Michael Falato - Spend More Time Selling and Less Time Hunting Using Automation

Time selling and less time hunting using automation. Michael Filato, the founder and CEO of Full Throttle Filato Leads, will be leading our session today. My name is Carl Gravakis. I'm the producer for today's session. Thank you for joining our community, and if you need any help, send me a private chat. We have a few events coming up this week and next week. Be sure to check out our event tomorrow, The Journey to Sales Performance Consulting: Elevating Your Enablement Practice with Mike Kunkel from SparxIQ. You'll find all these events and more at SMMConnect/calendar. Connect with us on X at SMMConnectUs, and you'll, you'll find more announcements as well. And be sure to check out our focus reports. Uh, signing up for the focus reports is free. You'll find, uh, topics that are interesting for, uh, sales and marketing management just click the link in the bottom right and that'll bring you directly to that page. We're about to get started with spend more time selling and less time hunting using automation. Thank you for coming to SMM Connect, Michael.

Hello, hello. Nice to meet everybody. I'm in Orlando, Florida, Winter Garden. So, um, Carlos, should I, should I get started, or what's your, what's your thoughts on—

Yes, you're good to go.

Okay. All right. Um, can you see my screen?

Yes, perfectly.

Cool. Well, just to give you a little background on who I am, just so you know, like, why am I even on this, on this production today, is that I've been selling for 25 years. I have a background in software sales since 1994 when the internet was just coming out. I worked for like ADP, uh, Monster.com, uh, companies like Jobvite, and then took these tech companies into large companies like AT&T, Verizon, Sprint, NFL teams like, um, the Cowboys and so forth, and the Bears. And, uh, have a background in the military, so that's kind of where my nickname comes from. Full Throttle is, uh, being a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu and a sales guy that's been kind of full throttle his whole life. About 4 years ago, I was doing, uh, I was a VP of sales, um, basically trying to drive revenue for a tech company. And I was building the top of funnel approach to go-to-market approach. And I'm like, there has to be a better way than using HubSpot, sending out emails, trying to figure out how they're going to get delivered. So At that point, I started building out a go-to-market approach using email. Then I added LinkedIn automation, and then I ordered the— I basically built these roundtable approaches. So the whole idea here is spend more time selling, just like the title, and less time hunting. If you are founder-led especially, or like a lot of times I was the VP of Sales, CRO of other companies, and I'm the sales guy too. So If I'm sitting there hunting, making phone calls all day, it's not a good use of someone that's supposed to be leading, or even your salespeople, or even sales development reps, which are commonly referred to as SDRs. So that's, that's the whole approach today, is just really looking at how can you spend more time, be more efficient, use automation, and be able to get 10 to 20 sales qualified leads. We call that SQLs in the, in the software space. So I'll kind of lead with some tips. This is not going to be a sales pitch today. I just wanted to kind of give you a background of how I work. I just kind of like to educate and show you what you can do on your own. And obviously, if you want to use me, I'm a done-for-you approach. I can help you with that. But the whole idea is just to kind of have you learn about LinkedIn and email and best practices. Maybe even refer business to each other on this. If you guys want to put your information in chat and say, you know, why you joined the roundtable, um, what you do, where you live. I think, I think, uh, our producer kind of, uh, he put a question up here: what piqued your interest to join this roundtable? We want to make sure that during this roundtable that I'm addressing, like, what, why you joined too. Um, so that's, that's, that's, that's a great way of doing this. I really focus on B2B So if you're kind of a B2C company looking for, you know, how do I sell more wrenches to mechanics? Probably not the best fit of learning about automation, but you probably learn something as well. But anyways, we'll get started here. There is an old traditional approach of, hey, you're a salesperson, you capture, you kill, and you eat it. Well, great. Like I just talked about, you should focus in on doing the sales calls, the consultative calls, the strategy calls, and closing calls. So that's kind of what automation does. You definitely want to look at your top 30 accounts and go, okay, I should probably handle those, maybe not with automation. Maybe those are your top, you know, ones that you gotta win, you wanna win. And so those are the ones that you can look at, but you should automate the rest of your ideal customer profiles. That's what ICP stands for. So the first thing is people go get email addresses and buy them and start sending out through a bunch of different platforms. The problem there is that you'll burn your domain that way. There's email health, and if you don't look at what, how to do it and do it right, you're never, you're gonna actually mess up your whole domain, um, trying to send emails to your current clients. So you gotta look at your SMTP server. Is there things like SendGrid, Mailgun? Yeah, you should set those up. But then how do you automate using that other platforms? There's companies like Outreach, Apollo, ZoomInfo, very expensive, and people will connect Gmail and Office 365 and basically start sending out emails that way. The whole idea there is that's what makes sense, but that's not the right way of doing it because you'll break your domain. So you got to know how to set up your DNS, your DKIM, your