CRO Founders Revenue Pipeline Best Practices Tips Tactics and Strategies 2025 06 24

I thought that was a dig at the way that Microsoft—

this meeting is being recorded.

Eventually there'll only be one Zoom user. Who will it be? Well, I originally like doing it where if you look at Alex and Michael and Victor's title, you could see who they are, what they do. You know, this is like visible FaceTime for you, so you should definitely let people know who you are and even what company or 'Even in, you know, Dimitri Dash, I help companies.' That's, that's a good practice on any of these, like, networking calls especially. I mean, obviously if you're with a one-to-one call, you don't need to do that as much, but that's a little tip, um, as well. Yeah, I agree with you, Michael. In fact, a lot of college students I mentor on LinkedIn, and they'll put, you know, they're a junior at Purdue University, and I always tell them a junior at Purdue University seeking a career in logistics. Like, be specific. Yeah, yep. Who cares?

So what?

Why are you telling me this? How's this help me? You know, give me some emotional or mental stimulation besides Michael Filato, you know, just on the name. Have a background if you can. Make sure you have ring lights. I mean, if you look at Bettina, she's well-lit, nice background, you know, it's those types of things. Make sure your camera is at the eye level as much as possible, because if you're like this or like this, it's distracting. Um, that's, that's really like— I mean, I was in TV production, so it's, to me, well-lit is very important. And also just looking professional, like, don't be in your, uh in your sleepwear and trying to do a meeting. But I think that's— that was more during COVID Let's see, we got here 24. I think we could get started pretty soon here. It's 5 after. Okay. So did I put the— yeah, I did. So in the chat, you'll see some of the things that we want to talk about today. And I'll just kind of introduce myself. I'm basically the host of the roundtable. Me and Victor, we, uh, we run Full Throttle, Full Auto Leads, and we're basically a lead gen company, um, that does roundtable masterminds like this to basically spread the word about what's working and what's not, some tips, tactics, strategies, even tech of things that you might want to share with other people. Things that didn't work that we can learn from and things that worked. Maybe some things about current events like, hey, how are these tariffs affecting you? What's some workarounds? What's some bold things that you've done that really significantly impacted your, your revenue in the last couple, couple of months? So those are the things that it's not really Michael Filotto. So we're not here to do a commercial for Full Throttle. We're not here to have someone go on and on about their company. It's like when I call on you, please raise your hand and say, hey, here's, uh, my name is John, this is what I do, I live in Chicago, um, I help companies do A, B, and C. But two things I learned, Michael, was that A, B, and C, right? And then we can have discussion points around that. It's much more conversational than how I started this whole roundtable thing, much who you are, what you do, tell us, and tell us in 90 seconds. We went around the whole room for 40 minutes doing intros. It was boring. It was commercials. And then no one wanted to keep on coming. This way, it's always different. Um, I mean, Rob Vidal there has been with me for months and months, and he always has a good expression on his face because he loves to talk and loves to listen. So yeah, so anyways, I'm in Orlando. Like I said, we do these things for our clients, and I do them for me to basically learn from other people and hopefully get business. And if anything, refer business to each other. Put your information in the chat so we don't have to do commercials. But again, when you talk, please introduce yourself, what you do, why you joined the roundtable today, what kind of got you, brought you to the table, and then two things that either worked or didn't work. And where I'm going to start off right now is What's some bold moves that I've— that's impacted my pipeline? So that's— I'll start with that for me. Some of the things that I've been doing is working with other people that have a pretty big Rolodex on LinkedIn like me. I have 30,000. So I've taken their LinkedIn and teamed up to do a roundtable one-off and said, okay, let's do something together. I won't charge you for the first one, but Um, I take all their, like, say, 10,000 connections and say, let's go after CROs and CEOs and do either a roundtable separately if it's a little bit off subject of what I do. And it basically builds my pipe with someone else's pipe. I help them build their pipe because I have 30,000 connections. I do this every day, and I'm not, you know, charging for the first one. So that's one thing that's really affected my pipeline is being able to you have someone put their arm around me and say, Michael and I are doing something and I trust him and that he trusts me versus, hey, I'm just going out cold. So that's one thing I learned. I also learned that if you look at LinkedIn, you definitely want Sales Navigator. You definitely should automate your LinkedIn so you don't have to do manual tasks. Spend more time selling and less time hunting every day.

That's—

be more strategic in what you're doing. I see a lot of people, this is the way I do it. I only do, you know, referrals and I only do one-to-one. Like, open the door with LinkedIn or email at least. Give them something like a roundtable or, hey, are you going to be at SASTR in San Mateo next month? Have something to talk about versus, hey, I'd like to network with you, I do this. You sound like everybody else. So that's my two tips. Um, anybody want to go next? Want to raise your hand on the on the Zoom hand thing. Or if any questions for me. Amir.

Raising my hand, I don't know how to do it yet.

Figure out how to raise my hand too. That's all right, go ahead, Amir.

Sure, what's up guys? My name is Amir Ryder. Some of you guys might know me, some of you guys might not. I used to run a— CloudTask used to be a sales agency. We got to about 360 contractors at the time and I pivoted to a B2B marketplace. The pivot's been A lot of work, a lot of technical work, but we are a GTM, go-to-market-focused marketplace with 3 objects.

What happened?

