Outbound: The precision era is here with TitanX

0:0016.4x. That's your number for today. I was just at an event with Titan X. They rented out the entire Dallas Cowboys football stadium for a day, had 150 revenue leaders, and they shared some really interesting data across a study they did in their client base of 3 million cold calls across 42 sales teams across 1 ,200 reps. The top 20 % of reps booked 57.5 % of the meetings compared to the bottom 25 % at 3.5%. That's 57.5 % versus 3.5%. That means the top 20 % of reps are booking 16.4 times more meetings than the bottom 25%. What we're going to talk about today is the difference between those reps, strategies that you can take in as an organization to really leverage those top performers and drive more out of them.

0:55Thanks for checking out the podcast. You're listening to Outbound Squad. My name's Jason Bay. I'm the CEO at Outbound Squad. And this podcast and Outbound Squad is really all about helping you turn complete strangers into paying customers. We're in an era right now where outbound isn't as easy as it was three or four years ago. When I was getting started over a decade ago, you could load up your sequencer, hire a bunch of SDRs, and you'd book a shit ton of meetings. And this is not the world that we're living in right now. There's immense category saturation. So especially in software, HR, for example, I mean, there's over 4 ,000 HR software solutions.

1:32The economic uncertainty in the marketplace today, buyers are very reserved when it comes to taking new meetings with vendors. A lot of them are looking to cut things and you can't ignore channel saturation. I mean, the amount of AI email junk that is in inboxes right now, the amount of cold calls that people are getting. It's crazy out there. So a lot of what we help companies like Shopify, Zoom, Rippling, Gong, some of the most successful, fastest growing sales organizations in the world do is figure out what's working with PipeGen right now. We've done that for about 250 plus sales teams. Our average client will increase qualified pipeline by more than 20 % within 90 days.

2:11So we install the systems, train the reps, work with the leaders. We help manage and make sure that the onboarding is tight. We train up the frontline managers to make sure that they can coach, reinforce all of that good stuff. So today's episode, when I was in Dallas, we had the Dallas Cowboys Stadium event on a Tuesday. And on that Wednesday, I spent most of the day with TitanX's CEO, Joey Gilkey, and their CRO, Rob Anderson, who was a previous client from Gong. and we talked partnerships and we recorded a bunch of podcast content, this being one of those episodes. So what we're going to talk about today is really a lot of the data that they shared with us so that I was absolutely blown away by the event.

2:55I rarely go to an event and am educated and leave with takeaways with anything related to Outbound or PipeGen because I mean, this is like what we do every day, right? Most of the time we're learning from doing and learning from our clients. We're not learning from other folks that are doing this stuff. And they were able to pull a lot of really compelling data. And they talked about, you know, the era of outbound that we're in the precision era, Joey calls it, you know, we went from the craftsman era of, we don't have any technology and we do everything by hand to the factory era. That was the predictable revenue movement, right?

3:29Let's separate SDRs, AEs and account managers. And, you know, we've entered the volume era where things have not worked as well. So we're using dialers, we're using AI to send out bulk emails, all of that kind of stuff. And we're back in an era of what is old as new in the precision era. So we talk a little bit about that. We talk about the flywheel that you need to make outbound work. There's four parts to that that we're going to dig into. We talk about the levers that most revenue leaders are pulling, especially as we're looking into 2027 on having a number that is 20 % higher with less than 20 % growth in headcount.

4:05So what sales leaders normally do, what you should be doing instead, we talk about the production layer. So a lot of that revenue equation is focused on the inputs, right? The capacity and how we can, you know, increase from an input standpoint, the inputs, like the activity and the number of calls that we're running and all that kind of good stuff. And then we usually talk a lot about the cost of the output. So the pipeline that's generated, the cost per meeting, cost per opportunity, et cetera. But really what we talk about is that production layer, the cost of producing those outputs, right?

4:40The efficiency that is won and lost. And we talk a lot about the phone. So what's won and lost by calling phone numbers that are bad, calling the wrong types of folks that are not in your ICP, having unskilled reps call on really good quality data and wasting it, right? So we talked about connect rates. We talked about conversion. We debriefed on the event that they ran. And like I said, this is the best client event I've ever been to. Um, it was super, super bad-ass. So, uh, without further ado, let's get to the episode. Do me one favor. If you like this episode and you've been listening for a while and you want some help implementing some of these things, shoot me an email, Jason at outbound squad.com.

5:19I'd be happy to walk you through how we have partnered with companies like Shopify, Rippling, Zoom, Gong, and really a lot of startups getting into this as well. And then everywhere in between, we typically will do an audit where we'll benchmark your performance against 250 plus other clients that we're working with. So shoot me an email, Jason at outboundsquad.com. Let's get to the interview.

5:49This is our first time meeting in person. First time meeting in person. It was so fun. It took a while. This is the way to do it, though. It is. The way we did it. Yes. The event. I'm like, I was writing a post on LinkedIn today, and I was just kind of thinking about what my takeaways were. And I'm sure you guys heard this a lot because I heard everyone else talking about it. Everyone was literally saying, this is the best event that I've ever participated in. And I was thinking about, like, well, what made this so great? and before I share that, I'm kind of curious, how did this idea of we're going to rent out an entire football stadium for a day, for an event, how did this idea even come up?

6:29I'm the marketer. I mean, we have phenomenal marketing, but I think I have a unique way of positioning. And so I think for me, it probably started with, so my dad actually, ironically, my dad's incredible at sales. He's still at Home Depot, refuses to retire. closes like$850 million a year by himself. And he takes his customers and he goes and he does Atlanta Falcons days where they go and they play flag football for like a few hours. Oh, really? And I was like, it's such a cool experience. It's a bonding thing. But obviously we have the product coming out. And the product has a theme because we believe that we're putting the flagpole in the ground of the era that we think that we're ushering in.

7:11And so my thinking was, okay, we got something big to say. We're creating a category. what is the biggest stage I could possibly think of to get the right people in the room? Yeah. And then as all good ideas happen in the shower, I was like, what if we just did a stadium? Is that even possible? And so then I called one of my advisors and he's pretty well connected. And I was like, call some stadiums and see what's possible. And he called around, you know, the Vegas, the Raiders Stadium, Cleveland Browns, Snoozefest. Yeah. Titans also snooze fest until they have their new state. I was a big Titans fan when they had Eddie George and.

7:47Oh, dude, the best. Um, and then some of them are just like, okay, some are like super expensive. And like, obviously we were bootstrapped until January. And so, you know, cash wasn't a thing for a while. We knew this was going to be a big investment regardless. And then finally we got ahold of Dallas and they're like super easy to work with. It's very central. You can fly direct from anywhere in the world here. And so we're like, okay, if we're going to get the types of people we want in the room in the right place it's got to be central it's got to be iconic and they need to be able to basically let us do whatever we want in the stadium yeah in different aspects because i want to kind of move people around yeah and once we got a hold of them their coordination team's great and so that's what came about and it was like how do we take a room that you're meant to fill up entirely and still communicate precision by inviting a handful of select people in yeah like let the event almost communicate the the era or the category we're creating in and of itself before anyone even knows about the product or what we're building.

8:45So when he brought this idea up to the team, were you like, this guy's fucking crazy? Whenever I get a note from Joey, it's a Slack. It's like after nine, I remember it pretty clear. It's just like, I've got a crazy idea. Just give me a call. I'm like, oh, God, what's new? What's next? And I did not expect to hear that. It's like, what if we just, you know, rented out the entire Dallas Cowboys stadium? It's like, I'm so in. Like, let's get this done. Like, the audience, we see all these people, like, hosting these events where they put them in, you know, a booth or in the stands where like these people want to get in the field yeah so that was probably the biggest thing was like everyone else puts people up in things i want to put them in the game yeah the real players want to be in the game a lot of people in our space are athletes or they're super into sports all right i mean i mean even if you're not i mean to be perfectly honest i don't follow football like at all i haven't since i've had a fantasy football team like probably a decade ago but going to an nfl stadium and getting to play flag football on the on the, you know, touring the locker room and seeing how all of that stuff like that was super cool.

9:40I think that was like one of the big things that stood out. Obviously, the experience was like a one of a kind thing that outside of this, I don't think anyone is really going to be able to get that type of experience. The other thing I thought you guys just did a phenomenal job at that we were talking about at lunch was the content was the perfect balance of like making sure we're not sitting in a classroom style type of thing for eight hours, but it was like truly insightful. Yeah. I mean, there were things that, I mean, I asked you for the deck immediately afterwards. I never do that when people talk about outbound, especially, you know what I mean?

10:13A lot of it, right? Yeah. And there's, there were so many things that were like genuinely insightful at the business level on like how to rethink this whole outbound thing and pipe gen and, you know, being asked to produce 20 % more with 20 % less, you know, kind of stuff. The other thing I think that you guys did, and I think this just might be a good place to start this podcast, is for anyone wanting to do an event, how you guys thought about it, I'm curious. But the last thing that stuck out to me is you guys were so picky about the group. Because I was like, I want to invite a bunch of people.

10:44And it was like, hey, it's got to be VP+. We don't want a bunch of people in a room where they don't feel like they can really interact with their peers and get a ton of value out of it. So I would love to hear from you guys. Like it felt very intentional and I'm sure it was. What were some of the things as you were planning this and advice you would have for other revenue leaders who are thinking about throwing a badass event for like their clients? Yeah. Because this was just like people have to do more stuff like this. Maybe it's not renting out an NFL stadium. But like what advice would you guys have and kind of what went into that process for you guys?

11:22well i think at the core of even precision the category or arrow we think that we're ushering in is this idea of of intentionality i think it's a volume game would say if you have seats the goal is to fill seats and i think what we talk i even said this in my you know the the reveal if you will was it's not about how many are in the seats it's about who is selected to be in them you guys have all heard that phrase like you know like the givers in line or whatever like the five people you spend the most time with or who you're most like yeah i think you got to kind of take the same thing with events which is like if you want to create an exceptional event that elevates everyone in the room there's a rising tide you got to bring the types of people that iron sharpening iron and people who are going through the same things you know we were very guarded we turned a lot of people away it was invite only even like with you like you want to bring some people let's see the list first and let's approve who we think is good um which by oh, you have sick customers, so it works out great.

12:17It worked out great for us. But I think that's where it starts, is you got to be intentional about not even just like what you do, but who's going to be there is probably more important than anything. And so if you can pair who's there with what you do with those people, I think that's when you create something special, which is what we saw yesterday and Monday. And I need the feedback from the people there. It's like, I don't know how you got all these people in the room. And that was like an – like we wanted to honor the people who were coming. Like it's one promise we wanted to make was like, It's invite only.

