Roundtable CRO 2025 09 09

includes anybody at any level.

This meeting is being recorded.

Cool. Now my—

it is.

Yeah. Um, let's see how many other folks we got to get in here. 57. Few more, few more that are going in right now. So yeah, you can get started. So what you're saying is you're penalizing those of us who actually were on time?

Mhm.

Yes, you got it. Busted.

Yeah. Being early is on time, being on time is late, and being late is inexcusable. Peter, are you a Marine? Because that's like— no, I'm just a human. Cool.

Well, Marines are humans too, sometimes.

Sometimes. Um, I would, I would suggest that you, um You basically change your name on your, on your, um, tile. If you look at Victor's Mines, um, you'll see like Dash Full Throttle or, or Dash what your company is. You have basically an hour in front of people here, they have no clue what you do. So if you look at Steve Furman, it says Dash AI Strategist. That gives me an idea what he's doing just sitting there too. So it's, it's nice to kind of get that extra exposure. So I would suggest you guys do that. Always a good idea. When we, when we go to you, you know, please raise your hand, uh, with the raise hand button on the bottom so we don't interrupt people. And, uh, just say like who you are, why you joined, and 2 tips, strategies, tactics, ideas that either worked or didn't work. Or it could be a tool, like, hey, I just, like, I learned about beautiful.ai 3 weeks ago about how to build a website in 2 seconds, you know. So that was kind of cool. I learned maybe a couple months ago, um, that I could change the pronoun on LinkedIn and put whatever I want. So I put Automation Expert. So that was kind of a cool thing. Um, so I want to kind of introduce a couple people that helped build this roundtable. Um, these are people that I trusted their LinkedIn connections to also add value to the adding the people today. So now we have a lot more people than just Michael Filato's connections. So I'm going to look down the row here. I think I saw Jason Myers. So Jason, say hi. So Jason, so Jason, tell us, tell us why you kind of joined the roundtable and also helped me build the connections today to get people to come in.

Yeah, so we're, you know, I work with an advertising agency that focuses primarily on B2B SaaS. You know, I'm struggling like everybody else on go-to-market issues, but do have some input from some things that have worked recently.

So we'll kind of go through that. We'll just kind of quick thank yous to the people that helped build this today. And then Steve Furman. Steve, want to introduce yourself? He's helped me. He's also a Marine. That's served our country. So thank you, Steve.

My pleasure. Thanks, Michael. I wanted to do this because I'm not into pitch slapping. You know, I've been in sales for a very long time, but I never felt I had to ever sell anything. I just told people about what I knew and what I loved, and they bought it honestly. So I've never had to really be a sales guy. So when I met Michael and he kind of introduced me to the whole concept of sharing our LinkedIn collectively in order to introduce people and talk about—

that I'm at and living in South Jersey, the whole nine yards is huge.

Okay, Joe, can you mute yourself?

Thanks, Joe. But anyway, so long story short is this is a good forum that we can actually help each other out, give good tips, tricks, ideas, things that are working for you and share. And building relationships is what it's really all about. So if we build a relationship, we can help each other. Awesome. If not, thanks for coming.

I appreciate it. Yeah.

And I'm a scaling up coach and an AI strategist is what I do. I help people implement AI with intent.

Is there anybody else on here that has helped me? I'm trying to look. I can't see all the files. Am I missing it, Victor? Am I missing anybody that's part of our team? Combing through them right now. If I didn't miss you, raise your hands. So I just want to make sure I get a thank you to you guys. I think we're all good. So, Victor, go ahead and let people in, finish it out. I'm just going to start sharing my screen a little bit. So I'm just going to go in a couple of minutes of here's some things that you should think about when you're building your LinkedIn profile. There's a lot of profiles that I see that are not well built. That you should have, take the time. And because this is the thing most people will see when they do this, is your profile first. Um, a lot of people don't have a background in their LinkedIn. Take the time and either get a background made in AI. You can see I have a background behind me in this video. You know, put something behind you. There's definitely, uh, ways to— if you don't have a good picture, there's an AI headshot generator also that could take your picture and and put different backgrounds and different suits on you. So that's one thing I like. This is the thing I mentioned earlier, is that you could change your, your, um, your, uh, what do you call it, your, uh, identification of how you want to be identified. Um, so your pronouns. Yeah, so that's kind of one of the things that I changed because I didn't— for me, I just wanted to have that. Um, This is kind of like your go-to-market pitch right here. A lot of people have VP of Sales or AI expert. Put down like who you are, what you do, why are you here today type thing on this. Why should I care about you? Put some color to who you are, whether you have a background as a scuba diver, jiu-jitsu guy, or a veteran in the Air Force. So make sure obviously it's about what you do for people, then kind of put a little color on that. You can see here that I've been building up to 32,000 followers. If you're not adding 200 invites a week on LinkedIn, you're, you're completely wasting your 200 a week. They limit it. So make sure you're at least either doing it with someone like me or, or basically doing it manually. But keep on growing because every person that is connected has a second connection, which means that you can be somehow related to that person— not related, but you can somehow get introduced to that person. Uh, yeah. How did you add that Automation Expert tag there? Where did you go to do that? Um, I think here.

