Marketing/Sales Roundtable 12 03 2025

look at the— if you look at the, um, if you look at the URL for the Zoom, that's always going to be the same one, so it doesn't get confusing. And I'll even put that in here as well.

Thank you.

Do we got people like Larry that need special attention?

I'm a little slow.

Slow. Does everybody have a good Thanksgiving? Yes, it's good. So if everybody's coming on here could put their camera on, be ready to engage. We do this one once a month. We have also a CRO, CEO, founder-led one twice a month that you guys are welcome to join. We have that one next week. We also have one that is being done by one of my clients, and that's a programmatic roundtable. And I'll, I'll put that in here too. It's, it's really for the CMO.

I think your twice a month one was the one I was talking about.

Yeah, that's the one. That's the one next week. So it's Tuesday and Thursday, second Tuesday, uh, and second and fourth Tuesday of each month is when I do that one. Okay, so that's, that's this one. I think this link will work for his That's immediately.ly. And Victor, if you could throw that link from Andrew's outreach, because the messaging framework, because I don't have it handy.

All right.

But I'm just going to let people— You want the roundtable link? Yeah, the round— just give them the gist of the roundtable too that Andrew has, because it's more for CMOs and people that do programmatic. Just a little bit different than today's. And obviously it's for our client versus the one I do, which is kind of more of an overall one. But, you know, today is really about AI, machine learning, tactics and tips that you've learned over the last 6 months that either really helped or kind of like, I'm never doing that again. That was a horrible idea. So that's the kind of things that we do on this thing. If you look at mine and Victor's, Uh, Kyle is in Larry's. You'll see Michael Filato/Full Throttle Leads or Larry Expense Reduction. Put your first name, like, like Rhonda's first name, last name, and then dash what you do, your company name. Or you're sitting here on the, on a, on a screen, and if you just have like Steve and that's it, no one knows what, what you do. And you're kind of— this is like good application of who you are, you might as well take advantage of this. Like my background, you know, if you don't have a background that says who you are, it's okay. But this is time where you, like, when you're doing a, a podcast or a roundtable or mastermind, you can get extra attention. So please put your information in chat, not just your name, first name, last name, but put your, uh, your LinkedIn, um, your phone number, your email address, what kind of grabbed your attention today, you know, why, why you came. But, um, we got this one. This one that's today is a little smaller than what I do next week, but this is one that, that Larry and I kind of started 4 years ago. So, um, it's more of not— we started off kind of doing pitching, like, what do you do, why are you here, and it got really old fast. And Larry actually was a good guy to say, you know what, when we do something more specific too. So that's why we talk about best practices and things that you learn versus, you know, I'm Larry and I help people reduce cost. No, Larry is going to tell you about something he learned more about that either hurt or helped a client or him, and it could be a product, solution, or just a strategic approach. Larry, why don't you start us out? Get— and when you start, say, hey, I'm Larry, I'm from this area, I do this 20 seconds and then talk about something you've learned versus pitch. Don't use a client and say how you help them and then turn it into your TEDx talk because it's really more of a commercial still. Larry, don't do that.

Michael picked me first because, you know, this is a challenge because I never talk for 20 seconds. But hi everybody. Oh yeah, I'm Larry Nippon. I am a partner with Scooby Mitchell. Uh, the fast 10-second elevator pitch is, um, we help companies reduce their indirect cost overhead, which evolves into budget that they can use for investing, reinvesting their business. Um, if you want to talk about AI, I, I don't know. Lately, why am I hearing myself twice, Michael?

I don't know. Uh, go mute yourself or, or, and then come back on maybe. That was weird.

Um, okay, it stopped.

Yeah, it stopped.

So, um, I don't know about everybody else, but AI has become front and center for me, and operationally I'm using it a lot in my business. But what I've learned is that the different platforms, they behave very differently. So I used to only use ChatGPT, and I found that ChatGPT was good until you got really long and busy on it, and then it got— then it gets stupid. So I started having to create new threads even on the same topic. Then I go over to Claude and I actually find that Claude is smoother, it's faster, it's leaner, and it's tending to give better answers. Claude AI is from Anthropic. So I would recommend what I've learned is—

What's Anthropic? Is that a company?

Anthropic is the company that created Claude AI.

Okay.

And Perplexity is an AI platform that actually is drawing upon the other AI platforms. They all behave a little bit differently. So depending on what your business model is, find that one of those platforms probably suits your needs better than the others. So explore them.

Yeah, that's, that's good, because even if you're using ChatGPT or any of these ones, talk to— make sure you use right prompts. Like, if you're going to work on a client or just yours, make it in a separate workspace so it doesn't pull information from everything that you've done. Don't just have a generic entry point when you do this. Um, Also load up— if you're doing one for yourself or your clients, load up all the files that it needs to know how to pull information and write it in that tone of voice. But just remember, when you do that, it also goes out— at least in ChatGPT, it goes out to the world. So you, you gotta make sure that's not shareable too. I don't— I'm not as an expert on ChatGPT. Do you want— do you know more about that, where the putting your stuff up there is also leaving it up there for other people, Larry?

I don't know a lot about how to protect it or how to silo it. I don't think so. I would love to hear from people that do, because I'm doing some stuff on there that I would prefer not to be shared.