DMARC, your SPF records. Ruchi, that's an email engineer. I mean, I've been doing this a long time. I still have an email engineer because I don't know how to do it myself. I'm a technical person, but I'm not I'm not writing that kind of code in that background. So think about that. You can definitely do this, but do it with a system where it's not going to break your, break your domain. If you do buy other domains, GoDaddy is a great place to look for those, but you're going to have to use Office 365 or Gmail Workspace to send out emails. You can only probably do 20 emails a day, 30 emails a day. Per email box, and those are going to start breaking that domain that's sitting on. So you're going to have to really look at the IP address, getting a dedicated approach to that. And if you're going to use HubSpot, I would use it just— or Constant Contact— I think is you got to have permission-based emails, which is more of a newsletter approach. I'm talking about cold outreach, getting out emails and using a place to basically sequence them. Okay, so you gotta definitely have that technology and know how to do it. Then you have to write an email that makes sense. What I do is I, I send out emails saying, hey, I want you to be part of this roundtable, and I want to basically, uh, introduce you to other people in your space. And the whole idea there is not to ask, not pitch slap an email or LinkedIn. Give them a reason why they want to learn and that can, that could be a great way of doing it. So, um, I covered the domains. Now LinkedIn, LinkedIn has changed a lot. I actually worked with Jeff Weiner of— he was the CEO of LinkedIn at Warner Bros. and, you know, turned into a billion— billionaire. It's a great job there, Jeff. But, uh, there's automation, there's a lot of automation platforms on LinkedIn, and they don't really want you to automate your outreach or your connections or any of that stuff. But there's thousands of companies that do it. Um, so I do it for you, but basically there's, there's tools to use, and there's like Octopus CRM, Linked Helper, all these other ones. I use a— I use one that allows me to send about 150 in-mails or invites a day. Um, follow requests, um, like their post That's a really good way of connecting with people, warming them up. And then there's ways to kind of send free in-mails, joining groups and looking for open profiles, which I'll actually take you on my LinkedIn page to show you how to do that. You can do it manually or you can hire a company to do it, or you can try to figure out how to automate. So a couple, couple ways of doing that. So the signal data approach is really something that you think of like, why do I fish where people fish? Like, if they're going to an event on LinkedIn, why wouldn't I scrape that list and go, okay, they're going to an event. Say I sell procurement software and it's procurement people going to an event. If you register on LinkedIn for an event, you get everybody's LinkedIn profile. And if you know how to scrape it, there's— that's intent data. There's intent data dropdowns in ZoomInfo and Apollo and LinkedIn. That's another way of looking at things. There's events that you go to in person. Scrape those lists, scrape the speakers, scrape the exhibitors. If those would be potential clients of yours, and basically say, I'm gonna go after those folks and send them a message saying, hey, do you want to grab a cup of coffee? You know, at that event. Even if you're not going, you know, a week or two before, say, listen, I, I was gonna go, can't make it, do you want to do a virtual cup of coffee? If they were, if they were going to be a good, uh, client, they would still meet with you. So, but always think about why would they want to meet with you. Who cares? So what? Why are you bugging me? How's this help me with my job? How does this help me feed my family? Who have you done this for? Whenever you write the emails, the LinkedIn messages. So that's important. Um, measuring data, which is the, uh, fourth, um, bullet point here. Doing subject lines, because what works for me might not work for you, what I do, right? So you want to do different A/B testing around subject lines. Don't go into ChatGPT and go, write me an email that gets me leads for this. It's going to be horrible. It's going to be a pitch slap. It's going to be a 'hope this email finds you well' is the first sentence. That's going to be the first thing that looks like, um, it's, it's basically ChatGPT written. So talk to ChatGPT like you are talking to a 5-year-old and tell it, 'I want an emotional, um, challenge-to-sales approach email that explains why I should even work with Steve at this, you know, my company, and do it in this tone. I've done ones to like IT people, said write, write to me like in the Star Wars theme. So that was, that was pretty cool. Um, remember, this is to get out— most of the time when you're doing these, don't sell. Do it, hey, I want to get a discovery call, I want to see if this is even a fit. Think of when you're doing this stuff, this is business dating. This is like you going and meeting someone, that special someone, and going, do I ask them to marry me the first day, or do I ask them to go on a cruise the first day, or do I ask to get to know them? You know, what— who are they? What are they about? It's business dating. It's— that's the simplest thing to keep in your mind. Um, so those are the kind of things that I, uh, wanted to talk to you. I'm going to go into kind of a LinkedIn tutorial of how to make your website I'm sorry, make your LinkedIn profile better and the tools that are already there for free. But I want to pause there and do a couple polls. So, Carl, once you put up the next poll there. Do you currently automate your LinkedIn outreach for revenue growth now? So we'd love to see how many people do that now. And, Carl, how many do we have on the, on the How many attendees right now are online?

