S2E1 | Dropping the Agency Label & Signal-Based Enablement with Alfredo Talib & Spencer Tahil

Guys, welcome back. This one is probably gonna be a more relaxed conversation with my good friend Alfredo. So welcome to the podcast Behind the Growth. And yeah, we're both making pretty much fundamental shifts to our operating models in both of our agencies. And I would actually like to say that neither one of us like the word agency. So Alfredo, I'll let you introduce yourself and kick us off.

Yeah, for sure. Thank you so much for having me here. My name is Alfredo and I have my own agency, although we're, we're gonna try to avoid using that word, but on paper I have an agency and I do go-to-market mostly I want to call it like a Claygency, like everybody calls it. So it's mostly going to be outbound automations in regards for B2B companies to generate more leads, automate their business, and all those important pieces that nowadays are fundamental. I've been doing this for quite some time, always been in the automation space, and a few years back when I saw Clay for the first time, I fell in love and that's where my story began pretty much. And that's also how I met Spencer Tahil. So I worked at a previous agency where I met Spencer Tahil, and then from there we kind of like just got to know each other. That's just in general, like one big thing I love with this space, and I hope Spencer agrees on, is that it's one of the first spaces I see where competitors love each other kind of thing, where it's like the pie is so big, but everybody knows each other. It's like a big family. And I love that because I'm also on like the Tuesday Triggers group, which is pretty degenerate. And even like SaaS Yacht Club and all these WhatsApp groups where it's like thousands of people helping each other. It's like, hey guys, I just landed a client. Could you help me with this? And they're like, yeah, for sure. Just do this, this, and that. And it's so amazing as a culture to have because most Founders, even if they have a co-founder or anything, they're kind of lonely because they're like working as digital nomads, not going to the office and having other people you could just share journey. Like I made so many friends, of course, like you included, like on the top tier level that you make them without even seeing them physically. You know, I saw my first physical guy like in January, like he came to visit me, shout out to Phil. But basically he's another agency owner, Italian. He's been traveling around the world, like Portugal, Thailand and everything. He just came to visit and it was so fun because I like saw a tangible person, which was crazy. Moving back to us, in my opinion, the market is moving very fast. There are people that are shouting the word bubble and like internet bubble, crypto bubble and whatever, like clay bubble. And in general, that's normal when there's a fast growing market. So the thing in my opinion spread like gasoline with fire because there was this need for companies to generate pipeline, but with the difficulty of generating it, meaning the typical example I like to give people is like, Facebook ads where if I had an e-commerce, if I had a local business, I wouldn't use ads at all. But the second I used them, I realized, wow, I have an acquisition channel now. B2C baby. And for B2B, it was never that easy because you couldn't put like a fricking billboard on the highway and your target audience isn't there. You couldn't do this, you couldn't do that. You can do a bunch of things. And there were some players in the market doing cold email. There were some players doing stuff, but never in a systematic way that made sense that you could analyze data, do stuff and process, you know? So the fact that cold email started becoming a thing, cold calling, and then Clay came out, which is whenever everybody asks me like, what is Clay? I don't know, you have, uh, like, like a one-liner for Clay, but I just say, imagine Zapier and Google Sheets had a baby. That's it. That's what I say.

Interesting. Yeah, I definitely think like Clay, I mean, that's a really good way of putting it. I describe Clay in my own words as the first-to-market AI-powered spreadsheet.

Yep.

Which is basically not a bad place to be. I mean, it is like Google Sheets and Zapier have a baby. I don't know if you were, you were still automating like on Google Sheets with Zapier, like when a row gets updated, then send down and then update this row. And then when the row gets updated, pull another Zap webhook and stuff like, were you doing that as well?

I was. And the biggest nightmare was that the best one was n8n for looping as well, like looping stuff. Zapier didn't have a loop feature that was kind of like comprehensive and didn't let you go back in your flows. 'Cause I tried all of them. So, you know, it's kind of sick. Like the AnyN then for me was kind of the best one, but at the same time it was not like super beginner friendly at the beginning. And I'm talking about before it exploded with the agents. Like, I want to say I'm an OG user, you know, I used it like probably like, I don't want to say like 4, 5 years ago. I don't even know, as soon as it came out kind of thing. But yeah.