Yeah, especially your financial stuff for your clients, you know, like, take these cost analysis. So yeah, Ray, I think I saw Ray come off mute. Ray, I know we talked about this over the last month, and Also, we had the Marine guy that was really into it, and it always defaults to on.

Um, so when you go to ChatGPT, you almost have to go look every single time under your user setting. Um, there's actually a link to turn it off so that way they can't use your data.

Is it real easy to find? Can you show us?

Because this—

I think this is a good time. I don't realize you don't do screenshot. Did you go— what happened though? We lose Ray.

I'm having trouble with my camera today, so I'm going up and down on you, so I apologize. Yeah, I can see if I can find a link to it. There's actually a nice little section of how to do it. I'd rather share the link to you if that's okay.

Yeah, that'd be awesome. Actually be better. Yeah. So yeah, Ray, do you want to kind of introduce— before you do that, once you introduce what you do, and in this case, what's something you've learned are lost and that's going to help us be better at what, at our job today?

It's—

so I work a lot with AI, but the biggest thing I tell people is really around efficiency. What I've learned recently, um, working with my clients is that I'm actually seeing more growth potential. Um, let me explain this. So for example, a lot of people talk about using one AI product, another, and I also heard like Perplexity come up I use Perplexity a lot because it can pull from different engines. And one of the things a lot of people are starting to do is they're talking about NGINX. NGINX is really just running multiple agents at the same time for different use cases that they're more specialized in. One thing I learned is there's actually some program software you can host locally on your PC to help lower your tokenization costs. And that's something I still explore and tell everyone to kind of look into. There's a lot of YouTube videos out there about how to do it for different setups. And that is one of the things I specialize in is that private LLM. I actually designed an LLM product that's very similar to Anthropic, but it's at a small level in my background. So I kind of like to tell people that I really love Anthropic. It's better than what I've designed. And, but there are actually use cases where you can actually design stuff locally on your PC now using like an N8n and you can actually set this whole process to get different feedback from different models and it helps you writing and content better.

Thanks, Ray.

Yeah.

So that's the long story.

I haven't, I don't, I haven't met Matt DePalm yet, so I'm gonna, so the idea of this, Matt, tell us how you got here and what you hope to, to basically, uh, drive your attention today. And then other thing would be is tell us what you do and where you live, but more about something you've learned. That worked or didn't work in business in the last 6 months or last year, and you're like, guys, I really did this, it was a really cool product or app, or B, man, that almost killed my business.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, uh, hopefully everyone can hear me okay.

Yep.

Also been having some mic issues lately. Um, hi, yeah, my name is Matt DePalm. I'm located in the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. I'm a marketing operations manager at ZoomInfo. So, um, as a company as a whole, and then personally as a kind of side, side business stuff, um, AI is kind of at the center of how we should be expecting to scale everything that we do in our personal and business lives. So, um, I think actually as soon as I hopped on, uh, Michael, I heard you, um, or maybe it was Larry, mentioning about how the more you go on with AI, it gets dumber, right? It loses its context. And, you know, uh, AI, like many databases, is only as good as the data that we put in. But yeah, for tokenization reasons, uh, context resets. So I've actually found that, you know, same thing, like breaking down, understanding how to write long, long-tail content with AI and starting to break it down by, um, like a general vision about what the content's about, breaking it down into either if it's a book, it's chapters, or if it's a white paper, it's an outline, and then taking it sort of like the, the smallest chunks you can write with AI, the more successful it will be because the context window is much shorter.

So what do you do, Matt?

I'm a marketing operations manager with ZoomInfo.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So ZoomInfo, we're a B2B data company. We own a portfolio of brands. I actually was working for an AI company in San Francisco called Chorus, which Chorus sits on top of Zoom.

Yeah, it's like, it's like Gong.

Yes, it's, it's a competitor with Gong. Uh, and so we got acquired by ZoomInfo in 2021.

Zoom got Chorus?

Uh, ZoomInfo. So there's Zoom Communications, ZoomInfo. Yeah, ZoomInfo. Yeah, ZoomInfo owns Chorus now.

ZoomInfo was real expensive.

It would— that is, that is the feedback that we do get.

Yeah, one thing, I'm not gonna bag on your company that you're at, but the one thing, when we had them, it's like, you cannot— that data is not yours. I'm like, what do you mean? That's something like you rent it. I'm like, I just gave you $30,000 for that, right?

Right, right.

So I think they're stopping doing that, but that was, um, a little bit stressful, you know, like having to have that happen. So a little feedback, I don't know if you guys are still doing it, and that's not— you obviously, you being new to the company because you got acquired, but that was something that, that was a little bit stressful working at a smaller company.

Yeah, I, um, I mean, I, I, that's the first time I've heard that. So I'm also like, I'm not customer facing. I'm not on the engineering side. I'm kind of in the middle. Like a lot of my clients are internal, the demand gen team, the customer marketing. Okay.

Yeah. Look up discovery.org, which is, I think they were doing it more.

So yeah, discover.org acquired ZoomInfo.

That's correct.

Oh, it was the opposite way.

Yeah.

Yeah. ZoomInfo was acquired by them.

Correct.

So our CEO, Henry Shuck, started DiscoverOrg about 15, 20 years ago.

Okay.

And then in 2019, DiscoverOrg acquired ZoomInfo. And then through some case studies and through some, some, some other studies, realized that ZoomInfo is the brand and the name that resonates resonates better with the market. So Discover.org once acquired ZoomInfo, and then the, the entire company rebranded as ZoomInfo.

