Sales Strategies for Startups: A Guide to Creating Effective Messaging

Hello, hi everyone. I hope you guys are all having a great week. So my name is Daniel, I'm a part of the marketing team at Appfy, and we are here with a super, super exciting webinar for you all with one of our graduates, Daniel. He's the co-founder of Autobound, which is kind of like ChatGPT for sales, right? So he's going to be talking to you all about creating effective messaging and leading sales through that. So if you look towards the right side, you'll have a Q&A option, right? So you can maybe ask, if you have a question or if you want to add comments, you could kind of add that there. But before I kind of get into that, why don't you tell me where you're all from, right? You guys could comment down in the, yeah, in the comments. We have people coming in from Helsinki. We have people coming in from Vancouver. Awesome, Canada. Bulgaria, Arizona, Dubai, Montreal. A lot of people from Canada. Austin, awesome. Houston as well, Texas. Yeah, Costa Rica. Awesome, awesome. So yeah, so we have a pretty international audience here. So we have a very, very exciting session plan, right? So before we really get into it, Akshay, why don't you bring Daniel on stage? I'll share a poll with you, right? So we kind of wanted to, we kind of wanna know what, how you go about messaging when it comes to sales, right? So let me share this poll. So guys, if you could go to the polls on the right side, you guys can probably vote here. Right. Let me know if you guys can actually see, right? So awesome, yeah. So the question is, what do you consider the most important in your sales messaging? We have highlighting product features, sharing customer testimonials and case studies, showcasing competitive advantages. Okay, right. So it seems like sharing customer testimonials and case studies is in the lead. Right, that should be pretty interesting. Maybe this is an indicator of where our audience kind of stands, right, Daniel? And so yeah, this should be pretty interesting, right? Awesome. So I'm gonna hide the poll from the stage, and Daniel, would you like to share your— sorry, would you like to, you know, unmute yourself and turn on your camera, and we can kind of begin?

Hey everybody. Daniel here. Thank you all for hopping on.

It's so nice to come to you, okay? Yeah, so you guys, if you like what Daniel's saying, if you're enjoying everything that's going on, you have an option to react with emojis right at the bottom. So let us know how you feel about everything, right? So I'm going to hop off stage. Daniel, over to you.

Hey everybody, my name is Daniel Wiener. I live in Austin, Texas, but I grew up in Denver, Colorado, born in New Jersey. I went through the Founder Institute, what's it, probably 4 years ago now or so out of San Francisco. Had a great experience. Fast forward to where I'm at now, I'm running a VC-backed startup called Autobound. You could think of us kind of like the ChatGPT for B2B sales emails. And it's always exciting to get brought back to the FI community. So I recall how difficult it was for— I went through the accelerator with Kyle Schuster, one of my co-founders. The difficulty around nailing your message, it's much easier said than done, right? So I'll share some war stories, best practices, hopefully some helpful tips and tricks for everybody to take away today. I took an interesting approach to how I'm going to spend the next 15 minutes on the presentation before going into Q&A, where I shared what I'm going to be speaking about with a few folks in my network. I asked them to brainstorm some of their top questions around effective messaging, and we're going to look at them at the same time here together in an effort to make my suggestions and ideas as, like, organic as possible. So without further ado, let's check out number 1 here. So what's my number 1 suggestion when it comes to building effective messaging? I think, and to preface, I'm going to be making these suggestions in the realm of assuming you've already figured out to some extent who your ICP is. Your buyer profile is. If you're still in the discovery stage and you haven't yet defined who you're selling into and what their pain points might be or what they care about, I've got some great recommendations there. But maybe actually in the chat, can you post like yes if you've already defined who your ICP is and no if you're still experimenting or you're still on the journey of figuring out who you're selling into?

Okay, cool.