We'll know in a second how many the responses are. 10% of people roughly are using the automated LinkedIn outreach.

Kind of low.

Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, there's so many tools out there, guys. If you're, if you're manually doing LinkedIn, Not a good use of your time. I mean, you, you want to, you want to at least get the door open and then start talking to that person. Like I said, business dating, I call it. So that's a really big approach. So let's end this poll. So the other question is, do you currently use lead magnets, which is what I brought up, like the roundtable, TEDx talks, podcast? I mean, I used to think, why does someone want me on a podcast? Well, they probably want to sell me something, that's why. So, interesting story, a lawyer had a podcast, no audience early, was okay at it. He was a, um, what do you call it, IP lawyer. And someone was saying that I was using Full Throttle, which is pretty generic name, um, and then I was infringing on their company. So I had— I basically used him, wrote a— he wrote back a letter and quashed that in 2 seconds. So he did get that lead because he took the time to interview me. Personally, I think, uh, masterminds and roundtables, which is what we're doing today, um, normally I have cameras on for everybody when it's smaller, like 20 to 30 people, and we all chat and we all kind of talk about Hey, give 2 tactics, what works, what doesn't. And I do less of the upfront, but today's more of a let me teach you approach. But feel free to join my other roundtables, which is more of a cohort, but that really gets a lot of people to do it. And if you look here, I mean, most of the people that voted here are not doing it. You have to give them some sort of reason for people to engage with you. If you're trying to sell and do a webinar and show off your software or who you are, people are going to multitask and not listen to you. Do we have any more, um, Carl? Is that the last one? Okay. The other thing is I want to know and, and basically take any questions, like what piqued your interest to join the roundtable, to make sure that I'm answering other questions. You might even have a question around LinkedIn or email, what I just said. So I want to do that, um, go to questions and answers a little, and then I'm going to bring up my LinkedIn profile and tell you how to make your LinkedIn profile more about what you do and how you help people versus your resume, which is mostly what most people do on LinkedIn. They make a front-facing resume. So Any, any questions so far on what I showed?

You've already answered the one that I had, which is the best lead magnets out there.

Or any on chat here?

None yet.

