Full Throttle Falato Leads - RoundTable - Lead Generation

Uh, close to Toronto in Burlington, which is about an hour west of Toronto, and an hour north of Buffalo.

Beautiful.

We'll be in Vancouver in the fall.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, for our anniversary.

That's, that's the other—

Is that you, Stacy? Are you, are you jamming over there? We're just waiting for everybody to get on. Probably start in 3 or 4 minutes. How you been, Michael?

Good.

How you go—

how you doing, Nicholas?

Good, man.

I'm just gonna have a nice little round table and, uh, and maybe do some breakout rooms and got— have people network and have some fun. And there we go.

Sounds good.

Got 3 more people joining.

I'm glad I could provide some elevator music as we get started.

So where are you from, Stacy?

I'm a little bit outside of Chicago.

Okay.

What part?

Orland Park, Illinois.

I used to live in Arlington Heights.

Okay. Yeah. So you're familiar.

And so what business are you in, Stacy?

Uh, I'm in sales after 20-year career in education, so recently switched over to sales and marketing.

Okay, what do you sell?

Ed-tech software.

Okay, well, we've got— we've already got a connection because David is a tech marketing guy, so there we go.

There you go.

Hi, Scott. Hey, Michael, nice to have you on.

Thank you, sir.

So where are you from, Scott?

Dallas, Texas.

Oh, okay, wonderful. What do you sell?

We sell an intelligent automation platform.

Okay, see here, got some more people coming in.

Is that like, is it just out of curiosity, is that like industrial automation? Um, are you talking about like for an operations department for warehouses or manufacturing or what, what type of automation?

Uh, it's more like app-to-app and people automation. So think really complicated Zapier or if-then-this-that.

Great.

Oh, hi Paula. Uh, where are you from, Paula?

I'm from Vancouver, Canada.

Okay, well, we've got— you got one other person from Canada here. That's good. I'm, I'm here.

What do you—

what, what's your business?

I do revenue growth, uh, marketing, uh, strategy and infrastructure for professional services and tech companies.

Okay, got iPad Phil.

What's up, Mike?

Hey, how you doing?

All right.

One of my customers coming on, Michael Goldstein. Hey, Michael, how's it going? How you guys doing? And it was a bunch of people are joining, so we'll just wait a little bit longer. Sorry for the—

uh, so Michael, um, for the benefit of everybody else here, I mean, uh, Michael knows what you do. What do you, what do you do and where are you from?

Which Michael?

Me? Uh, Michael Goldstein.

Oh, that Goldstein. Okay. There's a lot of Michaels in this world.

So my name is Michael Goldstein. Company is called SwitchPitch.

We help big enterprise connect with early startup innovation.

Okay.

It's like a matchmaker platform used by Pfizer and other companies to scout for things that they need that are early stage and new.

Michael, why don't you— Michael Bennett, why don't you go ahead as well?

Sure. So my business is called Software Development Resources, and as the name implies, that's what I provide. I actually sell— I'm an independent rep for about a dozen software development teams. So we do work with marketing applications, things like, you know, websites and mobile applications, e-commerce sites. And then we also work with startups, helping them with their first product or second version of their product, upgraded typically from like a freelancer. Uh, so my job is, is matching the teams with the need.

Oh, that's interesting.

I don't think we had, um, Yogesh, who actually was the first one on Say what he did. You there, Yogesh?

Was.

Was.

How about, uh, Jess or Carrie? While we're waiting for everybody to get on.

Yeah, my name's Carrie Harper. I work for Lendio in their, on their partner solutions team. So I help connect basically community partners with Lendio to offer loans to small business owners.

Okay.

I think we're getting close to going live. About 20 folks so far. Give it a couple more minutes. And good that we're doing intros, kind of doing that and getting some time out of the way too. Nikolai, is that how you pronounce it?

Uh, yeah, you can call me Nick also. Uh, nice to meet you all. Yeah, okay.

Where are you?

So yeah, I'm originally from Russia but moved to Mexico City. So yeah, uh, our business right now is also like Mexico-based. We are building the product which is called Vectorly. We're a small startup and I'm growth manager here. So basically I'm responsible for sales calls and lead generation. So basically what we do is that like, um, uh, we try to automate, uh, people management processes, mainly skills growth in the, in the dev teams. So we're trying to like, uh, solve the problem of productivity and employee retention in tech teams through skills growth, through constant skills growth, and by, uh giving the new career opportunities. So yeah, that's— if I put simply, that's what we do. Thanks all.

Cool.

How about Jeff Feldman?

Yep.

Hey, Michael.

Hey, everybody.

Nice to meet you. Yeah, I remember Michael. Thanks for the invite, guys. So Jeff Feldman. I work for a company called Dragon Boat headquartered in Santa Clara, California. Responsive product portfolio management. That's what we do. So it's a tech company and I lead the sales division.

Cool.

We just got Kat, an old friend of mine, join.

Hi, I'm Katrina Paglaroni with Aria by LeoForce, but also known as Kat, and we do artificial intelligence-enabled recruitment.

Cool.

Thanks, Kat.

I got a longtime friend, Phil. Phil Reeve, why don't you introduce yourself?

Philip Reeve.

I run a marketing research recruiting company. So I'm an executive recruiter, but specialize in the market research and analytic type jobs. Been doing it for 25 years across the country.

I think we're, um, I think we could get started. Uh, let me share my screen. Can you guys see my screen? Yep. Yeah. Okay, so basically, uh, we kind of done introductions already. Um, I, I'll do a quick introduction myself. I'm Michael Filato. I basically am the CEO and founder of Full Throttle Filato Leads, and the whole idea for what I do is just LinkedIn, email, and roundtable automation, just try to help build top of funnel. A lot of folks spend too much time on, on finding leads and not enough time working on the revenue itself. So today, uh, we were doing introductions, which, which we kind of already did. We're going to talk about some of the current state of many companies, um, talk about how much time has been, has been spending on hunting versus actually closing. There's a lot of companies that are doing emails or LinkedIn and they're hurting their, their profiles or domains. So we'll talk about like how can you help not do that. Analytics, A/B testing, some of the things that I've learned, some of the tool sets that I find very useful. And then the last thing is to kind of break out the groups into you know, 4 or 5, um, size and do some breakouts and just kind of network, see if you guys can help each other, um, and maybe share some ideas of what's, what's working on lead gen, what's working on closing, what's working on— could be sales training that you've done that you like, like, like Challenger Approach. Just kind of, just kind of just network. Does that sound good, everybody?

