Executive Roundtable Mastermind AI Authority Revenue The New GTM Playbook for Modern Growth Leaders

This meeting is being recorded. It was like watching a movie.

Okay, here we go.

Let's let people in. Okay. Yeah. Hey guys.

How you doing?

Well, thanks, Michael.

How are you?

Good, good. Oh boy, Doug's here again. Uh, guys, just pretend like you're hearing Doug, but just, just go like this and just pretend like you're saying—

this cancellation is working. Don't hear a thing.

Don't hear a thing. Hey, Matt.

Hello, sir. How are you?

Good, good. So Matt is my co-host, my partner on this roundtable. So he's going to be leading a good portion of this because I don't want to do the same thing over and over and over and over again, which is more of the, you know, tips, tactics, strategies, and ideas that we come up with on the one that we do twice a month. You know, so today is going to be a little bit more because we have a lot of his Connections joining because he teamed up. The thing that makes this really great is that him and I basically took our LinkedIn presence and our roundtables and podcasts that we do, and we kind of combined forces to kind of talk about, you know, the GTM playbook and how to lengthen your approach to something that's going to work. I'm sorry, shorten it. So Matthew, do you kind of want to tell people why we're here today and why you decided to Do the roundtable together?

Yeah, absolutely, Michael. So, I mean, obviously you and I met some time ago in person at a couple of different conferences, and we've been talking for a while. And one of the things that we always like to talk about is really the go-to-market motion, right? And now with AI being as hot as it is and what's going on in the marketplace, we both felt like right now was a good time to get together with a group of people and have conversations about your go-to-market tech stack, about how AI fits into that go-to-market tech stack, how people are implementing CRM platforms across the business. There's a lot of competition out there across the board from different new incomers to Salesforce and HubSpot. We're seeing companies like Addeo, for example, putting a spin on AI CRMs. So we're seeing a lot of different things in the marketplace from the speed of technology today because of AI. So it felt just like the right time, Michael, to get together, talk with some folks about the go-to-market tech stack, about CRMs, about AI, and have a kind of a fun, candid conversation today.

Yeah, since this is our roundtable that we're doing together, I think we should do a tiny bit of I don't want everybody else to do this because it's it's it's not the roundtable to do it on. But we're gonna position also what we do because the reason why we do these roundtables is not to just get people to talk about information tactics and strategies, but also introduce ourselves to each other's network. So I'm gonna start. But Matt, just go into a little bit of you know who's access at .io. So I'm Michael Filato, GTM. Full Throttle is my company, Full Throttle, Full Throttle Leads as well. And I'm here because we do these roundtable masterminds, LinkedIn events, um, things that do signal data, intent data, right? Pulling people from other places and bringing them into one place. Then I also produce a podcast, which is really good to kind of build that whole discovery call, uh, approach where you do it, you do a podcast. Everybody here That has an audience should go, how can I do a podcast or a roundtable yourself so you can get like-minded people together? It's a great way to give versus ask. So that's why I do it, because I'm trying to get people to connect, talk with each other, get leads from each other, referrals. But if you think about it, do you want to sell and pitch slap, or do you want to ask people, hey, I would love to have you on a roundtable, love to have you on a podcast, want to see what's a good fit, can we do a quick call? I've had 10 to 15 Zoom calls every day by doing that approach. It's a very strategic give before you ask approach. That's what I do. If you ever need someone, that's what— that's why you'd reach out to me. That this form is not for everybody to do that. It's really just today is Matt and I doing that. But if you ever want to do your own type approach, please reach out and I'll help you guys do it. Matt, go ahead.

Yeah, I appreciate that, Michael. Um, Great advice. So AccessIO, we are a RevOps consultancy. We help startups scale. We really focus on that, you know, Series A through Series D type company. We really wanna help, you know, business-to-business companies build revenue engines that actually work, right?

We—

there's a lot of buzzwords out there, a lot of things going on, but we like to be hands-on keyboard and build relationships that last and last for a long time. We have a number of clients for a couple of years now. 6, 8 months, 2 years is not unusual. We like to grow with you and scale with you and be part of the team and really invest in, in your organization. So we are that hands-on keyboard that helps build out your go-to-market tech stack, prepare your go-to-market tech stack, and help it get ready for AI.

So, Matt, What's some nuggets that we want to go over today? That's not— it's more about how can we help teach and help tactically and strategically these people on the call. And then I want you guys also to raise your hand in Zoom and say, hey, Michael, Matt, I have a question on that, or I want to pose this idea as a strategy or tactic that I've learned. I want to get everybody's opinion. This is a safe place to do this. It is something that I do post, just so you know, on YouTube and LinkedIn. So, you know, if you can't say it in front of your mom, probably don't say it. But go ahead, Matt.

