How to Scale GTM in the AI Era: Anthony Enrico's Playbook for Modern RevOps

0:00 All right, let's rock and roll. Hey traction fam. Super excited for today's session with my old friend and former colleague Anthony Enrico, the MMA fighter. MMA fighter by passion, RevOps genius by profession. I've had a great, great experience working with Anthony, who's the founder now of LeanScale, but prior to LeanScale, he was our head of RevOps at Boast as we went to 20 million plus ARR. And we'll get into the complications of what that entails, what is RevOps and how does RevOps help GTM win, but prior to Boast and LeanScale, Anthony led RevOps at this company called Email Edge, which was acquired by LexisNexis for half a billion and

0:55 Anthony is an all-around badass. We're super excited to dive into how do you win GTM in the AI era? You're hearing all about AI agents leveraging all kinds of technologies and data points to email people to generate more leads, to do more discovery, better discovery. So we're gonna get into all of that. Anthony, thanks for joining us and I'm super, super stoked to have you here beyond a friend as a guest on the show. You are always my ultimate hype man. So I appreciate it, love it, really excited to dive into it. And there has been even, our journey at Boast wasn't too long ago and so much has changed.

1:44 And here at LeanScale, I've kind of been thrown right at the intersection of technology, AI, what the modern ways to grow GTM at startups look like and yeah, I'm excited to hop in. You know, what's interesting is I was at Sastra a couple of days ago and although the AI gold rush is here, it feels like most companies are still running a go-to-market playbook that is from 10 years ago, 5-10 years ago, right? And so that's why this is very interesting is what is the modern GTM playbook look like with AI at its core and how do you build a GTM stack without burning cash? Remember the time where for every FTE, you had like

2:28 $2,000 in spend between like outreach and Salesforce and everything else. And also want to get your tools of trade. What are the tools you swear by for outbound onboarding and enablement? And how does the whole AI plus human fit in? Where do you bring AI? Where do you still leverage humans? So I'm super, super excited. Ops, you know, always feels like an afterthought, right? But I think it has to be a very proactive function. We always think of ops as after the fact, right? Dive into that a little bit. Well, usually you're thinking, especially early on, you're thinking, okay, if I hire one more AE or if I spend this amount of

3:14 revenue into one more marketing channel, my return on that can be more than maybe thinking of ops as a cost center. And that was really common. Like growth at all costs mindsets is just let's throw as many reps at it as we can. Let's dump as much money into marketing as we can and let's just brute force our way. Now, which I know we're going to get into in a little bit, but the North Star metric for a lot of startups now is revenue per FTE. So I think the mindset has shifted a little bit. It's how do I have one or two AEs that are making 500K, a million dollars to themselves that are supercharged by ops,

3:53 go to market engineering and giving them all the tools that they need to be super successful. So I think the proactive investment in RevOps is helping to keep headcount and spend in other areas low, but much, much more efficient in getting a higher return. Awesome. RevOps does the stuff that nobody wants to do.

4:18 But doing that proactively actually helps everyone do their jobs better more efficiently. And I liked the anchor here. The old playbook was how many people you hire raise money. The new playbook is what's your revenue per FTE? And if you look at it Hoppin versus like a cursor and the new AI native companies, you can see that revenue per FTE is going into the several hundred thousand dollars to the millions. So let's start there. I want to start with GTM foundations that actually work. What's the biggest GTM mistake founders are making in the first 90 days and what should

5:02 the GTM playbook for an AI native company or a company wanting to be AI native look like? That's a great question and a great place to start. I think what's happening, which is almost ironic, is people are just AI powering the old playbook. So what we see a lot of is high quantity, high volume spray and pray. They think their mass personalization strategy is going to work, but every single person can see through it. So I think what happens a lot is people are really excited. They get clay. They start building all of these like hyper personalized workflows and then they send it to a million people. And what they're really doing is actually

5:50 burning their reputation and not even giving themselves time to iterate on their messaging. Because I can tell from experience here at LeanScale, we have had to change our messaging 20 times and we're continually iterating it and fine tuning what that message is and fine tuning who our ICP is and spending as much time as you can on quality. But if we were to have sent the type of messaging we sent when we first started out to the entire market, I think people are losing trust faster than ever before because now their spray and pray strategies are powered and amplified

6:31 by AI. Because everyone is doing it. So if you look at the age of outreach where you would load up a sequence and your only personalization was the tokens for like first name and a couple other things. And then it was a volume game. It was a numbers game. And I know this teams and SDR managers say just it's a numbers game. Just get them on the phone. But the thing is now you got like every other company doing the same thing and decision makers are getting inundated. Now you slap on AI with like 11X and some of the other AI SDR tools and that is amplified. People's inboxes

7:11 are wrecked with sort of sales messages that all look the same. Where do you start? How do you change that when the volume is no longer the game? Yeah, well, and I think another metaphor I'll use is funding in startups. So when a bad company raises a bunch of money, it only makes it worse. And I think sometimes, so lean scale, we've been revenue back the entire time, we haven't brought on any money. And I actually think that has helped us make better decisions because we've been forced to make tough decisions about what we invest in and forced to pick things

7:53 that have the highest return. So just like how that happens in startups, I think that happens in go to market where, you know, if you only had a couple shots of getting your message out, maybe you'll put more care into it. But a lot of people just spray and pray like I said. So what to do instead? If it's your first 90 days, you just started, I would start with your network. And the people you know, and the people you built relationships with, if you as the founder can't sell to people who already think highly of you, and maybe even feel guilty not buying what your

