GTM monthly roundtable to trade tips and tricks on how to build effective revenue strategies

About two hours north, so I'm kind of back and forth.

Yeah, I um I used to work in Chandler downtown there by the Santana.

Yes, nice at a company.

Yeah, so Santana, Santan, Santan.

Yeah, the area it's grown a lot. So yeah, yeah, nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you. So we're gonna get started in a couple minutes. I'm just letting everybody in here. Um. Let's see, Daniel, did I make you co-host or not? I can't remember. Uh, no, not yet.

Not yet.

Okay. Yep, I'll let everyone else in. There we go. Okay, but basically our roundtable that we do once a month is more of a general AI, CRO, CEO, you know, anywhere from the guys that work and the ladies that work on the project— projects and programs to the executives. Then there's another one that I do that's for more the CRO level, C-level, that we do twice a month, every second Tuesday and fourth—

third—

fourth— wait, second Tuesdays and fourth Tuesdays of each month. And there's a whole bunch of ones I either do for clients or I do, um, one-offs like with, with folks like I've done with Larry and so forth, where we do a real special approach to particular product solution. I did with Doug as well. So I think did with half the guys on here already, Rich. And then we got a new Allison's going to be doing something probably in the future with us.

Hi, Allison. Nice to see you.

I just want to have a warning of This guy David Falato, who's on the call, he's not related to me. Anything he says should not be representing me. His, his suit that he got there is not real. It's all AI.

I was adopted. I just wanted to let everyone know that. So I was not part of the initial gene chain.

Let's see. I think we got everybody. So I'm gonna start off. And the whole idea today is to put your information in chat, like why you're here, who you are. Just don't put like Michael Falato and your LinkedIn, you know, put something like Michael Falato, Orlando, phone number, LinkedIn, and kind of why you joined. If you look at your title, like I have for Larry and Michael right here, You put, you know, founder, Michael, GTM.

Mm-hmm.

Put down what you do, 'cause everybody's staring at your, at your picture for the next 30, 40 minutes. And if they're only getting a sense of what you do when you're talking, then it's not necessarily the best thing to do. Um, what else? Uh, so yeah, let's, let's start, let's start off with like a topic or strategy. That has worked for you. And we're talking about like AI sales strategy. Uh, it could be even something that you learned a long ago and you go, oh wow, I actually started using that, that tactic strategy. The whole idea is not talk about who you sold to, what kind of tech you have and what you do. It's more about what have you learned strategy-wise. What AI are you really excited about, or what, um, event? Well, I like to know about events coming up, like, is there good events that we should be going to? So I'm going to start with Ron, and then if you have a question, please raise your hand in the Zoom thing as well.

Yeah. Oh, by the way, Tanya, uh, it's good to see you. I remember meeting you when you were at Deluxe. Uh, so always good people. Um, Michael's calls were amazing. Really connects really great people.

That's right, Ron.

I am sorry, didn't click for a minute.

Yeah, I saw it. So I was like, oh, Tanya, it's great to see you.

That is great. Yes, thank you. Yeah, good to see you.

Yeah, I wish I had some genius ideas or breakthrough ideas for you. Just grinding through and just trying to figure out what's working with AI and what's not working. I haven't come up with anything really breakthrough, unfortunately. I wish I could. share something with you. I think what I've learned from Michael on these calls is, you know, customize is really important. Invite people, invite them to be lecturers on their podcast, um, you know, try and get their feedback on things. But outside of that, I haven't really found anything that, that's really cutting through the noise, to be honest. I wish I had— I wish I had some better insight for you, Michael, so my apologies about that.

I'll, I'll start off then. Partner approach, guys. Right. There's not always people on this call that you can maybe sell to or refer business to necessarily, but there's ways to kind of take that whole partner approach and say, you know what, Ron has 30,000 connections, I have 30,000 connections or 10,000, whatever it is. Think of a way to take someone else's LinkedIn and your LinkedIn, blend them together and come up with their own roundtable like this.

Right.