Yeah, you know, one of the things that we talk to clients a lot about is customer journey mapping. And it sounds so obvious and so simple and so easy to do. But it really takes a lot of asking the right questions. When we work with organizations talking about their marketing motion, their sales motion, their customer success motion, trying to understand the data flow across that tech stack all the way through where the handoffs are, and you start interviewing people across the go-to-market organizations, what we find is there really isn't the level of communication that some people thought. There really isn't an understanding of What that process is across the go-to-market tech stack, right? If your sales motion is fuzzy to your sellers, it's also going to be fuzzy in your tech stack. So actually putting that pen on paper is really, really important.

What's the first, like, 2 things, 3 things you should look at when you're building a tech stack for GTM? Like, for me, I look for repeatable and scalable. And I look for the best systems and solutions that I could use for my clients. But some people are building, you know, themselves. I always say find the best partner versus completely build stuff yourself because are you a services-based company or a software company? If you're a software company, are you going to be servicing people by building something that's technical, right? So you got to look at like, do you want to be in the SaaS or AI business or do you want to be in the in a services basis that is presenting SaaS and services and AI and solutions. So what's your thought?

Yeah, we— so, you know, from, from my purview, the best place to start is really with the people. You know, we— a lot of people want to start looking at, all right, what's our spend for this tech? What's our subscription look like? How much money are we spending? You know, people start to talk about, am I utilizing it? What's my return on investment on these tools? Do I have overlapping tools? But really, people don't spend enough time actually saying, hey, show me a day in the life. You know, you get with different sellers across the organization. I encourage folks to get with, you know, their A performers in customer success, their A performers in sales, their D performers in sales, and talk with different people across the org and say, show me a day in the life. Actually have them share their screen and say, when you log in in the morning, tell me what you're doing. Are you looking at your email? Are you going into your CRM? Are you logging into one of your outbound tools, outreach? Are you going into Claude and asking it questions about your accounts? Those things tell you way more than some of the superficial questions that you can ask. So a bit of a show and tell, I don't think enough people are doing, Michael. And, um, you really learn a lot about what people are actually doing. And by learning that, that's how you can really shape your systems to work better for the people actually out in the field.

Jason, what do you— what are your thoughts? Do you have anything you want to add to that as far as what people are using when they start to do their go-to-market? Like, what do you guys Tell a little bit, 5-second, technically 30-second, about Active. But, um, also, what are some tips and tactics around what— Yeah, what Matt said.

I love what Matt said, by the way. I'm not sure if my video is coming through. I'm having some, some latency here. But, you know, I think we used to call it time and motion studies, right? Sit down next to them and see where they're clicking, see what they're spending time on, see where they're— where there's friction, and identify those gaps. So 100% agree with that. The one big tip that I'll give to people that I got years ago was Treat your tech stack like your employees in terms of annual performance reviews. Like, go through your tech stack and like, are there new updates that you're not taking advantage of? Are there new capabilities that you're not taking advantage of? Do you have overlapping kind of redundant solutions across your scenarios? And I think when I started doing that, we started seeing a ton of opportunity within the tech stack that we had instead of having to go outside of it. But I do think the big challenge right now, and I think the big opportunity for everybody, is how do you connect the tech stacks in ways that they haven't been connected before? I think this new AI world is like, how do I pull the AI out of a conversation analytics like Chorus or Gong? How do I pull the AI out of a Highspot? How do I pull the AI out of my Einstein or HubSpot and into a central place?

And what— this is for Matt and you. I mean, what's the tools using Cloud Cowork? Is it Zapier? Like, what's the best Solutions? Because I'm not a tech guy. I mean, Daniel, who's on here, he's my, uh, he's my client service director. He's the tech guy too, but he's using Claude coworker and some other tools, but, and Zapier and stuff. But what's, what's some good things that you guys should go, okay, either I need to hire Matt or Michael or Jason or Larry, whatever, or I, let me figure out some tool that I can maybe do it myself. What, what's the low-hanging fruit there?

Yeah, you know, for us, we look at it on a per-client basis, right? Because AI and Claude Cowork can do a lot of really, really powerful things, particularly if you buy an enterprise license, which we do recommend for organizations across the board. If you want more security in your data to protect your IP, you really need to have Enterprise Claude. So if you have a bunch of people out there just kind of putting in company information on team accounts or private accounts, that's a big no-no. Uh, please do, do not do that. Um, and evaluate, uh, an enterprise version. Once you have that, the best thing that we've seen with Claude Cowork are— and the, the use cases are really endless— but, you know, Jason talked about combining transcripts and Gmail, and if you have NetSuite and QuickBooks and all of these different things, Cloud Cowork does a great job of scheduling tasks, putting on, um, different things. I'll give you an example for a client. We just put an executive brief together where it actually— this client is a— is more on the SMB side. They use QuickBooks, um, they've got a note-taker, um, they use a Fireflies note-taker, they have Salesforce. And what we actually do is we go into their Cloud Cowork, we built out scheduling where they actually aggregate disparate information across the different data sources and provide an executive brief.

