Sales call teardown (#1): Navigating three customer projects
Rob Snyder breaks down a real sales call between Slick and Roster using his PULL framework, showing how to handle multiple stakeholders, ask discovery questions that surface actual projects, and deliver a tight 30-second pitch instead of a long demo.
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Hey, Rob, how's it going, man?
What's up?
Good to be here. Excited for this sales call teardown. Let's give a little bit of context to the listener about what they're about to— or the viewer in this case, about what they're about to see.
Yeah. So this is a startup called Slick. Founder offered for me to publicly roast his sales call. And so in this you're going to see a sales call recording where, uh, with a potential customer called Roster, where 3 people show up to a sales call, not super easy to navigate. And Harold, the, the founder, tries to figure out what to do and how to sell Slick to them. And so on one side, you'll see the sales call and on the other side, you'll see my notes and, and we'll be just walking through every kind of piece of this from discovery to Description of product to demo.
And who is this useful for and why is it, why is it useful?
Literally everybody should be. I think it is malpractice not to watch a public sales call teardown. Yeah.
Yeah. And what you'll be doing is applying the PULL framework throughout the sales call and helping you do these live with this. This one's not live, but you'll frequently do these types of teardowns where a founder will send you a sales call and then you'll just like basically say, this is what's going on. These are some of the things that you should have been considering, some helpful tips, like pointing out weaknesses or things that they did right. And then like taking notes throughout. I don't want this lead-in to be too long. Anything else you want to add before folks jump in?
No. If you're not familiar with the PULL framework, we'll link the PULL framework overview and why it matters, because that's pretty foundational. It's the thing that causes people to buy when it is present.
Yeah, yeah, totally. 100% recommend, recommend that. Um, awesome. Well, without further ado, we'll let, uh, folks jump in and hope you enjoy it. Leave a comment if this is helpful. Uh, awesome. All right, hope everybody enjoys.
Okay, so today I'm going to tear down an actual startup's sales call. I think this will be the most useful thing that I have ever posted because in a startup sales call, you can kind of see everything about the startup. You can see their ICP, who should they be targeting, how they, you know, like what problem are they solving? What pull are they serving? How they should describe their product, how they should show their product. And then this kind of sales tactics that are downstream. This is a startup sales call. They are growing. They, I think they got, you know, 50, 80 customers, something like that in that range. It is a startup called Slick. They got permission to share this. And, and so I'm excited to show it to you. They are an AI agent for go-to-market tasks. We'll say they are using the PULL framework that I've developed in their sales calls, as we'll see, but they're also increasingly product-led growth. Uh, like people just sign up on Slick's website. And so they're using the pull framework to try to analyze the data of usage to say, what are people actually trying to do in our product? And what, why can't they do this elsewhere? Um, so the big question that they are asking is, you know, we have people using the product for different reasons. Why are they using it? How should we like focus so that we can grow? How should we sell better? And how do we learn from these sales calls so that we know exactly what to do in order to grow super fast? And so this is a sales call that is an inbound, a warm intro. And yeah, it's, it's a company called Roster. They sell software to brands that run creator programs. There are 3 people on this call, which we'll, we'll talk about in a second. There's the CEO, there's the AE, and there's a go-to-market advisor. And so we're going to just start watching this and I'm going to pause incrementally to talk through different things because I think this will both help you understand how to run your own sales calls. And then there are some strategic questions that we're going to get to. As well here. So let's jump in.
Are we all, we're all wearing the kind of beige shirt?
Let's go. I'm colorblind, so I don't really, I don't really know.
Are you?
I mean, uh, just like with like reds and greens, so not really, but we're going to have to do some testing.
I'm interested on this.
Oh yeah, I definitely failed the test.
I do have something to preface this with. I, we had a meeting, a demo reschedule for 1:45 my time. Um, so I will have to jump, but this is all recorded, so I will absorb it all and I will chat with everyone. I'm so sorry. I was too scared to ask them to pick a different time.
All good. By your time, you're in Eastern time, so you gotta jump in like 10 minutes here.
Yeah, I'm so sorry.
No, all good, all good. Why don't we just start with you then, Libby? Uh, if there's anything that you are hoping to get out of this call, I know Randall just wanted us to connect, uh, but anything that would be helpful for you or anything you're hoping to discuss, we can start with that and then we can actually, you know, get onto your demo.
Sweet.
Well, I am, this is my first sales gig, so honestly I am open to any sort of feedback, anything you want to give me. Um, I was a CSM here for about 3 years, so I know the platform inside and out, but the sales stuff is all relatively new to me. Um, so any organization tips, any, you know, things that can kind of turn those cold leads into a little bit more organized situations, I'm always up for that.