I think like it's really interesting to think because like when I think of, uh, like AI automation agencies, there's only like a few people that actually come to mind. I mean, there's probably 4. Let me name them. You, Joe Hugh from Workflows Company, Ricardo Vandra from Upliftive Consulting, and then, oh my God, it's going to piss me off. It's going to piss a lot of people off that I'm not saying their name. But yeah, those 3, I would say like you 3 are like my go-to. I'm like, hey, have you guys like done this with MCPs and stuff like that? And I was just talking to Ricardo yesterday actually. But I definitely think it's, it's this AI-powered kind of like go-to-market is going to take center stage. And I think Clay just kind of just brought it to the consumer market. I do think that there's a huge problem with like people say that they can use a certain tool and they're like, hey, we're Clay experts, hey, we're N8N experts, and then they can't execute. And I think that this like, this is a big problem right now. And I think a lot of people don't know what to look for and they don't know how to ask the right questions when they're hiring somebody. It's not like we're all garbage, but like, come on, we're all in the garbage boat together, right? It's just how bad is it smelly?

I mean, I agree with you on that. In my opinion, it's like, There's the shiny object syndrome, especially when it's like new markets. And my philosophy that I tell clients, I tell people in the team and everything is anybody, even like a monkey, could press buttons on a screen. But what happens before that is what makes a good per— like a good professional versus like anybody. It's like I could learn how to do Facebook ads, I could learn how to make a clay table, but what happens before that is fundamental. It's what— it's like the 90%. So like another example is like even AI copy. Uh, let's say that you want to use AI to brainstorm some copy ideas. You could use it, but you need to give it suggestions and what you want as an output because you know what you want, not because some random stuff, and then it starts spitting out a 9-step newsletter for your audience and it calls it cold email with full of emojis, bold characters and everything. You kind of know what you want.

I would actually, I would actually put a hot take in here and I would say there's this guy, his name is Pablo. Big shout out to Pablo. I met him at a different agency when we were working together in the United States. I would put $1,000 on the fact that Pablo can send a better cold email campaign using his skills and all of his knowledge from sending cold emails for the past 10 years with no Clay or anything like this against 10 Clay users that are, you know, mid-market, uh, you know, expertise using Clay. I think that he would have higher conversions.

I agree with you. Actually, funny thing, I spoke with Arnold from Breakcold and, um, Arno, I think. Yeah. I, uh, yeah. So yeah, I, I butchered it, but Basically you was like the biggest clients that close like the biggest deals and everything are ones who send manual, you know, because they just research every prospect. And that's kind of your go-to when you, you know, talking about your specialty, because you also came over my podcast and it was the fact of bigger companies don't need like a cold email sequence or something. They need like relevant signals. They need to make sure that their pipeline is always on track. They're doing the right follow-ups, they're giving priority to the right leads, and it's mostly gonna be signal-based. And then there's gonna be manual outreach from the salespeople. Like that's the, let's say top tier, but I mean, it's relative, like top tier in terms of like if you're selling an enterprise product, huge ticket price, lower TAM, that's kind of the approach you want to go to. But, you know, I mean, you're the master in it. I won't even speak about that topic.

I don't think I'm a master, but thank you. I definitely see a lot more enabling, uh, uh, uh, and I'm just like vomiting. You see, like piece of trash right here. Um, but I definitely see a lot more enablement plays rather than full sequencing plays going on now. And I think that was not the case, I don't know, back in like August and like, you know, Q3 '25, like a lot of people just wanted to like spam blast and you know, that's fine. I guess if you want to like volume equals results, fine. Like keep believing in that. What I build now is like, I'm not building the infrastructure to be self-sequencing and it's not by my design actually. It's by the prerequisites of the clients that I'm working with right now. We have 6 clients and like I would say 4 or 5, 5 of them are running enablement plays where I'm actually pushing in all of the context, pushing into HubSpot, pushing into Salesforce, like all of these custom signals. And then it's up to them and me to strategize what is the cadence of the refresh of those fields? Is it every day? Is it run on a cron job? Is it run instantly? Is it not updated at all? Is it denoted to be updated by an SDR or a BDR or an AE? And then we designed the dashboard inside of Salesforce for them to be able to interact with the data that they need. Because like not everybody needs to see the same data. And what I've just been noticing is that these mid-market teams and these enterprises don't want fully written black box emails going out. They don't want to tarnish their name. They don't want to tarnish their— like they have the brand name, they just swing it around, right? Like they want to make people more efficient. It's not about not adding headcount. I was going to make a post about this. It's like, we help you scale without adding headcount. This is such a bullshit, like, tagline. I think the tagline is really We help you scale by making your headcount more efficient or something along those lines. I like, I really, and I truly believe in that because now I can take a team of 5 AEs and 5 SDRs and just do all of their event pre-work for them in an instant. And then, okay, all you do is you give me a list of events that you guys are going to match your industry. Okay, I use Surfer to go and find everything, do a keyword search, find all the companies. You guys dump all the contacts and companies into the CRM if you want, process it all. Boom. It's updated right then. Give it as fa— as fast as the APIs can fire, probably in less than 2, you know, 2 to 6 minutes, you're gonna have a fully updated event attendees list with like pre-written notes that are personal that your rep can just scan through, be like, yeah, that looks good. Copy, paste, go. Or just press a button and send it.

