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Practical Go-to-Market guidance specifically for B2B software and service companies between $5MM-$50MM in revenue.
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#24: Outbound Innovation: Tech Sales and Strategy with SaaS Expert Jesse
Happy Friday PROs, and welcome to our second edition of Outbound May!
Unlock the secrets to revolutionizing your outbound sales strategy as we sit down with Jesse, the bootstrap founder and SaaS sales guru with 15 years under his belt.
He's here to pull back the curtain on scaling a tech company without the safety net of institutional funding, navigating a saturated software market, and leveraging the democratization of technology to compete with the big dogs.
Jesse's LI
Lead Magic
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I think you burned me last time when I did my air guitar version of her outro.
Jesse:I was waiting for it again. I'm not doing that again. You're just piano with that? How am I burning you again? Just by complaining you?
Andy:burned me once, talking about movie critics, that's true.
Gary:Welcome to the GTM Pro Podcast, your essential audio resource for mastering go-to-market discussions in the boardroom. Here we share insights for revenue leaders at B2B software and services companies, especially those with less than $50 million in revenue. Why? Because the challenges faced by companies of this size are unique. They are too big to be small and too small to be big. This dynamic pushes revenue leaders into executive leadership without a lot of help or support. We are here to provide that support. Your journey to boardroom excellence starts now. All right, well, we are super excited. This is part two of our series on Outbound, and we're going to just be blown away here by the technical infrastructure of how to do this right. Jesse's been a long career in this space and we also appreciate that he's a data geek just like us, so we're going to learn a lot here today. So, jesse, welcome to the GTM Pro. Really great to have you here, thank you.
Jesse:Appreciate you inviting me.
Gary:Well, let's just for context, just provide a little background for us, the origin story of LeadMagic and what led you there, yeah.
Jesse:So uh, spent about 15 years in the sort of sas. Sales went up to kind of head of sales, vp sales kind of level. I did rep for a while. You know, enterprise rep did fortune 50, sold to mid-market, sold to different areas, and really I really liked the operational side of it as well. But I would always use it to sort of get an advantage in sales. I wasn't like looking to be the next RevOps person of the company, but I started to do that. And then, as I was getting more into the systems, I started to really get into like, hey, how do I really optimize channels like email? How do I optimize data? How do I do this? And I just felt there was a lot of handcuffs on me when I was working for companies because I couldn't really do whatever I wanted with the technology. It was sort of siloed with an ops team or siloed with an SDR manager, marketing leader.
Jesse:So I wanted to build my own company, built my own SaaS products, did that, ended up leaving the SaaS world for my own stuff. And then now I just run a bootstrap profitable startup software company here and it's been good and we like to compete against some of the bigger players out there.
Gary:It's pretty cool, yeah, awesome. Well, we appreciate the bootstrap story. I think so many. It's funny what comes around goes around. It's like all of a sudden a lot of people get religion on capital, efficient growth and the realization that, for the founders, you can actually have quite a nice outcome without ever raising a nickel of institutional money. And when you raise that institutional money, do it when you're ready to put rocket fuel on an already good engine.
Jesse:So, yeah, you make you make a great point there. Yeah, you make a great point there, and I think there's some interesting trends where there are bootstrap founders that are starting profitable technology companies, and they haven't raised a lot of capital or any. So it's exciting times now, because the playing field has been leveled now that there's not as much. You can't just grow at all costs, though.
Gary:Yeah, well, this is a bit of a tangent, but I actually commented on a post I saw recently that if you look back at the last 10 years, the SaaS era was you come in and you develop, you find a hole, you develop a point solution, you raise some money, you grow to a certain level and there was always a bigger fish to come in and swallow you or merge you together or what have you.
Gary:But now, as you come into any one, of those situations we're in the era of software saturation and so now, as you're trying to start any point solution, maybe there's some AI exceptions there, but for the most part we have more software choices than we can possibly deal with as a buyer, and we have a lot of legacy or incumbent platforms that, because of that saturation, have stalled out on growth. So where do they go? They start buying wallet share by the point solutions around them or they start developing their own, and because for them it's additive revenue, they immediately drop the price by 75%, and so suddenly you're competing with the very same platforms that were your integration partners now offer your solution for 75% of the price. I'm like you're dead in the water Now.
Gary:It could be a great outcome for you if you're properly capitalized. But if you shot for the moon and you made it to $10 million in revenue on a $100 million valuation, there is no platform company that's going to pay $100 million for you. They'll pay $10, but then you're wiped out by your pref stack. So it's a really interesting time as founders get in today and really think about what is the game we're playing and how are the cards stacked and for whom? Anyway, sorry for the tangent.