Okay.
Okay. And I'll add, Harold, I think part of like what we're hoping for here is we're just in the last like month, month and a half starting outbound motion here. So we've just started. And so Clay has been helping us and you met Blake before. So Clay has worked with Blake, but he's been helping us like kind of build out the tech stack and the motions. And so a lot of it was to just see. A little more about where Slick could potentially help us if, you know, in some— either as a complement to what we're already doing or in some places where it may be just a better or cheaper alternative to what we're doing. So, and maybe Clay can talk about what we're doing today and that would give you some context.
Sure.
Yeah.
Go ahead, Clay. Yeah. Yeah, I can definitely add some, some context here. So we've, we've, we've tested several different channels from the outbound side. Kind of trying to see what's working, what's not. Uh, we found that direct cold outreach is not as good as if we pair it with email, events, LinkedIn outreach. Um, and so we've, we've put more effort into, uh, the lists around the campaigns and tests we're running across LinkedIn and email. Um, right now we're currently warming up our email inboxes so that we can start scaling that a little bit more, um, as well as, uh, breaking out some different lists that we want to run these tests across. So I know Blake's told me a little bit about what you're doing, but kind of excited to see under the hood a little bit more and see how it could work or, or how, what, what problems it's solving.
Yep. Okay, so we're gonna pause here. So we just, so what Harold did, and this is a great way to start a call, is what are you hoping to get out of the call? Now, there's a challenge here that's not normal in sales calls where you have 3 people in different roles. One's a go-to-market advisor, one's CEO, one's AE. You have 3 different people joining in a first call. And so this is a tough thing to, to get to. We'll come back to some of the implications of this, but we're basically hearing 3 kind of different things. Libby's like, hey, yeah, this is my first sales gig. I'm open to any advice as to what I could do differently. Randall, CEO, is saying we just started outbound in the last month or 2. And open to hearing how you can help us either as a complement to what we're currently doing or as a cheaper way to do what we're already doing. And then Clay, go-to-market advisor, is saying, yeah, we're just, we're in testing mode right now. We're doing a bunch of stuff and I'm like generally curious to hear what you do and what problems you solve. Now, these are three kind of different things. We're gonna, yeah, Harold's gonna click in deeper on each of these, but my sense here is that what Harold should have done is when he saw that there were three people added to an invite, it's really hard to like do discovery on three different people. What he should do is he should reach out in advance to the per— whoever booked the meeting and said, hey, I saw you just added a couple people. Do you have 5 minutes to chat in advance to help me get a, get the lay of the land here to try to pull out, okay, who, who should I be focused on in this call? What's, what's the thing? Should I be focused on Randall? Should I be focused on Libby or should I be focused on Clay and what you were trying to do? Because right now it just kind of feels like I'm getting different things from different directions here. So ideally you like, Avoid being in this situation by being proactive and getting 5 minutes in advance to prep. And that 5 minutes could turn to 15, could turn to 20. Okay, cool. So this is a good question to start. What are we trying to do though here? What I found, like, what you might think, there's this part of a call that is called discovery. You heard of this either in doing customer discovery interviews or you've read a sales book and there's a part where you're supposed to like ask questions and they're supposed to say answers. And those questions we've been taught are about, oh, what are your pains? What are your problems? You know, what, what product do you want? Like all these kinds of things. And in my mind, there was always, it was always kind of mushy what I was looking for. And so the PULL framework, which I can describe really quickly, is what I've found is the, A way to describe what you are actually looking for in discovery that tells you what they're basically trying to buy, where, what are they trying to do and what are, where are they stuck? And so the Pull Framework, we'll, we'll fill this out here real quick. Pull Framework. There is a project on the to-do list that's unavoidable right now. They consider a list of options. To get that product done, but those options aren't good enough. There are limitations that prevent the project from getting done. And so if you think about it this way, right, the pull framework says somebody is trying to do something, but can't do it with existing tools, methods, options. If that's the case, they will try to pull a product out of our hands. If that's not the case, They can complain about their problems and pain points, and they're probably not going to do anything because they have other priorities or, or their existing options are like good enough. And so what we're trying to do here is we're trying to fill out the pull framework. Now, what we have so far is not really helpful. What we have here, what Randall said is, can Slick help? Like, I'm curious to learn about how Slick could help us as a complement what we're already doing or a cheaper way to do what we're already doing. So it might be like, there's like some vagueness here. It could be like, I don't know, it could do outbound for cheaper. Maybe. I'm not entirely sure, but what this isn't, what a project isn't, is like, I want to buy an outbound tool. That's not what a project is because that is a product that I want, right? That's, that's on the supply side. The pull framework is on the demand side. Which is, uh, it's not about products. It's about projects on their to-do list, things that they're trying to do and would be trying to do even if they didn't know your product existed. And so where Harold is now is we have a couple different possible things, maybe do outbound for cheaper, but a lot of like, I don't know, you tell me, what, what can you do? And so at this point, he's got to ask another question because it's totally unclear what to do at this point. So let's see how he does.