See a good amount of yeses, yes but close, some nos. Well, we'll start with the nos. If you're a no, I think creating your messaging, what you should first master is how to talk to your users or how to talk to your audience, because otherwise all the suggestions I'm going to make are going to lead you down down a path that might not be too helpful. So I would recommend reading a book called The Mom Test. I'm forgetting who the author is, but pretty cut and dry, most spectacular way that I've seen someone articulate how to go speak to people as you're trying to figure out your product and what problem you're solving. But anyway, so transitioning back to those who have figured out who your ICP is, My number one suggestion is to ensure that you are making the message all about them, not yourself. I've seen countless founders make this mistake in my inbox. I probably get 1,000 emails like this a month where it's people just spewing like, hi, my name is Daniel. I started this company called Otterbound and here's how we can help you. And in reality, like that's not effective whatsoever. Flip the table and look at it from the lens of, like, if your message hits somebody's inbox, what's 1,000 reasons they're not gonna wanna read it? So out of the gate, you have to be relevant and compelling to them, like their pain points, not you or your value prop. Be hyper-focused on the recipient. And that holds true. Whether it's like your landing page, your cold call script. Yeah, I think like having the mentality of trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes and thinking about all the reasons you'd be disinterested, but what would spark your interest and like, it's all about relevance and making it really specific to like, to them, not yourself. All right, number 2. So what channel do you recommend, be it email, cold calling, LinkedIn? Then there's, you know, ads, SMS, the list goes on. I think as you're first establishing your message, people are gonna have a lot of different opinions on this, but my recommendation is to do things the not so much fun way, which is go download, get access to like Apollo.io or ZoomInfo for contact data. Pull a list of 100 people's mobile phone numbers that really tightly match your ICP. You can even verify through most of these, like, contact data providers, like, check a box to ensure it's been updated in the past 6 months. So you have, like, the most accurate list of folks to reach out to. I would cold call 100 people. Well, I would first write down what you believe your most compelling, like, 2 to 3 sentence pitch is and be ready for some conversational back and forth. And of course have like an objective of what you're aiming to do with that meeting. But what you'll learn when you're cold calling is you'll tweak your pitch really freaking quickly and you'll get really good at it really quickly. It's not simple to do, but I think like, well, when I say really quickly, if you're totally fresh to cold calling in general, it might take you a little bit of time, but there's no faster way of doing it. There's no shorter feedback loop than picking up the phone, calling someone, getting someone live, aiming to start a conversation and really connect with that pitch that you just spent 20 or 30 minutes beforehand writing down and perfecting. There's no quicker feedback loop to then figuring out what can I do better? What's resonating well? There's a lot of effective ways to run split tests to hone in on what what parts of your message are resonating best. But I would start with cold calling, especially if you're still pretty early on in your journey of establishing your messaging. What's fantastic about email is that, well, what's not good about cold calling and LinkedIn, unless you're using an automation tactic, is they're not too scalable. Whereas there's a bunch of email sequencing or automation tools out there. We're kind of in that domain ourselves as Otterbound. Um, so cold calling to nail your message, and then I would expand to email and LinkedIn as like primary channels as you've figured out who your core ICP is and like what messaging tends to be working well. And then to run split tests from there to see like, uh, if I'm talking about certain pain points based on industry, does one land better? And just look at things like open and reply rate as you are figuring that out. Right, let's see. How do you make your email stand out from the noise? Great question. So this kind of ties back to my number one suggestion I was talking about earlier around making it all about them, not yourself. Doing the same thing here, but really focusing that idea on the first 20 words of your message. People say, and I'd argue against this, like it's all about nailing your subject line. Well, go to your inbox. I'm looking at mine here. You'll see, I think truncated at like 30 characters or something, your subject line or the subject lines of folks who are reaching out to you. And then a sentence maybe, or another 80 characters of that first sentence. So you have a little bit of space there to say something that's extremely relevant to that person to get them to open your message. So the first art is like the art of someone saying this message either looks like— this message is either like ultra relevant to me, and I can tell that quickly from looking at it, um, or it was obviously personalized for me. And personalization and relevance are much different. Like, personalization is not necessarily going to tie back to the pain points of who you're reaching out to. Whereas relevance does, but it might be a bit more broad strokes, not specific to one individual. So I'll give you an example. If I was— so at Otterbound, our ICP is the VP of Sales at a sales— at a software startup, say like growth stage, saying something relevant in that opening sentence could be If you're like other sales leaders I work with, or something relevant to the first sentence could be, what's your plan this quarter to ensure your SDRs have the right tooling in place to be personalized and effective in every message they send? Because it's relevant back to that person's pain points of opportunity creation or pipeline, whereas something personalized would be, um, saw you're from Colorado, as am I. Both of those things are appropriate to thread into the beginning of the message, but I think you have to have both to get a response. So standing out from the noise, the first challenge is getting opened or getting realized, and the second is getting responded to. There's a third, which is like getting out of spam in the first place. And some easy tips there, like if it's your first message to a new recipient, don't include links. That tends to be flagged as spam more often. And if you are using any bulk outreach tools like Mixmax, Salesloft Outreach, there's a whole bunch out there, Reply.io, the more emails that you send that look exactly the same based off a template, Spam filters can pick up that consistent content. So try to introduce some variation in your message. Something Autobounce does for you automatically, by the way. But some tips on getting out from the noise. What tools would I recommend to any startup founder working on messaging? So again, I guess you can slice and dice the concept of messaging in a million ways, be it your sales, Messaging and email or on the phone or your, your website. I would say I'm going to focus it more so on the conversations you're having with prospects. So like phone, slash, email, or LinkedIn. I think my first suggestion would be Fathom, one of my favorite products out there. Um, for, for call recording on Zoom or Hangouts, you could use like otter.ai as well. Um, what's so cool about that is like, it's just a simple tool that follows you where you do in meetings where, um, after the call