That's really cool.

That— I feel like that's what a lot of people are really going after. I haven't seen that strategic shift. I haven't seen it up until around 6 months ago. And maybe I'm in a bubble for do— for building systems at like that scale. We're talking like 2,000 accounts, 2,000,000 that this like enterprise-level company has targeted. They don't want to talk to anybody else. So, you know, like there's not much sequencing you could do with that. There's not much. I can send a million emails a month. I know people that are doing it. It's just a matter of like, what's the, what's the point? Like you already know who you want to talk to.

I'm sending 4 with one, which is crazy because of the TAM.

4 million?

Yeah, I swear I could show you offline. I could share my screen. Swear.

What are they targeting? Like Shopify stores?

No, it's like any little brick and mortar store in the US. I have 25,000 mailboxes in my account. Shout out to PlusVibe. They know me and they hate me. Like I had messages from the support saying, I have a, I can share you a screenshot. I have like a support channel message that says, yes, the platform is slow because you, nobody ever tried to upload a million contacts in a CSV to our campaigns. I'm like, yeah, man, but I need it.

And I mean, but are they getting results?

Yeah, they're, I mean, they're generating a shit ton of leads. I mean, the thing is the offer is very commodity, so it's like the volume was the only solution. They're like, they're doing money basically. It's like lending.

I feel like, but the infrastructure matches the scenario and the solution matches the strategy.

That's, yeah, that's the point. Like that's the whole different spectrum compared to going like surgeon level detail where you're really going after that specific signal. And actually going back to what you said about, I really like what you said about the headcount because that's a very popular phrase in the industry. I also saw the whole like different spectrum of it where there was one guy I saw on the website and it was like, hire me to fire your, like your team. That was, that was a bit too much, you know, bold claim.

Yeah.

Big bold claim. But nowadays, like I felt that it kind of goes in a spiral. So it's like something new happens. Everybody's like super polite in their messages and everything. Then they go, they get saturated. People start to say, fuck you and get on the call, do this, do that. And then people get bored. And that's why, like, give you an example, like in Italy, if you are more formal with your emails, especially if you're writing to 30+ years old people, it works like tremendously good. People want respect in cold email in Italy.

So no ciao bella.

No ciao bella, no mamma mia, nothing like that. They like, they want them to give you like, you know, the, how do you say in like in English, you and you is the same thing, but in Italian we have like the, I'm giving you as a like sir kind of thing. And it's like more of like a respect tone.

I had a big problem with this. Somebody emailed me in Czech actually, and they, they They informally, first of all, they translated the message into Czech. Second of all, they translated it into the wrong form in the wrong tense. And you know, me and my limited Czech language ability, I read it. I was like, aha, yeah, they're my friend. And I was like, but this is a cold email. But, and then I was like, and then I responded and I was like, dude, you gotta, you gotta localize a little bit better because just because my profile location says I'm in Prague doesn't mean that I, first of all, that I even speak Czech. I'm trying. I do. I could read the whole email. It just like wasn't relevant. And, and I responded. I said, hey, here's the advice that I would give you. And we actually got on a call and I helped them fix this campaign. It was, it was really funny. Um, I was trying to reverse sell him, be like, hey, you can hire me as a consultant. So I just did 30 minutes for him, but he didn't end up hiring me, which was really funny.

You wanna, you want me to reveal a secret? I wanted to post about it, but I'm basically booking 6 to 10 inbound calls through this without sending emails. I just re-pitch back. Whoever cold emails me, like cold DMs me, cold emails me or anything. Because I'm like on top of my, I don't want to say agency service, but on top of my service for this year, I set myself to build SaaS. So we have a SaaS that is going out already. And that SaaS is perfect for anybody who does outreach. So instead of replying back to the email, I'm like, cool, let's get on a call. Tell me more about what you're selling. And then I just challenge them in the call. That's the process. You just challenge them, put them in a shitty point where they're like, fuck, what the fuck am I saying? I'm selling this product, but this guy just told me I was wrong. I mean, what the fuck? You just put them in a tough spot, of course, in respect to them and knowing what you're saying. And then once they feel kind of like them with their pain points, you pitch your solution. You're like, you know what, your solution is amazing. I could get on a demo. Let's try it out. But I also want to tell you about my solution just because, you know, you seem a cool guy, you do everything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You get them on a demo on yours and man, like I started to release my SaaS and I went above 30 companies already signed up.

Hell yeah.

And already have my first case study. Yeah. From a big company. So that's cool. And I still have to launch and everything. And most of it comes either through referrals, of course, but through inbound-led outbound in the real term though.

And you're also, and I'm also looking at one of the hosts of Clay Club, Milan.

