Transcript for:
SAS Academy Podcast with Mike Manzy

hey what's up guys welcome to the SAS Academy podcast today we're talking to Mike manzy he is a five times VP of sales he's done over a $100 million in sales under his leadership and we talk all things sales hiring High performers retaining High performers building great sales teams we talk about the trends in outbound sales how you can leverage AI to get ahead of the market and then where that's going we talk about his mission to eliminate the SDR role completely and then we end off with unpacking how he is a 300,000 followers over the last 12 months so if you're thinking about creating content or you're putting effort in creating content it's just not hitting the way that you wanted to Mike unpacks some seriously tactical tips today to elevate your game this is one of the most potent and tactical episodes we've done enjoy let's dive in good to have you on the episode and and podcast Mike it's fun to have you here and uh we've got we got some meaty stuff for us to dig through you have quite the background five time BP of sales closed over 100 million in deals I'd love to just start off with why don't you give us a an overview of some of the sales teams you built yeah I think one of the unique things about my experience is that everywhere I've been has been a different type of organization turnarounds startups and everywhere has also been a variety of um types of companies meaning some are SAS some are Enterprise some are services and also a variety of locations you know you mentioned earlier one of my experiences before we started where I was selling completely everywhere literally and then other places where I'm selling in in super small markets so what I've done is basically when I began my career I started selling all of the international trips to high school so your Spanish teacher who took the whole school to Spain or whatever we were slinging those and that was old school man I remember we would close a deal they' give you a Bud Light like that's that's that's where we're at right and uh we were super excited to make $30,000 a year it was awesome ended up uh teaching English abroad coming back and saying I want to just kind of get my formal sales bit under under my belt because I knew I wanted to be in sale so I was at Career Builder for quite some time there and uh was in the Staffing Group sold in did well got promoted into a role where I was completely not ready for honestly and they had me basically growing their Canadian market and then saw the team that I was just on meeting the manager so I actually went into management and the next two years was selling a variety of things $300,000 a month deals with for for emails with companies like Darden and and Southwest as well as regular SAS model deals of 6,000 to $100,000 selling social media e-commerce tools as well as um time tracking but really we'll say like the middle bit of my career so far where it became a really pickup was when I got into to leadership and so I worked at one company where we had a team of four grew to eight and um the team was losing money and then we ended up being so well they actually gave me a secondary team to grow and I think the reason that that worked out was because I understood to like get a good grasp of the team and get the team culture there but where I went too far in that role was I became the friend of everybody and that didn't work in the long term so I swung the complete different direction at this e-commerce company where I then was like I'm just here to you know break next cash checks I don't care about anybody and it took me a long time to regain the trust in the sales team back because I ruined it in the beginning but we ended up like doubling Revenue year-over year so there were obviously some some good things there and then um at workable was a place that I worked at where I think I really expanded quite a bit we we were a team of six and we were doing I think at the time like 500k I want to say in Revenue and then about two two and a half years later we were a team of 20 25 something like that I think if I'm getting my numbers right and we were doing about 7even million and there it was like how do we handle inbounds how do we handle capacity we had a CEO who was so intense and just me through intensity made me learn so much about Trend analysis and thinking through the details that um I really grew up there and on the back of that experience I had so many templates and so many Frameworks that I had to go through mess up go through again mess up again I was able to flip that with with time doctor which is a company that tracks your time to be able to take a team of I think at the time it was two maybe three or four into a team of around 30 and we were doing inbound outbound International expansion uh changing the complete way the complete go to market strategy and uh we took that company which preo was doing let's say I don't well I don't want to put their their numbers out there but we'll say postco after we sort of had the fall of of rise and fall of Co ended up doing about five or 10 times more than they were doing previously so anyways that's where I've been and then for the last couple years now I've been Consulting with companies to do everything that I and other VPS of sales do in 10 months in 12 months but doing it 80% of it and 8 but 100% of the quality in one month or two months so that companies that are let's say under five employees under their first million under their first 5 million can get all of the lead system sales system hiring onboarding and managing system they need without having to hire someone like me and pay us 400 Grand a year and without having to wait three four five years to do it before the revenue made it made it reasonable to do it so that's where I am up until today my friend awesome I love it earned the stripes uh I there's you you mentioned this this growing up in change in leadership style in I love the double click on that because I think that a lot of those listening to the podcast they're either they're doing founder Le sales themselves or they're doing founder Le Sales Management um or we have relatively new sales managers so just in general audience here are probably in the middle of that what kind of leader do I want to be that do I want to be the one that's friends and I think that's probably where most of us start you very familiar the Continuum swinging to the other side of the Continuum on a little bit more uh I don't know how you want to call it just by the Numbers probably more more qu uh quantitative Sales Management and it sounds like you found a middle ground between the two can you talk to us about that Evolution and now you've worked with a bunch of vpsl you've probably seen people work back and forth through this H how have you how's your leadership approach changed I I totally totally want to click into this and feel free to push on me any any of this so I think that yeah we what I find is that most people that want to managers come in with this friendly environment and we want everyone to know that you're safe because we came in from environments where we didn't we didn't feel safe we felt like our boss was just a jerk one of the things we don't recognize is that a lot of the things that we did that made it a lot of the reasons that we worked so hard was because our boss was so challenging you know I talked a minute ago about how this company I had this really challenging CEO I remember we have a meeting that was two hours and we knew that it could go five hours maybe six and you were going to get screened at and so that's crazy on the one hand but on the other hand it really sharpened me so much so just recognizing that I think is important but yeah most of us do come in in that friendly Le the other people I see what's interesting is other folks I see who are like just super super money hungry number one number two and number three killer individual contributors they come in and are Savage they're like there's no reason we should have anybody who's not good in one week cut him and um what they don't understand is the nuance of getting humans to do things what they do understand is the Nuance of getting deals across the finish line so I do just want to make it clear like you can come from either end of the spectrum and you have to come to to this Middle Ground I think there there's a couple rules when it comes to balancing management either too much in the friend zone and too much in the boss Zone what you got to do is first make sure that you have created an environment of trust people can say things to you and you're not going to tell anybody people can put their trust in you be vulnerable with you the next thing you got to do is you need to create an environment where they feel like you're going to go back and forth with them like you're you're going to work as hard as they are and the third is going to be one where they feel like you're going to help them if those three things are true you're going to get there so for example to create that trust what I always did was I just try to be as vulnerable as humanly possible I'll talk about my parents I'll talk about what I say in therapy I'll talk about all the things that I'm struggling with even if it's at the organization to let them know like this guy is is telling me stuff below the surface and that it's inviting that's inviting me to tell him stuff below the surface and if I don't want to which is fine he's at least saying to me sort of nonverbally it's okay I you you trust me with the information you just shared with me I think I can probably trust you where on the the side of like working for people I feel like a real I don't want to call it a trick because it's it's something we should be doing constantly and it should not come from a place of like tip or tat but every month or at least every quarter you should be doing something that somebody on your team feels like has made a sizable impact on them this typically