Full Throttle Leaders Podcast - Pete Sanidas - Episode 10

All right, Michael Filato here again, my 10th show, um, of Full Throttle Leaders. Um, and we got Pete Sanitas, the founder of GTM Heroes, my former CRO at Jobvite, and a good friend. How you doing, Pete?

Doing well. Thanks for having me, Michael.

Good, good. Tell me what you're doing now. You've been showing me this, this awesome product and solution that you built. Give me a little background about yourself for the other people that don't know you and about the new project that you're doing.

Yeah, happy to. Uh, so I guess quick context, uh, been either an individual contributor, uh, a sales manager, a revenue leader, for the last 25 years, primarily in, in the SaaS and recruitment media spaces. But the reality is, is that we've hit a point with this kind of convergence of this, you know, age of AI and agentic, the tail end of what I think is the predictable revenue model that Salesforce brought to market, and every SaaS founder in Silicon Valley has leaned into over time and really the adaptations of what the buying behavior is to a point where we really need to start to think outside of the box when it comes to what really moves the needle in driving revenue. And that's what we're trying to build here at Go-To-Market Heroes and what we're doing with our Agentic AI in particular.

So what have you seen that, where have you seen that your product or solution I mean, I know what the answer is somewhat, but I'd love to hear you explain it, where it was missing and what you, what you've solved right now.

Yeah, I think, uh, there's a few things that jump out at me. Like, the first clearly is 88% of sellers are using AI right now, but is that for good or is that to the detriment of the profession, to the buying experience, to the selling experience, and to the rest? And I'm sure in, in your In your world, you've seen that volume of personalized outreach has grown exponentially over the last few years, while response rates has stayed flat if you're able to keep up with things, if not declined. You know, I listen to a lot of podcasts, read a lot on the entire funnel, keeping up with trends, and I'm hearing anywhere from a 0.5% response rate to a 1 to 2% response rate for cold outreach should be the expectation for organizations. Organizations right now. And, you know, the reality is 10 years ago when, when, you know, as a head of revenue at Telemetry and we led to a, you know, $100 million exit, we built a predictable revenue engine where we were angry when it was taking us, you know, 200 enrolled sequences to get a response, not 1,000 activities, right? And so you think about that. There's just a whole lot of garbage that's occurring out there in the space at the top end of the funnel, a whole lot of personalization triggered by things like CLAY and other intent signals. And the who and even the what to talk about right now with prospects is not a differentiator. You know, intent signals and the rest, it's not a differentiator. It's the how. Which is the amazing thing about our profession. It's always been the same. What really moves the needle in win rates, in revenue, is how well can we convert those that are actually interested and have a need for what it is we sell. How can we convert? Well, we can convert on a human level, unless you're doing e-commerce, but in what it is we do, you convert at a human level. And that goes back to basic human psychology. So for us, it's about teaching the how. We're putting a sales rep in position of how to communicate with Michael from the beginning. And it makes a big difference because going all the way back to some, some stats from Challenger Sale, and of course Challenger Sale loving the commercial insight, 53% of all purchasing decisions are based upon the relationship, not about the product, not about the functionality, at least according to the Challenger Sale. And at the same time, What builds trust? What builds a relationship? It's the ability to— when I speak to you, Michael, you hear what I'm saying. When I speak to you, you don't interpret it differently or tune out because I'm not speaking to you the way that you would like to engage, the way that you consume information. So, you asked what kind of brought me to this point. Go in the Wayback Machine. I went to school for informatics, the art, science, and human dimension of information technology. That's what a psychology minor. And so bringing these two things together in a world of AI, how do we bring the human element to the sales process in a world where everything feels like spam-level personalization? Like, if I send you an email and says, you know, hey, Michael, I see, you know, you were in the armed services, really appreciate it, as my first cold outreach to you, does that not set off your spidey sense around around AI use and AI bot usage as opposed to, hey, Michael, I know you're a CEO, you're a founder, you're a leader within the lead generation space. So I'm going to cut straight to the point because that's the way you want to be spoken to. Big difference. And so that's what we're enabling teams to go do with our tool.

I mean, these AIs are going, I see that you were at Telemetry and Jobvite and you grew revenue by this. It's just regurgitating AI junk to you, right? Versus, hey, I know that you worked here. I want to put you on a podcast, or I know that you are a direct person. Not, you don't have to state all this stuff, but I know your platform kind of gives me the background of how do I speak to you, what's been going on in your life. And if you're going to send me a message, make it more in my tone versus your tone.