Yeah, absolutely. I'm happy to share kind of like a general overview of the platform, uh, if that would be helpful. Maybe before I do that, I'd love to understand kind of where are things breaking down right now? Like, what have you not yet found a solution for? What are some of the things that you're trying to maybe overcome? And that way I can just make sure I'm talking about the things that are most interesting to you. Um, and this is not, this is, you know, Randall, Libby, Clay, like it's not just for one person. I'm just curious, like when you think about things that are blocking you from making progress or things that you wish you could automate or wish you could do, like what are some of the things that are top of mind there?
Yeah. I say, oh, go ahead, Libby.
No, go ahead. So before we jump into the answer here, we did have some breadcrumbs earlier from Randall in particular. He said as a compliment to what you're already, we're already doing or what or something that's like cheaper than what we're already doing. So what I might start with here, Harold asks like a kind of general, a kind of broad question here, which is like, well, where, or, you know, he has like 14 questions. What are you trying to do? Where are things breaking down? What's blocking you from making progress? That's a like decent question, but I would kind of take what Randall gives you here and says, okay, so you mentioned you're looking for something that would complement what you're already doing. Could you tell me more about that? What are you already doing? What are you looking for a compliment for? And so, um, we'll see what the response is here.
I was just gonna say one thing, Harold, I think we're not doing yet that would be interesting to explore is like signals-based triggers and outreach. So through social listening, um, gathering signals like, um, what was the example I was thinking of? Or even just, I don't know how much you guys can do kind of like some web scraping stuff, but we're, we're really looking for companies that like are running an ambassador marketing program. So usually they advertise that on their site, like apply to be an ambassador, or they're posting about it on social and like actively engage there. So I think if we could identify some social listening type stuff there, that might be interesting. But that's the only thing, that's the one thing that's top of mind for me. But what were you going to say, Libby?
Yeah, I was going to say it seems like we're using kind of 3 different things to all kind of do the same outcome. So we're using store leads to kind of figure out who we want to reach out to, putting them into Apollo, enriching that data, and then figuring out a campaign from there, whether that's HubSpot, LGM, whatever it might be. It does just, you know, there's a lot of steps, I guess we'll say, um, when it comes to actually building those leads. Because Store Leads is great, but like, it gives us like their general support email, which obviously I'm not going to email. Um, so that's the only thing with Store Leads is they just don't give us contact info, but they give us a lot of other info.
Gotcha. So just to make sure I understand that, you have, you're getting your companies from Store Leads, then you're getting the people at those companies in Apollo, and then you're going from Apollo to HubSpot or LGM or some other tool to run the actual sequences?
Essentially, yes.
Okay. And then is the, I guess if you ask is like, can we do this like more connected or more fit? Is that kind of what you're asking? Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Got it.
Clay, anything on this? Yeah, I think, yeah, I think, um, I think the process is somewhat disconnected right now. I think, I think it'll get better as we get more volume. It's hard to automate it too much at this point because we don't know what's working or not yet. So if we were to create a lot of automation here, it could just add more work. Um, if things didn't go right, I think I think to me, I think the biggest blocker and the biggest thing slowing us down is just getting the right leads. It just takes a lot of time to try and find who is the right person to reach out to and then getting those into the right cadences.
Okay. Okay.
