Welcome back to Second Groove. This is Cassidy. I'm here with Carl. It's Friday.
We thought we'd get together and have one of our jam sessions. So the ongoing thread that Carl and I have been talking about throughout the week and we thought we'd bring it to the audience here. Today, Carl, how you doing? Doing good.
Excited for the Friday jam session with you, Cassidy. So let's do it. What are we going to talk about? I don't want to show you a Thunderman teet up.
All right. No thunder stealing here. Here's the thunderling. You let me know if you think it's thunder or not.
All right. So there's this, I mean, in my mind, we talked a little bit about this on previous podcast, but in my mind, there's just like this gap. It like nags at me, right? It's so marketing teams, I think are a little bit ahead when it comes to like innovation and connecting the dots to their strategies and playbooks to kind of the 2022 buyer, the modern buyer aligning with how that buyer buys does research, learns, et cetera.
And the thing that's an anecdote me is that there doesn't really seem to be the equivalent on the sale side. There's not a lot of innovation really happening over there. A lot of the innovation that you see, if you want to call it innovation, these tiny microexperience, it really has to do with, you know, subject lines, you know, use these words versus these words. Ask for a meeting at the end of the email with your commonly linked, no, don't do that.
Just like have kind of an open ended soft close to the email. And I just am dissatisfied with the state of innovation in sales outbound because I believe that it could be such a powerful growth lever, but it needs to be innovated. It needs to evolve. And I don't search high and low.
I don't think there's a playbook out there or somebody necessarily kind of talking about this. So who better than us? Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. But let me ask you a question.
Why do you think that is the case? And what I mean by that is a lot of, you know, companies in our target market, let's call it software as a service venture back companies, they actually rely on sales to generate the majority of the revenue. But yet there's not a lot of innovation. Is that because you don't need to?
Is that because what? Yeah, you know, the honest answer is I don't I don't know, but I've got some hypotheses. Let me know if these are valid. The first one is that I think you're right.
The point you made is super important. Like a lot of sales companies depend on that channel, like the demand capture, like high volume SDR outbound to to stay alive. It's like the crutch, right? Like if that goes down, like the company sinks.
Why? Because it's really not a lot of marketing spun up. The marketing isn't reliable. And so I think like sales actually might be trapped because it's so necessary that that function just like nobody wants to touch it.
It's like, this is the only thing that keeps us alive. So we are not going to touch it. That is a, you know, like, but what happens when you start to stand up like really good marketing, we see this with our portfolio of companies, whether they come to us and they're like 100% or 90% sales led. And over the course of a number of quarters, sometimes more than others, they said there's a rebalance that happens where we get them to 5050 sales led in marketing source pipeline, sales or marketing source.
And then we get them to 6040, 60 being marketing source and beyond. I think you probably, maybe the hypothesis here is that you have to probably free sales to a degree to be like, okay, the entire weight of the company's revenue and future isn't sitting only on our shoulders anymore. Now we can maybe like look up and begin to figure out if there's a way to start innovating and adding new leverage. I mean, some of our companies, because their SDRs don't have to do so much volume anymore because of the marketing source pipeline that we are creating and in tandem with them, they can start to do a lot cooler stuff like focus on target accounts, etc.
Whereas before, it had to be high volume, you just you had to scrape the demands that was in market just to stay alive. That's my first hypothesis as to why I think that sales is kind of stuck or trapped. I don't know, is that valid? What would you add to that?
Well, I think that seems very valid. Makes a lot of sense, actually. So what happens in these times with that strategy? So last year or three years, you as a company have relied on this high volume, outbound motion, that you're just making micro tweaks to get a half a percent better effect of this out of it.
Now we're entering your session. My assumption is outbound goes, it's already been a low yield strategy. I assume yields go even lower. My fair assumption.
I think so. I think it's a fair assumption. I don't think it's assumption at all. We have to see that in the C.R.N.s of our customers.