Jesse:No, I mean you make some great points there. I mean that's some of the things that got me there and I think you used to have to be. Another area that I saw is you used to have to be a real technical founder to really get one of those solutions up and running. You needed the efficiency of your own time and now that really, I mean all the code is public now, right, like you can get on GitHub today and you can launch your own SaaS product. If you really wanted to, right, you could probably have it up and running in a few hours with a VA from you know somewhere where the cost structure is different, and I think people aren't really realizing how easy it actually is. I mean most of the you know I write a lot of code in chat GPT, right, like it's not that hard, you know. So it's just changed, it's leveled it out and I think you're seeing a lot of revenue professionals now that are jumping into it. So I think that's a really interesting byproduct of what you just mentioned.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, and that's actually a good segue to that same tenacity and creativity as we think about outbound. So we talked a little bit before we started hit the record button on some of the things that we need to think about, one of which definitely is email deliverability. And we say that we almost say it with a caveat, because our audience is likely CEOs of middle, lower middle market companies, revenue leaders, and for a long time, email deliverability was one of those things that somebody in the technical team took care of. He just didn't even think about it, but today it's as important we should obsess over it as much as we do the LinkedIn algorithm or any of those other things. It is literally the gatekeeper to our information getting in and particularly, as you pointed out before around us, getting into the enterprise. So we want to dig into that.
Gary:Then, a few weeks ago, you did a post around you know orgs that are getting the most out of AI, and there was this idea of the assistant and then the four parts like the language models, memory, knowledge and tools, and so we really want to think over, I guess, think with first principles. If I'm sitting here today, a lot of lower middle market companies had SDRs or thought about SDRs or had experience with SDRs the whole you know spam cannon version of that for a long time and in the efficiency area many of them got rid of it entirely. But now they're realizing, when I'm a slave to either paid or the algorithm or communities, that I really do need to get back and direct access to my prospective buyer, especially when I have a hundred different competitors in my particular category. But instead of going back to building the SDR wave, how would we do that today? I want to cover that.
Andy:Yeah, the way I'm thinking about that is instead of building an iron lung to cure polio, right? What's the vaccine If we were to be starting from scratch with this model? What are those aspects of those three areas in AI that you would use as foundational elements today, as opposed to just automating aspects of an old model? Which we see a lot of people even posting about, but it seems like you definitely have insight on what you would do foundationally using those tools.
Jesse:Yeah, I think where I'm getting the most lift right now is the fact that I'm able to combine. I think really where it starts is the API, sort of the API economy. There's an API for everything out there now and what we've been able to do is we've been able to harness that, really that programmatic layer. Now, if you're just kind of like you know the uninitiated if you will, I guess is the best way I could put it is if you're just using the tools and you're sort of relying on what you're getting from ChatGPT. There's a lot of things in ChatGPT or whatever you know that you're doing with OpenAI that you're not able to really use because they're dealing with a lot of sort of restrictions, right, they can't. You know the language model that they're using is, you know it's an older model. It's not going out there really live in a lot of ways. There's a lot of restrictions on what websites it can go to. It can't really go to every public website. It's not using Google, right, like Google's a better overall, a better search engine than I think, than Bing we could probably agree there and like being able to access the. You know if you could take that the large. You know the learning model and you can combine that with the tools, which is what I've been doing a lot of is you can do that.
Jesse:You start to pull in like really unique insights, and I think where there's a real opportunity for companies is the people that actually have the specialized knowledge, like I'll give you an example If you were to say like hey, headcount data, where would you get that from? Right, the person who knows, like what's going to have the most accurate headcount data, live, real time, right now. Right, like, what is that source of data? And you really get that from actually doing it and a lot of the people who are starting to do it. Really, I think and I was doing it a lot before this with sort of spreadsheets but you're starting to see a lot of people use tools like Clay, which is one that I'll call out Great company, great product.
Jesse:But you're starting to see people are applying this to their outbound campaigns and I think it's upsetting people in some ways, because everyone used to be like well, I could write a better email than AI, but now it's like yeah, but you couldn't do the 20 minutes of research on each individual person, so you're going to lose that war anyways, right Like now, you have an agent going out or you have a bot. You know like you're now using real information at a scale of know thousand to two thousand people, and it's not. It doesn't sound like you're. You know just your regular chat GPT does. It sounds like you're reading about the person and you had somebody do 30 minutes of research, then you gave it the email right, right.