I bet you Discover— Discovery— Discover didn't like that. Like the, the hard, the hard, um, you know, the guys that started the company. Because that happened to me too. I was at Telemetry, and Jobvite acquired us through a PE, and we changed our— everybody changed our name to Jobvite.

I'm like, what the hell?

Honestly, yeah. So like I said, you know, Henry being the CEO of DiscoverOrg was the one who like had to sign off on the change, on the branding change. So, you know, he's ZoomInfo through and through. I mean, if I, I'm on my monthly all hands and listening to him, to him talk, it's like he, him and our CEO, CRO James Roth make you want to run through a wall in the morning. It's wild.

That's awesome. Yeah. I mean, Zoom, obviously ZoomInfo is, uh, is the big gorilla, right? They, they, they have the biggest name and they're They're actually really good for cell phone numbers too.

Yeah, that's, that's, that's the kind of feedback I get. So I get, I get both sides. I get, you know, the quality feedback, but then I also have a lot of networks who are independent consultants or smaller businesses. And then the next feedback is, well, it's like really expensive too. So, um, definitely.

Uh-huh.

So thanks for coming on.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Uh, how'd you learn about this particular one today?

I cannot remember the name of your rep, but someone did reach out to me via LinkedIn. Oh, his name is Brandon. Brandon Smith reached out to me via LinkedIn. Cool. Ever since the pandemic kind of pushed us indoors, I've, I started working from home since then. And networking has been kind of the center of one of the things I try and do from like a personal branding standpoint, getting to meet other folks.

So all your clients are internal?

Yeah. So when I, when I say my clients, so I work for ZoomInfo, but I, a lot of my cross, cross-functional stakeholders are sort of my clients in-house. Outside of that, I do some work with some friends and some other business contacts for like consulting for marketing operations, email marketing, content strategy. Um, so, but for this, I, I, I rarely pass up the opportunity to network with a, with a new group.

So if you like, if you look at today's event and the one I do next week, like one of the ways I've helped build this is take other people's LinkedIn and go, hey, Matt, you, I don't know how many connections you have, but if you have 20,000, 10,000, 5,000 connections, say, hey, let's drive people from your first connections to this roundtable so that Rhonda, David, Larry, and Victor, and Ray could all get everybody's interaction between their contacts. I think, Ray, I did it with you, right? Well, but yeah, so yeah, so that's one of the things we do. David, I don't know what you do or your last name even. What do you do and what drove you here today?

Michael, you've been inviting me for a while now, and I thought I'd I'd come and chip in. I'm in Bristol in the UK.

Okay.

And I do workflow modeling.

Okay.

So basically we graphic— before you make an investment into a big digital automation, my methodology, you draw it out and then you draw it and you model it before you actually invest in building it. And in fact, we've discovered that By making people sit down and draw out step by step what they're trying to do, you usually identify where there are problems before you've gone ahead and built it. And ironically, I've also discovered that this works with AI, because if you can break down your problem into smaller segments graphically, you can take those segments one at a time and make a much better solution from an AI point of view than trying to do it top-level-down from the very top. And that's my level of expertise. So we take a graphical description of a workflow and then we use AI to implement it, and that provides a model that does what you'd like. And then the takeaway I find from that is that when you start out with a workflow, you don't necessarily know everything that you want to do. And by modeling it, you cannot model it unless you are forced to make those difficult decisions. And that's, that's what I do. Okay.

How about you, Rhonda? Tell us a little bit, something you've learned in the last 6 months and what you do and where you, where you're based.

So, hi, thanks for inviting me. I think I found out about you on LinkedIn and it's been on my calendar forever. And then I finally decided I want to meet some new people. So I'm just going to show up. So thanks for having me. I live in Carlsbad, a little bit north of San Diego. And since for a really long time, like 2009, I've been in the LinkedIn space. I like to say that what I do is I take you from being overlooked on LinkedIn to fully booked. So that's, that's kind of what I do. And then the other fun part of what I do is I teach people how to create instant rapport simply by looking at somebody's face, looking at their features, and knowing how they process information so that you can create— I have an app that goes with it. It's kind of fun. It's going to launch in January. What's really worked for me, and I've tested this for like the last 6 months, is using Dubb, which is a video platform. So whenever I have a meeting with somebody, I always send them a Dubb video and I just say, hey, this is Rhonda. No, it's not my avatar. It's really me. I'm not AI. I just want you to say hi. Thanks for connecting. I'm not in the process of connecting, collecting connections. I'm in the process of getting to know them so that I can refer them. and using dub. And then the other way that I've used it is, and this is just something I kind of tested. I don't know about you guys, but I send out a lot of proposals. And what I found is that they take their time thinking about it. So I ask everybody one question. I just say, I read this in a book. I don't know if it's true or not, but every US president has one characteristic in common. It has nothing to do with politics. I didn't even know what it is. Do you know what it is? And they all kind of look and they guess, and one person got it right. But the answer is that they take steps immediately. They, they make fast decisions. So I basically say, look, you know what? I'm not in the business of chasing people. I've got 2 kids. I'm— they're, they're fully grown. I'm, I'm not in the business of chasing people. If you decide that this is the right fit for you, basically take 42, 48 hours and I'll take $500 off. What are you gonna do with the $500? You can give it to Uncle Sam or you can go out and do whatever. And I have found that my close rate has gone up 70%. And typically within the end of the 48 hours, I get a signed contract and I get money. And the morning, if I haven't seen anything that day, I just send them another little video and I go, hey, I wanna make sure it didn't fall through the cracks. Um, no pressure. Uh, if it's not right for you, that's totally cool. You can't insult me. I have kids. But if it is right, I'd love to work with you. And, um, you know, take the $500 and go take your spouse out and blah, blah, blah. So that's what's worked for me. And the big, the big change has been using Dubb. And there's a free trial with it if you wanna, uh, and what's your average, what's your average cost to, for someone to hire? I'm just curious, like how that, so for that program that I'm talking about, which is working with me anywhere from, um, 90 days to 120 days, it's anywhere from $12,000 to $18,000. And most people that end up, uh, for a 3 to 6 month engagement, all done for you.