Got it. Okay. So a lot just happened here. So I think Harold's general question here is like directionally okay. I would have asked maybe a little bit more specific problem question because what we've gotten out of it, out of this, we've basically gotten 3 different things. We've gotten thing one, which is Randall saying, here's the thing that we wanna be doing that, but we haven't figured out how to do signals-based triggers outreach. He says there's some sort of an example in his mind that he, that he can't quite bring forward, which is, which is, you know, okay, that's interesting. We, we might wanna double-click there, but there's some specific things that they are looking for here. Libby says, yeah, our current process has a lot of steps to it, which is a different thing. And then Clay says, yeah, I know. He basically says, yeah, I know our current process has a lot of steps. It is, it should have a lot of steps because we're not in the automation phase yet. What we really need is getting the right leads. Who is the right person for us to be reaching out to? So, We now have 3 different things that all kind of sound like they would be projects on the, in the pull framework. So the project 1 would be, you know, kind of do SMART signal-based outreach, something like that. Project 2 would be something closer to reduce the manual work. For outbound. Project 3 would be find the right leads, right? These are 3 different projects that are all like, they're not on totally different planets from each other, but they are diff— sufficiently different that in my mind, I'm like, okay, cool. I've heard 3 different things. I have no idea what to do right now. And so, uh, when we reviewed this call live, the question is, okay, what do you do in this circumstance? Because it seems like These, these 3 people aren't on the exact same page. And if I'm Harold, I'm confused and I'm not sure what to show or what to do next. And so what I would do in this situation is make, and this isn't hard, make myself look like the dumb one here and say, okay, help me understand here. I'm not like, I'm hearing kind of 3 different things. It must be something that I'm, I am missing here. Is it like, I'm hearing there's doing smart signal-based outreach, reducing the manual work on outbound, but maybe that's not the thing, and just finding the right leads. I'm happy to show you how we can do any or all of those, but can you maybe point me to the one that is most top of mind, the thing that you're really trying to do right now? And, and so that's kind of what I would do is kind of just act, act dumb or, or I'm gonna genuinely play dumb because I am dumb in this situation because I just don't, I don't know at this point. And if I go and YOLO a demo at this point, it's almost certainly going to not fit what at least one of these people, probably two of them need. And if I try to demo all three things, it's probably gonna confuse all of them. And so maybe help me understand. At this point. And so this is also why having that, you know, when you see that there are 37 people added to a sales call, it's like, okay, maybe we need to, I need to chat with somebody in advance to actually figure out whose project I should focus on. And so if I do that, like, help me understand which direction should I go down here? The person who takes charge on their side in that moment is probably the right person to focus on. But again, we want to kind of avoid this situation. What we don't want to do is we don't, because right now we only have their project. We don't really have the other elements of the pull framework. Like, okay, why, basically, why can't you delay this? Why now, roughly? Like, why are you prioritizing? Is this something you're actually prioritizing now versus is this something you could do a couple months from now? If I don't get the answer to that, then what's in my mind for when they're gonna buy this and when they're gonna use it is probably different than what's in their mind for that. And that's gonna lead to me trying to push them to buy when they're not in a situation where they're going to buy. It's gonna lead to me wasting a lot of my time and them getting annoyed. So I don't have this answer. We guess. But I've barely ever been right when guessing. We also don't know, like, we, we know that they're using a couple different tools. I heard Apollo, I heard a couple, couple others, but I don't know if they're looking into anything else. So I don't know what we're being compared against. Is it we're just being compared against the status quo or not? And so there's an example here of what, what it could be is, you know, hey, we want to do, you know, we want to do signal-based outbound. Right now because we've done it manually and it kind of worked, but was too much work to kind of do on repeat for us. And we need to do this yesterday because we have growth goals that we'll only hit if we get outbound working immediately. Like, that's a foreseeable thing. And we've considered kind of just like automating with Claude code, but that, you know, it's like way too much work for us to do ourselves while also being a lean team. So like, I don't know if that's the thing here, But if that was the thing, then Harold would basically describe slick in a very specific way and show a very specific thing after this. What we want to do once we're going onto the supply side is describe the concept in like 30 seconds as a thing that fits their pull. I'll, I'll explain how you do that in a second. Um, and then see, so steps on the supply side, describe the concept in 30 seconds as a thing that fits their poll, and then see if the concept fits. Then you can demo, but you often don't have to. Yeah, this is going to sound crazy because everyone's like, wait, don't we have to demo? No, you, you almost, you like very rarely do. Most of the function of a demo in a sales call that I watch from, from a startup convinces the person not to buy. It's too much context. There's too much setup. There's too much stuff in it that, uh, yeah, it, it winds up convincing them not to buy often. People will just wind up going with slides instead of a demo themselves. And the slide might have a screenshot, but it's like not actually a, a live demo. And the customer is happier because they don't have to see a bunch of things get clicked. So this is what should happen on the supply side. Let's see what Harold does.
I think I have enough information. Let me just walk you through the platform in like 2 or 3 minutes. I'll be excited. I may have to go and then we can talk about some other stuff later on. We'll share the recording with you.
Is that working, anyone?
And Harold, I just summarized, like, I think the 3 things that are potential opportunities for us are 1, stuff that we're just not doing today, like a social listening or whatever and signals. 2, ways to, like, to Libby's point, tie more of this together and automate it. Or 3, ways to just lower cost because we have 4 different tools that are, you know, we're using or whatever it might be. And if, if there's redundancy and we can simplify and do it for less. So those are kind of the 3 areas, I'd say.