12:44And because it's invite only, we are like the gatekeepers of who's going to be there. And so I want to honor your attendance by ensuring that the other people that are coming are the caliber of people you want to be around. And so I think that is how you create the experience first. Because you're not going to beat conversations that you saw yesterday and Monday. And if you have people at different levels or different functions within a business unit that can't talk the same language or feel the same pain or have the same goals or same mandates coming down from their board, it's really hard to relate.

13:11and like, dude, just Monday night seeing everyone, no matter where they moved into different pockets of conversations, like instantly like thrown into deep conversations was super cool. That was like probably the most rewarding thing for me. Oh, it was phenomenal. One of the things that was such a surprise to most of the people is those envelopes when they opened them. And I was sitting right next to one of my clients and she was like, holy shit, this is pretty accurate. Oh yeah, yeah. And it was like, can you talk a little bit more about the thinking in that? Because, you know, the sales team was executing on this, like, bottoms-up motion, I'm assuming.

13:48Like, prior to, yeah. Talk more about that. Because a delighter was the word I was looking for. That was such an unexpected delighter. And there were many of them. Yeah, we weren't able to be at the table. So I was curious what the feedback was that. It was cool. When I was talking to Justin, he was like, it might even come off as a little creepy. Or that people are going to go back and, you know, talk to their team. And be like, you can't be saying stuff like that. But yeah, so we had almost like 300, I think it was 360 conversations in about 45 days on 60 unique accounts there. So everyone at the tables, we had multiple reveals of envelopes.

14:16So this was like what we call an account dossier. And so what we looked at is, you know, it's precision versus volume. But like volume doesn't just come in activities, but also with like AI and just like just because you can do so much more like an account qualification, for example. Like we were saying, what could we learn about an account from using the phone as a bidirectional channel for feedback on the front lines versus what AI would gather about that same company? And so we did different, you know, queries and prompts with Claude, Jim and I, all this stuff, even Clay. You know, everyone loves their Clay.

14:48And we showed that on one side. Then we showed what we were able to uncover about them. And so they all opened up their dossiers at their table. And I mean, some of them we had almost 25 conversations with. we understood you know business initiatives individual people may be getting let go at the leadership level I mean there was even a company we knew was getting shut down before it was public so what you can find out there from the phone is pretty wild I will say and so yeah we have a team dedicated to do that motion that we do outside this event as well but yeah it's good to hear the feedback was strong about that yeah the principle of like show don't tell was like ever present in that and I think the takeaway for anyone watching or listening to this is if you're throwing an event, one, curate the audience and like go for quality, right?

15:33The second thing, like give them something insightful. You talk about making the people there feel really seen. Yeah. Like, holy shit, you talk to people on my team and you like basically showed me what I can do with your technology. I mean, if someone was trying to get CISOs together, I imagine if they had the sales team hop on and like get all of these insights from people in the security team and like what they're dealing with. And that takes a lot of effort, but you guys had so many gives like that, that the like pitch, and I even hate to call it a pitch because this is like kind of your thing.

16:06You're like, you're like the positioning guy. And like when you're pitching, I was like, oh, this is interesting. I'm like, I took the most notes off of how you guys positioned and then how you pitched the thing and the offer. It didn't feel like a pitch because there was so much value you guys had already given everyone that it was just like, nailed it and then there was like but wait there's more you know oh that was the most fun when i was working with him on this and he was talking about this concept of offer stacking and uh you know i can let you go deeper into that but yeah i mean they were not something that we just came up with like in five minutes it took a lot of thought and intention behind it but the more he kept just being like there's more to me i was like we're gonna keep giving more away like are you gonna take that away from my reps commission he's like what's going on here um but uh yes yes I knew it.

16:50Sorry, Andrew. Are we going to get a ShamWow, too? What's going on? Let's talk about that part next. So there's curating the audience. There was delivering not only just insight through the content. You guys did a study of over 3 million cold calls, and you had all of this great stuff. But people genuinely got insight on their org, too, which I thought was like, that's something you can replicate across any persona. There's a version of that that you can do. And last on this, I want to talk to you about the offer because I think there's like two schools of thoughts with events. There's one where it's like, okay, cool.

17:24I've been to those dinners. I got invited to New York City one time. We went to like 9th on Madison. I can't remember. There's some really fancy place. I can't remember what it's called. But we were in a room for three hours. And I felt like for 45 minutes, it was like being stuck in one of those vacation time shirts. and it was just like awkward and weird and like all of that kind of stuff. So on one side of the equation, there's like people that will do stuff like that. And then the other, I think people are afraid to pitch. They're so afraid that they put on an event and they're just like facilitating connections and they're afraid to even talk about and like make an offer.

18:03What was the thinking behind the offer? And like, again, how would you suggest someone else if they're thinking about like, you should talk about your stuff? Sure. well one if you have extreme conviction about the problem you solve it helps a lot yeah you know like i'm doing a disservice to you if i don't offer you into something that is going to drastically benefit you know what is important to you but i think too is i'm a huge believer in reciprocity right and so the whole vision of this event was let's continue to surprise delight give um educate get you around people like you're not going to get this anywhere else so let's let's do that first i think a lot of people do this whole like give give big take give big take and our whole thing was like let's just give a metric ton yeah and then let's ask right we'll invite you into the next thing with i think the biggest thing to go into it was with no expectations like for me i had no expectations that people would take us up on it i knew they would by the nature of like when we give as much as we do and we present the case that we present like the data really did speak for itself and rob will probably jump into that but when you give as much as you do and you highlight the problems you highlight the potential solutions the levers they can pull and then you you offer them an invitation into it there's a there's an aspect that's reciprocity but there's also an aspect of like a relief right you almost just dumped on them like this shit's hard like what you're walking through what you're the mandate you've been given and the state of the market right now is hard and then to give them something that actually solves that I think is a big cyber relief for some people I think that's a big piece of it but you can't go in just guns blazing always taking you can't go in and if you truly believe in your product you truly have the conviction for it you also can't just sit there and hold it to yourself and think you're being the nice guy by not pitching yeah and so it's a nice it's a weird combination you always be balanced more towards the give and know that when the ask comes the The right people take you up on it.

19:57And to give the people watching and listening some perspective, like you're literally doing the offer and like, how big is the screen? Well, that was a part of the event, too, was until the sphere like was created. It was the largest screen in the world. And so that was a big part of it as well. Yeah, it's cool. It's like got to be over 100 feet or something. Jerry's world screen is epic. It's 160 feet. I wonder if any other SaaS demos have gone down. Category launch on the biggest screen. so the uh the dallas event team said nobody has done as much for their events than you guys did no one's used the stadium as much as you guys used it with 150 people like they were super impressed with how intentional we were yeah and uh all the activations we had for everyone at the event had tried to have something for everyone to do and thankfully everyone pretty much did everything yeah um but yeah the screen was like i think it's 160 feet maybe 120 but it's crazy It's massive.

20:47Yeah. I mean, yeah. And the booming sound, of course, as well, you know, just with the video. Well, it's funny. I did a sound check the day before. I was like, the bass isn't beat. It's not hitting hard enough. You had to turn it up. And so I had to turn it up. Yeah, of course. Oh, the one thing I like, too, the music was like the shit I grew up on in middle school, high school. I'm like, yes. Give me some 50%. This event was like nostalgia. Even like the craftsman stuff, I'm sure we'll get into. Trying to give people a nostalgic look at where we've come from was a big piece of that. Because I think a lot of what is going to happen in the future is taking a lot of the really, really good stuff from the nostalgic past and appending the new intelligence and modern stuff to that person or to that era.

21:24That's at least how I see it. Love that. One last thing on this I want to hear from you is how were you thinking about the role of the sales team and what kind of preparation went into that? Because that's really big, too, where you can't just have your sales team. I mean, you guys had a lot of people at the event. that like the event itself costs a lot of money, but getting all of your staff there and like doing like, what was the intention and thinking behind like, what is their role? Yeah. What's every rep doing? Yeah, it started 100 days before. I mean, we, I mean, probably planned this event for four or five months, but everyone, I mean, an event like this is a company-wide, you know, project regardless, right?

21:59And so everyone had key roles there. I mean, some individual people were signing up partners. We had one of our SDRs, you know, individually calling, you know, these people to just offer them something this valuable and it was really powerful too I think she was able to get 10-15 people there minimum but yeah the AE team I put a lot on them I mean because we have all the enablement and training coming up of you know new product that we have to understand and learn and be ready to have be an expert about it in the room they all had their own individual people they were assigned to as well that they had to you know have their own dossiers we've created and understood about them too right and so yeah there's a lot of planning a lot of prep that went into it but when it came down to it it was all about the execution on the floor and making sure that we were just facilitators of the experience you know knowing who our champions are knowing who is just an implementation that would want to connect with other people in that same journey with their order and so I just think of us as connectors once the event started and like purveyors of the experience and yeah they nailed it so now the real work goes in though we got a strike while the iron's high right so Yeah.

22:59And deliver on the promises. That's right. 100%. That's right. Can you – Oh, one more question just on this. Can you give an example of, like, if I was a rep at this event, how tactical were you getting and be like, hey, Joey's going to be there. Here's, like, you connect him with so-and-so. Like, I just want people to kind of understand, like, the level of detail. I mean, the day before, we even, like, I said, like, what winning looks like for this account. and we wrote it down like on a spreadsheet to ensure that like not just have like there's a revenue goal or a meetings goal or a pilot goal it's like every account is at a different phase of where they are right now whether it's a partner and they want to connect with these key people there's a prospect that might not be the perfect fit for us now but they know a ton of people so we wrote down what winning looked like for everyone and then everyone had either post sales or you know pre-sales owner on it and uh we'll go audit that after to make sure we delivered on all that stuff but yeah i mean it was very intentional i mean when joey i mean we're not a massive company with a ton of like funding at this point so the bet like this is big so we had to come and execute really well and so no detail could be missed at that point um so yeah they did a good job but uh there was a lot of intention behind it love that what were you gonna say yeah i was saying like even the so the night before the event this was month no monday before the actual um we have a spreadsheet we had every contact we had every account we had all the context of that account and then it was laborious why what do we know about this account who's in it etc but we also created a dossier for each account we created an attendee list with images on it why they're there who they're with conversations and all that preceding information and then it was okay but also who are our champions who are the activators in the room how can we make sure that you know one thing we told the reps was like be a connector like even if you're a rep and you can't offer anything to that person in the conversation, what you can offer them is a better conversation with someone else in the room.

24:49Who do you want to meet here? What was your goal and intention of coming to this event? How can we make that happen for you? That was something I asked everyone I met there. I just want to meet really smart people. I'm like, well, you're in the right place. Let's get connected. Give them examples, too. There was two guys in the room specifically, and they don't know each other from Adam, but their companies have so much synergy they don't even know. I'm going to be like, hey, you need to go meet Joe over here. and pull them out of this conversation, get them into a more valuable conversation. Be that person that's kind of working the room.