And I think that the reason is why is that Cassidy, right? It's because there's less demand to be captured. People are like recoiling and retreating. They're buying less things.
So when there's less demand to be captured naturally, if you're only running a demand capture playbook, that is going to yield less fruit two years ago, like maybe like the height of COVID, right? Or after COVID, if you were running demand capture only, and you were zoom zoom info hub spot, you were, I mean, just taking checks to the bank, right? Those playbooks were just ATM machines. What happens in the complete opposite economy, right?
There's less demand. Okay, now we have to create it. That's where marketing has an advantage, because I think they've moved the needle a little bit more forward. And, you know, having some kind of sense of what does demand creation look like?
But sales are still, I believe, you know, stuck to the degree and there's really no one to kind of lead them out of those woods. So let's get into the sense on the marketing side, obviously, we preach a lot about the need to create demand. And I would say even on the marketing side, we're at the early adopter phase of doing that for the modern buyer. Your idea is we should also be creating demand on an outbound channel with the sales team.
What does that mean? Yeah, that's a good question. We're still formulating it here. I think what it means is that the message changes, right?
Entirely, that's foundational, right? I think there's four key components to outbounds, right? It's target message channel timing. You could probably say the same thing about marketing, but we're just going to focus on outbounds.
So whenever you're in market to buy something, timing, the timing piece of that equation totally trumps all the others, right? Because I'm in market, you could send me the worst, most garbage email. And if I'm looking to buy a pair of Nike's, if I'm looking to buy, you know, B2C actually does this really well, right? They just send you discounts every single weekend.
There's a new discount for like a new bad birdie polo, right? They don't care about creating demand. They've created it already because I signed up for their list. Now they're just like one of these weekends, you're going to have an extra eight bucks, right?
And then you're going to buy from us, we're going to be there. Same thing with like, if I want to buy a higher marketing agency or buy a CR and if I am in market, somebody from Hubs for a CR and let's say somebody from Hubs about could email me like, Hey, Carl, no idea if you're in market or not. But we have an awesome CRM. If you are in market, you should take a look at it.
The worst email ever. I would probably respond to it. Yeah, actually, why is that? Because a timing is perfect.
It trumps the need for a good message for the right channel. I mean, never respond to emails by responding to this email. And it trumps the targeting large, largely as well, right? So your question is what is the main creation?
Like, well, demand creation now looks like you have to optimize and focus on the target, the message and the channel a lot more closely because you don't have that timing piece. The timing is wrong. I'm not in market. The timing is off.
So what again, does it look like to craft a message, craft your targeting, and make sure that it's aligned with the right channel that I want to learn and do research in that? That's what I think what potentially outbound could look like. And I think the yield is it could be massive. I think there's a number of hurdles that we have to overcome.
But I think the yield, I think it could be an entirely new growth lever for sales teams and revenue teams. You talk about this right and having the marketing team split up between create and kind of a create demand team and a capture team. I think the same thing could be true for sales. You have SDRs and AEs.
They just capture. And then you have SDRs and AEs and subject matter experts. This is a part of how I think this experiment will run better just running create demand. But they're using different channels than marketers.
They don't use LinkedIn ads. They don't use make a podcast or use phones. They use emails. They use channels that they traditionally use.
They could be super powerful. So let's walk through how we would do this. So we want to map out what experiment here could look like. Maybe this is something you'll run here.
If I labs, maybe it's something that listeners can take and run at their company. Where would you like to start on this? Actually, I'll give you kind of one starting point. Last time we talked on this podcast, you mentioned there's only two reasons you would ever answer an email.
You've covered one of them, which was you just happen to be in need of something and they got the person sitting in email, like he any other is the person needs to teach you something. Is there anything else in like, how would you go about tackling that? Yeah, I think our frameworks for demand gen applies mindset measurement execution. Right.
So the first thing that has to change if we're going to stand up outbound demand creation is the mindset has to change. Right. The mindset has to shift away from, you know, our buyers like to receive messages in these ways that worked back in 2011, 2014, whenever I pre covid pre whatever era this shift happened. And it has to shift to not everyone is in market only 98% of my only 2% of my market is a audience is in market.
