In this National Sports Forum webinar, Vice President of Business Development Mitch Heimblock introduces Michael Falato of Full Throttle Full Auto Leads, a veteran of enterprise sales in sports and software. Falato explains how many sports organizations spend disproportionate time hunting for leads after closing deals, and why moving lead generation to a dedicated, repeatable, and scalable process can dramatically improve sales productivity. He covers the technical and strategic steps needed to protect email domains (using subdomains, DKIM, DMARC, DNS verification, and third‑party email validation), automate outbound email drip campaigns, and keep inbox deliverability high. Falato also discusses scalable LinkedIn outreach—using automation tools, managing connection limits to avoid “LinkedIn jail,” and leveraging mass endorsements. He stresses the importance of data hygiene, enriching and verifying decades‑old contact databases, and integrating these data sources with CRMs (Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, HubSpot) via APIs and middleware like Zapier. The webinar outlines performance measurement practices, including A/B testing, open‑rate and appointment‑rate KPIs, and using analytics to refine targeting by industry, title, and geography. Falato compares the cost of an internal SDR team (including salaries, bonuses, benefits, and management overhead) with Full Throttle’s flat‑rate retainer model, which bundles email, LinkedIn, and domain‑protection services. He shares pricing details, onboarding workflow (email‑engineer setup, persona definition, messaging strategy), and personalization tactics using dynamic snippets. The Q&A segment answers audience questions about typical open‑rate benchmarks (20‑40%), the LinkedIn automation platform (SpendingTime) and its safety features, onboarding timeline (about an hour for email‑engineer configuration), database connectivity, and how to craft highly personalized messages. The session closes with a reminder about the upcoming NSF Virtual Summer Summit (August 25‑26) and a call to action for attendees to engage Full Throttle for lead‑gen services.
Chapters
Hello everyone, I'm Mitch Heimblock, Vice President of Business Development here at the National Sports Forum, and thank you for tuning in to our webinar series. Today you're going to hear from a long-time veteran of enterprise sales in sports and software, Michael Filotto. Michael has been a friend of the forum for a number of years, and he's had experience working with over 400 brands in and around the sports industry and helping increase their top-of-funnel leads. Recently, the NSF had partnered with Full Throttle Full Auto Leads to help with our marketing and sales efforts. Michael has helped to strengthen our domain's reputation, automate outbound emails with drip marketing, and clean up our database of contacts going back about 26 years. Full Throttle Full Auto Leads has helped the NSF identify interested and qualified targets across the industry and make sure our marketing emails were getting into as many inboxes as possible. With, with Full Throttle, our sellers were able to spend more time pursuing targeted verified leads and less time on cold reach-outs. If you're looking to increase your sales productivity and identify more qualified targets, I'd highly recommend reaching out to Michael after this webinar. But before we begin, I would also like to take a quick minute here to let you know that we have announced the dates for our upcoming NSF Virtual Summer Summit. We'll be holding this summit virtually on August 25th and 26th. So make sure to grab your badge during our early bird pricing discount. Just visit our website, www.sports-forum.com, to register now for just $69. But for today, we've got a great webinar planned for you all. With that, I'll kick it over to Michael to talk more on how to increase your top of funnel leads.