It's in the edit feature.

Pronouns, custom.

Okay, custom pronoun, got it.

Yeah, and that's where I added Automation Expert.

That's great.

Yeah. Um, and then another thing that most people don't do is add to their featured. There's a way to add feature to your profile, so you can add your, your things like get graphics made, add, add, you know, say, get, ask for 10 tips on ChatGPT about How to use LinkedIn or whatever it is. Keep on adding content to what you do and what you, how you do it. And, and make sure that you can, you ask ChatGPT in a way that a 3rd grader would understand. That's the way they think. So if you ask it very specific, descriptive, prescriptive approach, you'll get back tips and tactics around things that you want to maybe produce. Another thing is most people have like their background in their company. And what I do in my company is I put that I'm hosting a roundtable, right? Most people have, I made the President's Club, or I started this company and we do this. Give it more— give as much information as you can when you put your experience down. And another thing is, if you're part of groups like Pavilion or SDR Leaders of USA or RevOps, put that, put that in your LinkedIn as a community member because people could find you that way. It's a great way of kind of doing that. The other thing that I'd really recommend, you could see here that I have 134 references from LinkedIn. Should definitely look at that and say, okay, how many can I get? Because everybody that knows somebody that you've done a good job for, you would definitely want to make sure that you get a reference for that as well. So that's kind of the things that I would look at. Any questions on those tips so far?

I would also just add that in the featured section, you could feature any posts that you want people to stand out. It's a good thing to put them right there and rotate them. You got to really work on moving that stuff around. Don't leave it stagnant.

Christopher.

The things I've noticed recently that people are starting to do, and you might see it a little bit in my background here, is that your photo at the top, if you're a premium member, you can now set that up as a carousel with up to 5 separate images. So I've seen people that do, you know, author, speaker, coach, whatever else. But yeah, that real estate right there at the top.

Yeah, you can, you cannot— oh cool. Yeah, you could do a carousel. I forgot.

5 images.

Yeah. Great slideshow.

Did not know that.

Yeah.

Yep. And in fact, I also noticed on some Zoom meetings I've had recently that people are using video backgrounds, not just static backgrounds. So if you look at the carousel, if the little video screen above my head there, you know, I've actually thrown in QR codes to connect with me on LinkedIn. Purchase a copy of my book, go to my website, things like that.

Yeah, that's— you can also change your URL as well here as well. Add profile sections, you know, add your featured, add a course, add your Calendly in here. That's a nice thing to have. But you should, you definitely should have— you could have up to 30,000 connections on LinkedIn. So that's important. Another thing to do is, is to look at groups on LinkedIn. So if you go to, if you go to groups, you'll see that I'm part of like this, this has 300 million people, right? I'm sorry, 3 million people. I could basically go in here and either search with Sales Navigator or I could search with just normal LinkedIn and I could basically click on anybody in here Let's see. And send them a free message. That's a good hack. You know, you don't have to have LinkedIn Sales Navigator to do that. So again, what I do is I automate all this stuff so you're not doing it manually. But so that's one thing that's really good is look at stuff. But when you have Sales Navigator, You should— this is like $100 a month maximum, I think. If you look at Sales Navigator, there's so many ways you could search for people in this thing. My look at my, you know, my connections of like, if I want to look up Steve, Steve Furman here, and say I wasn't doing this roundtable with him, I just wanted to see who he's connected with, I could see everybody that, that, that Steve's connected to. I mean, that's a pretty big thing, you know. If he's not locked, he could lock it down, just so you know. But there's ways to do that. There's also people that post on LinkedIn, you know, that are my first connections. I could say, okay, these are people that are active on LinkedIn. That's a big thing because if I want to get a hold of somebody and they don't use their LinkedIn, I want to hit people on LinkedIn that are active. So that's, those are probably the best things I can recommend. You can also block out companies or add companies you want to hit. For me, I don't want to hit non— I don't want to hit nonprofits. I'm— where does it go? I'm sorry. So I just kind of go public and private, and I want to hit all these other ones for me. So that's interesting. But if you really want to be able to narrow down who you want to talk to, LinkedIn's really good at this stuff. This is— there's a billion— over a billion people on LinkedIn. I have 300 million people on email, so I can't go as fast on LinkedIn because there's rules and regulations and laws they have in their own community. But the more profiles you can use— I use my daughter, my daughter's friends' face as people that work for me. They basically use their LinkedIn, I automate it, and I push out content. They're not necessarily full-time with me, so there's ways to use people that are real in your life that maybe will never use their LinkedIn But you could, you could use it as an employee for themselves. Diane, go ahead.