can come in the form of get getting rid of a field getting rid of a meeting um just removing some policy that you might have taking over something that's been annoying them and just you know arguing with somebody internally so they don't have to little little tiny things like that but every time you do that obviously it's it deposits into their bank account and then it does two things one it gives you the ability to then ask for withdrawal um on the back of that deposit two it also tell tells them like he's going to put a deposit in I'm going to put a deposit in we're both like a marriage in this HOA if you will so when you're doing that every month people are like I trust this dude and I want to work hard for him because he's working hard for me and that's when you can actually do the last bit which is actually helping them you can't do the helping unless you've done the first in so once once you get to the point where they trust you you've earned the right the you have the space to help them once you you get them working hard and you working hard now the help will go somewhere because they're going to do something with it and when it comes to helping I think that too often what we do as managers especially as friendly managers is we try to give the answers and what this creates is the conversations I have every week Mike I get so many slacks from my team I'm so busy with just questions from people right you get it I see you guys it's crazy because when you've done that what we've done is we've actually created an environment where they don't trust themselves yeah they either don't have a manual to refer to and know okay manual says a I'll do a or don't trust a manual they have inside their own head of of their own gut so what's really key is that we use the right coaching methodology for people and I learned this straight from manager manager tools Basics but what you want to do is be like hey let's agree on what's the what's the problem you want to get better at blank cool so even if I have no idea what you're talking about I'm going to go okay well what do you think's the right way to do that here's some cool ideas and kind of scratch your head even if you know the answer scratch your head and kind of whiteboard out with what some potential answers are and then what you do is you you say all right well are you game for that you know ask for their commitment in some level and they cannot be game you could change what the plan is and then finally offer specific help don't say can I help you let me know if you need anything but be like hey I could put a reminder in your calendar would that be helpful hey I could reach out to you every one of one would that be helpful and when you do that they then feel like you've helped them but it really is all all their own so I feel like I'm running an essay right now but like to to put it to to wrap it up to really balance how you manage people you need to first grade an environment where they trust you second grade an environment where they know that you're going to work your butt up and third create an environment where you're actually helping them all those three things combined is what actually helps you be a good manager that creates a great culture retains top reps and doesn't have to spend all of your time answering slacks I'll tell you the biggest thing I picked up from that is the importance of vulnerability right I always joke with Johnny and I'm like man business would be easy if it wasn't for all the people you know and just trying to trying to get humans trying to get humans to human is is a tricky thing and I think you're right you know I've um I tend to index more on the friendly manager the friend zone uh as you put it kind of side of the spectrum um but I've also gotten some really great results out of teams that became very high performing by doing exactly what you said man is just bearing a little bit of my soul and show them like hey it's okay I don't have it all figured out I'm not up here on the soapbox preaching right I'm just it's us against the problem you know and just being a little bit vulnerable man that's a huge unlock for a lot of people listening like you don't have to have all the answers just because you're the boss totally and I I will say too the the one area of vulnerability that I think has gone on a long way in terms of creating culture is vulnerability about having to remove people you know like when they think the boss removes someone cold-heartedly whether they like the person and they knew it wasn't a good fit or they didn't like the person and knew it wasn't a good fit when the boss just comes in and says like the HR hey guys it wasn't the right move and we're moving forward people are like I can't trust you because suddenly when it comes to firing people you become a robot so you're like a different person where when you go this is really hard for me and like this is what I went through and you know hey I'm going to I have to do this how do you think it went what can we do to support this person people are like wow this guy is trustworthy even on the back end of my career here so that's really important too I always talk about like my bernade brown whenever I'm talking even in interviews I'm like let me have a brade brown moment here for a second yeah but I I think if I could just double look on it for one more second Johnny before you jump in there it just is something that I really want people to be doing more of is in the interviews have these have these moments because in the interview everybody is like ultimately buttoned up when you want to see what someone's actually going to be like watch what happens when it an interview you saying like yeah you know um I didn't get the love I I wanted as a kid and it really hurt me through my teen years um and I feel like it's one of the reasons that that I'm trying to I'm more extroverted now you I'd love to understand like you know what was life like for you man how are you doing so I'm not saying you should dig into people's traumas that's not it and I'm not saying you should encourageable to share things you shouldn't but simply sharing that lets that person go wow this is a real manager this guy really cares about me and more importantly they will open up whether it's about some trauma which I I don't want them to open up on if it's inappropriate but um but they'll open up more in the interview you'll see a lot more of them it's such a pattern interrupt I love double clicking on interviewing it's one of the things I take a lot of pride in in doing um doing a yeah and it's like you're the first person I've talked to on this podcast or really in general other than um than Max Hansen from y Scouts and his book is is another place I've seen this but um you know just asking people like hey how like how did you grow up and like what's been your journey through life to lead you to be the person you are and I always drisk it for them by saying whatever you're comfortable sharing is fine yeah yeah yeah and then just but yeah it's a it's a great way to a like I think gauge if they have the willingness to share something again we're not trying to like dig up tramas and get crazy but just like something other than like you know I went to Stanford and gra like whatever right give me something so we can relate as humans um yeah and just kind of just kind of seeing what they're into reminds me of that that study that Google did a project Aristotle right where they're trying to like deconstruct what makes these high performing teams and the the number one thing was psychological safety and I think that people take that term they're like well if we have that we can't be high performing and like no like it's the other way around you can't be high performing if you don't have that I think you nailed it with the the don't be a robot when you're someone it doesn't mean you can never fire someone or you sacrifice your psychological safety it's how you get there it's less about where you get more about how you get there think you're nailing it man I'm loving what you're putting down great stuff sweet all right let's do the Mike and match show what's up Johnny you got anything or he's gonna hang out yeah well this will I'm gonna lean in and get some some free Consulting from you here because I'll tell you I've I've struggled back and forth with holding a high bar of what we expect from our our sales team and having a culture of high support and when to and it's also something I helped coach against a lot with our clients is saying hey the friction to bring in new Talent has to be lower than the friction of or the the path of keeping a a mid performer on the team I like rename this I don't know if you're a sports fan I call it like the Dak Prescott Zone like Dak Prescott is a quarterback who is the middle of the road he's not a championship quarterback but he's not terrible and so he's got this entire franchise locked up and like I think he's just good enough for us to not feel confident that we can let him go but also you know not can't see a path with us winning with him and I I think it's easy to find yourself in the gray area running a sales team of like I'm not sure if I've got the you know the the franchise winning quarterback in every role or um you know it's hard it's it's harder when they're in the gray area than when it's like clearly they're not the right fit how do you help a VP reduce the the friction and second guessing associated with leveling up the culture and performance of a team especially as some you've come into lead teams in the middle sometimes you're inheriting team members you know sometimes you you've made some hires that don't pan out the way that you expect but it's not it's easy when they're missing quota month over month it's harder when there's it's in the gray area so how do you how do you coach someone through the systems of overtime if every six months 12 months we want to make sure that the level of our sales performance is increasing how do