with the sale, after a call with the prospect, you can critique yourself or show it to one of your advisors or a mentor at FI to help pinpoint all the things you did wrong and things you did well. Um, I would also suggest, I think LinkedIn's a really obvious one. Whether or not you upgrade to Sales Nav is a bit more dependent. I think for like really early stage founders, there's not a huge need to. You get a bunch of what you need out of the core LinkedIn product. I'm sure everybody's playing around a good deal with ChatGPT. I think when it comes to— I've got a lot of opinions on this. When it comes to ideating more quickly on really anything, ChatGPT is phenomenal. I would just be careful not to be over-reliant on things that are too strategic to your business. So what I mean by that is if you're writing a blog post on here's 10 ways to be personalized in your emails, ChatGPT can be fantastic for more quickly producing content that helps you get there. If you were to write into ChatGPT, give me an email template to write to a VP of sales or to write to a CMO that pitches my product with this value prop, I would be a lot more critical on ensuring that the message actually sounds good and is the right one to use. So use it as an assistant, but don't be overreliant. I might be saying something much different in the next couple years or a few months even as it gets more sophisticated, but don't put too many eggs into that basket. I guess that kind of dovetails a bit nicely into my next suggestion, which would be Autobound. So we built a product that writes hyper-personalized sales emails using AI. So when we first started the company, we collected this dataset of tens of thousands of really high-performing sales emails to train our own versions of OpenAI's model, the first one we used, I think was GPT-2 or 3 to make the use case specific to really good sales emails. Cause I think like ChatGPT is somewhat good at everything, really good at nothing. So we aim to be like fantastic when it comes to writing high quality sales emails. So if you decide email is a core channel for you, I would definitely suggest giving our product a whirl because we've spent a ton of time investing in the architecture to make personalization scalable, at least when it comes to email. Then last one would be if you're, you may or may not get banned from LinkedIn for using one of these, but there's a lot of like LinkedIn automated LinkedIn outreach tools that'll send in mails. At scale to an audience you define. So you could go to your LinkedIn search, say, show me VPs of sales in Canada. You can copy like the URL from LinkedIn, put it into— there's a thousand tools out there— and then specify the connection request message you'd like sent to each person in that audience. So it's kind of like email sequencing, but you can— there's no such thing as like bounce to email and reply rate and open rate are much higher because it's literally in this different concept of communication within InMails, not your inbox. So I'd play around a bit with LinkedIn outreach as well. When it all comes down to it though, I'd pick one and go deep. Big mistake I see a lot of founders making is like just trying to boil the ocean. You got so much on your plate, all these exciting things that you've heard work really well for somebody else, probably not gonna work for you. I would treat this as like, as with every other part of your business, as an experiment. So dedicate some decent effort into different methods, see what works and iterate and move on from there. But hopefully those ideas are helpful. The main mistakes I see startups make when creating their messaging. Let's see here. I think that going back to what I opened up with, making it too much about yourself, not about the recipient. Like Command+F your email before you send the next one and just see how many times you're saying the word I. Cut back on that. It's bad. I think I might give different advice here depending on how well you know the pain points of the persona you're reaching out to. I would arguably say, unless you're a freaking splendid founder, that it's going to be hard to be successful in what you're doing unless you know the problems that you're solving really freaking well, people want to look to you to be the subject matter expert. Um, so I think that one of the issues that I see founders making here is, um, either going way too far into the weeds way too quickly when hopping on the phone with the prospect, or inside of their emails they're like 5 paragraphs long, um, or even being like too high-level buzzwordy. I think there's a really delicate blend in the middle where you're kind of meeting the other person where they are. And when I say like too high-level buzzwordy, it's— so if I were to go pitch a sales leader and said Outerbound's a software product that helps VPs of sales increase revenue, I'm going to get like laughed out of the room, or I'm going to be ignored is what will happen. Whereas If I go in and I'm like spewing my life away in a 5 or 6 paragraph message or it's like a 5-minute voicemail, like that's just not gonna get responded to. So I think brevity is ultra important as is like precision with, yeah, I'd say it's like being very brief, precise, and tied to the prospect's pain points. The farther you deviate away from that, I think the more likely you are to, fall flat on your face or just to have your message be ignored. And pick up the phone. So make those 100 cold calls as not fun as it is. You're going to learn a lot in doing that. Let's see, something that I've seen a lot of my founder friends struggle with, and I did as well when we were first fundraising, is having much different messaging for investors versus your customer. I think it's important to split those a bit, but I've seen founders put like far, far, far too much energy into telling investors what they want to hear instead of focusing on creating a business plan and like less so even a business plan, just figuring out like how you're going to solve a problem. And validating that people want your solution because it solves that issue. Investor messaging and getting out of the rut of not having enough money to pay yourself or your team to build enough product, to sell enough product, to make enough money. That is a spiral of death. But I'd really put— I try to be as customer obsessed as possible. It's something we've been focusing a ton on here at Autobound. Next is, how can I use ChatGPT for figuring out my sales messaging? So like I was saying before, I think, uh, use it as an assistant. Just be very careful not to let it, um, be careful to not over-rely on the responses ChatGPT is giving for your content. Let's see, in— I don't want to be too assumptive here. I've seen a good deal of founders, and this is kind of spread all over LinkedIn, where like I'm tying ChatGPT through an API into Google Sheets or another product, and it's producing mass content at scale. I'll then tie back into like an email sequencing tool and like let it rip. I don't think the technology is there yet. ChatGPT definitely needs like a human in the loop to review the message to ensure it's accurate before pressing send. So I like the concept of like, and I do think in a lot of ways that the whole role of outbound sales, at least top, top, top of funnel will be automated quite soon. But it's pretty important to have that voice of truth or reason, which is you in the loop to approve something or make sure it's not going to piss anybody off before clicking send is a pretty key one. So let's see, I think that might be the last one. Yeah, so last question, that was the last question that my friends had brainstormed for my portion of this, but I'm super excited to hear what everybody else has to ask. So I'll turn it back over.

