CRO/CMO/Founders Roundtable - 7/8/2025

This meeting is being recorded. Hello, hello, hello.

Good morning.

Hi, everybody.

Doing very well. I think Hannah's, uh, basically on the beach here, so I don't know if we can let her in.

Yeah, sorry, seemed like the most appropriate background out of the options, so I was like, I'll just go with it.

No.

Uh, well, this is all I got going on on the computer, so hopefully it'll be fine. It needs to be.

I didn't know, I didn't know, um, especially like if you use like meeting, Google Meeting, you could see that the, the CPU in a, in a Chrome instance versus like a, a separate Zoom platform, how much it takes of your computer. I'm like, oh my God. So I was used to using Google Meet a lot because it was part of my system. I'm like, yeah, it kills you. Um, let's see, we're just letting folks in. We're going to start here about 11:05 and then make a couple introductions to folks that helped me build this, this today's event that I really appreciate. And we're not going to let a bunch of note takers in because it's just, um, I want to make sure I have control over the content and then who wants it, who gets it, and 'Cause sometimes we have very internal discussions here that don't need to be on YouTube. So depending on how, what we talk about, and if it's pretty vanilla but it's good, well, you can use it or recap it. But if it's, hey, we're talking about someone's company in a nice way, but it shouldn't be public, or someone doesn't want this to be recorded anywhere else, then we can also look at that too. But realistically, what we do here is we talk about best practices, what works, what, what doesn't work. You know, Stephy and I, and there's— I don't know if Brandy is in here yet. Um, you are? You got your camera on, Brandy?

I do.

Good. All right. Hey, um, Brandy, I'm logged in.

Hold on.

You got— you're logged in as, as Darren Babin, right?

I'm a shape-shifter, what can I say?

So change that. But one thing you guys should do, or ladies should do, is you look at my, um, name there. He says Michael Flau slash Full Throttle. You know, make sure you spell out your name like Stephanie did, and then maybe put a slash. I help this, or this is my, my company's called that, because you're on screen for the next hour, and if you just have your name, you're losing PR somewhat time of who you are and what you do, because I want you to put all your information in the chat so that we can maybe help each other. I mean, the whole idea is like trade tips and tactics. How can Steffi and I, or whoever else, take what I do and she does and see, like, is there a client or is there a way for me to help somebody else, right? So that's, that's why I don't do intros through the whole thing. So we don't do sales pitches. This is a no sales pitch approach. This is— we're talking about tips, tactics, strategies, best practices, what you've learned and what you've not learned, or what you've learned from mistakes or positive things, right?

Hey Mike, you do me a favor, and I apologize for interrupting. Can you tell me how to change the name on— I'm Zoom illiterate.

Yeah, you just, just go to, uh, maybe I could do it for you, but you just click on your, your thing and there's 3 dots. Um, and then you can change your name. So I'm going to put my contact information in chat. I usually use my signature in the chat so that everybody, whoever wants to connect with me, connect with anybody— everybody put their information in there. If you want to put, hey, this is why I joined the roundtable today, that actually helps. Let me just see. Michael Gell puts partnership stuff again. Who cares? So what? Who are you, right? That is the whole idea of doing these roundtables is there are ways that we can talk to each other and having your, your little square up should have something like, like Banga has, active cross. Well, what is active cross? We will talk. We might find out, but at least we know she is part of it. You know, put a space between your first name and last name is helpful too. Always be well lit. I mean, there is a lot of people that get on these roundtables and they look like they are in a dungeon. And, um, or just when you're doing a Zoom call, just think about the first impression here is how can I come up with a good, good first impression. But we already have, I don't know, 50 people showing up. This is a big roundtable. Again, we're going to be talking about a couple of things here today. We have Brandy Shapiro who runs a CRM company, um, that's really interesting approach. And then we also have Stephanie Beach, who is another partner that came up with, um, some digital media strategies that we use for Automation AI and what we want to talk about there. So that's what we're going to talk about. And then us three, since we're kind of the, um, the host today, we're going to introduce ourselves. We're not going to do it for everybody, but you can put your information, um, inside of the chat. Why you're here, what grabbed your attention. You know, don't just put your LinkedIn thing. Put down like, here's who I am, here's what I do, here's my LinkedIn, here's my phone number, here's my email, right? Not everybody wants to connect, but if you, if you hear some nugget from one of us or one of them, connect with each other, right? This is a CRO, CEO, VP, sales, marketing entrepreneurship, solopreneurship type roundtable. We know we're probably not going to have, uh, the VP of marketing at Cisco here, but there's a lot of small, medium, small enterprise, light enterprise companies that come on here. And I do this for free, so I do it because it helps people and also helps me. So my name is Michael Filato. I'm the Full Throttle Filato Leads President, CEO, founder, started this 4 years ago. Um, I help companies get leads or automation, uh, methodologies to reach out to people so they can either A, do their own roundtable, B, get more leads, top of funnel, or C, use email, LinkedIn, roundtables to produce some sort of communication channel. I'm, uh, in Orlando. I, um been selling for 25 years. So most SDRs, sales development reps, you know, they're 20 years old. I'm 25 years in the business, so I think I have a leg up there. Air Force veteran, black belt Brazilian jiu-jitsu, scuba diving. I'm just kind of a full throttle. This is who I am. And, and Stephanie knows that, and, and Brandy knows that, and there's a lot of people on here that probably know that. But I just say, let's, let's work smarter faster, more efficient, um, use ways to kind of fish where people fish, which means look at other events, look at intent data, and go, how do I help my business, or how to help my partners? So that's kind of why I'm here, is trade ideas, tips, and tactics. I don't know everything, but I'll give you two tactics. I'm going to pass this over to Stephanie and Brandy, and they're going to give you two tactics, tips, strategies around what they've learned. And we're going to go a little bit long form in this because we are the host, which is probably anywhere from like 2 to 5 minutes, but it's not going to be a sales pitch. And then we're going to ask questions either around what we said or questions you might have, or some tips and tactics you might have. Please use the raise your hand button on the bottom and then I'll get to you. Um, but the biggest thing is to put your stuff in the chat. And basically do that. There's a— there's 3 buttons, um, next to the chat where you could save the chat at the end, get everybody's information. But my 2 things that I've learned that's very interesting is there's a lot of LinkedIn events, there's a lot of conference where you could scrape the speakers, the attendees, or the exhibitors depending on who are your clients. Those are people that are trying to find leads try to find information, trying to learn the educational part of their business. Why wouldn't you wanna say, hey, are you gonna be at Business 2.0 in Vegas in 2 months? Are you gonna be at the Gartner IT Symposium? I do this with one of my clients. She gets 30 meetings from doing that. I've had 50 meetings set up at a Channel Partner Pros conference for MSPs because I said, let me take everybody's exhibiting. They're looking for leads, for me at least, That's a good thing for me. But there's speakers, there's all these things like they're already raising their hand. Either look on LinkedIn, look at an email, I'm sorry, look at conferences. And there's things like scrapers, data scrapers, there's LinkedIn automation tools that will grab. So that's one tip. Second tip that I'm going to give you that's great is join over 100 groups on LinkedIn. I mean, I'm sorry, under 100 groups on LinkedIn. You could send an in-mail on LinkedIn for free without having Sales Navigator or buying 150 email credits because you're in the same group. So that's, that's a really good way of scraping or just figure out they're there, they're raising their hand, why wouldn't I invite them to where I'm going, what I'm doing, or how I help them? Don't pitch slap people on LinkedIn and don't pitch slap people on email. What do you do? You guys are here because Stephanie, Brandy, myself, and other people that I'm doing this with offered something. I want you to be part of our roundtable so you guys can trade ideas, tips, and tactics. It's not about us, it's about what can we do as a collective cohort to help each other. And that approach works because it doesn't look so, um, relying on, hey, I'm just trying to sell full throttle. I would love to sell more lead gen, but that's not why I'm here today. So Stephanie, you, you built, you built this today's roundtable with me. We want to talk about AI. What's two things? First of all, who you are, what you do, why did you decide to do this with me? And what's two tips that I kind of laid out, um, that you think, man, I screwed this up, or I really did well and I want to share this?