I mean, you don't have to come to my roundtables to control this. And control the narrative. Like, I can control the narrative because it's my roundtable, but my whole thing is about getting people to talk, so I don't try to make it about me. But if you think about it, there's all these automation tools. This is what I use. You can have me do it or someone else do it or you do it. Take someone that aligns with your ICP, your total addressable market, and go, you know, let's do, uh, let's do a roundtable mastermind together around A, B, and C. Like David and I, who are, uh, like I said, my cousin, we're gonna start a podcast, um, that goes out to people that own franchises. So he does a marketing platform that does all these, uh, promotional items, and he's also in the, the, uh, uh, uh, the, um, what would you call it, space, David? The, um, franchise space.

Yeah, we manage and, uh, own like 21 franchises in 2 different brands, Jet's Pizza and Sola Salons.

Yeah, so there's a whole idea like maybe you can't sell together, maybe do an introduction, which is what you'd ask someone that you like. Hey, can you make an introduction? That's great, but that takes time and that's not going to be really more than 2 to 3 introductions and it's time-consuming. Think of something that you can do like this Either a podcast or roundtable or event and do something together. But you need to figure out like what's efficient. Efficiently is taking your connections and pushing something out using automation, but don't make it spammy and don't make it commercialized. Like I just say, hey, we're doing a podcast, or hey, we're doing a roundtable, we want you to be a special guest. That special guest verbiage is making them feel good. But I say, hey, before you get on the roundtable or podcast, can we do a quick chat? To make sure it's a good fit. Guess what that is? That's a discovery call, right? It's not a switch and bait. I'm trying to get you like I just did this with Allison, right? I'm gonna. I want to do a podcast. I do want to do a roundtable, but sometimes people are not going to respond to hey, I'm Michael Falato. I do go to market. I I I we we we and all about me. Not gonna work. So that's, that's my best suggestion for you guys, whether you do it yourself or not. Think about how you give before you ask. Doug, you want to say something?

No, that's good.

No, you know, we all believe that here on the call. I mean, yeah, because we're, you know, we'll— if we start pitching, we'll get cut off, Michael, and you'll just extract this.

Yeah, that's— no, that's called put to sleep. But you know, who wants to— honestly, I used to do pitching, dog. I mean, I used to have, tell us who you are, what you do, why you join, and what and how you help people. And it became 40 minutes of people pitching, and it just screamed entrepreneur, solopreneur stuff. And it's just kind of, you know, it's not that exciting when we do it that way.

Mm-hmm.

Hey, Michael, sorry I'm late. Scott Brown, um, couldn't get in, and then I got over, uh, another call and had a fire to put out.

No worries. Let's, uh, let's go with, uh, Larry.

Hi, uh, thanks, Michael. So, um, nothing groundbreaking in terms of what's working in terms of outreach, but, uh, I've done a deep dive into AI with Claude, um, Claude Chat, Claude work, and I've fallen on a couple of things that have really saved me hours. And I'll share a couple of things I'm doing. It might be helpful for you guys. But we do a ton of Zoom meetings. So I think everybody would agree that AI is forcing more and more content, more and more meetings. It's creating a lot more noise we really have the ability to deal with. And I found that I was sucking up a lot of my time every day just going through the information in terms of what I have to follow up on, who I have to track, et cetera. So I actually set up a skill project in Claude, and I tell Claude every hour, go into my Fathom backend, extract all the meetings that I've had between the last time Claude did it now, and create a summary document of all the to-dos that were generated from those meetings. And then also create a document, a summary document of each meeting, and place those documents in a folder that I— where I know it exists. It has saved me so much time. Because it's— what I've done is I've connected Fathom and I've connected my Gmail account and I connected my CRM. And Claude is doing a phenomenal job of pulling that all together. And instead of me going to all these different places, I now have this one place where I can look at everything that's coming up on my day and just a checklist item of all the to-dos I have to do. It has been a tremendous time saver for me. So that's just one way that I'm using AI. I'm using it a lot of ways, but that's been really helpful.

Nice.

You know, I, um, I started using, uh, HubSpot years ago, right? And interesting enough, um, you could go into any type of your accounts here. Like I did this for, for, uh, SOW that I'm working on. And I could just click on this thing called Ask Breeze now. And I said, I need, I need to figure out what I need to do with Scott. And so it looks through all my connections and messaging.

Nice.

