Full Throttle Leaders Podcast - Monica Stewart - Episode 9

I got Monica Stewart, uh, on the podcast today. Hi, Monica.

Hey, Michael, nice to be here with you.

Tell us a little bit about like what you're doing, um, why you do it, and who you're with. I know you started your own company not— how long ago was that?

Uh, it was actually about 6 years ago now. But it's been a little bit of a winding road, I think, like a lot of entrepreneurship is. Went out on my own, then took a sabbatical from the industry entirely for about 2 years and then came back. And I've been kind of, you know, running my business in the way that I am now for, I would say, like the last 3 years. And what I do is I help B2B SaaS founders build sustainable revenue systems between $1 and $10 million ARR. And the reason that I do this is because I've been in sales for my entire career. I've been in SaaS sales for over 15 years. And I realized that every company that I worked with, I kind of helped them do a consistent set of things that always moved them to the next level or several levels up, depending on how long I spent there. And I realized that I actually sort of just wanted to do that. I've turned down working for public companies in executive roles twice. And I just like realized that I don't really wanna run sales teams of hundreds of people. I really wanna help founders make their dream work. And the unfortunate thing is that there's so much advice out there that is like technically good advice but is completely inappropriate for people that are trying to build that kind of company at that stage. And so, um, I, you know, saw a space for myself to help people really cut through the noise and just focus on the things that are really going to work for them.

Is there a particular profile of the company, like certain SaaS-type companies, that like, are they in, uh, insurance or, or, um, marketing services? Like, what's, what's, what's your low-hanging fruit for your knowledge?

Well, it's all B2B. Um, that would be the first thing. And, you know, it's, it's people who are selling in a mid-market to enterprise sales motion. And increasingly now, I get a lot more PLG companies that are, you know, have gotten to like pretty high revenue. Like, let's say, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8 million, um, just through PLG. And now they want to layer on a sales-led motion on top of that, um, and like, you know, try to grow relationships with some of the larger people that have come in through their, their PLG business. Um, I would say that it's not really about the industry as much as it is about the sales motion. So if you're selling to, you know, any company that's got like 1,000, 2,000 employees and up, then I can help you. What's a little bit different is people who are selling to education and healthcare and government, because those sectors just have completely different decision-making processes, different things that they're trying to optimize for. And so I don't work with those companies so much. But other than that, it could really be anything. Like in the last year, I've worked with cybersecurity, legal tech, a couple of companies that were building products for insurance and banking. Companies that are selling to large e-commerce retailers. Like, it's kind of, you know, all over the place. And I think the fun part is seeing how many patterns there are between companies that might look very different on the outside.

Well, I saw a pretty cool case study, or what your clients were saying about you, from Uprise. Jessica?

Yeah, yeah.

I would love to hear like a little bit of a almost like a TEDx story about like what she did, why was this so interesting to her and how did you help her and what was like, you know, some of the KPIs with working with her?

Yeah, for sure. I mean, I'm not gonna share too many details about her company specifically cuz I haven't talked to her about that.

Sure.

But I think like one of the things I, I, um, I loved working with her and like I think she's a really good example of someone who, you know, doesn't have a background in sales. She's a product, product founder, right? She's had an amazing career in product, and also as a chief of staff at some very large fintech companies. She's just a complete powerhouse. And so what was amazing about her is like, she really applied that same, like rigor and dedication to just learning how to sell and how to build really successful partnerships for Uprise. And, you know, we worked together for about 2 years. And every conversation that we had, she would immediately take everything we talked about, go and implement it, and then report back on what happened. And so they made a huge amount of progress. Now she's hiring a sales team and they're like off to the races. And that's— thank you for bringing her up because it's, it's— I think it's a good example of like the types of stories that I like to see. And this is like really what's so gratifying for me about doing this work is like I know how much work it takes to even get to the point where you have a product and you've made the decision to go ahead and create your own startup.

Yeah.

And people think that they're like, oh, that's the hard part. And then you'll find product market fit and then, and then we'll just sell it. But what they don't realize is that as you grow, it actually gets harder to continue to be successful in GTM for multiple reasons. And so being able to like help people, like I was able to help Uprise get through a couple of different stages, um, and seeing them like, it's like taking the training wheels off, then like be able to go off and like succeed on their own is just really fun.

What would you say maybe one or two things in the last year that you learned that was incredible, either tech-wise, strategy-wise, um, or just overall? Learning or something that completely failed, like never do that again, but I lost and I learned.

Um, do you mean in terms of the work that I do with my clients or in my business?

Both. I mean, either or, just like I like to learn from your mistakes or learn from your successes, or my audience would.