Um, thank you for that intro. I'm Stephanie Beach. I am the founder and CEO of SMB Media Consulting. We are a full-service digital media agency working with brands and helping them drive, you know, their revenue goals through paid and organic advertising from strategy, media planning, implementation, all the way to campaign management and optimization. I decided to do this with you today, Michael, to talk more about AI and learn about how other people are utilizing it. I definitely found, you know, some interesting nuggets. The majority of the people that do know me and know what I do know that AI and automation has been part of advertising and digital media for a very long time. And now it's a little bit of a scary thing only because it's at everybody's fingertips. And so, you know, the way that I use it for my small business or, you know, for my clients definitely varies, and there's a lot of things that you learn. There's a lot of technologies out there that are also utilizing it. So I also wanted to do this with you to learn about the other technologies and how other people are utilizing things as well. A couple of tips or ways that I'm currently utilizing this is really, um, A, it's to help with content creation as well as, you know, some repetitive tasks internally. So internally I use it for ideas, you know, quick thoughts on this is what I'm looking to do. Can you give me 10 ideas on this? Or, you know, I also host a podcast called the Digital Marketeer. And sometimes based off of my conversations with people, I will ask for, you know, a little bit more, aligned in questions with what, what I'm creating there. And then for my clients, there's been a lot of different ways that we've used it. Some of— we've, we've used some different AI-powered marketing platforms for optimization to understand, you know, customer behavior and data, identify trends in audiences, as well as help with optimization automation in general. And then also kind of utilizing it as a lead generation tool. It could ingest a lot of different you know, data points and help with different trends. But I will say you are only as good as the prompts you put into it. And I would not recommend just copying and pasting, but utilizing it conceptually and then digging deeper into it is the way that I kind of approach that.

The prompts on AI are amazing if you don't know how to talk to it. I mean, I, uh, I was trying to do a round— I'm trying to do like this roundtable master class for how to use LinkedIn where I just maybe charge a small fee and do it. I was like, make me a graphic for this, and it started making me cartoonish stuff. I said, make me a very metallic, shiny, glossy— put a LinkedIn logo. And I wind up doing what I wanted, but I— it's like talking to a 2-year-old. You gotta be so descriptive in the— and you're using, uh, AI. AI is a great tool, but if you take what you push in and you get it out and you don't do anything to it or refine it, it's junk. So remember, you gotta— it's like training someone new. You gotta not just tell them how to do it or tell them to do it, you got to tell them very detailed manner, especially with AI. And it's— I think it's awesome. Is that what you're, you're noticing too, Stephanie?

Yeah, I, I have. And, and I think that it starts to learn you as well and what your expectations are. But it also is designed to always agree with you, which I don't think a lot of people realize either. So if you want a little bit of competitiveness or you want more of an unbiased opinion, you also have to prompt it to do that as well.

Is that why people are getting AI companions now? You, it's funny, I agree with you.

Yeah, maybe.

But I did the same thing. You know, I recently got back from Cannes, Cannes Lions, the film festival in France, and I did a collaborative content series with another group while we were out there. And we actually utilized AI to start the creation of the logo that we had. And then AI was able to spit that out, which was really amazing, very quickly, like during our dinner.

A logo for what, your company, or for— what was the logo for?

It was, it was for the collaborative series that we were doing. So we did this thing called Conversations in France where we interviewed a lot of executives on the street about their experience in, um, at the festival and some of the trends that they saw there. And so because it was two companies coming together, we created like a collaborative, um, logo for it. And we started out by utilizing AI for that, and then we sent it to a designer and they cleaned it up and animated it and all of that for us. But it's really—

put a link in the chat so we can view it.

Yeah, I will. It should be actually released sometime next week or the week after. It's still being edited. We did some really great interviews and we're just editing them all together and stringing them together to make like a montage.

So I'm gonna, I'm gonna skip over to Brandy, who actually helped me put this together as well today. Brandy, uh, introduce yourself. What do you do? And then where do you live? But what's, what's the things that you think CRM is lacking? Um, Brandy has a CRM company that I think goes through the full cycle of what needs to happen versus going to 15 different products that work with the CRM, and then you see the APIs break. This is not gonna be a commercial for what she does, but I think she brings up, um, some things that you should think about when you're looking at CRM. You know, I use HubSpot, I use Salesforce in the past, I use Pipedrive. There's pluses and minuses, and there's a lot of people we could chat with too today about what CRM they use, but I want to kind of hear when she talks to people, what are— what is the main things that they hate and what's the main things that they love?