Yeah, sounds good.

Cool. Just a little background. I've been doing this for 25 years, so I've worked at startups most of my life. Um, took Techmates from $250K to $2.8 million in the last 12 months. Took my company Full Throttle from about zero to about $90,000 a month, uh, in the first 12 months. Got the Full Throttle nickname from a Marine, and I'm an Air Force veteran, so you can kind of get an idea, like, what I like doing and what I can do well is kind of what I attack. Um, there is many organizations that are still doing, um, networking one-to-one emails. They're doing account-based— sorry for the type here, I thought I had a space— but they're doing LinkedIn messaging, and LinkedIn is kind of limited to you to about 100 a week. So you got to really figure out like, where is your time being spent and how you're doing it? There's not a repeatable and scalable approach sometimes that I see people doing. Everybody's selling repeatable and scalable a lot, like they're doing recruiting, they're doing technology, doing SaaS, but they also need to figure out what's repeatable and scalable and processes as well. A lot of databases that are people or user are not verified. They're getting them from a different platform. They need to basically verify them through another situation, another platform to figure out so they don't bounce. Data hygiene has been very concerning because of all the COVID and people either quitting, laid off, fired, or whatever. So there's a lot of that that needs to be, um, kind of fixed. And then a lot of folks are using HubSpot, Pardot outreach tools, and they're hooking it into their Gmail, their Office 365. Um, take it from me, if you do it that way, you'll actually ruin your domain, and then you won't be able to send emails to your— even your clients, your prospects. So there's kind of a strategy that you should do that's best practices. If you have any questions, please also use the chat and we'll stop and we'll kind of address them. I want this to be more of a two-way conversation than me kind of just talking. But, you know, it's what— if you look at kind of like what Salesforce invented, oh, 15 years ago, they invented sales development reps, basically people out of school that will book meetings for the senior executives or their account executives. If you've noticed, back when we were selling, we were younger, it used to go like this, right? You used to sell and then hunt, sell that hunt, and then your pipe would be kind of be doing this because we had to eat what we kept, what we killed, uh, or killed what we eat. Is that probably— no, eat what we kill. But the whole idea is to have someone feeding you leads, whether it's SEO, whether it's lead gen companies or SDRs. The whole idea is to have your focus on people closing business and kind of the monotonous of Legion kind of handled by someone else or some other company. Um, the one thing I saw is there's a lot of companies that are doing account-based marketing, right? They're like, okay, Michael, you're going to handle the Southeast like I did for Jobvite. Here's the 30 accounts you need to close. Well, that doesn't leave much time for every other company that's out there that's in my territory for that salesperson to kind of go after and, and attack. Because you got to have medium, small, and large deals coming through so you have that momentum going through. So the whole idea is to kind of have your— again, you can have your sellers focused on, on those top accounts that you want to close on. Um, if you look at deliverability, there's a lot of companies not doing a very good job doing this. And the whole idea is you got to understand what DKIM, DMARC, SPF, MX records are. They're records that need to kind of be set up, and you almost need an email engineer to set this up. So this, it's very important if you do get the HubSpots of the world or Outreach that you know how to basically hook these two different platforms up and then also hook them into your CRM, like, like a HubSpot or a Salesforce. So you got to verify your domain health, verify pretty much every email that goes out. If you get higher than a 10% bounce rate or 20% bounce rate, you have problems with your delivery going overall, and you could get graylisted, blacklisted. It's very bad approach if you're not understanding what data hygiene is and having a separate SMTP server like a SendGrid send out emails versus your Office 365 or your, uh, or your Google Gmail. Um, there's a lot of other things that people are also not understanding is Can you drip market, um, LinkedIn as well? There's platforms out there that you can basically do automation, you know, invites. You can send out unlimited emails as well. It's very important for you not to sit there and go, okay, I get Sales Navigator and go, all right, I got 150 invites for the month and I gotta use them wisely. There's a lot of folks that have open profiles, um, so that basically you could send them free emails. I'm gonna pause right there and see if there's any questions so far so I can help answer any questions. Anybody have a question yet? It's on the chat. The chat. Let's see. Let's see. I see introductions. Can you expand how you use an automation platform damages your email domain? So if you look at deliverability, bounces, and people hitting spam, that's what will ruin your deliverability. What, what I started doing when I worked at TechMain is I did Enfilada 1 at TechMain, Enfilada 2 at TechMain. So I basically came up with all these different email variations so I could send out 2,000 emails a day, um, back then. But And what I noticed is that all of our emails were going to spam. And we had, we had techs working for us, IT, like, um, staff members that would do help desk. So once you start doing that, you, you kind of get into a situation where you damage your domain, you can't fix it. And they, like, Jobvite, where I worked, unfortunately ruined their domain and had to switch to jobvite-inc.com. And they're a pretty well-established company. So you definitely want to You definitely don't want to have to get in a situation where you have to change out your whole domain. Subdomains, alternative domains, like if you're a.com, get a.ai, get a.net, get some other domain so that transactional emails can go out one way, emails for marketing go out another domain or another subdomain, sales can go out with another subdomain. That's what I'm trying to answer. Does that answer your question, Paula?

Yeah, Michael, I actually did this. So we were forced to change our URL, our domain. So the previous marketing firm before I was here was sending out a bunch of spam emails. Deliverability was so poor that intra emails like to ourselves that went through Gmail would be marked as junk.