And Fireflies that I use puts it in my HubSpot automatically because of their integration. I didn't have to do anything. It was pretty cool.

Yeah, Fireflies is— we do—

that's—

that is a tool we do like. Um, but, you know, aggregating disparate data, surfacing it in a meaningful way, because you can direct the co-work to the, uh, Claude co-work to, to do certain things in that brief. You can instruct it what you want that brief to, to talk about— revenue-driving activities, uh, territory performance, um, neglected accounts, or accounts that you might need to invest in, or or talk with other executives on, and even emails or Slacks that you need to follow up on. You can put this in this, in this brief. And they're like, I don't know how I live without this. Every day I come in, I look at my coffee, I get my brief at 7 AM, and now my day is structured. So that's one of about a bazillion examples of how Cloud Cowork can be really valuable for organizations.

I use Fireflies after each call and say, Tell me what I heard, what I owe Steve, and what are the next steps. And it writes me a freaking great next email. And I'm horrible at doing that stuff because I never liked homework. So just, that's one thing that I love AI for. Obviously, um, doing these roundtables and coming up with the agenda, that's another thing that I love to do. Let's go to, um, Aaron Milner. I don't know what you do, but what's your feedback and thoughts so far?

I think a lot of folks that can be attracted by the sparkly thing, right? We need to always remember what is the number one challenge we could try to solve that will move the needle the most, and then put the full weight of the organization behind that and only that. So for some folks, it's the very beginning parts of the motion— identifying your ICP, deciding which accounts to go after by using intent indicators.

Right?

Other folks have that dialed in. They know their ICP. They have a rich CRM. And they need to use AI to actually get people on the phone or get people to reply.

What intent data do you like the best and where do you get it from? I'll tell you mine, but you go first.

I found Bombora to be the best in the past. ZoomInfo, I don't really like. ZoomInfo kind of tried stealing Bombora's, but it's not as effective.

Do you think Bombora is actually um, has the right information because I use it in Apollo and it's never got me too far. I like when people go out to an event or I see them exhibiting or I see them, uh, registering, then I go, that's in real intent, and I can see that they're actually interested. But like, tell me about— tell me how Bombora— so I can use it better because I know a lot of people have Apollo which has Bombora as well.

Yeah, so I believe ZoomInfo used to use Bombora and now they kind of just tried stealing Stealing it, for lack of a better term. I could be wrong. The, um, I liked Sales Intel's. They use HG Insights. They've got great technographic data, but What the hell? Oh, Zoom info is like, uh, tell me that this meeting is being recorded.

That was weird.

It doesn't like what you said about Bombora.

Yeah.

Aaron, what do you do and why did you join the roundtable today?

I got invited and I'm always trying to learn, you know, so it seemed, uh, I'm always trying to keep up with the agentic stuff, which changes so much. I do sales consulting, sales coaching for Jason Bay's Outbound Squad. So right now my clients is American Express, uh, Global Business Travel. We've trained Gong, Zoom meeting like we're on, Rippling, Shopify, a bunch of great groups. And then, uh, I'm a former CRO and sales leader, but I'm a senior account executive loving life, um, with a manageable calendar, uh, just selling, uh, the best AI dialer, Orem, which I bought twice as a customer.

Awesome. Um, let's go to, uh, uh, Jeff White. Jeff, tell us a little bit your feedback so far, what we talked about, and then little 30-second— first tell us 30-second what you do. But guys, just please remember, I don't want to hit sales pitches here because it just, it drives me nuts. So yeah.

I'm not a, I'm not a sales pitch type guy. Uh, Times and Things Group, Jeff White. Uh, we're a veteran-owned, we're a service-disabled veteran-owned business. Um, we do a lot around go-to-market strategy specifically. Uh, we work with a lot of different groups that maybe are utilizing AI for sales production, or maybe they're utilizing it for sales, you know, like prospecting or HR scenarios. I've just actually had a conversation with one that was really geared around partner-centric scenarios too. So I bring people together. That's kind of what I do.

In a nutshell, what tech or what strategy did you figure out that worked really well for your client or for you that either failed or did really good success?