Okay, got it. Yeah, I think we can probably help with all 3. Let me show you, uh, quickly and then we can go from there. So let me share my screen.
Cool. So Randall does us a solid here and says, all right, I know that we've been talking about a couple different things. Here's what it might actually be at this stage. And it's still at a rough, like, kind of abstract level. Right? Smart signal-based outreach. It's, it's kind of these 3 things and maybe save costs.
Can you guys see my screen? Yes. Okay. So before you look at anything, just to orient you to what we're building, we're basically building one place to set up and manage agents that do go-to-market tasks for you. So primarily on the prospecting side. So one place to find companies, find people associated with those companies, conduct outreach to those people, track it, all that fun stuff. So I was doing, obviously you guys understand Roster better than I do, but I was just doing a little bit of tinkering with the agent. The way this is organized is you just talk with an agent like you would talk to a human, uh, and then it just does work for you and shows you that work on the right side. Uh, so I was just asking it today, can you find, like, you know, 5 minutes ago I was asking, can you find Shopify brands with 100,000 to 500,000 Instagram followers who collaborate with content creators? That's probably not like the best query, something Randall mentioned about, or who mention ambassador programs or something. But you can just ask it in like natural language to find these things. It'll, you know, ask clarification questions. Uh, I asked it to pull a list and then now it's running the search for these types of companies. Uh, from there you can just chat with it like, hey, now find people at these companies. And this is kind of., this is the part that you might be able to tie multiple tools in together. What I've done is I have connected here my Apollo account. Where is that? I could actually, I haven't connected my Apollo, but you can connect your Apollo account. What that'll do is it'll just use your Apollo account to automatically enrich that data. So you don't have to go on this other platform. If you don't connect your Apollo account, we have a shared kind of like Apollo, uh, like Slick account that you can draw that usage from. And that will just cost credits on like the, the roster or the Libby account. Uh, but if you have an Apollo account, I'm going to connect it. There's no credit drawn from there. Uh, there's a bunch of other tools you can connect. I don't know what you guys are using for email. Uh, Instantly is one of them, but this is just like one place where you hopefully like manage your tools for a little bit better. Uh, so from there you can set up a campaign. Uh, you can ask it to find people. I'll just pop you into one of the campaigns that I am running right now. So this is a LinkedIn outreach campaign where I have been, you know, just managing my reach out to founders who— that's one of the segments that we sell to. And you can see that the agent— I just talked to it, it updates me. The way I would think about this is I just grant this agent access to my LinkedIn, I can tell it to do anything associated with my LinkedIn and it'll just handle it for me. So I've told it, find founders in the Cambridge area. Once you've found them, connect with them on LinkedIn, message them. Uh, if they reply positively, then send them my calendar link. If they don't reply that they're interested or they want more information, alert me and then draft the response. And I just go into our UI and I approve the response. So you can see that it's just tracking all this and I just talk to it like a human. Like I found this, I was like on LinkedIn the other day, I found this random founder. I just told it to add this person to my campaign. And it's just tracking all this for me so I can see, you know, all the connections it sent, the people it's messaged, who's replied, uh, and who those people are. So I'll pause there. I'm talking for about 3 minutes. Uh, see, maybe Libby, if you have any questions before we have to jump, and otherwise Clay and Randall can, uh, we can talk about this after, after you have the hop.
Yeah, one question I did actually have was, so we connect our, like my personal LinkedIn would be connected to this. Um, am I writing like what I want those messages to say before and then launching that campaign?
Yep, exactly. So similar, like let's say we were actually, we're here. Right. And it found these 5 companies. You can say, now you would just talk to it.