Gary:So you mentioned clay. We've heard that we're familiar with it. They've used it. But for the uninitiated, get kind of give us a background of what it does and where it would fit in the equation.
Jesse:Yeah, so it's really the so I think really, where, if you looked at that diagram, I kind of showed where there's orgs that are getting a lot out of AI and there's other ones who are. You know they might be doing some of that but they're using it more for, like, content generation or like marketing, you know, blogs or whatever, but there's just so much more. I mean, really, where I'm seeing orgs get a lot out of it is when they're taking let's say, you take a table and I was just building this pipeline the other day showing somebody as a demo, really, and you know we'll have in our platform, we'll have. So, like, let's say, you were targeting on companies that were hiring sales development reps, you would take. So we have the data. We're actually grabbing all the job board data in our platform. So we have an enrichment there for getting all the job board data, but we get it from the actual company's job board, not like the aggregates, like the LinkedIn's and the Indeed. We go to the company's just because we're more accurate. So we basically grab all of that data and then we can push that into clay with a web hook and then you could start doing the kind of clay part of it, the magic part of it, right, and you can now build the campaign.
Jesse:So you know it's an SDR hire, but you target chief revenue officers.
Jesse:And now you're you know, let's say you targeted mid-market companies or you targeted a certain type of companies you would basically just keep adding those columns, and each column is sort of you're putting the story together and then at the end of it you then push it into your favorite sort of like outbound tool. Right, a lot of the people are using tools like Smart Lead and Instantly because they want to get the multiple inboxes. But what that does is that allows you to build your own copy. And really it's not the mastery of the copy, it's the fact that it's so relevant. You know, you can call out hey, I saw the headcount growth change there. You know, like that's interesting, you can call things out that you wouldn't be able to notice unless you did 20 to 30 minutes of research on that company or hired somebody to do that, so that that's where it really changes, right, yeah, and that pipeline is important because that can be automated and that's where you can drive some real investment back to your programs and these things can be more automated.
Gary:Yep, jesse, while we're here, let's just talk about this, let's take that ground up approach. So again, lower middle market companies a lot of them are, if they have a rev ops function. It's a couple of people. It may be somebody in sales op, marketing ops. There's not necessarily a lot of technical expertise there. You know, very lean marketing team, very lean sales team. There may not be anybody in kind of an outbound role. A lot of stuff is handled by demand gen or what have you. But I think it's kind of the environment and sometimes we're actually going to have to be thoughtful. I think a lot of ways that we're going to need to test, validate and then invest in terms of really with this function. But if you think about that, the test phase and how somebody would get started with this, what's the base kind of fundamental layer that you would put and what kind of skill sets does a company need to have to make that work?
Jesse:Yeah. So I think the fundamental skill sets would be you know somebody who curiosity right, they have that curiosity, they're focused on conversion, right, that's. The other thing is, like you know used to be your, you'd throw sort of your most junior people at the problem. Really, it's now really your best people, right, like it's your best people. So you have to think a little bit differently here. You know it's generally been that two stage organization where it's been that you know the lower, you know the newer hire of your company. Now sometimes they can outperform the you know the market, but it's usually far.
Jesse:You know, most of the time it's a whack. The whole team you know and all of that. But what you need is a couple of skills that I see people using right now is they're able to kind of take data and move it together and then maybe run a couple of like, you know, either like formulas or whatnot, and they can kind of understand that. Then some of the tools are helping. Where the tools help is, you can apply, you know, api calls to those fields and then add that level of enrichment and then you can possibly take that and you can also then add, like a layer, you know, use the right LLM on it, right like chat, you know, like OpenAI, gpt-4 or whatever on it.
Jesse:And then now you're now you're in business, you've now got the full. That whole line of that row is as relevant to that person as as it could be. And I mean you would be, I think you would. You know, if I could, if I showed somebody like some of the tables you could actually build right, like how specific it would be, you know there'd be a lot of less people out there that are saying like it doesn't work right, there's people that are like it doesn't work.
Jesse:I can write a better email, but it's like you're going to lose because you can't go. You can't go through the 30, 40 minutes of research.
Gary:It's just bottom line.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, exactly. And the level of specificity to your point. I mean, we harp on that all the time, which is, it is well, the collective we, the decision makers, are very discerning about. First of all we're talking a minute about, even if it gets to the inbox, number one. And then number two is if it does, does it actually get back to, like the mental spam filter? And that mental spam filter is exactly what you talked about, which is, huh, somebody has actually done a little bit of research and and is delivering. They, they, they're establishing that they know me. They're also establishing that what they're offering, or what they're asking, is relevant and providing some value. If we don't do that, we can have the most elegant, beautiful technical stack on the planet and it's dead on arrival. So, oh, yeah, for sure. Um, so, uh, let's maybe talk through the um you know.