Oh, never mind. So we have 3 objects. We have service providers. Michael is somebody I met in SaaStr. Funny story, I was able to make him a qualified meeting within 5 minutes. The guy did not buy, unfortunately, because he wanted to pay for performance, but it was a good match nonetheless. So we have software people and agencies. Some of our clients are hiring Sdrs, we built a lot of trust and, and, you know, comfort with them and that we were able to just upsell and cross-sell different agencies, whether it's SEO, paper meet, like different types of agencies. There's also 49 different types of agencies we have. I would state that just to contribute here, 'cause I could talk forever, things that have not been working for me in the last 5 years, and, and I guess I mean this in like the very direct, honest, polite way, was like truth and honesty where I was leading a lot with just like, you know, I made this mistake before, don't make it. Or just like kind of giving people like not giving people what they want to hear. And I noticed that the second you kind of try to give people a little bit of education, they kind of took offense. So I started to just kind of go with the flow and give people like, just really be nice to people and like, let them, let them tell me what they want. Versus trying to give them advice. So I think from a sales perspective, maybe you guys have noticed this, that like, uh, relationships do matter. People— I always thought that people would buy the best product based on their business challenge, but I'm learning that they buy from people they like. So I think now than ever, um, people are willing to buy an inferior service or product if they like you, which means that it doesn't mean that you should have an inferior product or service. It just means that you're able to win business based on being, being likable and being nice, right? And that's one learning that I had for me. And then another learning, if we want to talk about lead gen, was that I was able to, and I'll tell you the business, and I'll be super quick, you know, cut me off short, but I was able to, I had a business challenge with HubSpot where like my email sending rate went from 40% to 5% overnight. And then I purchased HubSpot's Beehive and I was able to, build an opted-in list of 150,000 people within 7 months to a year. And we are generating a lot of business and a lot of branding from newsletters. So I guess just to contribute with what's been working, this is like the Weekly 10 and like some of you might receive this, but we're getting, we are getting, and Mike, you're in one of these, we're getting 120,000, 6 opted in, 40% open rate and, and I guess my recommendation is that if you don't have a personal newsletter, it's a great time to do one because we have definitely, I've definitely noticed that we're getting buyers from newsletters and, you know, we're obviously going on, you know, we're, I met, I met Mike at a, at an event. So just getting out there with people, showing that you're building relationships has really worked for me. And I guess I'm transferring that to you guys, cuz I'm sure that it probably could work for you guys if it's not working for me.

Yeah. With that, Is Beehive like, um, like, uh, SendGrid, or is it something different?

Well, it's actually like more like a Substack, or more like even, uh, LinkedIn's newsletter functionality, where it's a newsletter platform and it just allows you to put a newsletter up together super quick, super fast, really easy to send. And it's also an advertisement network, so companies like, uh, HubSpot will pay me like $2 a click. Companies like, um Artisan, which got funded, which is like that AI, they pay you per click. So it's more of like a, um, Substack competitor.

Okay.

Thanks, Larry.

Anybody else wanna share or ask, ask a question? Can you stop, uh, sharing, Larry?

I thought I did, but yeah, I can try again. Sorry.

Yeah, you're still sharing.

Yeah, my apologies. I'm actually not a Zoom user, so I'm a little slow with it. Uh, yeah, there you go. I was on a different screen.

Sorry about that.

There you go.

It works. How about Bettina? You want to introduce yourself and tell us something, why you joined the Roundtable, and then also a tip or tactic that has worked, that's significantly helped with your fight or your client's fight?

So I'm not an American, so I'm mainly in Europe. So when I talk, when I hear Amir talking, you're talking as if you are under a lot of pressure. So fast and like these, we are not like this. Yeah. So we are more, yeah, we're taking our time. Yeah. So get to know each other, introduce ourselves, be polite, be kind, these kind of things. Yeah. What works for me is basically proving that I'm an expert in the field that I'm working in. So how I do this, I'm Speaking at events, I'm doing podcasts, I'm doing all sorts of posts, I'm answering questions. This morning I did a roundtable with one of the SPM suppliers, these kind of things. So that works, like wear them down. Basically, that worked in the, in the past a lot.

Were you, were you basically, what do you do?

Um, yeah, so I'm a, um, I'm a management consultant. For companies that have sales teams to not just pay them any kind of non-related money, but to pay them with purpose. So to link the sales compensation design to the company strategy.

And where are you based?

I'm based in good old London.

London.

Okay. Where's your accent from?

Germany.

Germany.

Sprechen Sie Deutsch? I spreche Deutsch.

Yeah. So my customers are basically worldwide, namely huge enterprises or smaller companies. But yeah, they, as I'm dealing with very confident information, they want me, they want to trust me. So that's important.

Well, thanks for sharing. Please everybody put your information in chat. There's a button, there's like 3 dots where you're after At the end of this, you should save that and basically, uh, have everybody's information. John, go ahead.

Everyone, um, I'm here in Atlanta, Georgia. I jumped on, I wanted to really hear from everyone on what's going on in the marketplace. Um, I am a certified Sandler sales trainer, so I help corporate sales team actually, uh, navigate conversations and quantify pain and ask better questions to actually get to the point of knowing if two parties should be doing business in the first place. Um, but I'm just here to listen, man, and hopefully pick up something that can, uh, create revenue for me.

Well, do you have, uh, something that failed or something that worked in the last 8 weeks that you can give us some knowledge on?