25:21There's the house party analogy back in high school. Have you heard this analogy before? Yeah. It's good. It's a good one. It's essentially like you don't have to be the cool kid, but if your parents go out of town and you throw the party and you're the one who's bringing all the cool kids to the party at your house, you elevate yourself to their level. That's Project X, basically. you know and so anyways that's the uh that's the whole thing is like you're a salesperson these are like cro's and svps and stuff like that like you may feel like you don't have something to offer you do which is connect them and so be intentional about that yeah that depth of depth of like preparation too is like you're pe backed you're p like we're gonna connect you you're in vertical sass oh you should meet with this guy and so you'd have to like be able to know that going in to be able to actually have that and it just feels so intentional right so i think that is like the small things that add up.

26:11And I think that one last comment on this for a sales leader listening to this and you're like, yeah, that's like, we should be doing that. But the amount of intention and then like enablement that you guys are doing around that and having the conversations and the dossiers and the spreadsheets, like I've never, ever seen that in an event before. Well, think about it. If we had six, 700 people there with our team size, how could we be that precise? How could we be that intentional behind it? So a part of it is also making sure you can go and work it deep enough to get that experience as well. And so It's a big part of it.

26:40100%. And I also just obsess about experience. You know, there's something about experiences. We live in such a digital world now. Like, if you can create an in-person experience, like even people don't even realize this, but the night, the first night when we were outside on the lawn in front of the stadium, it's this epic event. You know, the activations we had, there was like an entertainment thing, but there was also like the bourbon tasting. And I hand-selected every bourbon. Yeah. We had a cigar rolling. I went and vetted three different cigar aficionados. I asked them where they source their tobacco from.

27:10I asked them what the experience is going to be when they roll. I was there. That's a cool couple, by the way. Do it? That runs that business. Yeah, super cool. I love their story. And then how we're going to set up the cigar lounge. Paid extra to the hotel to let us do it because they're like, we don't let smoke. $60 ,000 fine if someone drops it on the turf. It's like, okay, here we go. Yeah. And I was like, it's a bet I'm willing to take. We'll set guardrails. But just being like, yeah, but what does it cost to smoke? and they're like you figure that out yeah we didn't really hear like red there's like what's it cost I felt like I was just like being sold to non-stop but just to make it worth it so anyways the intentionality behind it and I think another piece to just to you know on the sales team preparation I think what was also important was I wanted to publicly display to all these people there and affection and appreciation for my team because of the intention that they put into the work they put into this thing like a big fan of public praise and private correction yeah but I do think there's also this private correction that's also important so I wanted to publicly acknowledge everyone in the effort that went into it so I think people appreciate that because they feel that same way about their team yeah and just I think I'm a huge fan of just honoring when people actually sacrifice and so it's cool to do that for the team and watch them like put in this work and see this this thing that was just an idea get birthed into this massive stadium event that turned out just exceptional if you've never thrown an event like that i mean it's like the amount of detail orientation logistics to do all that i mean it started making my head spin and i was like let me just get back to selling at this point but just like it uh it was giving flashbacks like wedding planning and stuff like times 10 but yeah on top of all the other stuff we're doing that we're busy with you know you just throw in well it's probably five to six hours a week easily right easily yeah on top of everything else and so So it felt like a sprinted marathon for sure.

29:01Yeah. While launching a product. Yeah. So let's get into that part. Let's get into that part. So you opened up the event and it was kind of cool because it was in, it wasn't the tunnel, but whatever area that is of the stadium. And there was like a big screen above you and, you know, you're opening up and you start talking about the different eras. Yeah. Which I really love this. I have a version of that that I do, but it's really cool for any sales leader that's been in the game for a while to see like where we've come from, where we, yeah, where do we come from? So can you kind of set the stage with like where you feel like we're at and all of that good stuff?

29:38Yeah, I think it's like oftentimes we're so close to where we're at right now. We, we want to forget where we're coming from, but we also realize that history in and of itself will repeat itself, hopefully. And we should be learning and taking it from our past. And so one thing I wanted to do with the group was like to set the stage and build the case for precision. I think it was important to understand the different eras we have walked through as revenue leaders, sales leaders over time. And I kind of see them in like three distinct eras. And then right now we're going through what I think is the ending of an era and moving into the future era that we plan on owning.

30:14But if you think back to like the 2000s, late 2010s, there's what we call the craftsman era. yeah i loved this era um and and i'll i'll bring it back and we'll we'll kind of bring it to the future um but the craftsman era was simple right it was one person who owned it from cold to closed and beyond with the relationship they prospected they knew their account list it was very much a named account type of strategy and if we didn't call it abm or whatever and they named the account they knew their accounts like the back of their hand they knew the contacts in it they were very much involved in like the personal lives of their prospects too right we used to have all these like handshakes and in-person things golfing was a huge piece of it gifting was a huge piece of it um and i remember this because like my i started there my dad was already well into sales at times i got to see it like the relational aspect um but i think it was what i loved about the craftsman was there was continuity with one person throughout the entire sales process so they They prospected, they nurtured, they hunted, they nurtured, they closed.

31:16But then they also had the number after, which was they were there to keep the account, grow the account, expansion was theirs. And so there was this relational thread that went throughout. There was also context that didn't get fragmented throughout. And I love that era because it wasn't as scalable, but was incredibly impactful. But then you had, in 2011, Predictable Revenue came out. Aaron Ross, out of his run at Salesforce, which we could talk all day about how I feel about it. But predictable revenue came out. A lot of people in that room had built their careers in there, including myself.

31:45We built this idea or our sales career off the back of the predictable revenue model. And so by about 2013, 2015, everybody's running to this motion, which was we're going to take this craftsman. We're going to fragment the role in the name of specialization. And now we're going to build this new thing called SDRs or BDRs. And they own top of funnel and the grunt work. right it's like a lesser than thing now and if they do their job well it then gets handed to the ae who's going to nurture and they're going too close you might even sprinkle in a sales engineer these days but then after that they hand that off to account management and cs and their job is now to keep and grow so you took what was one person's job doing three functions and you fragmented into three different things we call it specialization yeah and we call this era the factory era because we took this craftsman and we said hey you own the entire assembly line now you're just a station on the floor and you got other people and you got assembly line in front of you you got assembly line behind you you just got this one thing and so we fragmented it in the name of specialization and all it really became was a headcount model how do we scale headcount to scale growth and the challenge with that was it did work to some degree and if you were in that area you kind of knew that it worked why because the phone was connect rates are high yeah there's no such thing as as blacklisted domains your emails got delivered they oftentimes got responded to and then LinkedIn was a wild west.

33:07You could do whatever the hell you wanted on there. You and I met in this era. You had like Duck Soup and you had like these LinkedIn tools. Phantom Buster. Oh yeah. Phantom Buster. Which is making a resurgence. Is it really? It still exists, yeah. In the GTME space, yeah. So is one part of this, the fact that VC and PE is at like an all-time high in SaaS and they're injecting money into sales development, growing sales development teams that they aren't even looking at the profitability of what the sales development team is producing. It's a big piece of it. So at that time, so we're looking at, you know, 2000s, early 2010s, craftsman era.

33:42Then we're at factory era, which is like 2013 to 2020, I'd say. And cost of labor was cheap and it was plentiful. Cost of capital was cheap. And so you could afford to build the headcount armies at that time. But then 2020 happens, and that's the whole Black Swan event where COVID hits our whole workforce that we built a bullpen around in an office with the rah-rah and the gongs. they all go home and then when they go home what happens well they start asking the question well if I can work anywhere why would I work here and so then you have this massive like diaspora where everyone's leaving and going to all these remote jobs where they're now creating a war on talent which means that I can go get paid more to go work somewhere else yeah so the role itself started to inflate and cost and so this happened in 2020 then you have stimulus money come into the market you have institutional capital, which is like next to 0 % interest rates.

34:33And so capital is cheap. And when capital is cheap, where does it go? Well, it goes from institutional capital and venture capital needs to get deployed. It goes into scale at all costs. And so then it got dumped into our departments, sales and revenue, to go create demand, capture demand, acquire customers. And what that did for us was we created this mass boom where money's going in, the costs are inflating. We're creating more roles because we can, this is like the window in time where we can go get our valuations are super high. Profitability doesn't matter that much. And then when you create this massive saturation, you then create commoditization.

35:12And when you create commoditization, you then race to the bottom. And when you race to the bottom, you make super desperate decisions. And what did we do in that this time? Well, this is the third era. We created the volume era, which is, okay, it's starting to work less and less. The headwinds are getting stronger and stronger. Connect rates are dropping. email is hard to deliver and respond to. LinkedIn's throttling everything. So the only solution we have is just do more of it, like do more activity. But then you have this moment in the volume era where the shift happens and the money dries up in March of 2024.

35:42Every economist basically points to this time where stimulus money, excess savings dries up. Private equity then does what private equity does. Valuations start to drop. Profitability starts to matter again. Well, this isn't a profitable motion because it didn't matter for a while. Well, how do we reverse this? Well, we've already created the problem. And so that's why I think that's the Roman Empire moment of when the issues happened in the four walls that led to them losing the battle and the empire falling, is the money dried up. And so therefore now the mandate has to change in this time. And we've created all these headwinds where the mandate's very difficult to accomplish.

36:18So that's how I see the three eras. Craftsman era led to the factory era. Factory era basically got put on steroids with the volume era. And then we basically just threw volume automation and AI at what we thought was scale. And what it ended up being was we're just throwing this stuff at stopping the bleeding that we've now created for ourselves. Yeah. What's interesting, too, is like when you look at the factory era in the predictable revenue stuff, it really fueled the sales engagement platform boom. Oh. Like Outreach and Sales Loft were, I mean, Sales Loft actually sold for like almost$5 billion.

36:54Yeah. Good timing. Yeah. Great timing. And it's just like all of these tools, there was this kind of like thing going on where like these companies would blow up and then Sequoia or whoever would get all of the companies in their portfolio. And there's just this money that's just going around in a circle, you know, like this. You're an operator at this time. what's it like experiencing and going through some of this stuff and when did you realize that oh shit like the sales engagement like the sequencing play that we used to rely on where it was just boom boom boom boom boom dial dial dial like that's not working anymore like what was that like experiencing that as an operator yeah i mean i grew up uh i did the sdr role back in like 2016 and 17 and so when i yes dude it was awesome i mean like i'd write email templates that are pretty good but still template and I was like a hero for writing like a report that would show who opened emails you know and then we'd call those people and they'd answer we'd book meetings with them it's sweet um 50 a day actually had to place them but um yeah I mean I saw a lot of this like technology emerging really quickly and at the beginning you know sequencing felt good like volume isn't illogical it's just available and so you just can hit more out there um but over time what I've found is it's not that different where we're at now like AI email is just another template It's just like dynamic templates at this point.