I think that one thing that I've learned in the last year is how much, just how much buyer behavior is changing and how much precision is required to get and keep people's attention. And this is something that I see on both fronts, both in my business and the work that I do for my clients. So in the work that I do for my clients, we're seeing that like in the large organizations that they sell to, there is more chaos, and there are more projects than ever. And so going in and running like a traditional linear sales process where you're like, I find champion, I do discovery call, we do demo, then they're interested. It just doesn't really work anymore. Definitely not for like a true enterprise Fortune 500 and increasingly on down the line as well. And it's because buyers have access to more information than they ever have. Everybody is doing their own research. Everybody's using AI to do this research. I think the new numbers are is that the typical buyer is 87% of the way along their intent and decision process before they even engage with sales. And B2B buyers consume content on average on 6 channels before they even decide to engage with you. And so that means that you need to show up as a seller in a much more sophisticated way. And you also need to be running a like multi-threaded sort of parallel conversation with multiple people in the organization because they're not waiting until they have that meeting with you in order to have a conversation about you or to make a decision on their own. Those conversations are actively happening the whole time. And so you need to have a lot more touchpoints and you need to be engaged with them in a lot of different ways. And the way that I see that play out in my business is, you know, my primary platform has been LinkedIn. For many years, like I think like most people in my industry. And I played around with a couple of other ones, but this year I've committed to 6 platforms. And so learning how to make that possible as a solopreneur, both from like a content creation perspective and then just like a scheduling, like mindshare perspective, has been like a new challenge. But it's absolutely something that like has to be done. And I would say, you know, anyone who's a founder listening to this, I don't care what kind of company you run, you should really be thinking about doing the same thing because again, this is where your buyers are showing up and like you should be in those rooms.

Have you done any podcasts, roundtables to kind of like get people and get to know them? Kind of like what I'm doing here now is a great way to get to know somebody.

But like my own podcast? Yeah.

I mean, that's, that's something that I've really learned. Like if I want to get a bunch of people in the room to talk to each other, I have a roundtable twice a month. Podcasts are really like, I really want to talk to Monica because I think it'd be a good partnership or maybe a good client. There's always something in the back of my brain like, why am I setting up a podcast besides just good content? So I get good content, get to know somebody, and possibly work with them. So, so people like ourselves that are small, 1 or 2 people, solopreneurs, that's the best way I thought that you could also probably try something like that as well.

Yeah, that's an interesting question. I've thought about doing like a, like a private podcast. I have a newsletter, and so I've thought about just like translating that into a voice, like if people want to consume it that way. I know I listen to podcasts every single morning when I go on my little coffee walk before work. Um, I've been holding off on doing like a podcast where I schedule people and have guests because of the overhead of scheduling people and having guests. I do do a LinkedIn Live once a month, which has been super fun with two of my friends, and sometimes we'll invite guests on there. So actually, I guess that's our monthly podcast. We also stream it to YouTube. But like, how have you— how has that worked for you? And like, how do you handle the scheduling? And like, what kind of, I guess, what kind of impact have you seen from it in your business?

Yeah, I use like a calendar or HubSpot calendar approach so I don't have to go back and forth. I have 30,000 connections on LinkedIn, so when I hit CROs, I just send out 4,000 messages on my LinkedIn about 150 days. Say, hey, producing a podcast, wanted you to be on it, like, like you got for me. And it's, it's a great way not to be selling, but you are kind of this is kind of a discovery call in a sense, but yes, it's also other people to view in and see what does Monica do, what can I learn from her, right? The roundtable is more of a cohort, um, melts, melting of the minds. We have 30, I have 60 people coming to that. Again, this is getting my name out there and getting other people to engage with other people, and they're doing with each other and I go, wow, Michael kind of helped me do this and he didn't even charge me. So it's kind of one of those things, it's like if you're a connector but you're not by one by one, let me introduce you to Steve, I'll, I'll do a little message on LinkedIn or email. That's very time consuming. I don't have time for that.

Totally.

Yeah, all this open the door so that people like you or me, or even, hey, I have 30, uh, AEs, I work at Twilio, I need to automate their territories because they're spending way too much time emailing, calling, and sending junk or spam or pitch slapping. So content, like when I was at Warner Brothers, content is king.

Yeah, totally.

Revenue.

Yeah. So are you familiar with like, like Gong used this strategy in their, I'm sorry, not Gong, but Outreach used this strategy in enterprise sales. I don't know if you know the story.

I know Outreach, because Apollo was part of that company, or the people came from Outreach and built Apollo. But tell me about it. I would love to hear this.

