in what's going on in their life because they're— no one really makes that decision anymore. It's like a group. And if they get egg on their face, then that could be the end of their career for that particular position as well. So, well, you're right.

One of the other comments you made too was about features and benefits. And, um, I, I just know from experiences, we all do, people don't buy either one of them. They only buy one thing and that's the advantage to them by engaging with you or your product line. So one of the great phrases that I stumbled across years ago that's served us well is let's say you're talking about a feature of the product line or whatever the case might be or your service is just to take a deep breath and say, you know, we help improve your technology so that you're able to really scale your business people don't hear any of that. When we improve your technology, now let me tell you what that means to you. You'll see people lean right into the conversation. We have clients in Israel and I was at a board meeting there and I said, now let me tell you what this means to you. And it's like the entire board leaned forward in the boardroom to hear the comment. And in the end, and it was a wild and crazy meeting, But in the end, the trigger point that we were able to engage with them is the CEO came out in the hall and he said, all we want to talk about is what it means to us. You're the only person that's ever brought that kind of message. And there you are. People want to know how does this apply to me? How do I solve my problem? I mean, you can extrapolate that any way you want, but it's an important— what this means to you really speaks to the individual with whom you are engaging. Thanks for putting this together. It's been a good and interesting learning. Thank you. Thank you.

Well, please, uh, everybody come back in the next 2 weeks. If you do need, uh, any type of funnel help or any strategy, please reach out for you or your clients and, and we'll see each other in 2 weeks. God bless.

Thank you.

Bye.