Yeah, I mean, junk. I mean, yeah. I, I, I— we all learn from mistakes and what we do, or people that don't know what they're doing. So if the email engineer that I use definitely, uh, knows this, he works for Coca-Cola as well, so he keeps people out of Coke. But yeah, thanks for sharing that, Scott, because it's— you don't know what you don't know until you learn it, or someone tells you, or you actually fail at something. And, uh, I, I've, I've done enough of those to kind of get up and, and learn what to do right. So does that answer your question, Paula?

Yeah, it, it does, Michael. I was just, I was, I was curious about it because automation is what I do. And, and so there's a bunch of things that we do to manage deliverability, but one thing we absolutely don't do is send out cold prospecting, mass cold prospecting on on the corporate domain, like absolutely not. So that does answer it, yeah.

Yeah, you definitely want a subdomain. I actually have like having a subdomain with an alternative domain. Like even put, like I have a company today that said, let's get, like, get, what's it like, getxerox.com versus xerox.com. They would use kind of a different, really close to what their domain is, but that helped. Um, Kat said she had issues, uh, you had issues despite using subdomains. Um, that— I don't know what— how that was set up. A lot of times if the DMARC or DKIM or SPF or MX records are not set, that's important. You got to have all— you got to have an email engineer. I, I watch my email engineer do this about 30 times. I have no clue what the hell he's doing. It's, it's, it's a science, you know. And then everybody has a different setup. One person has GoDaddy, and they use that for their control panel. Then they have Gmail, and then they have some sort of virus software they will need to run it through. So there, you know, there's definitely a strategy to doing that.

I got a question for you, Michael. When you send— and also for you, Paula— when you use a subdomain in the body of the email, do you avoid using the the main URL, in other words. So you've used a subdomain to send, but in my—

I use the, I get 'em to go back, click on the real domain, not go to a, to a subdomain. When they reply, it gets forwarded to that holding inbox. It gets then forwarded to the real inbox.

Well, but I'm talking about within the body. So what we've experienced is the spam police or whoever will scan the body of the email. So let's say you're using a subdomain as a sending domain. But you have a link somewhere within the body of the email to the actual domain. I've, I've seen that get picked up and then they, they hold, they hold the main domains responsible.

So David, that's a huge topic and there's so many factors that could be going on there. If that's, if that's something that you're experiencing, I'd be happy to pop my LinkedIn in and we can connect and have a conversation with you about it offline. I suspect there's a few different things that could be going on with you, and it comes down to everything from how your domain is set up to how your links are tracked to who you're using for a platform. And we could spend an hour just trying to figure that out.

There's a lot of variables, David. And my email engineer too, it's someone that you'd want to get a couple of different visions. And there's always things that change around too, you know. Well, I'll continue. I don't see any more questions, but I saw Christina talk about top 50 doesn't just mean your biggest counts. Yeah, it's your ideal customer profile. I agree. You know, there's a lot of folks that not necessarily manage A/B testing like I do. Analytics will tell you exactly what's working and what's not. You might have an idea of what your ICP, your personas are. Um, you know, I work with a lot of startups, so they're still trying to also figure out, you know, where they're going to get the most bang for the buck. So I help write the content. A lot of people help do that, but a lot of people send marketing messages to me and go, let's use this. I'm like, no, it needs to be about challenger approach. What's in it for them? Who cares? So what? What have you done for other people? Fear of missing out. Can you somehow get into the heart and the brain of that person to want to book a meeting? The whole idea in that email is not to book, is not to close them or sell them, is to try to get them on a discovery call. So analytics are very important, um, having KPIs and just understanding, um, what content works and what's not. Because subject lines, length of emails, you don't want to put attachments, especially in your first or second emails. Those get, you know, caught in spam filters as well. So really, some of the questions I have for the team is like, you know, do you have a CRM that's connecting to these automation platforms? Um, does your— the database that you're working— is it— is it getting updated weekly, daily? You know, a lot of these platforms that you can buy, like a ZoomInfo, they update a certain amount per per week or per day. You never just wanna buy a list. Lists get old really fast. Are people using Sales Navigator? If you look at the difference between Sales Navigator and just LinkedIn as a whole, the search functionality is night and day in Navigator. And you can build lists, you can save lists. I can personally automate lists in there. I can also scrape or download Crunchbase and find out who just raised money Send them a list. Um, you know, having a team just do lead gen and having a team that just sells is important. Um, but you definitely want to understand like what you're getting for $5,000 or $6,000 a month for someone that just graduated school versus what you can get with, you know, someone that has 25 years experience like myself. Um, I've also came up with— and this is the thing that I want to go in the round tables and breakouts— I was like, what Things have you done with and that you could share with the group, um, that has really helped you in different topics, like whether it be a trade show or— like, I look for SDR jobs personally because I know like they're looking for Legion people or they're looking for salespeople, and I apply for them. I have my SDRs applying for them, and when they ask and say, hey, can we interview? Yeah, I'm saying, you know what, I'm actually looking to help as a contractor. Or in the database I use, if they're looking for a software engineer and you guys in this company I work with, those building of software websites, it's a good chance that they might want to hire that outsourced or nearshore firm. So I use that. I also notice that trade shows, a lot of people stay at their booths. I mean, I'm going back to trade shows and the whole idea is just to walk around and say, hey, what do you do for Xerox? What do you do for for Lenovo and asking them what they do. Um, if you— there's too many people stand that stands behind the booth, you know, it says, you know, what's your name, here's what I do, and is you're almost talking about yourself too much. So I've really found that I've gotten 70, 80 like cards, business leads from doing trade shows because I hustle and because I ask them about them. And I don't stay at the booth if it's dead. I go walk the halls, I go I'll actually look down at someone's name badge, look at the app, look it up, find— look at their LinkedIn, find out something about them, and then kind of follow them around until I could get them— they're not talking to someone. So it's not creepy, but I'm definitely trying to make sure that I, I do that. Or after they chat up on a, uh, on the, um, on the stage, you know, there's people that wait in line and want to chat with folks as well. So that's also a good good approach as well. Um, the last thing would be is, are you scraping websites to find, like, if it's a, if it's a show, conference, or, you know, that your top 100 list, are you taking that, scraping it, and you put it into some sort of automation platform? That's another thing that I do. So, um, that's pretty much what I wanted to kind of share my knowledge. I think we have, um, how many folks we have on this thing? Yeah, someone just write MailTester. They, uh, my, my email, uh, engineer uses that. I also have used, um, uh, what's it called, MillionVerifier, to look at the emails and making sure that those emails don't bounce. They have a catch-all approach, and they also have, uh, they test them out. So that's called MillionVerifier. I think— I don't know if we, based on the size of the group here, that if we have to break out or not, or we can just kind of keep it up, keep up in one. How many we got, like, uh, 21? I think we can probably just keep, keep this size here. This is not too big where we need to go in breakout rooms, but I'd love to kind of open up the room a little bit more and have people share some other things that they found worked well for them as far as helping them either close just certain questions for discovery or lead gen. This is really meant to kind of do some brainstorming together.