Hello everybody, thanks for, uh, having me on the call, Mitch. Um, I've been going to the Sports Forum National Sports Forum since what, 2006? So it's great to be back and let people know what I'm doing. I'm going to share my screen. At the end, we're going to take some Q&A as well. So let me get this set up for y'all. Can you see the screen, Mitch? We're good. Okay, great. Um, so basically the agenda today is just to talk about what I've seen from talking, I don't know, to about 20 or 30 different agencies, sports teams, organ— organizations overall. Um, talk about how much time is spent closing versus hunting. Um, how are you protecting your email domain, ensuring deliverability? Also with LinkedIn, Are you measuring your analytics? Are you doing A/B testing on content? And then what tool sets are you using and how are they interacting with each other? What I've seen is that many companies are doing the old-fashioned way, which is what I started with, you know, back in 2006. They're doing emails, they're making calls, they're going off of those relationships, they're using LinkedIn one by one. And it's really great when you're going after those top 25, 50 accounts. And, but it's not really a way to kind of scale, right? It's not repeatable and scalable. The databases that folks were— have been using are not necessarily up to date. COVID unfortunately really damaged the sports marketing space, and a lot of people were either laid off or had changed jobs. I'm sure a lot of them are getting jobs back, and so all those— all the data that we had over the years, including what we had helped with National Sports Forum, I was able to enrich them and verify them and make sure that they were deliverable. So the biggest thing I see is that a lot of folks are spending time doing the whole full, the whole full sales cycle, and what they're doing is spending a lot of time on hunting once the deal closes. So what you'll see is that, that whole revenue pipeline go, go like this, right? It's like, okay, close, close, and now we gotta hunt, hunt. So if you look at kind of what Salesforce invented, I don't know, 15 to 20 years ago. They made the whole idea of let's get people that do lead gen and have them just do that and feed our closers. And so that's kind of what Full Throttle and other companies that do lead gen do, is take that top of funnel off that plate of that particular organization and outsource it and, and do it in a way that's repeatable and scalable. So what I've also seen is that people are emailing from their main domain, especially if you're a team and you're sending out emails and not using subdomains. You can be damaging your, your domain when people hit spam or those emails bounce. So it's very important that you have tools that protect your domain. That's creating a subdomain. You can read a lot of articles on why to create a subdomain or use different domains for different reasons so that you protect your main domain, which is your life, your life, uh, your, your bread and butter. Um, to have you verified emails, um, the way they go out. We at Full Throttle have seen that even their main emails going out, they have records to call DKIM, DMARC, um, the DNS records, and a lot of times they're not set up right. So it's a good idea to kind of have that verified as a whole, and then When you set up the subdomain, there's a lot of work that needs to do when you kind of set that up that also a company like mine should do. There's also ways to kind of verify your domain, whether you've damaged it from sending out lots of emails, newsletters. There's some websites you can check that, see if you're graylisted or even blacklisted on some of these sites. There's lots of platforms out there that have a bunch of emails like ZoomInfo, um, and other, other lead gen companies that use this, but they don't always verify the email addresses. Even if they do, it's best to actually have a third-party service email verify emails, and that will help with the deliverability rate. And also, if they bounce, if those things happen, Gmail, Outlook, even like a Constant Contact will actually stop letting you email or shut down those emails. Are you doing any automation around your emails or using drip marketing, maybe 3 or 4 emails, you know, over 3 to 4 weeks or 2 weeks even, and kind of doing kind of a path, different emails to different people based on who, what, and how they do things and doing those personalizations through that. There's also tools out there that do LinkedIn, right? So you have LinkedIn And a lot of folks will just connect one by one by one. Are you spending time and looking at other capabilities to kind of make that LinkedIn approach repeatable and scalable as well? There's also ways to kind of take that and do things where you can endorse people's skills and basically help them build up their profile, but then also that gives a starting point for you to talk with them. A lot of things that I also have seen that people are not doing is in general is having KPIs for your email approach. Are you doing A/B testing? Are you figuring out like what should the open rate be and what should be the appointment rate be? Are you asking for the appointment? Are you using, you know, Calendly or some calendar approach? Are you going back and forth 4 to 5 times just trying to book an appointment, trying to figure out what a good time is? There's a lot of people I've ran into that are not necessarily doing all these things that the software space is doing, Silicon Valley is doing, to really kind of drive up the revenue scale really fast. So that's very important. And being able to look at industries, titles, locations, who's responding, who's not, and it's kind of changing the way you're doing things as you go and not just kind of keeping back with the same old thing. Tool sets. Now the tool sets are interesting because a lot of the teams, at least I know they're using, I think, Microsoft Dynamics. So that's great, but there's the database side of things and people are getting Zoom info And you should always make sure that the database you have could somehow feed into your CRM. Um, there's a lot of tools out there that have APIs, that have a middleware called Zapier, that they can do things, um, that feed things through each other. Also, tool set that every salesperson should have, and you probably all know, already, Sales Navigator. Use it on a daily tool. But taking that Sales Navigator and linking it to a LinkedIn automation tool is very important as well. And then do you have a team that just focuses on lead generation? You know, is it up to every person to kind of hunt and kill, you know, those leads and accounts that they're going after? Or do you have folks that are just doing that lead gen? I mean, I'm not really just talking about marketing, your marketing department doing that, because you got to have folks that will kind of pinpoint and figure out who you need to talk to and making it that your closers and seasoned veterans are closing, not necessarily hunting every day. So that's kind of the, um, the gist of the information that I wanted to share with you. Then I really want to go into kind of how I do things just so you could see what my approach is, and then we'll take some Q&A, right, Mitch?