1000%. And not just that initial message, but how are you going to engage with me throughout the process?

Yeah.

And if we break it down to the most simplistic in terms of behavioral personality types and DISC profiles, without getting too deep into human psychology and behavioral profiling, the reality is there's 4 main profile types. Most of us are actually somewhere between one. We don't fit nice and cleanly within one of those 4 boxes. But if there's 4 main pro-type or personality types within the DISC model, You were likely to not be aligned with 75% of the people that we're talking to in terms of those that have raised their hand and said, I'd like to talk to you about your product or service, or that responded to that cold outreach and said, yeah, I'd like to do more, I'd like, I'd like to see a demo. Mathematically, 75% of those you're not going to naturally be aligned to.

Yep.

What do most sales reps do? They do what that works for them. They do what works 25% of the time. And they end up with 20% win rates if they're lucky. What we're enabling sellers to do is do what comes naturally to you within the understanding of what comes naturally to that person on the human on the other side. This human-to-human sales powered by AI so you can actually have effective communications throughout the sales cycle. Some people want to see ROI, but do they want to see ROI as stories, or do they want to see ROI as hard numbers. Their behavioral profile can tell you that. The way they engage with you early in the process can tell you that. And our tool can actually take your information that your corporate marketing or, or your business sales ops is providing and turn that into a one-to-one document that the same case study or the same ROI statement can be rewritten to the way Michael wants to see it versus the way Pete wants to see it to the way Sally wants to see it. And that's just one example of many, whether it's case studies, ROI, ROI calculations, content through the process, proposals, you know, pitch decks, discovery questions, you name it. We're able to kind of triangulate all those things together.

So what steps are you in right now? I know that you're basically launching or have launched, soft launched. Can you tell us where you are with GTM Heroes? When is it going to go full throttle? When are you going to start hiring folks? I know you're kind of building everything out. You're almost there. Is that— can you give us a little bit?

Yeah, we're— so we're in invite-only stealth mode right now. So I would encourage anyone who's interested to learn more, go ahead and reach out directly to me. Or if you've got a relationship here with Michael, go ahead and reach out to him and he'll get us connected. But we've got a number of highly successful, experienced enterprise, mid-market, and even SMB sales folks throughout the process, whether they're pure hunters, hunter-farmers, or on the customer success and account management side, all putting the tool through its paces right now. And we keep hearing some of the same things over and over again. We're hearing, you are giving me back as a sales professional, hours a day with the way that our tool can quickly go look at prospects, do research, or customers, do research, identify stakeholders, and then be able to prepare that rep for that next engagement, whether that's a discovery call, handling objections late stage, or even putting together the final proposal in a way that makes sense to those that have to sign off on it. We're also hearing you're letting, you're letting me do this better than ever before. Some of these things come naturally, and some of these tips I wouldn't have even thought about and I noticed it resonated in the very first call, in the very first 2 minutes of a conversation.

I'll tell you that I started using you heavily today for my calls the last 2 days instead of LinkedIn. Way better for me to research, figure out everything in one dashboard, one view. Why? How? Just stopped me going to 15 different places to try to figure out what the hell I need to— how to talk to that person.

Yeah. And that's the key, right? So in this world of AI where it feels like everyone's rushing towards kind of standardized boilerplate personalization and automation. We can bring the automation of all of these things that you know you need to do but historically have taken a long time. Or then maybe you'll go piecemeal in a ChatGPT or a Gemini and bring it all together. And then again, within this thing that makes the biggest difference, which is, can I actually connect with the human across from me in a way that they can hear what it is I'm gonna share with them. Again, that's been the biggest missing piece if we think about predictable revenue and sales operations and sales enablement. You know, again, I've led all of these functions over time. And it's always funny to me that like, you know, maybe you have a sales ops leader or sales enablement leader that has a process that worked for them as a rep. Now they didn't choose to stay as a rep for the rest of their career, which is telling in one way related to their sales skills. But they, you know, they'll say, this is it, this is our playbook. I want everyone to follow it exactly this way. And what ends up happening? You've worked on enough teams over the years, Michael. What ends up happening?

The playbook's not specific to either your role, to the personas, or the ICP that you're— The whole—

Someone really wants to get a hold of you. Yeah, you end up hearing Um, this pitch doesn't work for me, doesn't fit my style as the rep. Yeah. So I changed it. Or this, this pitch doesn't fit for my prospect, either their company or them as an individual, based upon how you know them. And reps are constantly altering it. Well, why again, why are they doing it? Most of the time they're doing it because they don't feel comfortable, their own personality profile.