Thanks, Michael. So I would add 3 things. This is, this is great. This total gold. I just changed my pronoun, make them custom. I didn't know about that. Thanks, Michael. So I would just say that with your tagline, like where Michael says I get, I can't remember what you said, like get like 40 new leads or so. Look to see what your tagline, how your tagline shows up when you comment, because that's really important real estate. So it should— when you're, when you're engaging on other people's posts, you want to see what, what shows up. So like Michaels will probably go up to like, for my clients, probably. So you'll see I produce over 40 leads per month. So you want people in your— when you're commenting to get curious about what you do. So that's really important. And then also you can, even if you don't have I Love Sales Navigator, it even if you don't have it. And this is in— this is not through Sales Navigator, but if you go to the search bar, you can actually search to the followers of your competitors if they are in creator mode. So that's— so you can make lists of the people that are following your competitors. And then just the third thing is the way that I'm posting, and my team posts for me. I write the posts, But then my virtual assistants engage for 30 minutes, then they post, and then they engage for another 30 minutes. And like Michael showed, they engage with the people that are— we have a list of people to engage with, but we also make sure that we engage with the likers of my posts and people that are currently active. So engage 30 minutes, post, and then engage another 30 minutes. And that's really brought up our engagement.

And make sure, make sure you also answer your connections. I never leave invites. There's never more than 5 to 10 that are sitting there. I do it every day.

Yeah, my team does that for me. They check the invitations, but we also make sure that they're— we only accept ideal clients for who are who, and the other people can follow us because like you said, you can only have 30,000 connections. So that's, that helps a lot too.

And with my, with my automation solution, I had 29,800 about a month ago. I took out everybody that was in HR because that's what I used to sell to, HR tech. So you saw the CHROs. I'm not going to be selling the CHRO lead generation. So that's why I took all those people out. So now I have 2,000 more connections because at 30,000 you're capped. But make sure you, you look at how can I put, uh, follows, uh, comments and likes and all that stuff. There's other things you can do besides doing just invites. Robin. Robin Cole.

Morning. First, I want to tell you that I appreciate that you were willing to stand in harm's way to protect my cherished freedom.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Uh, I see that you're from my part of the country in the middle of the heartland because you went to SIU. I'm just across the river in Cape Girardeau, so you're impressing the fire out of me.

Thank you.

I'm only here to try to learn from each one of you to how to maximize the applicability of LinkedIn. And so I'm just a witness to all you smart people.

Tell us what you do real quick. So, and if you learn something in the last—

the, the The primary advantage we have is the ability to evaluate, optimize without compromising cyber liability security insurance to lower its cost, and then prepare an enterprise that we work with to be ready for handling any kind of a cyber incident. We're in continuous preparation to make sure that claims, 44% of which in this country are denied by the insurers, that they're in the favorable position of being able to achieve their claim. So it's an elaborate process. Information technology primarily.

Thank you. Laura P. Yes, thank you.

My name is Laura Prendergast. I am a bio researcher by training and experience. I recently completed a patent filing to protect a gene delivery system for HIV cure genetics to get that into a living human being. And I'm pleased to have been invited to this roundtable mastermind. Thank you. I actually have a question. So, I'm a little bit new at fundraising. I've done grant applications and that kind of thing, but You mentioned a little bit earlier about automating the outreach using the direct, the messaging on LinkedIn, if I'm correct. And I was wondering if you could provide a resource or walk us through that or something like that, because I would love to not have to, you know, cut and paste and do all the kind of the scut work involved in, you know, if there's a way to do it.

Yeah, there's a bunch of Um, LinkedIn automation tools. If you just go and type in, into Google and go, I'm looking for LinkedIn automation tools, there's Copilot, Octopus CRM, go.ai, goHighLevel.

Yeah.

Um, so there's, there's tons of them. I use Linked Helper. The thing is you got to know how to use them and you gotta have the time to use them. So that's why people hire me to do that stuff, because like, do I sit here and try to learn something, or do I focus in on being a CEO of my company? So you just got to figure out, like, is there a budget to help? Is there a budget to do it yourself? And compare the time that you might use, um, to do that. Woody. Michael, hi. I was curious as to what you have found out as far as the best time to post on LinkedIn to attract the most you know, people that want to connect with you, um, how many times a day? Yeah, I'm not necessarily like a guy that, that is an expert on the post. I'm more about sending direct messages, um, but Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I think are pretty good for posting, maybe even Fridays. But I think Mondays, everybody, everybody's trying to get their, their act together for the week. Um, what I would suggest is not just posting this. Figure out what is your gold contacts, your tier 1 in LinkedIn, because I have 30,000. So I just did, I just did this message today. Are you going to Inbound 2025? That's, that was this last week. That was, uh, HubSpot's, uh, conference. I have no idea who's going to that. But I have 30,000 connections. So I hit new people, I hit first connection, said, hey, are you going inbound? Do you have any background with the conference? What do you think of it? Um, by the way, I went to SaaStr, which was about 3 months ago. That was pretty good. How's business doing? I had 600 replies and I had 45 meetings from doing that.

Wow.