38:13So it's kind of more of the same with everything. And so, I mean, I first saw the collapse of like email replies like pretty fast was like the first kind of like fracture. I think is what I started to see. It was like channels were performing at disproportionate levels at a certain time. And as email started to go down, I started to see LinkedIn start to produce really well. And there's always like these little pockets of time you could capitalize on really well. If you timed it really well, you were able to outproduce a lot of your peers. the phone kind of was always that constant throughout but now you see like on LinkedIn too like I'm getting spam there more than probably anywhere else yeah like it's it's it's insane right and so when I started seeing it is when I mean I was at gong probably like in 21 through 3 and seeing like just talking a lot of our sales teams and like seeing the data seeing the challenges and you see these like patterns when you zoom out in the market when you have like that vantage point.

39:07And you start diagnosing performance and you start looking at the cost versus some of the different inputs. And that's when we worked together and we were doing some of that 3E stuff. And I just think a lot of people, they grew up in that era. They learned that. Their leaders were promoted. That was the playbook that worked. They're training people on that now. They don't know any other way. And so they're just going to keep throwing volume right now. And so that's what we're seeing right now is people are desperate. They don't know what other plays to run. and those channels are getting overly saturated.

39:36Honestly, unfortunately for some of us that do the right stuff, it's like numbing people out regardless. Like you could have a really good email, but if you get 50 a day in your inbox, it's just gonna be desensitized there. And so I've seen it evolve over time, but I think AI is just because you can and just because it's, all we're doing is just cheapening a channel that didn't work very well in the first place right now. And that's where everyone thinks AI email is gonna save them. And unfortunately, it's not really panning out that way. Yeah. And it's this constant need, I feel like in tech, especially to find the easy buttons.

40:07The sequence was the easy button. The AI written emails, the easy button, the AISDR, which how much of a freaking joke has that been? Man, everyone wants that. Like, you know, who wants that to work the most? The C-level people, the same people that would never respond to that stuff. And so when I talk to people, they have this realization. It's like, we ask our team to do all this stuff that we personally hate all the time. Like you get a call, you say hello, four or five second pause, like I get pissed. Like, you know, I get spam calls all the time, like flagged as spam. I get a ton of emails that just clutter my inbox, LinkedIn stuff.

40:42Then that same leader turns around, tells their team, they're actually championing this stuff and thinking they're gonna get different results. It's kind of madness. It's freaking crazy, dude. I had a client who sells large enterprise, like Fortune 1000, it's like database type solutions. And they basically said, hey, we're not going to allow our sales reps to work any of our inbound stuff anymore. So unless it's a demo request and they book a call on the calendar, all of that warm stuff in the middle, the people like on our marketing list that actually like our stuff, they are only allowed to have the AISDR engage it.

41:20I was like, guys. And then that rolls up to RevOps too. So RevOps is like creating all of the stuff for that. They're managing the tool. And I'm like, dude, you guys, what are we doing? So we're kind of in like a what's old is new kind of phase. Before we talk about what to do, I would love for you to give some context around like the state of the CRO that is like planning next year. Sure. And you guys set this up really nicely. like let's talk about what they're being asked to do the levers that they would normally pull which you talked about quite a bit yesterday and let's let's kind of go there to kind of set this up because i i think that you guys are really changing the way that the revenue leader is thinking about solving this problem so yeah go ahead well i think it really starts with again that that this shift this moment that's happening during the volume era which we're still in, but I think it is dying out.

42:20When the money dries up and profitability matters and LTV to CAC matters and CAC payback matters and revenue per head matters and your magic numbers and rule of 40s matter, the mandate became very clear very quickly. And it always starts at the very top, right? So it comes from the board, eventually makes it to the sales floor. It's do more with less, right? Or like the most recent variation of that is we want an AI story. Yeah, that one's When I said that yesterday, people just started laughing because everyone in there is the whipping boy of the board. And they're all just basically told, give us an AI story.

42:52It's never enough. We want an AI story. What they're really saying is we want more with less. Because they're not even talking about we need that in our product. It's a whole different conversation. They're talking about in our growth, we want more with less. And we think the answer is an AI story. So what they're tasked with is they're tasked with, okay, our targets are going to go up and to the right regardless. They're never going to go down ever again. Every quarter is the next biggest quarter for us. And yet my resourcing and my allocation of the budget is going to continuously be more and more constrained because profitability matters and payback matters.

43:25And so because of that, they're now left with, okay, well, what levers do I still have that I can pull that can let me do more with less? And it usually looks like this. I will open up my model, my spreadsheet. We're going to do a little spreadsheet magic here. I've got all these sales. right and oftentimes and i simplified this in my talk where it's usually headcount times activity times conversion equals pipeline and then it's pipeline times my win rate times my acv equals the number i can get and that's basically what this big labyrinth spreadsheet it gets far more complex than that but that's the general sense of it and so what they tend to do is they say okay well let's let's take the most expensive thing out let's cut headcount boom okay we're going from 40 SDRs to 32.

44:12I'm going to save 800 grand there. Okay. Well, we have a rep capacity model. So what we know to be true about the rep today is they can do this much input to get this much output, not knowing it's getting worse every quarter. Um, but this is the model we have. Well, let's just change the capacity. Let's just say, um, we're gonna go less in this, this column, this cell over here, which is head count, but I have to figure out how to make the math work because it's just a formula i'm gonna put the plus button over here and just go up a little bit in activity or dials or emails or sequences if i if i had a dollar for every time a cr i was like if i could just get every rep here to make 12 more calls a day like dude it just doesn't like it changes everything it's like that's like the plan for the next year 12 more dials every day and the problem is like and rob and i'll let him i won't steal his thunder but he talks about this production layer.

45:04People don't realize the impact and basis points in our funnel. So I'll give you an example. If I have a 5 % connect rate today, and just over time it slowly just gets deteriorated to 4%, I'm like it's one basis point, right? It's not much. That's a 20 % drop. So if I do the same thing I do today, and we just deteriorate this 5 % to even 4%, it looks small and nominal, it actually means I'm going to get 20 % less of the outcome that I want. Yeah. And so the challenge, though, is that when you start to crank up the volume in these other cells, usually activity. Right. We're going to push it off the headcount and go down over here.

45:41There's the the less that we're going to answer the mandate on. I got to go push it up somewhere else because the math is the math and the model is the model. They don't realize that the more you increase volume, the more you deteriorate basis points off of your funnel in different aspects. Right. Your email, if I go from a two percent response rate to a one percent, that's a 50 percent drop in production if I send the same amount. And so I got to send double the amount to even make up for what I was getting before. But unfortunately, when I do double the amount, I deteriorate it from 1 % to 0.8.

46:10Yeah. Right? And so it's this push and pull constantly. So what are they faced with? Well, they're faced with this mandate that seems impossible to pull off, but they only have so many levers that they've ever been handed to actually pull to get that mandate to come true. And what you tend to find is CROs have a 17 to 25 month runway and they're out. And why is that? Well, it's because the model is the model, right? Spreadsheet doesn't lie. It's just math, right? It's, it's very hard facts. Yes. If this is true, I will do this. But I said this in my talk, which is like the challenge is once you put it into the spreadsheet and you close the model and you put it into your deck and you present it to the board and they say, yeah, that's what more with less looks like.

46:54It's real. Then we're like all high five and like, we're going to go do this thing. Let's go. The challenge is that spreadsheet still lives on in the cloud, but the person who owns the spreadsheet is the one who's actually having to see this thing come true. And so when it fails and it does, it can't be the model's fault. And so someone has to take the fall and it's going to be the person who owns it. And that's where, that's, that's the challenge that the market sees right now. Yeah. And those levers, right? Like that they're pulling, there's some that are more theoretical and there's some that are just like objectively, like you can do tomorrow.

47:25And I think that's why when it's the biggest quarter of your life, you're going to pull the ones that are not theory, right like how much effort does it take to move win rates over a large group of aes you have to figure out what is actually the real constraint within all of that training you know better than anyone else and reinforcement and actually change that's a lot easier than it actually is it's moving when like and how much can you really even move win rates if it's already pretty good like 25 are you going to double that you're not going to get to 50 win rates unless that's a product market fit boom that's probably not charging enough either if you have 50 win rate that is also true right and so there are certain levers that have outsized gains on them but like right so there's a lot of work that takes time to get a win rate maybe a sales velocity type play there's product roadmap and attachments you need these things all take coordinated effort and things you also don't control by yourself right there's finance on pricing it to get approved from the CFO on discounting there's cheap product offer that has to prioritize what you want that's actually gonna get sold into ARR so we go over these things you can make 50 dials tomorrow you can send a hundred more emails everyone tomorrow We'll pound that table on it.

48:27And so that's what you pull. I mean, it's really hard to fix foundational things in this seat because you already inherited probably something from the last one that didn't make it much, much farther, right? And so we joked when I was at the public company, it was like every quarter is the biggest quarter of your life. You have a 90-day sprint. So can you really zoom out, slow down, and fix what is happening? That's why you see a lot of companies go private after being public too. It's something I talk about, like even us being a private company and we do have growth equity or private equity that backs us, is this whole motion around this strategy of quarterly earnings reports if you're public or just quarterly board meetings.

49:03It creates the behavior. Ironically, if you just didn't create this behavior, the PE would get more of what they want. Yeah. But when you push and you drive for, did you hit your number? Did you hit your number? Did you hit your number? You have to make the short-term decisions, the levers I can pull today. At all costs. At all costs. I mean, just you guys are in that seat right now. How do you guys deal with that pressure and have those conversations? Because I'm sure there's pressure for you to deliver on the quarter. Yeah, always. Well, it's this constant push and pull, right? Like I want to be a good steward of the money that was invested, right?

49:32It's one thing that I said when I took on money, because we were bootstrapped up until January. We took on 27 and a half, somewhere in that range, million for a Series A. It was a pretty sizable Series A. And so I knew, for me, I had a couple of convictions. One, I wanted to stay bootstrapped as long as I could until I knew for a fact that, one, this thing was going somewhere. and then two that I could guarantee a return on their capital right because I'm a I might be I might come across a certain way online whatever but I care a ton about stewardship for a couple of reasons one of which is I don't think any of this is mine but two I think it's I don't like leverage over my head you know and so I don't like having bosses I've been terrible employee my entire life that's why I probably have to run companies but I knew that if I was going to go into this I had to feel like there was a confidence with what we were building that was going to get them a return but i think the third thing to your question is is when we took on money i had very specific rules that they were like if these things aren't true i won't do it and part and that's why we selected up data and they have been awesome you know when up data invested in us there was we got a ton of attention in 2025 because we grew super fast we were bootstrapped with zero to five million the first 12 months um we're polarizing we have this unique category created called phone intent and so we have people knocking down our doors and most of them are like the typical suits you know like they're just there for being financial engineers we know that they're going to beat the shit out of you at the board like it's just one of those like you're going to force us to change our vision to help you hit your number um and so we got it down to the short list finally an update it really showed up and came to bat with the valuation the money the terms everything we wanted and the rule was you're buying into our vision we're not buying into your spreadsheet, right?