Yeah, I've actually had a— this is Michael Bendit— I had started a program, an email outreach program, and I set up different— instead of different subdomains, different domains like, you know, mycompany.us or you know, org or something. And there's tools that will actually warm up your inbox so that it's not perceived as a spam source. In fact, a product called Warm Up Inbox.

Yeah, I've used that, Michael. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like it's gibberish back and forth, but it's deliverable emails and you all share in the Right, it's a pool. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you have to, you have to know how to set that up. I had to have my email engineer set that up because it's— I tried doing it a couple times, like, damn it, this is not easy. And he's— and he actually told me it wasn't really needed, but I go by what he said. But I, I was doing it because I thought that would warm up deliverability back and forth.

Yeah, that's the idea.

Yeah. So, um, who else has, uh, something to share?

I've got a jobs example. Yeah, so, so I look at, um, at job posts all the time because we've identified like tangential technology to our ideal customer profile. So our customers also use, you know, X, Y, and Z technology. So we look for those keywords in the job post. And then we also use it for content. So I actually scraped 800 jobs off of LinkedIn and looked at the certain technical skill because the other platforms that we were competing against, they really like oversell their capability. And so we were able to prove like the technical job skills that you needed to run those platforms. And so we use that in competitive situations because they'll say, hey, this is a no-code platform. And would say, hey, we, we scraped 800 jobs off of LinkedIn and like, you got to have a master's degree to run this thing. And so it's helped out quite a bit. So job posts are a goldmine.

Yeah, I love the job post and I've closed like 7 deals from that. They're like, wait, so you, you applied for a job or you said— or I take it and I, I input it into my CRM and then I enrich it with the data. And then like, if they look, if they're, they're fishing in that lake, I might as well fish in that lake as well. You know, that's the kind of way I look at like advertisers advertise. So hit advertisers if you're going after advertisers. But how— I've tried to scrape, um, LinkedIn, LinkedIn Jobs, and I haven't found a good scraper for that. And I've even asked a couple of the automation platforms if they have a good scraper for the LinkedIn Jobs thing. I know how to scrape Angel, which is a startup job site, and I think, um What's the other one? The one out of Atlanta. But anyways, yeah, I'd love to kind of hear about what scraping tools you like.

Yeah, I paid, um, I paid a guy like $100 on Fiverr and he did it.

Yeah, Fiverr's been great. I, I got my, uh, my PowerPoint, my one-sheeter, um, all that stuff done. Even SEO keywords kind of set up by people on Fiverr.

No, Michael, on Apollo, you had recommended me to using Apollo, and they have a tool in there where you can search jobs on Apollo and then, yeah, identify people you want to target.

Yeah, I use that.

Yeah, that works.

Yeah, I've done that, and I've mentioned like, I saw your job posting, and sometimes, um, that wasn't as accurate. So I'll look on Apollo or these other ones, but I won't necessarily mention that I saw a job. Because the person that I emailed doesn't— didn't necessarily post that job, and now I've lost them that— now I've lost them that they basically are ignoring the message because they didn't post a job. Like, that's not the point. The point is I can help get you guys leads as a, as a whole. So I, I just almost use it as a, a tool just to kind of email them instead of mentioning that I saw them. I used to mention I saw your job posting.

So I've had a lot of success with Phantom Buster, and I will just add a link in here. Then it's really awesome in how it scrapes LinkedIn. You can be very specific to what you're looking for and provide the link of the search that you did on LinkedIn in LinkedIn Search or LinkedIn Sales Navigator, and then it comes back with a list. Or in this particular case, what it's doing is I'm targeting a certain subset of folks on LinkedIn, certain titles, it's asking each one of those folks if they would like to be connected to me, and it sends a message to each one of those folks that I sent on a specific time frame. So they, they're not looked at— LinkedIn's not looking at Spam Buster or me as a spammer. It's like only sending like 10 messages per day because I think we can only send 100 a week. Automation system.

Yeah, I— the platform I used, um, basically allows me to— I could send like 200 in-mails a day and I could scrape and I could say which ones have open in-mails policy or not, which means they have an open profile. So that I've used that one pretty, pretty well and that's been— but I haven't figured out the whole like— yeah, that's a good thing to do is hire a, um, a virtual assistant type person to scrape. But I'm, I'm always trying to find like, was there some platform? There's a couple that I use, um, that scrapes. I'm trying to remember the names.

Um, well, just say, Michael, this is not a virtual assistant platform, it's an automation platform.

Yeah, automation. Yeah, yeah.

So you just set it up and it does it for you.