you avoid that like just good enough higher that's yeah absolutely potentially taking the seat of a higher performer that's great and I I think you're nailing a few things here there's a few things that this is opening up by the way I'll just kind of dive into and then I'll answer your question I think the the first bit is recognizing when you have a c c performer all of us nice people that get into management and want to be nice we are the ones who who spend far too much time with that bottom performer um so it's important to note that basic yeah now you get it so it's important to note that what should happen is anytime you have a poor performer poor performance let's say by a human U what you want to do is first let them know then let and and add more support then you want to let them know formally and add even more support and then you want to let them off on their own and maybe it isn't the right fit but if you haven't done those first two you're not going to feel good enough about letting them letting them off but just give yourself a specific time frame when you go to do these things if your sales cycle is under 90 days these should be 30-day times 30 days if you stink 30 days of formally you stink 30 days if you got to go um and then the second thing I want to say is on the opposite side of this which is because we're spending so much time with our botom performers if only we can get Jerry to be the best guy ever we spend way less time with their top performers because also typically top performers are low Rangers they're leave me alone I got this but spending time with our top performers doesn't need to be actual time with the top performer you can spend time for the top performer maybe that's looking at their deals and figuring out how where in your network if you have someone that can help them close a deal maybe that's um hiring a VA for them to handle how unorganized they are because they all are really low you know there there's a variety of things that you can do to support that guy but let's go to your question how do we handle that middle of the road person and how do how do we overcome that feeling of like we can't lose them we can't move them up what do we do what do we do Mike I'll tell you the the the give more specific to the profile not hitting Target but doing all the intangibles well they're working hard right so they're great culture fit they're working hard when you say jump they say how high they put in the effort it's just not showing up results I think that's the the gray area that's hardest to sus out and one that you can find yourself looking up you don't you don't decide you're going to give it three months or six months but you could look up and realize you've had six months of this person being on the team and the reality is like the results aren't there effort has been let me see let me see if uh if this answers the question and maybe I'm sure I'll have some people that disagree with me here when you have someone on your team who's doing all the inputs but the output isn't there sometimes that just mean it's the wrong team I've had places where I've had I I see this very often every week I usually get a call from somebody who says I was killing it at my last company killing it at the company before that came this new company can't close the deal are they a bad sales rep no it just for whatever reason doesn't work out it's this every company has a combination of leadership expectations product Market fit customer and if you don't have that weird combination that works perfectly it just doesn't fit so I always tell someone hey I'm looking to to job ship I hate my company whatever I'm looking to leave where do I go I go if you're killing it at your company only go to other companies where you're selling to that same um target market and only and try as much best you could to find a company that has other major things similar to your current company so if you're killing it in Salesforce don't go work at a startup if you're killing a startup don't go work at Salesforce if you're killing it somewhere where you have a ton of support to get inbound leads don't go somewhere where they're going to pay you $500,000 a year but it's all outbound so you got to think about those things to to actually be successful because just like any any business owner too there are plenty things we were good at plenty things we were not good at and there's plenty of things we messed up we messed up but we shouldn't be risking the revenue of our business on someone to learn on on the back of our Revenue if it's going to be truly not a good fit so no if you're if you're getting the inputs not the outputs I'm going to you can thank you for your time move on yeah yeah absolutely okay let's I'm curious how much of performance let's let's narrow this down to in B2B SAS the success and failure of a sales team how much is dependent upon who we hire and then how much is it dependent upon how well we coach and manage at post hire like 80 it's 8020 who you hire makes way more of the difference so if you have a a really good team I've come into good teams and then I've uplevel them but I can think actually workable is a great example I remember coming in had so many great folks in the team change the script up Lev the sales we increased our win rate 20% we increased our deal size 15 or 20% in the first like 90 days or so but it kind of was like coting from there and then it was a matter of we lost we lost a good rep and I was doing three times as much coaching couldn't get the team where we needed to we ended up bringing one of the Reps back actually who had left and suddenly we were doing we were doing well again so it really is about retaining the the right recruiting and retaining the right reps and I feel like I've learned a lot about retaining I've lost some incredible people and uh so happy to talk about that as well but yeah it's it's mostly people let's do that let's well I love to take two stops and man I'm already feeling like we might have more on our list to chat through than we have time for so just you just got a wealth of knowledge and background appreciate you you unpacking it this way let let's start with what do you see most commonly if you are working with the VP and they don't have the hiring stuff nailed just run me through maybe the top one to three these are the the common the low hanging fruit that we go after to make sure if you're not doing these one or three things hiring is probably not where it needs to be for you to be able to hold your team accountable because I kind of see the the ability to hold your existing team accountable and to expect high performance is directly related to your ability to go source reps like if you don't have a great hiring process in place you you inevitably will lower the bar because you have no other chice so to you I'll say often times to our Founders and sales leaders is like hey really make sure that You' got access to the best talent in the market so that you have the confidence to coach your team as hard as you need to coach them to get the best out of them so talk to me about what are the top one to three things that are missing for for VP of sales that doesn't have access to the top Talent yeah first thing uh is going to be a hiring scorecard you need to have something quantitative that you can look at to just check your gut because the people you're going to love are going to be the extroverts or the ones that have some weird thing on their resume so you need to hire a scorecard just to hold yourself accountable the second thing that you need is you need to know how to dig in to um their grit so this is where I want to talk about how they've overcome University and want to talk about their previous jobs and their previous bosses and how they handle things because that's going to give you an understanding of can this person handle adversity their ability to handle adversity is directly going to be seen in their revenue because sales is adversity um and then finally it's in expectation setting so when I'm if I'm writing a job description I don't want it to be to anybody I want people to go I don't want to work there when I'm in the interview I want to scare some people away and I want to make it extremely attractive to top performers and things like hey we we only keep top performers around here we we have we have a real culture of elevating everybody who does incredible and we do not accept anything under 100% that is the kind of thing that'll be very motivating to a top performer but really unmotivating to a bottom performer as long as you you can hold it up with with with real uh like reality some people just say that but you can even tell you the person I'm interviewing with I'm interviewing is not a high status person is not a high performer then it's going to be really clear this person's just saying that but really they're just like more of a place that's going to fire everybody so you get those things right you should be able to get the right folks in the door awesome now let's say you've got the right folks in the door you have the high per the culture of high performance how do you make sure that a high performer doesn't leave yeah so there's a couple techniques are a couple tools I use here to make sure that the a high performer never leaves you got to make sure you're running one ones with them every single week here's a plus sign for you on the screen you got to show them that you care about them tell them about your life ask them about how things are going on outside of work that kind of a thing um two you need to make sure that every month you're running a nine box Matrix I think this is an older technique but I still do it I don't care the nine box Matrix is basically potential versus um performance and that's going to help you really realize when performance might be slipping and you want to do that monthly because what we find with the high performers we give them so much runway that they might have three or four