8:29 product is, you're gonna have a real hard time selling this to a stranger. So I think the first couple sales that you make, keep it small, keep it within your network, keep it with people you know, and they're the ones who will give you honest feedback. So they'll tell you what's working, what's not working if they're getting value. And I think that's an amazing step one. Where do you expand from there? Or how do you expand from there? So once you feel like, okay, got a couple customers under a belt, feels like they're getting value, I'm getting the positive signals, I think next is just micro micro niche. So think

9:09 about who would this product or service be an absolute no brainer for? Like there's absolutely no reason they wouldn't buy it. And then make sure economically like they're getting the best deal of their lives, especially early on, because you can do that. Go there and I can give you an example. So we had the founder CEO of Moxie and it's a full service platform plus services for people creating medspas. And their hyper focused niche target was somebody creating a med spa for the first time. So they built software and services around that very specific person. And I think

9:52 what it's going to do is your messaging is going to be hyper focused. The way you position your value proposition is going to be hyper focused. And then it's just another test like can I get beyond that level and close those people who should be the easiest people to close. In terms of the GTM foundation, like every founder should build before hiring a sales person. What does that look like? I would say this tends to be a golden rule for most things, but have some empathy and say, did I build the sales role that I would be really excited to have a job in here? So if you were a salesperson, would you be really excited to fill that role

10:37 and join the team? And what tends to happen is founders think, oh, I'm going to hire some sales people and they're going to go grow revenue for me. It's a cheat code where I could just pay someone and they're going to build my business. But it doesn't work like that. They're really just harvesters of pipeline. And I know there's some great reps. And I'm not saying that it's because the position is bad. I think people just get confused about what the job is. They're harvesters of pipeline. They can help build a little bit on their own. And they're closers and they should get paid for what they do, but you can't expect them to create the demand

11:16 in the market. So foundationally, I would always start marketing first, brand first, get some channels that you feel like you can reliably build pipeline on. You build the sales process for yourself first. Make sure you have the resources you need to sell well. Do you have a good pitch deck? Do you have good leave behinds? Do you feel like your brand is making your job easy? And then when you just don't have enough time on your calendar for the demos, or you don't have enough time to build the proposals, that's a good time to bring on a salesperson. You know, I love

11:51 that you said that, right? A lot of people want to hire a magic salesperson without figuring out the hard things, right? Like when you're a startup, you're built in phases. First phase is validation. What is that? Does the message resonate with the market? Can you get four or five pilots to pay you to try it out? Then you optimize for product market fit, which is high retention, high engagement. And I think in the early days, you can't hire a magic salesperson to figure that out. They're not incentivized, right? Most salespeople want to make, not most, all of them want to make a commission

12:27 on deals closed. If you don't have somewhat of a repeatable engine, or a way for them to make commission, they're going to check out the founder needs to be the Renaissance salesperson, which is talking to customers, trying to make sure the message is aligning, keep refining that, and then taking that feedback to product to build a product. You're sitting at the intersection of product and sales. And what you learn in those early days, making those calls, sending those emails, getting on demos, doing customer development is you refine your messaging, you refine your ICP.

12:59 And if you can walk away with an ideal customer profile, a hyper niche with whom the problem resonates, then you can come up with the right messaging, the right channels, because you know, you know, where they eat, breathe, drink, sleep. And you can scale from there. And I love what you said about, Hey, are you bursting at the seams? Do you have more leads than you as a founder can close, then hire a salesperson, but it should always be demand before the rep. And I think a lot of people severely under invest in marketing, especially some of the brand marketing, because

13:45 I think, of course, everybody wants the magic money machine where I put in a dollar and I get back 10. And you can somewhat visualize that on paid ads, reps, SDRs. But that's not how the real world actually works. Like somebody has been looking and interacting with your brand for months, maybe even years before they even hit one of those campaigns. And I think there's just a severe lack of investment in brand marketing, which I would say a lot of SAS with the advent of AI, especially AI and development, a lot of SAS is getting commoditized very quickly. And I think the

14:29 winning strategy, it's going to be like any other commoditized industry, you're going to have to have some functional advantages, but your brand is going to be more important than it used to be before. So people are going to have to follow the brand as they pick out what tools they want to use. 100% man, I used to be a big believer that you need demand. But I think now the best brand marketing will generate demand because demand has turned at the, in the age of AI, it's turned into a sea of sameness. Everyone is pushing similar content on LinkedIn. Everyone's pushing the same

15:08 webinars. Everyone's sending the same emails and everything looks the same. The right brand marketing will help you stand out, will help you build a community, will help you build authentic connections and a voice. And that in turn will generate demand for you. What are some things you recommend in that first marketing engine? What are some, I guess, tricks, tools of the trade, some strategies you've seen companies you work with do well for? Yeah, a couple. Well, one, I know that sounds not that insightful, but get a good designer. Make sure your stuff looks good. Aesthetics matter. Anytime I go to somebody's website and

15:53 it looks like crap, I just assume that's how they approach everything else. Or I assume they're not serious. When I go to their website, when I take a look at their pitch deck, when they send me, send me materials that I can tell have been professionally designed. It's, it shows intentionality. And I think a lot of people maybe think, well, what's the difference between like a good website and a great website? It could absolutely mean the difference between a sale. You just won't know it. You're not going to have attribution on it. So you have to be comfortable with that.