Yeah, thank you, Daniel. That was a super, super kind of interesting format. We haven't really done that before where we kind of brainstorm questions and then take it from there. Like oftentimes, this, they're, they're questions that the audience tends to ask. So yeah, we have a couple of questions that we got from our audience, but before we get to that, I have a question as well because, uh, for a lot of people, a lot of the people in the audience there, we have a lot of early stage founders with us, right? And what most people might not know is that Autobound very recently raised around, right? So one of the things that you talked about was the messaging when it comes to investors and when it comes to business prospects, right? So my question is, right, how do you kind of prepare messaging where you're able to kind of communicate what you offer as a startup to an investor, but also at the same time, cater to what they're looking for, right? What's the right balance? What would you say?

Yeah, great question. I think first I would ensure that you're quite close, if not all the way there, with nailing your messaging to the persona or your customer. Like, I'd really invest in that first. Because you're not going to have a fun time fundraising if you haven't even figured out like how you plan on solving your customers' problems. Right. Something that you said that I'd also try to be cognizant of is I would shy away from telling investors what you think they want to hear because even if you succeed at that, you're likely going to find yourself in a mismatch with expectations from investors or like the vision of what they want you to be building versus what you're actually working on. Yeah, as a founder, you're going to get pulled in a million different directions, but I would first be like super focused on nailing the message for your customers. And then when you're seeing enough traction and you have enough viability behind what you're building to go raise capital, and that's there's a whole nother conversation to be had there. And then I would shift your attention to like, okay, now I'm 1,000% on fundraising. Um, the way you approach and tell investors that is maybe a bit different, but, um, it's all kind of a matter of focus. A lot of what will work with customers should be part of your, your messaging with investors too, but you'll need to be a lot more high-level and visionary when it comes to your pitch to investors. As opposed to what you might go back and forth on with the customer during the sales cycle.