Let's see. Okay. Yeah, we are sending the deck. Barry. Um, so we'll— I'll be doing that. I mean, the, the deck I have is, is, is a little bit more about what I do as a company, but it has, it has it up here, the tips and tricks and so forth. But, you know, there's, there's the whole SDR approach too, where there's internal sales development reps, and it's, it's pretty expensive to do it that way, or you externally hire a company and they usually hire those kids as well. So I just, uh, I would be very careful hiring new kids. You know, there needs to be jobs. They— I wouldn't— they spend— people spend billions of dollars on this type of approach, and, um, it's not necessarily the best approach because there is a lot of turnover. They don't want to be SDRs, sales development reps, lead generators, more than 6 to 12 months, and then you have to backfill, and then it's a lot of turnover. So just, just work more efficiently. So I'm going to go into LinkedIn, um, best practices for your LinkedIn profile. And you guys, you're going to love this because these are things I didn't know that I figured out. I'm like, wow, I would have known this back in the day, that would have been great. So the first thing is, if you look here, this is what it shows when you're, when you're looking at other people's profiles. So have enough information on who you are and what you do in your tagline. Don't just put VP of Sales of American Roofing, right? You gotta have more like, I am a go-to-market expert, I am someone with 25 years experience. Then go in a little bit about yourself, give yourself a little color. I mean, I'm a veteran Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt, and play the saxophone, you know. So there's people remember that. Um, I found a way recently to change this. This is where you put your pronouns. For me, it's like I want to put something else because I'm obviously a man, but, um, automation expert right here is what I put. It has a certain amount of, um, a certain amount of tagline there you could put. Make sure your company has a logo. There's so many people that have a company in there and they don't match it up, and there's no logo to that business page, and that looks suspicious. So fix that. Make sure your college pops up. You can see here I have 32,000 connections, followers, and about 29,000 followers. Let me see our connections. You can only have 30,000, so be careful how far you go. You want to Verify your LinkedIn profile. That means they're going to ask you to go on your app, go left, go right with your face. That will help you be someone that's a trusted profile because there's a lot of fake profiles on LinkedIn. I see a lot of backgrounds on LinkedIn that are green, the LinkedIn basic profile. Guys, make something pretty back here. I mean, I took what my business cards were and put it in the back. Very important to do that. Change your URL to something more simple because it's going to give you numbers and stuff like that. Um, you could add profile sections here. Um, you can add, uh, your click here to go to my Calendly. You can really make this kind of an interesting approach. There's an AI software that took my picture and put me on 30 different tops, suits. I didn't have to do all, I mean, this is me, but this is, they put me in the background. I mean, it's great. I take great pictures on cruises, but I don't wanna stand for 200 profile pictures. So now I have some really good LinkedIn pictures in your about section. You know, I put my intro email there. Again, put something that's going to drive business for yourself or your company. I mean, if you're looking for a job, it's a little bit different. You should have more, here's what I do for other people, and it's more of a resume. But, um, if you're a solopreneur, I, I put my featured recommendations here because I have 150 referrals, recommendations. Always ask anybody that's ever liked you that you're friends with. Um, I have military people, I have my former bosses, I have everybody I've ever worked with, AEs I worked with, and they're giving me referrals and recommendations. I don't get asked for recommendations or referrals outside this. I have 150. So work that. Put your decks up here, your videos, your comments. When you have your, um, you put your company in here Make sure you put what your company does, not just— a lot of people don't have this, they just have this, and that's— I don't know what they do. I, I need to know. I need more information. Don't make people ask for more information. Um, I would also put down that you're, you're a member of different clubs, organizations, networking groups. This is a great way to kind of use that and use that for more networking for yourself. Um, what else would I would suggest here? Get endorsements. That's nice too. So that's, that's on your profile. I do some of that work, but, um, definitely have your profile for PrimeTime. Make sure you have Sales Navigator. And Sales Navigator is about $1,000 a year. If you don't have this, you're not gonna be able to do a lot of searching. So if you go to lead filters, I can go, I want connections of, you know, whoever. Let's just see, let's just say Pete Sanitas, who's a former boss. I can see every one of his, every one of his connections here and go, I want, uh, people that are connections that have shared, shared experiences, right? Or changed jobs or posted on LinkedIn. And then I could scrape these lists, you know, I could even send them a free message. You could see here, so I got, uh, 150 credits I get a month. But if I'm part of the same group, which is right here, so I could, um, let's just say, so I'm joining a whole bunch of sales ones. You could join up to 150 groups, I mean 100 groups on LinkedIn. So what happens here is that you can send them a free message. You can see right here, free to open profile. That's a, that's a real good workaround, guys. Look for people that are in groups and join as many groups, and you can send them a free message. Big, big deal to do that. I always, when I get so big, like this one has 500,000 members, start narrowing down. I go, hey, I want people that just changed jobs, and then I just want someone in sales, and