Michael Falato founded Full Throttle Falato Leads eight months ago to run SDR outreach for companies. He uses dedicated subdomains and email verification to protect client domains, and focuses on challenger messaging that emphasizes ROI instead of product features. His Florida-based team has 400+ client wins and already landed 13-14 customers.
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Welcome back to Marketing for Your Future. I'm your host, David Binfield, and on the program we talk to digital marketing experts about their best practices and some of the tips and tricks of the trade. And joining me today, we have Michael Filato from Full Throttle Filato Leads. Michael, how you doing?
Good, how are you?
I'm very well, thank you for joining us. So let's Michael, let's just jump right into it. Tell me about Full Throttle Phil Auto Leads.
Well, David, I basically started Full Throttle Phil Auto Leads about 8, 9 months ago. I was always getting more leads than all my SDRs. SDRs are obviously sales development reps that get leads for people across multiple companies, and I built my own SDR outreach team to basically automate email and LinkedIn automation. So that I can send more emails, more LinkedIn invites, more LinkedIn in-mails, so I can get appointments. Appointments obviously help with top of funnel, and sellers could sell at these companies and worry less about looking for meetings. So that's kind of what I built over the last 8 months, um, and it's going really well.
So Michael, talk to me about how you found, uh, that need, right? Like, like, how did you know that, that you needed to start this company? What, what prompted that?
Well, over the, over the years, uh, companies like Jobvite, Symphony Talent, monster.com, TechStation, I've always been able to open the door faster, better, and cheaper than most people. And a lot of folks tell me like, why don't you start your own lead gen company? Or why don't you manage sales development reps? I just never thought I could, uh, run a company on my own. But, um, it's, it's grown so fast in the last 8 months that Um, I've gotten like 13, 14 customers now and it's doing really well. Um, the need is that there's a lot of sales development reps that are usually kids out of school and they're getting hired to work at these software companies or technology companies to develop leads. What happens is they don't really understand the business yet. Companies are using their own Gmail or Outlook to send emails to like a HubSpot or Marketo or, um, Yesmail or any of these other platforms that do automation, and they're damaging their domain. They're basically ruining their domain by using their email as a main way to send out emails, and they're not cleaning the data, and they're not verifying the data, and they're not using a separate email server to do it. You have to make sure when you do this stuff that all your records are in place, that you have a subdomain approach, they have a kind of an email engineer to set up all the data and all the integrations so that you're not ruining your main domain, your main business, your domain.com when you're sending out these emails. So you got to do it responsible and you got to do it scalable and repeatable.
Nice, that's very great advice. So, uh, you said you've been doing this for about 8 or 9 months, uh, that's, that's not a very long time to see such success. So talk to me about, uh, some of the hurdles that you've had to overcome because that's a lot in a short period of time.
Yeah, there's— the hurdles are just, you know, you, you lose and you learn, right? So if you figure out what you did wrong, do it right the next time. Um, there's a lot of companies out there that, that do lead gen, a lot of companies, and a lot of it's offshore. They're using folks across the world for very cheap labor. You know, when you hire Full Throttle, you're hiring me, you're hiring my team that's local to Florida, local to the US. And that's been doing this for 25 years. I have experience closing the NFL, working closing AT&T, Sprint, working for Warner Brothers, working for Monster.com. Um, there's like over 400 clients I've closed over the last 25 years. The other, the other approach is hiring a company that, that's like I said, hires kids or hire— hires people across the world and they're just making phone calls and sending a couple hundred emails a day. There's a strategy to this approach. There's You gotta think about the challenger approach, like, how can I get my message across that shows that there's an ROI, there's some fear of missing out if I don't do it? And if I write the message in so what, who cares, why, and when, that is important, because that's what, that's what your, uh, your people that read emails are thinking, you know. And that it can't be a product dump. It needs to be like, what, what problem are you going to solve? And give some examples, give some ROI, and give some companies that you've done it for. And a big thing for me is put out a calendar link. You know, here's my calendar link. We'd love to see if there's even a good fit for us. Book a time or send me your link instead of going back 4 or 5 times about what works for you. There's a really good approach using Calendly and using kind of a challenger approach when you're reading, when you're sending out the emails to make sure it makes sense for them, not me telling you what I do. Gotcha.
Well, Michael, thank you so much for being on the show. Unfortunately, that's all the time that we have for you today. If you'd like to learn more about Full Throttle Philato Leads, go to dailyadbrief.com. That's gonna do it for us today on Marketing for Your Future. I'm your host, David Binfield. Until next time.