The two ones I use that are a Chrome extension is No Coding Data Scraper and then Data Miner, M-I-N-E-R. So that has— I use those two once in a while. Um, so I used to have like a, uh, SDR kind of go through the list and like a virtual assistant almost and write down every company name. I'm just— it's— by the time you look at the automation tools and someone doing it manually, it can get pretty expensive, even with the virtual assistant in another country. You know, so, but there's definitely room for both. How about Stacy? Stacy, give us some, uh, insights that, uh, you've killed it.

Oh man, well, listen, I'm the newbie. I told you guys I'm a career changer after 20 years in education. So, um, how do you educate people that don't want to learn? Yeah, right.

Yeah.

Um, so I I am really doing a whole bunch of different things that I'm, I'm just feeling my way around. I'm the first full-time sales hire for the company that I'm—

what do you— what company again?

It's called Insight Education, and, um, they have a tech platform that the, the company had built, but they've been around as a consultancy for like 22 years.

Okay.

So they built this tech platform, um, to help with the work they do, which is around instructional coaching. So it's like a video platform. Think Gong for educators, essentially.

That's pretty cool.

And yeah, but it's been very interesting. It's a small team, and so I'm coming in new and feeling my way through, which is why I'm here, right? So I've got experience. I just don't have it in the sales space. So trying to figure out my messaging, How can I use my former position as the buyer? Like, I was the chief negotiator and the buyer of all our tech contracts. So how can I use that now as the seller? So I'm, you know, I'm here to learn and take any input from those of you who've been doing this a long time.

Cool.

Hey, Jess, this lazyapply.com looks pretty damn cool. Tell us a little, tell us a little bit more about, I mean, is it doing quick applies on LinkedIn or what is it doing?

Yeah, just, you just set it up and then whatever parameters you want and then it does quick, quick, quick. Yeah, quick applies through LinkedIn and you can do, you know, I think up to 100 and some a day applying for the job. So it uses a little bit of AI and some other stuff to, it's, it's not 100% very are accurate in my opinion. Sometimes it'll say I'm in the wrong country or something, but, you know, it'll do 100 and some applications for me a day.

Yeah, I have my, one of my SDRs doing LinkedIn Easy Apply all day, and then I have him take that, put it into a Google Sheet, and then I basically import it into Apollo and then send them emails. But, you know, I don't want to take a job away from someone that's part of my family. But, But yeah, I mean, $129 is kind of expensive for that, but it's still—

I got it on a lifetime deal, one-time purchase.

Are you AppSumo? Yeah, they still have it up there.

I'm not sure, I haven't looked.

Yeah, I love that. I love AppSumo. I have like a signature, like a DocuSign for like $80 for the— for a lifetime.

Yeah.

What is AppSumo?

I've never heard of that.

So AppSumo is like this new software startup companies that basically give you lifetime software access for their, for their program. And this, this, in this case it was Signaturely. That's kind of like DocuSign. And I got it for like $40 or $50 lifetime. Um, it's a, you know, it's, it's a kind of a knockoff of a product sometimes, or sometimes it's something that's no one's ever designed yet. I, I got a, I've gotten some other things like a, Script writing where it helps you write like emails. Um, what else did I do? Oh, I bought— oh, and you know what, a good cal— there's a good calendar program on AppSumo called TidyCal, T-I-D-Y-C-A-L. They actually build it, and that's a competitor to Calendly. It's $29 lifetime.

I use Calendly.

I use Calendly just because I was working at Techmate and doing my own job and I needed to put multiple calendars. And there was— Calendly just seemed to work a little better. But Tidic, for $29 lifetime, like, I kept it. I'm like— but yeah, AppSumo is a pretty nice thing to know about. But I like this.

I think you just got me into trouble because I am a software addict and this is going to be a bad scene.

Oh, it's an addiction for sure.

Yeah, AppSumo, it's like you have like 2 months to to refund, no questions asked. So I did it and I've done it for a week. I'm like, this sucks. I didn't even want to pay $50. And a lot of times I just also kept it because it was $30. And, you know, if I ever lose Calendly, I still have a backup for $30 lifetime.

Right.

Yeah. There was something else I bought on there, but yeah, it's definitely— and then I don't know if there's a lot of people here that are entrepreneurs, but I and Phil Reeve, we got MediShare, and that's a place to get health insurance if you don't have, you know, you don't work for a company more or they don't have health insurance. It's kind of a Christian-based approach, but you don't necessarily have to be that religious to join it. But it's like $800 for like 4 people, and you can't have a pre-existing condition. But I found that to be a very valuable tool. I'm not going to spend $3,000 to $4,000 guarantee a month on Blue Cross when I can get this for $800, and then maybe I'll spend a couple thousand dollars a month, maybe I won't, you know. But it covers also tragic things that can happen as well. You just can't have cancer, you know, as you're getting it, so as you have it. So that's the one— that's the only drawback. If you have someone that's sick, then you won't be able to get it. But That's, that's a good alternative for healthcare, as I noticed. And there's plenty of people on here that I know are small companies like myself as well. So there's a couple other ones too.

There's another, um, I— if we're just sharing software that's cool that worked is, um, I just tried out this weekend copy.ai and jasper.ai that, you know, can write blog articles or social media posts or whatever. All you have to do is like put in a sentence and a couple of keywords and it spits out all this content.

So that's—

yeah, this— so Copy.ai is much more expensive than the one they have on AppSumo.

Oh, okay.

I'd have to— I could tell you what the, the company name is, but they have stuff like that. Um, I'll look at AppSumo and see what it was. I think it was called Rewrite or something.

But, um, yeah. And a really good one that I just dropped in the chat is Jasper.ai. That's the number one. Yeah.

Okay.

That's the one I also looked at. So you think Jasper's better than Copy.ai?

I don't know if it's better than— it's certainly more popular.

Okay.

But it means it's better.

Jasper's a copyright thing. I mean, a copy, uh, like, uh, copywriter.

Yeah. I've, uh, I've been using Jasper for about 4 months.

Good.