Yeah, but Tina kind of shed light on it. So we, we do a lot of one-to-many conversations, so I do a lot of free talks The most recent one, we did a talk at a concrete association. Martin Concrete here in Atlanta is one of my bigger clients, and they invited us out to come speak to about 3,000 concrete organizations that met, and it's led to probably 16 new deals in the pipeline and 2 new pieces of business that have been closed, just borrowing credibility from them and the relationship we have. So anytime you can get in front of a group of people and have a conversation where they can decide that they like Michael, for example, It's really been advantageous versus cold calling one-on-one.

Yeah, it's like the whole, like, LinkedIn approach that I'm doing as well. Get someone to do it with their connections and help them. You help, you help them, they help you. Even maybe give them a referral so there's something in it for them. But, uh, you're always going to do better when someone else is talking about you versus you about yourself.

Yeah, we call it transfer credibility.

Yeah, Sandler's a really good program and I think a lot of people are using them. So welcome, John. Nice to see you first time. Alex. Yes, sir. Alex Todd, do you want to interject in any— Sure.

Hey everybody, great to meet you all. Great opportunity. Really welcome. Thank you so much for running this. Michael, because I think it's really, really helpful to hear what people are doing and also share our insights. We're fairly new to the sales process. We're a startup. We have a technology that is a commitment-based accountability system and behavior modification system. And so, our challenge has been as a startup as big product market fit because we have a horizontal technology. It can be used for anything from health, improving health, to compliance, to coaching, to onboarding, you name it.

The—

what we've started to do just recently is use LinkedIn very effectively. So we've been using LinkedIn for a long time.

Yep.

And in a fairly—

my main tool for LinkedIn.

Yeah. So, and it's very— in a simple way, just sending invitations to connect and stuff like that. But recently, in the past few weeks, we've actually got a very sophisticated— got a template with sophisticated, you know, follow-up process or workflow, if you will. So for people who— and then integrated with Zapier, and then also integrated with OpenAI's API for automatic context and, and, and then messaging that's very customized to the individual based on their LinkedIn profile and so on. And so, so we've just started that, and that feeds a custom-built spreadsheet, which is our kind of makeshift, if you will, CRM that automatically populates and schedules the whole process of following up with everybody by sending them a follow-up message, engaging with them through their messages, through their postings and so on, and also integrating now a complimentary email campaign. So we're just in early stages of all this and we'll see how it goes.

Yeah, tell us something that that, that failed miserably that you learned from?

Email failed miserably. It's absolutely a disaster. Nobody responds.

Yeah, I do email and LinkedIn. And to me, LinkedIn email does work. If you have an email engineer that sets up the DKIM, the DMARC, the SPF records, you have very precise messaging on email, and you send enough emails to go out. So emails do work. I But you got it. It's the messaging that really counts. And that's one of the reasons why I go around with the roundtable or mastermind or, hey, you're going to be at SaaS Stock or SaaStr or, or Conference 2.0, or even I even went to a saddler conference as well. So you just got to have a game plan and not make it about you. Because email does work, it's just you got to know how to set it up. You You know, I want to call on, uh, Jack Rand. I haven't met you before. Any insights who you are, what you do, why you join, and maybe some insights of something that's worked to help you grow your pipeline in the last 8 weeks?

Sure. I'm a strategic business coach and a business strategist. I work a lot with the fractional executives and consultants and the people that serve them to help them grow their business. Most of the time they engage me because they've come outta corporate and they're yearning how to sell their product or service. And that's what, that's where I help them grow their business.

Mm-hmm.

What I have found that works is it's actually having what I call just a conversation with people when I meet them that I have a series of questions I always ask. They're really easy questions, but they're always the same. And that tells me where they are, who they are. They can ask me anything. But I find it helps structure the conversation so we can, you know, I can get to know them, they can get to know me, we can see what the next step is.

Yeah, I, I definitely find that, uh, when I get on a discovery call, so, you know, Jack, what, what, what, what made you book a time with me? You know, what, what grabbed your attention? What was, what brought you to the table today? I just shut up. So that's the best questions I ever learned from someone else.

It's like Sandler calls that the upfront contract.

Upfront contract, yeah.

Yeah.

And the golden silence, right?

And Jack, good to see you.

Good to see you, Rob.

So, yeah, so, so you want to share one of those golden questions that you like?

Well, here's, here's a question I'd love to ask that no one usually asks. Uh, and by the way, Michael, you invited me, so that's why I came. So here we go. So there, uh, and, uh, the question I love to ask someone is, how did you get started in this business?

How did I get started, or anyone on this call?

Well, if I'm talking to you directly, Michael, I'm going to ask you at some point, how'd you get started doing what you're doing?

Um, it's been a sales guy my whole life, and everybody tells me that I've been really great at getting meetings. And then I was at a company that basically I was the VP of sales, but we didn't have a demand gen approach. So I basically figured it out myself and go, hey, this is better for me to do this outside of this company and basically build while I'm at this company. So I have kind of a ramp. So the whole idea is, if you can, without screwing around with your current employers, start working on your own company and work for yourself. Without having to be go broke or fund your own business. And if you can't build the tech yourself, be a service-based company like I am. I never wanted to build a Linked Helper or Apollo or ZoomInfo. That's too much money, time, and I'm not going to compete against the big boys. So I always suggest people to find something you're good at, you love, and then at least get 3 to 4 clients paying you $5,000 to $10,000 a month. That's way more than you're probably going to make working for a software company or, or a consulting company.

Amen to that.

Yep. Amen to that. That's— is that what you're looking for, Jack?

Yeah.