Yeah.

But if they had a tool that could say, hey, we know this is how you like to talk, Michael, and we know this is how Pete is likely to want to receive information. You guys overlap 50% of the time. That other 50% of the time, there's a few little disconnects. And oh, by the way, this case study we read, or the initial pitch deck, or even the standard discovery questions, we're giving them to you as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and sales ops is saying, or enablement saying, do them 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. Meanwhile, your prospect would actually like to hear them in 4, 5, 2, and skip the other ones because they're a waste of my time.

Or follow the responses and let them dictate how you want to talk.

It gives, it gives it all to you turnkey. And so again, what's going to make the biggest difference in, in selling? Well, when you know that 53% of the buying process is based upon the relationship, not the other, and we know that 75% of the time humans just naturally aren't going to be aligned to their most common or like-for-like personality type. If we can, if we can impact those two things with anybody who's slightly engaged from the onset and through the process, we can make a big difference in revenue in ways that really nothing else can.

Could your platform determine whether this is like a one-two decision, like CRO, CEO, or there's a steering committee, or is that just kind of You have to ask those questions.

So one of the coolest things about it, cool and scary at the same time, is Go-To-Market Heroes started as a consultancy bringing together the experience that I've had across many organizations, whether that's via merger and acquisition integration work or different organizations that I've been a part of, to develop playbooks, to define ICPs, to define personas, to define the messaging to the those ICPs and those personas to be able to segment the prospect, uh, base and then build campaigns around them and then build sales book playbooks and all the things I, that I was kind of, uh, poo-pooing here a few minutes ago but are fundamental. You have to have a, a documented process. Our tool, in about 7 or 8 minutes, and I think you did this as well, you can point it towards your URL, you can upload your existing case studies or testimonials or reference points and it's going to do all of that for you. Not let you— it'll let you edit it as well, but it's going to figure out how is your brand currently being presented, what's the value prop, what's the core messaging, who is, who is the ICP based upon your current marketing materials, and then who should you be selling to and how should you be selling to them based upon against those personas that we've assessed. And then who are the actual individuals, the people that sit in those personas. And then we've tapped into some of the leading data sources so we can get you their contact information. And then we can use, uh, writing style, um, behavioral profiling to put you in the right direction as to what their behavioral preferences are going to be in that first email, in that first discovery call, or through further through the sales cycle. And furthermore, we also do the same thing for you so we can match those two things together. So what we're really doing is saying, here's your core messaging and go-to-market foundation as a business. Think of this as everybody else's sales playbook. This is the company that you're trying to prospect into, the company, and what's important to them, whether it's news and research and all the things that a good rep would go audit in their prospecting or early engagement. And then here's the person or the people that you're actually talking to. On a behavioral level. And where do these three things intersect, and how can we help you go execute your standardized sales process in a one-to-one fashion for every one of them while keeping you pointed on the right thing? So to your point, who's going to make up the buying committee? Well, we're going to tell you who's likely to make up the buying committee based upon the marketing that your team— based upon what your marketing team or your go-to-market team has already established. But we're going to refine that, we're going to make it easier, we're going to kind of But to your point, bring all those components together to save time, but more importantly, execute better.

What's— this is probably the one last one or two questions. Uh, what's a lesson learned, tactic, strategy, tech that either A, went really well or vice, or B, that it just bombed and you're like, I'm like, I'm not gonna do that again. And this is the reason why I do this is you lose, you learn, you win, you learn.

Yeah, I'll go into directly into your world. A couple of years back, and again, huge successes over 10 years ago, building out an SDR team to support a very finite target market of about 2,000 enterprise employers that my company wanted to acquire. And we built out a robust— before there were clays and all the access to data— very robust ongoing auditing, manual validation of our data so we could effectively message to those companies and the handful of key personas that were part of the buying committee for what it is we represented. But over time, that became less and less valuable. I've seen it. It's a resource at that level to even rethink what an SDR is. Fast forward to about, I want to say, 3 years ago now, I ran across 11x. Now this is when they were still at seed stage, well before they, they, they, you know, raised their $50 or $100 million or whatever they're at to this point, before they were— products were named Alice or Jordan, right? And so this automated SDR thing is, is going to be perfect. It's going to go out, it's going to do the research, it's going to understand my value props, it's going to allow me to, to go ahead and, and just take all of that manual activity and go execute it at scale. And it wasn't cheap. I want to say it was probably, uh, somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 a month for not all that many enrollments. So maybe about a dollar an enrollment. Um, what I found— this very early adopter to, to a lot of the things that I'm describing today, which is simply leveraging AI to get a base level of personalization to do cold outreach is not going to solve for much. I mean, cold outreach is purely a numbers game and it has value, but I think there's far too many CROs and revenue leaders and absolutely every CEO, uh, or I'm sure there's exceptions, but almost all the ones I've ever run across that think, well, if we just do more outbound prospecting, we can solve all of our revenue problems. Reality is there's probably only 5% of your target market that are actively in market at any given time. And to think that you're going to go drive—

time is huge.