Yeah. Like, I mean, it. It's helpful. It'll probably get you 80% there, right? And then I'm also hiring contractors on Fiverr that use Jasper and Surfer SEO. So basically what Surfer does, and I think it's more valuable than Jasper, so you type in your keywords into Surfer. And what it does is it, as you write the article, it tells you how you're gonna rank for your keyword. Oh, so like if your keyword is, you know, email marketing, which you would never rank for, right? It basically tells you what keywords you need in your article and it gives you a score from 0 to 100 as your article becomes better and better and better. And so I think since we've been using it, we rank number 1 for like 5 or 6 different articles. And we've got a couple of featured snippets for answers. So it's really cool. But it's work just like anything else. And I've been paying— I mean, I overpay on Fiverr. And so I pay $120 an article. And that's like a 2,500-word article. But a lot of people will sell it to you for less than that.

Yeah, definitely share like good people on Fiverr because not everybody's created equal, you know?

Yeah, yeah. The guy I've been using is, you know, he's kick-ass. I don't know that I'd share him.

I really love Fiverr. I just, I mean, it's just so much better than having to pay full price.

Yeah, and then just the headache. I mean, for, for me, just to go on Fiverr, pay by credit card, turn in receipt, you know, with the corporate card, it's just way easier, you know, from a paperwork standpoint than dealing with a contractor and chasing payments and chasing our accounting. Um, and the, you know, the quality of work, because, you know, it's reputation-based. Like, I have a reputation on Fiverr and suppliers do as well. So it just helps everybody because you just wanna do quality work.

So are you, are you taking Fiverr, Scott, and dropping that into Jasper?

No. So I'm just paying a guy to use Jasper.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

So I, I also subscribe to Jasper. I use it myself and I can get, I mean, I'm an okay writer. I'm probably just as fast as Jasper. But it does, it does fill in some words for you. And depending on what you're writing on, so, you know, most of Jasper only goes to 2019. So they basically scraped the internet to, you know, up to 2019. So I'm emerging tech, so there's no content on the internet for it. So it depends on what you need. If, if we write about our space, we have to write it ourselves. But if we write about like industry, you know, issues or whatever, you know, it does pretty well unless your industry issue is initiated by COVID or pandemic, right? Because none of that content is in there. But you can teach it, right? It's, you know, it's AI, so it learns what you type and it learns from you. So it gets better and better and better. But it's not cheap. It's $100.

Month.

There's a tool called Ink for All that I put in the link, I put in the chat. It's also, I think it's a combination of like Jasper, Semrush, and Grammarly. And I've seen it demoed. I haven't really used it myself because I don't do SEO writing. But it's pretty sophisticated, very sophisticated. I think it might even, it might do better than Jasper even just on the AI writing.

I have a question. Go ahead. I have a question about the quality of content that you get from AI writing tools. I mean, I get that you can, you know, see the keywords and all of that, but do you actually get content that positions you and your expertise different, or are you basically regurgitating what's already out there to try and grab the links bot.

It takes, I mean, a lot of it is based on what's out there and what's already ranking well. And, you know, the Ink for All, for example, examines what's ranking well, tries to understand based on the content, you know, what it is that's helping it rank well. And so it'll give you a starting point if you want to obviously work from there and change things up or add things, you can do that. And apparently it does learn from your style. When you fix something, it will make adjustments in the future based on those fixes if you turn that on.

We were talking about software for us, right? We're not talking about for our clients because for our clients I'd hire an SEO agency before I'd send them to a website to say, let's do it for you.

Yeah.

Okay.

Well, I mean, yeah, the content is not everything, right? And a lot of these SEO agencies use these tools as well. To help generate content, uh, that's, that's relevant and that'll rank well.

Yeah.

And Michael, why don't you tell them about your, uh, your referral network too? That's been very good for— that's a tool.

Yeah, I mean, I, I have, and Michael and David are members of it. It's, uh, it's called the Trusted Referral Network. It's a network for marketing services providers. So, um, Okay, you know, anybody who is a small marketing agency— Paul, you might be interested. Um, Lacey, ghostwriter. Uh, you can go see the site, it's trustref.net, T-R-U-S-T-R-E-F dot N-E-T. Yeah, you could look under Filata, you'll see Michael's company. You go under software development, that's my company. Um, Two Pins is David's company.

Yeah, I'm gonna start a company called 3pins, just get one better.

One better. Yeah, we already purchased 3pins.com, so you're too late.

I'm gonna get 4 or 5.

But did you purchase 1 pin?

Nah, nah, so—

That's what I would register, 1 pin, so I'm above you in the list.

It's too similar.

That's great. That's like back in the day when like, what was it, the storage company, 5 A's. I don't know if you remember that one. They were always at the top of the book, right? The store, because they had 5 A's.

I just put a link for, um, for Daily Ad Brief. It's, uh, it's like a— it's very professionally done TV show that's online, and they interview you like they would like, uh, like a business magazine show, and they don't charge. So I have— I put a link just to the to the main site, and then I put a link to all my interviews. They keep on calling me to talk about Top of Funnel, but if anything, it just helps you with like an expertise approach. And if they're not charging you to talk about your company and what you do and how you help people, not a, not a bad, not a bad deal. There's another one I did called Kelcan TV as well that was out of Australia. So if it's free, it's a good price for me. How about Christina? She's just sitting there. She's probably double-tasking here. Tell us something.

Well, I, um, joined today because I wanted to hear some, uh, tips of the trade in marketing. I am a revenue leader and I've worked closely with marketing and the companies that I've been a sales leader for, but haven't actually led marketing. And so I am yearning more and looking to take on some roles and some potential contracts that include the marketing function.

So, so you're basically, uh, you have your own firm that you want to basically be a fractional marketing person, or tell me about what your company does.

I don't have a company yet. I actually just left a company where I was the VP of sales, and I have decades of sales leadership experience and I am toying with the idea of starting my own fractional sales leadership or revenue leadership company. And one company that I'm talking to that if I get the, the contract, I will be in charge of the marketing function as well. So I wanted to join today to just hear from other marketers and lead gen folks.