Exactly, baby. 10th of February, everybody. You know?

Yeah. So, dude, that's awesome. I mean, I feel like this is a good question for us to explore because I feel like we operate fundamentally with the same mindset, but I, I think like on paper we have different agreements. Like, whereas I position as, as like fractional advisory and like more on the strategic side with the background in revenue operations, I feel like the shift is coming for both of us. And by, probably by the time this is released, um, I would've already formalized like the repositioning and kind of like the soft rebrand. But yeah, dude, I am getting rid of, I'm deleting the word agency everywhere that I see it, you know, like all of our Slack, like I don't refer to any of it in, in calls. Unfortunately, people are looking for GTME agencies, like go-to-market engineers, and I don't think it's a good title because it's so broad. It's niche, but it's very broad.

It's very broad, but it's niche for the ones who don't know much about it. So it's like, I'm like, coincidence is I'm also pivoting slightly, uh, and I'll talk more about it soon. Uh, but I agree with your point. It's like as if the market is moving, but The guys who are actually like the companies who actually have the capabilities to invest are kind of going on the longer tail. So let's say, I mean, not like to be humble, but let's say we're on the first or second piece of the train that is moving forward. And unfortunately the rest of the market is trying to catch up, but when it catching up, you see a bunch of saturated stuff along the way because they're lagging. Not, not the people, like the companies getting the things, because there's a lot of, like, I understand them completely because there's a lot of misinformation. Like even me or you, if we were to hire a SEO specialist or something, we wouldn't know anything like that. We would be on the back of the train. We wouldn't even be on the train. But basically for every market, there is this thing where the market moves in a direction. And unfortunately, because the majority of the market is speaking about the same stuff, because they're on like the center of the train, let's say, there's a lot of misinformation and like saturated stuff, seeing that you're buying as a consumer, like as a company, the right item, person, service, or anything. But at the same time, you're not realizing that there's already progress in that and things are moving forward. So that's why like a pivot is excellent. What you're doing is amazing because the companies that I also see most success with in terms of clients are the ones that don't treat me as like a vending machine. It's like they don't want me to put money, get leads, get money. I mean, of course I use my own service for myself and it works. Okay. That's why usually they say they're like, if it works for you, then it should work for us. No, because there's a lot of other stuff. It's not just a matter of that service because let's say if you're, you don't have a landing page, you don't have a website, your LinkedIn profile doesn't have a banner and Those are other things that may seem dumb or like very detailed, but they're not excuses for my like underperformance or anything, but rather are those things you need to keep on check in 2026, you know?

Yeah, I think it's like, uh, I described it in a few other podcasts and I describe it online. I'm very vocal. I, I stopped giving a shit and I feel like that has garnered— and actually I don't even think it has I don't have to think about it. I've seen the results. I went in a year and a half, a year and 7 months, I went from like 500 LinkedIn followers to like 5,100 organically, like no ads, no LinkedIn outbound, no nothing. And I just like, I didn't start shitposting. I was like more hesitant to do it at first, but nowadays I just stopped caring. And I feel, you know, there is confidence to it. I do feel like value is being provided all around by a lot of good people in industry, but like today I went on site and they should, they were like, oh yeah, Olivier referred us to talk to you. And like, now this is our third conversation. And I asked them, I was like, well, why did he refer us to talk to each other? And they're like, said you were a good partner that we should talk.

Cool.

Awesome. Right? Like, that's awesome. Like we all know each other. And like you said earlier, I don't feel like, I personally don't feel threatened by like 60% of, I would say I don't really even feel threatened by like 90% of the market are competitors, I actually kind of feel more built up.

Mm-hmm.

Technically, they're competitors, but we're kind of comrades in this situation. I don't know. I don't really know how to put this into words. I've kind of stalled this. I'm sorry.

I mean, in my opinion, how I see it is that let's say if I'm fighting for a prospect, and then there's another agency fighting for a prospect, there is no point in me like destroying my relationship with that agency because I might spoil that relationship, but Maybe that client may go to some other dude. So I just pulled the relationship for no freaking reason, you know?