Yep, we'll do Q&A at the end, so please, please input all your questions in the chat box below.
So, um, basically what I do is have over 210 million people in the database. There is tons of folks that I've sold to in the past. As you can see on the right, I've did the, the, the, um mobile messaging for the NFL, for the USTA, worked with AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile to basically do a lot of their activations, UFC, was in the military for 12 years in the reserve. So that's when I was at Tech Station, when I worked a lot with the teams and worked with Ron and Mitch and, and SPJ and all those folks. And so I have a pretty big background of 25 years, as Mitch was saying earlier, on the quantitative and qualitative approach of doing this data. You got to look at these charts and graphs at any point and say, okay, our C-level or directors or founders, um, VPs, are they the ones responding? What title? What industries? There's all these types of things that, that a company should be able to give to you, including mine, that does quantitative and qualitative email, um, approaches and also can A/B test and kind of change, change lanes each time when it sees what's working and what's not. On the LinkedIn side, as I talked about earlier, are you doing things right now that's one by one, or are you able to basically send out connection messages on the go, you know, 25, 30, 40 at a time, and then check what's working and what's not, taking pending invites back so you have more room to send out invites? Because LinkedIn is obviously a different, a different pony. It's— there's a lot of things that they, they limit on LinkedIn. So I kind of keep people out of the LinkedIn jail. Same thing with the email side of things. Nice thing about what I also do is do endorsements. That's what you do normally is endorse somebody. We can do that at mass scale and be able to send out endorsements for CRM, endorsements for sales, endorsements for sports, and then basically drive content back and forth and then hopefully get that discovery meeting. The model for an SDR that I've seen, especially in the software space, is that they're getting paid $3,000 to $5,000 a month. They're normally right out of school, and you have all these other things you want to— you have to do bonuses, Social Security, um, insurance, data tools. And then a lot of times these folks will have managers. So if you all look at how it is to do this internally it could be very expensive, $30,000 to $40,000 a quarter. And then that's just for one SDR, one SDR manager. Then you kind of times that by 2 or 3, and it could give you your total cost of meeting could be pretty high, um, you know, $2,000, $3,000. What I look at is that the way I do things, it's the flat rate, um, and it's a lot cheaper to have an expert that understands how to do the email side, but also understand sports and marketing and SaaS and platforms and just make sure that all that stuff works together. I'll go through the pricing, you know, one-on-one with you, but basically it's, it's a retainer type model that does email, LinkedIn, and emails. And we do a subdomain like I talked to, talked to you about earlier in the presentation. We also verify the emails, we help write with the content And that includes email and LinkedIn. So basically, the last part of the sales portion of this is protect your domain, automate anything that you can. That's on LinkedIn and email. Make sure that anybody that's setting this up has some sort of email engineer that understands— not IT people don't necessarily always understand how to deliver an email. It's, it's a very specific job title that they can do this. I have one in retainer, and like I said, I help write the emails as well and help you focus in on the middle to in the funnel. So thanks for your time. I look forward to, uh, taking some Q&A. Um, I can be reached, just so you know, michael@fullthrottlefullautoleads.com. And, um, that's my phone number up there, 512 639-3375. And if you email me, email me, I'll send you my link to my calendar as well. Mitch, why don't you take it away unless you want me to show the slide for the next, the next event?