51:20Now, there is an aspect where you've got to get them to return their money, and they have their own fiduciary responsibility with their LPs. And so I want to make sure that we're delivering for them. But at the same time, we don't want to make short-term quarterly decisions that impact long-term, massive valuation drivers for us. So a lot of it's just setting the expectations of the board. Now we're still majority control, so maybe we're in a different position than someone who sold off 51 % of their company. And so I feel for them. I hope I don't have to get there anytime soon. But if I do, hopefully it's well worth it from a valuation perspective.

51:51But I think it's setting expectations. And I have – like I lead the board. I manage the board. Rob has enjoyed some of my management of the board where I've – I said, hey, we're not meeting on this month. We're too busy. It's for real though. We'll talk to you all in a couple months, but thank you. But I do it out of respect. It's like, hey, you guys need to return. We need to focus. So something's got to give here. I will give you an update. You and I will meet one-on-one, but I'm not going to go take my team off the field. They're going to produce right now. And they actually agreed with it.

52:24So it's been more about board management. It's like something I've had to learn as a CEO. That's one thing I'm learning in this season of life is the levels to this game, of which I am finally entering into some of them. Yeah. It's cool to see your progression as a CEO, too. Yeah, did you know me eight years ago? Yeah, we met when you were doing the tribe prospecting thing, and we've decided at Outbound Squad, too, that we're like, hey, we want to grow this thing. I don't want to just be a solo consultant with an EA. So I'm going through kind of a miniature version right now of that journey as well.

52:56So it's cool to see, man. So basically where we've gotten to is the precision is really where we need to focus. Like, that is our biggest lever. the win rate and increasing our average deal size and all of that kind of stuff is like do we need to focus on that yes but that's not going to deliver like a very quick win and it's very very hard to create that change so we start looking at all of the kind of leading metrics around pipe gen i mean really it's the quick and this is how i sell you know because i'll inevitably get sales leaders that say hey well we're focused we just brought in you know value selling like let's focus on that i don't know if we can do the pipe gen i'm like pipe gen you have to do that it's got to be regardless like we got to do both you know um but this is the quickest way to make an impact the vantage point you guys have that i love is very similar to ours and that you see all of these organizations and they talk about pipeline coverage and you start to really dig into the stages and i shit you not this was like a at the time 100 mil arr company and we're looking at like stage one and stage two the amount of pipeline that was sitting in there that they were forecasting that was literally like deals with no next steps that had been in there for 13 months the chasm that's like you know 600k deal oh yeah uh you know like that kind of stuff let's talk about pipeline coverage as a concept and i'm curious like what you guys think of that and like how people should be measuring pipeline and like just how fucking bogus most of the the pipeline is because this is really to like i look at a lot of what we do as uh like you have fake pipeline that's why you need to do my past uh ceo uh cro as well ceo used to say your your pipeline is cosmetic basically in italian accent you know it was always just it just evaporates basically it's like at stage two the chasm i think it starts with misaligned incentives between the sdr and a program in a certain way i mean obviously aes are going to want closed one revenue that's what everyone else wants that's why we're here and then the sdr what can they control?

55:00And so there's different flavors of meetings set to meetings held, opportunities generated to progressing stages, but there's always that conflict. It was actually really interesting. So I was talking with one of our customers, Chad, over at Zip. They're great. And they saw this problem as well. Like what was going on with like this pipeline being created by the SDR program versus what was happening with the AE side. And they looked at actually measuring the cohorts of that pipeline. And they ran an analysis of opportunities pushed in the last five days of a month by those weren't at quota they had a win rate drop of almost like 10x or something like that and so why is this happening right calling up your a like please flip this over for me here and like so you're incentivizing this stuff and then you're reinforcing it and then you're filling it with cosmetic pipeline that starts to fill it up and then that starts to kill the efficiency and production metrics of the sdr team and you just keep filling stuff up with that but that's like what most people are doing right and you just assume some of it will close.

55:54Here was the most contrarian view I've ever seen. At first I still was like, what are we doing? To have an SDR that's 120K and to not have a quota, to not have anything on meetings, like the CFOs would faint everywhere. Why did we do that? So you didn't have to actually worry about the outcome of the call itself. Like you just, and so we, what happens with that is you don't force fake pipeline in. You don't force a conversation that just cause you can get it done. And so like that really contrarian view over there starts to feed in more. It's so anti-capitalism. It still makes me like, sometimes I'm just like, man, this is crazy.

56:30Coming out as a Marxist. And so I just think like, it really starts right there though. Qualification criteria and cinemist alignment and CFOs like what's pretty on a spreadsheet that can get measured. That's meetings, opportunities and pipeline, right? And so that always, it starts right there, I think is where the gap comes from. So how do you guys measure pipeline then? Is that a metric that you look at or do you measure conversation? Like how do you know how the quarter is trending from a pipe gen? Well, just because we don't pay or on like meeting set and pipeline revenue doesn't mean that it's not being created.

57:01You're just not forcing that function to say that is the quality measure of how we're saying. If you're talking to the right people consistently every day with the right message, you're going to get it, right? But yeah, we look at pipeline. We look at pipeline coverage, look at weighted pipeline. You just know that more of it's real. Yeah. Like, and there's like, you know, you have a standard of like what can actually be in certain categories. like we also know that you can't forecast or we run pilot motion right and so before a pilot happens you have to look at more of a trending weighted approach of like that pilot pipeline that will convert because until someone confirms results like in a pilot it's pretty hard to even put an upside category on that and so we have different like approaches that go more mechanical or scientific in the earlier stages to help us plan 90 days out and then as we get later there's around the accuracy of like the standard definitions of where it has to be, what has to be true, and then inspection.

57:51I mean, it's basically, nothing novel there, I don't think, but it's an important thing to make sure. It's like, it's a risk lever, right? Like how much is your weighted versus what you got? The less it's covered, the more risk setting evolves, and that makes you do stupid sales practices more. So pipeline does cure. Well, I do think a lot of companies get out of the practice of like truly on a regular basis, setting true commits, right like it's incumbent upon you to meet with your team and force them to commit their number right whether for us it's you know we believe that uh the atomic unit of our sales process is pilot converted right it's the middle stage in our funnel it's a stage it's usually a paid stage but it's a big it's a monumental stage and it's very forecastable after it it's forecastable before it and we want to make sure we treat those two those two different you know two different sales processes basically and so we have forecast meetings on pilot commits right how many of those units are you committing to and i think what rob does a great job is he he will question the out of you on like so you're you're calling a commit on this but you haven't talked to him in two weeks like riddle me that bubba you know our average time from a pilot being completed to going through procurement red lines is 45 days and there's 10 days left in the month and you have it and commit what are you doing you know asking the hard questions and the logic you just gotta poke holes in it.

59:11And I think too, like one thing that people have come in and thought was interesting about our forecast is I don't inherit the gap upwards. I make the reps own the gap downwards. And so what I mean by that is there's a difference between like a deal back commit, like I'm signing on this deal as a commit, but they have to commit their top down number, you know, every week as well. And so let's say you have a quote of 200K a month, you're calling 200k only one of your deals is back with 50k so you have 150k gap to show me how you're going to close that with your upside with your best case upgrading deals through a lot of other companies have it where the cro is stressed until the last day and everyone just throttles their commits right near the end and they just like sandbag it's like no make them call their shots even if the deals don't exist there and how you're going to make your number happen the quarter and i think that ownership that you push down is the right thing to do I think it's something that, Rob, you know, this is where people might get totally twisted with us.

1:00:07We're not anti-AI by any means, right? You guys leverage the shit out of AI. We leverage the shit out of it. We leverage it in the right place, right? I use this whole analogy of front of house versus back of house, and I won't get into it unless it's interesting. But one thing Rob's bill, which is cool, is we have the human forecast, which is rep-driven and pretty heavily driven by the leader who's going to say, hey, you're committing this, but the numbers will add up, bubba, to protect the innocent. But Rob's also built this internal tooling for us that basically has an AI forecasted, weighted forecast.

1:00:44It has all these rules and very deterministic rules set into it. And so it gives us almost two versions. Okay, what's the human commit, right? And there's a human forecast. And what's the AI forecast? And how far off are they? and then the benefit of the AI is we can now say, okay, well, where do they differ? And that's where we can really start inspecting and say, okay, well, this is actually, AI forecast is actually showing us 1.2 million this month. This one's showing us humans 1.1, who's sandbagging 100K and where is it? Yeah, we'll tag them. It's like, Andrew, my sandbagging rep. Andrew is the sandbagger.

1:01:17He's also our highest performer, so I'll give him that. I will. But you have overconfident and underconfident tags on not just the amount, but a forecast should be a confidence, an amount, and the time, right? And so we have that confidence level on all of those things. It just makes you ask the hard questions, I think. And so I don't use that as ground truth only. It's just a tool, right? It's just another level of context where I trust my reps, but this whole thing is driven by actually what is said in a call or what is on an email. Like it's raw evidence is driving that. And it's interesting what you will find there sometimes.

1:01:49What's the phrase? In God we trust, but also bring data. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. This, I think, is really interesting because if there was one thing a sales leader could do, and I know that fixing the way that you forecast is not a very easy thing to implement, especially at these really large companies. But I think it would create more urgency around pipe gen, especially for teams with a lot of account executives where a lot of the pipe gen is not happening because reps are saying that they don't need to. And on paper, it kind of looks like their coverage is, hey, we got 6x coverage. You know what I mean?

1:02:25I think fixing that. I don't see 6X anywhere anymore. It's crazy. I won't even look at unweighted coverage anymore at this point. It's just like it's complete. It's cosmetic. I've become him, I guess, at this point. I get it. It's good. But unless it has a forecast category standpoint, I'm looking at weighted coverage and I'm looking at rep calls. I don't look at just a raw number. I mean, it's helpful, again, as how much do we have out there? Usually you don't realize. If you look at all coverage, it's just low. It's like, okay, we got a gap there. But, yeah, I don't know. I challenge the leaders though.

