In this episode of the Full Throttle Leaders podcast, host Michael Falato interviews Annette Merriman, founder of Imagine AI Consulting and fractional CRO at CloudRoute. Annette explains how she leverages 25 years of experience at Fortune‑500 firms, especially Salesforce, to help small and midsize businesses automate operations and improve revenue processes. She describes her ideal client profile—companies under $50 M in revenue and fewer than 25 employees—including nonprofits, financial advisors, real‑estate agents, and lenders, and outlines her services around CRM implementation, data hygiene, and operational consulting. As CloudRoute’s fractional CRO, she coordinates sales teams, creates unified outreach plans, and focuses on account retention (the “farmer” approach) rather than pure new‑business hunting. Annette shares practical advice on AI and automation adoption, emphasizing incremental improvements, clean data, and using AI to open doors rather than replace human interaction. She also discusses lead‑generation tactics such as intent‑data scraping, personalized outreach, and “business dating” analogies. The conversation closes with Annette’s contact information—website imagineaiconsulting.ai and email Annette@ImagineAIConsulting.ai—and an invitation to schedule calls or view AI assistant demos.
Chapters
Hello everybody, we got Annette Merriman from Imagine AI Consulting. How you doing?
I am doing great. Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I'm excited to be here.
So tell me, Annette, um, what have you been doing? Like, tell me about Imagine AI Consulting. What brought you to start your own shingle? And what, what kind of clients do you have right now?
That's a great question. So I started Imagine AI Consulting about a year ago after 25 years at top 500 companies in the US. Last company I worked with was Salesforce, and I still work a lot on Salesforce ecosystem and opportunities in the ecosystem. But primarily my consulting business focuses on automation. Of medium and small-sized companies, those companies that are not like the large enterprise companies that I come from, that probably don't know a lot about AI and automation. And they really need help by a consultant that's not a McKinsey or a Bain. They need somebody that's down to earth that understands the enterprise way and the enterprise capabilities, but they need it to be delivered to their size business. With their size teams.
And what's, what is your typical client? Are they 500 employees, 200 employees, $50 million in revenue, or what, what would you just, who do you work with most and what do you like, what do you like to work with?
That's a great question. So right now my sweet spot is below $50 million a year in revenue. I'm reaching companies that have below 25 employees. And they know they need to lean in and do something with their operations. Most of the time they're not really sure. I work with companies, I work with nonprofits, I work with some financial advisors, I work with real estate agents and lenders. So I really have a full scope of operational expertise that can parlay into almost any business. Um, but I also specialize in customer relationship management systems coming from Salesforce. That was a natural expertise for me to lean into. So I now help companies with association management systems, CRM systems for small mom-and-pops, as well as large financial institutions. So I can really use my skills across the board for any company that's ready to operationalize, automate, and move more quickly, more efficiently, and give their employees time to do the fun stuff.
And what's— I see CloudRoute on your LinkedIn. Is that one of your clients, or how's that ingested into your life right now?
Actually, Michael, that's a great question. I am also a fractional consultant, so I consult with companies in both revenue operations as well as operations. So I have a role right now as a CRO for CloudRoute. It's a software company that does implementations in Salesforce. So we reach out primarily to larger companies and Salesforce AEs to help them close the gap between where they're on plan today and where they need to be by the end of the quarter or the end of the year.
So you— are you kind of like a sales engineer on their sales cycle, or how do you work with Salesforce AEs?
Um, as the revenue, um, revenue lead for the company. I operationalize the other sales team members. I help them plan and organize what their structure is going to be to deliver the plans. We determine who we're going to target and we go in as a team so that we are speaking the same language, delivering the same presentations, the same operational capabilities. And we have really come up with some great plans. That's been a huge leap forward. I've been working with them for about 6 months. And with cohesive offers in place, we're able to gain traction and really help the account executives out that, that are really struggling with this year's quotas.
And what's the major fail point that they don't know that you can help them with?
A lot of times, um, and this year it's really key in, um, the Salesforce ecosystem, is making sure you do not lose an account. So they're making a shift from proactively being— gaining, um, new clients exclusively to now they're making it as important, or even sometimes more important, to not lose those clients. So with our plan, we actually give the account executive, um, 20 hours free to help them figure out a strategy to turn some of their red or clients they think they're going to lose accounts, turn them around and get them back to success. So with that 20 hours of, um, engineer work, sales engineer, operational support, we've been able to help several companies turn around and of course help the AE save those accounts.
So it's more of a farmer saving versus a hunter closing.
Yes. Okay.
So is it the CRO that's hiring or the VP of customer success or who's the one that's hiring you in the companies or is the AEs hiring you directly and they're spending their own money?
Actually, it's a good question. So I am hired by the CEO of CloudRoute. It's a company based in India. I am their American US liaison. I also have liaisons throughout Europe and Canada.
Okay. Um, what's a life lesson, whether it be in sales or revenue or leadership or personal that two things, one or two things in the last 6 months that you learned, a different tactic, strategy, um, technology, or you just failed at something that you thought was going to work but you learned from it?