Well, so far, yeah, that's exactly what, what I ask. Then I ask a follow-up question. I ask them, what's your biggest challenge? And they will tell me something.

Okay.

Cool.

Does anybody have questions for Jack?

Yeah, Cathy.

Yeah, I kind of sensed a really good segue here, Jack. So it's really great to know conversation starters, but I think that one of the big challenges out there today is getting the privilege of having that conversation. And I have, I run my own sales and marketing consultancy, have done so for 15 years, specifically for B2B technology sales. Prior to that, I had 20 years of experience in B2B technology as a sector in sales, in marketing. And what I've seen in the last, really it started before COVID but it's really become a challenge today is I firmly believe especially in the tech sector, but really everywhere, personally and professionally. I believe that we are in a true communication crisis where it's more challenging than ever to connect with people meaningfully, however you choose to do it.

It's because of all the, the high-volume pump and dump that's been going out. It's all about quality over quantity and, uh, targeted approach, right?

Well, we talk—

we've talked favorably about LinkedIn, I'm at a point in my career, I'm in the, you know, the twilight of my career. And I am more willing to acknowledge truths than a lot of people who are not in the twilight of their career. Like Amir, you said you have found people that are willing to pay you for clicks. Good for you, because that's very interesting that a company is willing to do that. Because if you're like me and you get tasked with following up on clicks, or downloads, you know that a lot of it's kind of vaporware. The people either didn't mean to download something, didn't mean to click on something, don't really have a need, have no memory of having done it, etc. So I've been involved in every channel, and even to this day I'm still telemarketing every day. There are instances where it does work. I've done over 1,000 email campaigns in the last 20 years. I've done so much. I've had million-dollar budgets for, you know, SEM and SEO, etc. So I've So I've been through all the channels and I'm willing to talk today about what works and what doesn't. And to your point, Michael, about something that works, there is a game changer out there, and I've been spending most of my time training sales teams how to do it. And it's kind of unexpected, and it's video. So one of my biggest business lines right now is training sales teams how to prospect and sell and maintain relationships with video messaging, not commercials. You can do a one-to-many commercial, but I'm talking about one-to-one specific messages for that person. Like if I were trying to reach you, Michael, and I, you know, I would, I would come to you with a very specific message from me to you.

And like a, like a Loom.

Yeah, yeah, like a Loom.

I think, I think that's true. Truly one-to-one is what she's talking about.

And I'm in agreement with that, is that it's not just a mass-produced video.

Video for everybody. It's a true one-to-one, right?

So if I'm doing telemarketing like I'm doing it for a few different clients right now, not my usual gig, I'm getting— it's a— I'm doing telemarketing to help bring on new reseller partners. And yes, to your point, Rob, I do have a one-to-many generic video in my follow-up email, but I'm training people on that, on that one-to-one. And I find that the challenge is that I help people get over is getting comfortable with video. And getting comfortable coming up with that one-to-one message. Because the fact of the matter is people don't know how to interpret LinkedIn profiles. So they look at a LinkedIn profile, but they don't know what that says about the person. So they kind of have to be trained on what to look for and how to create a custom message.

So if you get a video from someone you don't know, I also think it depends on you if it's off-putting or not. I mean, I'm a very outgoing guy, but if I get a video from someone I don't know, and they hold up my name like they do in those loom videos.

I don't recommend that.

I don't recommend that either.

Yeah, no, this is, hi Michael, this is Kathy Dunlay, and I wanted to, you know, reach out to you because of blah blah blah. Yeah, but I have a real message for you, for wanting to connect with you specifically, not just a generic message. But that's, but that's, you know, getting into the weeds a bit, so I'll stop there. And I just wanted to throw it out there, and it's kind of why I was interested in connecting with with you all today. A, because we're in communication crisis and very rarely do we network anymore. My, my tech clients, they have defaulted back to live events. It's expensive and it's time-consuming, but it's the only way to reach people. People are not using the phone for phone calls anymore. You can't text people you don't already know. LinkedIn, I know some of you are using it successfully. In MySpace, it died a few years back. More than a few years back.

You know, all that on the event side, I use LinkedIn and email to drive people to an event I'm going to or not going to, and I use that as my anchor, my signal. They're attending a software, like SaaStr, a software conference. I know they're interested in software and they're in sales for me. So I'm say, hey, do you want to meet there? Or if you're not, let's do a virtual cup of coffee. That works very well. It's non-aggressive. You know, we're getting people just to chat with each other. I did 4,000 messages on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Helper. I had 600 replies and 50 meetings. I mean, it works. You just gotta build up your—

I think it depends when you say it works. I think it really— the caveat there is it depends. If you are trying to sell a 6-figure solution to a VP of technology or CIO, I'm sorry, LinkedIn rarely works anymore for anything.

For tech people, they don't really care much about networking or like these roundtables I'm doing right now. You're not going to get CISOs to come on these things.

Yeah, especially enterprise. Enterprise is not going to—

Right, exactly. So when we say it works, when we say LinkedIn works, email works, I assure you, if you're trying to sell technology to a large technology a large company in any industry with a, you know, high-level tech staff that are all making like $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a year and have multimillion-dollar budgets. Yeah, I'm sure you— they're not on LinkedIn anymore, only to brag if they've retired, right? Only to brag and say, oh, thank you for the last 8 years at blah, blah, blah, and it's been so great. But, but they're not connecting with that way and they're not buying or they just have an assistant doing it.

You're not actually talking to them, right?