You'd say, okay, we're going to pause here and we'll go back a little bit. This was a 4, like 3, 4 minute monologue here. And it is directionally good. It's, we'll say it's not bad. It's not great either. So the, the pieces of this are we want to describe the concept in 30 seconds as a thing that fits their pull. And we want to pause there and see if the concept fits their pull. Now, what Harold did is he described it as, hey, we're building the one place to set up and build go-to-market tasks where you can find companies, find people, do outreach, track it. He said something along those lines, which is, I guess, generally okay. But given that what they are trying to do is like Do smart signal-based outreach, reduce manual work for outbound, find the right leads, save costs. You basically want to describe this as, yeah, we, we have the kind of, we have an AI outbound agent that makes it easy to do signal-based outreach with almost no manual work at low cost. You just chat with it like a human. And it will, you know, it will kind of find companies, leads, do outreach, however you want it to, and extract it for you so you can improve. Uh, you know, so it's something like that. So it'd be some sort of description like that, which he's not super far off from. But what I would say here is showing the product at this point is not what I would be doing. If you show the product, then they're going to be hearing different things out of your mouth and what they are seeing. And so what I typically recommend is to actually either show a slide that basically says these exact words. Or your website. You just pull up your website and, and show the homepage. And it's because what we're doing is we're describing the concept level, both so that the concept makes sense of what they are going to see before we jump into the product. And we're not slapping them with a demo or anything like that. Now from here, so then we should pause and say, any questions about that? Does that, like, does that seem like it might fit what you're looking for? Or you could even ask the opposite of that, a leading question in the opposite direction, which is, I'm not sure if that, like, I'm not 100% sure. You tell me if that's anything like what you're what you're looking for, right? And then they will pull for more information, at which point you could show a demo if, if that is relevant. Now, from here on out, Harold kind of went through a kind of radical— I find if you ever find yourself on the settings screen or going through a setup flow, you are way lost here. The demo, the goal of the demo is to show the fewest possible things that make it click for somebody. And so what I would show as Harold instead of this is what should, what should the demo be? So this is the description, the like concept on the supply side, the demo should be, you know, it should basically be like, here's an example, which he eventually gets to. Of, you know, a, of outbound that I ran or that another company kind of like you ran, where we just by chatting with the agent, they could find very specific leads. And you can see they found these very specific kinds of leads. That kind of seems like what you were talking about, Randall, when you were talking about the kind of signal-based outbound. Is that— am I roughly right there? Yeah, you could just do that with ChatGPT. You just tell it and it will go and do the research for you and find those leads. Again, does that fit what you're looking for? Okay, great. Then it can, right, then it can do very specific outbound for you using whatever, right? Like, and it can enrich the leads or, right, you could just kind of talk step by step there. Well, What's on the screen is not like 40 different things. It's something that's like this, right? And it's, you know, something kind of like this here where you're just, you're just talking through this. And the point is not to leave that screen, just to show them that one thing and then have a conversation with them about what they are specifically trying to do.
Okay.
That would have taken 30 seconds here, 30 seconds here versus it wound up taking like 4 minutes and we got into the Apollo setup and all that was kind of confusing. And so, um, again, this is tightening. This is still a fine call, but, but this would tighten that and make it way easier to sell and to know what people are actually buying. Now Libby then asks, one question I had. So then we get a question. So, um, uh, right. So what Harold does, asks about, um, the, uh, right. Like Harold basically asks, do you have any questions? Yeah, I'm sure they have questions, Harold. Obviously they will have questions. That's not the important thing. For us to ask. Does this— the question should be, does this seem like a fit for what you're looking for? Or something like, it's like, it's, do they have any questions?
Yeah.
Like, I'm still trying to, I don't feel like, what, what does that button do? Like, that's, that's a question. That's not a useful question to, for them to assess if this is a fit. And sometimes, right? Like sometimes you just asking, do you have any questions? We'll get you there. A lot of times it won't. And so does this seem like a fit for what you're looking for? Libby then asks, what was the question? It was, it was, can I review messages before sending? It's a great question to ask. The answer should, like, this question is basically like, if no, I might not buy. If yes, unclarifiable why. And so what I've tried to do is get behind this question. Oh, interesting. Tell me more. Is that what you're trying to do? Is that like really critical to you? Like, would that make it a fit for what you're looking for? And let's see what Harold does.
Yep, exactly. So similar, like let's say we were actually, we're here, right? And I'd found these 5 companies. You can say now you would just talk to it. You'd say now pull people who work in the I don't know if you guys sell to like chief marketing officers, maybe like pull the chief marketing officer at these companies, find me the LinkedIn, and then I'll set up a sequence and you'll say, here's what I want the sequence to look like. And you can include elements where maybe you want to be a human in the loop. Maybe you just want the agent to run completely autonomously. Uh, really this can do like anything kind of the way we differentiate from LGM or Dripify or some of these like Lemlist and these other tools is they're like very rigid kind of like sequence builders. Uh, but a lot of people have a little bit more nuance that they want to run go-to-market with. Uh, maybe they want to be in the loop sometimes, maybe they want to be alerted if a company is like a tier 1 account so that they can send something a little bit more personalized instead of having everything go to the same, same sequence. So that's kind of like how we're a little bit different from some of the other tools you've probably heard of.
That's awesome. That was my one thing too.
It's like I've—
Okay, cool.