Um, there's a theme for me, it seems like, in the new year 2026, and I said it a lot in '25, but now it's becoming even more apparent. A, as you leave a big company like I was used to working in, I find something new every day that I didn't know and something I didn't know about myself. And the more of those small little things that I might be able to modify, change, or improve in myself makes a huge difference as we move forward as a team, as a company. And then I would say it's the same with both automation and AI. It's those little things you don't realize are a problem, but then when you expand like myself expanding into growing my own company, you realize those small things become bigger things as you implement automation, as you implement AI. I talk a lot to clients about AI and automation. And everybody thinks it's going to solve all their problems. But most of my time is actually spent working with the CEO or leadership team, understanding what their operations and systems are. And then explaining to them how those systems and operations could improve. And they could keep the same tools they're used to using most of the time. They could add on some additional tools, but they don't have to revamp everything. They don't have to throw out the kitchen sink. Most of the companies I work with already have a good foundation. They just need somebody like me that can understand the different systems and how they should be working together.
Are you, are they other ones going from blank to Salesforce that you're helping or, or, or these are ones that just have Salesforce and they're trying to just to keep that client or, or is it Salesforce, um, proper or is it Salesforce integrators?
Um, most of my companies, I'm not implementing personally, uh, Salesforce CRM system. I have an engineering team, CloudRoute, that would do that for me. What I do myself is more the medium-sized company that wants to understand operationally, how could they do more? How could they be better? How could they personalize their outreach to their clients? And how could they do that all more quickly so that they could get more leads so that they could get more revenue? So same with you and your business, right? We have to start at the basics.
Yeah. It's just like when I do this, it's It's about not selling, not pitch slapping. You got to automate the outreach on email and LinkedIn, do roundtables, masterminds, podcasts, scrape other events because that's intent data, signal data. And then you'll get 20 to 30 meetings, but you shouldn't be sitting there making phone calls and doing one-to-one emails all day. You can go one-to-many, but it's still one-to-one. But ask them what they think. Of a conference, or do they want to be on a podcast? Compliment them, but don't pretend like you know them. It's business dating, just like you would do in dating life. So slow your roll, learn something about them, be naturally inquisitive, and ask. Don't ask them to go on a cruise the first date, you know. So that's, that's how I explain it. Everybody laughs because it's true. I mean, people like— if you look at LinkedIn Oh, thanks for connecting on that. What did they do? Like, whoa, whoa, I don't even know you're in here. You're just throwing like statistics, marketing material, or just total AI crap of I saw that you worked here. And I don't even work for that company. It's like, I'm a member of the Orlando tech community. But I'm not, I'm not a— that's not my job. But I picked that up from my LinkedIn. So you gotta look, you gotta stop the too much AI and use AI just to open the door. You finish opening the door, introduce yourself, shake your hand, look them in the eye, or set up a strategy when you're at a conference. Like, don't go there and go, hi, what do you do? Hi, what do you do? You know, have all these people you want to meet, set up like a little table by the coffee shop and say, do 30-minute increments, you don't even need a booth, you know. Instead of $20,000 in a booth, you spend nothing, you know.
So that's, that's kind of your strategy with leads. You always have, um, a very unique perspective that delivers versus, yeah, you know, the mass emails or, or you call it pitch slapping.
Yeah.
Um, you always think really unique creative ways to get one-on-one, which is where we build the relationship first, and then you coach them and help them on increasing their revenue?
What's the, the biggest thing I see with like Salesforce integrations, HubSpot integrations, is garbage data in, garbage data out, or it's here's a new lead source, here is the records in the CRM, and it's confusing it because that is the same company but a sub category. It's just like there's so much data mess. And is that some of the things that you help straighten out as well? Or is it more just you just help things from not losing the deal? Is it more on the sales and marketing side, or is it more on the data hygiene side that you work, or both?
I, I really start with the data hygiene, right? So what tools are you using today? What's working? What's not working? Or what do you think's not working? And then what are you using the tools for? Like, what is the goal here? And of course, if they already have a CRM full of old data that's no good, yeah, I always advise they clean that up first. Unfortunately, that makes some persons uncomfortable, but it's really making sure that the checks and balances are there, putting the data in correctly the first time, and setting up the mechanism for the follow-ups. So making sure that lead that comes in gets responded to right away. Some of the statistics, especially when I work with real estate agents, is somebody calls a real estate agent, they want to talk to you right now, not in 2 minutes, not in 10 minutes, not in 2 hours or 2 days. And they can lose that lead that quickly. So what system is in there to immediately respond, even if it's not you? A quick text or a quick voicemail back, or just, hey, I'll call you in 10 minutes. Yeah.
So tell people, we're running out of time. Tell people, like, how to reach you.
Um, best way to reach me is on my website, um, imagineaiconsulting.ai. Okay. And you can also see my AI assistant demos, which are super cool, and, um, schedule a call with me. I'd like to meet everyone.
How about your email address so people can reach out to you as well?
That would be great. It's Annette@ImagineAIConsulting.ai.
Okay. Well, I appreciate your time. I hope you get a lot of PR from this and we'll keep in touch and hopefully we'll see you on our roundtables.
It's always great to see you, Michael. Thank you so much. Thank you.