16:23 The next thing I would say is, is content. Content is the new advertising. It's, it's the new commercials. It's the new billboards, whatever you want to call it. You have to have a content strategy. And that can mean a number of things. Maybe yours is written. Maybe it's tutorials. Maybe it's podcasts. But you have to have some type of content strategy. That's how you're going to get your brand out in an authentic way. And one thing, in the context of B2B, SaaS, B2B services, it's what we're in. It's an amazing way to build an authentic relationship. Like you sit down with

17:05 a thought leader who could be a prospect, have a meaningful conversation about the industry that you're in. And then now they know who you are. And now they've had a chance to learn about your business too. Fantastic. Now let's get into the lean, mean GTM stack. I want to talk tools. What is your go-to stack for GTM for an early stage startup? Maybe with one founder, one contractor, a couple of folks. Yeah. So I'll start with CRM. I think starting on HubSpot is amazing. So if you feel like you can fit HubSpot into your budget, which it's pretty affordable. It's getting more

17:48 expensive as they've gotten better. But I think starting with them is going to, one, give you something that's pretty pre-built. You don't need a lot of help getting it set up. But then you will also still be set up for scale. So you don't have to go full fledged Salesforce right out the gate. There's some other CRMs that might be interesting, but eventually you're going to need to migrate into something like HubSpot. So I'd start there if you can. Why is that? Why is that? A lot of people say you need Salesforce at scale. Why is that? I actually don't think you need Salesforce

18:22 at scale anymore for a while. I think what tended to happen was people would turn Salesforce more into like their data warehouse. So you needed something that could handle the complexity of your data like Salesforce, but it's a shitty data warehouse. A better combo is stay on HubSpot for as long as you can set up Snowflake to be your data warehouse, put your sales data into your data warehouse, put your product data into your data warehouse, your financial data, do your reporting from there, hook it up to Looker. That's a better like data strategy than trying to turn your CRM

19:00 into the company's data warehouse, which a lot of companies were doing. Makes sense. So you got HubSpot. What else in there? So my new favorite sequencing and data tool is AmpleMarket. I think this team has absolutely knocked it out of the park. I think they're putting outreach and sales loft to shame. I think Apollo looks like a dinosaur compared to what they're doing. So AmpleMarket is going to tie in all of your sequencing capabilities, as well as all of your data capabilities. And they're one of the few companies I've seen do this really well and artfully.

19:38 They have AI powered individualized sequences. So I'll give you a couple examples, ones that we use. It'll track if people are changing jobs. That's a big one for us. We track if there's a new head of RevOps somewhere. We track if there's a new CRO somewhere. Usually that comes with some operational changes on the way. It'll automatically find those people and then give them a custom sequence built on that intent signal and then fire it off. So both email and with LinkedIn. And most LinkedIn sequencers are either like standalone and they're okay or they're terrible

20:16 like in Apollo. So AmpleMarket does a really good job of the email and LinkedIn sequencing, getting AI intent signals. And my favorite part, they put all of those sequences in a holding pattern to make sure you can read them before they just fire off. And then you can scan it, tweak it a little bit, rock and roll, lock and load, send off and fire off the sequence. I also see like social automation, like multi-channel. So that's on like pushing the LinkedIn multi-channel sequences, meaning you message someone on LinkedIn or Instagram kind of thing. Yeah. I mean, a lot of it is you can automate liking a post, you can automate commenting on

21:01 a post, you can automate a lot of the interaction on social and then move them into sequences to kind of warm them up, which I think is great. But I think just some of the bread and butter cold outreach, they do super, super well, much better than the other companies out there. And their data is really good. So you can, you know, segment based on who shares the same investors, you can segment based on personas and build those personas. So really, really lights out on data and sequencing. And then I see I see that it's got ways like AI driven copilot. So to to even write

21:43 copy that resonates, etc. Yeah, the copilot awesome feature where it's just going to automate those sequences for any intent signal, something they're doing, we haven't tested it too much. But I'm curious to see how much traction it gets is they even do AI voice. So it'll do a voice message. And you can put that into your sequence, you record your voice, so it'll make it your own voice. And then they'll layer that into the sequencing as well. Makes sense. I'm, I'm excited to try it. I've been a long standing Apollo user because of the data and the sequences I use mix max as well. And I recently signed up for Lucia. So I'm really

22:28 excited to try out ample market. Sending emails is one of has been one of my biggest hacks, like from cold emailing people to speak at my conferences, and come as attendees, almost everything I've done is just cold email people with personalized hyper personalized messages. And it always works. I get like on on newsletter stuff, I'm seeing like 12 15% click rate, not open rate. And on which is which is insane. And on on using the sequencing cold emails, I get like 90 plus percent open rate, and huge reply rate near 50%. So I'm a big fan of anything that provides an uplift there. Other tools in your in your stack, you talked about clay,

23:17 you're using Riverside. Let's dive into those. Yeah, so I think I think clay. You've probably heard of it by now. If you haven't, then you know, maybe you're you don't have a LinkedIn profile. But clay is all over. It's all over. One of my really close friends was the first check in clay. So oh, that's awesome. That's awesome. No, they've done an amazing job. And they've been our on our podcast. So yes, they're head of education, did a full demo on lean scale podcast, and what they've built and what they've done has completely changed the game. And I think they've

23:50 changed the perspective people have on ops. And they've coined the term go to market engineering, which I think is such a appropriate term for a lot of the work that people like lean scale, and people in rev ops in general. But the way we we think of clay, and the way we use it is, is thinking about it in the enrichment space. So pulling together all of the different data sources, and there's so many, they have hundreds of integrations with different data sources, and water falling, you know, how you're going to enrich a contact or enrich a target account that you have, and bringing in as much data as you can, and then doing it in a cost effective

24:33 manner as well. And then the other one that they do an amazing job of is their collisions. So going out, taking a look at their websites, taking a look at publicly available data on the company, and then pulling this together in a meaningful AI powered way to get you information about that company. So some really unique stuff that isn't a field in zoom info. It's not a field in Apollo that you can just search on an ample market. What I was talking about earlier, you can't, you know, hey, I want to know companies that have posted a podcast last week. That's not