Gary:So, yeah, for sure. So let's maybe talk through the you know. So we'll put this in the show notes. But this graphic that you created, which love this is you know, you have your assistant box, the model and the memory knowledge and tools. Can you expand on each one of those three boxes and, kind of, what are you thinking about there?
Jesse:on each one of those three boxes and kind of what, what are you thinking about there? Yeah, so what? What I'm seeing is a baseline company, like if I would say you know, I hate to do this, but we'll go with, like a maturity model, right, you know your companies that are sort of just starting to adopt ai. Maybe across the company they're building a lot of content, they're building a lot of the use cases are are sort of okay, I could do this. Maybe they're writing some emails. I, I hope they're not, because the emails kind of come out a little funky if you don't really, you know, if you haven't you know, they can come out a little funky. You do have to do some tweaking there.
Jesse:And then, where the part that happens, though, is, like I said, as you go down a layer, uh, where you have the memory, knowledge and the tools. What I mean, what I mean by the tools are, like what are you using to bring in to the model? Right, so? So, and when do you bring it in? Right, like what? And you know information as a, you know it's got a, it's got a, um it? It doesn't get better always with age, right, like it's not going to get better with age. So if you have information and you can react on that information, the tools can kind of help you bring it in. Now people are using tools like you know, some ones that I'll kind of shut out, obviously Clay, but there's also some really good open source tools out there. They're not really that expensive right. They're free, right Like self-hosted. You probably can buy a support plan, whatever Tools like N8N or PipeDream or those types of tools, those ones people are bringing into their databases. And then you have the knowledge part. Now the knowledge part is more around your vector databases, as you know, and sort of chunking that data so you can process larger amounts. That might be used to say like, hey, these are our target accounts, we're going to go find the other good target accounts and we're going to use that and we're going to go through all of our gong recordings or we're going to go through whatever other sort of strategy to do that.
Jesse:And then the third you know just the embedded part of it. The memory part of it really is that, and I know chat GPT is starting to add some of this stuff in it. But if you know how to do it outside of this, if you can store the conversation, because you know gpt tends to hallucinate, right when you're using it right, like it kind of forgets what, what it was doing and it it doesn't. You know, eventually, as you're doing those prompts, as you're doing chat gpt, eventually, as you know, it only has so many tokens in it. But where companies are doing really well is if they can understand how to use those embedded, the embedded data they can. You can store it when it matters, right, like if you know, if you're, if you want to make sure that the result is always enriched by LinkedIn data at the very end, so you know you got the right people and they're actually working at the company, that information can be brought in. And that's really where you can say like, hey, make sure at the very end you always check if the email is valid and the person works there. Yeah, got it. Not forgetting that, making sure that GBT doesn't forget that when you're applying the model to your outbound.
Jesse:This is what I'm seeing and this is really really helpful. This is where we're seeing like just major lifts. Now the campaigns can take a little longer to set up, actually, and they need a little bit more of a skilled person, but when they go you could start to see some real advantages and you don't even have to. Really you're not necessarily asking for that like first meeting or anything, always right, you could sort of be a little, you could step back a bit, knowing that you don't. You know you're not going after after you're trying to get that completion.
Jesse:As you know, you hear out there for people that are making the calls or doing that. They're trying to get the distribution right of the, of the, of the content or their brand Right. That's the hard part right now and, as you know, that's like the hardest part for any company to break through. The noise, the volume can help if you can build some quality to that and some real relevance, not just this personalization stuff that everyone's overwhelmed with. I saw you liked Kyle Coleman's post. You must like my SaaS and you want to buy a $100,000 SaaS product.
Gary:Yeah, of course I can make that leap easily. You bring up a really good point, so I think that's the other thing too. Right, if we so, let's. I mean, anybody that's had an SDR team knows this that it was largely at the S in SDR is sales, so it was largely in a sales department, which at the time made a lot of sense because it was a developmental ground, if you will, for future AEs. The activity required was more sales oriented and training, and the metric of success was booked meetings, right. So you get what you incentivize, and so that leads people to not necessarily want to be patient for the buyer and deliver value.
