Venture Summit - Top of Funnel Lead Automation - Spend more time closing and less time hunting

Hello everyone, Joe Benjamin here from Young Startup Ventures. Thanks so much for joining us for day 3 of Venture Summit Virtual Connect. We're starting off the day bright and early with a session, a workshop given by our friend and sponsor Michael Filato of Full Throttle Filato Leads. The session is titled Top-of-Funnel Lead Automation: Spend More Time Closing and Less Time Hunting. I'm gonna ask Michael to join me up on stage. I want to briefly take this opportunity to thank all of our sponsors. That includes our Diamond sponsors, Burns Levinson, Platinum sponsors, Oracle for Startups, McDermott, Will Emery, our coaching sponsors, Troutman Pepper, our Europe partners, which is Invest in Bavaria, Gold sponsors include Kartika, MongoTel, Zendesk, Full Throttle Philadelpho Leads Innovation Center, and then venture sponsors include Energy Foundry. Following this session, we have a panel discussion, uh, which will be— is titled, um, Where's the Exit? So be sure to check that out and of course the rest of the agenda at the venturesummit.tv website. There's also— I want to remind everyone, a networking lounge for you to connect with other attendees. Michael will also be there, networking with some of the attendees and assisting them, so please join him for that as well. A little bit about Full Throttle Philadelphian Leads. Um, they provide on-demand sales lead generation for business-to-business clients for less than a full-time salesperson salary. They have access to over 950 million contacts and can develop persona-based drip marketing campaigns using emails and LinkedIn automation. They can provide a shorter revenue cycle, tighten the messaging, as well as provide metrics, insights, and consultation. Of course, all VCs want their portfolio companies to be extremely successful, increase sales, and do it in a shorter time span. So that's why we brought Michael to actually give you some of the insights that he's learned over the course of many years to help you guys ramp up the sales in an easier fashion and get the VCs on board more quickly. Thanks so much, Michael, for joining us and sponsoring the session. It's a pleasure to have you and take it from here.

Thank you, thank you, Joe. I appreciate it. Um, great intro. Looking forward to talking about top of funnel. I'm going to walk you through some best practices that I've done over the last 25 years and I'm definitely interested in hearing feedback and questions from all of you. I'm going to share my slides real quick. It's not too many slides, so, but let me share my screen for you. Share that. You should be able to see it now. OK, it looks like it's sharing. So today we're just going to do a little quick introductions, a little bit more my background, talk about the current state of many startups and SaaS companies, how much time is spent closing versus hunting, how to protect your domain, ensure deliverability. There's a lot of issues there right now. How are you automating LinkedIn? How are you measuring analytics? Do you have KPIs? Do you do A/B testing? And then what are your tool sets? What are you using? And then if we have time, go into a little bit of how I do it. And if that doesn't have enough time there, we'll do some one-on-ones or networking on at the table, um, later on in today at 1:30 or 5:30. So basically my background is 25 years of enterprise sales background. I work for startups like TechStation, TechMate, um, Monster.com when it first came out. So my background's just basically getting more leads, more deals, more closings than most people I know. And what I was really good at is getting more leads. Anybody else. I closed NFL for $300,000, USTA for $300,000, um, about 35, 40 different professional teams, UFC. That Monster was a top salesperson there as well. The whole idea is like, you know, you have professional salespeople selling and you have them spend way too much time, um, hunting. So you really want to make sure those folks are focusing on discovery calls, closing deals, strategizing, um, basically doing playbooks and so forth of how to make sure that deal closes. My job for those types of companies and people is to help with top of funnel. I have access to about 950 million contacts, and I'll kind of go through that when we talk a little bit more about full, full throttle approach. So the current state of many organizations, most are using network one-to-one emails. They're using their connections, the connections of connections. Great, that's going to get you some bigger deals, some maybe elephants, but that's really good for your account-based marketing, your 25 target accounts. What's going to fill the rest of your pipeline? And that's kind of where a lead gen company, SDRs, fill in. It's not a repeatable and scalable approach if you do it the way that you've been doing it probably over the last 20 years. I mean, I was one of those people that actually did it that way as well. Um, a lot of databases that you might have in Salesforce, HubSpot, other places, they're not necessarily always verified, especially during COVID A lot of these folks that have that content information actually changed because they got laid off, fired, or changed jobs. So you damage your domain that way, you damage your email deliverability, and it's not a— it's not a good look for the company. I mean, I actually did things wrong before I did things right. And I was using HubSpot and using 15 different emails, um, through Gmail to basically be able to send out thousands of emails a week. HubSpot— I'm sorry, HubSpot will turn off your, your, your email. Gmail will shut down your emails, which happened, and then it starts ruining your domain. So even emails to your customers start going to spam. So not a good— not a good look, not a good way to doing things. And you don't know what you don't know, so that's kind of things that you got to look at. Are your closers hunting or focusing on the middle to inner funnel? You really want to spend more time closing for these folks. Is the fluctuation of your pipeline going up and down? Obviously, back in the day especially, people were having to close deals, their hunting would go down, and they would have to build it back up so their pipe would look like this the whole time. Salesforce, great company. They, they really invented the SDR approach. Let's have people that could just get leads and have them feed our closers, our engineers, our account executives. So that's kind of what's going on with how much time is spent closing versus hunting. There's a whole new pipeline of SDRs that's sprung up over the last 15 years. If you look at hiring AEs, sales development reps, any of those folks, it's a really hard place to find people right now because there is so many jobs out there and not enough people. And that's kind of where, companies like myself come into play. Where's my mouse? It just disappeared.