Yeah, you think you're going to go drive more effective outbound by XYZ with some base level kind of creepy personalization of, hey, I saw you went to Indiana University, how about them Hoosiers? How about them Hoosiers? But it's not going to do much, right? And, uh, it's certainly not going to move the needle.

You know, people try to align with you, like, oh, I'm a father too. I'm like, and what does that have to do right now? You didn't even earn the right to get to know me right now. Yeah, right. So you got, you got to basically handle that, right? So the whole idea is to look at asking a simple question and you get a simple answer, because people can handle the truth.

Yeah, well, and I think the other thing too is like You know, depending on which stats you're looking at these days, you know, I just saw one poll that said like 80+ percent of, of all enterprise buyers say that they prefer not to deal with the salesperson. Let's think of why. Well, almost every— and at least if we stick with the SaaS world— almost every SaaS sales team is following some version of the same predictable model playbook, whether we're talking about, you know, Pre-discovery calls with SDR when you fill out a demo request and I have to do an SDR discovery call before I do an enterprise rep discovery call and it feels very boilerplated or to whatever style is of each of those individual reps.

You're forcing that person through your process.

Yeah, here, come do a mutual action plan that's rigid and predefined, right?

Like, did you have me do that years ago?

I did, but we were all preaching. Right? But it, it wasn't, it wasn't— what it did is it said, okay, we can at least get locked in on our 15% win rate.

We said locked in, the camera actually—

yeah, it said locked in. We can at least get locked in on whatever our existing win rate is if we get everybody doing it the same way. Yeah, the problem is that's 15 to 20%, and it doesn't change. And your only answer is to try and fill up more of the top of the funnel.

What worked in the past doesn't mean it works today, you know.

Well, not to mention, is it the playbook that's getting your, your 15 to 20% win rates, or is it 15 to 20% of the time the rep matches behaviorally with the primary buying decision maker, not the damn playbook?

I mean, and so you're talking about the personality match or personality match.

I mean, again, how many times have you said, based upon the customer's need, their challenges, whatever it might be, this is a slam dunk, and you get ghosted following the first call?

Yeah, yeah, you get that warm and fuzzy feeling, which I did with you a couple times. And they're like, and they're like, what happened to them? Like, why are they ignoring us? It's ridiculous. But it's just, it— one's emotional and not has anything to do— that person has something to do with personality, not Fit.

Yeah. And, and I think one of the things, like, I, I just go back to kind of basics. I think I probably told you a lot, you need to ask why more frequently. Um, but if we think about like go-to-market exercises right now, and it's again listening to a lot of podcasts, reading a lot of— try to read as little on LinkedIn these days as possible because it's such a wasteland of influencers, but, um, You know, everybody's all about, oh, you just got to have, you know, it's about speed off of intent signals. You know, you just have to have the best intent signals to know who to go target based upon news releases, what's happening in their business, promotions. And again, you know, what's it take, a free Apollo account to get really good intent data on targeted accounts these days? Like everybody's got the same win. Information as to directionally when to reach out to somebody.

Kind of late sometimes. You mean by the time that gets up there, they've already considered—

So if everybody's got when and everybody's kind of got their prepackaged why, it's the how. How am I going to communicate to you when everybody's operating off of the same intent signal to pitch their little why?

So why should someone try to get ahold of you right now? I'll leave you with this last question. How do they get ahold of you and who's the best type of company to get ahold of you right now?

Yeah, again, right now we are seeing success with organizations that have, you know, single person organizations in the earliest founding stage trying to develop their go-to-market. 'Cause again, in about 10 minutes you can have a really good perspective on who you need, like, what it is you want to go say to who and what your sales process should look like fundamentally.

I would say 3 minutes.

How you adapt it individually.

How good it is, your product.

What's that?

I'd say 3 minutes. That's how good your product is.