Thank you, Michael. It's a great honor for me to be here today. And Stephanie, I can't wait to see your series when it's edited and available. So thank you for that. I was not able to make it to Cannes this year, so that'll be awesome for me. So in launching the buzz, it was out of like necessity, if you will. On one hand, we had all these desperate, disparate different platforms that we were working with. So getting a clear picture at any given time of what was happening within our company was untenable. You know, you've got email over here, social media over there, operations, accounting, what have you. So Everything's clearly under one roof. There's no need for added extensions unless of course you need like an ER— you have an ERP system or something that's very specific or endemic to your company. And as long as there's an API or we can actually usually create one for a company if they don't have one, it as well can be hooked in. So we try to make sure that everything is inclusive. I personally embarrassingly come from an era that when I first came onto the work scene, you were hired for like a level of expertise that you had and then you had a support team that handled all the stuff that you— like the minutia work that you just weren't good at to begin with. And today we all wear so many hats. So now with Abuzz, it really allows people to focus on what they're best at. And I think our best gift to our clients is the frustration of them saying, if I had more human capital, if I had more time, if I had more of a budget, I could achieve X, Y, and Z. So we really give the power back to the company and alleviate a lot of stress this way.

So what do you think people's biggest mistake is when they're looking at CRM? They're looking at price or looking at maybe HubSpot as the big name in the space. I think Salesforce is a great company, but there's a lot of setup there. What's two things that you learned that would shorten some of the time of frustration of either finding a good CRM or things that you should think about? Two things. You should think about when you're looking for a CRM or managing your pipe and your data, what's two things that people either really mess up or they're doing a great job at? You see, you see all these different companies come into your, to your, to your pipe.

So I think on one hand, what Stephanie was saying, so with us, we have, um, our AI is set up like we guide you through training your AI so it's properly trained. Our content generator, if you will, which is horribly embarrassingly called Ask Brandy, which I did not name it, allows you to go in from a persona marketing perspective. So you're actually capturing all of those important stakeholder groups instead of just sort of throwing spaghetti up against the wall. But I think for me, I think people get caught up in two things, right? It's HubSpot, HubSpot and Salesforce, and they're both great companies. But I think people are used to, you know, we're kind of creatures of habit. So if this is what you're interested, you're introduced to as being the gold standard, I think for us in respect to them, we're one price for as many seats as you want. Our mantra is the more you grow, right, the longer you'll stay with us. We're not holding you hostage for all sorts of incidentals and extra fees. And I believe that we're the only platform that has an internal agency all staffed by marketers and people that know how to grow businesses. So we're not just throwing tech at you no matter how intuitive and easy it is to use, which thank goodness it is, but we're holding your hands. You've got a QB that shows up who understands the system, understands marketing, understands business growth, and understands everyone's internal struggles. And I think the big thing that across the board, I think two big things. One is the ability to do conference follow-up in a super fluid and beautiful way because we have a card scanner on our app. You can use a QR code if you want. Everything is marketed. You've already pre, put in your content, your follow-up, and it's meeting people where they live today. Where do people live predominantly? Two places, LinkedIn and on their cell. So being able to implement AI, exuding, you know, personifying the tone you need to all of these important stakeholders completely. Your AI is going to speak to Bob differently than he's gonna speak to Robert. But meeting people where they live, right? Meeting SMS and speaking to them in a way that—

We got a question. We got a question from Gregory. Gregory, why don't you go ahead and introduce yourself and ask that question to the— I want this to be a question that's answered by the group, not just our 3 people.

Just by way of background, early days, I think it was 2002, I became a Salesforce admin at the very beginning. And rolled out a number of instances for and did consulting for some large orgs. They use it, they have customized Salesforce. But one of the biggest issues that I found is data quality and management. So nobody has built that into a CRM. It's always a third-party tool. Nobody's come up with a CRM that does dedupe, data normalization, data standardization, the ability to create your own, say, picklist values for company size or company, like, you know, SMB, mid-market enterprise. And it, it seems like that's the missing element. So my question is, does Buzz do that out of the box, or is that what your AI— does your AI do some of that, or is it just doing kind of content creation, kind of the general—

So it does do data scoring. It's so I would love to connect with you after because let's, let's not do it over my head. I'm going to be very honest with you, but I have brilliant people that can speak to that. But yes, 100%, that's built into the back end because it's something that's incredibly important.

Yes, we definitely want to stay out of sales pitches and, and we want to educate, but if we got to have very specific questioning on what your product does, Let's hold that as a one-off, um, just so we don't lose people's interest. Um, I want to see if there's any other questions or anybody like Michael, Partnerships at Dan Ads. What's two things that you've learned in the last 6 weeks, 6 months that's like, this helped me, I got through this, this partner approach, sales approach, revenue approach Or I fell flat on my face and it didn't work. As we know in sales, or with my martial arts background, you lose and you learn. I'm getting beat up all the time by 22-year-olds, but I go, hey, I might not want to do that again, right? So same thing with sales. I should have probably not have said that. So what's, what's a learning? This is what I really want this to be, is more, uh, learnings, tactics, strategies, helping each other. I definitely don't want to make it any type of a pitch program because if we do that, none of you guys are going to come back the next week. Go ahead, Michael.

I didn't know we were just gonna throw people on the spot, but hey, you're here, pal. So nice to meet everyone. I, so I lead partnerships at DanAds, which is the leading self-serve provider for publishers. So what we do is we build ad buying platforms. We with large streaming companies like Disney and Paramount and some other international streaming platforms and a lot of other small to medium-sized publishers and a lot of newspaper clients. So the biggest challenge that I struggle with in my role is really finding custom solutions from the biggest clients to the really small clients. And my biggest struggle is that each, each client has a different budget. Each client has a different audience that they're going after. And I have to cater their strategies individually to different, you know, to have different solutions to go to market. So if anyone has any experience in that on that side, I would love to hear their, their thoughts on that.

So you're having to come up with custom solutions for one-offs that is taking you off the, the ball of being able to service most people? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, so I, I have to help advise on their commercial go-to-market strategies. So, uh, you know, what might work for a Paramount who has unlimited funds and can put as much marketing, paid and organic marketing, into their platform as possible to make it successful— I'm dealing with the opposite, where I have clients, uh, like Zillow or, you know, TripAdvisor who might not have a marketing budget or might not have the resources to properly staff their platforms. So it's really coming up with unique and creative ideas to, you know, think of new ways to bring demand into their platforms.

Are you doing programmatic in your plan?

This is entirely direct.

Totally direct.

And going after SMBs.

When I do this for my consultancy business, I stay in my, I stay in my lane of, uh, this is what I can produce, this is what's repeatable and scalable. If I go off one here, one there, one there, I'm never going to get things done. And I don't want to— I'm not an expert, all that. Personally, I'm more of a consultative, uh, consultative approach. So you got to make sure the scope creep doesn't pull you out. Like, I worked at Monster, Simply Talent, um, Job Bank, all these tech— everybody wants something different. But you got to say, here's what we're doing, here's our path in product and service, and we can maneuver a little bit here. But if they're going to be your $18 million client versus $500,000, I'm going to go with the $18 million client, you know? Yeah. So I, I want to hear it from other people on this, but partners is also— like, if you're a partnership guy versus sales, I don't know, it says partnerships. There's also a way to use partners as a, as a sounding board too, and automate some sort of approach for them that help you using like marketing development funds. But please raise your hands. Let's help, let's help Michael out with that question. Anybody have some feedback there?