So what does a message look like to craft it to the 98% because right now outbound focuses its messaging on the 2% that's in market alienates the 98%. Okay, so our mindset has to change. We need to change how it is that we think about our audience. And instead of treating everybody as something like they're all in market asking to book a meeting this is a man.
Let's flip that on the head and say, Hey, let's actually assume that no one is in market. What does messaging look like then? And so I think that's the first thing that needs to change is the mindset. The second radical thing that has to change, Cassidy's measurements, how are outbound teams measure today?
Meetings booked activity metrics, number of dials, sales accepted leads, which is like sounds good. But if I need this many sales accepted leads in this month, it's going to be changes how I think about what I'm going to talk to when it shapes my messaging, right? Because I need them to go pipeline now. So I get my quota.
And so that's the second piece that needs to change after mindset is the measurement. What does the dashboard look like? We need a new measurement framework for this new funnel for this new motion. And then lastly, the execution is arguably I think the hardest part.
The message is easy. The script changes. I've used this before on my own anecdotally and previous sas roles. The message I'm not asking for meetings necessarily.
I'm inviting to conversations that only give something away, right? It might sound something like, Hey Cassidy, it's Carl Ferrer of fine labs. Look, I'm calling you out of the blue. I don't like we don't have to do this.
What I want to do. We've done a bunch of research here at refined labs and we're noticing three to five trends that are impacting XYZ role and XYZ industry today. I'd love to share the deck with you, share the research with you. If you want to action any of this, you could do it on your own right?
Something very like abundance mindset. Like I don't want anything in return for you. So I ran a playbook like this on my own in HubSpot. And it worked.
I booked a whole bunch of meetings. And then I didn't do discovery or anything like that. I just ran like these, I called them executive briefings similar to what we do in our sales process. I said I did it for prospecting.
And it was fantastic because I just sat there and I just taught like my people that I wanted to sell to something new. And that's pretty much I think what the message could sound like. I think that's actually a lot easier than what SDRs are trying to do today. All this personalization.
I have to do all this research. I actually don't have to do that much research if I'm just inviting you to a conversation to share trends with you. You either want to know those trends or see this research or you don't. No big deal.
The hard part is you have to have something of value now to share. Funny story. When I first start launched this campaign, if you want to call it that HubSpot, I didn't really have anything of value to share. I didn't know if anybody was going to take the meeting.
So I just kind of like shot before I aimed. If that makes sense. And I joined I remember joining a call. I invited a director of marketing to come to this call and she brought her whole executive team.
Now when I got onto this call, you know, I'm actually nervous when all these people join these calls. I could feel like a bead of sweat coming down my brow because I had no idea what I was going to talk about. The call went like total garbage. I completely wasted their time.
But I learned a valuable lesson in that. That's actually the hardest part. I think current like SDR work and and thought leadership is like the hardest part is the call itself. Handle the objections do this in this new notion to man creation via outbound.
The hardest part is actually that call. It has to be extremely valuable. And I think sales needs help on what to do there. It may not even be a sales person that runs that call, maybe an SME, maybe an analyst, a researcher, right?
Somebody like Victoria on our team or so I said me or somebody that really knows their stuff, right? I don't know. But that's how I'm thinking the experiment might be built. What do you think about that?
Yeah, you know, I went through my head when you first started, I can just got this discussion. One of the things we preach and create demand, it's frequency over time of your message in a market. And so it's never like one post, several one video, never one ad. It's kind of the frequency of hitting your audience with that message, which is somewhat hard to do in email.
I mean, Mark has been trying that for years with nurture emails. I would say those are not those aren't entirely effective. So when we first started talking, I thought you're going down this path of, Oh, great, Carl's gonna have to send out seven emails to each individual person over the course of like several weeks to kind of reach that level of frequency where they're getting something different, but a value each time. And you mean after that initial conversation like the nurture process?