In the last— I would say that, that I had to, I had to kind of reoperate ChatGPT, my enterprise account. I had to retool it because I didn't care for the output. The output was horrific in my opinion, and I had to retool it. So I've kind of built my own little piece that I throw in there and say, don't talk like you talk. This is how I want you to talk. This is how I want you to—

Don't be so wide-eyed optimistic. I want to hear the real— so you got to write prompts. I mean, when I use ChatGPT or any of these others, be very energetic, passionate, use a Star Wars, like Star Wars. theme background of this and, and use a, a challenger approach customer because I want to put— I want to basically tell this person how and why they should use me, but in an ROI manner. So talk to it like you could use voice-to-text. I use a thing called Whisper too. That's a really good voice-to-text. I love it.

I can't—

my thumbs are getting old and I can't do as much, you know, so Except for I started, I started playing around with—

so I have a huge— because I was at Texas A&M Law School. Yeah, I have full access into all of Perplexity. So their entire, like, their highest level Perplexity. And to be honest, it's not bad.

But I don't see much difference in what I've built over here with Is there a difference in any of these high-level ones versus the normal one you buy? I never even played around with it.

There is, there is. Like, one, as, as, uh, I think, uh, Matt or Aaron was saying, was, was security, right? Main point that I will tell anybody, stop using the free stuff. Uh, if you have anything that you're putting on there that's proprietary or stuff that's for you, you need to kick it into, you know, pay the $20, guys.

Seriously. If I upload, like I was asking it about my divorce, right? I was saying I put my finances up there. I go, what should I— what should be right here? Now, how do I keep my stuff from going all across the internet?

One, make sure you're paying for that enterprise license.

Is it going to, to the whole world if I put my stuff up unless I say keep this on a separate thing?

I'll, I'll go to Jason if you don't know, but Well, I will say from a law perspective right now, what we're, we're learning is that there is no litigation precedence yet, which means that your wife, right, that you're divorcing, her lawyer, technically, if they know that you're utilizing Perplexity or ChatGPT or whatever else, there's nothing that truly stops them from getting that information from Your product because—

let me go to Jason and then—

Go for it.

Then Philip, we— go ahead, Jason.

Hey, Jeff, I wanted to know a little bit more about how you were training Chat because I agree the output sometimes is just maddening. Even like, how are you training it to not do stuff? Because even when I build projects, Or with inside a project, or I'll have it build a script of doing something in repetitive, and I will tell it things like, do not use short sentences, do not use the it's not X, it's Y format. And even when I prompt it like that again, it still fucking does it.

So I will tell you that what it's doing is it's doing it in— and pay attention to your projects. Because it will continue to do it throughout each different project as you add different projects in there. It will then revert back. What I've built is, for me, I do go-to-market strategies. I help with companies that are dealing with cybersecurity challenges with AI as one piece, but I deal with people who are trying to bring a product to the market, trying to bring their business to the market, This is what we do, right? We help them into what's going in from distribution standpoint into actually selling into a reseller and then selling into a bigger client, right? That's kind of what we do. And what I've noticed is that, as you were saying, you'll start to see it go back and revert. So for me, I have— I've built out an entire thing like this is the data, this is the information. This is how I speak. This is, this is the, the data points that I want you to know about. And then I put it into a prompt. So now I can say that, hey, for this project, make sure that you're paying attention to this.

I want to go to Philip. Go ahead.

I was just gonna say that, um, I did want to point out that the Unknown Worlds Entertainment lawsuits Yeah, I'm on an AI GTM.

I'm learning a bit more about AI GTM with a bunch of Americans. Hello. How do AI GTM enable everything?

Hello.

Sorry, what did you say?

Who's speaking?

Lorena.

Oh yeah.

Oh my goodness. I know. I don't know how I'm gonna— I don't know about watching that game. It's too late at night. That's my—

do you want to mute?

I'm a big fan, but—

Lorena.

Oops.

Jeez, that's comedy. Hey, please don't do that. Go ahead, Phil.

Sorry, I'll be quick. I just wanted to mention that the Unknown Worlds Entertainment lawsuit that just happened here a couple months ago did set precedence that there is no attorney-client privilege for discussing with an LLM. So anything that is put in there is subpoenaable, can be done in discovery.

I know, I know, back in the day they were trying to get someone's Alexa speaker in because I think somebody got killed or something like that, and they, and they wouldn't— Amazon wouldn't release it. I mean, that sounds like the same type of—

Well, that was because Amazon didn't want to tell people that they're listening, right? That was a whole different ballgame.

They didn't admit they had it. This is, this is that it actually— they can pull it for discovery. Sorry, I'll be quiet.

The Trump administration is picking, you know, who wins in the AI race. There's political around the—

I don't want to get into political things here, guys.

Agree.

I do want to—

they were spying and they were giving away free code and all that. I think it's— there's more to it than just You know, hey, they're giving away the free code and they're giving away, you know, they're eliminating security risks.