What I've noticed is that people that have said no to me, I get pretty hyper-qualified, like, referrals. This is, like, where 80% of our business comes from right now. Like, very hyper-qualified referrals. Like, you work with me directly. This is, like, the quality over quantity that I'm always talking about. But, like, I've talked to people on a Tuesday. Like, a few months ago, I talked to somebody on a Tuesday, and by Wednesday, I had an intro email from that networking call to a different founder that he got off the phone phone with, and he is like, yeah, you guys should talk. Like, you guys are looking for each other exactly. You guys have the details, here are the details. And then we ended up signing the referral because it was just, it was seamless. Everything was pre-scoped. They wanted strategy, they needed execution, they got both. Right. And, uh, I do feel like when you make it easy for people to buy your services or for people to understand what you do at that 1,000-foot view and also like 3-foot view, becomes a lot easier. The problem that I have is that there's so much crap floating in the market, and it's not even that there's crap. It's— there's— it's undereducation. I don't think it's miscommunication. And I'm going back on what I said before, because I always try to say it's like, oh, like people are miscommunicating the capabilities of like the platforms. And then I bite myself in the, in the, in the ass. I was like, actually, I'm wrong. They're right. And stuff like this. I'll correct myself from what I said before. There's a lot of younger talent in the go-to-market landscape. And I think it makes it very, very hard as a buyer to be able to figure out who actually knows their shit. And I think this is very hard to convey. You know, I, I coach students, you mentor students, you consult for people as well. And from your side, what do you think about like the buying situation? Of course, like your customers, what are the things that they're looking for usually?

I mean, I want to say that when deciding on a partner, there's two things that usually happen. So first thing is case studies. So they want to see case studies, they want a rapport, but even those ones like don't represent 100% of the reality because as we know, like I could have a case study in one industry and unless I'm only verticalized in that industry, it's kind of like the stocks. Like you're not buying because it's going to go down and up and blue, you know, it's like it helps till a certain point, but it just helps to know the world that you're not a stranger. First of all, not for the results. Then the other thing is because there's a lot of like paradox of choice and stuff, people start to get like, it's not monopoly, but it's like the opposite where it's like, like the guy who has the purchasing power has too many options and you could just like choose the price pretty much kind of thing. The typical example happens in like big supermarket chains that go to farmers and like just undercut them in price just because they're the only guys. And what I'm trying to say with this is that because they don't know what to buy, they're like, okay, let's run a test. Let's start with free. Let's do this, let's do that. Because their only risk in that situation is the money they're investing, right? And man, I've been flooded with people who buy courses of like not even reputable people in the Clay space or in the GTM space. And they're like, I will get you 10 meetings a day in the next 30 days, or I'll give you $10,000. Like those kinds of emails, they're like too much, you know?

I love me a good guarantee.

Yeah, but I mean, there's guarantees and guarantees, right? There's like, you would guarantee like I'm just imagining like a certain outcome, right? So a certain workflow signal structure in place rather than—

Yeah, I actually just had a conversation about this. I've restructured my contractual agreements and maybe this is like TMI, but I actually tied their desired state to a variable payout.

Okay.

So like if their main focus is, and it's been really well received and I didn't realize that it was going to be like asked for, for 3 of the new clients. We just onboarded 3 in January. Crazy. And all 3 of them have similar niche terminology. For instance, like one of them was very focused on, on the HubSpot Salesforce integration and SDFC connection and how that ties into like Cargo and Clay. And I said, okay, like what is your desired state? And you know, I did my interviews with the VP. I did my interviews with the account executive and the marketing operations person. And they just said overall, like, I contained it. I triangulated the problem and I said like, okay, so you guys have 18,000 contact records inside of HubSpot, but only around like 12,000 companies that you guys want to do business with. Like, don't you guys want to have better quality data in, in HubSpot so there's less noise? Don't you, wouldn't you rather have all of the buying committees mapped to those target accounts and then work backwards for like account-based marketing plays? And I brought it up to the VP and after I did my interviews before we went under contract and they said, yeah, that's actually really good discovery. Like, what's your plan about it? And I said like, well, why don't I, why don't we tie that desired state so that I have a piece of the pie and like, let me put some skin in the game. And the second I said, let me put some skin in the game, like they know I'm, I'm fucking invested. And I don't know, I just, I, I work with only a handful of clients. So I said to them, I was like, well, if you guys have all of the target accounts in your target addressable market and in your service addressable market and all every single one of those accounts of those 12,000 are scored on a scale of 1 to 100, have at least 5 buyer personas in the buying committee attached in on a record-to-record basis inside their CRM, and all of the custom signals are flowing both onto both record types on company and contact. Let's tie that to a variable in month 4. And they agreed to it along with the QLs and SQL handoffs, right? And like the total count if But that was like one of the desired states. Like that was something that they didn't even think of. So of course, like it's less overhead, but also like their success is my success. If I wanna do a good job, I'm incentivized to do a good job. And I, I, this is like a new model that we've been playing with. Mm-hmm. Um, rather than just saying like, yeah, pay me $10,000 a month or pay me $5,000 a month. Yeah. I don't want it to be exchanged. I want to have a partnership. And I think like that's the word that you said that like really stands out is When you're looking for the right partner, not for the right vendor. When you're looking for a vendor, I am not going to create a 25-page proposal for you if you're just looking for vendors. And that's, you know, that's just the scenario. I'm not in the business of making proposals. I'm in the business of working together and building cool shit. Let's do it.