I have maybe one small idea. Because you work with so many companies that do have massive and big budgets, there's, whether you're large or small, I think there's some consistent throughputs from a marketing perspective. Look to see if you can create, like, more of a power buy. So now you're able to offer some of your smaller clients the kind of inventory that your larger clients are getting because you can bundle them together. Does that make sense?

Yeah. No, that, that, that's definitely one area that we focus in. But then it's also the, the marketing that goes behind that. And, you know, the, the, the biggest issue that I see going, you know, trying to mainly go after small and medium businesses is that especially in the media and advertising business is, you know, you could buy media from a company for $500 and it doesn't necessarily mean that that'll give you $500 of business.

Get outta here.

Oh, but that's another, you just brought up something really well, right? Some of the smaller companies, they're afraid to spend money. Mm-hmm. They, no matter how much you tell them, hey, we're gonna spend your money, but in order for this to really work, you have to have consistency. How many times does someone have to have exposure, right? Until they have that call to action. And it's hard because, you know, normally these are guys that have busted their ass. Maybe they have funding, maybe they don't, and they don't have that kind of sticking power, right? So you've got to like white-knuckle hold their hand, and that's like, that's the frustrating part. So I agree with Michael, you got to kind of put your foot down with people and say, if you are going to work with me, here's the minimum parameters for you to do that, right?

Like, to me, everything's about that expectation set, KPIs. Otherwise they'll be like, I thought you said this, you said you're gonna do this. And it's like, guys, I'm an automation guy. I'm not your completely marketing agency. And that's what I get for me and my side thing is I'm, cuz I'm a consultant approach. I mean, a lot of these people, people on here today are, I own a SaaS company and then SaaS companies kind of go ahead.

Oh, I was gonna say on that note, I think the other thing that people miss a lot is just like how temporal AI is. Like you have to keep up with it. Like you can find a solution that'll work really great, but then within 3 months, another solution may come out that's far better. And so you have to pivot. So my biggest challenge has been I mostly work with corporate clients, but I'm trying to move towards small to medium business because they can't pivot fast enough to get the actual value of what I'm trying to offer. Like I built a tool last year that last May would've been worth a ton of value to them. And then by the time they were able to implement it in the fall, it was worth far less because so many other things had come out and other competitors were already doing it. So I think personally for me, like the biggest challenge is also finding a client that is ready to move right now on what you're directing them to do.

And where are you based, Hannah?

I'm in San Diego.

San Diego. And what's your, what's your company do?

Oh yeah, sorry. My, my name's Hannah Omori. I am the founder and CEO of AI Marketing Flow, but I am actually probably moving it into slightly different space. I'm actually trying to move towards cybersecurity, which I know is cra— a little sounds crazy, but I think it's something that's so necessary. And from my experiences at agencies, that was always something that was never top of mind. And with the way that AI can hack these days, I'm just like seeing the, a lot of potential for where people are going to need a lot of help there. And it's actually relevant as well for when you're building products for clients because you want to make sure that you're learning the best practices for how to make AI secure in a way that is guaranteed to not be leaking any data that's supposed to be private. I don't know if you guys know, but there was a recent case with GPT in New York that made it so that they're going to have to save all conversation data, even deleted, even temporary chats permanently forever as a result of that court change in New York.

So I didn't hear about that.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, there's always new changes. That's the thing.

You have to, you have to delete ChatGPT save searches in, if you have—

There's no way, there's no way around it. It's just all saved forever and it's court ordered at this point. So you can use Claude or other options, but, but GPT particularly, just know that it's not—

They singled out ChatGPT instead of Gemini and Claude.

That was the one that came up in that particular court case, but I don't have the, I don't have much background on exactly why the ruling went that way. I just, I've read about it and made a good note of it because of the implications.

Peter, what do you have to include on this? And just before you start, who you are, what you do, why did you join the roundtable quick? Sure.

So I was an invitee of Stephanie. So thank you, Stephanie, and thank you, Michael. Yeah, I work for a company called Factor 11. We are a platform that connects hyperlocal demand to retailers from sort of online visitors around everywhere. That isn't Meta and Google. But yeah, I mean, just to Hannah's point quickly, and it's not why I raised my hand, but yeah, there is a growing subcategory in AI around AI data permissioning because even major organizations, like big orgs, are now having this problem too, where even if you have all of your data ring-fenced within your own GPT instance, it can be very, very challenging to ensure that people can't just inside your organization can't query information that then is used to feed responses by GPT, but are having gaining access to information you shouldn't have, like, you know, what is the CEO salary, or, you know, whatever it might be, right, that like that, it's, it gets very complex. And I think even from small to large businesses, but no, I just wanted to kind of go back to Michael Gelb's issue, they, you know, Dan Ads were a partner of ours when I was working at the Washington Post, and we were trying to launch Zeus. But Michael, just, just to get a little clearer on your question, is this about helping those platforms monetize the smaller to medium-sized enterprises rather than the scale advertisers they already have?

Exactly.

Yeah.

So I should have said that earlier. So that, that is the target market I'm going after, is educating SMBs and tier 2, tier 3 agencies that, you know, there are all these ad buying platforms now that are readily available and you don't have to go through, have a DSP or SSP and, you know, have all these fees that, you know, with all the middlemen in the middle that you can buy directly from publishers. And so yeah, I am solving for the SMBs to educate them and trying to get them comfortable with purchasing media directly.

Okay. Yeah.

Cause it was, it was a challenge that we had as well at Zeus. And unfortunately, just as we were trying to face it, the plug got pulled.

Yep.

But, uh, they're back now.

Yeah, he needed more money for his wedding in Venice. But, uh, but yeah, the, the— what we started to look at with, with some of those brands, I don't know, this is valuable, this is actually starting to look at a very— looking at things from a very different marketing challenge, or, you know, a different marketing viewpoint. So kind of product-led growth rather than these businesses that we're so used to. Like, let's take for example, you know, your enterprise partners, they are so used to taking, you know, direct sales collateral to market. And that's great when you're talking to a major agency or a huge corporation who are probably advertising with them anyway. But it gets a lot harder when it's, you know, monetizing local inventory from a, from a small business in— I'm just going to throw it out there— Des Moines, right, who probably can't even recognize that there is an opportunity for them to advertise on these platforms, right? Their world just looks like Meta products and SEO.