bad months but in your mind they have it uh so you want to make sure you have that to identify what is performance slipping because that typically will be the start of them wanting to leave and then finally you want to have a quick check-in with yourself monthly of who's the most who do I think is like to leave on the team and how much of an impact would that make on the team so really what we're talking about here is a team-wide check um of just gut feel a team wide check of actual performance and then a week to week individual check and if enough if with that many checks in place you are not able to see when someone's unhappy or looking to move or whatever you're going to have some bigger fish to fry the culture you have in the first place is not one of high performance yeah I love dude it's it it starts them leaving their heart and mind leaves before their body does so what you're getting at here is if you're having the conversations frequently enough you'll figure out when is the heart and mind leaving and make sure that the vision and the uh where we're going as a company that their personal vision and Mission fits inside that that you have a chance to co-create what the next chapter looks like versus them telling you hey I think my future is outside the business so I love it man Matt you had something to say I just want to call out for are listeners right now that number one this is management fire but number two it has nothing to do with sales right like the in the sense of everything that you just described I just don't want anyone to zone out in the sense of like I don't run a sales team so this doesn't apply if you are human managing humans every single thing that just got laid out here in the past five six seven minutes about these rhythms about the one-on ones and you know getting the overall read on the team culture and the the nine box like which which I love like we do a similar thing just if you're managing people just rewind this podcast and go take some notes and write this stuff down because this is the Matrix like this is what you need to see it it it takes real work and a real time investment and rhythms to do this right it's not like you know I'm the boss and I'm just going to make it up like it's it's real it's a real workload but it's not just about managing a sales team and I just want to call that out one second for people one thing I got to add on to that before we jump too I whenever I do any sort of comments on my management Tik Tok or Instagram where I say here's how you manage people and you do you say this phrase or you do this thing inevitably I get a 100 comments that are why don't you just be normal just be authentic just be yourself and the fact is when we're on sales calls we're doing techniques and different things to make sure that we can move people to to do what we want them to do and the same thing is true in life and so if you want people to be the best version ofs that means that you can't just be the regular version of yourself you need to manufacture a little bit about how you run the team I don't think your high school football coach talks to his friends the way he talked to you in high school football but you may have made you the best version of yourself as a result so there is a level of authenticity balance with manufactured push or manufactured vulnerability even um if needed to to drive that that um performance in in and of itself it's sales right I mean like every yeah that's true too is sales was coaching a group of like uh of our early stage Founders yesterday um probably 40 or 50 of them and most of them don't have sales teams selling through trials that's what the topic of the coaching call was and I was like basically told him first off if if sales makes you feel like oh I don't want to be a salesperson like you've already failed you're a salesperson you're a Founder you're a salesperson right you're ever G to hire someone selling a vision ever want to keep someone you're selling a future right it has nothing to do with closing deals in the pipeline in HubSpot that's just one you know it I'll be maybe all right M let's let's shift gears to outbound sales um I love to get your your viewpoint on hey what what does it look like to build a scalable outbound system today and then I love to get your view on where you think it's going AI is certainly changing the game and having an influence Matt and I have some differing opinions on what the impact will be of AI on outbound sales but let's start off with what's the opportunity today um how do you build an outbound a scalable outbound system yeah we're we're in this wonderful Gap period right now before there's been new rules with with emails and before everybody gets some new tool outbound is really interesting and here's what's happened a couple years ago everyone on the planet bought Apollo and I don't think it's talked about enough how big of a ship Apollo made on the entire planet of sales because previously the people people people who could get sequences and and sorry you want you want to jump in Johnny yeah for those that don't know what's Apollo oh sorry apollo.io is a tool for capturing contact information and sending email sequences out but previous to Apollo existing which was like 80 bucks a month the only tools you could do this with were like 15,000 100,000 a year so we went from a let's say the US went from a country of maybe tens of thousands of companies that were able to BL asked everybody over email to hundreds of thousands of us are now doing it so suddenly nobody trusted their inbox it got way worse for everybody and we're all seeing that now so what we've seen pop up as a result of that is there's like a hundred different companies now that are like we can make custom memes and we can do AI videos and we can do we can automatically add in the first line of the Inbox and we're going to automate all the personalization that's all coming in the backs of um email getting less and less trusted and therefore people having to get more and more unique but all we're doing is just chasing this NeverEnding tail and um what I'm on a mission to do but not be not against actual people but I'm a little on a mission to get rid of the SDR role this this role is not a the requirement that everyone believes it needs to be while 10 years ago all the SAS companies read predictable revenue and bought a bunch of sdrs and that was cool because they got VC money and it didn't matter that they were not profitable even now regular people founder Le companies are doing the same thing because they think that's that's what you're supposed to do but if we pay an SDR let's say 75 to $80,000 a year and they're generating let's say eight meetings a month we're we're paying some which is which is what a typical SDR will do 12 meetings a month um so now we're basically paying $80,000 for 90 meetings this is insane this doesn't make any sense unless you have some crazy win rate of 50% this doesn't work so that's all to say how do we make outbound work today what we want to do is we want to you we want to use AI just as a place a mountain to stand on top of so we can still have an SDR here on doing this but for founder Le companies you don't need it you can stand on top of that mountain yes even with everything else you have going on here's what we do so so the first thing you have to do is you need to get a a list of people that are in your ICP we can talk through ICP um you know exercises and all that but get a list of people on your ICP there's two major things important here here's the first one personalization is not nearly as important as it used to be relevance is more important than it used to be so what we need to do is actually take that list split into teeny tiny lists so what I typically do is cliental come and they'll say Mike we sell to clients A and B these two types of Industries and we typically sell to title one and two so now we've got ab12 we got four different icps I'm going to take that and split it up and say okay well there's also a difference in general around a company that's been around for one year versus 10 years who does have a vpa sales who doesn't have a vpa sales uh there there's a difference between an individual who's tenure at that one company is under 90 days is under six six months is over six months so now we can take that list of let's say four four different icps and it can become 24 icps so what we're going to do now with this list is we then need to Leverage The Power of AI and actually create some personalization now I don't have the best prompt or haven't found something that will work at a massive scale when it comes to chat GPT so I try to reduce the number of words I want chat gbt to return for me but I do try to get creative with the type of information I pull from chat gbt now before I go to this next bit I know that clay exists there's a company called clay and Clay will basically automatically do a bunch of This research for you the challenge with with their wonderful company and recommend them for any anybody who needs to do things in scale and has the cash to do it it can get very very expensive because they do a credit system so you might say oh I I have a million credits but you might for what I do for example each each contact would be like 30 credits so you end up having to pay a ton of money for these all right but let's talk about what we do now we have this super relevant list super similar segmented list then you want to take uh you want to create a column and I have like a whole sheet for this where it pulls in top rated restaurant in their City top rated dish at that restaurant it takes their the name of their company and shortens it it takes the name of their job it shortens it it finds the first job that they got it shortens that um it may pull their LinkedIn bio if they have it and it pulls a chat sheet a small small small PS if it doesn't have that we have a PS that comes out saying congrats on hitting your anniversary and it pulls