And instead of going through my note taker, which is Fireflies, which goes into HubSpot, now I can just go here and say, you know, what, what are my next steps for Scott? And help me write a message, write an email to him. And this is really good for, for me when I, when I, uh, Yeah. Look at who I need to talk to and if I need someone in my company to do it for me. Because if I have to sit there and say, hey, Faith, can you do A, B, and C and follow up with Scott and find— and like, it might be a warm lead now, not a, not a hot lead. You know, that's a lot of time. So there's that Breeze thing. It's, it's kind of pretty cool. If you got HubSpot, that's a really good one to, to, to think about. There's also a thing called delfi.ai where you can make a digital twin, especially for Larry and Doug here. Make a digital twin of yourself to ask so people can ask questions of you.

Mm-hmm.

And then they can get at least a sense of who you are and what you do. And if they need more information, then they could book a time with you, right? So you, now you're taking that time displacement of trying to tell people what you do over and over that's repeatable. It's just kind of wears you down. So I've done that as well. I thought that was a pretty good product. Again, I got no stake in any, in, in HubSpot or Delphi, but I, I learned about these tools from coming on these calls and doing them.

Nice.

Those are really good.

Michael, I found a, uh, limit to the writing capability of Claude though. Oh, it's a CMO. I think my creative angle is writing. I'm not a graphics guy or not a writer, and I do a lot of, uh, composition work, and I'm doing it with Claude, but there is definitely a limit with Claude.

It—

I have to do a lot of editing to get to my final version. And it's trying to learn my voice and it can't. So there's a limitation, and then there's also a sense of maybe job security that it's not going to be able to completely replace me. But I think there's a creative limit to some of these AI platforms that if you are a writer or something like that, it just cannot go all the way for you.

David, have you—

oh, sorry, go ahead.

Have you invested the time to actually create your Claude voice. There's quite a bit of information out there. Reuben Hassid is really exceptional at guiding people through that. I found that Claude has actually captured my voice pretty well, and I'm doing less and less editing. And also Opus, their newest version, I think it's 7.8, has really spearheaded— had jumped ahead on that. So I don't know. It's pretty good.

I agree with you, Larry. It's pretty good. But the value that I get out of it is when I want to write something about personal experience, I get it to find the topic and then I just regurgitate all of my history. And Claude is very good about sorting that into a coherent story, but then writing it with the edge that I want, it just hasn't been able to get there. And I've been doing it with Claude for 8 weeks now and it hasn't been able to completely replicate the How about ChatGPT?

I mean, I use ChatGPT and Gemini. I mean, a lot of people are Claude Coworker, Claude this or whatever. I started using a little bit, but, and I get so many people saying how great Claude is. Um, but the ChatGPT stuff has been really, really hit the voice that I want.

But hey, so you can, there's a couple things to know with, um, Claude and ChatGPT. First of all, if you're gonna move over to Claude, you can connect ChatGPT and Claude so you're not losing all of that. all of those projects and all of those chats that you've had. The other thing with Claude is there are all these skill sets in it. And so what I recommend is there's skill sets for writing and for voice. And just like what was being said about, you know, it's— so Opus 8 is the latest version. And with Opus 8, the digital twinning within Claude, not using Delphi, but the digital twinning using Claude is like, above and beyond anything I've seen yet. But I would say that when you're doing things with Claude, grab the free skill sets. There's a ton of them. So when you're in Claude, just type in for skill sets and you'll find writing, editing, voice. All of these things have prebuilt skill sets. And go out and search online too because there's skill sets that are in GitHub. that you can download as well. You just have to make sure that you're checking them for security because there was malware in one of the skill sets like a week and a half ago.

What's the difference between Claude and Claude Cowork?

So yeah, I'm sorry, go ahead. Well, okay. The biggest difference is Cowork. You give Cowork access to your actual hard drive selectively. So with ChatGPT, you can't do that with Claude Cowork. You can actually have Cowork reference files on your hard drive and have Cowork place files in dedicated folders on your hard drive. So Cowork is really a project manager. It is truly a coworker, whereas Chat doesn't have access to that stuff.

Cool. I'm gonna go to Scott Brown here.