Gary:So, now that we're taking this approach and, to your point, backing off, it's not about the meeting. In a lot of ways it's about I need to get into your mind. It's mind share. I need to establish a relationship. Hey, we've got some great content. We want to invite you to this event or webinar or whatever. It is great content. We want to invite you to this event or webinar or whatever it is. So, with that in mind, where are you seeing companies of this size actually place this group? And I guess that's the next question we don't really need a bunch of humans, if any, certainly to execute. We need an architect, but we don't necessarily need to execute. So how does that change the what, how we measure success?
Jesse:Yeah, no, gary, I mean you brought up a great point there. I mean, the biggest, the biggest thing that's kind of changing there is, you know, you see some people that are there. There might be they're a little early to the party, and I've been doing this for a while too on this side, but they're saying like, hey, one I could bring in one you know clay expert or you know API expert and an expert whatever who has a sales background but has some technology background. Maybe was an SDR at one point. Right, I think doing something is also important, right, skills, experience, that stuff does really matter. I mean you really have to fail. You have to know what it feels like to get a couple of calls hung up on and a couple of you know emails back from people that are nasty.
Jesse:So you have to know what it hurts, right, like.
Jesse:So the point is is that, like you're seeing these people say, like hey, I could take on a whole SDR team, and I actually think it's even worse than that. Like there are some SDR teams now that are they're they're really adding, you know, zero to the, to the. In fact, you could really make the argument that if they stopped showing up to the office, like if they just stopped, the entire company would be way better. Now I'm not saying get rid of the people. I'm saying, just like anything in life, maybe repurposing them right, and I'm seeing some amazing roles for some, and some of them don't even really want to be in sales anyways, they just got kind of put there right Cause it's a good sort of hey, you got a business degree, do you want to? You know, like, that's kind of what a lot.
Jesse:And the problem is there's such a silo in all of these companies. There's so many weird blockers to get them into, like operations or RevOps, and some of these people could be your best RevOps people. I've seen SDRs that would blow away any of your top RevOps people. I mean, I have a group of people on WhatsApp that if you were to go in there on a day. There's like probably 9,000 messages in a week in there and all they're doing is just talking about every single tool and every single source of data, and it's a lot of SDRs that are starting their own little businesses and that could have been. Probably they could have been maybe your top marketer or your top rev ops.
Jesse:But since some people miss the boat on the talent, you know they're right. You got to bring up the right people in the right organizations. Not a lot of people are investing in them the right way. There's a lot of sort of like stalemate in the middle right between your sales and your marketing leader. So that's where I'm thinking there's a huge opportunity for somebody to take somebody. Like maybe maybe you put somebody with one of these programs I know there's a lot of these bootcamps, clay bootcamps, different bootcamps to do this Like, put one of your top upcoming SDRs that wants to move to marketing, or you know you're really leaving money on the table. These are very talented people that you know. They're almost looking for their own little pirate ship, if you will.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, that's that's, you know. It's funny that you say that and reminded of Mark Robert at Stage Two Capital. Yeah yeah, recent podcast mentioned some Look, if you fast forward five years, a lot, if not all, of the GTM motion could be run by RevOps and tools and ai and tweaked by humans like we were. You know, it's not inconceivable now. We're not there yet necessarily, but I think that's the point is, uh, starting simple, starting with quality and then and then determining where you can lean in and and um create critical mass the research piece is so huge, Jesse.
Andy:I mean, we keep referencing a particular email that struck both of us, Gary and I, because of the research that was done prior to, and some of that might've been automated I'm not even really sure. But if an SDR could just focus on the efficiency of generating that research to your point, it's huge chunks of time that can be theoretically automated. And then you're armed with this really great information to then break through that clutter, create some initial you know gravitation and relationship building, and then you can get your message across, which is I can, I can help you, not not by selling a product right away or trying to get a meeting, but I have this information that'll really help you and it ties that all together like that just seems like a great and really actually stimulating role for somebody like that.
Jesse:Oh yeah, I mean the organizations need them, right, because I don't actually think they. And it's funny because the actual realization hasn't even come yet. I think the realization is going to come when you get rid of your seven-figure data provider contract right, when you're buying it as an API, you could be much more efficient, right, and we do have APIs for a lot of our stuff. And when you're going out there and you're saying I'm going to buy it by the API, maybe I get a monthly, maybe I start this, I go, but I'm going to go hold all these vendors accountable to the quality because the data quality continues to go down. Right, you're going to start getting less and less as the provider gets bigger or there's whatever.