I want someone that's, um, let's see, a vice president. So now we're getting into really my, my specific approach. Then I can either do this manually— you can see this one was not interested, so a lot of these I probably hit. And then you can see here, I send them a message with my roundtable. This is, this is my lead magnet, and this works like wonderful. And then if they don't answer, then I'll send them a message, hey, let's have a virtual cup of coffee. So again, if I'm doing this manually, this is, this is mind-blowing. Like, I want to just die trying to do this myself. It's too much. So that's some good, good tips there on using Sales Navigator. You could basically look at connect your first connections and automate that, your second connections. If they went to the same school as you, that's a good, that's a good way of doing it as well. So I think that's Oh, one more thing. There's certain, there's certain platforms that allow me to look at which of these profiles are actually opened. You can see here, this, this is a premium member. So if you, if they're open profile on LinkedIn, you could send them a free email as well. Um, Stephanie, it costs $1,000 for Sales Navigator for the year, um, or about $100 and something a month. You can do it monthly or a year, but if you don't have Sales Navigator, you're basically searching like this. It's horrible. It's like I'm looking for salespeople, you know, oops, can't spell. And LinkedIn allows you to only pull these filters, right? Or second filters, just a little bit of this and one title. Here I can do multiple titles. You know, I get I'm not a salesperson for Sales Navigator or LinkedIn here, but it's worth it. It's worth it to have it. You can actually— there's an automation platform called Lazy Apply. I'll put it in chat here. So I know some people were actually looking for jobs as well. That is a great way to automate your application, your application process, and not click on apply for jobs all day. The best way to prospect phone numbers is you can scrape them in here. There's platforms like Octopus and CRM and Linked Helper and all these ones that I use. There is phone numbers on Apollo and, and ZoomInfo and all these ones, those cost a lot of money. Um, the probably the best thing is to work with a professional, whether it's me or someone else, that has a big contract with a lot of these platforms so they can get— they have the power of buying and they're doing it for you. So that's, that's what I would do. But I mean, I'm, I, I'm definitely hearing that phone numbers are and calls are coming back to style. Because, um, people are getting kind of bombarded on email and LinkedIn. So I would rather still have a warmer lead than call them. I don't— personally, I don't like when someone— I don't answer my phone, and I'm in sales. I don't want someone calling me out of the blue and interrupting me. So I'd rather have a warmer, warmer lead personally, and I could, I could do enough volume. I mean, I have 10 Zoom means every day doing this. But on average, you'll probably get 10 to 20 sales qualified leads a month. Um, so roundtable is something that's similar to what we're doing today, um, but the roundtable I do is basically I produce the graphic um, talk about a subject and then use LinkedIn and email to drive people to that roundtable. And then usually I originally get about 200 registrations and about 20% show up, probably similar to what I'm doing here. Um, and the whole idea is just to use the outreach of exactly who you want to show up to go. Like, I'll do a CRO roundtable for me and then kind of just a lead gen high-ticket account executive one, which you see here. And the messaging I use is, hey, I'm doing a roundtable once a month, here's what we're going to talk about. And then I basically build a form. I think I have to go to a different site here. One second. Here it is. So I built this form in Google Forms, or you could build it in Eventbrite, or I obviously host it with, with my friends here. And the good, the good thing I always ask is, hey, do you want to book a time? What brought you to the roundtable? So I gave some of that budget authority needs and timing information to do that. So, and I, you know, a good 30% of my, my deals I get from education first. Find the problem, figure out what it's costing them, challenge yourselves, and say, this is a $600,000 problem I can solve for $6,000, or whatever the savings is. But come to people with a solution, not a cost. So, um, so yeah, that's, that's the roundtable approach, guys, is just to really do that and, and always be kind of like, say, why By the way, if you want to chat, you know, we can do this as well. And here's my, here's my LinkedIn. I'm sorry, here's my calendar. So I look at like what it costs to hire a kid versus hiring professional, whether it's me or someone else. It definitely costs a lot more money to train, buy the tools, and then get, get someone to do that. So what time is it? 2:30 here. I'm going too fast. So let me take questions of— tell me some— what I want to learn from you, from the group here today, because this is usually how I do my roundtables, is what two tactics are you using? What has worked for you either or not worked for you? And the reason why I ask this is that we can also learn from each other. It's not just about Michael Filato and my knowledge. We all have things that we've done and you want to share, either something you're trying to fix or, or find out how to do, or you found something that worked really well and you want to share it with the group. If everybody gives one tip and we have 50 people here, now you got 50 tips besides the ones I gave you. So I'm really hoping you guys are interactive and, and give us a tip or tactic or a strategy that's worked for you, or question for me. Or for the— or for the cohort here. I'm gonna pause, my voice is going. Cole McCoy is writing something, so I'm waiting on him. No pressure. I've just been using LinkedIn Sales Navigator to search for people at different companies, but that's about it. Well, that's, that's definitely a way to start, um, but you don't want to do it manually. You want to use automation tools to basically