Hey, thanks, Michael. I appreciate it. Um, okay, everybody has a car, everybody picks a car. because they like the way it looks, drives, whatever. So basically, pick something you like and stick with it. It'll get to know you. I use Gemini. It knows me. I don't mess with anybody else. Once you find something you like, if you, if you like a Mercedes-Benz, or if you like an Acura, whatever you pick, find the tool that works for it. And that's like—

I like, I like the Yugos. Do they still have those?

Only if you go to Yugoslavia, which is not even existing anymore. So with that said, don't make it complicated. I'm actually an architect. I went to MIT. I wrote 3 aspects that are used today in digital marketing. I've got my book. In fact, I'm rewriting that book to a real book because I mean, it's an ebook. And I've got a publisher who says, write it as a real book. Let's get it out there, make it a bestseller. And then I'm going to write about after that, the fear that everybody has about losing their jobs. Don't worry about your job because you have feelings. You're a human. Guess what? Worry about what's underneath that secret stuff. That's why we're in conflict with Iran right now, because of Japan— or not Japan, but China, Russia, Iran— our security and your identification. So my next book she wants me to write is that. So if you want to get some more information about that, let me know. And that's my recommendation. Find a voice. that you like, that— and, and they'll let— they'll get to know you. And in fact, I'm writing books and they write my first draft. They don't write the book for me, I dictate it to them. I don't give them a prompt, I dictate.

Yeah, I actually use a thing called Whisper that's a dictation tool, and it's freaking awesome. I mean, I don't like it for my phone at all, but I like it for my computer, and I do not want to I almost look at a keyboard like, why the hell are we still using a keyboard and mouse? You know, I think the mouse still we need, but, um, the keyboard—

Just click both.

I want to go to Mark Frank, who's a good friend of mine in, in, uh, Orlando here. He's been killing it in his agency, and I just thought I'd catch up with him and have him introduce him to the crowd again.

Hey everyone, uh, Frank Bertoli, like Michael said, uh, here in downtown Orlando. So come across each other quite a bit, but I've got a marketing agency, Performance Marketing. We manage a couple hundred million in ads and help clients measure that through data analytics into billions in economic impact. Been doing the same thing for 30 years, 20 with this agency. And so it's good overall. Sales always, you know, never ends.

Mm-hmm.

Sales, business development. AI is definitely new. We're using it a lot internally within the agency. It's natively built into a lot of the tools. We're on the Google stack. We buy a ton of Google Ads. We do a lot with Meta and Facebook as well. So a lot of native AI tools within there. We're on Google stack. So we have Gemini, the business professional one that the team uses quite a bit. Um, personally, I like, uh, Grok. I've looked at Claude Code a bunch. I have not done— I've never been a programmer, um, which I know it does a lot more than that now. I don't have any agents working for me yet. It's kind of interesting just watching it come together. So I use it personally at work and personally, um, for a lot, a lot of legal reviews before I send it to my attorney, pre-vet stuff, which is interesting.

What do you like for what, what Platform do you like for legal questions?

I put it into Grok.

Grok.

I put it into Grok. I use ChatGPT. I have a paid subscription there as well, but I found myself just— I use Twitter and use X a lot personally and professionally. So it was just natural to go to Grok. And I think it gives some pretty good answers. They all have, you know, it's a race that someone else takes the lead in, you know, once a week, once a month. So I don't think there's a wrong one to use, but I just encourage everyone, my peers, everyone that works here at the agency, it's a tool. You gotta be, you know, it's not gonna take your job right away, but someone using it will take it tomorrow. So you need to be innovating, using these tools, finding out how it makes your workflow easier, better.

If you had one piece of advice, you know, 'cause you've been very successful, Frank, and we've got people here that do well, but they might be going through like a revamp in their career. What's something either A, here's some good advice that I learned, or B, I did it wrong and you should learn from that too?

Oh, maybe I'll share one of each.

Yeah.

I subscribe to never stop learning, right? It's like, I think, I'll be fortunate maybe in the next few years to sell this agency, but it's not to retire. It's to move on and do something new. Constantly learning, following my passion, passion about what I work about and personal life. How do you overlap those things? So always be learning and, you know, never—

Actually, but what was the particular life lesson? Not like always be learning, but like, I did this and this happened, or I did this and this did not happen. Not to put you on the spot.