Yeah. And then from there, again, whether that stuff's already baked fully and you're a big robust company with hundreds of sales reps or anything in between, really a good fit. You know, it was interesting when we when we first started building this, said, you know, kind of SaaS, SaaS is a little bit overplayed right now. Maybe we'll focus more on more boring markets. So whether we're talking about manufacturing sales or even more traditional service industries, transportation, you name it, everybody's selling to other humans. What we found is this, there's not a specific vertical that this is helping. Basically, if your prospects have LinkedIn profiles and they have websites, which almost everybody does at this point, we can really help that process around how do you engage more effectively with those that are already raising their hand or responding to you with some intent to have a better sales cycle that meets them where they are. In order to get a hold of me, go-to-market-heroes.com or just Pete at Go-To-Market Heroes. And happy to get folks an invite code here coming out of this while we're still in the South and kick it around a little bit.

Well, thanks for your time, Pete. It was good seeing you.

Likewise.

Continue to working with you.

I'm going to flip it back around on you. Yeah. All right. What's working? What's not from the tech side from your perspective right now?

I think event-based marketing that turns into meetings. So what I do is I produce roundtables and masterminds Or ask someone, hey, are you going to inbound? That's a HubSpot thing, right? What's your thoughts on it? Are you going to SaaS? Just a very open-ended question to get the door open. Then you start dating. Too many people go, I know this, I know this, I think that, and they get too cutesy with it. So if you have GTM heroes with an event approach and understand how to go after tier 1, which is tier 1 is like your I have to win these accounts. Then tier 2 and tier 3 should go a little bit less, you know, in a specific role, but more about I want to give you something. I want to ask you my podcast, or I want to put you in the roundtable, or I want to see if you're going to be at this conference. So that's what—

what about related to AI? Since, uh, you know, you're bringing— I won't say how many years, but 30-plus years of real-life earned experience to the table as a value for your clients. And yet there's plenty of organizations that have, you know, baby-faced kids that are saying, I'm going to do this all, I'm going to do all the lead gen via AI and trying to sell that as a software. What are you seeing that's working there on the front end with AI versus not?

I think AI could be— I'm gonna— I, I just talked to Michael Becker, who was the, the MMA Mobile Marketing Association president. He's a good friend of mine. He's discussing like how to build a digital twin of yourself. So I load up everything, like my Fireflies recordings, all my materials, my personality, and so someone could talk to either AI Michael or real Michael. And I love it because it's going to remember everything I ever said, so it's going to give you enough information to get a sense of, do you want to talk to Michael for real, or set up almost be my agentic SDR or, or VA. So I'm thinking that's going to be pretty cool. So we're going to build that. We're doing a roundtable for him and me. Um, but I think AI is awesome, but you got to use it the right way and not make it look fake or disingenuous. And I think that's a lot of things that, that people do. I think the way you've built out your platform, it lets me be— especially if you have good training— ask the questions in a very, um, intentional way. Yeah, you know, it's like one of your guys told me a long time ago, instead of saying like, what keeps you up at night— that was John— um, he's like, you know what, the first thing that I say on these calls, so Michael, you booked the time with me, what brought you to the table today? Like, what grabbed your attention? I gotta talk to John today. Yeah, the way he said it, and I could even say it better because I was in acting, you know. So So that the way you say it, the how you say it, the, the way you build on a question or their response and then tie in your platform to that while you're, while you're looking at them and talking to them and doing a little bit of prep work or doing it on the fly, you should be able to do this right. But you got to have the personality and the drive. No one could teach the whole energy and drive. So you got to be natural, naturally curious to want to—

100%. I think I'll leave you with this, which is, you know, I think that the thing that, that I hear from peers, from, from reps, you know, long-term successful reps, and from prospects is, you know, this AI is— it, it's almost diluting everything. And I would just say to people, like, if you're not using your data and your AI application of data to be more human, You're just finding a faster way to be more annoying.

I got a really good question for you. Who was the best lead gen guy you ever met?

Full throttle, Filata.

There you go.

I think at one point in time, I said you're way too expensive of an enterprise AE to be the best SDR I've ever worked with.

Yeah.

And I'm very glad that you took that to heart to have the success you've had with it.

Took a while because I took it— I didn't like it at first, but I'm like, you know what? If I could have my own company, I would never want to be an SDR in a company.

No, no, no.

Well, thanks for your time.

Thanks for having me.

We'll, we'll continue the conversation and feel free to put this video up on your website, you know, on your LinkedIn. I'm going to throw this to my video sponsor, which happens to be Full Throttle, Full Throttle, Full Throttle Leads. So somehow they got into the to the, uh, sponsorship mode of this one.

Well, thank you, Chris. Grease ya. Have a good one.

Take care.

Cheers.