Let's have, let's have Chick interject.

How do you raise your hand, by the way?

Oh, they changed.

There used to be a button for it.

What happened? It's in React. I will get on camera. I just, I came straight from working out. So anyway, I was just going to add to what Kathy said. So I am combining video, which I put on the chat, the tool I'm using, which is called Scoop.

Oh yeah.

Oh, and the cool thing about Scoop, and I'll provide a link that you can use to check it out. The cool thing is it's integrated directly into LinkedIn, so with a downloadable extension. Then what I'm doing, and that's just for, you can use it for meeting follow-up also. It's great. But to get through to the high-dollar amount people that Kathy is talking about, I am doing campaigns using customizable cartoons. And I actually, I'm in another mastermind with a Wall Street Journal cartoonist who has developed a methodology where he's got a a tool that you can cut out the front of a FedEx envelope, put the cartoon in the window, and then when you send it to them, they cannot resist opening it. And then on the back, I'm putting my name and I, because I'm an author of a book called The Game Changer, you know, hopefully people will at least check me out, right? So I put my information and then I put a QR code. Okay. QR codes are like, I think, the real miss of— we've all written them off, right? But if you link the QR code, the QR codes are definitely back. They are. But if you link them to a personalized video and put a handwritten note on it using just a sticky note saying, here's a personalized message for you, again, they can't resist. And I actually use QR.io where you can put either their photo or their logo in the middle of it so that they know it's not generic. You know, you took the time to do it for them. So the combination of video, the cartoon, which again, it's just irresistible. A customizable cartoon with their name in the cartoon. It's, it's, again, I think it's a game changer.

These QR codes on my business cards where if you scan it, it's actually a contact download. So it adds directly to their phone so they don't have to type everything in.

Right. But this is the QR code to the video where you're doing exactly what Kathy said. Hey, you don't know me, but I'm Chickie Fitzgerald, and I've got— I'm using a cartoon that's showing your financial performance. And at the bottom it says, hey, you know, Tobias, or who would have thought that Tobias would have done this by trip enabling the blah, blah, blah, right? Because we sell technology that integrates into sites and systems that adds trip planning into whatever you do. So, and again, that sounds kind of odd, but every single one of you, every brand on the planet sells to travelers. You just don't sell travel to them. So if your site or system spurs them to travel, they have to go over to their favorite travel store. My company stops that. So You know, for instance, again, you asked about big wins, Michael. And so we sent out a cartoon to the head of revenue and e-commerce at legacy.com because we can trip enable the obituary. So when somebody's going to a funeral, they can find the hotel nearby. And we sent this cartoon saying, who knew that? And again, put his name in the cartoon. And it's just, it's a home run. And anyway, I wanted to show you guys. So the book that you might want to read is called How to Get a Meeting with Anyone. And, you know, this is the other mastermind that I'm in, but that just came out last week. And again, it's all about using cartoons and physical things to send to people. And I'll finish real quickly. We've also got a timer, a beautiful wood timer, you know, an hourglass. And one of the pushbacks from clients is they think it's going to take too long to implement our solution. And we did it as a plugin that will take less than an hour.

So let me get, let me get Michael, some other folks to chime in. Michael, go ahead.

Oh, thanks. Yeah, I mean, a different perspective that I would give is not as much about the channel of communication or the medium of communication. So it's not as much whether it's email or LinkedIn. I interview hundreds of buyers every year as part of a moderated prospect meeting program that I do where I actually lead the meeting for my client. So, I'm listening all the time to what these guys are interested in and ask them questions about, you know, who do you meet with and why? And one of the things that's really come up from these buyer interviews is they're keenly focused on, you know, where they are versus their best-in-class peers or their competitors. Specifically, they're very focused on, is there a performance gap that I have that I'm underperforming my competitor? And I'm amazed by how little they know about where they stand versus their competitors. And these can be in any one of the jobs to be done. So whether you're a forecasting software, whether you're a project management software, whatever you're doing, if you can help that that prospect understand where they are in terms of getting that job done versus their best-in-class peer or versus best-in-class in the market. I think that's amazing. I've just launched a new Sales and Marketing Maturity Index, which some people might be interested in. And what it does is it ranks organizations on where they stand on the 5 or 6 key pillars of sales and the 5 or 6 key pillars of marketing. It gives them a rating on both. So, you can look at the company and say, well, where do I need to improve?

Where am I doing?

What measurables do you use for that?

I'll put the link in the chat. What it is, is there are pillars like, for example, planning in marketing, right? So, what is your— do you have a tangible marketing strategy? Is it documented? Have you— so, you go to we have absolutely no marketing plan at all. Nothing in writing, right? So in each one of the pillars, whether it be planning or whether it be branding, marketing, whether it be sales, CRM, there's a set of questions that they answer, 5 of them answer, and it gets ranked against what best-in-class is and what best-in-class does. And then it gives them a score for each one.

Michael, what do you do?

So my company is Go-To-Market Pros in Boston. So I do a lot of things. I help companies enter the US market. I help companies ramp. Sales in the US market. I set up moderated prospect meetings. I do go-to-market strategy. I help them identify where the gaps in their sales and marketing organizations are and using that to apply AI, because many of them have no idea where to apply AI. But if they know they're underperforming their best-in-class peers, that's a perfect example to apply AI to. So helping them strategically understand where they're good, where they're bad, where they need to improve. And I do that a lot of times by helping them actually meet with their buyers and interview their buyers.