No, no, let me think about it. I gotta come up with a good one. Quick one, but a good one. Um, I'll give you—

I'll give you, for instance, like, yeah, or an event. Like, I would scrape everybody's exhibitors, all the speakers. And set up a bunch of meetings before I even got to the event versus what I used to do. Hey, I'm Mike, what do you do? And it's just like half of those people I'm asking what they do are not ideal customers for me.

I, I take a ton of meetings. I meet people. I've never seen an opportunity I don't like. Sometimes it's, it's a hindrance because you don't say no to enough stuff and it can bog your calendar or time. But I'm always open to try to figure out where's the value in this. And the value could be learning what not to do in the future, same thing. But I'm always open to meetings and networking and talking to new people. I feel like there's lessons to be applied from their business that's applicable to my own, from my business to theirs. So I always try to approach every situation.

I like a lot of what you said, Celine, in Falato's meeting. I'd love to get together sometime and chat.

I have my, I have my hand up. I have a question for Frank, please. Frank, what do you think of, um, the offerings that they do at LinkedIn and the LinkedIn advertising putting out?

It's very expensive. It's not as targeted. And if you want it to be targeted, it's cost per open. Like, it gets really expensive, um, LinkedIn advertising, at least the type of performance marketing we do.

Okay, so it's not cost per thousand, it's cost per open?

Oh, it's cost per send sometimes.

Wow.

Whether, whether they open it or not.

By the way, I'm glad that I pivoted to being an author rather than having digital agency. I'm done with that stuff.

Yeah, there's, there's great—

you know, you can let— you know, you sound just like I did, whatever your age is. I'm 63. You're probably what, mid-40s? So you sounded just like I did. You sound just like me.

I got a little more than that, but yeah, they're all— the channels have benefits. I mean, LinkedIn has an amazing audience. It's just hard to get in front of them is very high. They charge— listen, everyone charges what the market will bear. And if people are willing to pay cost per send, that's how LinkedIn—

Well, it depends on how specialized. I use a guy that actually does Connect, and it's actually relationship. So if you actually have relationship in your database, then cost per send actually works out really well. Your return on investment is really good there.

Yeah, so I would think so.

Actually, if anybody's interested in that, I can get them connected with my friend. His name is John Keel. He's out of Columbus, Ohio. I'm working with him and he fills my funnel, that's for sure.

Awesome. Let's go to— I'm sorry, you done, Frank?

I'm sorry, I was just gonna ask Scott what he does. Wasn't sure. Will you send a follow-up or introduction?

Oh, actually, um, I'm a kind of a Renaissance man. I work in the wine industry here in Sonoma County. In Northern California. I'm an executive with a wine branding company. So we're all over. We work with retail, get the wines in the retail. We're trying to save the wine industry actually here in California. And then I'm also an author. I just got into publishing. I just actually work— I'm working with a partner in publishing. So we have an established publishing. In the music industry, Willie J is a friend of mine. And I've got a friend who is in Chicago. He's also a musician. So we're working with musicians. We're helping people with a better way to publish their books. And I'm also working with a major publisher, Alinka, which is Leaders Brand, used to be Leaders Press. And she's going to publish my AI book. She's the one who said, pull my AI book, which was at BookBoon. It was an ebook. And she said, we'll make it into a bestseller. And then I'm writing another book from that for AI about not being afraid of AI.

I'm gonna go to MK here. MK, one of my favorite people. MK and I did a roundtable, um, we had 300 people registered. Like, obviously we got 20 people in here, and this is the one I've been doing for a while. Uh, that was last week, right?

That was great.

Yeah, you want to talk about a powerhouse in the, in, in the space? And she's built a really cool product too, which we won't get into a sales pitch today, but I want to introduce her as someone that you should connect with. And just tell— MK, just tell us what kind of ideas you came up with in the last 6 to 8 weeks of something that worked and something that didn't work and kind of why you decided to do a roundtable with me as well.