No, before this is not me before you got to like a better explanation where you're talking about, but this was not the path you're going down. It's my point. The path you're going down was the hook is different. So the hook is not, Hey, just consume my content and get educated.
The hook wasn't was book a meeting, even though you don't want to buy anything. The hook was, I have something that could be a value to you. Let's get together and talk about it. I know something that you don't.
And then let's like, but I'm not going to get it to you here. You have to like meet me and let's talk about it. I think that's a really interesting approach and not where I thought you're going. The second bit of that is I think the observation that you're probably not the one providing the value and you've learned this from experience.
And when you think about most companies, we think about our company, who are trying to target, trying to go after CMOs, CROs, directors of demand gen, we got a whole bunch of subject matter experts in our company that you could tee up to deliver that insight, especially on the back of the things that we're doing in the vault, which is research oriented. I assume a lot of other companies have the same subject matter experts that they can prop up and bring into these conversations, which I find quite interesting. I mean, I wish we hope that they do. Yeah, I mean, I think how would you then, so this is an interesting concept of experiment.
So let's say we set this up and we're going to go run it. What are the positive signals you're looking for early on, kind of the precursor to measurement to see if this is working or not? So why can you feel like your actual experiment, like you're going to run it next week and maybe you are like, how many people would you reach out to? What would you be looking for as early indicators, et cetera?
Yeah. So back to my framework, then I'm my framework, just what I think is the framework target message channel timing. So the first thing that I'm going to do is like, remember, this is a big investment of time. And I also have to have something of value.
So before I even go outbound, there has to be something about it. So this is where sales is going to have to figure out partner with somebody internally in their org to be like, what is this value add, this value give? What do we know? I think this is the hardest thing for companies.
This is where this experiment dies before it even survives or lives or whatever, because a lot of companies don't have their own research. They're not doing their own research. They're not, they don't know something. They're just trying to, again, peddle a tool.
Some companies that I think have scratched the surface of this research, I think still don't plumb the depths of the value that it can actually bring. It's like gone. For instance, we see the research that they put out. It's like, I think we all maybe agree that it could be like a little bit more meaty, right?
A lot of it's kind of like very, you can tell it's just kind of funny. Or it's it's for marketing. It's not really for deep education of insights that are not obvious. And so I think some companies that get a lot of data, like us, right, can do a better.
So that's like one of the first things that has to happen. Like what data do we have at our disposal that gives us a unique perspective, that gives us a unique angle, that gives us knowledge that no one else has. If you don't have that, this doesn't work. So I think that's like phase one is what do we know that no one else knows?
Because that's why somebody takes the meeting, like in my previous framework, I'm either in market or you are going to have something for me that is a value that I don't currently know, which is a high bar, not that I know everything. But even for like a CMO, you got to teach that first. Like it's a high bar to have something that they don't know of a lot of these, like senior revenue leaders. So the experiment, your question, how does this start one that has to be built and maybe it manifests itself in a short slide deck of the research and the findings and then the insights.
And then what can I do about this? The second thing is we have to detach from the outcome of that research. I want the companies that I present this to be able to execute this on their own or hit a wall and be like, I need to execute this, but I can't. That's when you might not be going to sales process sooner than you thought, because you surface something new.
Okay, I don't want to, I've belated that point, but that piece has to be critical. It's the center zone of value, that value piece. I run the experiment starting next week, the targeting, right? Because we're investing this much time, I'm really going to comb through a target account list like this isn't high volume.
I'm starting with 20 or 50 companies that would change the course of refined labs, if we were to bring them into our portfolio. And that's where I would start. And then massaging the messaging, early indicators, positive signals, does anybody take these meetings? I think in the meeting, once you start running the meetings, I think positive signals inside that meeting are, does the audience agree that this research, these findings, this knowledge is as valuable as you believe that it was, right?
Is this change the game? Casa, you've been on calls where you learn something new. You and I like rant and riff on things and we teach each other things all the time. Those are really exciting, fun experiences.