Right, yeah, that's a pretty good answer. I think a lot of people, particularly startup founders, when it comes to communication, they don't really think about that aspect of it, right? Like the messaging having to be kind of similar but at different levels, right? Because we tend to treat every, each stakeholder very, very differently. And that's what sometimes, that's what we're kind of taught. So it kind of makes sense. So yeah, sticking to the theme of being a startup founder, right? So we have a pretty kind of like a more of a basic question from Radu, but I think it's kind of good to get out, right? So what is the best way or tool to identify problems for your customers, future customers?

Is that a question to me?

Yep.

I would say talk to them. This goes back to what I was saying in the beginning of the call. Like, the— my suggestions for what to do if you have not yet figured out what problems you're solving or who you're solving them for are totally different than having an established ICP and knowing what you're gonna, uh, knowing what problems you're going to solve. And I'd say like the best way or tool is go read The Mom Test and then implement what you've learned.

Right. Yeah, I think that's a pretty good answer. I've also shared the link to the book in the chat, so if anybody wants to check it out, you can do that. Yeah, so I have a question here from Mike. Should the cold calls have an actual pitch or just try to get them to book a discovery call?

Uh, you'll likely need to pitch somebody in some way, shape, or form for them to have enough interest to want to take a discovery call. Uh, I think is my shortest answer to it. Um, my recommendation, like general cold call format is you wanna establish some credibility by letting the person on the other end know what you're doing or like how it's helping other people out. So this has been like one of my favorite versions of how I've done this is like, hey, Mr. and Mrs., VP of sales, I'm calling you because I noticed like XYZ and whatever I noticed is tied back to the problem we solve for. Like, I noticed you're hiring a handful of sales reps. Um, I used to work in sales. I quit my job and I've literally spent the past 4 years building a product exactly for folks like you. And we've been able to help other sales leaders like massively generate revenue. I think we can do the same here. Um, open to talking. And at that point, someone will likely say yes or no, or they'll ask you a question and now you have a moment of dialogue. You need to define like how much you need to hear back in terms of like qualifying that person before setting up a next call. Like if they said, yeah, you know what, like super interesting, we just laid off half of our team, or we just laid off our entire team, we have no budget, but I'd love to talk. I can set up a call to learn more and like take that person's time, but that's not going to lead to a sale. So depending on how, kind of where you are in your company, it could be helpful to get additional feedback, but I would argue you need to spend your time with people who are actually gonna, who might actually buy. So once you've established enough interest, I think some level of qualifying is important. So they might answer like, oh yeah, that's cool. Like I am hiring a handful of sales reps. How can you help? I get that already kind of communicates some interest in this issue, but like Sales 101, the way I was trained back at Oracle was you're aiming to qualify 2 of the 4 of BANT, and BANT is Budget, Authority, Need, and a Timeline. So do they have budget for the problem you're solving? Do they have the authority of giving you that budget? Um, need— is there a recognized pain point or need to solve it? Uh, and timeline— is this deal going to potentially close in the next like 6 or 9 months? Um, I would go for like at least one. You need at least the need in that first call. Um, and before you're spending too much time with the prospect on like call 2 or 3, I would ensure you have at least 2 of those. There's a million frameworks. Someone has posted about SPIN Selling. That's great. MEDDIC is another good one as well. Don't beat yourself up too much over which you choose. I think any of them will work. It's mostly on you to have enough conversations to figure out how to tweak your pitch and make it happen.