Awesome.

Ben, can you guys hear me? I'm on my headphones.

Yep.

Yep.

Okay.

So, Michael Phelan, I have heard—

I have—

your reputation precedes you. I'm in the Greater Boston area too, and I have heard your name.

Well, thank you, Kathy. And I can relate to what you're saying about that, that difficulty. And again, it's like the point of the spear is very, very weak. We need to offer enough value to drive an exchange of information. And that should be what a marketing or sales lead are, where the buyer is giving us information, we're giving them information, and there's an interaction. I think part of the problem is we've always thought a marketing lead is a download lead or a click to a website or a click on an ad. I would say that we should redefine a marketing or sales lead as an exchange of value and information. Between a seller and a buyer. And if that's not happening, you're not generating engagement, interaction, and leads. So, I think we fundamentally need to think about it differently. So, I would agree with you. Most of the old-timey stuff, "Hey, look at me. I know you." Buyers actually couldn't care less about what you know about them. And we're spending a fortune trying to demonstrate that we know a lot about them. They all know all that. What they do care is about what you know about their best-in-class peers and competitors and where they're underperforming. So, I think we're wasting a lot of money on advanced marketing personalization. When I interview buyers, they couldn't care less about how personalized the message is. The— what they do care about is what is the impact that you can have on my business, and can you help me close performance gaps?

There's too much of this AI personalization. I could personally tell, and that's why I say, listen, business date, get to know someone, open the door. It's not your time to just throw up on them what you know about them or what you know about their competitors. Mention it doesn't work. Mention maybe a couple things, but the whole idea is to make what's in common. Are you going somewhere? Is there any good trade shows coming up? Comment on their post. There's ways to open the door and soften your approach.

It's—

this is business dating, just like you would date someone in life. You're not going to go on a cruise, you're not going to ask them on a cruise the first time you meet them. So go on a cup of coffee, virtual cup of coffee, and say You know, what's, what's, what's keeping you up? What's, what's going on with you guys?

People are practically— it's like walking into a bar. They're practically saying, hey, you want to come back to my apartment the second they make eye contact with you.

Actually, Michael, something you mentioned there, which is a really good idea, is suggesting events that may be relevant to them. Like, people really want to network now. They want to be out. So if you say— see a marketing person or a salesperson say, hey, did you know there's an AMA social meetup next week? And I'll meet you at that event. Um, that can be a really cool way.

It works. I use it now. I have— but my whole thing is to get 15 meetings before I even get there, right?

I wanted to add some value quickly. Something came to mind, Mike. By the way, when you say tip of spear, you mean the offer, right?

Just to clarify, it's really— it's, it's not your offer as a company, it's your value exchange to the buyer, right?

Right. Yeah, the offer could be like a free product requirement roadmap if you're a software development company. So just, I, I'm I'm all about offers.

That's why.

Well, not your, no, not your product offer, not your company offer, but the, so for example, if I'm gonna give you 15 minutes, no, no, I completely understand an offer to get to know each other.

I, I really get the concept of an offer. Just one thing to bring up that has been working really well for my chief RevOps manager is that he goes on people's blogs or websites and finds an error, a mistake.

Mm-hmm.

And he will say, hey Mike, um, I found this broken 404 link on your blog. And thought I would just let you know. And he books 100% of the meetings whenever he adds value like that. And that's why I just wanted to cut off.

That's clever. I like that idea, Amir.

Yeah, we book like 100 inbound meetings, give or take a month, and they're scaling up. And, you know, I went from an outsourced SDR company where I was, you know, we were a cold calling machine to a media company. And that's why all this offer really means a lot to me. It just makes sense to me because it's kind of what I study, but let you guys go.

Well, let's tell them something they don't know. Is really what I'm talking about, is don't focus on what they already know. Tell them what they don't know. And what they don't know is things like auditing their website, doing a before and after, showing them a comparison. There's a lot of different ways of doing it. In fact, there are about 30 different ways of doing this, and I packaged up a workshop that I do for, for my clients on that. But it really is tell them something they don't know. And most salespeople training are teaching you to tell them stuff they already know. So I think that's That's the huge problem is we're just telling them something they already know. We should tell them something they don't know.

Real quick, Michael, and you and I should probably have a chat offline.

Ben has his hand raised.

Go ahead, Kathy. We can talk certainly offline.

Yeah, definitely.

If you guys want to talk to each other, there's a one-to-one chat, Kathy, on here. You can mention that and do that or put your account in there. But I just want to make sure I get Ben in here because he hasn't— he's been having his hand raised for a while.

Michael, I appreciate that. No, thank you. I actually just saw Wade, uh, sent a comment. He's actually the one that invited me out here, so I really appreciate that. So my name is Ben. I specialize in unsecured term loans, and we help startups and small businesses up to half a million. So I just wanted to touch into a little bit of like my sales process since I'm in the referral business. We're about 93% referral-based, so I don't cold call clients, and if I do, it's usually by accident. So I can't emphasize enough the value of LinkedIn. I've had 6 calls in the last 3 days where people have told me the only reason they called me is because they see my post.

Okay.

It's funny things. It's memes. It's relevant media. It's, you know, deals for the month. My sales process is very simple. Set up your LinkedIn to where somebody can click on it and they understand exactly what you do. My first picture is a personal picture of me at the Small Business Expo. With a picture of "I love small business" behind me. So people see, okay, he's personable. Then you have requirements and a couple of the deals you do. But the key feature here is that, uh, that bio that you have, making sure they have a reason to want to click on that profile.