You can feel that energy when people get excited. So that's kind of a fluffy positive signal. But that's something I'd be watching for. Like are people engaged?
Are they on the edge of their seats in this call? They ask questions. So they want to know more. Like is this fascinating to them?
That's like achievement unlocked. So those are some of their early positive signals. Can you send us more information? Can you share this deck with us, Carl?
Like who else can we talk to? What do you do at refined labs? Those lean in types of signals, I think, would communicate to me that there's something of value that we're positioning here. And that would be a positive signal to me.
What do you think? What positive signals do you add to that? Well, I think one, just people showing up on the call, I think it's a pretty high bar. So that would be positive.
I think, too, like, yeah, do they get value out of this interaction? You probably need to leave it at that point. Obviously, you want to have the same carry through and then to call you back. And so for that was never the objective.
So the objective wasn't here to capture the demand. The objective, the test for is the creation of demand. And I guess your point is, can you get people into the discussion and can those people get value out of the discussion? And what level of frequency is that happening within your sample size?
The marketing equivalent is ungated content, running ungated content in the feet. That's all this is, except it's a human that's delivering and not the LinkedIn feed, right? So it's like, there's no expectation. We're not looking for that click.
We're not looking for that conversion. We're looking for that consumption of something valuable that makes you think, right? Like before, there's an intensive purchase, I believe that there's an intent to explore, right? And I think what's interesting, because of the low frequency and kind of the process, you're going through one of the things you have to kind of think about is when somebody engages with your content, what's called on LinkedIn or they come to your website and they read something, they're spending one or two minutes to maybe 10 minutes max.
If they're listening to your podcast, they may be spending 30 or 40 minutes. That's a one way communication. This is 30 minutes, 45 minutes of pretty in depth interaction back and forth. So when you think about like time to get to know somebody to build a relationship, it does take a while when it's one or two minutes at a time, but I would compare that to like this could be a 40 minute conversation where if you've done correctly, you've advanced that relationship pretty far because you spend a lot of time with this person on a given topic.
This is one way to think about it as well in terms of the depth of which you've made a connection. It's a deep, deep impression. I don't think there's any channel that can make this deep of an impression to your point. It's too way communication.
There are no other channels available to us today that allow for too way communication, at least a marketing disposal. Maybe you could argue like chatbot, I don't know, something like that, but this is the deepest form of an impression that you can make and it done right, even if they never buy from you. So here's my question and maybe this needs to be part of your experiment. Who's the email come from?
Does it come from Carl the Head of Sales, set this up? Where does it come from? The subject matter expert who's going to go through this research or these findings? I think we need to add that to the experiment.
I think that it'd be crazy to think that the SDR or the salesperson would get more positive responses than coming from up here or somebody who shares the title and SME to your point. I think that should definitely be part of the experiment. Honestly, I don't know if the results would be super different or compelling because first of all, email, like you just, SDR just removes their title from the email. There's just a name there.
The title is irrelevant. It's really, again, I think the message. Is this interesting enough to me? Can I create enough of a compelling case?
Like, is this whatever knowledge that they appear to have, something of value? I still think the message would carry most of the weight, but yeah, I definitely want to weave that into the experiment of when it comes from, if something came from Chris or from you versus me or an entry level seller or SDR, is there a different hit right there? I have to say, yeah, it would be. Yeah, I would think so, but it's a good thing to test.
Now here's my question though. You know, you did this at HubSpot, but everybody has to HubSpot is. We probably do this at Refine Labs in which case if we were to do it within our community or people who've engaged with this in the past, I know that we are. Maybe outside of that, we don't.
But you still have that air cover of like brand awareness. What if somebody who's like, you've been capturing demand forever, nobody really knows who you are. How do you think this impacts, is this even worthwhile experiment? Or do you need like a create demand brand awareness strategy going?