Right, so yeah, that was a pretty in-depth answer. I hope that helps, Mike. All right, so next up we have a question from Ahan. How do you scale personalized outreach? Do you recommend using any automation product?

Great question. I would recommend using Autobound for scaling personalized email outreach. You can sign up at www.autobahn.ai/signupfree in chat. That is my number one recommendation. Free to use. We'll have a paid version launched in the next few weeks, but we're always going to have a free tier, so give it a shot.

Awesome, right? So yeah, we have our answer there, Ehan. So here's an interesting one from Nicole: should I wait until my app is in the App Store to do the cold calls or invite to beta testing?

Uh, the latter, um, invite to beta testing. So if you're waiting until your app's in the App Store to do cold calls Nicole, maybe you're on here now. Do you already have people who you are like damn confident are going to use your product once it's launched? Maybe you could chime in on chat. Cool. Okay, well then the next question is like how many and how sure are you that they're actually going to buy? It's not going to hurt. I don't know what else you have on your plate. It's not going to hurt calling people, reaching out and trying to get more letters of intent or conversations started. That's by no means going to be a bad thing. So I'd say go for it.

Right. Awesome. So yeah, Hope that helps, Nicole. We have, yeah, so kind of interesting from memory. Any hints on how to avoid coming across as a salesperson on a cold call?

I don't, you're not going to be able to. I think what you're aiming to not do is come across as like, What I would be much more concerned of is any hints on how to avoid not establishing trust on a cold call. Um, you're going to be salesy whatever way you look at it because you're a salesperson in theory calling somebody to try to make a sale. So don't dance around that. I think what you're— what you should be really focused on trying to optimize for is like cold calling and selling is very, it's a mental sport for you as the salesperson to not be too salesy, but also to establish like trust and credibility. One thing I've always tried to keep in the back of my head is you could call 1,000 different people. Like, why are you choosing to call that one individual? Like, it should be because you've done enough filtering and research on that person that you think you can actually solve their problem. And if that's the case, they should be kind of thankful you gave them a ring and having that mindset of I'm calling you for a purpose. I noticed these things here, so I think I can be helpful. You wanna seem like a subject matter expert or consultative. Salesy is okay, but when you're shifting into overly salesy or not trustworthy, that's super dangerous.

Right, awesome. So yeah, so here's, okay, so you did briefly talk about ChatGPT and I think one of the concerns for a lot of people and Jay kind of chimes in there as well is that you might sound like everybody else. So maybe if you could go over the tips that you just kind of shared with us on using ChatGPT. Won't ChatGPT make everyone else sound like everyone else in the crowd? What do you have to say?

Yeah, one thing ChatGPT is not so great at is adapting to your tone and style and your message, how you pitch, how you sound. My suggestion was not to be over-reliant on ChatGPT in the first place when creating your emails. Specifically, website copy is a bit different and you shouldn't let ChatGPT write your cold call scripts. I think, so tweak the email recommendations if you are using ChatGPT for templates that it gives you to make it sound much more like human and informal. I would strive to be like, again, brief. Less than 100 words. Don't use the word I. ChatGPT is not good at those, like, best practices in email. Products like Autobound, and there's a handful of others that are entering the space that write emails with AI. I think we're farther along than most, though I haven't used everyone out there. Like, the next wave of how these tools are being tweaked or enhanced. One is off of the salesperson's tone and style. So we're actually about to launch something that learns how you write and how you sound, and that's kind of specific and unique to you. So if it weren't for companies like us taking that approach, I think generative AI will kind of become more of a people will sound the same, but I can share at least what we're doing is helping you build in your brand and your voice into the content.