I just want to address, Michael, your question earlier. If you're using Claude Enterprise, there is an option in there that you have to uncheck that allows Claude to use your chats to train their AI models. So you have to— it's by default, it's on. So if you haven't gone into the privacy settings, go in and uncheck that.

Is that in most of the AIs?

I think so. I've seen in a couple so far. I've seen it in, uh, in HeyGen as well. So I think you do.

I heard about that. I just never—

I don't know.

For me, I don't really worry about what's being put. I should probably, because I don't put— I don't put that crazy stuff except for my whole life falling apart. I'm just kidding. Larry, go ahead.

I want to go back to, um, Larry. Okay, pal.

Shh, quiet, Michael.

So going back to what people were talking about in terms of training the AI, now I'm a Claude guy, and I use Claude because it does give you the ability to create a hierarchy of training Claude. And I actually put in the chat, I put a link to an author on Substack, his name is Reuben Hassid. If you haven't come across him, I strongly recommend looking at his content. And one of the things he has given is an incredible walkthrough of how to build your Claude ecosystem. And he creates a hierarchy at the very top, something that Claude looks at every time. And there are several files that are read-only files that Claude looks at every time, and it's how not to sound AI, things not to include. It's a combination of what to do because AI responds much, much better in terms of positive things, telling AI what to do works much better than telling AI what not to do. But this hierarchy of information has been a godsend for me because I had stuff coming in the messages constantly I didn't want, and I kept on telling it not to do it, but I was telling it in the wrong place. So look at the positioning of your prompts and your information and you will get much cleaner outcome. I didn't say that as well as Ruben does, but if you look at Ruben Hasid, I strongly recommend his content. It's a great Roadmap.

Matt, do you have any feedback or any questions you want to ask the group?

You know, one thing that I couldn't help but think about while everyone was talking is almost taking a step backwards. And if you haven't already, go to Anthropic, go to their website. They have Anthropic Courses, it's called, and they're free. They're directed courses. You can go in, it will give you, um, really the framework on how to use Claude Cowork, how to prompt it, the right way to say things, um, how to structure your prompts, the— a number of use cases. Um, it's very easy learning. Uh, it's, it's actually— I, I think it's enjoyable, but Take a look at the Anthropic courses. It's a great place to start. It will really help you even if you are really well experienced and you think you know everything. Take a look at it from the purview of Anthropic. I guarantee you'll learn something new.

Who else has a question?

Michael, can I jump in and comment on one thing? You mentioned Whisper a few minutes ago and somebody else was talking about It was Jeff. Jeff, you said you didn't like the output that you were getting from ChatGPT. So, you know, you re-engineered it and put new input in. One of the things I found is if you use Whisper in your prompting and your directive, the content responds— your content when you speak, it comes across much differently in AI than the content you type. And when I started using Whisper in my prompting and building out my information sets, the results were astoundingly better. Um, I, I really don't type anymore. I'm using Whisper for anything, and I'm finding it to help my productivity, and it really helps the quality of my communication with AI.

It would actually rewrite some of your stuff too if you want to do it that way. It takes a little longer. Uh, I did take it off my iPhone, uh, just because I—

it—

you had to press all these keys to get to that particular— what, depending on what program you're using. So I only use it on my computer now. So I thought it was a pain in the butt for my phone, but Whisper has definitely changed my life as far as being able to not have to use the keyboard for every little thing on here. Let's go to, uh, Jelena Arnold.

What do you—

what do you do, Gina? Jelena? So how do you pronounce it?

Jelena.

Jelena.

Jelena. Yes, sorry. Um, I took myself off mute. It's nice to see you, Matt.

Good to see you as well.

So who are you? What do you do? And what got you here besides Matt?

All right.

Well, Matt was my big driver because I'm a big supporter of Access.io. They're doing good work. And what I do is I am the owner and principal founder for The Translation Layer. That is a RevOps consulting firm where we focus on ensuring that the plan put in place is actually translated and communicated properly to all functions to ensure that you actually have alignment. A lot of people in our space don't really know how to internally sell the plans that we put in place. So AI is a big part of it. A lot of my clients and the people that I'm working with right now are very gung-ho on getting AI in place. But no, everybody has a different understanding of what they want. what they need, how it's going to benefit them. So I want to get a good understanding of every function and how they need to be using AI so I can speak to all of that.

Yeah, you know, I, I love how you, you frame that because, you know, when we first started this conversation, the first thing we talked about was customer journey maps, right? And, you know, everyone wants to talk about AI, right? We already heard so many people jump into the conversation really animated and excited about it. But really, AI scales whatever you already have, including your problems, right?

Mm-hmm.

So, you know, before people start to go down the, the journey, the AI journey, take that step back, understand your data flow as it translates today. Where are things going from one to the other? That's going to make your AI implementation that much more successful. And oh, by the way, when you do that, you're going to find pain points that AI can solve really, really, really well.