Okay. And you're, you're helping them write content and, and help them build their LinkedIn profile?

I, I build the profile and then I give them all the tools and I show them exact— the secret sauce that I give them is how to— and I guarantee that if they do it, it works— that at a minimum they'll have 5 appointments on their calendar every single week with their ideal prospect or referral partner. That's the guarantee. So, so most people, you know, actually get the appointments. I can't— that's why I did the course on face reading, because you can have an appointment all day long, but if you can't close, you can't read the person, you can't close, right?

Yeah, I basically take this messaging here and I have about 10 to 15 Zoom calls every single day. So I'll share with you guys a way to get some really good leads without even having to basically, you know, hire a guy like me, which I do email, LinkedIn automation, and help get people top of funnel leads. But if you look at the messaging that I just put in there, I say that and I say, here's what the roundtable is about. This is the one that's next week. So you got— if you guys want to join Oops, I just sent that to, I sent it to the, I sent it to one person. Hold on. I just screwed that up.

One second.

Message. Okay, here we go. Sorry.

Rhonda, the video you said, are you saying Dove or Dub?

I'll put the link in the chat. And if you do the link, you just get a 7-day free trial. And here's a little tip for you. Call them. Tell them that you want a demo. They'll give you another free week. And then if you decide you want to buy, they'll give you 50% off. I don't know if they're doing a Christmas special, but I will tell you that literally has been a game changer for me.

Now, do you know what they charge? What do they charge a month? You know?

Uh, I don't know what the month is. I think I pay $400 for the year.

Okay. Have you—

And it integrates directly with LinkedIn, so you can send a message directly from LinkedIn. It's like a little icon in your LinkedIn, or you can send it in your email. Plus they have office hours every single day.

So I don't know if a lot of other people are interested in video, but, um, I came across a, a video service recently called SendSpark. And what is really interesting about SendSpark is it does use AI where you could take one video and substitute certain phrases in that video with the person's first name or their company or their industry or their interest. So you can repurpose one video and you can send it out to as many people as you want. And it's pretty reasonable, it's $49 a month, but then you get dinged after a certain number of views of that video. So just depends how large your audience is, whether it makes sense for you financially. But you, Pranda, if you use video a lot, you might find that works well for your process and saves you some time.

Yeah, thanks. I've heard of it. What I found with Dubb for the most part is when you put the, you know, put it in an email or put it in your LinkedIn, they actually see a picture of you like waving or whatever. So they're gonna click on it. And the other thing that I really like about it is you can respond with an email You know, or you could respond directly using the dub. And I get, I get notice immediately when somebody's watched it so that I can call them right away. They're like, oh my God, I just saw your video. But they don't know that I know that I just saw their video.

Yeah.

How's it different than Loom?

Loom is a little clunky. I don't like Loom because it's a third-party kind of thing. Like it'll just say, here's the Loom link versus you get to see the picture of the person and you can personalize all the the stuff behind it because I've used Loom before and it looks okay. But I just found that with Dubb, it's really worked. And I have one client—

if you think about doing that to someone that's enterprise, I think they— it's not the same. I've been—

you can't—

it looks hokey when you do this to someone that's at a big company. Someone that's never seen it before, it might work, but A lot of these folks, you do a Loom type of approach or video, they know it's AI, they know it's automation.

Well, that's the— so to my point, Michael, that what I have found is that they are always so surprised that after a phone call or after an appointment set, it's you and it's really me. It's the same background. It, you know, it's, it's really me. And they're actually like, wow. And I've had people that have sent me emails that said, I'm already bought in before we even have our conversation just because I took the time. And the other thing that I'll say in the video, just so you know, is I'll go out and I'll look like you're talking about complexity and all these different things, and I'll say, hey, I'm curious, I saw that you actually used to play pro baseball or whatever. So they know that.

So it's a one-to-one video now?

It's a one-to-one.

Okay, I thought you were doing automation with that.

Oh no, no, no, no, it's, it's a one-to-one and it It literally— and the other— I'll just say one quick other thing that works. If somebody sets an appointment with me and it's somebody I really, really want to talk to for whatever reason, I send them a video and I'll go, hey Michael, thanks so much for booking on my calendar. I know your time is valuable. I wish we could meet in person, but here's a $5 Starbucks card. Let me buy you a cup of coffee. I'm really excited to see you on X date. Nobody ever stands me up. I sent you a $5 Starbucks card and They're like, oh my God, you know, like, I bought you a cup of coffee. And it's crazy, but it really works. It's stupid because nobody does it, but try it.