Okay, here we go.

So how are you protecting your domain and email deliverability? Do you have a scalable approach? Are you using LinkedIn, using LinkedIn automation tools? So one of the main things, whether you use my company or any other companies, you need to have a subdomain. Like for me, it's like mail.fullthrottle.com. That does not affect fullthrottleflottoleads.com. So a subdomain will protect your main domain. You hooked it up to, to like a platform like SendGrid and use another, um, sequencing tool so you can send out enough emails. Um, you need to have your email records changed. It's not an easy thing. Having an email engineer like I have, which looks at your DKIM, your DMARC, your SPF, MX records, Those are all things that you need to kind of do to make sure that they're actually getting delivered. Just because you start sending emails doesn't mean that the records are set up in the right way on your DNS and all your email records. Have you verified your domain health? There's a bunch of sites out there to kind of plug in that domain and see how healthy is this domain. Has it been used too many times? Is the IP address healthy? Are you verifying emails before they go out? To make sure that they're current, that they, they get delivered, that they're not going to bounce. Bounce— anything over a 10% bounce, um, when you send out emails, whether marketing emails, one-to-one emails, or, or kind of email automation for sales like I do, you need to verify those emails through a secondary source. Um, and then needs to say automating your email with drip marketing, having 3 to 4 emails, maybe at the 4th or 5th, a breakup email saying, hey, 'Are you the right contact?' is a, is a good way to try to grab people. Being able to send 1,000 to 1,200 emails a day for companies that have a pretty good TAM, total addressable market, is definitely something that, um, it's good to have because you want to be able to, um, have enough emails go out because it's still a numbers game. And then a lot of folks are saying, 'Well, I have Sales Navigator and I'm doing in-mails and invites and so forth.' Great, that's a very manual process. How are you automating this? There's bots that I use, there's, there's automation that companies have. There's ways to do this so that you could set 150 a day versus 100 a week, which is what LinkedIn's, um, um, current availability is. The other thing is, like, if you can't measure it, how do you know if you're doing it the right way? So you got to have KPIs. Like, what's your, what's your goals? At 15 to 30% open rates? 2 to 3 to 4 meetings a week. Um, what, what content's working? Are you just kind of guessing? Are you having an A/B test? It— make sure what's working, what's not. And you measuring what titles, locations, industries are responding and being able to figure out, can I spend more time going after logistics or, or Australia versus US or US over UK or whatever the approach is on your targets, is see what's working faster so that you could put more emails and LinkedIn messages behind it? Because if it's responding more, why not feed more to that particular approach? Um, what tool sets are you using? A lot of folks will tell me, I'm using HubSpot, I'm using SalesPardot, I'm using Pipedrive. You know, is it— is the CRM connected to your, your contact database? Is it always updating? Because people that load up their Salesforce with contacts is not a good approach though, because that data gets old very fast. So you need kind of a real-time API between your contact database and your CRM, which is what I do as well. And also using Sales Navigator as a daily tool, because there's ways to build lists and there's ways to take that list and automate that. There's ways to do tons of filters on there that you can't do with, with normal LinkedIn. And just doing things manually, it does not get you to to where you need to go to. The other thing is there's a lot of teams, a lot of companies that will have a lead gen team. That's great, but I see someone, some teams that have 6 to 12 SDRs, first job out of college, and they're spending half a million to a million dollars a year just doing that. So there's a lot of money being spent, but you gotta, you gotta understand when do you outsource and when you insource it. And make sure that if you are doing it on your own, do you have the right subset of approach? Like I said, the subdomain, the separate email addresses, the automation, and so forth. So that's kind of the tool sets that are going on there. I'd like to kind of pause here for a minute and see if there's any questions that have come in, and then I could go into a little bit about my approach and how I do things for my client. Is there— could anybody, uh, tell me if there's any, uh, any, uh, questions? I don't know if I see here in chat. Nope, I don't think I see any. So I'm going to kind of go into kind of my approach. This would be something that I would share if I was doing more of a one-to-one demo about what I do. But so a little bit about me, um, and what— how I approach it. The reason why I'm talking about myself, not just my companies, because when I work with people, um, you're getting me. You're getting someone that's 51 years old that has been doing this for 25 years. I have about 120 references on LinkedIn, all the way from tech companies to people that I served in the military with to HR tech and so forth. So this is some references that you can see about my background. Check me out. as far as references. There's also 15 references on LinkedIn for Full Throttle. I've been doing this for about 11 to 12 months live. I'm up to about $80,000 MRR. Um, there's about 5 of us that are doing this, and a lot of it's built around automation. I basically take the, the lead role of making sure that everything's set up, everything is dialed in, and kind of making sure that every time I work with a company that they are getting the most leads that they can and they're getting the most exposure that they can by using email and LinkedIn. There's been different