automate that and then use your time on LinkedIn or email for more of the who are you What brought you here? What's— what are you trying to solve for? You know, that type of thing. Yeah, posting, Alicia, posting knowledge and being active on LinkedIn helps. In the platform I use, I'm able to invite and follow up, message, do in-mail sequence. I can actually follow, post, and invite. So what I do, and I didn't really believe in this 20, 20 hours ago, I'm sorry, 20, uh, 20 months ago, was saying, hey, thanks for sharing your post. Any, any good events coming up? By the way, I'm holding a roundtable. I would love to have you join as well as a special guest. So what Alicia just said about being active on LinkedIn, posting knowledge, really helpful, but also posting comments on other people's and likes. Very, very, uh, very good way of doing it. Um, I would post either on either a post or article and ask ChatGPT to help you write it. That's what I do. Let's see, question: if someone has LinkedIn Premium, and so do I, can I view their profile? Um, maybe. I'm not a LinkedIn expert, to be honest with you, on every little thing that they have. Plus, they always change what, what you can and can't do on LinkedIn. So even if I thought it was, it could have changed last week. But, um, Premium is not that great, to be honest with you. Um, you got to have Sales Navigator Core, and it's not that much more than Premium. Premium is pretty, pretty, uh light. If you have sales recruiter— no, I'm sorry, if you have the recruiter seat, you have to be, you have to be a recruiter. But you could send like 1,000 messages a day. So that's pretty good. I'm going to share kind of a success story. You can see here I was getting 20 to 30% opening rates for a couple clients. It's probably even lower than that now because Gmail, Office 365, Yahoo, and all these other ones came up with harder, really harder to send out messages. So that's why I connect to SendGrid and I connect this to Salesforce and HubSpot to record what I'm doing so people can see that. Intent data. There's a lot of platforms that have intent data as well now. So that's important. You can see here that I was actually able to pull out, I think there's 12, you can do 12 now. But I mean, I could just for me alone, there's intent data, right? CRM, I use Aira, I use HubSpot. They have a free version that I set up for my clients for free. Um, it's pretty good. Then there's a starter package for $28 where you get like 5 seats, you know, 2 super seats and then 3 other ones, and you get a little bit of each, each silo that they have. From there, and then it gets to be $800 to $1,000 a month. So be careful with HubSpot pricing and understanding it because if you really have a decent-sized sales team and you want to build that out, it costs money to build out HubSpot or Salesforce. And once you get past the small startup phase, it starts getting expensive. But I think that's pretty good. Pipedrive is decent. Um, there's a couple other ones, but yeah. Can you share with Sales Navigator? Do you have unlimited. Claudine asked, can you share with Sales Navigator, do you have authority ability to send messages to prospective connections? Yes. So Claudine, um, on Sales Navigator there's a tool that I use that basically pulls, um, for ones that have open profiles. That's one. With Sales Navigator you get like 150 credits a week or a month of in-mails. So that's another way of doing it. And then if you're— the biggest trick today would be, um, joining a hunt, joining groups, and really joining groups, you kind of got to do that from normal sales, um, normal LinkedIn. You can see here, this is normal. I put in sales, I could go to groups, and you can see here that I'm Oops, let's see, I'm gonna put sales groups right here. So you can— if I put in sales and then I put groups, you can see I joined about 100 of them, right? So it's pretty easy. If you look here, Sales Gravy, there's 37,000 members. If I show all, see, I can send them a message for free. That's huge, you know, to be able to do that. So I can see who this person is, connect with them, but I might just want to send them a message. So the problem with sales— problem with just normal LinkedIn is that I don't want to send messages to all these people. There's people in here that are tech people. So that's why you do it this way, and you basically say, I want someone in this group. So you can only do one group at a time when you do this, otherwise it's going to fail in the platform I use at least. And then I want to hit people that are in sales and their vice president, and maybe I want to look for people that have, uh, SaaS in their profile, which is software as a service. So you can see here there's 170 And these are people that I really, I would really like to talk to. And like I say, don't hit people that are 10,000 or more because they're never going to chat with me. You know, I can also do that approach, but, and I probably would go here because there's only 12 here for that group. I'd probably go CXO, senior, um, director. You can usually pull about 2,500 with the platform I use. So I'm sorry. This one, I picked only 10,000. Sorry. That's, that's not what I want. I wanted to pick smaller companies like this. That's how you do that. So that's, that's how you'd, you'd pull people. Let's see. Jeff, why use Sales Navigator versus all-in-one sales automation platform like Clay and other aggregates and intent data from multiple stores? Um, I tried using Clay. Very complicated. I know what I'm doing on tech. First thing, Clay has a good reputation so far, but there's a lot of AI coming out that might circumvent all that stuff on Clay. I don't know. Um, Sales Navigator has— it's part of sale— it's part of LinkedIn, so it's gonna be protected, where I think if you use other automation platforms, they have to keep up. And at one point, even what I use can be closed off. So, um, for— to me, I'm gonna make $1,000 like that. So for me, $1,000 a year, I buy like 10. I'd probably spend $8,000 a year on Navigator. I don't like to, but I, I have much more expensive tools than that. So Jeff, that's, that's, I would use more than one, one tool and use what works