Yeah, I mean, totally. That's a great point. I sometimes see that one of the biggest issues that especially like first, firsthand agency owners or in general, like businesses in general may face is that, like, especially when it's service-based, is like, what do I sell? Unless you have like only structured packages or structured services you're doing and that's it. But sometimes when you don't know what to sell, just ask more questions. It's like, that's what I do.

You know, just ask questions and shut up. Exactly.

Like my idol, like my teenage idol, which was Jordan Belfort. That's the reason why I studied economics and everything. Then I just stopped listening to him. Of course, I just stopped. Disclaimer, but he finally in the podcast gave the answer of how to sell the pen. And although in the movie he says like, I saw, I used to, you know, like people in Antarctica or I sell anything to anybody, you know, the thing he said is ask questions first. Do you use a pen? Because if you don't use a pen, you're not even in my market. A goal of a good salesperson is not selling something you don't need.

And, and that's why the very first actually article that ever got picked up that I wrote. Was by me and Cognizant, one of the data intelligence providers here in Europe. Honestly, really great shout out to their marketing team. Thank you so much because this propelled me so fast. They had like a marketing handbook and it was called Fix Your Funnel, Fix Your Funnel Handbook or whatever. And it was like 25 or something experts that had all given their opinion on like fixing your funnel. And the thing that I talked about was how to say no as fast as possible. And when you say no, you qualify because you're disqualifying. You're basically creating the netting between the bullshit of the hopefuls versus the great matches. And of course, like when— what the problem that I see on like on all of the younger companies is that they're so like, you know, pushed to get the demand and let's send 1.5 million, 4 million emails. I've never heard of anybody sending that many emails. That's a new record, Alfredo. But sending 4 million emails a month, right? Like generate the fucking demand, dude. And like, just be done with it. That they're not thinking about all of the time that they're gonna waste doing the qualification and paying a senior account executive to do that later on, right? And this is a huge problem. It's like people are not saying no. They don't ask the right qualifying questions. Even in my business, like, I've screwed up before where I'm like talking about something random, but like echoing like what my clients and I talk about, they told me, they're like, I asked the BDRs like, how do you feel like you're doing at your job? Do you feel like you're sending qualified prospects to the account executives? How— what does the handshake look like between market and you and you and the account executives? And that if they can't explain that process, dude, something's broken. And it was. And I went to the account executives and I did my interviews and I said, hey, listen, how do you think the quality is coming in? Are there things that you would love to change that you haven't given your feedback on in any documentation that we can improve the handshake on? And they gave me like a list and they're like, oh, like we want to ask these specific questions. Like we haven't had a chance to talk to the VP about this in our one-on-ones. Friends, like they didn't have time for us. Okay, cool. I'm, I'm here fractionally. Let's like, you know, let me put this boat forward. Can you give me a private document? And we move the needle, dude. And I, I feel like, um, when you say no early, even in like your business, becomes so much easier. Yeah. Like I'm not gonna create a proposal. You, you shouldn't waste your time. You're not in the bu— you're not in the business of, of serving everyone. Or maybe you are when you send 4 million emails a month. But like, I mean, it's a niche.

I mean, I said I, my early mistake was back in July, I started sending like 300,000 a month for myself only. Wanted to go like mass market. I was like scale, scale, scale, scale, scale. Then I kind of matured, let's say, compared to like before, which is a really cool part of the journey. But I mean, I get clients that it's pretty fun to send that many emails and like share my screen because like that, I want to stay with this client because most of my closing happens because I just share my screen, show like 25,000 emails and they're like, cool, send me a proposal. It's such a high effect. And sometimes I even joke with them. It's like, hey, I ain't no like, dropshipping Shopify guru. I'll just refresh the page in front of you. So just to show it's real, right? Actually, one thing I want to add is a big mistake I see, and this also hurts buyers, is that whenever you go to like a beginner, they may say yes and accommodate everything with unrealistic expectations just because they're beginners. And I like to give the example of like me and you owning a store and the client comes in, hey, could I buy a Coke? Yeah, sure. Oh, could you also give me a free water? Sure. Could you also, do you have like $10 in your cashier? Sure. How many Cokes are going to come tomorrow? 1,000. And then there's nothing. But that's kind of the example of like you as a professional, you should give like realistic expectations and be honest whenever you can. But at the same time, also know when to say no, but not just because you're a dick and like you're just trying to get money, but just because you're realistic. It's like a doctor, like you're a doctor. It's like, I don't go to a doctor and check my heart problem and say, hey, could I get a free scan? It's like, no, it's like a professional doctor would say like, yeah, the scan would be this much.