So they, when they started like going really big on enterprise sales, they started a podcast and they actually acquired like a smaller like media group that like ran the strategy for them. And they would invite the CEOs that they were trying to sell to or that there were, or that were their existing customers to go on the podcast and they would talk to them about their go-to-market strategy and how they were out, Outreach and Apollo, like same, same tool basically. And so it was great because they would get them to be really open about their challenges and their goals and like what else they were using outside of Outreach in a really open setting where they got to like brag about their strategy and it didn't feel like doing a discovery call with an account manager. But of course now like they, they know all of that information, right? And then they would use it to kind of like parlay into wherever they want to take that relationship.

Yeah. Was this. Is it— what are you doing to address that? Well, we could do that. It's, it's, it's like guerrilla marketing 101, if you think about it. Totally. And it works so good. I have 15 Zoom calls every day. I'm exhausted by the end of the day, but at least I know full throttle, full auto is really who I am, you know, doing this all day long. And but what I decided to stop doing is just getting too many people that are small, like maybe under a couple, $2 million, under $2 million revenue.

Uh-huh.

Just my roundtables, because then it's everybody kind of like somewhat trying to sell to each other.

Yeah.

With the podcast, I could go, I want VP of sales at Twilio that handles the whole national accounts, and they're not feeling like— because those, they're not going to get on a roundtable and go, let me talk to other people. Let's— and then they get on a call and they see Michael and Monica who are great people, but they're not their, their ICP, their peers. Yeah, yeah, it's both, both is a way.

What do you see, um, what do you, what do you see right now that people are doing in top of funnel that's really smart? And like, what's the most common mistake that you see?

I— most common mistake is AI. I see that you work for here and you do this and you gotta President's Club this, they're regurgitating your accomplishments because they got an AI bot writing crappy copy.

Yeah.

Yeah. And then they're just going, hey, I'm going to bring this back to the top of your, your, your—

Right.

Hope you're doing well. Hope this email finds you well. Come on.

You know, so basically just like, like lazy, like super old tactics.

Yeah. 90% of the crap that's on there now. So if I say, Monica, I'm going— thinking about going to Inbound for HubSpot, and our SaaS tour is coming up. Have you gone to that? What are your thoughts? I'm thinking about going. That's my message. Guess what? No, I don't even know what that is. Yes, I'm going. Or B, I don't know, I might go. I don't care what you say. I just want the door to open so I can go, Monica, actually, I'm doing a podcast, or actually, I would love to learn more about your company, whatever it is. So it's more— it's business dating is dating, right? When you ask someone out, don't say, well, let's go on a cruise next week. You try to get to know them before you just lay it on too thick. It's right, the messaging, and especially LinkedIn, you'll get kicked off of LinkedIn for all that crap. So slow your roll, get to know someone, ask them about themselves. And when you're doing a podcast or roundtable I want you to be on my roundtable, but I need to talk to you before you get on to see if you're a good fit. I was doing that a lot. I stopped doing that a little bit more. I just now I just ask a question in the registration. Do you want, do you want to talk about your role? Before I would give them my calendar link and my calendar was booked for 3 weeks. Great. But some of these people I had to cancel because I'm like, this is not a good fit for me to even waste 30 minutes, unfortunately. So I just kind of put it back in my, my decision-making of do I actually want to do a roundtable or podcast because it's my time is valuable, just like theirs. I don't want to waste their time or my time. The other thing is scraping events. Like if I see LinkedIn Live and you have 400 people registered and you talk about middle funnel, middle of funnel approach is going to nicely be attractive to my top of funnel approach where we work together. So I'm just going to take everybody you read, you put on LinkedIn Live, scrape that, and without your even permission, and get their email address and invite them to my top of funnel one. Or I team up with you, I say, hey, this is the biggest one, the one together. Yeah, yeah, but this is the biggest way I've ever won is I took your LinkedIn, you have 5,000 connections, I have 30,000. I go Monica, we don't compete. You probably don't need me to do lead gen because you're pretty busy and you're a solopreneur, right? You can only handle 3 or 4 clients and you're like, oh, this is too much, which is, you know, I can handle about 20 because I use a lot of automation. But at one point we can't just have unlimited clients. So I take your LinkedIn and go, Michael and I are doing a roundtable. Let's get on a call and see if you're a good fit or just show up. And we'll do a roundtable, one-to-many. And so I use your thing to basically baptize me saying I trust Michael and vice versa. Right.

Yeah.

It's so far the most— the way I get most meetings by using someone else's LinkedIn for 20 days.