25:08 a field you can pull down in one of those systems. So I think finding information out about people and companies clays just completely like opened up the opportunity to do that. Then I do think they position as like personalizing some outreach. I think you can do that. I think about it more as like personalized research is probably going to be more effective. And then using a sequencing tool in paired up with clay. Why would you need clay if you have ample market though? So ample market will get you kind of the typical firmographic information you have. They have a couple additional things that are interesting. But it's not going to go to their

25:55 website and scrape, hey, what are all the roles they're hiring for? It's not going to go to their website and scrape. Hey, are they including this type of messaging? Like, I'm selling to a very specific type of company that works in this type of space. And they message things this way. ample market's not gonna be able to pull in that data, or clay's clay agents can go get that data and pair it up with like your zoom info data or wherever else you want to pull it in from. Now, you talked about ample market a lot. Let's dive by use case, right? So outbound prospecting,

26:30 sales engagement use ample market. What about ICP building, targeting, lead scoring, etc. So this is an interesting one, because I think this is one of the most overlooked aspects of building out your go to market foundations is nailing your ICP and its dynamic your ICP changes as your company changes as you introduce new products, you know, the definition of who your ideal customer is will evolve. So there are a couple of interesting tools that I think allow you to house that data. So ghost GTM AI is one of them, where they will look at your past data and then create ICP profiles for your current customers and then try to project those in the

27:23 future. I think that's really early. So I think that's something that, you know, they're not all quite there yet. But I do think that's coming. Something that I think is interesting, that people can use off the shelf today. I'm going to pause just because I can hear the there we go, sweet. I'll keep going if you're good. Okay, cool. Something that I do think is interesting that you can use off the shelf today is a company like ocean. So ocean.io. It's a look alike company, you can load up your ideal customers, the ones that have the highest lifetime value,

28:03 the ones that you feel like are converting the best, load them up into ocean, and it will go find all of those look alike companies. So if lean scale was a good example of a company for you, a load up lean scale dot team, and it's going to pull all the other companies that look just like lean scale. Here are the ones in the similar revenue bracket, employee headcount, they're in a similar space. And then you can use those to start targeting your outbound efforts, especially if you're in more of a upmarket, ABM style motion, then something like that is going to be super

28:36 powerful. What about like, in terms of lead scoring, demos, qualification, scheduling, onboarding retention, what are some tools you use there? Let's go go down your list of tools. Yeah, there's a mixed bag. And also some of these depend on where you're at, like if you're super early, or if if you have room in your budget to bring some of them on. But I'd say HubSpot has some decent out of the box lead scoring, I think that can take you pretty far. If you need to take it to another level where you want that scoring to impact routing and exactly where you want things

29:12 to go. One of my favorite tools that's out right now is default. So default AI powered routing, and lead scoring is a part of that as well. But it's not just routing, it'll route and create things for you. I'll give you a tangible example for us. You go to lean scale.team, we have a service called on demand, you can go in, you can sign up for it. We're using default to bring somebody in, automatically create a slack channel for that person, automatically create a project in our project management system, and then automatically create all their stuff in Salesforce

29:50 as well. So it routes, but then you can also create a lot of things based off of that as well. So I think that's a good one. If you're getting into more deal scoring, pipeline health, you're using AI for forecasting. I think one of the best platforms on the market right now, and it doesn't get a lot of attention as it should, is Ebsta. So Ebsta, one, they clean all of your data. So you hook up Ebsta to your email server, it brings all of the emails and meetings anyone in your company has ever had, and then creates them as accounts, contacts, puts them in as

30:32 activities in Salesforce. You'd be shocked at how much data is missing just from your emails. Then it'll create relationship scoring, like how engaged are you with all the people in your system. And then they will do conversational intelligence, very similar to Gong. And they'll use a lot of that conversational intelligence to give you a score on the deal and how the deal's going. They automatically cover all of your qualification fields. So if you're using like MedPick, Bant, Champ, it'll fill in those fields for you from the call recordings. And it will tell you if a deal is progressing well or not, and will tell you exactly what you

31:16 need to do to get a deal back engaged. So something that full blown, that's probably good for like, you know, you have 15, 20 reps and you need that level of sophistication on forecasting. But anyway, those are some of my favorites in those categories. Two things that people don't pay enough attention to, one in particular is onboarding, right? If your customer is not onboarded, right, the chances of them becoming dormant and eventually churning is very high. And then of course, retention. But I do think onboarding is the leading indicator of engagement. And engagement is the leading indicator of retention. If somebody

31:56 pays for a year contract, because your company paid for it, but they never use it, they'll cancel. And they won't use it if the onboarding was so messy that they couldn't even get time to value. So what are some tools you recommend there for help? Well, honestly, for this, I'd start with the process and the mindset, like you were saying. I think you could probably go pretty far with just your CRM and getting the right trackers and fields in. If you do have a very technical product and you need to measure exactly how people are using your product, like what are they clicking on? What features are they

32:36 using? And I do think that's a good use case for a CSP. So if you're going to like a churn zero or plan hat or something like that. But what I would say would be more impactful is one having... What is a CSP, by the way? Oh, sorry, customer success platform. Well, okay. Sorry, I'm just rattling off a million tools. And it's my favorite thing to go through. So it's like a churn zero or a catalyst, but then there's like other sort of feature metrics tools like Pendo that one might use as well to track engagement kind of thing. Yeah. And Pendo would be very deep. So if you

33:13 need really, really deep analytics, I think you could get pretty far with like a churn zero. Depends on the use case. But I would say before you even go buy a tool, I would have a very, very clear definition of what first time to value is for your company and for your product and making sure you are sprinting to get there as quickly as possible. So for LeanScale, it's not a product, it's a service. But we know that people start to see and feel what LeanScale is doing the first time we get a dashboard up. The first time we put up a dashboard in Salesforce or Looker, and we visualize their data, that's when they feel