Jesse:But that's the biggest thing is actually, I think there's another missed cost around data. If you were to turn somebody because, look, the first people that want to buy tools are usually your SDR teams that need a phone number but if you ask SDRs, they know what tools they like, right, like you'll talk to them and they'll you know. And I think that's where there's a huge opportunity for people that are like really up and coming in their career to sort of do this and look, the only advice I can give you is like, if your company won't do it, just promote yourself to CEO and start your own little business on the side. Sorry, I hate to do that to people, but it works and you probably will be successful. And there's a lot of people who I could point to that have done this already. Uh, there's been a lot of people that I've worked with and got to take a chance in life at some point.
Gary:You know you can't play safe all the time yeah and the uh, the other you brought, you know, data providers is a great point. I mean not, you know, not to pick on zoom info, as andy says, but we'll pick on. I was, I was just going to, so thanks for meeting me today. Um, you'll be the bad guy, you know. I mean, understandably, from a business model perspective, they were a data provider and then they realized, hey, we need to move into being a platform because the data is becoming commoditized and, you know, became more and more expensive to do that.
Gary:But the reality is that with the we say this all the time the intense specificity with which you need to communicate, like the, the quality, to break through the clutter, you need multiple data providers and to your you've mentioned this it's like you probably have to go out and find, you know, a combination of data providers to get you to a true ICP. What's available to you, what? What is a function of really understanding the customer, then understanding what's recent to your point about time and knowledge, and bringing that all together, and especially companies in the lower middle market today, the way they're priced. I can't have five vendors, and so you start to get really creative. Then, with AI, you're like, and so you start to get really creative. Then with AI, you're like do I even need them, if I can start to pull this in on an AI basis and start to mash together my own little data set?
Jesse:Yep, yeah, this is what people realize. I mean, look, the real information that you probably want is on LinkedIn, but it's in public, right, it's really around how you can source. I mean, look, all of the data providers are getting their data the same way, Right, every single one of them. Right, they're all getting it from LinkedIn and they're getting it, you know. I mean, they're doing it like in public, right, they're getting. They're getting it in public, right, it is public data. Right, as you know, you can record your browser in public. It's part of your rights. I mean, at least in the US, you can do that and that's your choice and that's what the data providers are doing. Now there's also privacy coming in and there's a lot of other things. But what I think is important is, if you buy it by the API, you can hold them all accountable. Maybe you make a little bit bigger investment in some of the credits and get your price down, because pay as you go is always going to be more expensive.
Jesse:But I think what people are realizing is, hey, I could have paid 60, but now I have Clay and I got six vendors. I can do a waterfall enrichment, which is what a lot of you. That's the new, that's the cool word right now. If you're, that's what the kids are doing right now, right, but it's the waterfall enrichment stuff. I can't find it in these three providers.
Jesse:Clay's already set up contracts with these ones, so I can go just grab it here and I'll be on the phones in no time, right. So it really created another whole world for sales development and that, and a lot of these sales development people. They're very bright people and they could probably do the ops job and the marketing job too, like I'm finding ones that are so impressive that they really should be entrepreneurs, which is really what they should be. Yeah, and it's great because it's creating that. That's what the market inefficiencies creating right now is a whole bunch of very talented people that are going to make it out if they're, if they're committed and you know that's what this shift is going to do, and I hope they do they take the right path.
Gary:Yeah, they're cutting their teeth there and you brought up phones, so we've talked a lot about email, but let's talk about some of the other channels and how you think about how these all work together. So there's the. You know the phone call and I think we're probably all like my phone right now on silent and if it's a number I'm not going to answer it. You know, I'll use my little pixel screener to find out who it is if I need to, but you know voicemail drops. Certainly LinkedIn touches things like that. What are some of the other channels that you're using around, presumably with email being the anchor?
Jesse:Yeah. So email works where it's where it doesn't work very well right now and like I know enough about the email email server stuff with the B2B stuff that it's really hard in an upmarket or I guess I hate the phrase, but ABM approach email is really hard If you're a mid-market company, like a lot of your viewers and listeners. If you're a mid-market company and you're targeting companies with a lot of security gateways, like we're talking Mindcast Proofpoint, you can just scan the MX records right, have your IT team do it. They'll tell you exactly who's who. That's probably your best source of ICP if email's going to work, by the way, it's pro tip there.
Jesse:But if you were to look at those companies, you will have a hard time getting in on email. Where phone is going to work a little bit better, maybe a little less technical of an audience, I think a lot of the technology people seem to be. I mean, I hate to generalize this, but yeah, where I find you know, if you find somebody who's more technical they're they're just kind of an engineering audience. You sales people like to talk to people. Bark, you can call them up, they'll probably have a little more conversation, but it's going horribly bad in a lot of engineering ones. That's where you're seeing even uh security is another one, like cyber security. I'm seeing there must be a post every every week from somebody in cyber security saying zoom info is selling my mobile phone number illegally, right?