the number of months uh versus number of years anniversary so doing this is now giv me let's call it a half dozen different personalized variables which can all be done with a GPT plugin into Excel that's what I do with all my clients even the ones that are using my done with you program so that's the setup now let's move on to the next bit so we got sequences sure I sell sequences I write sequences some work some don't for different Industries but just go Google it or find something that you like and start there but the I said there were two things that were important here's the second thing deliverability if you send all of your emails from HubSpot you send more than 100 a day you're going to get flagged a Spam or you're not going to get flaged but they're not going to go through you send 100 emails a day through Apollo same thing you send 100 emails a day from an active kid camp or maretto or some other marketing tool they all come in with that Banner it looks like it's not a real thing you can't do threading on the emails doesn't work so what are you left with well historically what we've done is we've said let's just hire more sdrs 10 Str strs 10 email accounts 10 emails a day per email account look at us but you don't have to do that anymore so what you want to do is you want to instead get multiple domains join acme.com try acme.com multiple emails per per domain you plug all of those into a tool like instantly or smart lead are two companies where you can do this and you do domain stacking so now I Mike mansey founder LED sales might have 100 emails I plug all of those emails into instantly I then plug all of my sequences into instantly I tweak my sequence ever so slightly for each of those 24 different segments and I uh now tell instantly hey don't send more than 10 emails a day per email address but here's 100 email addresses and I add into the sequences by the way all of that personalized information now you can send out a th emails a day and still get 50 to 80% uh open rates like I'm getting it's so get between one and 9% reply rates that I'm getting and so you as the founder can do a thousand emails a day and handle the 340 inbound emails you get per day do you need an SDR to do that no you've got 10 minutes to do that and you can simply plug those things in to tools like drify to do you take that same Automation and have it happen over likein to a parallel dialer like Nooks so you can do one hour of cold calls and have Nooks make a 100 cold calls for you while you just sit on on the on the phone or if you want to hire an SDR you can but now instead of having an SDR crap 50 incredible emails of which still only 20% are going to get opened you could have an SDR who responds to 20 emails a day is doing cold calls all day LinkedIn messages all day doing research all day to really find the right folks if you do those things you can get out bound to run for you and that's how you get outb to work today now next year who knows but that's how it works today I love I first off love the Tactical give I got took notes like a mad man there um so yeah yeah yeah I love it um I'm really curious and where Matt and I were were debating prior to our our recording here was where do you think this goes over time right what you've just just described as the indivi is the ability for an individual to dramatically increase the number of uh messages they're sending out and you mentioned a couple different tools and the you know the so there's a moment in time where a segment will hear this and like get ahead but I think that where the market is going will lead to like more and more messages being sent do you think that this makes it easier for more people to do outbound and that you know companies with lower acvs would be precluded Ed who have in the past couldn't really do outbounds and make it work that makes it more likely that they do do you think it raises the expectation like how do you think this impacts outbound AI impacts outbound over the next like two to five years yeah so Ai and even what I just said which is what I literally install in companies is going to kill outbound so like the thing I just told you is going to kill itself truly the only way for sustain longterm growth is going to be through content because what's going to happen here is as you um stop to use your email you stop using your email because now everybody everybody is relevant everybody has the best message and you're like holy cow I can't run into a bad message we're gonna we're gonna shy away from email and I bet you we see slack get bigger and bigger and teams get bigger and bigger people will say I don't even need email so if I get an email it's like getting a phone call it's probably not for me so what's going to happen is um it's going to remove people from the sales process the traditional sales process for a longer period of time you know back in way back in the day the sales process was you open you walk in the door and Bob you know now we're talking the sales process now they've already done some level of research before they talk to us but we're now starting the sales process but because we won't be able to capture demand um as early as we can today without outbound people will be able to do almost all of their research and decision-making prior to the sales process so what we're going to have to do is we're either going to Le we'll probably do both hard hard hard on product lead growth people will will start to just make their websites really conversion op conversion rate optimized pricing convers rate optimize really speed up that like let's call it sales funnel even though it's like on a website without a person but the other thing is we're g to as people who want to reach out to folks we need to to reach them where they are which will be like on Instagram on Tik Tok everywhere else for them to decide before they even have a problem I like this company and then when they do have a problem we're just a deao answer and so without that long I mean outbound is not going to be working for a long term no way not possible yeah it seems my hunch was that this that if you had to have let's just say today and when predictable Revenue came out it was you know 25k annual contract value was about the the minimum that you could do to make it work for a cold outbound it was lower than that if you're doing you know inbound marketing and calling those maybe you could get away with it like 10 to 15K but I think that number goes to 50K in a year 100K just because response rates would go down by so much that it just be tough to make sense the easier it is to send volume the more volume you're going to have to send to get the response Absolut I love that you have it's funny Matt and I talk about making sure that we are capturing the opportunity today which you just laid out well how long that lasts maybe it's six months maybe it's 12 but you also are heavily invested both personally and then I'm assuming in what you teach your the VPS you work with on the long game which is the content creation so I love that you can you brag a little bit talk about what you've done on the Tik Tok and Instagram side and uh how you did that sure so um I think it's two years ago I don't know if it's two or three I'm just like it's all blurred but a couple years ago I decided I was going to spend 30 days and I was going to post three three times a day on Tik Tok one friend of mine she's a photographer she was the only other friend at the time who I who like admitted she would like watch Tik toks and uh it's it to me she said I just did this post and I got 700,000 views and I'm booked up for the next three months I said no way well I'm competitive as hell so I said I'm going to do this for 30 days I'm going to beat her at so every day I posted three times a day I had no idea what I was doing all I did to to to prep was I just Googled or you know Tik Tok looked searched some hooks uh in some different formats of how to do a video filmed a couple in this office here and saw what would happen now within within two months actually not even within one month of starting someone just called me up like book meting with me and said you know what do you do and I was like what do you need and they said this and I go funny thing that's exactly what I do and they said we'll give you $110,000 to do this and I said great I would take you $10,000 to do this and that was it so since since then I've now grown that Tik Tok account um to 120,000 followers about six months in I decided that my audience was all salespeople and I wanted to talk to leader so I opened up a new account so I now have both I rep post six times a day and on the leader account I've grown that to 80 or 990,000 followers and then this year in January actually between between Christmas and like January 2nd I gained 60,000 followers on Instagram and then from then to now I've gained another 60,000 followers so like overall it's like 300,000 followers across those platforms I got I don't got nothing on LinkedIn I got like 8,000 followers on LinkedIn every post I do gets like five clicks nothing on it YouTube I haven't really focused on making my my content great on YouTube so I'm like 2 3,000 followers there um so there still a lot of opportunities in these different Pockets but I've been able to to grow these channels and you know I'm typically averaging between 20 and 40 meetings actually this month I'm pacing for 60 meetings so but 20 to 40 meetings a month exclusively from Tik Tok Instagram and let's say YouTube and Linkedin potentially man I love it if you don't follow Mike you should that if you've if you his it's actually what got you on to this podcast was like exactly I you know seen you scroll through seen many of your your posts and didn't realize how closely connected we were um through your time at time doctor but um you're a great follow on those accounts I'd love to unpack you know Matt and I talk frequently and if for our listeners listening that have heard previous episodes we are