Yeah, I think that's the biggest thing is having a specific use case for AI. Because like you said, Matt, if you add AI to a really messy system, it's just gonna make everything so much worse. And if all of the go-to-market functions are not aligned, it's only going to get so much worse if you don't have a specific use case for what that AI is doing.

Lorena, you had your hand up.

Yeah.

Hi.

Yeah, somebody said jump in. So I just thought I'd jump in into my— sorry about that before. What the— what I use AI for, I don't know if you want to hear my— so I'm a fractional CRO. I currently work for a deep tech startup. SiriSei, which is actually really awesome, by the way. They have a database which is a context layer for agentic AI. Really, really fast growing, super, super hot product. And I just recently hired a team out of the US, and I also work with another fintech. And the main thing here about— they have enterprise Claude and they have enterprise ChatGPT. and a pretty good tech stack. For me, the game changer has been creating content. So let's say slides in Claude, that has been like super game changing because it goes so quick. Just upload old templates that I have from the past, proposal decks, overview decks, and even contract documents, statement of works, statements of work. So B2B enterprise sales. Mm-hmm. Really great. And then, um, so then also there's even the sales playbook that I, you know, redesigned for, for the, for this particular company. Um, so creating the step-by-step that then we use and implement in HubSpot, um, with all the sort of, you know, how we use each of the qualification tools. Medic, I use a combo of Band, Medic, uh, Sandler. Like, I created that over the, over the years. Um, My own methodology. That's—

have you built— Have you built a digital twin? I did that on delfi.ai, and, uh, I thought it was great for people to talk to a virtual me. And then I actually use it for my daughter who's working for me and stop asking me a question every 2 minutes about what— how she should answer an email.

So that was—

it's a great— and then use it for onboarding. So I think you guys should always look at like, how do I make a, a depot of data, whether it's, uh, A virtual you or maybe LLM AI version that's behind the wall. But I have a visible front-facing digital twin of me that was pretty cool. But it's not a face. It's more of a voice. You're like, you can have a conversation with it.

Have you done that?

Great. What did you build it in? That sounds amazing.

DALL-E AI.

DALL-E AI.

Okay.

I'm going to explore that. That sounds amazing. Yeah, I should do that. Because yeah, and then the other thing I've been using is just like, you know, you take recordings of calls and you can then generate some coaching suggestions. I created coaching matrix for all my team, the inherited team plus the new hires, and they all have different experiences and backgrounds. So rating them in terms of the skills that they have, their strengths or weaknesses and what they need to do to change. But also we can, you know, we can run all the recordings, the calls where they're actually, talking to clients and we can then pick up on things that they need to change. So it's, it's been mostly about that, right? The sales cycle from qualification to close.

Yep.

Plus training and onboarding the AEs, et cetera, and the SDRs. And now we're beginning to apply it to data and I, I'm just beginning to scratch the surface in addition to using different tools like Rio.dev for augmentation. In this case, open source in Solbase, but also Unify. And, you know, there are a bunch of other platforms and we use Apollo and this and that. So, but it's, I want to get a lot more into the, you know, the depth of how do we generate leads and to convert using AI.

Put your information in the chat so that you guys, you can schedule some one-on-ones with some experts here. This is the whole idea of doing the roundtables is I'm definitely not the expert on everything, but I do know everything. So ask me. I'm just kidding. Mohammed.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Thanks, Michael. My background, I'm a private equity veteran. So I used to be deal team and operating partner. And because of the opportunity today of using AI to actually change the game in that space, I've switched to become a PE tech builder. So I build around private equity and I try to build solutions for private equity across the value chain. So currently, and the relevance of this discussion is that we've built like great products regardless of how great I can claim my products are. If you don't really go to market fast and if you don't use technology because everybody's using technology, you are disadvantaged. So I realized that I need to learn go-to-market using AI very fast, like extremely fast. And that's the reason why I'm here. And I would share the same question that Lorena just shared. What's the best way to use AI and technology to expedite the go-to-market and the outreach? It's not easy. I mean, I know that you guys have been talking about, you know, I consider myself as a fast and lifelong learner. I learn things like quite fast, but it's not that easy. It's much more—

Yeah, use AI to open the door, like for just to get conversations going. Use it to open the door, right? Don't be so cute about the AI situation, which some people do. They go, let me tell you everything I know about you to get you on the call. So they'll basically regurgitate your LinkedIn and email to try to build alliance with you. And it obviously looks like crap.

It looks horrible. Yeah.

So what I, what I do is give, like, hey, I want to talk to you about, uh, a Roundtable Mastermind podcast, or which works really well, hey, I'm thinking about going to, uh, Dreamforce in San Francisco. Um, what are your thoughts about that? Have you gone to that, Michael?