The headline underneath your picture.

Exactly.

Look at mine, look at yours. It's like, I do this, I help that. By the way, I'm a black belt. You know, it's like, make it, make it personal too, but make sure you, people understand what you do.

Exactly.

Profiles are our front-facing resume looking for a job. I want to make it about what you do to help them, like you're saying. Go ahead, I'm sorry.

No, it's okay, Michael. Um, but I would say the biggest sleeper is I post GIFs under comments that are relevant to what they're saying, that are usually tied into a big movie, something funny, something that people can recognize. My top performing comments have more views than what my profile gets on a week-to-week basis. So that's how I get most of my inbound. I comment on— you have like 3,300. I've only been doing it like 8 months, something like that. So my, my, what I'm trying to say here is if you know that in my case, I work really well with SBA lenders, I'm going to find the top 10 SBA lenders in the country, find their best BDOs, and I'm going to comment under all their posts something funny. Connect with them, whatever the case is. And then once that person physically interacts, clicks on my profile, whatever the case is, I'll send them a message on LinkedIn. I'll give them a cold call, send a text, and it's something like, hey, I just sent you an email. I appreciate the connection on LinkedIn. Whenever you get a chance, check out the subject line, blah, blah, blah. I think it'll be relevant to you and your team, and I look forward to discussing in the future. Just very soft. And if it doesn't work, just hit the next. But I just figured I'd let you guys know because I'm still on that. That outbound process, if you will. So this is kind of like what day to day, this is a legit, I'm a salesman, this is what works. I'm not saying it works for, you know, all of what you guys do, but if you're in the referral business, I cannot highlight enough how important it is to make your LinkedIn personable, but more important, just give people a reason to click on.

Also take your LinkedIn, Ben, and I've done this for other companies where You like, there's a company called Spokebone and they work with Twilio. There's tons of Twilio reps. There's only, there's only a small team at this software company. Automate their LinkedIn for you and them and use like marketing development funds and build out your, your marketing partner program. Don't just count referrals, count on how can you help them with more business. By using their LinkedIn to make you look good too. There's ways of doing that that has massively grown other clients that I've worked with. But whether you use me or anyone else, think about the partner program approach, because anybody that talks about you, that helps you and helps them, and you could help them pay for that program. And that's why there's MDF funds, marketing development funds. That partner program works great. I want to I want to throw a little time to Wade because Wade's helped me a lot with these roundtables. So Wade, tell us why you joined and why you helped and something that you've learned in the last 2 weeks.

Well, I think, you know, a lot of the inputs that have been there. So first of all, a longtime software development tech guy building a lot of enterprise systems, moved over to sales a good 5 to 8 years ago, mainly because I own my own software companies. And, you know, if you're a founder, you're typically the first sales guy, right? So that's where I kind of learned sales, but have been focusing on tech and SaaS sales, um, pretty heavily for the last 5, 6 years. And, you know, a lot of everything we're talking about, the noise and all the channels, been a battle for the really since COVID um, The AI stuff was personalization was the AI was short-lived. I think it is becoming saturated. I'm curious about voice and we talked about video. We already see avatars and video generation tools with AI. So the personalization of AI is already a video is already coming in there and the video tools are just getting incredible. So, I just look at the future and it is just so foggy what it is that we can do. I like some of these ideas about going back to the physical. It's expensive to send out those Federal Express packages, but everything is just so noisy. And that's the challenge is to really kind of find a channel that is still you can get your true self out there and provide value without being fake. And, yeah, it's just the last, really, the last 6 months has just been so eye-opening with AI and everything else on how communication is struggling. So, I appreciate everybody's comments. I mean, just awesome, awesome conversations. I hope anybody that's joined us Finding value. So thanks, Michael, again for letting me hang out on your, your channel here.

No worries. I have one thing to add, Mike, that you're not going to like. So I get to speak to a lot of founders because I sell a lot of software. And I've been talking to founders that are building agents that replace, that are agents that buy from agents, right? Like I didn't create it. I'm not the one.

Yeah, it's a big thing right now.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like the guy, Santosh from Shear AI. Obviously, like every business is challenged, right? Like, will marketplaces even exist in 5 years is a question that I ask myself every day. Do you guys think that the future is skilling up and building relationships, or do you think the future is using agents to do business with each other?

I personally think it's a mixture, but I'll let everybody else kind of chime in.

I don't know if this is controversial to say, but in, in my world for sales and marketing, I haven't seen any benefits afforded to us from AI. What I've seen is AI can be helpful for people in sales and marketing that are uncomfortable writing and coming up with their own content. That's about it.

It's good for research. It's not good for message building. And they even have bots out there that you could take blocks of messages and dump it in. It'll tell you how much was written by an AI.

I professionally disagree with you guys.

It's going to be about 88%.

Yeah. And to your point, Wade, about using AI avatars for video, it's usually pretty obvious. And what I'm finding in my market, again, people don't read stuff or absorb stuff if it looks fake or salesy. And they know if something was, you know, they can tell the difference between an AI avatar or an AI photograph even, which I'm— the only thing I really support in AI is AI photographs for a professional photograph of yourself. Other than that, now one of you was saying you professionally disagree.

Me.

Yeah.

Why do you disagree?