Yeah, cool. So thanks, Michael. Fail fast, I think, is probably my piece of advice. I'm monogamous with Claude. He's my favorite guy in the whole wide world. I work with him in all different channels. So we're working through our finding a voice and things like that. He does lack human sentiment. So I think that's, you know, and you're quite a personality. So I would say, Don't expect the LLMs to have your personality. Have your personality and then help them find the expression of that. So I like to fix problems using technology. So I started in IT software, then I went into martech. I created the first transactional email company. I'm sorry for that. Now every time you go get a coffee, you get 5 receipts. I should have put an off switch in it. I didn't know to do that when I invented it. I'll put off switches in the future.

Thanks for that.

Yeah, I'm really sorry. I, I cuss it every time I use it. Now what I want to do is I want to help the relationships of buyers and sellers. So I met Michael through one of these roundtables, and he's giving free advice, like valuable advice, every day, all day long, to help people grow their businesses. And I think, you know, serve first and the revenue will follow. So we want to work together to solve the big problem. B2B sales is completely busted right now, and it's broken for buyers and it's broken for sellers. And we got people in their 60s with the last kid in college on their third layoff. And so I come to Michael's events because I meet people like you. I learn important things, and I can contribute in a way that ideally we can get the industry back to its next generation, which is the tech is doing its function and humans are connecting and solving complex human problems. We don't know how to measure trust between human beings. We don't know how to measure relatedness between human beings. Not yet. I'm working on it with some of the people Michael's introduced me to. But let's get the computers doing the data and the stuff like that so we can spend time figuring out the next gen of how do we work together? How do we get the economy beyond the big 8? Because our economy is dependent on the big 8. We need other people being successful. I appreciate everything that Michael does. I appreciate the people I meet through him. They're— everyone has been just really exceptional in who I've gotten to work with. So thanks.

Thanks. I'm kidding. It's really important for you guys and ladies to think about what partners you want to pick. And don't just count on that as a manual approach. Have someone open a door with you, not just yourself, not just, hey, can you write me a little note and introduce me? That's so old school. It's too slow. So think of ways to make your connections and their connections work. And then a lot of people look at their LinkedIn and it looks like I made the President's Club. I did this. I, I, I, you got to make it about what do you do to help me? And if you look at my LinkedIn, it's a little bit of that, a little bit like, hey, I'm a black belt jiu-jitsu. I like kickboxing. You know, make someone remember who you are, right? You just put VP of sales and Xerox, and I grew the company from $4 million to $10 million. It's not going to ever be rememberable no matter what company you're at. So, um, you just got to, every time you write a message, who cares? So what? Why are you telling me this? How's it gonna help me? And if you write, if you think about that, everything you post, same thing. I use a thing called Blaze.ai that basically posts on every single channel that I have. X, Instagram, LinkedIn, and I don't have to think about what I'm gonna post about and what story it's gonna put in, what video. It's like a social agency. I don't think it's great. I think it's good. You know, it's, it's $800 a year. Now, if you're going to have that in podcasts and roundtables and masterminds and all this stuff and keep your, keep your brand in front of people, but give them something versus talk about you and what you, what your company does, people just don't read that. So have a strategy for that stuff, I would suggest.

Tanya, what—

I know I asked this at the beginning, but my brain just kind of dumped. Tell us a little bit about what you do again.

Sure. Most of my career has been in marketing technology, data-driven. So when you're talking about AI, of course, the real data, the proper data is key. So Melissa, I think I've met you before. Anyway, side note. Yeah, so I've really mostly been in enterprise sales. with marketing technology, related technology across the board, multi-vertical. So a lot of things have commonalities. So sales is not what I do. People have sales as an old-school word. It's really about selling with clients, which means people have problems to solve in their companies. And how do they get resolved for that within their organization as well? So I'm hip to hip with clients on how do we get these problems solved? How do we empower your outcomes of, you know, driving results of growth and acquisition and retention together? So that's really, really my entire being, and relationships are everything. So that's number one important, authentic relationships. I keep in touch with people forever. And Ron, I'm so sorry that I— I haven't chatted with you lately. So really it's about empowering and aligning with what they need and how to help them get it, not just internally but externally, and really leveraging multi-partners. My career has been mostly agnostic, so I'm here to help people maximize the results they already have trying to get out of their existing marketing technology. You know, Frank, you were speaking the word of, you know, And your side as well, there's a crossover that, because I've worked with, um, not just tech companies, but agencies as well. So it's a nice hybrid of a lot of things. There's tech and social media that help drive awareness and things like that. So I don't know if that summed it up properly, but it's, uh, driving relationships, building relationships, and doing great things together at the end of the day.