It wasn't, hey, I'm Michael Filato, I do lead gen, I would love to talk to you about how I can get your get 30 leads your first month. That's salesy. That's sales pitching in LinkedIn. You'll get hammered for that, or you'll actually get warned about it, you know. So the whole idea is to give somebody something that they might want. And that's why some of you folks are on this roundtable. It's like, I didn't pitch you. I said, hey, do you want to join a roundtable? You want to be part of something? Do you want to engage with people? It's an open mic here, right? Offer something like that. Or, hey, are you going to be at a conference? 'Can we get together?' I was never going to go to HubSpot. It's across the country, and it was my, my, uh, father's 91st birthday last week, so I'm like, I better go see him, you know, instead of going to that. Um, so I just, I mean, I love the whole event anchor magnet strategy of like, what can I say to somebody that's not so salesy but it's going to get them to reply to me? I've had so many people, hey, I'm not going to inbound, let me know how it is. I'm like, I'm not actually going to go this project, but I was trying to find out, but I would love to see if you want to be on my roundtable and possibly if there's some reasons that we could talk about lead gen, right? It's very subtle. So that's what I would suggest. If you worry about posting on social, personally, I don't get a lot of people responding to my post. There's some influencers on LinkedIn and other channels that are really good. I'm just not— I just don't get a lot of people replying to mine. I'm more of a one-to-one approach. Steve, you're on mute, buddy.

I just wanted to comment. The products that I created as an ISV are horizontal in nature, and as a small ISV, it's hard for me to target such a huge potential market. So I have tons of examples showing use cases on our website, but that also limits the perception of our product's reach. So I wondered if anybody had some words of wisdom on that, given a limited marketing budget.

I'm Peter Gysaker. My advice would be niche down is as much as, as much as you can. Who can you help the absolute most who also has the money to, to afford it? Uh, trying, trying to be all things to all people is a certain path to failure. The more you can specialize and niche down, niche down, the The more you do spend on advertising to reach that, that small audience over and over, it'll be much more effective. And because you'll be very specialized, you can actually charge more because people pay more for something that's extremely specialized instead of something that's generic.

You gotta have a power— thanks, thanks, Peter. Gotta have a power statement, Steve. Like, I help companies bring in 40 leads within the first 90 days.

That's very—

like, when you told me what you do, I had no clue what you— I still don't have a clue what you do.

No, you have to actually— and if you can say, I help companies, uh, with annual revenue of $2 to $10 million in the IT space who do this, again, go down specialize as much as you, as you can. The more you specialize, the, the easier it is to, to target your, let's say, dream 200 clients, and you just hit them over and over.

Also ask ChatGPT, you know, say, here's my website. If you were someone that never heard of my company, to talk to it like a 2-year-old. You're someone that never heard of my company. Do you— does this make sense?

Have a conversation with it.

Yeah, I mean, Victor on my team was my client service director VP. He, he has a basically like a long discussion of exactly what he wants, and I started doing what he was doing. It's like you could spend a lot of hours just trying to talk to it and, and get into its head. Um, night and day between asking one simple question and, and Starting from beginning, who am I? So far, what have you learned from me? And then starting your question, getting very, very, uh, intent-wise.

Well, I'll give you all a little tip. If you keep the same conversation going, like I had a chat with mine on my phone for like an hour and a half on my point of view, which is AI with intent, but it took me an hour and a half to get there. But you can go back to that same chat and build on it, or you can put it in a project and then add files to it and build on it there as well. But Collectively over time, it's gonna really get to learn you better.

Definitely pay for, for ChatGPT or one of those services. I mean, the free version is really, if you don't own a business, you can get some help.

Yeah.

At a minimum, you wanna be able to protect your data and turn off data sharing at a minimum.

Sure. While I've got the mic, I just wanted to make a suggestion also. Uh, I'm very active on LinkedIn, have been for a long time. And, um, I fairly regularly post articles on LinkedIn, uh, both professional and not. Um, and I found that that's, that can be effective because if you, if you write something that hits what people are worried about or what they're interested in, you can get some response from that. Just a thought.

You know, polls actually do pretty well as well. And I mean, I, I, I've made me dancing one time. It's just like, be goofy, be yourself. Dana.

Not so much a question as it is just some comments. I think it was Woody that was talking about posting things of that nature. My suggestion and what has worked for me has been I post 5 days a week. I schedule them ahead of time, but you have to come from— and I'm, I'm in sales. I've always done sales. I'm high-level sales. So it was really hard for me to get my head out of selling and into talking and showing expertise. And so as soon as you flip the script and show expertise, you're going to drive people to your, to your site, to your phone, to your email. And so the content is critical. In that regard. You know who your audience, audiences are. You know what you do. You know what their pain points are. So think from that end is that when you're posting, come from it from a pain and solution. Don't be salesy. Don't put your website at the bottom. Sign it off with your name or ask a question at the end to generate more conversation. From there. I've—

go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead. I'm sorry.

No, I was just gonna say like I've, I've been able to generate more leads that are from people I don't know in doing that, um, since I started to change the shift and how I think about posting in general. Um, and I post Monday through Friday. My posts go live between 6:30 and 7 in the morning. I actually have, I have Sales Navigator, so my outreach every week is to 200. I'm, I have a thank you for connecting. I don't put notes in when I connect with people, but I do a thank you once I get a connection and then start conversations that way as well. That's, that's worked really well for me to drive, drive leads.