Des Moines, Iowa? Yeah, yeah. I used to work for Dice.com out of Des Moines.

Yeah, I was trying to pick a town, um, but like, yeah, you know what I mean?

Small town, but, uh, with, with 10 pizza shops, you don't know New York. Yeah, they got pizza from New York. That's all it counts, right? Alan, do you have a question, or—

I just actually wanted to comment on Michael. Michael, I'd love to connect after my, uh, I work with the SMB market, and I guess, um, I mean, it sounds like you're solving for this, and I feel like you've already handled it, but I can tell you that if you can give them some very— you know, you're talking about educating them, and I think Um, giving them the answers, some very specific, hey, here's what's worked before, like a really small bite on where to start and having that be repeatable. In my experience, um, when they're coming into, into your space, they, they know so little and you know so much, and, and it's, it's overwhelming to the point of paralyzing. And so, um, and again, love to connect, and, and I'm actually looking for partners in my business right now for this because when I work with scale-ups, they realize that they need something, just a more leverageable advertising component. And, but they really, they haven't been in this space, right? I'm working with a lot of tech, tech SaaS and, and service-based work. So I would just say to you, like, how could you make it so small and obvious and say this little bite, this has worked for this type of client in this way and, and just give them 3 options and reduce the options. I think could change so much in them trying to kind of navigate and figure it out. But that really came to me.

If you look at Costco, if you look at Costco and this is not apples to apples, they give you 2 or 3 things to look at and they make it or 2. They said, here's this or this. Don't give too many options. Then your brain melts down. And they've been there. I love Costco, but You gotta make it here. Don't make me try to understand what you're trying to tell me. What's in it for me? Who cares? How do you help me keep my job? And how do you help me feel good about staying at this company? If you're trying to sell them something, help them versus sell them. There's so much pitch slapping going on on LinkedIn. I mean, this is my world. Pitch slapping in email and LinkedIn. I do this, we help companies do that. I, I, I, we, we, we. You know what they say, we, we, we, then you pee over people. You know, so it's like there's that old saying, stop pitching, stop feature selling. What do you do to help somebody actually just get better at something? Patrick?

I was going to echo off what Ellen said. So I'm currently working at a venture capital firm here in Atlanta, but prior to that founded a company that used AI to find waste and fraud in expense reports. And we eventually recognized just what she said. We'd implemented more systems than anyone we were talking to. And we started becoming very prescriptive, just the exact opposite of consultative selling. We come and go, this is what you should do. Here's how you do it. Because every time we were selling to big companies, every time you ask them a question like, what workflow do you want? Well, that kicks off 3 meetings for them.

Them, right?

And we had a better idea of what their workflow should be, what they should be looking for, all that kind of stuff. So I think being very— being prescriptive when you have expertise to bear can, can help you a lot. And it, and it does keep you doing, uh, you know, your delivery more, uh, repeatable, repetitive kind of.

What do you— what do you do, Patrick?

Uh, now I'm so Eventually sold that company to private equity and 7 years ago joined Tech Operators where we invest in B2B, in particular cybersecurity software. So, we're based here in Atlanta and I forgot to mention Caroline Ford invited me.

So, Caroline Ford, would you give her a little background about what Caroline and you guys do in Atlanta because it's a pretty unique accelerator like what we do here in in Orlando. We have our Orlando, um, we have, uh, what's it called, University of Central Florida, UCF, that has a tech incubator. Georgia Tech has one. That's, I think that's what you're part of, right?

Well, that's what she's part of. She's part of the ATDC, the Advanced Technology Development Center, which I believe is the oldest university-associated incubator accelerator in, in the country. So it's been around a long time.

I don't—

Caroline may know. Um, uh, and, and we work with them a lot, and I certainly try to be helpful to entrepreneurs and that kind of stuff. And so, uh, that's where Caroline and I collaborate.

Well, nice to have you, Patrick. I think we have a conversation scheduled too, right?

Yeah, we talked about— yeah, I'm happy to.

Yeah, cool. Um, Evan.

I just wanted to go back to Ellen's point a little bit. I found it interesting. Evan, I'm the founder of Dreamwriter. We're a B2B hyper-personalization platform located on Menlo Park. Joined this because I, a couple of weeks ago, joined one of these roundtables and loved the conversation, so wanted to rejoin. But one of the things that I found really interesting about kind of determining whether you need, you should focus on an educational-based market marketing tactic or doing more thought leadership is one, thinking about the space that you're in, whether it's a new market that you need to educate more, or whether it's a really established market where a lot of people already know a lot about you, but also your target audience. And a lot of times when it's more on the SMB front, if it's a new solution, you're needing to do a lot more education-based marketing versus if it's you're targeting really established companies that have specific positions dedicated to the exact market that you're in, you dial it back. But I think a really interesting additional point is that different roles. So if you're looking at your buying center and there may be some roles that need to have more education-based versus ones that need to have more thought leadership. So really taking and breaking down your ICP to have the right messaging and the right approach for each individual area within that.

And how did you learn about the roundtable?

How did I learn about— through Flo Baymond originally. So I joined last week. Yeah.

Awesome. We have Noel, who is actually a friend of Dr. Ford's as well. Dr. Ford is on the roundtable. I'm asking her to come off camera and not be so shy here, but go ahead, Noel.

Yes, so my name is Noel Ross. I'm with Sweet Ross. I'm in the food industry, and so there's a lot of small businesses in this industry, and I'm in wholesale and manufacturing. And so what I would like to add is, I think when you're looking at small businesses, especially right now, from my perspective, is that you need to have of really a lot of flexibility. Um, maybe kind of think about how the target is not so long-term and just have smaller milestone goals, because the way that our industry is moving, you know, it's basically by the day there's a lot of changes. So you have to think like, what exactly would be the goal for maybe 2 quarters or maybe just a year versus like how long it would have been in the past? Like, let's do a 3 to 5 year idea or a pitch or a target market because within the food industry and with people moving so much and the stores changing a lot, we have to be extremely flexible and very innovative. And so I also work with Georgia Tech and the Georgia Manufacturing Extension Program as well as AIM, which is the AI and Manufacturing Program. And so I'm using ChatGPT and basically a lot of different innovative ways with cybersecurity and, and also looking into like how you can generate targeting specific target markets. Because the way that the markets are moving right now, and I mean moving in a sense of physically, people are not in the same spaces where they are. So it's hard to find the small businesses or hard to find the same stores. But ChatGPT GCP has been one of those things that because it is very flexible and there's a lot of data that's being driven constantly every single day, it gives you the opportunity to use the, the textual dexterity of the data that's being analyzed frequently because everyone's putting into the database. So I was invited by Caroline Ford. Thank you very much. And so I hope that kind of helps.