You mean by doing a joint event with them and then having them invite their audience?

Yeah, that's— yeah, yeah. Think about this, like when you go to a conference and you're like some of these smaller SaaS companies that go, hey, I'm this company, you're that company, we don't compete, but let's, let's have a— let's do an open bar for an hour and we'll split, bring our clients. Great. But that was $7,500 each to feed. And do they even remember that that was—

that you were like involved in it? Totally.

Then you're checking people at the door, you got Michael Filato from Full Throttle Filato, you know, that's a vendor. Why would I want that guy? And I'm going to, you know, so you get people that are like me that are not necessarily your in-market. They might be good partners. Great. But if I do this specific, I just want to see CROs and I want to get them from Monica's first connections. Mm-hmm. I want to do a joint roundtable. That's pretty powerful. Same thing with me because I really have going to do it for you. I have more CROs and I have more, I have 30,000 connections. So originally I'm like, I'm doing you a favor to be honest with you at my point. It's the people that have 2,000 connections that I'm like, I don't even know if I want to do this because unless your connections at 2,000 are awesome, then it's a decent amount of work to do this stuff.

Yeah. I mean, they might be right. It's like the disconnect between the size of your audience and like the quality of your audience is getting pretty crazy right now. There are people that, you know, I used to work with, like, you know, back in the day in like 2000 and like 2019 or something like that that were like so early in LinkedIn. And now they've got like 400,000 followers, 200,000 followers, like 70,000 and up, right? But if you look at their engagement, like they're getting about the same as me and I have 22,000. So it's like, it, it is— I think people that built their audience early and then didn't really evolve their strategy or like change their message, um, yeah, they still have the numbers, but like, are those people even in relevant roles anymore? You know, like a lot has happened in the last 6 years in terms of people's careers, and if you weren't intentionally growing your audience and maybe even like getting rid of connections, your relevance is going to become less. But then there's people like— there's people that I know that have smaller audiences than me, but their engagement is just super, super, super high because they, they built almost all of those connections in the last 2 years. So it's all hyper relevant to what they're talking about now and like what their current business is and it all kind of compounds.

So the platform I use lets me take out connections. I was selling HR tech for half of my career. I love CHROs, but I took them all out. I'm like, I don't need— I have 35. I have 30,000 connections almost. At 30,000, you're done. You can't have followers.

Yeah, you're gonna follow us.

Yeah, you have— if you have 22 and I have 30, we should definitely do a roundtable together and make— and use our— my, my mostly— what's to say, it's probably the same people we're talking to, just different parts of the sales cycle, you know?

I mean, potentially. I don't know, who are you talking to?

I'm talking to companies that are anywhere from couple million to $200 million. They have sales teams, sometimes product— well, it's the same ones that you were talking to that you were mentioning earlier. Um, even some of these huge companies, they might have like a team that needs help where I'll automate their LinkedIn. If anything, getting to do email for a larger company, you know, then you get into all the IT people going, don't play in my playground or sandbox. But when I do roundtables, masterminds for mid light enterprise companies or smaller companies that have Series A, Series B, uh, seed round money and they're growing. That's really what I'm doing. Or they're trying to raise money and they want me to go out to, uh, to their VCs and try to raise— help them raise money. I'm even doing stuff in politics sometimes where I'm trying to get people in that city or that county to show up and talk to the candidates. But that's Yeah, my whole thing is I know how to get it delivered without breaking stuff. Most people break LinkedIn or break their domains. But yes, well, I guess if you offer, offer something to somebody versus sell them, you're going to get people to show up. And if you have a good name in the business, you're going to be able to do that. And then if you don't, then you just, you just tag on to people that have a big following and say, I'm going to give you some PR at the beginning of this thing. So it's a sponsorship that's free, right? Maybe I could sell this at one point for $2,000 every time someone comes on. I put their banner up. I don't know, I'm just trying to get a point versus worry about nickel and diming everything.

I've seen sponsored models for this. Um, I do have to jump to another call, but is there like a thought that you want to leave on?

Um, just want you to give your information, like how they get a hold of you, your website and your email address, and hopefully, you know, people reach out to you from this. You're welcome to use this content any way you want. If you want to chop it up and use some of these, uh, sound bites for stuff. But yeah, tell us how to get a hold of you.

Yeah, best way to find me is on LinkedIn. I'm just Monica Stewart on LinkedIn. I write every day about enterprise sales, scaling, entrepreneurship, and Yeah, you can go there, read everything else that I've written. I have all my other podcasts linked there. And, you know, if you want to talk about questions that you've got for your business specifically, you can send me a DM.