Right. Awesome. So yeah, yeah. So let's do another one last question and then we'll kind of break into networking. So folks, if once we're done with this, you'll have the option to go to the networking lounge where you can join a table, speak to each other. The FI team will be there as well, hopefully Daniel too. So yeah, we have this one last question, but I kind of want to tweak it here. So the question is, do you have a draft script to help? Instead, what I want to ask you is, let's assume I'm somebody who's never done, you know, any emails, sales through emails, right? This is my first time ever. Like, how do I kind of begin? What's the thought process here for someone who's never done this before?

Great question. I think of a couple of tips and tricks. So this is what I do when I first call someone. The first thing I ask is this, um, is this Stephanie? And she'll go, yes, who's speaking? And that's your first 15 seconds you just earned and you should work on really freaking nailing it. So Stephanie, Daniel here. I noticed something that you could not say unless you spent manual time looking into Stephanie. Daniel here noticed you're hiring a handful of SDRs in your Denver office. I'm running a company called Autobound that helps SDRs write personalized emails with AI. I think we can be pretty helpful here. Can I pick your brain for a few minutes? And that's like your, that's I think the most important part of your message where it's like relevance tied back to value prop. And then be nice about it. Like I wouldn't be too assumptive saying like, Do you have time to speak this Thursday? I might instead say, would love to hear if this is an issue you're having. Are you open to chatting for a few minutes? As you're opening. So first, perfect that, get some idea of what you'll say next. Call 10 people, see what happens, and just start flushing out like different parts of the conversation, how you can be better at responding and asking questions. A lot will sort itself out from your first call to your 100th. Other tips would be, once you're more into the conversation, try not asking— try to refrain from asking yes or no questions. Ask open-ended questions and stick to trying to maintain credibility. So like Stephanie, I used to work in sales myself for 5 years. Like I know the pain. You've already established like now you know the issues she's dealing with a bit more closely. We're helping other companies just like yours solve for super spammy sounding emails and like low open, low reply rates, missed quota. I guess I would then shift back into a yes or no question. Like, is that an issue you're facing as well? Helps build credibility while you're doing some of the qualification. Yeah. And then just keep iterating from there. Like you're gonna hear like, oh, we already use X, Y, and Z tool, or we don't have any budget. You'll hear these objections. So I would try to also perfect. Like, I'd create this document. Here's the 15-second intro blurb. Here's the 20-second thing I tend to say after. I'm gonna get asked one of these 3 questions, and here's my response based off each one. It's this kind of framework. You'll, you'll figure it out. You just have to put the time in.

Awesome, there you go, Stephanie. You now have an entire framework on how to begin. Yeah, so folks, it's been 45 minutes. Daniel's answered a ton of questions. So Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. I love this format because I think it really kind of got to what the audience wanted to learn and hear. So thank you so much for taking out the time to be here with us. Folks, I know you guys are already showing him some love. If you could let him know, the emojis are right down there. Awesome, you're getting a ton of hearts, thumbs up. Yeah, those are great.

I've never had so many emojis before. Awesome. What you can do to help me out, FI group, is go try out Autobound and you'll get a handful of automated onboarding emails once you've signed up. You can opt out if you like. But in at least one, we ask for feedback in like a super short survey. So we're still figuring out our product and go-to-market, as is everybody else here. So I would love to have you guys sign up, try it out, let me know how it works. We're working on making it better as well. I put my LinkedIn URL into here too, so it'd be great to connect there as well.

Oh, cool. Perfect. Awesome, guys. So you heard Daniel, sign up for Autobound. You can hit him up on LinkedIn as well, talk to him, get to, you know, maybe he could help you out with something. So Daniel, thank you so much for joining us. And thank you folks for joining us. If you wanna learn more about FI, go to fi.co. And yeah, we are pretty active on social media as well. If you have any questions for us, you can hit us up there.

Thanks everybody.