The efficient within the pod of the people who know you versus those who don't. Any thoughts on like that from a targeting perspective and kind of impact? I think, I think not, I mean, I think it makes the value that you bring have to be maybe a little bit greater, you know, because you know, you pick up a phone and it's an SDR from Refine Labs or from HubSpot or from Salesforce or from GONG. It's like there's already trust in rapport there.
So I think you're, if you have no brand recognition, I think you start a little bit further back on that scale where there's, there's just no trust in rapport there. But I don't know, I'm thinking of myself as a buyer though, like even if you don't mention who you are, like, you know something. I don't know, maybe it's maybe I'm too open, you know, maybe you hang up on this person and I would, I don't know, maybe it's like user dependent here now. But if you know something awesome, I'll even chat with you down the phone at least for a minute.
So is this brand recognition help? Yeah, I think your point of course it does. Is it necessary for this to work or not? I don't think so.
Because again, it's the knowledge that you're selling. It's this, it's this mysterious secret knowledge that it's something new which we're starving for, right? Like you just can't find non obvious insights out there really anymore. So if you really truly have something, I think people take that meeting.
Yeah, here's my push on that is like, you know, you're not a good test because as we established on prior podcasts, you'll respond to anything. Yeah, sure. Sure. Sure.
You're a sucker for a good email. I, on the other hand, don't respond to anything. So you know, even the, the opening of like, hey, we have some fantastic research. We'd love to share this with you.
I would probably even open it up. I would definitely not open email if I didn't know who you are. You're probably right. I think you're right there.
But if you answer the phone, called you now, you're talking to me, right? And if I answer the phone, if I don't know who's calling you, who's calling you? I'm going to see them on an outline. I'm going to have to go look around.
You below, you're not the multi-thread. I think with Cassidy as target. But I was going with this somewhere and I think you're hitting on it. So let me like give you my train of thought and you respond to that.
And that is, you know, maybe you're not shooting for the old person. He's like the head of growth or CMO. Maybe this is an interesting matchup and the thing is something to test. Match of like, um, roles, responsibilities.
What I mean by that is you go after the director of demand, janitor, the senior manager, the man, jan, and you bring a performance marketer from refined labs to come share something about them. Period. So maybe this is a peer to peer outreach exercise versus, um, S and E. To a variety of different levels.
If that makes any sense. I think absolutely. I think that's an option. I think the challenge there is like, now we like, where do we find these SMEs and these peers?
It makes like scaling the strategy a little bit more challenging because we can have like five SDRs fairly quickly. So I think part of that experience would have to be like, is the juice worth the squeeze there? Like is the uplift that significant to justify being like, okay, we should, like we sell the CFOs and to accounting personas, we should hire three accounts that want to make more money and are tired of doing accounting and maybe want to be an SME and accounting software company. I think that would be a part of, you know, of that experiment, I think for sure.
So. So, how is that at that point? Remember that it's also not always about the meeting. Some really interesting research that I've kind of found it went on like online.
I'm like, Dan, anecdotally, like insights here and there from other colleagues of mine. And I mean, if you can peak enough interest, even if you don't get a meeting, you start to at least now like pass the puck into marketing's world because I might now not take your meeting. You might not take my meeting. But if I created enough of a buzz there on the phone with you, even though you hung up on me and told me to go, you know, walk into traffic, you might go check out my website.
And if the marketing team is doing a really good job with retargeting and actually putting like good story and good messaging in the feed, now, at least you're, you're not gone, right? Now, we're putting some kind of messaging in front of you to begin with. So I think that this solves for a lot of like the marketing and sales alignment angst that a lot of SaaS companies experience today. So I think there's like an alternative effect, right?
You've heard it said a lot about cost is inbound. So is that, you know, a horrible outcome? I don't think so, you know, you didn't take them. You know, big deal.
You're not in market anyways, but you know, you're going to be retargeted potentially. Now I might follow up that call with an email that's like, Cassidy, it's super sorry. I walked into traffic, but it wasn't a busy day. So I'm still here and I'm sort of follow up with the email and, you know, sorry, here's what I wanted to show if you thought this might be interesting, you know, I'll strive you for you, you know, there's more work that could be done there that gets you into another channel into another one of our streams and you never know.