publications similar to this where I've been featured, where I've done— talked about lead gen, dailyadbrief.com. So if you get this deck from me or you want to, or you see it on my LinkedIn Full Throttle page, you can click on the videos and watch that. There's also the National Sports Forum. That you can view that. So there's about 230 million people, um, in a database that I have. So basically what I do is I look at who are you trying to reach, what are the targets, what are the industries, how can I make sure that the messaging that you're sending out is going to the right people at the right time, to the right people, to the right personas, so that we can get meetings, so that we can get exposure for your company. Using Calendly to book the meetings is a very important approach as well. Don't have people go back and forth 5 times. This is too Tuesday work, there's Wednesday work. That doesn't, you know, it's a waste of time, to be honest with you. Also understanding which A/B is working, like is message A subject line, message B subject line, this industry working better than that industry, being able to understand what messages work and getting what meetings are being booked, and obviously making your salespeople sell versus hunting all day long. Another thing that I do very well and some other companies do very well is Automation on LinkedIn. Automation on LinkedIn is very important because it needs to look like you're basically sending out these messages and typing them yourself. The way I do things, it looks like basically, um, I'm basically sending out messages from your profile and getting meetings, getting invites and connections for your, for your profile, building up your profile and your status, and also sending in-mails. And what that does, it basically is safely sending 150 of these a day versus what you could only do on LinkedIn, which is about 100. So between LinkedIn and email, there's access to about almost 950 million people. So I probably could find the right, um, people that you want to go after. If you want to target just VCs to raise money for your company, I can do that. If you're a VC that wants to target, um, startups, I could do that. If you're a company that wants to target basically um, um, just your, your target prospects, your total addressable market. That's what I do. If you look at what it costs to basically hire someone as a, as an SDR, it's anywhere from $4,000 to $5,000 a month in the US. You have commissions, bonuses, cost to hire data tools, ZoomInfo. You have to manage that person. So the basis of it, it could cost you about $40,000, $30,000 to $40,000 a quarter. And if you're lucky, they might be able to send 500 emails a day, and they're probably going to ruin your domain because if you don't have the subdomain and email, separate email server, it's important. And then they probably can maybe send maybe 1,600 invites. Nope, not many in-mails because you have to pay for those. So it'll cost you about $126,000 a year I'm sorry, you get 126,000 messages out for about $168,000. I basically do it for anywhere from $4,000 to $5,000 a month, double the amount of emails, 12x on, um, LinkedIn, and then about 300,000 touches for the year. Again, getting means is important, but I also get the word out there because we're sending enough messages to produce that that, um, amount of exposure. So why Full Throttle? Basically, there's 15 to 30% open rates, 20,000 emails a month. Domains, uh, your domain is automated and protected with the messages that we send out. With that amount of messaging, either we can do very small, a very large amount per month. The whole idea is to— it's a numbers game still, but let's get personalized with the messages and let's make sure it's protected and not ruining your domain. I'd say on average I get anywhere from 1 to 6 to 7 meetings a week. It really depends on each industry and how we do things and why we do things. And does it resonate on LinkedIn? It's basically taking your profile or one of your salespeople's profiles or your, your leaders and getting them more exposure, more connections, and more meetings. I have an email engineer that's been doing this for 20 years, has a background from Coca-Cola, protecting their emails as well. I have 25 years of sales experience, help write the emails, get the right strategy approach. And then just my whole approach, as when you hire me, you're getting a guy that's been a top sales guy most of his life, a top lead gen person most of his life, a brown belt in jiu-jitsu, a kickboxing guy, a, a guy that's played professional sports or semi-professional sports from baseball. Just someone that's kind of like Type A, go get it, full throttle, say what you mean, mean what you say. Um, so that's kind of my approach over overall. My pricing is really based on a retainer approach, 3, 6, even 9 or 12 months, anywhere from $4,000 to $5,000 a month. I basically include emails and LinkedIn subdomain, do drip marketing, and have a particular way of doing qualified leads so that you pay for only real qualified meetings. So that's really the gist of what I do. I don't want to go too much more into what I do unless you want to do, uh, you know, a one-on-one. I have a Calendly that you can book me on. Um, so I think that's pretty much what I want to talk to you about and would love to take any questions or feedback and go from there. Benjamin, are you there? Anybody from the, um, from the event? Well, I don't know if I see any questions. They were supposed to push them from another platform into chat here. Yeah, no questions yet. So I guess I'll basically let everybody get a little bit more time back in their day before we do our morning kickoff. Does Young Startup Ventures want to say anything before I sign off? All right, well, I'm not gonna— I'm gonna sign off here. I'd appreciate everybody's time. I look forward to hopefully working with some of you, and we'll kind of go from there, um, and hopefully talk in the near future. So thank you so much for your time, and we'll talk soon. Thank you.