Gotcha. Let's, let's go.

I don't—

I haven't met Susan before. Susan, what's something you— tell us what you quickly do that's not pitchy, and then tell us something that you learned in the last 6 months that worked or didn't work, or product or solution most would be more of a strategy in my, in my hopes versus a product. But, yeah, go ahead.

So, Susan Porter, I'm based in San Jose, and I recently joined a company called Moonbrush. My background is enterprise software sales. I had 10 years at Microsoft, a couple years at SAP, that sort of thing. So very different from Moonbrush. Moonbrush is a startup. And we provide data intelligence. And the way it's provided now is through a SaaS platform, so people can use it themselves instead of having to just hire us. So that's kind of the short version of what we do. The product has been in development, so I haven't had a lot of opportunity to sell it just yet. We're now capable of being sold and in the market. So what I've started doing is trying to find out kind of what is the secret sauce, what will intrigue people about this, because it's kind of a complicated discussion. And I tried using a, a message with an option for a survey. I'm sorry, not a survey, a form where they would fill it out and I would send them a sample of a search So we say, you know, and it will give you something behavioral or psychographical. People don't know what that means. So I was trying to get people to fill out the little form so I could actually give them an example that they could relate to. And we focused in on the finance world and we looked up finance people who do segmentation and things like that. And it did not work at all. So I believe the reason it didn't work is because people are too wary of clicking on anything in an email. And it— and I did use a Google Form to offer that.

I use Google Form for this type of thing a lot, and it works great. And then I switched to Eventbrite because I have a monthly version of this, and I got tired of trying to manage the email list. So Eventbrite's pretty good too. But the— if you use a long URL in Google Forms, it's a little too long, and there's a shortened way to do it, but Yeah, I embedded it.

Is that the problem?

Maybe. What? I embedded it. No, I basically— there's a way to shorten the URL inside of Google Forms so it's not this long, it's this long. And I, I've gotten 600 signups, 600 on mine. So it might be what you're asking them, like if you're asking them to give, uh, you're asking them for a response to something that they don't have interested, right? I say, listen, you want to— I'm giving them, hey, do you want to register for this roundtable to be a special guest? Before that, I need you to book a time with me. So they book a time using my calendar and they fill out the Google form, and I have 650 people on my form. So it's probably the message and what you're asking. What's— what's— what are you asking them to do again?

To answer 8 questions, takes about 5 minutes. So that I—

why should I do that, Susan? Sorry, why should someone do that? You got to think of like, think like this. I don't know you. I don't— why should I fill up, take the time to fill out a form to get a, a list that relates specifically to their business? Yeah, I would go— I would, whether you're using me, I know we talked yesterday, the day before, I would offer them, say, hey, I want— I'm putting together a roundtable of executives like you that I want you guys to basically talk to each other and we're to come up with ideas around A, B, and C. And then you— then in that roundtable you put together, go through those questions. But just think about this. You have not earned the right to ask them that question or spend time because you don't know them. But if you build a relationship with them like we are right now, you know, I'm sure any of you guys would take a call with me after me doing this for you and with you to at least say, hey, can you be a sounding board for me? This is a sounding board, real time. So turn that message into something that's about them. People want to be heard. They want to talk and they want you to listen and they want you to— and then if you can introduce them to Rhonda Kelly and Cynthia, you know, that's giving. What you're asking for is an ask right now. I'll let Cynthia kind of chime in here because I think I see her shaking. I see her nodding her head too.

I was agreeing with you, Michael. Susan, what I have found is that no matter how great your product or service is, I need a dopamine hit within the first 60 seconds. And if I don't get that through your content, through your form, through your ask, through anything, I'm off to the next thing.

Yep.

People say that humans have a low attention span. I don't think so, because they'll sit through a Taylor Swift concert for hours. So the attention span is not the problem. It's the compelling reason for me to engage with you. Not a convincing argument, but a compelling argument. Why should I listen to you? What are you giving me? In my experience, that's what's worked. And I've tried— Susan, look at me— I've tried everything. Except clear lucite heels and pasties. That I refuse to do.

But I've tried everything.

No, thank you. I'm taking notes. I'm not looking away.

If you don't mind, I'm going to jump in to this point also. Kelly?

Is that you, Kelly?

It is me.

Yes.

We can't see you.

No, I can see me. You can't see me.

Yeah, but you're like— I guess we can see your eyeballs.

Really? How about that? Yeah.

Okay.

For some reason, my— I always have to use an external camera. My internal cameras always break. I don't know. I don't know, the Wicked Witch of the West thing.

I don't know.

Anyway.

Okay.

Is that better? Well, anyway, just to everybody's point here is, Michael, I was very hesitant to click on your link for— and I went back and I looked at it, and I think it was actually Victor who sent it to me. But I looked at it probably 10 times before I actually clicked on it because I was I was so concerned about clicking on a link. At the same time, the reason I ended up doing it was because you were giving me something.

Yep, that's, that's, that's— I've been doing this long enough that I'm like, pitch slapping, asking them to look at your white paper, um, can I get 5 minutes of your time to fill out this form? No, I don't know you, I don't care about you. But you gotta get— you gotta earn that relationship. It's— think of personal dating. Some of us haven't dated in a long time, but I still— I'm going back to that life because I'm getting divorced, so I know what it's about.