And where are you based again?

I'm in Chandler, Arizona, um, and I also work in Flagstaff, Arizona. It's only about a 2-hour difference, but it's a whole different world.

What's the elevation? It's like 3,000, 4,000, right?

Yeah, Flagstaff is 77,000.

Wow.

Okay.

The peaks there where I grew up skiing is over 10,000, and you'd never know that in Arizona. It's a 2-hour drive between where I am in Chandler and Flagstaff, so it's quite Quite palatable and easy. So I work whatever location I can depending on the climate.

Let's go to Allison Snow.

Wait, I have to ask, are you still skiing?

I do ski. Not right now. We didn't get a lot of snow. I'm— and the whole season has been horrible, um, in Arizona. We didn't get— yeah, so unfortunately no. Yeah, I'd like to though. Thanks for your—

Go ahead, Allison.

Cool, thanks, Michael. Nice to meet you all. Thanks for, thanks for having me. Really nice discussion. I, um, started an independent agency, if you will, solopreneur, so I don't want to make it sound bigger than it is between us chickens. And, um, I, I started it for 2 reasons. I had more of an impetus to start it than a clear vision. One, I'd served as a CMO or SVP of marketing at a number of spots, and it seemed to me that the role would change pretty frequently these days. And I found myself twice sort of talking myself out of a job, just talking to the CEO and saying, okay, well, what do you need now, right? We started at this altitude and now we're at this altitude, and this isn't really what I want to do. I kind of want to do something different. And I'm saying, well, you know, we're going to cruise for a bit and that's going to be cool too, and let's cruise. That's, that's a wild oversimplification, but the idea being I found myself a tad bored and found myself thinking that things move so fast that for— if I were a CEO, I would want to think about hiring fractionally just so I could have the talent I need at the exact right moment for my business, depending on the key priorities and projects that I have. So I started to do that. My My description of the business is trying to help founders and early-stage revenue leaders kind of get out of their own way by making really good decisions in the first place to prevent so much of the alignment debt that bigger companies have. So that's essentially what I'm up to. I'm in Boston. Michael knows because we talked earlier. I'm right next to the airport. It's kind of noisy if I open my window. But if you've flown into Logan, that's where I'm sitting. And it's just delightful to meet you all and be, be welcome to this group. Thank you.

Thanks, Allison. Who hasn't kind of chatted and wants to give some ideas, tactics, tips, or strategies? How about Darren?

Hey, folks.

Hey.

Darren Crosby, Peachtree Capital Advisors here in Atlanta. On the AI fraud, I use ChatGPT, and then I think might have been mentioned before on one of these calls. I also use Granola, and Granola will sit there and gets access to your calendar, sees when you have calls coming up. Records the call, takes notes of it. And, you know, if it's a sales call with a new prospect, you can go in and say, hey, analyze this conversation for me. And they'll give feedback and then say, here's some of the strengths in your message and here's some of the weaknesses just to help you kind of Continue to craft and refine what your offer is to your clients. And I've found that to be very beneficial.

Was there something like a Granola and Fireflies?

My understanding— I haven't used Fireflies. My understanding is that's more of just a note-taker.

Uh-huh.

And Granola is what?

Granola is a note taker, but it's AI-driven, and you can go in and ask it to analyze the conversation.

Yeah, Firefly does all that.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I mean, I, I say, hey, tell me what I should email Frank after our first call. And didn't always have that, but I'm like, that saves me like 2 hours of me like What the hell was I supposed to do and write back? And what did I owe him? Otherwise I'd be going back and forth and back and forth between the recorder. Can you imagine back in the old day we had to write these notes? I couldn't read my own writing.

Yeah, the biggest difference with Granola is it's anonymous. It doesn't show up on the meeting screen when you're recording the meeting. Fireflies does, which sometimes with Granola is nice because sometimes Notetakers get kicked out. Granola doesn't.