Awesome. There's a lot of tips and tactics that basically work and don't work in Gemini or ChatGPT. And if you could automate any type of flow in your life that doesn't look robotic to your end customers, that's a very good thing. But you got to know how to talk to AI because if I have people go, do you guys take someone's LinkedIn profile and then send them a very specific message? So I'm gonna say, I look at your LinkedIn, I see that Noelle is part of, uh, the group at Georgia Tech. She doesn't work for Georgia Tech. So now it's talking about that you work for Georgia Tech because it reads that, and now you lost the whole message. So the more you say, I think I know who you are, and be cutesy about it You got to be careful what AI is going to produce, and not even in an automated way that doesn't make any sense. So when you think about trying to get people together like, like I'm doing right now, hey, I want you to be a special guest. We're doing, in your case, something about food industry best practices, what's working, what's not. I want to get all these people that are in the space and industry personas to chat together. That's much better than saying, Michael, I see that you work for Hershey's. I know that you make ice cream. I know you guys just had a great 10-Q. Does that look like—

No, it's not authentic. Like, honestly, I find it so offensive.

Yeah.

Congratulations, Brandy, on your awesome workout. And then half the time their AI like somehow manages to leech off of like, I'm connected to you. Like, oh, and I see you work with Michael and you're his CMO. No, I am not. Like, so I think it's important if you're going to utilize AI out in the wild, you got to train it and you have to put guardrails on it so that it has a tenor and a tone. It doesn't go, you know, off into crazy areas. Like my personal AI is, you know, she's a little quirky and pithy, kind of like me, a little sassy.

A little, no, no.

A little sassy. But at the same time, like my AI is taught, if someone hits my personal AI, it knows if they're not quote unquote showing buying signals, but they just want to have a conversation or they want to shoot the shit, that AI is going to support them through like choosing the hair color the next time they go to the hair, whatever it is. But I think it's really important if you're going to employ AI, put the guardrails on because that, that's representing you out in the wild. And once it says something or goes off the rails, that's your reputation. You can't get it back. You've just put your reputation on tech. You know, I think you guys all have like— I'm learning a lot and I'm so super grateful for it. I think, you know, especially when dealing with smaller companies, you know, you find people are— companies are either what I call science-driven or they're sales-driven, right? Their, their team is like a profound team and they like, they've got some fabulous product or service or tech and they're all about that. And that's where like their employees and their leadership come from. Or it's the converse, that they're sales and marketing. And I think the easiest way, at least for us, in establishing strong, beautiful symbiotic relationships with new clients is understanding who they are, what their strengths are, what their internal ethos is, what their priorities are, and then understanding, like, true needs and then true wants. And then once you establish that, then you can lean in with a plan that's going to be appropriate.

Awesome, awesome, awesome feedback. I think we have— let's see, Gregory. What, what, what? Yeah.

I was just gonna, so I'm a co-founder of an AI startup. We're, uh, 3, 3 quarters in market. We do audience building. Um, and the problem that I've had just besides the pivoting, so I just, I'll throw that. We, I wanna touch back, I was saying earlier, pivoting your business is so important and being able to pivot quickly and enterprise don't do that. We've had to pivot our entire go-to-market because most enterprises can't transition their go-to-market to use our data well enough and it just doesn't work out even though the data outconverts. So the, we had to pivot how we sell the data. But I, the part that I was gonna go back to is training the AI. There isn't a platform on the market where you're gonna put your, that I've seen without building your own model that will allow you to train it in a way to have a conversation that's relevant to your buyer personas, right? Because if you think about all of the AI SDR tools out there on the market, they don't have any other resources other than what they've connected to, right? 10-Ks, LinkedIn profiles, right? Those are all the inputs that they're getting. Even your CRM data doesn't necessarily give a complete picture of what that, the, the person's behavior is or how they interact. Or what they consume, right? And to get a psychographic profile around that. And I haven't found anything on the market. I was— Evan and I had talked after our last roundtable a few weeks ago, and he's working towards that. That really helps. You know, there's one or two out there that, that are only copy. They don't do any of the other stuff, right?

Yeah.

And that— and that's, I think, one of the bigger problems. And also, like, you connect this up to your tool and it's got all your financial, all your closed one, who you're doing business with, and it's a token-based model. Now all of a sudden all of that's in the models.

But you're—

but, but the thing is, when you take AI and you come across way too— here's what I know about you by reading, read, read, reading— it's not a— you're telling them what they already know, right? And you tell them that you know that, that I know that you know that I know.

And it's offensive.

Like, like DeNiro said, it was— it's an offensive conversation. You know, but the thing is, it's like, who cares? So what? Why are you telling me this? How does this help me? And we have 41 people on this call today, the Zoom call, because we asked all you guys to give your feedback and, and network, not because I'm trying to tell you I understand your lead gen problems and I want you guys, or I want to pitch this, the Branding CRM or, or other people, or Stephanie's agency. They helped me, so I gave them a little light at the future. But the whole idea is to have a cohort, you know. And so if you do things where I'm at this event, I'm doing a cohort, I'm doing a roundtable, I saw that you're attending this, let's chat, versus I think I know from reading all this stuff and using AI that I understand your business. It's business dating. I know that I'm gonna get dinged by somebody saying this is not dating. It is, it's business dating. Don't pitch slap and don't say, hey, let's go on a cruise when I've just met you. How about we go out for a cup of coffee, we talk about what, what, what's your likes in life? Or in this case, it'd be, what's your, what's your needs for your business? What makes you happy? And just not be salesy. Are we— everybody's always trying to pitch too much, and that's not the way you could do this relationship. It's really relationship You can definitely get a lot done on a Zoom call with a group of people versus me having one call with Gregory, one call with Brandy, one call with Peter. Great, we should do that if there is intent for us to maybe work together. But when people are trying to pitch slap and there's so much of this crap going on, it's like really going up to somebody that you're interested in going, you want to get married? I want to sell you something. I want to stay more— let's sign a prenup. That's— it's business data. You gotta look at like, how do you develop that conversation relationship the way you would if you were, if you were doing it and for your personal reasons? I'm telling right now, I've been selling. I'm a really good sales guy, I'm a really good Legion guy, and I was totally against all this. I was like, I do this, this helps that, what's, what's the problem? No, it's not about what my product does, it's about how can I figure out is there any synergies there. And really what happens is if you could say, hey, I'm going to be at a conference, whether you use automation or not, and say, going to be at a conference, see you're speaking, there's 20 speakers, you don't need automation for that. Just say, I'm going to be at Gartner IT Symposium in Atlanta, do you want to, do you want to grab a cup of coffee together? I'd just like to maybe just look at my network or your network, see if there's ways to help each other. Nonchalant. Nonchalant. How about we, uh, get Vince on here and then we'll go to Noel? I've heard Vince kind of introduce himself. And what, what do you— what, what's something— again, what's something that you've learned, yes, good or bad, that addresses some of this AI, top of funnel, partnership programs, whatever we're talking about here, which a lot of it's around AI? What can you— what can you spread your knowledge on, Vince?