1:02:55If you have 6X coverage and you have a deal that's in stage one or two with a forecast category, that's your failure. Yeah. You're not double-clicking, triple-clicking. I think a forecast just sets the tone of how you actually operate. It's like the tone of the culture in a way. The call is the culture. And so if you're not forcing yourself to ask the hard questions, click into those things, then that's on you. Yeah. Not the rest. I think we've built – for some reason, culture has gotten so soft where the amount of times I see this – And it happens in all sorts of categories. But, yeah, that's just like a lot of work.

1:03:29Right? It's like the work. Like, we see this all the time. It's like, yeah, doing an accurate forecast is a lot of work. But it's what's required to do the job. And so either do the job or get out. Choose your heart, dude. Do you want to be like the person that comes in and completely has no trust left in you? Do you want to take your lashings at the board? Or do you want to get it right and hit your number? Yeah, like someone's going to pay. You want it to be you? Like, come on. Like, yeah, so interesting. Interesting. So let's keep this going. Let's talk about the production layer. So one of the reframes that I got from you talking about the production layer that I thought was really interesting, and again, a lot of the takeaways were...

1:04:05I was like, oh, this is kind of interesting positioning, right? How you guys are doing this. You knew what I was doing. What we can position against with Outbound Squad too, you know, when we're selling it. And I like the idea of the production layer. You have the inputs on one side. You have the outputs on another. You have, hey, what about all the shit that happens in the middle to create those outputs? And the part I thought was interesting on the inputs though was this idea of capacity. Like we have X amount of capacity and a really great way to think about, you know, pipe gen and outbound is like capacity utilization.

1:04:40Like how much unused capacity, no different than a airplane, an airline or a hotel thinking about like how much unused space that is a fixed cost are we not like capturing. and you look at a trend across SaaS where there's 50 % roughly quota attainment across the board. I mean, like, holy shit. You have all of this open capacity across these teams. But talk a little bit more about the production layer and why that is such an overlooked aspect. Well, if we zoom out, so we talked about production economics. So it's like the... I feel like you were really proud of that. I did. I digged it. Rob Love's a good coined name.

1:05:22I do. I loved it, man. you know so i got more coming um but uh yeah joey taught biology it was my turn to teach economics so um and so i i define that as basically the return of your paid selling capacity and so then when you look into that like you have what your cro typically looks at right it's averaged out data it's sanitized it's clean it's made by your vp of rev ops you've got pipeline capacity you've got cac you've got cost per opportunity you've got attainment right all of those like more output metrics at that 30 ,000 foot view that they're looking to run the system. They also see the inputs on the side of like what I pay for, right?

1:05:57I'm paying for X headcount, this tool stack, this type of data. And so then what happens though, between what you pay for and what you get, and that's that black box that we wanted to uncover. And the truth is, is like most people have no idea how to even look at that or carve it because it's complex. And like, so if you like take away that black box, what we're talking about, and it was on the phone channel naturally for us. It's what we are experts in, but things around who's calling, to whom, how often, at what speed, by what method, and then what actually happens when the conversation starts.

1:06:30That's where almost all the money that you're spending on that capacity is evaporating every day. And so to frame it for people, if you have a 50-person team, you don't have a 50-person team. Every day, you pay for 50 selling days. And by the end of that day, they're spent and gone. And so you're not paying for activity. You're paying for capacity. Your team spins that with activity. And so what are they doing with all of it? And every step along the way there, a simple way is just like the effort they put in, how efficient they are with that effort, and how effective they are along that whole channel.

1:07:00We started digging into very specifically and carving it in unique ways. I think my biggest takeaway was that the average team just doesn't exist. Like when we look at data averaged, it hides all of the variance and the truth that you're looking for. And that's where a lot of the insights really started to pour out. And there was a lot there. So I'm curious if there's some that you really wanted us to talk about here a little bit today. Oh, man. That insight in and of itself, especially with a large org that's got like 1 ,000 reps, that's what they're always going to look at is the averages. And they're not looking at the – dude, I mean like almost every time we do a manager training, one of the things that we talk to the managers about is we take them through this exercise we call the dream team.

1:07:42And it's basically applying the 80-20 rule to how you spend your time and who you spend it with and over-investing in where most of your revenue is coming from. Almost always, it's like two or three reps on each team producing 60 to 80 % of the revenue. Yeah. And you look at the distribution curve across an entire company, it almost always looks like that. The biggest thing I think that would be cool to talk about is like, what specifically did you notice around? because all of those things you talked about in the production layer are like, unless you have a tool that you guys have that you just launched, you actually can't really get great insights into how many times the right accounts were called, the distribution of performers, the top performers and where they're spending their activity versus the bottom.

1:08:32You can't really get insight into anything at that level. um but yeah i would love for you to talk about like the the amount of calls that go into a p1 versus with top reps versus lower reps like what what did you see in the differences between like how these top performing cohorts from an activity standpoint not the volume but like the precision around like who they were going after and how often over what period of time like i don't remember the exact stats but what were some of the kind of high level observations there yeah and so we We analyzed 3 million cold calls across 42 reps. 42 companies?

1:09:10Oh, yes, 42 companies, 1 ,200 reps. Yeah. Good call. And so it's not a small sample. And we didn't do anything besides just normalize and anonymize it. But it was the raw data. And the raw data is the call logs, like who made the call to whom at what timestamp, what was the result, things like that, right out of your SEP, right out of your dialer. And we normalized it there. And so first thing we're looking at is just what are reps doing? because what we saw was your top 20 % of reps across the entire data set producing 60-ish percent of all of the production meetings. The bottom 25 % were producing 4%.

1:09:42And so that was a theme across all of those different layers is just how is Pareto showing itself up? Like the millions of dollars of waste is just crazy. Well, yeah. I think the one slide that was the most damning of all of them and it kind of talks to your... Not even that one, we should talk about that one. But there was one where we showed a group A and a group B. It's a company that everyone listening would know and you would think they have their shit together. They clearly do not. But if you look at it, there was one cohort of Group A, which had 25 reps, and one cohort that had, I think it was 58 or 60 reps.

1:10:12Yeah, it was almost double. And let's just say you smashed them together. So talking about the CRO and what they see, they would have seen that this cohort of 75 total combined booked about 250 meetings. And you would do the average and say, okay, well then on average we're booking, call it three meetings per rep. but if you split it into group a and group b one has 25 one has 50 reps you find that 250 meetings came from group a and zero came from group b so 50 reps produce zero output yeah but if you at the cro level are just looking at the top number the north star and the dashboard you would say okay well this group is 75 book 250 no 25 book 250 and 50 which cost me 1.7 million dollars book me zero over 100 days over 100 days and they both did around 50 000 or 50 000 dials they both had around 2 ,500 connects.

1:11:02So the effort was the same. The efficiency was the same. And the output, I mean, we joked, we're like, could you at least book one meeting? So it would be a$1.4 million cost of meeting. But yeah. And so that was just the eye opening thing is this is how that's at a large scale, but proportionally that's happening at your team of 10, team of 20, team of 30. And you laugh, but I promise you it's happening in your own org because no one bucked the trend. It was like of the amount of people there, I think there was like three or four orgs that were a little bit different off of that, but almost everyone has about 20 % driving about 60 % of their results of the phone.

1:11:35Yeah. So I think, and I know this is maybe like a simple thing for anyone that's really good with data, but this is kind of like 100 level, like how to look at your data properly stuff. I think we need to re-review and like get back on the same page with, because a lot of the data that's out there on pipe gen, whether it be cold calling, cold email, it's all of these like averages and things that don't really tell the entire story. A hundred percent. So I thought that stuff was like super, super insightful. I can make it practical for people who are not people. Super simple. You put a dollar figure on the head.

1:12:10Yeah. Let's just make it round. I got a hundred reps, a hundred grand each, right? That's, that's what it costs. Okay. Well then you look at, okay, what are the inputs that each individual rep did? And let's look at through the funnel, everything that they accomplished, right? The outcomes. And so it might be in the dialing channel. It's dials made. Look at each 100 rep, how many dials I made. Look at connect rate. Look at conversation rate. Look at meeting rate. Look at qualified pipeline. And all you have to do at that point is take the dollar per head, apply it to the activity, and that's the cost per activity.

1:12:45And then you look at the outcomes and you now do the same thing. Okay, well, this activity drove this many outcomes at this stage. That's my cost per outcome on that stage. Go to the next stage, it's the cost per outcome on that stage. And if you can just do that, which is put a dollar in the head and then get the activity and the inputs and the outputs that that person created for you, you can now put a dollar per activity and dollar per outcome of every stage of your funnel, and you'll see everything you see. Yeah. One of the things that was crazy was one of the slides was like roughly the same cost per dial, roughly the same cost per conversation, but 10x the cost of a meeting.

1:13:23on the lower performing reps. In that example you gave earlier, it was zero. I mean, it's just like there isn't even a meeting to quantify the cost against. Yeah. No, cohort A was like 2 ,300 bucks per meeting. Cohort B was 1.4 million per meeting because it's infinite, really. So if I'm a CRO, one of the big takeaways from here then is not looking at my data in such a macro way and really kind of peeling it apart and saying, hey, a bell curve does not exist in our sales team. It doesn't. And then that's why you go back to where we started is the levers. You can actually start pulling more headcount.

1:13:57You don't need more headcount. Like you just need to get your best people more opportunities and at-bats to do what they do best. That stat you did was so good. He had that one stat where it was like if you just took the conversations the lower 25 % would have had and figured out a way to shift those conversations to the people in the top 20%, the cohort would have drove like 1 ,100 more meetings than the whole team. And that costs you nothing. It actually saves you money, like a significant amount. Because there's the opportunity cost of not only paying for those people, but to not have those in the right hands.

1:14:34And so for the CROs, like you do this all day with your inbound leads. Like you know if you route your best, most expensive leads to your best salespeople, you almost instantly get a lift. It is no different happening way earlier on the conversations you're having with your team. So those potent people, you need to design the system to allow them to do more. That's where precision is not just scarcity and removing things. It's knowing where to double down as well. Yes. Yes. Let's talk about connect rate.

1:15:08So essentially with this precision model, the one sort of leading activity that we are like banking on is the conversation. right it's like how can we produce more high quality conversations serve them up to the right reps give them the right enablement and like all of that kind of stuff so that they're prepared for this there's kind of two sides of that equation let me how did you refer to it again there's the there's the connect rate and the connect the conversation right we're talking about receptivity uh oh call deliverability versus call receptivity yes yeah so call deliverability let's talk about connect rate and like give us like the short master class on this like why is this something that we should even be thinking about and like this is obviously not as simple as just looking at the dashboard and being like oh it's 4.8 there's so much more under the hood going on into like why that is if that number is even accurate like phone number health all that kind of stuff yeah i'll start at the macro level so i'm a big believer what i call front to back optimization.