You gotta, you gotta date.

You gotta get to know somebody. You gotta go out to coffee. Then you can ask them to go on a dinner. Then you can maybe go on a cruise. But if I love bomb you and say, let's go on a cruise because you're beautiful, that's what you're doing when you're pitch-slapping, right? Or you're asking them to fill something out. You would not earn that relationship yet. I know I put this in a dating terminology, but it, it resonates to a lot of people. Like, yeah, when I was young, people were— I wasn't interested and it was— they were driving me nuts. So that's really what it comes down to, is, uh, what— who— they're gonna ask themselves, who cares? So what? Why are you bugging me? What does this do for me? How does this help me keep my job or, or help me run my company? And a podcast is a great way of getting people to talk to you, but to me, everybody's doing a podcast and everybody doesn't have audiences. So why would I want to do this? And that's why I do the Roundtable Mastermind, because you guys are all the content and, and, and the editors and the, and the content writers. But when you speak, it's not me talking about LinkedIn automation, email automation, and roundtables, which is what I do. The whole time because you're gonna be like, this guy's just trying to get it, get a lead for me, or he's trying to use— he's trying to sell me. I'm not gonna get people showing up maybe once. I want continuous. And I have 80 people showing up for the one next week because I put a lot of time and effort into that one as well as this one. But if you, if, if you want people to think, you got to say— you got to look at the messaging that I put out there. I want you to be A special guest of a roundtable. But before that, Susan, can you book some time with me? You did the same thing with me the other day. You booked the time because you got a message. It wasn't pitchy, but I got to know who you were and develop a relationship and possibly work with you in the future. That's, that's a long tail. But you know what, going, hey, I do lead gen, let's get on the call, I might catch you at the right time— 90% probably won't. Unless I— unless I pick intent data from another event that you're going to that's all about go-to-market strategies, and then I can say, well, there's intent there, I might be able to get their, their information and so forth. So anybody else want to chime in? Cynthia?

So we used to do a lot of lead magnets and they have failed miserably. Because I think that depending upon your avatar, they could be, in the words of those previous to us, hip to the game.

Yeah, they see that. They see the, the, the somewhat scamish part of it, right?

Yeah, yeah. For example, your link, um, I received it from Nikki, I think.

Yeah, Nikki. Yeah, Nikki.

Yeah.

Yes. So I went to Eventbrite, I signed up it, and in her email it said click on this link to talk to somebody. I wasn't doing that. So we have to be aware of our avatar, who we're trying to reach, and, and try multiple things and multiple avenues to get with— get to connect with us. So I love the fact that I could go on Eventbrite, I could register without having to talk to anybody. And that was for me. Others I've heard signed up to do a session with you. So I love your, your omni approach of being able to reach the right people, uh, because not everything works for everybody. And I think as entrepreneurs and as marketers, we have to think about, let's try and see what lands, what converts at the highest. Because it's always an experiment, just like our marriages. It was an experiment. I got some data and I'm on to the next experiment, right?

That's, that's what I'm doing.

Yeah. It's all perspective.

Yeah. But yeah, you're right. I mean, the reason why I let people into the roundtable without doing the intro discovery call is because I don't really want to talk to everybody. You know, someone, to be honest with you, solopreneurs, I love them, but they're going to be good for referrals, not necessarily always hiring me.

If that.

Yeah, if that. So I don't mind sometimes if I don't get booked because it might just be I'm paying it forward and they'll pay it forward one day. But, um, yeah, I put both of them in there and even put the Zoom link in there because I don't want to go, hey, here's a Zoom link, and have 15,000 requests for the Zoom link. Like, here, just come and show up, you know, make it easy.

Yes.

But what you had trepidation about, I'd say 90% of people do book Do, did they do book the one-on-one? Because they want to see if it's worth their time too. And, but if you know, that's probably somewhat of a lead magnet, which it is.

Yeah.

And I will, I give you 15 minutes just like any movie.

Yeah.

15 minutes. If it's not valuable, I'm out.

Yeah.

And I saved, I saved 50% of my car insurance. What's that commercial? Geico or—

Geico, Progressive. They all run together.

Yeah. Um, Jim, good to see you again. Why don't you tell people what you learned, who you are? Hey, Michael, it's Cynthia. I don't know if you put your information in chat there, but make sure we know, you know, who you are and what you do and what you're looking to, uh, connect with. Go ahead, Jim.

Oh, thanks, thanks, Michael. No, uh, first time here, uh, interested in hearing the discussion. Everybody's— I always learn so much from everybody else's situations. I've been doing this for 30 years since 1996 in digital marketing before anybody ever thought there was digital marketing was a job. And then, but today, the last year, I used to work for a company called NSI. We had 16 brands in the electrical and HVAC space that I was the director of digital marketing for. So we were constantly running multiple, multiple campaigns and all over the place for lead gen and for also for awareness for our introductions for products. Into markets. So now in the last year since the PE gods that owned us got rid of a whole layer of marketing, I jumped into the AI pool and put my scuba gear on and I really dug in deep. And so in the last 90 days, opened 3 different companies, one selling auto parts online and one that we do lead gen, particularly through Clay.com. Well, what— and using that—

what, what's something that You could tell us that failed miserably, that you, uh, or worked really well in this time.

I can—

two things.