33:55 like LeanScale is doing something, not just getting added to their services payroll. So we try to get there as quickly as we can. So I think figuring out what that FTV is, and then hyper focused on measuring when you can get there. Now, what does your actual GTM tool workflow look like on a daily or weekly basis? Yeah, great question. So I talk a lot about Amplmarket. I use Amplmarket. I have a couple sequences in there. We're mostly targeting people who just fundraised. Normally, they're wanting to do some enhancements to their operations at that time. So we reach out to the CRO,

34:36 head of ops, if they have one, the founder, we have very specific sequences there. The other one that we're looking for is job changes. So I'm looking for anyone who just started in a new head of RevOps or a new CRO, reaching out to them. We also go back and reach out to the companies that they came from. So if they're new here, it means somebody else is new at where they were before too. So we're kind of hitting both of those at the same time. And then the third, which has actually been the most effective for us in building business, and I think because it's just an authentic way to get engaged with someone, is I reach out to people inviting them

35:14 on the podcast. So I'm reaching out to heads of RevOps, founders, CROs, getting them on a podcast. It does a lot for us. One, we get some amazing content out of it, which helps the brand. But two, I get a chance to have an authentic conversation with someone. We get to know each other, learn about each other. And then at the end, we always hit them with, hey, we also have a referral program. So if you know anyone, it's a way that they can monetize getting to know lean scale as well. So on the sequencing, that's mostly it. And then using AI just to do deep research and preparation. So if I'm about to get on a call,

35:53 I'm pretty much plugged into chat GPT. So hey, tell me everything about this. Tell us where we may meet some of their pain points, and just making sure I know everything I can about a company before hopping on a call. Now, from your experience with your clients, is there a couple of GTM workflows you've seen automated? Is there a couple of GTM workflows you've seen automated that saved a full time hire? Absolutely. Absolutely. I think where it's really saved is AE and SDR headcount. So a lot of the sequences, we have a customer that has used a similar job switching sequence.

36:45 They're using clay. Their clay agents are scraping websites for new job postings. And then they're putting that into their sequence tool. So that has helped AEs run their own sequences. So you don't need to pair them with SDRs, where a lot of times you'd have an SDR paired to do that type of work before. So I think what we're seeing, AEs are just making a lot more money. If you do have an SDR, they're just incredibly effective. So you don't need to hire as many people to get the same result. Yeah, I think the future doesn't belong to the largest teams. It belongs to the most

37:27 leveraged. And I think ARR per FTE is a really, really important metric to watch. And I can't say this enough. When you're looking at companies going into the hundreds of thousands into the millions in ARR plus per FTE. Yeah, I think the going metric before was if you're at like 150 to 200 and you were growing, you were doing pretty well. A lot of the companies we work with have 500k plus revenue per FTE, the ones that are doing well and scaling. In this age of AI, there's a lot of sea of sameness. There's a lot of errors. AI doesn't work 100% all the time as we'd like to

38:11 tout or see. It gets you pretty far. And I think like my workflow has changed significantly. I can just do a lot more with less. Just leveraging something as simple as chat JBT and leveraging Apollo, for example. Not even some of the latest tools you mentioned, but everything is getting AI enabled. But how do you balance AI output with human oversight so the quality doesn't drop ultimately? It's not about producing more with less, it's producing better. That is the key. Yeah, I mean, initially, when a lot of these tools came out, I had the same excitement and

38:49 height of just like, oh my goodness, I can send this thing that I would normally spend 30 minutes on, I can send it to 100,000 people, because AI is going to get it pretty close. But right away, people are seeing right through it. I mean, I get it all the time in my inbox, somebody goes, wow, I really like the insight on your podcast that you posted last week. I'm like, you didn't listen to the podcast. Like this is this is some, you know, AI bogus that's coming into my inbox right now. So I think the way you framed it, AI with human oversight is the best way to think about

39:24 it. Look for just like ample market does a good job of, hey, we took it 90%. But we really need you to take it the last mile. Like here's a full sequence, we wrote out everything, but go tweak it so it actually sounds like it came from you. And make sure I didn't send anything out that just doesn't resonate. And for me personally, too, I use, like I use chat GPT to write a lot of my LinkedIn posts, but I don't just copy and paste it. But it gives me a lot of new ideas, things that I didn't even think about. And before I do a podcast, something I've been doing recently too,

40:00 is I load up the storyboard. And I say, Hey, I'm doing a podcast on this. Can you pull some external research, maybe some like, psychological things that would relate to this as well? Like, are there things that I can pull in externally or some statistics that would be relevant to what we're talking about? And then it does like a full research, fully relatable stuff that I can drop into the podcast, that normally you would have somebody like, you would hire someone to give you that level of preparation, and to copyright all of this stuff for you. But now I can just get it from

40:41 chat GPT, clean it up, you know, make sure it's saying exactly what I wanted to say, and then post it. Definitely, man, it's it's given me great leverage. Even even something as simple as taking transcripts from these audios, right, and turning them into clips, turning them into blog posts, turning them into visuals, it's what you can do. And it's not more, it's better, it's differentiated, I think the ability to prompt in a unique way, a creative person will always be able to win this game, I think in the age of AI, where AI will take jobs faster than one can upscale.