for you, right? But for me, it's, it's using things like Link Helper and Apollo. And it's really people hired me because of my 25 years of sales and software and knowing how to use these platforms. Because when I started using these platforms, excuse me, just getting over a cold. Um, it was hard to figure them out. And then I'm like, if I can figure this out and do it for people and do a done-for-you service— you know, I grew this to $80,000 a month in 14 months, and I didn't build any software. I just did a basically repeatable and scalable automation approach using professional services. And that's hard to do most of the time when it's human-based, because you can't— the more clients you have, the more tools you have, the more people you have to hire. Mine's— they work and don't sleep, the bots. So, um, what else? Oh, should we create videos to send the prospects? I don't like them, to be honest with you. I see like somebody with my website in their picture, and first thing I know, that's some sort of automation, or it's just some cheesy way to get my attention. I always use voice notes in LinkedIn. I used to like that. That could work sometimes. Um, the video, you gotta think about like how desperate it might make you look using a voice or video. I mean, I used to try that. I used to like it. And I, when I get them now, it makes me a little bit like, oh, a little aggressive. I don't know. I used to be the guy would call you, call the hell out of somebody, and I'm not that guy anymore because I'd rather work more smart and efficiently having warm leads of people that want to talk to me versus someone hanging up on me. Because if I call someone cold, to me it's— I'm catching them off guard. Um, what are your limitations on in-mail video? Might be a better downloadable asset even if you include an attachment. Yeah, I mean, I mean, I kind of addressed that, but you know, you got to see what works for you. There's— I sell to CROs, CEOs, founders, software companies, services companies, you know, try selling to procurement people. I had a procurement company selling procurement software. It was impossible to find those people online that were willing to interact. The roundtables are not good for CIOs or CISOs. They don't want to network as much. They want to learn. So if you have like the CISO or CIO from Chase Bank as your featured fireside chat, that's worth something. So you think about who your audience is. Is it an education approach or is it a networking approach? I tend to be more of a networking guy when I do these things, but Obviously, there's 200 people on a, on a Zoom call, it's kind of hard to do that. So what other questions we have? Do you think SDRs, BDRs will be replaced with AI? Yeah, I would think not completely. I think that instead of hiring 10 to 15 SDRs, I could see it every day. We just let go of our SDRs. SDR team, we kept 2. So, and those are going to be replaced probably because they're going to be AEs at one point. So automate what you can. But yeah, I don't think, I don't think SDRs have a good path as they used to, just because of what have you. You need to, you need to understand strategically how to help someone, not just press buttons, which is what a lot of these SDRs are doing now. They're just Dialing for dollars. And there's a lot of even chat or live voice SDRs now too. And those sound— we're getting better. They sound pretty real, but I could tell. So I would again focus in on strategic things to be solved by humans. And that would be a senior SDR to determine whether this is a good fit for the AE. Any other resources like LinkedIn worth using in generating these leads? Um, there's a lot of different platforms out there. I mean, LinkedIn— think about this— LinkedIn is the source of truth, whether you like it or not. I'm updating my own information. Mostly doesn't become bad, not like ZoomInfo or any of these other platforms where there is a lag of updated content because they're grabbing, snagging, cultivating, and collectively grabbing stuff across the world. So yeah, LinkedIn is the best to see what the— your total addressable market is. And then you need to figure out how to enrich that data, um, by taking other lists and then use intent data, signal data, Invent data. If you know that they're going somewhere doing something, that's intent data. That's anchor data. I mean, there's some— I do really well because I know what I'm doing and I know why people are doing or showing up someplace. I'd rather do that and then walk around the room and say, hi, what do you do? I'd rather know what they do a little bit so I can come with a more sophisticated question. It's about 2:45. We got about 15 minutes left, but I don't want to drag out 15 minutes for the sake of it. So I'm going to take some more questions and give you back probably 10 minutes at least. Carl asked if I take my roundtables, if I record. I record all of them. On Fireflies, which is like a note taker. And then I'll take little snippets of them and put them on— I have a couple on my YouTube page, which is a post in here of all the ones I do. I do one once a month that everybody's welcome to come to. So I'll send you a link for, for my roundtable. This is it, and this is what we cover. Put this in chat here. And then if you want to see one that I've done, here's my signature panel that has everything that you would need to know on me and who I am and even how to book a time with me. But if you go to Eventbrite and you want to sign up for that, that's, that's a great way of kind of getting on my, on, on the radar with cohort approach. And then I'll be obviously doing more of these with, with, with this group. Um, which is a great group, a great— Ira, who is on this call, is a good friend of mine, and we're, uh, we're basically helping each other with, um, outreach and networking. And the whole idea is just to help each other pay it forward. That's kind of how I look at it. It's like, I'm not trying to sell all the time. I said, is this even a good fit for you or me? Can you tell me more about Firefly Notetaker? Firefly, when I bought it, was about $220 a person a year. Pretty good. It's amazing. Am I still sharing my screen, Carl?