we're kind of harping on this founder-led content is a must now it is is really becoming less and less a choice and I think that for those sitting with the outbound tool right now like we have some of our largest and most successful clients are heavy outbounds right but they're also they themselves started to shoot more content and seeing the trend growing that you alluded to so can you help unpack like I think a lot of times the question is like how do I get started I don't have anything to say Matt and I have talked to are bleue in the face about like our perspective on that but what you you said you made the commitment hey for 30 days I'm going to shoot three videos like talk to us about where you got started how it's evolved now you put out three videos per day I doubt there's like an entire media six videos a day I doubt you got an entire media team sitting around you right now so like you talk to us about how where you started how it evolved how do you crank out six videos a day yeah man so this is this is I'm so passionate about this and I hope everybody's listening or taking notes not because like I just want you to take notes but because I really truly feel like everybody should be capitalizing on this right now the goal of my company is to make people more proud of themselves by selling more stuff and I think this is a cool opportunity to get people to be feel way more proud of themselves so let's just get rocking first thing that that I did was I just said okay I'm doing it and I was like a few days of just rumbling like are you share going to bed am I doing you're like you got to do it the next thing I did was I just went to Tik Tok and searched hashtag sales to see like what what who's out there what are they doing and I wrote down two things I wrote down what are the like hooks that they're using because I kept hearing that was important and what was the format they were using so I a lot of hooks I just found were like negative hooks so instead of being like um the old uh BuzzFeed hooks of like three ways to see how you could be better 10 ways to kill it it was the opposite it was like three things I wish I never I wish I did 10 years ago two ways to to stop having things happen so using that away Ling which made all the difference um the next thing was the format so I saw a lot of them were what they call talking head just like the selfie whatever I'm a lot were like doing things in the house like they were uh you making coffee or whatever um and then a lot were these like faux role plays where someone would like they would talking into the camera and put like a napkin on their head to pretend to be like the other person so I'm like okay those are the formats and those are the hooks then I just wrote down General topics that I I feel like I had some opinion on and um started filming what I found has made all the difference to get me to continue to crank things out this is so dumb not filming in any app other than Tik Tok hear me out so on Tik Tok this is real tactical on Tik Tok what you do is you press and hold the button and you let go when you want to stop recording and it just records a snit so the if you were to watch my Tik toks me or me making Tik toks it sounds like this there's a couple thing delete there's so there's delete okay so today I want delete and so I don't have to like I don't have a phone with like 60 videos that I'm deleting because it took me so long to get started I can just hit like dismiss or whatever it says and I can just get rid of that last two seconds or whatever and that has made all a difference to get me to say okay I'm I'm gonna make this because I don't have to do a longwinded video I had to do a video recently that was like a minute oh my God took me like an hour because I'm like okay make sure you get it right don't sound scripted with this you let me let me make sure I'm I'm hearing what you're saying you said instead of sitting down to record a good one minute video you record in the app which allowed you just to do to start with record a good hook so six seconds and then you did the next six seconds and you you smaller segments so you're chunking down to all all the way all the way down from hey I'm gonna produce content we make the commitment okay now I need to do a video instead of shooting the whole video in one take I'm gonna try to do just a good hook and intro three seconds I need three seconds that's all I need love it and so it was like these little commitments of three seconds that made it made it makes it so and that's still how I do it today even as well um STS that's that that is a big piece of it um and then I will say people always I tell them when they're getting started I'm like you got to post three times a day and uh I heard that originally on the app you know people would say that but I realized there's a couple reasons that's really important one is you have no clue what's going to go viral for sure um and then two is your creativity will come when you make a bunch when I what I do is I only film videos in my car which I know I shouldn't be doing uh on the way home when I do drop off and on the way to school when I'm doing pickup and what I find every day the first video I just sit there man I sit there holding my phone trying to think of something and it takes me like 10 minutes to get one video out and then in the remaining eight minutes I'll crank down four videos because you're just like I got it I kind of I I get what I'm saying I'm with it um that's it and then here there I've like saved a video or two that I've liked and gone back to that um and I want to give one other different tactic on how you can make videos if you're thinking Mike I don't want to make to show my face I don't want to do this there's it's a really good time right now on Instagram Instagram is definitely about ah six to nine months behind Tik Tok so it's kind of cool like I see what gets big on Tik Tok and then it gets big on Instagram later when I do a post on Tik Tok like the one I'm going to tell you about right now it'll get a th000 views that same post on Instagram will get 30,000 views so I'm going to show you right now the easiest trip you can to make content without having to show your face and make it wicked fast so what you do is you're going to actually just I wish I could remember the website but just Google vertical videos vertical HD videos or or don't just film 15-second footage of you walking around your neighborhood of your apartment whatever do not matter the next thing you do is you just write down on the screen something that would take 10 12 seconds to read and then you make the video eight seconds long this now makes people rewatch the video in order to actually see the see all the text um it makes it really engaging you'll typically say something that's controversial which will cause a lot of comments um if you're being true to yourself because your a is trying to make everybody happy um so that's a way that you can create a ton of content without having to actually show your face a couple other Tri trick you can do here is top 10 lists you're a realtor top 10 largest houses smallest houses highest cost per square foot lowest cost of per square foot you sell data software just think about um all the things that that that people you sell to Chief data officers care about Google Chief data officers they care about cost of their team and different project management tools they care about whatever okay cool here's the top 10 project management tools here's the top 10 uh different ways that it people like to be managed here's the top 10 people I just found on LinkedIn after an hour of research so you could do so many top 10 lists that will keep you endlessly busy and then just duplicate that content for top five lists or one of the top 10 or double clicking into one person and talk about why that person is the top 10 why that market is the top 10 so you should easily be able to come up with 30 40 pieces of content if you just sit down and actually make make a little bit um over a little bit of time you you'll get more creative as you go I want to run that back for just a sec to make sure that I I know I fast no I love it um and you're true to your website what do you say East Coast Vibe zero patience or something like that I was like friend um so basically a stock video or some b-roll some stuff where you're not in it right is the background you write down what you want physically over overlaid over the video and then you Riff on the same topic verbally like with a voiceover is what you're saying correct later on another video I'm saying like video video one is stock image text post got it so no video just rocking nothing sure yeah video two could be the same thing text over it video 3 could be just the just the b-roll and and you're and you're saying it I got a couple videos where where I actually do it and I'm just I'm just um writing so I just literally film my hand writing and I just put it on like 5x speed so you can you want to see it or I'll do a whiteboard and I'll write something down do a two-c video of the Whiteboard write a little bit more two second video two second video Che video um what we want people want is they want us they want to know that there's a payoff at the end so when you show them a top 10 list they got to see number one when you show them that you're writing something that's going to take up the whole screen they got to see the bottom when they start reading the top they got to get to get to the bottom so that's what makes people engaged there's obviously a variety of ways I can probably tell you 80 different things right now that can work in these different platforms but I do think that to get started it's really just write down a few things come up with a couple of top 10 and uh and start with some text over screen you know heck I even put together maybe we could put it in the show notes or whatever I put together a document where you can just ask customers certain questions and then if