Yeah, definitely. So I guess I'll just touch on a little bit more. Thanks, Michael. Really appreciate you kind of walking us through how our organizations can improve on funneling leads and utilizing qualified targets. To help improve sales productivity. I know before we started working with Full Throttle, we were definitely very in the dark on a lot of this stuff, and we were, you know, you kind of helped us bring us up to speed, bring us into, you know, 2020, 2021, and help with our email deliverability. As I mentioned at the top of this call, we do have our NSF Virtual Summer Summit coming up here on August 25th and 26th. We've got a lot of great organizations and sports execs already involved in the Summer Summit. And so we hope to see you all there for another great NSF event. We currently are in our early bird pricing period where badges start at just $69. So for more information on the Virtual Summer Summit, just visit our website, www.sports-forum.com. I think right now, Michael, we should probably kick it to the questions. I see we have a couple in here if you want to address any of those.
Sure, should I stop the share?
You can keep it on, you can keep it on.
So we have, um, a question from someone here. What is your average open rates? Um, I'm seeing about 20 to 40% open rate, so it's a lot higher than, than when you do the newsletters where you see 0.2 or 2%. So that's a big deal when you send specific messaging to specific people. And you personalize it, you should be able to get better open rates. You mentioned SpendingTime. Is that the tool you use on LinkedIn? And if so, how do you use it and stay out of LinkedIn jail? I don't use SpendingTime, so I'm not for sure what that is, but I use a platform and I basically run that platform for my clients with the email. And basically it gives me warnings if I go over too much activity. So that kind of keeps you out of LinkedIn jail, and it also stops you from sending too many invites that might get you put in a warning list, or where you have to kind of end up writing their email address before you even send an invite. So that keeps me in a safety spot as well. How long does it normally take to get started? It's pretty fast. It's, um, I set up a call to talk about the onboarding process. I do customer profiles, personas, Messaging? Are we going after— if it's a tech company, were we going after certain titles, personas for working with a team? You know, we're trying to sell sponsorships or seat licenses or suites, and then basically strategize in there. The email engineer part of this approach takes about 60 to 80 minutes with one of your tech folks, is so we can make sure that we kind of keep it separate, a separate lane for outbound, outbound high-velocity emails. Um, what database does my system connect with? Um, my database of over 200 million people is a database that most people use to do, um, marketing to people. So it's not something that I actually built, but something I connect with, and it works really well for me the way I have it dialed into a high-velocity outgoing email server. Um, so it connects with Salesloft, Salesforce, HubSpot, um, I think one other one that has open APIs. It also has Zapier, which is kind of a middleware to connect with other platforms. Um, what else? I think, I think that was all the questions. How do I get How can you get personalized emails? So there's things called snippets. Um, I'm gonna stop my share. I can't, uh, stop the share. Um, you guys want to stop the share? So we're off.
Yeah, we're off the share now.
Okay, cool. Um, so basically the question is how can you personalize it? The thing that I like to do is the capabilities they have is I could say, how, you know, hope you're enjoying your Thursday afternoon. So it looks like it's coming right from that person. It looks like when I do this for my clients, it's coming from— like, when we do this for Mitch, it came from Mitch. It didn't come from a third-party company. And then we're mentioning the company's name in there, the time of day, the verticals. Um, so it could get pretty personalized when you use these things called snippets that grabs information from the database. Um, and then obviously you want to— you want to write content for different verticals. Like, we for my clients. I do ones for financial, ones for sports, ones for SaaS companies, one for consumer goods. And the more personalized the messaging is, the better the open rate should be. I think that's all the questions. Anybody have any more questions? And that's it, Mitch.
Great. Thanks, Michael. That was awesome. So thank you everyone for tuning in today. We hope you all enjoyed today's webinar and we look forward to seeing you all in August. Stay tuned. We will have some more webinars coming up before that August date. So if you want to stay connected with the Forum family. So thank you so much for tuning in and hope you all have a great rest of your day.