Yeah, then— but there's also laws around. Yeah, I think they do that. They do— like, Fireflies wasn't doing that before, like, hey, we're being recorded thing. And then they must have got threatened by something, you know, because you can't— you can't have that as your tech and expect that to not cause legal issues. Because every state has their own state regulations. You know, it's like, and then you got the mafia listening in half the stuff here. We can't have that. Frank, shh, don't tell them about that. All right, Python? Okay, let's see. It's 12:11:45. How about Lee? Go ahead, Lee.

Yeah.

Greetings, everybody.

Happy to be here.

I've got some tech that I'd like to share. My name is Lee Pomerantz. I'm a fractional Chief AI Officer. I'm a certified Chief AI Officer, but delivering that to the market as a fractional model. 24 years as a digital marketing agency owner before that. I'm doing a lot of go-to-market activity for my own business.

Yeah.

And trying a lot of tools, and I've hit upon one that I am really liking. This is not an affiliate link or an affiliate pitch. It's called Get Swan, or the app is called Swan, and it's purpose-built for go-to-market activities. I'm using it right now where it monitors. People who are commenting on my LinkedIn posts because I'm posting on LinkedIn every day. So it's monitoring activity. It's looking at my 5 or 3 ICPs that I've loaded into it and it's automatically surfacing for me. Hey Lee, this person commented on your post and he fits ICP 3. You should reach out to him. Okay, automatic. I get a Slack message every morning of, you know, what the activities are. It's also, again, based on my ICPs, I have it going out and getting me 5 new fresh leads that I can reach out to. And again, it's doing that research and due diligence in the background, and then it'll execute and send out, you know, the messages for me. So it's really purpose-built. Yes, you can use Claude and you can build all these agents on your own and kind of string this all together. But these folks have a really dedicated GTM platform, all kinds of playbooks in there. I'm skimming the surface on, on how I'm using it, but it's very proactive. I just launched a cold email campaign. It connects with everything that's out there. So it connects with Instantly, which is an email platform.

Mm-hmm.

And the agent in Swan actually went into Instantly and set up the whole campaign for me. I didn't have, I didn't have to do a thing except load up a list. So check it out. Um, they're well-funded. They did a capital raise. The owners are building in public, so they're sharing what they're doing, how it works. It's a real lean team. I think it's 3 or 4 people. Um, and, you know, they're trying to be one of those AI unicorns. No, I don't know if they want to be at the unicorn level, but they definitely want to get to like, you know, $10 million annual recurring revenue with just 3 people as quick as possible. So they're building in, in, in public and, and they're sharing that. So I just wanted to share that and, um, appreciate being here.

Thanks. Um, I'm gonna give you guys Back, uh, 15 minutes.

Can I interrupt, Michael? Yeah, go ahead. I want to thank you, Lee, for meeting with me on Friday, and that's a great tip.

And yeah, that was cool.

I enjoyed our call, Mark.

I don't know if any of you are using this service, but I have a discussion board in a Slack channel that's just blew it up with a whole bunch of marketers and go-to-marketing people, and I'll put the chat in. Have I introduced you to Bordy.ai? Have any of you used it? I am getting my calendar filled up and it's—

Uh, he's awesome.

Bordi is your, your guy. If you're not getting a daily calendar appointment with your ideal client profile, then you're not using Bordi correctly. And I, I just love it. So if anyone wants to meet with me more on that one, that one's fun. Super fun. Thanks. The way I'm doing it is I'm, I'm, I'm an SEO for SEO companies. I'm white label SEO company. And so I want to meet with and have discovery calls with other digital marketing agencies, and Bordy gives me a calendar appointment a day.

Yeah, Bordy is like a phone matcher type thing. Oh, he's more than phone.

He does text. He'll text you out of the blue and just say, hey, I got someone you should meet, you know, like, oh, I got a suggestion, you should be doing this. He'll email you and text you at the same time, just Catch you off guard.

It's great.

Thanks, Mark. I gotta, I gotta cut this a little short because I have to get ready for an onboarding call. But I wanted to thank everybody for joining. We have, we have a call every Tuesday, 2nd Tuesday and 4th Tuesday of each month that you could join. MK and I are doing another Unfiltered Console marketing event that you can reach out to her or me about that one. And, um, I look forward to keeping in touch with all you. Thank you, Michael. Thanks, guys.

Bye.

Thanks, Michael.

Thanks.