I guess I'll ask you a question. Do you think— because what I have seen is that I'm like, I'm building prototypes in 5 seconds. I feel like, do you think that you're up to date with the current AI innovation, meaning that like what you might have tried 6 months ago, do you think anything's changed exponentially today? Because I highly disagree because I think what's missing from your statement is the rate at which these technologies are improving. And I have team members making AI videos that I can't tell the difference anymore. So like I'm not able to tell the difference anymore personally. Do you think that you've seen the best of the best, or do you think that AI has hit a wall and what you've seen is as good as it gets, or do you think that it's going to get better?

I don't know, but I'm just saying that what I've seen so far, it's pretty obvious when something's been written by AI, and it's pretty obvious when something is a video created by AI.

One last request. Can I send you an example we created offline to get your truthful opinion?

Absolutely.

All right.

Send me one too.

I'm sorry to interrupt.

Go ahead.

No, go ahead.

Oh, I was going to say that I've owned an AI company for 5 years. I'd love to see what you got.

Yeah, I'm like, I get a lot of these tools for free because we sell them. So like v.io has been making this new avatar and like my team member, my team member last night built an N8N workflow that would like build content. It's, it's, it's all of it's getting much better is what I'm saying, but I don't want to take over this call. So maybe it's better I just email it to you because I can, I can go on.

I just reshared my information.

Yeah, yeah, I'll email you both. And like I said before, my position is I, as a market, I don't decline sellers, so I get to see the innovation, right? And I'm just looking at everybody, right? So I'm not like, you know, I'm not like— it's not like me building the technology.

We gotta be careful not to generalize, like, all AI is this, all AI is not this. It's changing every day.

And exactly, it's constantly learning. It will get better.

And that kind of brings it to my point is that it is getting so much better. The barriers to entry, this stuff is going to massively kill our channels and people will just be inundated with phone calls and emails and LinkedIn by AI-generated content.

And it's part of the problem.

I wrote an article back to events.

What do you want?

That's how I met Michael.

Yeah, I think we'll get back to events, but I'll give you an example.

Like, I can't share my screen right now, can I, Mike? That's too distracting.

We got 4 minutes.

Yeah.

So like, man, I'll just email you guys some stuff, but like I was able this morning, and Michael's in this group. I have a group that's all about product market feedback. Cause there's a, there's a company called Wynter, W-Y-N-T-E-R. They charge $20 to $30K a year for feedback. So I created a community for free feedback and I was able to take a CEO's, um, website and I put it into something called bolt.new, which you guys should try. And I said, you know, improve this. And it literally built a prototype that, you know, I'll send the prototype right now, the link. If you click this, I built this in 5 minutes, and I, I'm not a UX guy, I'm not an expert, but with the tools we have now, and I can show you the before and after, just so much better. I'll let you go. Sorry for cutting in. I know you got 2 more minutes, Mike.

I'll just—

I'll email you.

Cool. Yeah, I just want to thank everybody for making time. Um, I'm doing these twice a month now. It's everything you can register is through Eventbrite. Um, I don't know if everybody has done that, but I will put that link in here so you can also—

you also— John's had his hand up for like a hot minute.

Yeah, I'm just— we're just out of time today. John, do you have something real quick?

I'm good, I'm good, and I thoroughly enjoyed everything though. Looking forward to the next one.

Yeah, Amir, do you have something that doesn't require a login?

Like, yeah, yeah, I do, I do. I'm sorry, I'm just moving fast. Let me, let me see right now. Can you let me know what I just shared doesn't require a login? And by the way, I—

it does. It does require.

Okay.

All right.

Let me get you without a login. I have to deploy it. I'm like learning these tools as we speak and just transparently, I probably lost $2 million in the last 2 years of my pivot hiring product market people that had Ivy League school to— and what's the only thing that saved my company was getting into product myself and using these tools to be transparent because it was like it just allowed me to like get what I wanted done quicker. But I'm going to share it with you. I'm going to email it to you. It should be live now. Um, wait, the transfer is real. Your site has been successfully deployed and you can view it here.

Okay guys, let's, let's take this— I'll let you go, Amir, for, for the team here. Just, uh, make sure you, uh— I could get you the emails if you don't have them, but I just want to make sure we don't get too, uh, specific for one thing on this call. It's kind of a group. But, um, anyways, Definitely, uh, in 2 more weeks, we're every, every second and fourth Tuesday is, is this one. And then I have a sales and marketing one that I do, um, every first Wednesday of each month. And then I do these one-offs like I do with Wade. I've done ones where it's just Wade's connections and my connections, and it's more about what he does versus what I, you know, what I normally do, which is CRO and founders. So, uh, please, please keep in mind helping each other, referring business to each other. Like, like I said, Amir has this marketplace that, that I love. It— you could refer business as well, and it's, it's more like a two-way market marketplace. But, um, thank you, Wade. Thank you, everybody that's, that's helped grow this thing. Please feel free, um, to interject and, and put, put this on your LinkedIn. Also, just, just keep in mind when we're doing these things We need to try to keep, keep the conversation a little shorter so everybody can get conversation in because we couldn't really get to John as much as I wanted to. And, and then if you haven't talked like Dimitri, just, you know, introduce yourself real quick on the next one and make sure that we all get value out of this. Because if we, if any of us just hog too much of the time, then someone's going to feel left out and they're not going to come again. So we just got to make sure that we we're, um, fulfilling everybody's thoughts of what they want to do as well. But great job. This was a great conversation, um, and we'll talk soon. We'll talk in the next two weeks. Thanks, everybody.

Fantastic.