41:22 What matters is your ability to design your creativity, your agency, the more agency you have, the better your output will be not more output, but better output. Now a big part of RevOps is helping companies create repeatability. What does repeatability actually mean in concrete terms? I think the first sign that you're hitting some level of repeatability is I actually start with planning. So can you set targets? And can you hit them reliably, at least close. And I think when you're doing that in a pretty consistent basis, it means all of the tactics you have underneath

42:06 are being they're scalable and they're repeatable. But I think the way you know if you're doing it is if you can look out a quarter or two and hit a target. And I'm not saying make up crazy false targets, it's just can you look at the previous data, project in the future, make good business decisions of who you hire and where you allocate your capital, and then get the amount of growth that makes sense for the investment you made. So I think from planning it's there, but a lot of everything else, it's going to be iterative. So some of the sequences I'm sending now, maybe they

42:43 work today, it's probably going to get tired in the market. Three, six months from now, I'm going to have to change the approach. You know, what looked like good content a year ago looks like absolute garbage now. So I think you have to keep iterating in the tactics. But I think if you can be repeatable and hitting targets, that's when you know you're in a good rhythm. You know what's what's really interesting. And you and I can laugh about this is sometimes you see that first metric of repeatability. And then you forget that the world doesn't operate linear,

43:17 like that. And you're like, okay, you know what, I got to x million with y head counts, and I'm going to forex the targets, and I'm going to just forex the head count, and watch that. And then that's like a train wreck all the way to the bottom. You know, it's funny, I know we both have that shared experience, which is exactly right. And then when I when I started lean scale, and we were incorporating everything, I was talking to our lawyer. And he just gave this, I don't know if it was advice, but he just said it, he said, Hey, this is going to be the easiest

43:57 time in the business. It's only gonna get harder from here. I don't know why he told me that. I don't know if he was like trying to convince me not to do it or what. But he was absolutely right. It was like, hey, go close a couple deals with your friends and family. Like you could do that. Now you got to go into like a micronet. Oh, now you got to like, create a brand and messaging to get strangers in and then you have to the type of service like Anthony and Rico would provide, we got to make sure we're getting people who could provide an even better service and train them

44:27 and equip them like, I haven't had better advice than that, that at each stage of growth, it's, it's not a linear growth of difficulty, it's an exponential growth of difficulty. So expect your conversion rates will not be the same, your investment will not bring the same return in that channel, because you're going to wear it out. There's only so much elasticity you have in the things that you're doing. So anyway, it gets harder as you grow. You know, at every phase, as you go from validating the market to then the next phase being product market fit, which is engagement retention to then product channel fit. Do you

45:05 have repeatability of a channel where you're kept payback period? It's not years, but maybe it's months. And then you get to a point of scale where you're adding new products, new markets, new technologies, etc. Right at each phase, I think you have a tendency to fall out of product market fit, although you may have also with each technological wave, you might fall out of tech product market fit. So for example, looking at the first one, say you validated the market, but then, you know, when they're using your product, some things may have changed as they got into using it. And you may not have the product market fit that you thought you did.

45:47 Or maybe you get a reputable scalable channel, and you're getting volume of leads. But the requirements change something changed. And you may start to see lower retention. And you got to watch that watch engagement, watch onboarding as as a leading indicator of retention. And it's the same with every technological shift, right? You lose product market fit, or you stand to choose to stand to lose product market fit. For example, the SaaS folks are losing product market fit right now in the age of AI competing with AI native companies. But if you look at the cloud era,

46:24 if you stuck with the cloud, you would have lost all business. And if you didn't move to, you know, from, like, sorry, if you were in the on prem era, and if you didn't move to the cloud, you would lost all product market fit. Right. And then the same thing, it from going from SaaS to AI, if you don't adopt AI, you're going to lose product market fit. Absolutely. And you just have to think every time you go through that transition, it's only going to get harder and harder as you go. So don't don't expect it to be easy. And the second you feel like you need to be tracking all this too. And I think a good metaphor, I know

47:04 you're extraordinary when it comes to health and fitness, like probably top 1% of humans who understands how the human body works and how to keep it, you know, running optimally. But in in health and fitness, you're looking at biomarkers, you have to be measuring like, what are you eating? How are you exercising? What does your sleep look like? And if any one of those starts to go off, it's a canary in the coal mine that hey, there might be something else happening here. And in the same regard, you have to look at your go to market foundation as well, say, Okay, what's

47:37 what's happening? Why is onboarding running a little bit slower? Why is churn going up a little bit in this segment? How come we're not able to get traction with some of these new reps? What's going on? And I think you really have to be measuring all of those markers and go to market just like you would for your health. And then constantly making adjustments and making decisions. You know, what's really interesting is we've been conditioned as a society to treat everything like sick care, you get you get sick, something breaks, and then you go to the doctor and they've tried to

48:10 figure out the system symptom versus looking at the inputs or rather leading indicators, their goals, every goal has a behavior and a leading indicator. If the leading indicators are not being met, there's no way you're going to hit the goal. So if you look at it in fitness, if one of the leading indicators to dropping body fat is you need to be in a caloric deficit, and the other is you increase your daily activity, not just gym time, if you go just to the gym and lift weights 16 minutes a day, you're still sedentary, right? Like how many minutes of walking

48:49 time you're getting, are you in a total calorie deficit, etc. You're not going to drop body fat. And so then you're going to keep looking at the scale and getting pissed off and, you know, and so and want to break the scale, right? And there's the same vein, you have to get really maniacal about tracking your food at least 90% of the time, right? Like if you're saying, oh, you know what, I eat clean five days a week, and the remaining two I eat whatever, that's still, that's not good, right? Because the whatever you eat will on the cheat days will overcompensate for all the hard

49:27 work you put for the five days out of the week. And the same thing with business, if you're not tracking the leading indicators, and so I see this in sales a lot, sales reps will come and say, oh, I'm going to close it, I'm going to close it. Well, no miracle deal is going to walk in the door the last week of the month or the last day of the month. But a lot of old school reps say, oh, you know, the last day of the month, the Hail Mary always comes through. Yeah, the customer doesn't care. The customer doesn't care. It's the end of your quarter. They're not buying on your timeline.