Thanks, Dana. Lance.

I've been, uh, I've been on LinkedIn for since about the Dark Ages. Um, my network is pretty decent. It's around, I'm just under 20, around 25,000. Um, but most of my network, I founded and sold two different companies. Most of my network is folks that I've met at industry events, at conferences. Had dialogue with, and I focus heavily on CEOs, founders, C-suite, and senior-level executives. How I grow now, I have to kind of cull my audience. I've had it at the max multiple times, and then I just go through and I clean up and just determine whether or not I still need those connections and whether they're relevant and open it up. Um, I do a biweekly newsletter. I do content 2 to 3 times a week. I focus mostly on just what's going on in— because I specialize in recruitment advertising. Um, I used to be a TA leader, so I just focus on that kind of content. And just organically, people, people reach out and connect with me, and I Sales is a component of my job. I'm not a salesperson. I hate the, the concept of trying to sell stuff. I just offer solutions and conversations, and it just manifests in business.

I mean, if you, if you do want lead generation type stuff, it's these roundtables, these, hey, I'm doing a podcast, I'm going to be at this event, like I mentioned earlier. That works really well. And if anybody on here wants to do kind of what Jason and And, and Steve did where we kind of took your— take your LinkedIn and automate it and help build this community. If we help build the community, it helps all of us. So, but it also brings your first connections back to the top of funnel. So think about that. A lot of the folks on here that, that have worked with me, like Steve and Jason and so forth, have benefited from that. Um, because they're not sitting there going, hey, do you want to join a roundtable? It's all automated. I'm gonna go to Jason too because ahead of some of the other folks, because he's the one that helped me as well build this. So if you also help build this stuff, you also get a little bit of preference on the top of the hour and also when you want to interact. Jason, go ahead.

I just wanted to give something that's working for me on 1-to-1 outreach on LinkedIn. So first of all, I research targets. For, what do you call them, triggers. So we're researching like SaaS companies that have low ad performance. And so then I will reach out to people in those companies that I think are in charge of that, like a CMO or a CRO. And I will put notes on there. So I'll say, hey, our research flagged your company as having low ad performance. Not sure if that rolls up to you or not, but I've got some suggestions on how to fix it. And then, so I'm leading with value based on a trigger. It's contextual and relevant. That's really the important thing. When they connect, I actually put a slide together with one of their LinkedIn ads, what works, what doesn't, how to fix it. And that gets me into conversations. But, uh, you know, the point is, like, if you're not contextual and relevant, nothing else is going to help you.

Yeah, like, when you're writing, so who cares? So what? Why are you telling me this? How does this help fix my life or help my family? Make it emotional, personal. Joanne Gore, thank you.

Um, thanks for having me here, for, for starters. Um, Mike, this is awesome. I've learned to write things down because by the time I'm called on, I forget everything that I wanted to say. So there's a few notes that I've jotted down. One, somebody asked about the time to post. There are a couple of factors there to consider. I used to always very flippantly say, oh, these times, these times. I know for a fact Sunday mornings 10 AM, 11 AM are prime times to post. In the evenings at 10 PM, prime times to post. But that's for my audience. What it really boils down to is understanding who is it that you want to see your posts and when are they most likely to be checking LinkedIn. So you need to know who your audience is. So I put it in the chat, but you know, we, I, I run a B2B marketing agency and I preach day in and day out, if you don't know who you help, how you help them, and why it matters to them, then you are wasting your time. You are wasting your marketing dollars. You are wasting your resources. If you can't answer those questions, stop what you're doing and figure out how to answer those questions. And that's what we do is we work with companies to help them pinpoint that quickest time to money. And there was somebody that was talking about that, using pretty much the same words. And I'm sorry, I can't remember who it was. But when I say that quickest time to money, it's who's going to buy the most from you in the shortest amount of time and spend the most amount of money. And that's who you go after first. So the one with all the horizontal solutions, figure out where you're going to make the most amount of money from the least amount of people first. Go after them, figure out what marketing works for them, what calls to actions, what headlines, what offers, what downloads. Get it working for them. Then once you have it working and automated and churning those leads and that business, then you can focus on the next vertical or audience. And that is the easiest and most succinct way to be laser-focused, And really keep your resources and your dollars at bay. And that gets into the whole value talk track, right?

I'm going to go to people that haven't spoken yet. So I'll try to get back to you, Diane, but Michael Smith.

I'm Michael. I'm based in Kansas City. So I think it was Jason, your first individual. He's wearing a Chiefs jacket. So maybe a fellow Chiefs fan there. But yeah, I'm a partner with Fortium Partners. They provide fractional and interim CIO, CTO, and CISO services to companies across the US and Canada. Historically, they have existed in the major cities—New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Atlanta—and now they're moving more into the secondary cities. So any advice on how to market those services, um, from a very reputable firm that's available again in major cities but maybe relatively new in secondary cities?