Yeah, yeah, Michael, if I, if I can answer you, okay? Uh, when I started building ventures or startups We started by the product and then started working around the design of the website, design of the go-to-market material. Nowadays, with the advent of AI, I mean, over a period of 2 years, okay, now we have the video ready. Like, we have our own promotional video, explainer videos, even music, even songs if we want to target the Instagram and the social media, light targeting. So all of that, you know, AI can, you know, make—

that's pitching. That's pitching, man. You gotta ask them, you gotta help.

And that's why—

yeah, exactly.

Do it a certain way.

Yeah, go ahead.

No, no, I'm just, I'm just trying to explain. AI has transformed, you know, the way we do things. And let me, let me be clear. I mean, you guys, people who work in go-to-market, I mean, you are, you are like, you're specialized. You are actually advanced at this. We are, certain builders, founders, we are very, very, we lack that skills and we have to work fast. And honestly, we can't afford to hire consultants for everything we do. I mean, we run out of seed money by tomorrow, actually. So, you need to be very careful. You need to be extremely talented or extremely versatile in the way you approach it. So, back to your point, and here is your point. All of this is great. All of this is what AI gives you or tries to simplify or try to make affordable. The biggest challenge remains your go-to-market. You know, how are you going to find 20,000 leads, send them emails, make sure that you recycle these emails once more just to make sure you got a clear yes or a clear no and move forward? I'm not talking about sales funnels, which you can do in Kajabi for peanuts. I'm talking about more complex than that. And that's really the challenge. Now, can AI get to the level of expertise that a person like me don't need to call you for help? I mean, I mean, as simple as that. I'm being direct. Yes or no? Okay.

Sorry, I think that's the wrong approach. I completely disagree with that because you're still operating as volume, right? And this is the problem. Like, I'm getting more and more volume of this crap and my inbox every day. You're not going to get through with that. So what we're using AI to do is, again, go back and read the Challenger Sale or the Challenger Customer. It's all about delivering insights to the customer. Like, what can you deliver to the customer that they didn't know about their business? And you can use AI to research a lot of that. We're doing that right now. We, we just ran across a country, a company that is in the middle of a rebrand or a product repositioning. And so we're doing a bunch of research before we reach out. We're like, we noticed this and we're assuming that this is your issue. And then it's totally challenger sale at that point. But it's not about volume. So anyway, that's my—

That's— volume is a spray and pray approach, right? I mean, I can have a boatload of coaches.

But if you're using AI to personalize at scale, that's what's causing the problem.

Yeah, I mean, I'll put what Jason said. I, in working with, you know, SaaS and technology companies, I think there's 2 common, not to overanalyze or generalize, but there are 2 common issues. The ICP isn't defined more, you know, enough, meaning it's not as granular as it needs to be. And the value differentiation, the key messaging positioning is not, again, is a miss. Like, don't— and that's the foundation which you build every go-to-market with. And so if you don't have those 2 key points, which the majority of, say, SaaS and technology companies do, they're just saying what their competitors are doing, then your, your foundation is, is faulty. So.

I wanted to just remind everybody that I want people to raise their hand respectively. That's all because Ian has been waiting. But, uh, I'm good, good insight here. Ian, why don't you go ahead, please?

Yeah, I kind of wanted to build on the topic we're talking about right now. So in my opinion, like what AI is good at is specialization. So, you know, when you talk about outreach and messaging and who you're going to contact and all that kind of stuff, like what we're doing, for example, is we're building a software with Claude that will identify a buying committee for us for specific companies. And it's more effective and accurate than like—

Like a steering committee that's the buying group in that company?

Yeah, buying group.

No one wants to make a decision by themselves anymore.

Right. This is more about like, you know, slightly larger to enterprise-sized deals, right?

But it will—

what it's able to do now is because we're VerifiedFirst, one of the companies I work for is HR-focused, right? It's an HR-focused tool that will find the right buyers in a committee to buy the product. And it speeds us up because now our SDRs can reach out to the right people. We know that the information is correct. It's not— there's no ghost information in there. So it's kind of a replacement, for example, like for Zoom, but it searches for us in the right way so that we're more effective and it's faster. So I mean, that's one way you can use AI. You know, I'm also involved in just in building a product for salespeople that it kind of goes beyond that where it's also building out like playbooks and messaging based on personas. And, and if you want messaging, base it on something rather than some kind of generic, you know, message that you're sending out to everybody.

There's a friend of mine that started GTM Heroes. Yeah, that kind of attacks that whole thing, how to, how to do ABM, right, the buying community. So I would check out what they built already. Julie, go ahead.