you fill in their answers it'll then give you a hook the actual hook you should use the text that that they said and the outro you should use so you can just get the text at least for like 1,200 different posts no problem so maybe we we'll share that I want to double click into your experience doing this and and here's why um I've been on this journey recently um I am exactly the same as you except for all the followers uh which is cool but I'll get but um but here's the thing right is like anytime we're starting something new it's like you got to get through the the shitty first draft phase right like the beginner what was that like are you one of these guys you were already well spoken you got on Tik Tok and you blew it up during that first month or did you have to go through the trough like walk us through that man yeah I I think that the the thing that is the most important is there are two elements that I think make for a really solid let's call it business Tik Tok or Instagram or whatever one you you need to be true to yourself like don't try to get fancy I've seen a lot of people that are trying they're trying to like do it like it should be on Tik Tok just be yourself hell I just I just got an editor and had to edit a few my videos people just started shredding me in the comments they're like what just sucks like this guy just said moving away from what he does just be yourself and the second thing is what people want now is they want tangible tactical value that they can imple Implement today they don't want to see hear a one minute video on the general idea of something they do want to hear a one minute video that has five takeaways they can actually take right now so if you get those two things wrong it's not going to work forgetting for forget how let's say good you are hot you are whatever that said in the beginning what I what I was getting wrong was I was adding um too much I kept seeing everybody doing Transitions and sound and it made me take my videos took me all this time to edit because I didn't know what the hell I was doing and so I'm Googling like how you had on Tik Tok and I realized that that was all all a huge waste of time and I I think though um I think that the other was I started out with just these listicles three ways five things and people are tired of that stuff man so just getting down to like um bringing myself into it I've interviewed 100 people here are the top things I've said to them I've I've listened to a thousand minutes of sales calls that you don't have to here's here's three takeaways I messed up and got fired three people that I shouldn't have had to fire in the flirt first place learn from my mistakes that's the kind of stuff people are actually interested in I love that it's uh it's funny because I've been on a similar realization um with you the only thing you can be for any extended period of time is yourself right everything else is going to it's going to get stale it's going to rot on the vine it's not going to work you know and so I um yeah it is really interesting because I think it's at least for me I'm not saying this is true for you necessarily but for me it it was a bit of insecurity I think of thinking I needed to be somebody I wasn't in order to fit in with everyone that I was seeing on the internet and I absolutely I kind of want to go back and just start mashing the delete key on a lot of my earlier videos for the first couple of months because I was just like trying to it's like trying on all these different shoes but you don't even know how big your feet are you know it's just so weird and then yeah it's just and then it clicked and it's like it's just me I just gotta be totally you know what you know you know what happened about two weeks ago maybe it was three weeks ago I did the opposite of what I was trying to do instead of clicking record and unrec I was actually doing the opposite so I was my video and I didn't look at my video like I just added the caption and posted it and people were like uh it was about Pips and people are like this man's editing is needs to be put on a pip like it so funny so it's literally just me in the car like the hook is there I'm like when you want you want to put people on Pips and here's why you want to do or whatever I'm saying and then it's like the phone down you just see my gut in the car my heavy breathing as I'm like you know trying to just drive a car somehow I'm breathing heavy and uh you know my wife was like you taking that down I'm like no hell no yeah you know that that was great it's so funny people see me like pull the camera up go okay just put pull pull the camera so embarrassing but I think actually it brought PE people in they were like okay cool this guy's legit I appreciate him so yeah I think it's important I love it man that's awesome it's uh it's a wild skill though to have that perseverance and it's funny because especially when you're good at things but not good at something right it's I I feel like it's this strange thing that happens in our brains where we assume because we're good at three or four other things that we're a decade or two into we're going to go do this new skill and be good at that too and it's like you got to remind yourself that like it's okay and expected to suck at this thing or it probably wouldn't be worth doing in the first totally I mean I just I if if you guys have the time for want me to I'd love to just give some tips on this stuff because I just see so many people trying and just getting it so wrong um and just going like going so clearly in the wrong direction if you're open to it we're I think it'll resonate well with our found let's rock so here's the deal what your your content I know there's plenty of content about like um film while you're what you're building and everything that's really cool for like if you're building a like a physical product to be like here's Us in the in the grocery store you know that's that stuffs cool but when especially when it's uh software that you built so it's kind of in the back of your knowledge or your service um it's on the back of your knowledge that that's not quite what people are looking for what your content should be must answer this it must be is the person I'm selling to going to get value and be able to change something they're doing as a result of what I tell them so instead of like let's say so I'm I'm in I'm a I'm a fractional VP if I start making fractional VP content that's great for fractional VPS none of my clients care about that none of them so I shouldn't be like here's how I make sure I'm like organized and I can like handle multiple clients that's the waste of everybody's time I want to think more okay my clients what their problems are I don't have enough leads I don't have have a system to actually close deals I can't hire the right people and keep them on board I don't have the time to lead my team so I'm talking about things that you would you would want to know if you were trying to lead a team things you want to know if you were trying to make a sales system things you want to know if you wanted the lead system so don't ever think it's really about you it's about value for that individual person that's really really important the next thing with it is I'm just going to repeat this that it needs to be something they can do something with right then if they're getting if they're if they're reading a book they're they might be thinking about it for a few days if they're listening to a podcast maybe a few hours a Tik Tok an Instagram a thing on LinkedIn maybe a few minutes or a few seconds and so you're not going to tell someone something about like the general take on outbound like you asked me I'm not going to do a whole thing on the general take of outbound on Instagram I do it on a podcast on Instagram I'm going to go like here are the Tactical things you need to do in order to make sure you can take advantage of the current situation of outbound so make sure that if it's if it's um if you want to talk about something you know maybe it's softwares you're using people love to know new technology they can get um a new shortcut on your iPhone that makes a difference that's cool I know people are constantly stuck in this thought of like I have to post on LinkedIn because that's where my buyers are and I have to post content about my product all of that is completely useless it needs to be about something that person cares about do an iPhone shortcut do a keyboard shortcut do the softwares you that you use to keep organized do the thing you use in Google Calendar to keep to to to make things work as a ex project manager from from Facebook that's what people actually give a about and they can do something and go you know what man that guy's freaking best like I use this this this shortcut and I love it so when you come up in their feed a week later and you go hey here's how make lead systems and Sales Systems they're like well tell me more I don't know anything about leads your sales heck I'd probably say 10% of my comments are hey mik I'm not in sales but I just love your content you know that's because I'm not saying it has to be about every single sale call and what I'm doing so those two things are just so critical I want everyone to really understand that um and then I'll I could give you guys some like tricks tricks of the trade of of how to how to get the the algo the algorithm to work for you whether be Tik Tok or Instagram so one of them I gave you earlier which is make the text take longer to read than the video is that's a great one um the other if you're on Tik Tok in particular you want um your videos to either be under 20 seconds or over a minute under 20 seconds it's easier to get keep engagement over a minute Tik Tok will literally boost your post if it goes over one minute one minute one second um anytime you can add in let's call an Easter egg to your to your post so you can just be holding holding a funny straw um or your uh you have some like weird thing