Thank you, Michael. I think from a standpoint of AI, the one cautionary aspect of this is your data security and your cybersecurity, because one of the things that people don't always think about is things like ChatGPT is it's open and available to the wild. So if you're putting any sensitive information in there, it is not, you know, it's not protected. So I would just urge people especially if they're looking at sensitive information, if you're working with a sensitive client, to give that some thought. I'm not an expert in cybersecurity, but my significant other is, and I would just urge you to think about that because it's a— it is a danger moving forward, especially if you're looking at sharing anything specific or branding new products, anything like that. Just be careful about that. But I do agree with what you were saying, Michael. I think it's become very much a pitch-centric approach. People are working too hard to try to close a deal in the first message or the first outreach, just as opposed to building a response. One of the things that I have found that works really well is first connecting with someone on LinkedIn through Navigator. And then being able to start a conversation there, then take it maybe if you're going to follow up into an AI tool.

What happens on LinkedIn, because this is my world, is you should follow, maybe, maybe say something about their post, right? Not like, great post. Like, say, hey, thanks for sharing. Do you have any— like, I use, do you have any good events that you'd recommend coming up? By the way, I'm doing one for CROs. That works magically. And then when you send them an invite, don't say, I sent you an invite because I see you're doing this and I want to talk about that. Again, you're pitch slapping, kind of. Just send an invite and don't put anything else, right? Okay, I see that you know Steve. No one cares yet, you know. It's, it's— you look at what everybody's doing and stop doing it because it's going to get, A, your LinkedIn banned, B, get your, your email approach into a spam approach. Don't send out the same message all the time. Hit 15 email inboxes and send out 50 emails per box per day and use automation platform. There's levels to this stuff. And again, if it's not about them, then who is it about?

Right.

That's a good thing to think about.

Noelle. You know, you took the words right out of my mouth by saying like there's levels to this. When you come to dealing with AI, one of the things that I was trained with at Georgia Tech is that there's scalability behind it. And there also has to be a generic side to it to go back to what you were saying about cybersecurity. So I would never want to say something like Noel's Granny Green Apples, right? I would just want to say apples. And I would want to build the understanding to outreach, not so much through searching. I think a lot of people search through AI, but you have to kind of get enough data of what you're doing. So if the language that it's familiar with and it can learn what you're doing consistently. So you have to have a sense of formality to it and be really specific, like write a brief note, I need to write a letter, and then it learns in that way. It needs to be a descriptive form, it needs to be a narrative in that kind of way. And then once you— once it establishes what you want on a personal level, you scale it up to something to where it's more industry— I'm sorry, commercial specific. So green apples that go into Kroger's, right? Not Noel's green granny apples, but green apples that go into Kroger's, right? And that's very generic still. Any Kroger's, any green apple. And then after you go up to that point, you scale it up into industry, more global. So the idea is that there's just apples everywhere. Apples in France, apples in Washington, apples, and then I could say, okay, hey, where are all the green apples? And then what are the crop harvests that happen in September for green apples, right? So that way you can protect yourself as far as the data that you're trying to get without people, without that fear of being able to be exposed. But then also you have the scalability of AI understanding, okay, there's a person, there's a corporation, and then there's an industry, and then it'll kind of work, uh, backwards and reverse to where it'll understand exactly what you're looking for with the tonality of how you're writing to it, as well as the actual information, because it's machine learning plus it's data analytics, and then also it's, it's giving the memory side to it because it's getting this really good search stuff, right? And I think once I started to understand, like, that's what it's about and not just running a bunch of weird questions in there. Like, like, I can't remember her name about the, you know, what color should I dye my hair? I'd be like, stay away from that kind of stuff. Like, it won't help because it'll just confuse the language and you just need to kind of be very specific and keep drilling down on it. So it'll understand, like, what are we trying to do for a task? What are you specifically wanting? Do you want to do a pitch? Are you trying to do a proposal, you know, um, and then it'll kind of retweak what it's doing over and over and over again. And I've been very, uh, very lucky to work with ATDC for a long time, and, you know, they've really helped me understand, like, how many ways to look at this for myself within manufacturing. So, um, that's, that's just something that I think that I feel a lot of people are just using AI as a search engine, and it's not really meant to be just a search engine, like like that.

Easiest way for people to understand how to really use it too, right? I think for people that aren't in an industry the way that we are, or that is exposed to it all the time, that's kind of what they're used to. And we're even now advising our clients on how to optimize their websites and how to optimize, you know, their strategy to show up in AI search engines and, and, and in AI results. Because even if you look at Google now and you do a search, you know, the first few, um, answers are no longer sponsored, they're AI-driven.

Yeah.

And then it's a sponsored—

even, even in theory, they're saying, do you— would you like to use ChatGPT? Yeah. I feel like theory is horrible for me, you know.

You know what I'm noticing? We were actually— we're having an internal conversation, so they're finding that people, like, for the rote stuff, like, my kid has a bee sting, people aren't going and using Google traditionally because you're like, do I go to WebMD? Do I go to Harvard.edu? You just get your specific answer. So it's the exploration of new things that I think search has a lot of relevance for. But yeah, those quick, like, very tangible answers, people are going to AI.

People are looking, how do I come up on the answers of ChatGPT and Gemini versus how do I get on the whole Google approach? It's crazy because you got to have a profile of why you should be listed on, on ChatGPT and AI. I think Google and all these other search engines are going to be very smallly used in the future compared to— or they've integrated, obviously.

But no, you're 100%, you know, I forget and I apologize which one of you was talking about like you got to figure out when to pivot. And I'm waiting for Google to, like, figure out their pivot point because, you know, a million years ago, I used to run a consulting company where we went into industry-specific organizations and, you know, righted the ship, pivot the ship, or sank the ship. And I'm waiting for the search engines.

I want to get some other folks.

They pivoted.

Wait, I want to get some other folks that we haven't spoke yet. Andrew, tell us what you do and why you joined the roundtable.

Yeah, Michael, I'm like, like Patrick, I was invited by Caroline Ford. I've been a chief revenue officer my entire life until we sold a technology company we started in '04, sold in '14, and I came back in-house. And so I'm growing revenue, not only working with clients, but also our entrepreneurs and our ecosystem. We, we invest a lot in private. And so I'm always trying to get better.