That's not tied to your product, but more about a lesson learned for us. Because what this thing is today is not about how my product solved this, this is a lesson learned. It's more about something I used either here or here, or technically to help do something better that you guys don't have to do and figure out how to learn or figure out how to fail. So that's what today's about.

Okay. Well, I can tell you what went miserably wrong is, I don't know if anybody uses CRMs, but, you know, trying to use your CRM for both go-to-market and also your transactional and SQL traffic. Is a miserable failure. So that I've always found is a good thing if people use CRMs in their business. I don't know how many use a CRM here, but if you do, if you use HubSpot, you'll— I'll tell you one thing that really doesn't work is mailing out of HubSpot to do it, to do any go-to-market mailing is like, you know, you're in everything that I've learned is, look, if you're going to do mailing, don't, don't trust a third party, buy the domains, set up the domains correctly, warm up the domains, and only send 50 emails a day for each, each domain. And then cap it at 1,000 per IP per month. And you'll get your emails through as long as they're bespoke emails. If you send spray and pray, and I've been doing emailing for 30 years, you're going to not get your message through. It won't get in. People will— there. That's why I liked what Michael's doing through direct messaging in LinkedIn, because you're kind of like always assured of getting at least a blue bar at the bottom of your LinkedIn screen from somebody. And that's if it's done right, like the way Michael does it is what attracted me here. You can actually, you know, make some pretty good headway and fill your pipeline. But if it's done wrong, you've created a real negative impression for your company and yourself and you probably will never be let back in the door. So that's what I've learned. Don't screw with direct messages in bulk because tend to— you tend to piss off people and you lose people. And the other thing is do your mailing right.

Don't leave it up to HubSpot or, you know, and HubSpot charges $50 per thousand to do that whole outreach.

I—

and you got to, you got to have 20, 30 domains and different email addresses and IP like you're saying, like what I do. So yeah, don't use— use HubSpot if you have to for mailing to your newsletter as a newsletter approach, right? And again, I wouldn't even do that because it's a, you know, they charge you actually to store your marketing. They're called marketing contacts. But HubSpot is great otherwise, in my opinion. I just don't like it for that.

No, they do a great— it does a great job of a lot of things. The problem that I— look, I've been using HubSpot since it was a blog platform. It started off as a place where you could publish blogs and then they found out that forms were the gateway to success. And so they put everything into that. Once they started figuring out that they got data, then they started doing everything else as opposed to like Salesforce, which let everybody else tack on stuff onto them. They're like the platform that everybody jumped on, whereas HubSpot wanted to put everything on the platform so you didn't have to go anywhere else and use Marketo or Eloqua or Pardot or anything like that. So the cool thing about HubSpot is, is that it does do some things very, very well, and that is being able to create audiences and tagging and create cohorts. What I use those for is I take those out as CSVs and then I plug them into Google Ads, LinkedIn, and Meta so that I'm only marketing to the same people across those three platforms and not using ABM type spray and pray playbooks. Those don't work. I was the biggest fan of ABM. Believe me, I was I was like the poster boy for ABM. And then when I found out about, say, Primer and a few other tools, I said, that's stupid. Why, why should I pay for programmatic media that 50% to 60% of my ads are going to nobody? I'd rather just go to the people that I want to see my ads. So that's what we found out.

Yeah, it's, it's, you could definitely do fast outreach on email, LinkedIn, if you do it the right messaging that doesn't get marked as spam or on LinkedIn or email, you don't have to go slow to get your results, but you got to be specific to get your results. So that means the messaging should make sense and should be a give, not ask.

Like, like, yeah, the personalization is key, is understanding the person's needs, wants, desires, and then pain points, then being able to come up with solutions that actually speak to that. That's what I found, you know, the tools that they— that we use for the businesses that I started. That's what the tools that we use is to find out like what Moonrush does is create that psychographic fabric that you can then weave a story from.

Yeah, but you got to be careful when you, when you tell someone everything that you know about them in a pitch, right? I understand that you're like, I'll get messages. I understand that you're at the Orlando Tech Community. I want to talk to you about A, B, and C. I'm like, Orlando Tech Community is the community I'm a member of. So you read my LinkedIn. Through AI, it gave me the bad messaging. You're trying to align with me and now you're pitching me.

Yeah, that would be a bad way to go about it. What I'm talking about is more on the psychographic side, is understanding what, what they've written, what they've said, what their company situation is, and not just doing the standard, hey, I know you live in Orlando, and B, I see you're in this group, and C, you have these— you've— your industry faces these issues. That's not what I'm talking about, Michael. So it's way deeper than that. That's like I said, that's why Susan's stuff with Moonrush is really kind of like where I move. I move towards that rather than saying, hey, I want to do more volume. I'd rather do less volume and do it way better in the smaller piece, kind of like the way you do with what you're doing.

I think it's a mixture of both between being very specific and going after your, your what I call like your whale hunting for those top 30 accounts. And then those other 300, you could be like, hey, I'm putting together a a think tank, right? I'm not sitting there trying to regurgitate or pretend like I know the pains of your company because I don't know. I don't know what I don't know. If you assume that I know, now you're gonna make an ass out of you and me, which is— we all know what assume means. So, um, so anyways, we're about 10 minutes beforehand. Does anyone, um, want to introduce himself? Well, how about Victor? He— Victor's my, uh, VP of Client Success. He's been with me for almost 3 years and he's kind of like my right-hand man, basically produces the events, make sure my clients do well. He has a background in also brokering companies to buy and sell. So go ahead, Victor.