1:16:09So picture your funnel, right? So from inputs, your activities, all the way down to the outcomes you get. Turn on a side because it's easier to draw on on a whiteboard when I do these sessions. But front-to-back optimization says, okay, we have a metric at every stage of the funnel, right? For dials, it would be connect rate, conversation rate, meeting rate, qualified op rate, or sales accepted rate, and win rate, right? What people tend to like to do is either at the very, very front, do more volume, but no optimization, just more volume in it. Or they like to spend time on the back. And we talked earlier about basis points mean a lot.

1:16:44Well, a basis point, when you have a 20 % win rate, going to 22 % win rate is like, cool, it's 10 % bump to the whole funnel. It's great. If I go to qualification rate and I go from a 50 % qual rate to 55, it's a 10 % bump to the funnel. And should we be optimizing those things? Yes, of course. because 10 times, you're going to get a 20 % lift. But if you go to the very, very front, the small basis points that you can create an improvement on create massive multiples to the whole funnel. So why is connect rate so important? One, because the phone is the most important. I'll first say that. And so therefore, if the phone is the most important, we need to be optimizing the most important channel with the most important metric.

1:17:26So if I make 1 ,000 dials and I have a 4 % connect rate, I make 40 connects. and then I have, let's just say I have my metrics through my whole funnel. If I can go from 4 % to just 5%, one basis point, if I can improve it, then I improve and the rest of the funnel stays the same. I improve my entire funnel and the outcome at the very, very bottom by 20%. If I can go from 4 % to 6%, I improve my whole funnel by 33%. If I can do what Titan X does and go from 4 % to even 20 % on the low end, it's a 500 % lift on funnel. And all you had to do was call the people who are likely to answer and not spend all your rep capacity and rep hours on people that aren't going to answer.

1:18:07That's why it's the most important to me is because at the end of the day, nothing can happen without the conversation happening first. And so how do we optimize for before the conversation so that the after the conversation, even if you change nothing about it, has a massive lift in the outcome that we want? And so that's why I think it's the most important is because it's at the very, very front of the funnel and it's after the inputs. and so I think it's the most important the second I think and this is more like larger philosophy is that we think that the conversation is the atomic unit of the whole go-to-market organization I won't go physics on you guys at its core the atomic unit in physics is more about it's the it's the thing that holds value first that everything else is built upon yeah it's the molecules and matter are the things that we see and attribute value to like this table is matter but matter can't exist if the atomic unit doesn't exist.

1:18:57And everything before the atomic unit holds no value if it can't create that thing. And so we say the conversation is the atomic unit because from it, everything else can be built. And why do we say it's the atomic unit of the whole go-to-market organization is because not only is the cold call meant to create a meeting for us, which could hopefully create pipeline, which could hopefully create revenue, but a conversation also holds something extremely valuable, which is building blocks towards other channels, a conversation as proprietary first party intelligence that I can gain from a conversation I can't get anywhere else.

1:19:30Right. We kind of just displayed this in the dossiers. Right. Yep. Is I can take that information and if I can get unique proprietary signals on an account that I want to sell into, what does that do for email? What does that do for ad copy? What does that do for content? What does that do for product? What does it do for CS? And so why do we think Connect for its importance because it gives us more intelligence that we can't get anywhere else. Especially in the AI era too. dude yeah you can just get all the transcripts from the stuff and everything everything is insane everything and so i think it is the most and i know i'm biased and people are like oh you sell a connect rate product yeah i do and the reason i sell a connect rate product is because this is so fucking important all right that's why that's why i sell it and so that's my whole theory my thesis i think it's probably proven at this point i'd like to think so um you want to get technical about ConnectRate?

1:20:17I mean, we don't need to go into like super, super technical on it, but I'd say like high level, what are some of the things that people should understand about ConnectRate and why it's so bad and some of the tools and things that people might be thinking are helping, but really destroy your opportunity to connect with your target market? Well, like I said earlier, saturation creates commoditization. Commoditization is a race to the bottom. And so when we saturate a channel like the phone, right, and we want to derive value from this channel, we tend to naturally say we want to just go do more of the things that got us value.

1:20:50And we don't realize that oftentimes quantity will degrade quality over time in two ways. One of which is when I do more volume of something, I tend to be worse at it because I'm less prepared, I'm less on my feet, or there's other headwinds, right? And so for example, with parallel dialing, like let's just say I fire up a dialer, it's a parallel dialer, and I can rip even a small amount three dials at a time i'm not sure of those three people who's likely to answer if they're going to answer so when someone finally answers i'm now thrown into a call with someone that i'm not prepared or know who it's going to be right worse when you make five dials right i have five potential people i can talk to there's no way i'm ready to know who's about to talk to and so then you get a degradation on conversion which i know we're going to talk about here shortly because that's your sweet spot where you see a degrading just by the mode of dialing you choose to do, you will degrade the conversion rate.

1:21:45Yep. Right. So you actually hurt that funnel on its side. In your sample size that you showed, it was a fifth of the conversion rate. It was a 2 % conversion rate roughly through a dialer of connect to meeting versus a 12 % dialing single line. It was insane. Yeah. I mean, I hear all these like common misconceptions. Like we could just call everyone, like, right? Like why not just call everyone? I'll tell you that you shouldn't. Like, and so we looked at individual reps, but then we went across the bigger data set. So one rep had 10 % connect rate on single line or power. I'm not even going to be a hater on a modern dialer, right?

1:22:17Power dialing or parallel. And that was 5%. So instantly, it was just half, right? So naturally, someone would say, well, I can just make double the dials. It's easy to do that with these dialers. I'll just cover more ground. But we say, at what cost? Because the penalty doesn't just stop there, right? And so we looked at a bigger company. And they had about 250 ,000 dials. One side, it was like connect rate was 4x less. Next, though, the conversion rate is where we typically are seeing the biggest degradation by far. The pause, the list dilution, not knowing who's going to be there. And that was like about a 6x less like conversion.

1:22:50And then on a labor piece, because we're talking about we pay for capacity, activity is how they spend that money. The dials to meeting ratio is like 30x. It's like 2 ,300 dials to get to one meeting versus like 90 or something like that. and all underneath though you are absolutely collapsing the system of how you're supposed to deliver them the numbers as well and so you create this loop like the more you dial the less you talk the more your numbers show up as spam the more you chase that with more volume because you're stressed to hit that number and the loop continues and and so we see this pretty pervasively right there's like an even more dangerous silent killer in this whole thing which is you eviscerate your tam oh yeah oh my gosh eviscerate your tam i'm not even talking about like oh we lost our shot is that you have mechanically or technically in the networks and the infrastructures of dialing, right, telecom carriers, you have hurt what's called the reach rate, right?

1:23:42The percentage of your market that will answer will no longer answer. So by the nature of the practices that you allow your team to do, which is oftentimes parallel dialing or massive volume dialing, bad practices, you will start to hurt your number health. And when you hurt your number health, like I always ask the question like, Jason, are you likely to answer a cold call? And if you're like yeah I'll answer one Jason if I called you right now on a cold call and it was marked as spam how likely are you now you're like never definitely never like cool so okay so if 20 % of my market mathematically would have answered if I was clean numbers if you just interject spam into the equation it's probably minimum that you can now only reach 12 % of your market yeah so you didn't cut off eight but you cut off eight basis points but what you really do is you cut a 40 % of my time I could have talked to yeah that's like the silent killer because we don't have infinite teams.

1:24:32Yep. And especially companies that have a really big enterprise or strat motion, I'm like, dude, you don't have all of the - You cannot afford it. Like, especially dialing through and trying to get a hold of these execs and that sort of thing. So your positioning, though, I want to be really clear, is that you are pro-dialer. You are anti-parallel dialing. Yes. I have never been a parallel fan. Yeah, it's the method. Like, I mean, we do all this work on rigor of carving accounts. We hire the reps. We train them. We do enablement. And then right at the final mile, we turn around our entire strategy into telemarketing to a degree.

1:25:02You just start blasting everything. I mean, that's where I come from is call centers. Yeah, but we call it GTL dialers. Yeah, it's strategy. I wouldn't do that because it's good marketing, right? Like we're being hyper-efficient. It's the AI story that we need to deliver, right? What's so cool, even back to that 30x less efficient thing, was they sent us our data. I ran Rob's benchmark analysis that we built. He built. I'll say him. and when I got the data back I was like holy shit like hey guys if you just stop parallel dialing that's it just stop doing that your connect rate will go from 2.3 percent to nine overnight if you stop parallel dialing you just single line or power dial in your same dialer same reps same list everything's the same if you just stop doing that your connector will go from 2.3 to 9 % but your conversion rate will go from 2 % to 12.6 % yep and I was like go do that and two weeks later they go hey we fired some people awesome save money but and they're like on the dot we're at 9.2 % on connect rate and our conversion rate's actually 13 % because we've just been doing this they're getting better yeah insane yeah they all speed up just to slow down is what we say like you didn't need speed in the first place you need results you just don't realize in that quest of speed you are killing your output you know um so i'm sure you see this a lot too like i mean you do a lot of training on once the conversation actually gets rolling where do you think the gap is like where i mean you see these top performers that are super potent and then the bottom reps like what are you typically finding is the biggest lever you can pull to be more effective with the meetings on your training yeah well i think just to kind of use your flywheel.

1:26:40Your flywheel is list, message, rep, follow-up. And what was the fifth part? There was intelligence. It's not even in the flywheel. It's the thing that's like the hub that speaks to each of those things to make it spin faster. So the list strategy, there's a couple things I think with that. You guys are really great at the P1s and prioritizing and rethinking your entire contact strategy around who's going to be likely to engage with me. where we kind of do the first kind of pillar in our approach that we call it disqualify. It's this attitude that a great AE has around where I'm not going to fuck around with a bad opportunity.

1:27:15I'm going to disqualify. That's why I love self-sourcing accountings. Yes. And the thing that I was taught was you don't want your pipeline to look like a funnel. You want it to look like a martini glass, right? You want to shrink down the top of funnel and then go really deep on the opportunities. This is all of the analysis around your target market and around industry verticals, the situations and triggers that are present in accounts that like make them have the highest win rate, close the fastest, et cetera, applying all of that to make sure that when I do get that P1 on the phone, like this is like a prime account.

1:27:47I'm talking to the right person, all of that kind of stuff. So that's what we do on the list side. The message side, I probably would say is what we do extremely well. And I would love like, we worked together at Gong like four or five years ago. Yeah. Dude, our stuff is so insanely awesome compared to them with all of the AI stuff, especially. We'll ingest like all kinds of like call recordings from them and basically take what their buyers are actually saying in sales calls and then reverse engineer that into our framework. We call it reason to meet. It's trigger, tension, trust. What are the triggers that make the conversation relevant?