What Harold does there is he goes, and it's, it's like fine, it's okay, but this isn't what you want to do. So he, the answer to that is just, yeah, you can totally do that. You can do whatever you want to do. If you want to be in the loop, if you don't want to be in the loop, You can set it up. It's, it's, you know, it's basically whatever you want to do. He then goes on a kind of, he takes us, he takes a shot at tools that they didn't mention. The way we differentiate versus da da da da da. It's like, cool. Thanks, Harold. Why bring them up? Why are, what? And, and when we were talking about this, he, he was saying, well, I felt, you know, I often feel the need to communicate what our differentiation is. It's like, well, if they're not considering those options, the differentiation on that vector doesn't actually matter. So don't— why bring it up proactively? When you bring up things that aren't relevant to their pull, the only thing it can do is add surface area. It adds concepts in their mind. Which convinces them either to have to think harder or just convinces them that this isn't a fit for them. 'Cause that's not what we were really talking about. It's not really what we're here for. And so I know it feels like you should communicate that and say, hey, here's how we differentiate. Or things like, here's what our vision is. Here's how we see the world works. Here's our perspective of the problem. These things are only downsides. And so let's, let's see what happens here.
Like, I think with the industry we're in, we're kind of preaching organic, word of mouth, authenticity, that kind of thing. So I think that's one thing that I would love to be able to do is get notified, maybe personalize those to the few individuals I need to, and kind of keep going. So I, I love that aspect of it.
Okay. Yeah. Uh, you'll see on the homepage, there's basically, so I don't know if this is relevant. I also have this like scanning Reddit threads for me. It's like automatically drafting comments for me. Uh, but this is what you would kind of see here, which is I have this LinkedIn outreach to startup founders and I just asked it to alert me before it sends anything to message. So I would go here. And the agent says, hey, like, it drafted this message. I click approve and it sends the message for me.
Okay, Harold, what are we doing here? So, so Libby says, oh my gosh, I love that aspect of this. And Harold says, cool, let me tell you about other features you didn't ask about. Reddit threads. Let's talk about da da da. Like, what are you doing, Harold? This is called selling past the close. And, uh, again, I, I've done it. I'm like the, I'm super guilty of doing this. So, so, you know, But the point is we shouldn't do that. We shouldn't— we— if Libby says, cool, I love that aspect of it, then you stop screen share and say, great, Randall, Clay, Libby, what else do you need to know to assess whether this is a fit or not? And that's it. And like the call could be done there. We're going to fast forward a little bit. Um, Libby has to jump at that point and, uh, yeah.
Any questions you have, Clay or Randall, uh, just let me know how we can be most helpful to you guys.
I think, I think this is super interesting. Uh, I, I like, I really like this. My biggest, I guess where I'm most curious is understanding where everything is. Um, where, where is the data being housed? How do we view the data? Can we pull in data from other sources? Um, and then where do we manage the sequences or the campaigns that are going out as well? Just so we can have eyes on, on, on that really well.
Yeah, I'll add to Clay's, like in addition to You know, I think if we have a lead list or we want to do— I think we've talked about Harold multiple times, like lookalikes or something where it's like, oh, these are some great customers, let's find lookalikes. But then on the back end, how do we sync all of it up with HubSpot too so that everything's tracked in HubSpot?
Yeah.
All right. Good question. So let me, let me first address the lookalike one. I'm glad you gave me your broader question about how are things organized and how do you actually use this tool. So the way things are organized is there's a homepage and the homepage is really just a place for you to, one, like see all the things that are pending your action. Uh, so that's largely in the case of if you've asked the agent to get your permission before sending a message or, you know, in my case, commenting on a Reddit thread, that's what the homepage is for. And then, uh, from the homepage, you can also go into like the agents that are doing work for you. So this is really probably just going to be like honestly one agent for roster to start with, which is just prospecting. You would click into it and you would, this is the LinkedIn one that I was talking about. And the way to set up a sequence is just talk to it. So if you wanted to, if you already had a list, for example, You would just upload that list by attaching a file. Uh, if you want to import a list from somewhere, it seems like you guys probably want to import from StoreLead, uh, which we don't have an integration with yet, but we can definitely look into that. Uh, and then Randall, on your point about like lookalike customers, you can literally just upload an existing set of customers and say, can you find more companies that are like these customers? Uh, and the agent would do that. And finally, on the HubSpot side, that is an integration that we support. You just integrate your HubSpot account here. And then when an agent, let's say, uh, let's say someone replies to a LinkedIn message, the agent, you can direct the agent to update, to create a record in HubSpot and update it.
Will it do that automatically if, um, like, could you set rules and say, okay, any emails that go, like, because emails will go out through Slick basically on—
Yeah. Okay.
So here.