Jesse:you know I saw that this week again. You know it comes out every week. I don't think I was in, I think he was in IT I think or something like that. But anyways, the other channel that a lot of people are sort of mismanaging, you know. So phone is.
Jesse:Obviously the hard part about phone is you still have to get a group of people who want to get on the phones and want to do that, and then you have to go buy sort of the most expensive part of the data is definitely the mobile phone number right, like that's the hardest one to get right. You know, on a low end, maybe five to 10 cents, you can look at our stuff that we're doing. And then maybe on a high end, maybe 60 cents, a dollar a record. It's a lot of money when you blast it through that and you better get some people on the phone that aren't mad at you, right, but you're really going to have that committed team. And then I think the other channel, that it's an interesting channel and it's hard for me to even talk about it too because of LinkedIn put me into like a I don't know, I didn't even know they were doing it, but like some special status.
Jesse:But the LinkedIn channel itself is one that it's sort of what's the phrase If you know? You know, right, and what I see is is, like there are orgs and you know, obviously I would never do this because it would just it would hurt my brand on there, right, but there are a lot of orgs that are getting a lot of value out of sort of automation on LinkedIn, and this is going to go off pretty sour if people are like whoa, is he talking about that? But there's a lot there. Now, what are they doing there? You know, I I think the fake stuff is getting a little extreme, like the fake profile stuff.
Jesse:But if you had your founders going out on linkedin and you were I'm not saying you know, never violate terms and conditions of any sort of social media website that you're on, of course, and but at the same time, like you know, if you had maybe a va helping you connect the account to more people and you were a founder. That's one of the ways that we're seeing. And then I think there's also some other things that linkedin's done where they've opened up uh, they've opened up some of these brand ads. I don't know if you guys have seen these yet, uh. So what you can do is you can run an ad on your post.
Gary:Right.
Jesse:And you can target the companies that you want. So you really can turn your founder's message and your company's brand inside. It's much more organic than an ad. It just feels a little nicer and not a lot of people figured out that it's an ad.
Jesse:It's really hard to tell. It just says like promoted post at the bottom, but it's really hard to tell. It just says promoted post at the bottom, but it's really hard to tell the difference. And you can stuff them full of links and you can do whatever content you want. Obviously, you got to pay to play, of course, and it's not necessarily cheap.
Jesse:But if you run ads properly, like brand ads properly, you can get the reach, and that's one of the things that startups and mid-market companies struggle with. So I think that's the other one, and if you can tie that together with LinkedIn and maybe some extra efficiency there, I'm sure your CEO is not going to connect to 50 people a day. You're probably going to have to hire a VA or maybe even find a way to automate it, but that's really where I think other companies are getting a lot of lift. If I had to say, like one area where I see a lot of mid-market companies getting some patterns of growth, they turned and you know, a great example is Adam Robinson. I mean, you look at like what he? You know he kind of he kind of had a little bit of an issue with Sixth Sense. You look at his brand right now.
Jesse:I mean he is the hottest like for well, he's like the hottest, like the most followed person on LinkedIn right now and it's just a. You know, it's just like a complete I mean you put anyone, anything you post right now, you're like come on, man, what's the next one coming out? Man, I love Adam. He's a great dude. I met him a bunch of times. He's a great. I put him on the show here, you can get a hold of him. But uh, you know he's just a great dude and uh, you know, I was, I was upset that six cents did that, but at the same time, like that channel, he's showing everybody how you have to do it as a mid-market company. Yeah, yeah is the like vi, like you, look at how to do it. That's, that's how you do it yeah, and then you're yeah.
Gary:That's one way to get published the brand you're going to build a founder brand.
Jesse:Sorry, that was the. That was the takeaway.
Gary:Yeah, yeah, well, and then the one two punch right when, where, where done well, you're really orchestrating. You know, the organic reach out of connection. Especially, this goes to a point we always make, which is you can only do that when you've maniacally defined your ICP. If you have a watered down, broad, generic ICP, then your message is going to be flat. You're going to be reaching a bunch of different people. You can't be as specific as you need to be. And if you start there, then you actually have the ability to have the outreach. Have the promoted post, have the email that references the content from the promoted post, give them something related. That's a problem solving component. That's not just asking, they're trying to sell them something. And all of a sudden you're like oh, I got five, six, seven touches in a week and it's all interesting and valuable. Suddenly you on the radar. But you know you got to be well orchestrated yeah, it's that orchestration it really goes back to.