1:28:24Tension, what are the problems that the buyers are sharing? Trust, what is the social proof we have that aligns with that? And that's your opener, right? And what we'll come in and do is say, hey, if we're selling to, if it's a company that sells media, let's say to marketing leaders, what are the triggers that make it relevant for them so that I'm prioritizing my list based on where they're opening up grocery stores, where they're growing, where there's expansion, contraction, et cetera. Tension, I know that these marketing buyers have these two sets of problems and I've nailed the language in the buyer's language.

1:28:59and then the trust, I have my system serve up to me the customer story that I should be using. So instead of, hey, Rob, it's Jason with so-and-so, I was calling to see if we could talk about your marketing strategy for 2027. Do you have an hour next week? It's, hey, I noticed this thing, right? This trigger, I noticed that you guys, I noticed that you guys just opened up a store in New York City and you're competing with, you know, Walmart and et cetera, all these other stores. You got a minute, it's Jason with so-and-so. Yeah, who are you with again? Well, hey, I noticed this thing. I talked to a lot of marketers that are really thinking about how to separate their brand when they're not able to win by being the lowest cost provider.

1:29:37It looks like you guys are doing a ton of marketing right now, investing a ton of ads right now. My guess is that you're probably not seeing the return they used to. We just help so-and-so company through this. How much of that is relevant to your world right now? And if you can get every rep doing that, where they don't even talk about the product, they know how to make the conversation relevant. They can talk the buyer's language around the problem. And they have a good, like, short customer story that they can use. That's how you get from a, you know, 3 % to 5 % conversion rate into a first meeting to that 10%, 15%, 20%.

1:30:12We had a client go from 22 % to 35 % conversion rate on that first call into a meeting just by enabling every single rep around, like, three simple talk tracks that just nailed the language. And what we didn't talk about here is AI automation. This is the AI story that works, but it's not going to be the one at the board level that's going to make it rain. But the fundamentals at scale, and Joey talked a lot, it's like conversation forward and AI supported in a way. And so it's like the fundamentals are still here. We're talking about craftsmann era stuff, like having a compelling message with the right targeting at the right time, but using AI efficiency to build that quickly.

1:30:51Building that playbook at Gong by hand, that took so long. But it worked, right? Dude, we talked to so many reps. I did so many one-off calls. I would have to spend hours workshopping persona-based messaging. That took a long time when we made that thing. So long. You guys had to put a ton of work into it, too. I remember. Now, like, we can basically come into a messaging workshop and say, here's what we think your messaging should be. And then we kind of fine-tune it based on what their best reps and all of that kind of stuff will say. But we know that this will work because this is literally what the customers are sharing in the sales calls.

1:31:24You know? But the next part of that is like really the soft skills, like the execution of it. So it's that and then the reinforcement or where we spend a lot of time. With rep execution, dude, this is stuff that I honestly I learned at 19 going door to door selling house painting services. It was like tonality, putting a smile on your face, like being someone that like if they take a meeting with you seems like you might be a good hang. You know what I mean? It's the little stuff like that. Like if you think about when we worked with Gong, there are some reps that just like they're not only knowledgeable, but they just have all of the other intangibles that honestly are very hard to teach.

1:32:07Well, we've shown this. Like let's just say we don't do personalization like you did, contextualize the call. We've done it where like someone like me, I'm really good on cold calling. I don't do it much anymore. I'm good at it. And we've done tests where it's like, okay, let's run 10 different openers, 10 different scripts. but I'm the constant variable in this whole thing. And the variation on meeting rate was negligible. It wasn't as much about what I said, assuming we don't do personalization, because that does have a massive lift. It's how you say it, how you communicate, the winsomeness you might say it, or the tonation, or where you pause, or where you interject to be more human, as opposed to being a robot who reads a script.

1:32:48It's wild, the impact of the intangibles, the soft skills. And I think that this is why I talk a lot about like we are in the business of building special forces teams. Yeah. Not infantry. Special forces takes a different approach to military operations than than than an army does or military or infantry. It's like the intentionality that goes into like the craft. Yeah. It's so different. And it's not a it's not a knock on one or the other. It's just saying that the strategy is very different. And right now, the only strategy we can afford to move towards in the market with the headwinds we have is the special forces model.

1:33:22We talked about this in my talk. Infantry is the model you go with when mass is the message you want to communicate and when you can afford the cost of what it takes to do an infantry model, which we can't anymore. And so moving to the special forces where you have personalization, where you are sharpening the soft skill crafts, where you can be a good hang if they ever thought about that. I just don't think people think about that as much. It's why we're so aligned at this table and why we're unifying what you do with what we do. So, yes. It's risky for these people to make those bets, too, because it's so contrarian.

1:33:53But what we saw in that data is if you remove that bottom 25%, you would lose 4 % of meetings. 4%, but you get 25 % of payroll back. So how can you actually get that elite talent density? How can you actually recruit these people? I mean, I've done top of five. I think I've probably hired 500 SDRs. Every 5K more you pay, the bar goes up exponentially. And so that's a bet I would make about the CRO right now is ask for less headcount, but ask to get approved to be able to pay them for more. Like get the best in the market and set up a system that allows them to get into conversations like all day.

1:34:26And then over-invest in data and like the right tech that you need to. That's right. Like most people are absolutely hammering the cost of inputs without understanding their cost of production. Like a lot, we ask people in the room, like do they know their cost per conversation? Do you know your cost per meeting? Some people kind of knew, but for most of them, I mean. Nobody knows their cost per conversation. Like I think two people that are our customers because we told them about it, right? Yeah, we told them. We forced them to. But once you hear that, it's mind-blowing. A lot of them are around$500 to$1 ,000.

1:34:55The low bottom cohort were somewhere around$2 ,500. Every conversation. And so we're over here taking – you need multiple data providers today. People are slashing them, getting the cheapest one possible, trying to consolidate tools to the worst things you could have, not understanding that layer. And so you're cutting all these cost of inputs without understanding your cost of output production. And that's what we flipped it on is we want to make sure you optimize that production cost. And I think even in your work, we talk all about cost per conversation, but I think the other side of the coin is value per conversation.

1:35:28Yes. Oh, interesting. Right? Like I think, so you look at the front and I've been a hundred grand for these outcomes. Okay, well, what was the value of the outcomes at each stage? Well, now I can start to see the value of the conversation and the cost per conversation. So you'll start to see that massive disparity in the top 20%. And we didn't even talk about the top 10%. Right, yeah. We mentioned top 20 % is driving about 61 % on average of the results, let's say 60. The top 10 % are driving 40%. Yeah. The next 10 % are driving 20%, and then it falls off a cliff. Yep. And if you look at the cost per outcome, it's substantially better here, but the value per outcome is also substantially higher with this top percentage.

1:36:06And so there's different ways, depending on who you're talking to, on what's going to land with them. Yep. Write that down. Write that one down. We got to go in two minutes. The last thing that I would add to kind of summarize, not really to summarize, to kind of put a bow on this, is the human element of this. It's really easy to look at a fucking spreadsheet and be like, oh, yeah, we can do this and this. And to not think about the human element is just huge. And one of the biggest things about Titan X that is so cool is the morale of a sales team, account executives who normally complain. The ones that do outbound, that put effort into it, they complain, dude, I'm putting 90 minutes into this a day.

1:36:45And I'm like, I'm just not talking to anyone. And it's not that they're like extremely unskilled. The morale boost that you would experience from, oh, hey, I just made a call block for an hour. I'm an account executive. I've personally done this with the tight next data. I talked to 10 sales leaders in 45 minutes. I was so mentally tapped after that. I was just like, dude, I'm done. I need to like recoup from that. That was like a lot of high level conversations with these VPs. But the morale boost you get across the entire org. PipeGen is about more about energy management, I think, with the AEs.

1:37:20It's getting them pumped. The best leaders that I've seen, they get AEs to do it. There's a great story and narrative around why they're doing it. They comp it properly. But more important, they fucking get active with people like on a weekly basis. The managers rub shoulders. They're doing it. The VP sometimes will get in the pit and say like, hey, once a quarter, like I can still do this to you guys. like the energy management and the morale, I think, is really a big part of this that is very under. Well, that's something that makes it sustainable because like you don't have heroic sprints that drive the results you want.

1:37:48You need to come back every week, even if it's PG Tuesday or Thursday. Yeah. But you do it right, intentionally, consistently. At scale, it's going to drive you the results you need. Yeah. And I just think that AEs, we have this mandate, we're driving on them, but they're the most under-resourced and invested team for PipeGen specifically. You think you buy all this bloated tech for these SDRs that are lower cost, that are not nearly as good. You pay way more for these AEs that are having conversations with your buyers because they're better at it. Yet this team has all the tech. This team has a cell phone and stale Salesforce data.

1:38:18And you give them 30 minutes a day and say, you're going to prospect 30 % of your pipeline when the team over here can't do that with all the other stuff you get it. You'll figure it out. It's crazy. It doesn't make sense. The reason I love this conversation, we don't talk enough about this, but I had a keynote maybe like a month or two ago. where there's a room of CROs, and I talked about this idea of future pipeline capacity fragility. It's fragile. Why? Because if most of your results are coming from the top 20%, they're your top performers. And if you don't create the environment for them to win and continuously win, people want to be potent, they want to win, and they'll stick around where they feel like they're potent and well-utilized.

1:38:55It's not that AEs don't want to self-source, it's that AEs don't want to waste their time. 100%. And so if you don't create the environment for them in two ways, one of which is you help them maximize the value of their time spent which is get them into more conversations for example but secondarily we don't talk about when you have this bottom 80 percent especially the bottom 25 that it's just a cesspool of performers right they're all c players d players are not performing the longer you keep them around you don't realize that they impact your 20 yeah and people don't want to be on a team of losers and so when i say like the pipeline fragility for the future what happens the top 20 if you don't create the environment for them to win or be around winners is you lose them.

1:39:34And so you lose your top 20%. You don't lose your top 20 % of pipeline. You lose 60 % of your pipeline. Yeah. Because they either need to move up in their career or they will move out to somewhere else that will give them that opportunity, either more money or more value for their time. And so we don't talk about that, but I think that that's another reason why we should be considering slicing headcount at the very bottom of our, of our org to protect and preserve and drive or create more value for the top 20 % or else they will leave. and they will move and your pipeline will then be fragile.

1:40:03100%. Good stuff, fellas. Where can people go to connect with you and learn more about what you guys are doing? Tidanex.io or Rob and I are both pretty present on LinkedIn as well. Yeah, you can find us there. And we got something cooking here coming out. Not just the product launch, but we have something very valuable for the market that's free November 1st. I'll just tease it. Keep following along. All right, that's a wrap. Thanks, Jason. Cheers. Yeah, you too. See you, brother.

1:40:33Thank you.