I mean, obviously I think LinkedIn has the best tool to reach for a billion people. Um, it's just providing the messaging is what counts. Email and LinkedIn, giving someone a reason why they should contact you. If you're providing some way to communicate network, meet at a conference, lead magnets I would call them. That's to me a lot better than pitch slapping them on email or LinkedIn or having cold calls. Um, cold calling for me now is, is not cold call, it's like warm call. It's, I saw that you, you responded, I saw you open, I saw you clicked, saw you registered. I'd rather talk to someone that has a high propensity of not hanging up on me So that's kind of how I do it. Um, but it's, it's really trying to find something that's in common with it. If you just say, hey, I see that you worked at, at Northrop Grumman and you, you've been a top producer your whole life, that sounds salesy. That sounds like you just read my LinkedIn and your AI basically sent out an AI message. You know, I get 15 to 20 meetings every 2 days by doing what Basically how you guys got on this roundtable. So my pitch to you guys is create your own roundtable, do your own podcast, go to an event and mention that and use that as an anchor. Like, are you going to this conference? I would love to get together, get a lot of background there.

So anyways, all right. Yeah, no, thank you.

Yeah. And another thing you can do, and this is Peter again, are you doing Google Ads search advertising for people who are looking to find a fractional CTO or CIO. Yeah, there are. Yeah, those are going to be your most high-intention leads. Those are companies looking to find a Fractional Employee right now.

I'm going to check Fractionals United as well. It's a Slack channel.

They've got a ton of fractionals. There's groups on LinkedIn as well for fractionals. Again, like I showed you guys at the beginning of the call, you, you could send free in-mails, free direct messages to people in groups. Join— you could join up to 100 groups. Don't, don't miss that approach. Max, I'm sorry, Neza. Neza.

Yes, that's Neza. Hello everyone, this is Neza. I'm based in Rabat, Morocco. Thank you, Michael. Assalamu alaikum. Thank you, Michael and Victor, for having me. This is my first time. I would love to share 2 tips. So I'm in the B2B space, so it's not linked to LinkedIn, but what I found very useful is upselling to existing customers. And we just closed a deal of $100,000 thanks to a thank you letter. So keeping this contact with customers, and one of the indicators I follow is talking to 3 customers at least per day. My second tip is regarding a tool, very powerful tool for searching your files. I would put the link, it's called Everything. It's much, much more powerful. You can search even by a keyword inside your document. So in us using digital for our work, this is very useful.

Thank you. So it's kind of like an AI tool for your internal documents?

It's not an AI tool, it's a normal tool, but not a lot of people know about it. It's very quick in searching your entire external hard drive, internal hard drive as well.

See, this is why I like it.

It's called Everything. I'll put the link on the chat. Yeah.

This is, this is the type of little tips and tactics that I love to learn.

Max, I really appreciate it, Dezza. I am from the B2B world. I'm the third generation in my family to sell to the consumer products industry. I've been a Home Depot vendor for the last 25 years, and I've sold $500 million worth of consumer products. And the way I do it is I've always worked with Independent Manufacturers Representatives. And so anybody here from Wisconsin, Minnesota, anybody know Menards? So Menards is in—

Chicago. There we go. Wisconsin here.

Save our money at Menards. Yeah. Menards is in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. So I have a rep that lives in Minneapolis. He knows the buyer. He knows the customer, he knows their internal systems. And so I'm a warm call expert. I honor every other type of sales. I love what you guys are saying. I resonate with what you were saying. I just wanted you to know that I'm in a different vertical and I'm in the warm call business. And that's the way I do it.

Yeah, there's, there's actually some ways to look at these partners that you have. Like, I started working with a company that's very small, 2 salespeople, but they work with Twilio. Twilio is a tech company. They have 300 salespeople. So you can actually take your independent sellers or partners and say, can I use your LinkedIn? Can we produce some sort of event, either a dinner, a breakfast, bagel and, bagel and brain dump, lunch and learn, and just say, let's take our two LinkedIn or, or connections or email databases and create some sort of thing. That's much easier than calling people all day long as well, or conjunction with it. But there's a way to take your partner approach, and like, that's kind of like what I've been doing with my clients, or even like Steve and Jason's. Like, how can I take a partner and build off their putting their hand around me, arm around me, and me Vice versa.

In, in my world, I make sure they make money. So maybe they make 25% of the profit, we keep 75% of the profit. Yeah, give her all about commission. Yeah, give her—

because if you help, if you actually even pay for their LinkedIn to be automated, and then you basically give them 25% of that, there's no reason why they shouldn't do it. But you're gonna get, you're gonna get that gold star of them being a partner of yours. So that's— I found that to be very successful when you work— started working with Twilio and, and Smoke Phone. Laura, Laura Lorenz.