49:57 This whole like, spray and pray used to work in the past. But if you're not taking the actions, if you're not creating content, if you're not building thought leadership, if you're not at bats with enough leads during the week, then chances are you're not going to close. And so what that means is if you didn't do like say five demos a day, if five demos a day gets you to five clients a month, and you're doing like two demos a day, chances are you're not going to close those five clients a month, right. And so I think watching those leading indicators is really important.

50:33 As we close out, I want to get into the lean scale case study, right, stemming from your advice from from your lawyer. A lot of people miss this is like you got to design the business to engineer love, right. And that love sort of creeps out as you add more and more people, the love of Anthony, how do you scale that Michelin star experience, right. And a lot of people, what they do is they start throwing technology and bodies at it. And they forget that it's all about the process. What is the ideal process that engineers for the customer love and wows the customer? What are maybe unnecessary steps? Remove that so the customer gets to the

51:15 delighted state as quickly as possible, then you tech enable it. So I want to I want to get your case study based on the advice your lawyer gave you is like, how did you start the business? How did you pick the micron niche? What are the things you did to build the brand and the company you are today? Yeah, happy to be an open book about this. And if you ask me a year from now, maybe some of my answers will change because I'm learning a lot every year. But I'll share where we're at today. So starting, it's a little bit different. So it's a services business, you know, we didn't have to

51:50 invest a lot of money upfront, just experience to get it going. And we started it on the side. So my co founder and he case a guy based in Brazil, he's been my number two at three companies. And him and I started this. And really what happened is very organic. After the email exit, there were about 200 people who worked at email. And after a year at Lexus Nexus, 100 of them left. And they all went to a bunch of different startups. And I ended up getting, you know, calls to go work at a lot of different places. And I was like, Nope, I'm dedicated here, but maybe I can help you on the

52:33 side. So eventually, the side hustle turned into the main hustle. And that was a very big inflection point for me personally, because at the same time, I had a family I wasn't, you know, I needed to make money, I couldn't, you know, just like, go move into my parents garage and start something. So I already had a daughter, I had another daughter on the way. And when we were making the decision, like, Hey, do we go full time, like, we need to make sure some revenue is coming in the door first. So we were pretty calculated about that. And we had like, we're not going full time unless it's

53:09 bringing in this amount of revenue. And all of those early customers just came from my network and contacts. And then when it got to that inflection point, we made the decision and, and moved into it full time. So I think from there, you're absolutely right, you have to like scale your love, you have to scale your passion. And I think I even knew that walking into this, I had seen companies get built. And I still fell into two like, basic traps. One, I was thinking, Hey, I could probably train some really junior people to do this, and then scale it and keep the margin

53:48 really high. And, you know, I bet we could grow the company this way. And if I had money in the bank, I would have hired a bunch of people like that, and would have probably like, burned it to the ground. So I'm happy we didn't have any funding. Then I realized, I need to find people who are better at this than I am. Maybe they're not in a situation where they could start a company, maybe they didn't have some capital from an exit that they had, so they don't have as much comfort, but they're really, really good at what they do. They're amazing at what they do. And they can do

54:18 a better job than I could. So I had to go into like, how do I get fewer people, but better people than me? That was a big one. And then we had to get processed early, early on. So are we using the right systems? Are we tracking our time? Are we tracking the data? Do we know what it takes to manage an engagement? Do we know exactly when we need to hire someone? And like down to the penny, had to be hyper focused on our finances too. So every single dollar we made sure was exactly where we wanted to go, and made sure nothing went to waste. So that was a lot of it. And you have to,

54:57 culture is intentional. And it's something that you have to care for, especially as the founder, especially as a CEO, you're in that position, you are responsible for the culture, and you're responsible for the personality of the company. And people watch what you do. They watch the decisions you make. They watch how you react to somebody in a meeting. They watch how you react to a customer who's not being fair to you or being tough, or they watch how you react. They test your integrity. Hey, if there's an opportunity to like sneak some more money over here, should we? No,

55:31 never absolutely not. Integrity above all. So I think those things, I didn't know how much work maintaining the culture would be. And I didn't know, I knew how important hiring would be. But I didn't know to the level. And then I fell into the one that we talked about. I hired a salesperson way early. And I was like, how did I do this? I know this. I've seen this movie like three times. How did I make this same mistake? And that's exactly how I thought of it. I was like, I could hire this guy. And I think our service is pretty easy to sell. I'm going to have him go do

56:09 it. I'm going to empower him with everything. And then he's going to go make me a ton of money. No surprise. I'll skip to the ending. It didn't work like that. And not his fault. My fault. We had no brand. We had no marketing. We barely had a pitch deck. And I expected him to go make me millions of dollars. Like that's that's stupid. So that never works. You know, Anthony, it's funny. So I recorded my unicorn porn podcast series is a 10 episode making tongue in cheek on on Silicon Valley and unicorns, things I've learned over the years. Every piece of advice I gave out from past

56:44 mistakes, I feel like I made it again. And worse. And my wife was listening to it. And she's nodding her and she's like, what? She's like, you should just stop because all of those pieces of advice you gave out there were sound bites and clips. You made them again. I know. I know. So now I listen to my podcast a little bit more closely and make sure like, what am I saying? Maybe I should actually do what I tell other people to do. You know, it's it's funny because we've been used to working a certain way for a very long time. And although we know there are mistakes, we sort of

57:20 creep into this muscle memory of mistakes and we make them again. So you got to be very, very deliberate in training your mind and surrounding yourself with the right people so you don't make those mistakes again. It almost is like you have to feel like Neo in the matrix where you write down these past patterns, maybe their top 10 things that you consistently or made mistakes on or gotten bitten on or five and write them down. So like when you see the leading indicators of those happening or like stop like Neo in the matrix getting shot at, it's like dodging them.