I think essentially what we're finding right now in the past few years with email especially has been trying to merge the type of language people want to hear and the saturation of people, what they're listening to, what they're hearing, what they're sensing, much like what Cynthia was mentioning. It has to be compelling in the first 15 seconds, be readable and capturing you right away. Otherwise, they're going to turn and move on. That's a side of the whole email entries and then putting together the clients list for our people, essentially. Is no longer sending emails from one mailbox or one domain. You have to get super creative with that side from the configuration side. But definitely, I second anyone and everyone who mentions everything about language and getting people to answer you back, and then those replies. And it's about the subjects, it's about the content inside, and then the replies. What does really work for us and our clients has been the roundtable invitations, telling them, hey, you're joining, but before you join, please come and see us. Come talk to us to see what your role will be in the roundtable and then go from there. And we get to learn about them. They get to learn about us. We get to see if it's a good fit and we go beyond that. So beyond that, we reach out to them and say, hey, how's the feedback on the roundtable? You know, I see that you do this. Now we can have a conversation because you learned about us. We learned about you. And it's not so cold. Uh, definitely would encourage people to do that, maybe create a good platform for yourselves.

Okay, you don't even need to— I mean, not that I want to pitch against myself, but you don't even need a Full Throttle to start your own little ad hoc. You could have 5 people coming to a round table and go and just get some people that you sell to that, that are clients of yours. And, you know, even people at companies, they create these things called CABs, client advisory boards, because they want their clients to talk about what's working, what's not, what products they should do. And they— and they're— that makes them sticky with, like, say ZoomInfo had a CAB, um, they will probably be part of the company going forward for a long time because they feel like they have a voice. So people just want to be heard. It's a simple thing in, in the psyche of America. Tell them they're interesting, tell them how cute they are, tell them that you want to hear from them. But before you— I, I actually totally agree with that. Let's talk. So you're giving, you're giving them a compliment and you say, well, let's do a really quick, um, discovery call to see if this is a good fit. And if that works, or the one thing I did like with the HubSpot conference is I said, hey, are you going to Inbound in September to the conference? and I had, I had 30,000 connections, and I said, I'm gonna go after just people in SaaS and sales and marketing. I sent out 4,000 messages, 600 replies, and had 45 meetings, and I wasn't even going to inbound. So it was amazing. So think about what will get people to engage with you versus, you know, sending out an ask before you earn the right. And if you have connections in your LinkedIn, use them for this roundtable. Well, I could talk to you about how we can make that work and give you like a special, um, mention at the beginning of the call. Think about making your own, or thinking about taking— using an event as an anchor, not as a lead magnet, but as an anchor. Say, hey, I want to get your take on, uh, CES in Vegas in June. You know, are you going to that? Is that something that actually, uh, you've been to. I haven't been to it yet. Even if you have been, you know, whatever, ask them the opinion question because you'll get tons, tons of information back versus, hey, I want to, I want to get your, your, your feedback on this for, um, on this product that we're launching. Like, I, I tried that. They're like, who are— who the hell are you? I don't have— I'm not going to give you free advice. You know, I had that couple of jerks that said that. But again, make it about them, you'll get— you'll get more, uh, you get more, uh, bees with honey, I guess. I don't know what the saying is, but what is it? Sugar or ants?

I don't know.

But I'm gonna let you guys go. I have to get ready for my next call. But, you know, feel free to— if you, if you look at chat, there's a button that says— 3 buttons, uh, that you could basically say, I want to get the chat as a text file. So let me know if you can see that. And then, um, please reach out to each other. I encourage you guys to ask each other to help each other, you know, and make introductions. Like, if you saw what I did and how you got on here, some of them were from people that I don't know a long time, but they let me use their LinkedIn, and we basically exchanged my LinkedIn connections with theirs and your, your connections are also worth money, right? Or they should be collateral for you to get help. You know, Victor, I think he had a great call with a, with a, um, person that does the middle to end of the pipe, so they close deals, but they also have 30,000 connections on their LinkedIn. I'm like, they probably haven't talked to half that, half of their LinkedIn in years. So if you just reach back out and say, hey, it's Susan, I just wanted to let you know I'm doing a roundtable football as well. I'm starting a new company called, called, uh, what's up, Moon? What's it called? Moon, Moonshake? Was that— you're on mute. Forgot now, my brain's—

Moon Rush.

Moon Rush. Yeah, so there's— you get on top of that thing of like, oh hey, Susan, I haven't talked to you in a while. That's me doing that as I'm thinking, hey, roundtable with you, you're gonna get all this icing that drips down the side of the cake that I haven't talked to Susan in a long time. So if you don't make it look like you're obviously trying to get something from them, you're giving, or you're just touching— but if you're just saying, hey, I just want to see how this year went and want to touch base with 2026, guess what? That sounds pitchy even though it's not, but it is. So give them something, like, like Cynthia was saying as well. So, um, feel free to reach out to me or anyone else on this call except for Larry, and then, um, we'll keep that. But actually, Larry actually has a really cool, uh, solution here, just to give him a little props. He does save millions of dollars to a lot of companies that I've heard of. So reach out to him if you want, uh, to learn about him. All right, guys, take care.

Thanks for the shout, Michael.

Bye.