I, I have been using a tool for the last year that links with LinkedIn called Evy AI, and it is fabulous. You feed it your persona much like you do with ChatGPT or Claude or anybody you're using, but then it will create comments for you. So there's a lot of times where I'm sitting going, how do I want to say what I want to say about this article I just read, right? And give them some good feedback. It's so it creates that it will create your posts. The other thing that I think is really cool about it is it will do a deep dive into the person that you're looking at from all over the internet to find out the information that you want to have before you speak to them. So it's, it's a super cool tool. I'll put it in the chat, but it has saved me, A, saved me hours on LinkedIn and B, just, You know, every day I'm looking at it going, where was this before?

Use automation AI to open the door. Use your personality and human approach to keep that door open and get them interested. Don't use AI for everything after. Yeah, there's no— I don't. I let it comment, but then I— I know. I'm not saying you do. I'm just saying there's people that use AI to like sell. Like, you're not selling yet. You got to open the door. Right. Get it, get it, get them on a Zoom call. Meet in person. Steve, I'm sorry, go ahead.

I was going to say there's other ones out there like Humantik.ai, which does a lot like Evy does. I happen to know Joel, the owner of Evy. It's a good product. Another one out there that is pretty inexpensive is called Flymsg, F-L-Y-M-S-G. And it's got a lot of good things. You'll be able to do an optimistic post or a thoughtful post. Then you can edit it, humanize it. Like I always say, 10-80-10. 10% idea from you, 80% AI produces it, 10% humanize it. Always keep a human in the loop is, is, is the end result. But there's no way that you can literally respond to every single post that comes through. That's just, I don't think it's physically possible. But if you can automate it a little bit and still keep the human part in it, so it does come from you and your heart. That's why my VA might do all my LinkedIn posting, but she doesn't do any of my responses, sending the people that come in. I want to respond to them, so it comes from me.

And think about this too, if you have— if you don't have a VA and you have a nephew or niece that's, that's kind of getting started in the business world or just graduated high school, you know, you might want to say, you know what, how can I help someone on my own, you know, and give them at least $10 to $15 an hour? I mean, some of these VAs you could get for $8 for 10 to 12, you might be helping someone, you know, in America too. So just depends on what's good for you. And sometimes we're working with family and friends, it's not good. So I've had some arguments with my kids about like them doing work for me and then did they actually do it? But, uh, that's a whole nother story. Byron?

Yeah, yeah, I've been there before too. I'm on a cycling cooldown. I just thought I'd catch this, this, uh, session. Um, So we talked about posting and, and not being pitchy but helpful to draw an audience and truly be sincere about them. So I started a blog for a client and wrote original content about a topic that I knew little about a year ago. You know, ultra pure lab water. I mean, I got a D in chemistry, so I use AI to do research with ChatGPT and I use Claude to write it. And then I have a handwritten ability to like dumb it down a little bit so it doesn't look so well structured. Right. Then I use social to post it, to, to promote it ultimately, to draw an audience, to build an audience at the website. And along the way, at least use the blogs for, for deal progression. I'm not getting a lot of people following these or liking the articles. So I'm listening in on this session. To figure out how to do better promotion, better organic promotion. I, I like your idea, Michael, about asking if, you know, have you, have you gone to this trade show or that trade show? Just try and draw an audience in. But any quick advice without trying to put quarters in the slot in, in LinkedIn?

Be consistent. Like, give good, helpful content that will benefit people without asking for anything. It's like connect, serve, and then ask later.

You know what I mean? Yeah, I don't, I don't put a message in my connections like, hey, thanks for connecting. I mean, it just— I just asked them to connect. I don't put anything in there so it looks like I'm selling something. But realistically, I don't fix what's not broken. And when I say I'm going to do a roundtable, I want you to be a special guest, and we want to have a quick chat before to see if you're a good fit, or hey, I'm going to be at an event, it works. I'm getting I could show you my calendar. I'm getting 10 to 15 meetings a day by doing this. So I would take what I give you guys here as, as a Bible for this, because it does— this is what I do every day. I'm not saying you have to use me to do this, but I'm saying use this idea of give them some sort of good feeling about what you're doing. Make your— make a round— like, if you just work in, in a company that basically just does sells to Menards and Home Depot. Create some sort of group for these people. These all people pay for these types of groups to network. Be the person that starts that network. It's not hard to create that with yourself if you do some sort of outreach. And if you do that outreach, you should probably use automation to build that group. Otherwise, you're spending half your day just doing that. Joe Silva.

Thanks, Mike. Again, I apologize for earlier. Um, Steve, thank you for bringing me into the group. No, Steve, I was a VP of sales for KUKUA MSP technology company. Prior to that, I spent 19 years as a financial planner, had my own practice, and currently I am the business development director for an accounting firm, actually just in between two. Now I was with second accounting firm doing this.

Do you play a sax?