Well, real quick, I just want to say one last thing. What I'm finding out is the key is industry. Be industry specific when you're doing this stuff and train the AI to provide you exactly what you need based on the industry. Don't, don't go broad. Don't go generic. It doesn't work.

Be specific. Talk to it like, say, please explain to me like a 3-year-old. You know, what, what you would do here, or explain, or explain, tell them to repeat back what you said to them in a 3-year-old version, because, uh, sometimes it does, it just goes so wide or so specific. It has to be somewhere in between sometimes. Julie, go ahead.

I think that, um, like the conversation that we, that has just been happening for the past few minutes really highlights for me like the 2 biggest AI use cases that I see. And one is like gathering information, especially gathering information that like one human could not possibly get on their own. Like it would not be worth the time investment to get all those different pieces of information, right? If you're a seller, if you're whoever it is, combing all of the different information sources out there and simplifying it in the way that you want it to be simplified. And then also replicating and proliferating best practices. I feel like those are the 2 main AI use cases that are important to focus on. I think when we talk about like, okay, how can I not have to hire consultants? How can I, you know, just like make it happen quickly? I think that that is the part of AI that is— I think that's where people go wrong with AI because they're just saying like, I want AI to tell me what to do or tell my team what to do. And you don't— I don't really think you want that. You want AI to feed you the information that you then use your human brain to figure out what to do with. Or you want AI to help you train up all of your B players to be like your A players, um, or train up or like make it faster, whatever it is, like replicate what a human is doing well. Um, so I feel like those 2 buckets of use cases are like, if I was starting out with AI today, that's where I would focus.

Um, yeah, use AI where it's repeatable and scalable activities and use your brain and personality to date, business date one-on-one, but use AI to open the door. But don't get too cute where you prescribe the solution because you read something. And that's what people do too much. It's like, you don't— you're like, it's like going up to somebody going, I know you're Virgo and your birthday's this and you like to go on cruises, so what do you think? I'm like, what's your name?

Right.

That's the same shit. Stop going too fast with people in life, whether it's personal or business. And by doing AI, they're doing spray paint.

You—

I heard something earlier that just spray and pray. No, you could be— go fast with email, LinkedIn, but ask them opinion or give them something instead of pretending like you know who they are. Go ahead, Matt.

So while we're talking through all this, Julie, great to see you, by the way. And, and, and Michael, you know, everyone's talking about how they want to use AI, some different examples. But I would love to ask everyone in the room, do you have set goals for your AI? Because Not everyone today is developing a set strategy for their AI. And when I say goal, right, it's things like I want AI to shorten my sales cycle, I want better forecasting, better pipeline, I want better lead handling, lead handling, I want more visibility into my accounts, I want to know more about white space on my accounts or retention. and expansion. These are all goals that you can set and then use AI as a tool, part of multiple tools, to help you achieve those goals. Because what we're seeing a lot in the marketplace today is this scatterbrained thought process where you're like, wow, AI can do so much, which is great, it's really exciting. But then you start doing a little bit of everything and you start going, all over the place. And then you never really actually finish one thing. And you never really know if you got to your goal. So, you know, if I know we're getting towards time, and if you walk away from this call, set goals for your AI, develop a strategy for what you want to achieve, do that thing. And once you do that, then get another goal and set that, that goal. And then that's how you're really going to get the most out of it.

Use AI to help you set those goals.

Either way, you gotta have goals.

Yeah, we're running out of time and I gotta get ready for my next meeting. Um, but I wanted to thank everybody for joining. Obviously, if you can reach out to Matt or me about any of your go-to-market strategies that you might want to talk about, great. Obviously, we have people on here like Jason and, uh, the 2 Jasons that have worked with me in the past as well, including Larry. Um, where we've done joint roundtables like I did with Matt. So just think about how can we help each other pay it forward. Again, guys, if, if you want to really have a nice discussion with people without selling them, think about a podcast. It doesn't have to be fancy. Just say, hey, Philip, I want to get you on the podcast. I want to talk to you about your journey. What have you done? How's it working? People want to talk about themselves in a nice way. And if you give them a form, you'll get a discovery call and you produce it and you get content. And then that content turns into AI search engine optimization stuff like AEO. So be cool. Um, give first and you'll, you'll definitely kind of get those top of funnel things through the table a little bit faster. Thanks for your time. Um, if you guys want to save the chat before we get off and it goes away. There's a button, right? There's three buttons dot dot dot next to the chat, and that's where you can save the chat. So if you can look at that and click save chat, you will basically. I'll see if I can put it in the. I don't know if it's going to do it while while we're doing this here. No, I won't do it while we're talking. But anyways, I'll be taking this recording and putting it on YouTube and LinkedIn. Okay, thanks. Thanks for your time, everybody.

Thank you, everyone.

Thank you. Bye-bye.