Yeah, that's— congrats on that. Hopefully you get that. I mean, the whole idea with the consulting approach, in my opinion, is, is there a way to spread yourself, you know, 3 to 4 clients at $8,000 to $12,000 a month, then you can make a nice living? But sometimes the fractional approach and not— and having maybe 2 clients at $5K, it's nice living, but you know, how, how can you almost do a rinse and repeat approach, a scalable, repeatable approach that doesn't require tons of your personal time. And that's why I love what I do, because LinkedIn and email and even this roundtable approach, what I'm doing today, is a repeatable and scalable process that I've learned where I, I have 18 clients already and I'm not even close to being at my, uh, my, my bandwidth. And that's how—

that's great.

Yeah, so I hit like $85,000 a month MRR already just, just using my own LinkedIn and email approach. And just making sure that I'm feeding that, that, uh, the funnel with, with the right filters and the right people and the right messaging, and then letting it go.

Yeah, yeah, that's exciting.

Congrats.

You could find something or staff to kind of be able to have enough clients to make it like, oh, I'm making a really good living, more than I could as a VP of Sales. That's, that's the key.

Yeah, Katrina has an interesting question in the chat there about the magic number. What do you think, Michael?

What's the magic number per client so they don't treat you like an employee? Oh, well, it's— for me, set expectations. I'm not your SDR, I'm not selling for you. I'm doing— I'm an automation solution and expert, and either you could send the emails on LinkedIn or I can. I charge about the same amount um, that you'd pay a kid. That's— I've just really set expectations on a thing. But I've had people say, this is the way I want you to do it, this is the systems I want you to do, and they want to have a call every week. And I'm like, I'm not— I'm not your— I'm not your salesperson. I, I, I have my business I want to do my way, and I want to work with you, but if I'm waking up every morning— I used to wake up every morning like this, this just really stressed out, like, I don't know how I'm going to handle all this. And I used to take it personal if I lost a client. I just figured out that I'm amplifying their message and I'm charging them what they would either pay a kid for or pay me for. So if you're charging $15,000 a month, like, if, Christina, if that's what you're going to charge and you have one client or two clients, they're probably going to treat you like you're part of the company because they're paying you that. Yeah. What is—

what do you—

what's your average client a month, Michael, or roughly? Or I'm sure you have small— some that are smaller than others, some of them are bigger than others.

Yeah, I mean, it's— they're originally smaller companies that don't understand like what it costs to build an SDR team yet, or, or they have built— they have done lead gen and it hasn't worked with a company or with internally. Or they don't want to— they don't have the time to sit there babysit a kid. Um, but I, I charge mostly $5K a month per client. So, you know, you take 15 times 5, and I'm like, wow, I'm— I was making $250 as a sales guy before, and I thought I was pretty good. And now I'm going to make a million dollars hopefully this year. And it just blows my mind that I didn't think about doing my own company for, uh, for myself a long time ago. And again, I also look at like, am I that much more expensive than hiring a kid to do lead gen that doesn't have any tools?

No.

So I don't feel like I'm too expensive, you know. So it's just— and if people can't afford it, I'll say, listen, don't we do $4,000 a month and 10% commission? I always try to find a win-win, a hybrid approach. But if they are— if they're two people and they have one client and one's a credit union, they can't mention their name, That was one of my clients. I had a really hard time trying to find them leads because they're not sales guys, they're engineers, and they don't really want to use their LinkedIn, and they don't have any clients. How would the commission work?

Just if you, if you get— is that me based on booking meetings?

Yeah, like when I do commission approach, I maybe charge a little bit less, and then when they close the deal, it's, you know, okay, you get something. I get 10% of the first 12 months. Okay. Because they would, they would have to pay a SDR either bonuses or commissions, insurance, Social Security.

Sure.

And then they have to fire them at one point, or they want to move— those kids want to go up being AE within 6 to 12 months.

Yeah.

And then, and then you're not necessarily even someone that is born a salesperson sometimes, right? Like, you're like, you know, SDR even. And then SDRs, it's a burnout job.

Yeah.

Have you found that it works, Michael? Like the ones that you've put on commission, have you— have you— do you have enough length in that to determine if they pay you on, on a consistent basis?

Sometimes, you know, if they— you know, like, I had a, I had a client that was on earlier on this thing that he's about to close things, you know, it's about 4 to 5 months for him to actually close it based on his approach. But, um, you know, I, I'm— commission's more of icing for me. I'm okay with 4K and commission but I'm not going to just drop my price just to drop my price. Yeah, you have to get to get, you know. I'm very much of a— there's a transparency sale this guy named Todd Caponi does. It's very well built out platform. It's like, you do this, but then you got to do that. You just don't drop your price because they asked you. So, or I've done like, okay, $4,000 a month instead of $100 a meeting, I'll get $200 a meeting. Or if you do 12 months instead of 6 months, I'll go to $4,000. You know, it's always about like win-win for me. It's like I'll work with other people, but don't tell me I'm expensive at $5,000 when you can— it's going to be $7,000 all in a month for a kid. Then go ahead and do that. Call me in 3 months.

Yeah, call me when you're in pain.

Yeah, it's just— I, I've had SDRs who got 3 meetings a month. I'm like, I'm not even an SDR at Chubb, right? And I got for a week. So you got to have that heart to kind of like do things a certain way and have a certain drive, or you're not going to even be a good sales or SDR person. So it just— I don't know, I think the youth of today are a little bit suspect.

Hey, hey, Michael, what's a good response to people who go, well, I'd like you to prove that you can do it? How about we work on a commission-only basis?

I go, Go ahead and get those people. Those people are not going to spend time on your account, right? Yeah, I'm like, it's, it's like even like, uh, uh, Phil, why don't you, why don't you talk about, um, how we talked about retainer versus, uh, um, versus contingency for recruiting?