I play a lot of things, not well, but, you know, seems to be the jack of all trades, right? We're in sales. But I bring all that up because what I'm— to the point of knowing your audience, in my— basically, everything I'm doing is professional service sales, right? I'm not selling a product. I'm selling a service, right? So, and that was very heavy in the financial services space for sure. So, we really had to differentiate ourselves in a lot of ways. And one of the things I'm finding is we're kind of going back to— it's kind of recycling, if you will, in that when we first— when I was first in financial services, we needed to have website. It could be as crappy as possible, but it just needed to be there, right? You were ahead of the game. But then it was commoditized. Everyone has a website. If you don't have one, you're suspect. But now if you have a bad one, you're really suspect. So the technology that we're working with, like LinkedIn for instance, is you need to be there. You need to be a voice. You need to have a presence. You need to connect. People need to know who you are. They need to research you. But when it comes down to that extra push— and this is the point of kind of the connection to the human element— one of the things I found that's been working great, because no one gets it anymore except for certain occasions, is I send out cranes thank you cards, or just general fold-over cards, handwritten, very simple note. Like, ideally someone I've met online. Like, I might— if you're in the group, Mike, I might say to you, a lot of— Mike, great meeting you in the, in the roundtable today, loved what you had to say, excellent connection. By the way, here's my business card. I don't know if I ever get to see you in person. Hopefully I will, but I'd love to connect further with you at some point. Best regards, Joe. Right. Have your people call my people.

All right. What's that? Have your people call my people.

Well, the thing is, in that situation, you're going to say, we're going to do one of two things. You're either going to say, you know what, I really, that's, I don't get these. Right. The only reason I opened this up is it looked like a wedding invitation, which is the whole point because it's handwritten on the front with the address. Some type of personalized stamp, because the whole point is what we're trying to do is get to, get to the person, right? You're getting through all the noise. Yeah. And why are you trying to do— so why are you doing LinkedIn? Why is this something that's supposed to be engaging and this, that? The problem is there's a lot of noise because people can't get past the first 2 lines. It's like, I need something new. I'm going past, past, past. It's very, very hard for someone to not open a card that arrives at their door. Just like, you really want to get them, send them a FedEx. If you really— if your product is that high quality, Send them a FedEx. No one does. No one puts a FedEx to the side.

No one throws away a FedEx. Have a tiered approach, right? Your top— Well, that's the point, right?

You want to have this. Yeah. This may be they don't— they did get your card and they got busy. They went on vacation. Yeah. You're following up. You are still going back through LinkedIn and, hey, you know, say the card, don't know if you received it. Hope I had the right address. Something, something, something. The whole point is you're building on a reason to have a communication, not just pitch slap.

Don't use automation. For your top 30 accounts you want to go after. If you do use it just to open the door, but FedEx is a great idea because they're going to open it, guaranteed. But make sure there's substance inside and not, not substance that's bad.

Send them a Starbucks card. Say, hey, look, just want to get one. I want to grab a cup of coffee with you. Use this for when we can get together.

You know, I would even look at like sending them something from Amazon. Like if they went to Southern Illinois, send them a Southern Illinois That's more than a Starbucks thing. Like, look like you actually spent some time. Starbucks is great, but if you send them something from their alma mater, that could be something. Adam? Absolutely. Adam, we got 2 minutes left before I have to jump on a call, so I want to make sure you get your— can you just keep it concise and we'll get you going? Sure.

Hi, Michael. Thank you for hosting me in this and adding me to this event. I'm excited to meet all of you. I'm a I work in the growth marketing domain. I come from two backgrounds, the product, technical product and the marketing. And I usually join companies to help them with optimizing the whole funnel from marketing to sales operation. I evaluate the whole, you know, business processes and I work basically on what's called automation across the whole workflow of the business. So, and to do two things, to optimize the processes and to create new processes in place that can automate the actual growth of the business in terms of, you know, automating repetitive tasks of sales team, you know, do the whole onboarding with AI or actually, you know, do certain action, for example, like when One time we optimized the sales flow and we added lots of automation in case of no-show, certain actions happen. And I use usually a bunch of tools for that that I would like to share with you. One is called Zapier, which is for non-technical, you know, marketers. And there's one called N8N. This has been very, you know, powerful in connecting multiple tools at the same time. So you can, let's say, book a meeting, onboard a customer with an AI call and get the meeting booked. So the sales rep doesn't have to, you know, worry about that. This, for example, has saved some companies 40% of their, you know, or 30% of their workflows or even workforce. So just, I will share these tools with you in the chat and yeah, it's If you have any questions, please let me know.

Guys, thank you, ladies, for making time today. Again, it's 2 more weeks, we have it again. If you do want to also help out like Steve and Jason and other folks have had, I'd be glad to talk to you about the, the ways for us to kind of help you guys get in front of more people. And then also, if you look at the name Michael Filato slash— I think, I don't— I think, or I might say your name, there's 3 dots um, that you could save the chat. There's three dots that says save the chat at the top. Yeah, so on mine it says my name, so if you go to the right of that, there's three dots, and then you go save chat, and then there's all the things. I do post these videos on my YouTube channel, um, so people could— that couldn't make it. But please think of us, think of each other to help each other out for business. Hopefully we got good tips and tactics that we're always sharing. This is never meant to be a commercial for anybody. It's just meant to trade tips, tactics, strategies, ideas, and, and tools. So thanks for making time, and, uh, we look forward to seeing you in the next couple weeks.

Be kind. All right.