in your hair that you never you never bring up just something keeps people engaged also like I said to you earlier people want to to get that payoff so that's why we all watch those stupid coffee making videos where the person's just pouring an ice coffee in some milk what's it going to look like we got to know so anytime that you can do a video where you're even just in front of the camera there's a guy I wish I could remember his name all he does is cut fruit he just cuts fruit and you watch the whole video CU I got to see him cut the next pineapple you know and he's given incredible content which is why I stick around but really the pineapples is what keeps your brain engaged for whatever reason I'm sure we'll find that it caused an add for the for all of us you know 10 years from now but it's it's it's the reality the other bit is um if it's if you're not going to have a Easter egg or or um something that you're doing another trick is you just add a ton of movement so a lot of my videos I'm starting over here and now I'm going to move over here to the left I'm going to I'm walking around my my my house I'm outside I'm in the car even if I'm in the car I'm G to move with my left hand to my right hand I might move the camera up or down little little little things like that make that make make it more engaging um and then another good one is just using um using that away language works so well so not that toward language of three ways to get stuff but away language three ways to stop not having stuff um makes people engage quite a bit um as much as I hate to say it because I think on LinkedIn people do it they do it wrong and they're kind of on jerks about it but um a controversial um hook can go a long way you know I just had a post recently where I said I'm on a mission to kill the SDR now the reality is I'm not on a mission to make all every SDR lose their job that's what I'm sort of alluding to but that's not what I'm saying I'm saying I don't think that we need to have that role whatever so I have comments of people that are arguing with me going like you want people to be out of work what a jerk and then that's causing people to comment on those comments which is again creating more more engagement on the post itself um and it's interesting too because you'll see people com to your defense on things which makes you want to keep doing the doing the content as well so an engaging cook like that makes a lot of sense and then finally I think what I'll leave here is like my last like trick is um create the kind of posts that do well are kind of hooks that could do well just general could do well but in general uh are going to be like I did blank so you don't have to or I've done blank of blank times here's a learning I interviewed a thousand people sold $100 million been on a 100,000 calls whatever you know so if you sell some data software you're like I've I've looked through 10 billion lines of code it's probably true right you know like I've I've I've I I messed up you know I lost $100,000 you know last month and here's how you cannot do it and it's like something that that you did that that re hurt your data your your provider could actually help them with and I'll just leave leave a I'll just put a cave on the whole thing with which is don't worry you don't need to say this this post sponsored by visal sales.com we do leads sales and coaching you don't need to you don't need to say Link in the bio they know they know the links in the bio don't worry about it uh oh I should probably just give the note about captions don't put a lot of stock in the captions don't freak out about them um all you want to do is you want to have a couple captions that are semi- related to the videos I might do a video on performance plans I'll do performance plan hash pit and then a couple of hashtags that are the audience you want so I'll just be like a hash BP of sales hash CEO hash owner that's it so don't get crazy with it dude full of tactical I see Matt's man I have a shared notion file and uh he's just jamming on notes I think you made him especially giddy when you said share the tools and the hacks and the keyboard shortcuts because like this guy has got a world full of them I think your content road map for the next six months just got your so I I have two things on my screen right now I have our shared notes file from this discussion and my shared notes file for all the reels that I'm going to shoot on Tuesday um and I have 17 of them so far that I've jotted down during so rock and roll CHR man you're welcome Johnny knows Johnny knows the way to my heart so far um Mike I love man so much of what you shared today has been both you you just have a knack for striking the balance between uh the big picture why and then right down to the Tactical it's like no no shock that your content's so engaging I'd love to hear like you you've clearly put a lot of time and effort into to this what let's zoom out one of the things that attracts our audience to us and a big part of our culture and tribe at sass Academy is what we call the integrated life that work number one work is something to be enjoyed and something that builds you the person and that we win in every area of life we don't just win in our professional career so I'd love to just kind of zoom out to like what's the why for you you mentioned pickups it sounds like you got a family like why put all the time and effort into doing what do official sales tips and Publishing the content like take this big picture yeah I mean there's two there's two answers to that one is the real answer and I think a lot of us don't realize that or why is the real answer and I'll be vulnerable here to say that for whatever reason I feel like that my love will come on the back of doing something great and I need it needs to be deserved it needs to be earned even though I know that's not true I feel like all of us have some level of a chip on our shoulder to go like we are working hard because we feel lesser than we typically find that high performers are motivated for two reasons one they're confident they can do it two they are so scared that they can't and that that in between is what makes us do it so the why in reality as much as we're going to say is you want to insert whatever stupid mission statement is on your wall right now your why is probably to feel loved and I think that's the actual truth but let's let's say what what I actually what the why is that I tell in my head versus just the one that that I think is reality um and that is I really want everybody to feel so proud of them and I want to be able to say that I've made an impact on people maybe that's selfish and I want to be able to sleep better at night to know that but my if I were to have a charity a nonprofit you know all the things I'm doing with my business to to get more time back is not to go sit in the beach that time is actually so I can spend more time actually taking on individual coaching clients because I know that the kind of impact you can make in someone's life whether it be emotionally or even just confident in the short term of like you got this you're going to make it through this this time or long term where that person now has the ability to hire a team of 10 people and grow their business like this makes a real impact on actual human beings and their actual life I know we're just talking about sales tips here I get that we're talking about leadership but I also know that when you get sales and you get leadership right you can change your own life in a lot of the lives around you so like I really I can't tell you how much this is this is so near and dear to me I think the ultimate um bit you know within my within my life is I want to be I I truly feel like for you to be the best husband father son whatever are all the different things you could be you need to just work on being the best version of yourself wherever that is and so if I can if I can take care of myself um in the professional way and as well as all the things personally Hobbies or whatever else Health at some point here in the line then I can actually be a better husband a better father or whatever so it's not so much about I want to do things so my kids can point at them and go Dad did that he's a role model I want to do things so that I can be the best version of myself and everyone will just in general feel like they want to be a certain level of them of themsel hopefully in the back of seeing me doing some hard things that said if I can coach them individually to make people actually be more proud of themselves they're going to be better versions of themselves that's what I'm working on every day like I hope you hear this passion and I love this Stu sorry for the no it's yeah 100% it's um it is it is contagious and inspiring man I it's it's a huge part of what we this the culture we curate at at SAS Academy is being in that environment where we say all the time make you got to become the person that you needed in your darkest days like that is life yes a life well when you if you call talk about reaching your full potential it is it is that hey let's and that's part of the angle is to say hey why shoot content like you one year year ago needed you share that content um yeah and so yeah I think it's just uh you're you're doing a great job leading um from the front and I really appreciate you coming just like you shared so generously on on the podcast here do me a favor if someone's not already following you tell us where where the listeners can find you too easy anywhere you want at official sales tips so at official sales tips or official sales leader tips on Tik Tok other That official sales set me up and uh let's get connected on LinkedIn it's Mike man7 if you know the link if you know you know cool awesome we'll link it up Mike thanks so much for being generous of your time keep doing what you're doing we'll be following along and uh enjoy the chance to jam with you today thank you so much let's go thanks so