Harold gets a couple of different questions. These are like decent questions, but again, I don't know at this point, it's not clear to me whether these people think it's a fit or not, or where are these questions coming from? Are these, are these kill shots or are they like, oh, I'm just curious. Like, yeah, we're totally doing this. So if I'm, if I'm Harold here, I'm pausing and saying, wait, but before this, right, what we have to do is we have to figure out their pull. That's part one of the call. We have to offer supply and see if it fits. That's part 2. Actually, see if it fits is part 3. Or if it likely fits, and then it's kind of like address fit questions is part 4. We have not yet seen if it fits. We're not sure. We've heard Libby say it, but Libby didn't exactly say it. And so I have no idea here where we're going. And now we're doing what I call blindfolded hockey goalie mode, which is we're just going to get questions and we're going to answer them without understanding why we're getting these questions, what these questions mean or anything like that. And so, um, yeah, we can, what I'm going to do is I'm going to fast forward for the interest of time. But, um, but you're getting a lot of questions here. And then what happens is later on, later on, there's a point in here. Okay. Right here. Here's the interesting point. A little bit later on when they go through a bunch of questions that Aren't super clear.
And like, I think we could start with a couple of things. Like we have the store leads that where we already are running campaigns and we could just kind of move some of the campaign and to you guys to just see what further automation it drives and kind of just simplifying for Libby where it's more about to Clay's point, like saving time. But I also think we could, one thing we're not doing on the front end for getting leads is use you guys more for listening and kind of intent signal-based stuff. So like an example is there was, there's a conference, it's actually going on today and tomorrow that I don't know if I'm going to be able to make it to, but it's an e-com conference in Salt Lake. And so I was having Claude just scrape LinkedIn and the conference website. We're not attending, so we're not on the list or we're not sponsoring to just see like, oh, who's attending? And then Libby was kind of reaching out on LinkedIn and stuff. So that was one where we cobbled together a little bit of like Claude with the LinkedIn. And so that might be another one where we could just try to run a few other campaigns that we wouldn't necessarily be able to do just through Store Leads because we don't have that dynamic, like listening and signal-based stuff. So I think we could definitely do that. And like, I think LinkedIn, we could, I think what we could build to be—
Okay. So this part, this is the thing that if we had known this at the very beginning, this would have informed everything. This is basically the pull. This is the, this is what they're trying to do. We have this kind of manual thing where we are having Claude do stuff, right? And, and we would like to be able to automate that and do more of it. That's what Randall's been trying to communicate this entire time. How do I know? This would have led to a different demo. This would have led to a different product description. This is the thing and it's coming out at minute 25. We need to get that at minute 1. And so that brings us back to that initial question that Harold should ask. What should Harold's question be? Obviously, first question is like, why'd you take the call? What are you hoping to get out of it? We need, we can just, that's a, that's like a required question. But if they say, hey, you know, I think, I think Randall at the very beginning said, could help us as a complement to what we're already doing or cheaper than what we're already doing. The second question is like, is there like, what are you trying to do differently or automate or do that you can't do as it relates to outbound? Do you have any examples of things that you're trying to do differently so that we can get examples like this? And then you say, okay, cool. Yeah. So as an example, in this conference, we're doing da da da da da. But it's super manual for us to do this. And we want to be able to do this kind of thing on autopilot for all future e-com conferences. It's like, okay, interesting. So it sounds like you're looking for a way to do signal-based outreach to find leads who are going to conferences and dah, dah, dah, and be able to do outreach to them and have that work on autopilot. Is that roughly right? Okay, great. It sounds like you've tried Claude and kind of like doing this manually. Why isn't that good enough? And you'd get some sort of reason. That way you'd fill out the poll framework. From there you say, yeah, okay, great. That's exactly how some people use us. In fact, I have an example campaign here of people who were doing some web scraping for people who were attending a specific conference. And you can see they just typed in da da da da da, and, um, and then they were able to personalize the outreach. Is that the kind of thing you were looking for? And then the call would have been done in like 6 minutes instead of 25+. So zooming out from here. So zooming out, there's a lot of things that could be different. It's like, okay, let's just ask poll-shaped questions at the beginning. It's, and it's okay to kind of like sound dumb and kind of say, I'm hearing different things. Is there an example that you can give me? To play dumb. Then pitch the concept without showing the product, right? Just show, show something that basically echoes the words you're saying that makes the concept make sense. And then demo the least amount of things. There are some other strategic questions. That I think we'll have Harold come on and talk through at another point in time. But, but I think we can do one more call of his that's going to look a little bit different than this. But yeah, I hope this helps. And like, let me just— if you're at this point, and you're like, wow, this was super helpful. Let me know. I can do more of these if people grant permission. If you want me to do that, and you can get your customer to give permission. Yeah, like send it my way and I might be doing more of these cuz I think this might be helpful. So there you go.