Jesse:You know, if we're all going to sit in a room and you know a bunch of people who do kind of this for a living or gtm, or they consider themselves students of the game, would we all sit around and say, hey, let's go higher, the most junior people, give them a bunch of tools and put a bunch of pressure on them to deliver qualified pipeline to our sales organization? I don't think we'd all sit in a room and say that was the best strategy for our business. And I think once we start there, like once everybody says yep, we probably made a mistake there, then we could start. You know, it's like admitting it. You know, then you can kind of move forward a little bit. If you just sit there and you say, come on, just do it more, do it more, you're just going to keep getting into the battles of. I mean, the battles can be rough right now too. I mean these messages I'm reading them. You know there'll be a post every couple of days. Like you know they'll put there'll be a post every couple of days. Like you know, go like just the. It's just we're really setting them up for failure.
Jesse:And even the email delivery thing is even. The worst part is some of them are getting locked out of their corporate email accounts now, like because of the, the, the, the G, the Google jail. So they get enough spam complaints. If they hit the wrong Google customer right Big cloud Google customer, honeywell, or some Honeywell or some big cloud Google customer you hit the wrong 30 people at that company report. Boom, google blocks the account and they got to go through a two-day appeal process back to Google through their IT team. That means they don't have access to benefits, they don't have access to anything, and now we've basically isolated them from their own email system. Right, I mean, that's to me. That means you basically got them fired.
Gary:Yeah, that's great, and think about you know anymore that, and not just email, but the entire Google ecosystem, your entire operating system at the company.
Jesse:It's bad. And look, what happens is the IT team says wait, we have to say that we're not going to do this anymore. And you guys are like they look at the investment you've made in your tool tool departments. So I have met with some companies that have had their org shut down. Now I haven't met with any that haven't got it turned back on. So I will, I will tell you that. But I have found, because I've gotten I usually get the call when it's like the CEO can't get emails from the investors and for some reason, you know, it's like there's seven, eight people that will tag me on LinkedIn on it and then it'll be like the CEOs on the phone would be like pretty much cry, because it's like my quarter is going to, I'm going to lose my quarter of my investors.
Jesse:I want to help, but it's like you know it's. It's pretty simple. Like you got to stop sending it from your own company organization, your domain. You probably need to do it somewhere else. If you're going to do it, if that's the right move, then do it, but don't do it inside your own IT department. That's just not a good. Your IT department doesn't want anything to do with this. Right, right.
Gary:And your security team doesn't either. And bad behavior is an exercise in futility, because it's just going to get you shut down again.
Gary:So yeah, yeah, well, it's not, that's for sure yeah, it's only going to get worse, uh, or more. It's going to place a premium on back to fundamentals, on just getting really good at who's your customer, what do they need from you, and let's be authentic about how we get in front of them. And now we're just looking for ways to do that efficiently and creatively. So, jesse, this was awesome. So a couple of things. Tell us quickly about LeadMagic, and then where can people find you?
Jesse:Yeah, great. So LeadMagic we've been helping companies with our. We have a product that basically you upload lists, you get emails validated. We help you find emails, we use validation, so it's considered GDPR there. We also have help you enrich profiles, things like that, for you can upload sheets and you get sheets back. A lot of people use this for that, and then our prices are really, really low. So we try to keep them very low, just as a and the quality of every result.
Jesse:I like review and make sure that it's good. So I'm big on this and that's where you can lead magicio. And if you sign up, you can get I think it's a thousand. We're giving away a thousand like validations for free or email finding or whatever else we're doing, and like validations for free or email finding or whatever else we're doing. And then you can find me on LinkedIn. I have a lot of content out there that I'll put out there from time to time. I'm also a member of the pavilion, I think, gary. That's where we met and you know I'm around. You can message me in the DMs. I'm cool with that and you know let's try to get back to the primary inbox.
Gary:There you go. Yeah, all right, so we'll put all of those links in the show notes. Definitely, go give Jesse a shout out on LinkedIn, follow him he's. I mean, I love the, the very technical but very practical advice that he's given. So this was awesome. Really appreciate you making the time and this would be a fantastic addition to our outbound in May. This has been awesome. Yeah, thanks a lot, you bet. All right, thanks, jesse, stick around. We'll say goodbye for now. Until next week. Bye, bye. Thank you for tuning in to GTM Pro, where you become the pro. We're here to foster your growth as a revenue leader, offering the insights you need to thrive. For further guidance, visit gtmproco and continue your path to becoming board ready with us. Share this journey, subscribe, engage and elevate your go-to-market skills. Until next time, go be a pro.