Yeah, so I did, uh, contingency recruiting for years. Um, that's where, you know, I go find somebody and then somebody pays me a fee, usually 20 to 25% of their base salary once they're hired. And the problem is that since they're not outlaying any cash up front, then they sit there and there's no urgency to get it done. And when they do find somebody, they know there's a large price tag attached. So they're going to do anything they can to find somebody else or delay it. And then they're going to take that dollar amount they're going to pay you and take it out of their salary. That's why people don't get hired. So I created this budget recruiting, I call it, where it's just a monthly fee and they just pay me the service to go find the people, recruit them. You can hire as many as you want. And then the incentive is every month they have to, you know, pay me again. So they're incentivized to actually move quickly to make a decision to hire because otherwise they have to keep paying me. And then none of that ties to how much they hire them, so they can use that money to then you know, spend more money to get that person on board versus paying me, and then they can come back to me with multiple jobs. So that, that small monthly number just seemed to work very well.

Can I ask how much, or is that—

oh yeah, no, I break it down by salary. It's like $3,750 a month for $0,000 to $50,000 and $4,750 from $50,000 to $100,000 and just goes up. $1,000 blocks. And then if somebody gives me multiple jobs, you know, I can make it for less. Like, I have clients coming to me with 4 or 5 jobs, and I just charge them, like, let's say, the $4,750 or the $3,750 a month. So, um, that's how it works. And then they get a— they get a list of everybody that I've contacted. They can see them all because I don't have to hide anything. You can see who they are, what they said, you know, link to their LinkedIn profile. And so it opens up that transparency of 'Well, I'm paying you all this money, what are you doing?' You see hundreds and hundreds of people and what their contact is. That was one thing I wanted to mention is everything just in general, everyone was talking about all this, this, um, you know, marketing and emailing stuff. I put a note in there for a place called Sly Broadcast. That thing is amazing. Basically, you leave a— you record a voicemail, you put in the numbers of who you want to call. I have it all automated and it will call— I'll call hundreds of people and I walk away and it will call your phone number, not ring the person's phone number, and leave a voicemail.

So you don't disturb them.

It's called Sly Broadcast?

Yes, Sly Broadcast.

I'll put it, put the link in here. Yeah, I'm looking for it, but there's the link. I mean, there we go.

It's amazing. I just filled a job with Visa. Okay, we had done our emailing and all our messages through LinkedIn and You know, whatever reason it went to spam or she didn't get the message, she doesn't work there. She got the phone call, called me back, hired. That's her. And they wanted to do contingency. They paid me $40,000.

Yeah, I switched.

I didn't even make the phone call.

I switched my— I do recruiting too. Um, so some people say, you know, I need to hire a director of sales before I hire you. Like, well, I actually was a recruiter too, so I've been talking to Phil because Phil focuses on, on a certain industry where I can— I'm a little bit more, uh, more in sales and marketing, uh, any, in any industry. But I, I placed someone at a company in San Diego and they owed me $25,000, and then she just got squirrely and I have to chase her, and I never collected. Then I had to hire a lawyer. I'm like, I'm never going to do contingency-based work or back-end commission-only work. It's like I'm worth something. You got to value that for yourself and say, you want to hire someone for straight commission, then go for it. I'm not that— I'm not that person. Just let me know when you're ready to be serious, because I— it's like real estate, right? If you dedicate yourself to a realtor, they're going to spend more time with you. If you don't spend the time with them to sign some contract, they're not necessarily going to try hard for you. So— and I also did real estate in the past as a guy that flipped homes and stuff, and also showed homes, and it was really hard to work with people that didn't really dedicate to you. So that's why I signed contracts for my lead gen. I don't do it on just success-based because I'm, I'm not their company. And the same thing for recruiting. I'm working to help you find someone, just like Phil does, and he came up with a great idea that I've embellished on my, on my, my side.

Oh, I gotta go.

Yeah.

The other key thing I'll just tell you is if you come up with any model where you can put in a monthly dollar amount, and what I do is I just, I make it small enough that you can put it on a credit card. I'm like, grab your points, do whatever you want, and then I am paid. I'm not chasing you, we're not talking about payment. You're paid and now I'm doing my work.

Yeah, I charge in front of each month for what, either, um, recruiting or lead gen. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna chase somebody. So yeah, that's a key thing with, you know, if you're a smaller company, you know, I just say, listen, I charge in advance of each month. I don't want to have to chase people. I've gotten burned. You know, you're a big— you're a bigger company, and some people— I don't want to do no net 30. It's like, let's get this going. Here's— give me a credit card. I don't care, I'll take the credit card fees. I just Marilyn, we haven't— we didn't hear what you do or any background of you. You're on mute. If you have to drop off, obviously, which I'm just going as long as people want to go. I got a call in 30 minutes, so whoever needs to drop off, go ahead. Marilyn Zachor? You're on mute. All right, well, we'll skip that. How about Karen Jones? What do you do? Well, can you hear us, Karen? I can.

Hold on one second. I gotta find me.

We can hear you. Oh, you can hear me? Yeah, we can see and hear you.

Oh, you can? Okay. Yeah, so I am Director of Government Safety. Sales for Techpert. We are a small minority business enterprise out of Miami, Florida, and we provide application development, and we also have a staffing model for government business.

Okay, cool. And then Lacey, I don't think we heard from Lacey yet either, right? And you're on.

Hi, good afternoon.

Hi, you want a little brief, brief introduction of who you are?

Sure, thanks. I'm Lacey, independent ghostwriter, copywriter of AL Interpretations. Um, I like to always like to share that I'm Ray Bradbury-inspired, David Bowie-powered, uh, kind of writer.

Cool.

Michael, I'm gonna drop it.

I'm gonna, I'm gonna reach out to you. There may be something we could discuss.

Cool.

Well, I appreciate everybody's time. I'm going to try to do these every couple of weeks. If anything, you know, networking, learn some new tricks. And, uh, and I do this for my clients as well, so this is, this is another way to do lead gen as well. All right, thanks everybody.

Bye. Thank you.