Yeah.

My main question is always, what's the name of your company, Andrew? Oh, sorry.

VIP Wealth. We're here in Atlanta, about a $3.5 billion wealth management firm. Here in Atlanta by a bunch of Georgia Tech guys, baseball guys, put in a plug-in for Georgia Tech baseball. But long story short, my immediate next door neighbor is now a professor at Georgia Tech teaching a PhD level class in AI. And with the West Coast route and long story short, my question is always around, and I talked to him the other day at length, what do you feed the beast? Like I'm literally writing playbooks, internal playbooks, KPIs, messaging responses. We're acquiring smaller independent advisory firms. So writing the what happens after the honeymoon, so to speak, like all of that kind of stuff. And my kind of my, my need on my end is literally the best place to go start to learn. I know how to use AI for the most part. I put myself on a middle level. I'm embracing it, but it goes back to that. Are there great blogs, podcasts, learnings, teachings, findings? I went to Georgia Tech, so I'm a student of the game. And I was thinking of Noel. I already reached out to you. I'm about to send a direct message to say, is the ATDC teaching this to a lot of the younger entrepreneurs of how are they able to run their business even more efficiently with less people? Yeah, that was a long—

that was a lot, but a lot of STEM people and, and see, there's a lot of STEM people in, in, in, uh, business building a product, but they need to produce revenue and they're looking for accelerators and just venture capital. If you have more revenue coming in with your own self-propelled revenue that's repeatable and scalable, you're going to get accelerator and VC money way better, faster, and cheaper because they— you already have a proven model. So I would definitely suggest anybody that's really a STEM mind, or, or even people that are entrepreneur, have an MVP, get some revenue coming in, service the hard on the backend. If you can't do everything on tech, it will happen. I mean, I grew something to $50K a month, $80,000 a month without even building anything because I was able to use software as a service selling service sales as a service. And I'm not saying I'm the greatest entrepreneur in the world because I'm not. There's way more successful people on here, but revenue is king. Content is king, and I've been doing this for a long time. Warner Brothers, NFL, Monster. If you don't have revenue, you don't have content unique, and you're selling the same old crap and you're selling iced Eskimos, it's an up, up, up, upstair battle. You know, you're trying to climb those stairs every single time. Work smarter and work smarter, more efficiently. Go ahead, Noel.

Um, so I would like to look at it as a specialization. So every AI model is a little different. So like Claude is really good for writing. I think it's good for formalities. ChatGPT is really kind of good for partnering with other different corporations. So there's like Canva, LinkedIn, and stuff like that. Gemini is more so for like building your AIs. If you wanted to do like something to do with Python. I, again, I work with the ATDC, but I work in more than one different program. So I also work with Georgia AIM, which is the AI in manufacturing. And so with me specializing in AI with Georgia Tech, that's kind of my scope is AI in manufacturing with dealing with sensors, automization, and robots. And so that's another way that I look at technology.

Do you think manufacturing has taken on how do I get more customers in the I feel like they're doing process and automation to build things, but they're not necessarily figuring out how do I sell more what I build. They're not using that, the marketing business development partnership approach. They're doing this more on machinery, processes, operations. Tell me, this is not my space. I'm asking this as an inquisitive question.

Yes, I would say it's definitely more about operations, um, because Well, with AI in manufacturing, right, it is about streamlining and doing a different type of manufacturing. So you're looking at more lean manufacturing, doing more circular manufacturing, and that kind of processes, processing, engineering going into what would be like net zero or something like that. So scaling into sales is still kind of, I think, a new territory and very like pioneering because And this is why I was saying, again, like being so flexible, because with the way that so many different corporations have changed their footprints or, you know, their, their customers themselves have changed, you have to kind of understand that the trajectory for sales might look a little different. But when it comes to automation with equipment and workforce, that's a whole nother thing. Yeah, game in itself, right? I mean, it's like It's hard to kind of just scale that down in 2 seconds.

I wanted to—

I don't mean to cut you off, but we're running way over. And I wanted to thank Stephanie and Brandy and especially Dr. Ford. I've never met such a giving, caring person in my life that wants to help people. And I think we should— I do this every 2 weeks. So you're welcome to join that, everybody. Um, I also work with people like Stephanie and Brandy to help use their LinkedIn profile to automate this, and Dr. Ford, Carolyn Ford, and took their LinkedIn. And this is why we're at— we were at 55 people today, now we're at 15 because we're over time. But, um, this is probably one of the larger ones. We had about a couple hundred, 200— you have 200 people say they're going to show up And then you got about a 20 to 30% show rate because people get pulled into fires or things that's going on. So I wanted to kind of just give Stephanie and Brandy maybe 60 seconds to say goodbye and thank you. I wanted to say thanks for joining. Come as many as you want. If you want to talk about me helping you with lead gen automation, doing your own roundtables, happy to help. Stephanie, you want to close out too?

Thank you everybody for coming. I thought that this was really informative and very helpful. I love everybody's perspective. Um, I appreciate, you know, my connections that came and participated or came and learned something. I know that there was some people last minute said that they couldn't, but this was really great. So I thank you for the invitation and, um, hope to, you know, see all you guys soon.

Awesome. Thanks, Stephanie, for helping, and look forward to working with you in the future. And Brandy, you want to do a quick, uh, thank you?

Absolutely. So thank you, Michael, for having me here. I've so learned and enjoyed so much from listening to everybody. I love to meet people and brainstorm and understand what makes you tick and talk. So anyone that wants to connect and we can just have like a cool brainstorming session, I would absolutely welcome that.

So remember everybody, there's 3 buttons take that button right by the chat, download the chat. I felt like this was pretty informative, but nothing that we can't post on maybe my YouTube channel as far as this is the learnings from it. I'm going to take the AI approach of this transcript and say summarize what we learned, and then I'm going to post that on LinkedIn as well. And feel free to contact any of us. Hopefully we trade business tactics on our own, one-to-one. Doesn't always need to be kind of a group thing, but if you have ideas around doing this, or you're going to an event and you're trying to get— figure out how to do some guerrilla marketing, I always say fish where people fish. Stop trying to convince— like, if you're an ad— you sell advertising, sell advertising to advertisers. Don't convince someone how to use advertising. That's two things now you gotta convince. Do like tier 1, tier 2, and tier 3. Look at what's already low-hanging fruit. So God bless you guys, um, love this good conversation, and let's keep in touch. And then two more weeks we got another one going, and then, uh, I also have one-offs, roundtables as well. Thank you everybody, have a good week.

Thank you.