58:00 And a lot of us don't put those leading indicators down. And my general theme has been the goal is not important if you don't understand the leading indicators and the inputs. And if you follow the leading indicators and the inputs, the score will take care of itself anyway. You may win some, you may lose some, but I think the leading indicators are more important. I do want to ask though, how did you land on this ideal customer profile? Well, mostly I built it for me. I wish it was the service I wish existed when I hopped into companies because I mentioned my co-founder Sakai, he did most of the technical build of anything.

58:44 And I dangerous, but not good enough to build things out in a scalable way. So I was like, what would I want? And how many Anthony and Ricos are out there? It seemed like a good enough market, like head of RevOps, series A, series B company, probably not enough to invest in a full like team or dedicated headcount. And the big, probably something that I was a little bit of an aha moment for me, when I was interviewing at boast, I interviewed with you and the interview with Alex, the founder CEO. And I remember saying like, Hey, you can bring me on and I can do all of these

59:23 things, but I still need to hire someone else so I can like actually put it to work. And I remember just feeling like that was super lame. And what if Sakai couldn't come with me? I was like, what would I have done? I would have put myself in a position where I literally couldn't do the full job. And I had no idea where I would go. So I wanted to make lean scale. If you're had a RevOps and you go into a place, we have all of our playbooks, we have engineers, we have tool recommendations. We're seeing this, you know, at 50 companies right now. So we can tell you what's

59:56 working, what's not working. And I just think that would have been the coolest thing that I could have engaged with when I was the head of RevOps. So that's how it started. Super, super commendable. And I like the advice there is you got to build it for yourself. Then you can engineer the love, right? You're more passionate about the problem. A lot of people, what happens is they don't love the problem. They don't love the customer. They're not like passionate or charged up, super motivated to fix it. They just see a dollar sign and then eventually they lose interest and they can't stick with it. A lot of success in life is just longevity and

1:00:35 just sticking with it for the long haul. And if you hate your customers, you hate the problem, you're just not going to stick around because as you scale, you're spending more and more time with customers, not less, right? Although you hire salespeople to close deals, eventually you become like a chief PR officer or chief community officer, right? You're spending time with customers, you're getting on calls, you're talking about the industry, about the technology. If you hate it, you don't love that space. You won't last long, right? You can't go by life

1:01:09 pretending. I want to spend the last few minutes here in rapid fire, right? Action in 60 seconds. What's your favorite cold email prompt that actually gets replies?

1:01:24 For us, it's a podcast invite. So for me, it's, hey, love your background. We run a podcast on RevOps. We think you'd be an absolute fire guest to have on the Lean Scale podcast. We'd love to book some time if you're interested. And for me, I'm giving them something of value. So I think give something because we can help them build thought leadership. We can help them do some stuff. So if you have something that's like giving first, that's best. I think that's how we grew the first 10 million revenue at Bose, right? We had no marketing team before you came on. It was all hosting events, community events, by bringing speakers,

1:02:05 speakers get value because they get an audience and our audience learn from the speakers that they would otherwise not see anywhere else and bring these top tier iconic speakers. And that helped us generate a lot of business. So it's a start of a relationship. Anytime you give and you keep giving the person on the other end starts to feel obligated. There's this law of reciprocity. So I like that most underrated GTM tool under a hundred dollars a month, under a hundred dollars a month. I was going to say ample market, but they're a little bit more than that. So I can't throw them in there. Riverside, I think Riverside, I think content's

1:02:42 got to be part of your strategy. Riverside gives you like a full suite to set up your podcast, set up everything you need to do. The editing is incredible. I'm pretty blown away with what it can do. And yeah, you can get a plan that's well under that. You know, what's funny is even if you can't find guests or you're too shy to cold email people, set up a podcast with yourself and just interview yourself or have a colleague interview you on Riverside and each podcast and you got a podcast interview. Of course you can chat GPT the script for it. That podcast interview could turn

1:03:17 into a sub stack blog post. It could turn into multiple LinkedIn posts. It could turn into multiple tweets. It could turn into multiple clips for Instagram and you now are everywhere and try doing that for 365 days and tell me if you didn't see an uplift, especially if you're on a channel where your customers are like LinkedIn. It also forces you to stay ahead and stay current. So you're making sure you're, you know, bringing things to the content that are actually worth listening to. One GTM process every startup should automate by next week. Performance to plan of all

1:04:00 your go to market bio biomarkers as we call them earlier. So you should be putting that out. It should be an email and auto slack. It should be keeping everybody fully visible on where every single health metric of the business is to plan. Biggest waste of time in GTM right now. Sending a million cold emails, a million cold LinkedIn outreaches. It's not even neutral. It's not negative. Everybody's spending a ton of time just blasting a million messages, not spending enough time on quality, and they're just ruining their brand in the process. 100%. And lastly, if you were running

1:04:43 GTM solo today, what would your dashboard include? Target accounts and my priority for which ones I'm going after and why. It would look at how many, how much pipeline I built, how many opportunities I've created. That's probably one of my favorite leading indicators. We're building genuine opportunities. And then close rate of those opportunities to one. And then to goal. So if I had a goal of X amount of pipeline, what is it hitting? How much have I converting from opening opportunity to closing it? We've definitely tweaked processes when we've seen that dip down.

1:05:21 Like, wow, we're not converting these. Something must be wrong or something seriously wrong with our sales motion because conversion rates have been garbage. So that's super important to me. And then just close one to goal. Are we closing enough to get there? Fantastic. Anthony, this has been a great, great conversation. I think we could go on for days, but we'll end it right here. Wishing you great success, my man. And I look forward to hanging out in Scottsdale with you. Thank you, Lloyd. Great seeing you, man. Appreciate the time and looking forward to that as well. Awesome.