Well, unless you're in Europe and it's covered by health insurance, but yeah, you gotta wait 3 months for that. I think I always have this joke with my girlfriend, but I'm only one tax, I'm only one scam away from generational wealth. And it's, you know, I always have a laugh about it with her. I don't know. And she's like, yeah, but you're a good person. You should remember that. And I was like, well, yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's those ideas that are fun in our minds, but then if you think of the morals, if you think of how you're gonna—

it's terrible.

And the best part is one of my one of my like dear, dear mentors, like when I started freelancing back in the day, he told me that the same effort, if not more, needs to be taken for like the scamming and the criminal side that you might as well just have a legal business. It doesn't make fricking sense. It's pretty interesting because you need to like to make a proper, let's say scam. Like now I don't want to make a scam episode, but to make a proper scam, you need to study it. It takes hours and hours of time. Of course, your brain is full of dopamine, so you don't feel the time because you're like liking what you're doing. Easy money and whatever the fuck. But then you realize that, like, I have a friend, his family store got robbed. Okay. But the robbers, I don't know how they planned it. They just like entered 5 minutes and they left. Kind of a heist kind of thing. And I'm just imagining all the preparations those guys had to do to steal €800 from a cashier while the guy and his family was only worrying about the damages that happened to the shop rather than the fucking €800. He was like, man, if I met the thieves, I would've just given them the money and like not even bothered. But luckily insurance paid back. But just imagine those thieves that plan the heist for so much time just to get €800 out of it. You might as well just find a full-time job. I mean, think of that, right? You don't need— it's like sometimes like those people, I understand because they feel that they don't have any other escapes, which is cool. But if you have the brain and the capabilities, it's a lot easier for you to invest that time. The thing is it's less like it will give you less dopamine because once the honeymoon effect of opening a business ends, it's going to be shitty day to day. And that one is like kind of giving you, I mean, till a certain extent, uh, but it's like kind of what Elon Musk says. It's like you're eating a glass every morning or something like that. You're like, it's like you're eating a glass of water rather than a glass of water, like really glass.

But yeah, I think like it's really interesting though, because thinking back to this sketch, I don't know who did it. And there was like, this guy runs into us, uh, into the bank and he's like, I'm gonna rob you. And he has like a face mask on and the bank is like, Give me all— he's like, okay, we'll give you all the money. He's like, no, motherfucker, give me a job. And the guy, and he's like, and then he works there as like a security guy for like 45 years and he's like promoted to manager. And then a new robber comes in. He's like, get out of here.

It's like, it's like him and the friend discussing the plan. And it's like, I have this genius idea. It's Kid Field. We will rob them without knowing that they got robbed. And then the guy was like, man, it's called a job. Fuck off. You know?

No, I, I, it's just so funny. I like having conversations like this because it's just, I don't know, it's just like a whole reality shift away from business. I play video games with like my team and I play video games with Adam Andrzejewski, you know, if he ever gets on Discord, I'll play with him more. But I really feel like the camaraderie in our bubble is nice. And I, I know like, I don't wanna like overuse the, like this Clay bubble, but it is, it is a bubble. Like we all know each other and I, I went on site today to LeadsPicker HQ and like they opened their laptops. They're like, we're going to get like antiquated with the tool and the API calls, the docs and everything. And they both opened their laptops to LinkedIn and on the tram ride over there, I am not even joking. I saw like 10 LinkedIn posts and they opened their laptops and both of them have both of the LinkedIn posts and like we all see the same shit. It's hilarious. I mean, sad, but hilarious. And then I saw the CTO of HubSpot like posted tweet or something and she was talking about how go-to-market engineering, like she was like, rip cold email, enter Signals, and everybody's losing their shit. And like, here we are at the front of the train and now we've got the CTO of a multimillion billion dollar business, like coming into the fold. I think it's nice, but I think it's, I really hope it gets commoditized in a good way. I have a very big fear that at the velocity that the market is scaling right now, like our market is scaling, like all of the data's gonna be commoditized. It's just how big your wallet is and all of the talent is also going to be commoditized too. There's always going to be somebody that can do it cheaper than you. Right. Yeah.

I mean, now, now we're kind of facing the opposite where I remember back in the day, like go-to-market engineers, you would find like 10 job posts, probably less worldwide. Now it's crazy because a lot of companies are hiring, but there's not good enough talent out there. That's also one problem, right? Because it's like either they're too good and they have their own agency or they'll get hired for a crazy amount of like salary and then they'll drop off. There's a lot A lot of like, I don't want to say like, I don't want to make like everything generalized and make stereotypes, but what I'm trying to say is that we're in a situation where currently it's just like the job market is not as commoditized as saying like a web developer yet.