Yes, we can still see it.

Yeah, I'm going to show you Notetaker. There's a whole bunch of— There's Otter, there's Gong, there's a whole bunch of these things. But let's see. So it basically records the conversation, knows who's talking, has the video of it. I can also search Things like, was it a positive or neutral? They talk about metrics or pricing, how much time I talked, they talked. Um, I can even take snippets of this. There's a, there's a platform, I forgot what it's called, that takes snippets, puts some sort of subtitles underneath it. Um, I just can't remember what it was called. One of you guys probably know. But yeah, it's, it's awesome. And then it puts it in HubSpot for me. And I had this since it started. So, but there's a lot of them out there. And I really like this one. But there's tons of them. Caption AI is good for captioning. $10 a month. Yeah. That's, that's pretty cheap. This is— forgot how much this one was. This is about— if it's $220, a year, it's about $20 a month. So that's pretty good, Carl. Captions, you guys see like this one for me, it has a HubSpot integration. So, and then it puts— I just started doing this on accident, I think. But if you look at— why isn't this working? If you look at, um, let's see, it actually puts all the notes in my, my, my Google docs. So you can see here what I was just showing you there. I think I got too many things open, but it actually puts objectives, pricing we talked about. I mean, even makes it a to-do list. I mean, it's all— I, oh, I, I don't know where I would be without a note-taker at this point in my life. I hated it hated it at first because it was, it was given to me to do, was gone. And it was, they wanted to listen to our calls, my VP of Sales, right? I'm like, I'm gonna be judged now every single thing, single thing I say. So didn't like it at first, but then I loved it because it was taking notes and I can't read my own writing. And now that my, my own CEO founder, I'm like, I use it for more of a refresh— refreshing my memory, because I'm 54 now and I don't, I don't remember everything anymore. So what other questions? Sorry if my voice is grovelly, but I was basically in bed the whole weekend. Thank you, Michael. All right, I think it's good, good time to close up. I appreciate everybody's time. Hopefully I gave you a lot of information. I didn't really want to, um, turn this into a pitch or, or anything like that, so hopefully you got a lot of good information out of this and more You could do all this stuff almost that I showed you yourself, either A, manually, B, getting your own platforms and doing this, or C, hiring someone like myself to do it for you. So, um, I do, do also give referrals to people that bring, bring me, um, companies and referrals as well.

Thank you so much, Michael. Thank you, everyone, to rate our session and let us know your takeaways and any topics you'd like for us to host in the future. Jerry will try and host those. And with that, I'm going to pause the recording. But feel free to ask any other questions in chat. We'll hang out for a couple more minutes. Thank you everyone for joining us today. I'm going to be closing out the session so that the recording can process. Look, look forward to you joining us again. Have a good one.