You know, I think you're, I think exactly what's happening, what has happened to the web development industry is going to happen with the go-to-market industry actually. And it's really funny because Jonathan, the guy that's full-time with me, he's running operations at Growth of Mind. He owned a web development firm and he is like, yeah, I'm selling this. The bubble's about to pop. And then he sold his whole agency and came on board with me. And now we're going to, and now like a year and a half later, we're seeing the almost the same effects unfold. Like I think we're about 3 to 6 months away from it happening, but Claude Code, and it ends, done. It's like you can build a whole system based on Claude skills. You don't even have to open Clay. More power is going into everyday consumers, but The problem I have with it is that everyday consumers are really dumb and they're saturating the market.

I mean, I agree with you on that. And the thing is that the, I mean, the issue is mostly them, but at the same time, it's also that there isn't like much, at least until a certain extent in the options that buyers have is like the differentiation, what the buyer can see is like practically nothing in terms of difference because they're all talking about the same stacks, same tools, same everything. So on paper, it's as if like they're all the same, but for a buyer, but then like you're in it, you know that if you see some random dude flexing about his open rates on his emails, which in Italy is very popular on like big agencies that do go-to-market, they just like start shouting to the winds, hey, I got a 60% reply rate, uh, open rate, which if you're doing it with criteria and you know that you're gonna dedicate a fraction of your mailboxes, let them burn just to test or whatever. I never experienced that, but cool. I know there are some tools that are just focused on that, but there, there are those little things that you that are in it know that things are not doing right. You probably, if you see the wrong stuff on HubSpot, your eyes will pop. Probably you want to like break the screen or something.

I want to kill whoever made it beforehand. It's easier for me to just delete the whole instance and start over, honestly, in most cases.

Another thing is in general, I like to take this as my motto of life is always be yourself, never show the mask. Because I see this in client relationships, in hiring, in everything. Like when I was like applying for jobs, I most likely had a good percentage of like job acceptance rate just because I was myself from the beginning. And I'm I'm speaking about this because I used to never be myself. I don't wanna make like cry story now, but I was like a very shy guy in the past and I never actually expressed my own feeling. I mean, not my own feeling, but my own like way of thinking to the world just because I thought nobody gave a fuck. But actually they give a fuck because you're original, you're yourself, you're everything. And people like that. There's no surprises.

People buy from personality or people buy from personalities that they trust and rationalize later.

Don't say people buy people or else you may get arrested for human trafficking.

I said people buy from people. I'm kidding.

I'm kidding. Yeah, no, I know, I know, I know. But just, I was ready for the people buy people. I was like, man, clip it, clip it, clip it, chat. You could ask the editor to put some sirens or something.

Oh God, don't do that. Okay, so I think time for us to wrap up. Alfredo, what is one piece of advice other than be yourself that you would give to somebody that's entering the space?

My biggest advice is, first of all, do what you like. So if you like this kind of stuff and you feel that you're in love with it, you're not just chasing the money or whatever, love it, do it. And the biggest advice is understand the logic of things and why you're doing them rather than the stacks or whatever. Just try to remember it by heart and, and then logic and copy, but that's just logic itself. So logic is what dominates everything because cloud code may come up, some kind of like new spaceship technology may come up, you know how to use it. It. That's the important thing. You already know how to use it without touching it because you know what it does and how it can help you. Like, that's the advice. It's not, oh, let me check the latest 10 latest softwares that are used and oh wow, okay. And you know, it's not how it works. Like, those are helpful to know what tools to try, and R&D is a huge part of it. Like, I invest part of the money always in testing new tools, but it's mostly all the logic or else just burnt money, burnt everything, and Awesome.

Where can people find you?

Tinder? No, I'm kidding. I'm not like that. On LinkedIn at Alfredo Talib, T-A-L-I-B, or just simply misspelling Corner with two Rs at the end, corner.io. I also have a company page, so that's my main channel. And then I have a podcast, which I'm going to start blasting more and more episodes for this year, called the Cornercast, also that one with the misspelled R, just because when I was registering the company, I just by mistake pressed the second one. I'm kidding.

I believe it. I totally believe that.

Yeah. Crazy guy. Uh, I mean, I thank you for having me here. It's been a great talk.

Yeah. And, uh, yeah, super fun too. So, uh, yeah, let's catch up and show me those 4 mil numbers soon.

Yeah. I mean, we could just cut this. I'll show you real quick, but also one thing for also Spencer's guests, we have to host a fricking webinar soon, which will rock the world. We'll just give like a live demo of something we don't know yet.

Let's do it. We'll pocket shark.

So at least no talking, just showing. So people could criticize us saying, you guys don't know anything.

Bring it, bring it, bring on the hate.

The MMA ring, octagon.

Oh God, the promotion.

Thank you so much, man.

Yeah, dude, thanks for coming on. See you guys.