We don't know what the experiment's going to yield. But maybe you come in and that demand is captured or recreated in another channel. I don't know, but you're in our ecosystem now, you know. So Carl's create demand strategies and noise and shit out of Cassidy.
So he goes, he goes, he goes, he goes, he goes, he goes, he goes, who the hell is this guy work for? And I can do it one night. One of them, I'm going to go to the top of the street. Cassidy, I walked out in the traffic.
I'm still here. You take a meeting. That's hilarious. Okay, I have a, I have a question.
I mean, I have to ask this for Kevin Young. You have a luxury of working for a nice guy who would be like, Carl, I trust you, go and figure this out. And my injury is a strong word, but you know, I'm in a good situation. You have to let you have the luxury and go off and like, I trust you won't say anything stupid and he'll give this a shot and see how the experiment goes.
But Kevin, like he has these authoritarian like marketing leaders who don't let, they don't let him walk off the reservation. But he has to say what marketing tells him to say. And that's it. He can't be creative.
How do you handle that? Like, what if you can't as a salesperson, improvise? Well, I think it's a classic, like we say to some marketers, like go work for a CEO who gets marketed. So he's going to tell Kevin, you better just go work for a marketing team that gets sales, you know?
No, I think that's a valid objection, if you want to call it that. I think a lot of teams sales think they're hamstrung and don't necessarily have access to content. I mean, this is a personality based answer here because me, I don't care, right? I'll ask for forgiveness before I ask for permit.
I'm just going to go build a landing page. I'm going to go build a deck of mine anyways. I think it's helpful to have that kind of support, especially if you're not the SME. But yeah, I think the framework that we share with marketers is relevant here.
Run this as an experiment. No, don't frame this. It's all I'm going to go and do this new thing. And I need all these resources.
I need, need, need, need, need, need. Don't be super needy about it. Okay, doing some on time, I'm running this experiment. This is my goals.
These are like that framing, I think is similarly powerful here. Do it really lightweight. Don't need a lot of things. Maybe don't call your target accounts at first.
If you can get traction with like tier three accounts where the research doesn't have to be as in depth and it's okay if they tell you that this call sucked. It's all right. It's like you're practicing on tier three accounts. That's probably if I was in that kind of authoritarian environment, I would probably start there.
Like what's the cheapest, lightest lift experiment that I could do with an audience that wouldn't harm anything if the experiment didn't work out? I'd start there. You just need an insight. You don't need a deck.
You need a Google sheet, Google doc and an insight. And I think you've largely solved the issue. You know, there. Yeah, this is actually a really good advice about how to kind of don't pick your best accounts.
You'll find tier three. Because if you go back to our experiment, this is an experiment which you're reminding the organization about. And in this experiment, what we're trying to test is, you know, is there a hook to get people to engage and then when they engage, do they get value. And so you're, to your point, like you don't necessarily need to test that yet on your most important accounts.
You just need to test whether you can provide value and get people to engage. Well, it's the same thing with a medical study or with, you know, testing a new car, right? Like Tesla, they, when they're testing the cars, they don't put humans inside of them in random into walls, right? They put crash gummies in them.
The same thing with the medical field, right? They don't test humans first, right? They start with, I don't know where they start, right? And it's chemical based, you know, experiments and they move on to like maybe rats or mice or something.
It's like some kind of animals like that, which is like, I don't know, kind of weird, but it is what it is, right? And eventually they move on to, you know, there's an evolution of the test and then of the experiment. I think the same thing is true here. But don't start testing on your dream clients that that's unwise, you know, start find something else, find, you know, lab rats.
That sounds really cringy, but find your lab rats somewhere else first. Start there positive signals, then start to move up. So find your lab rats. I love that.
Okay. You promised your LinkedIn audience that you're going to run an experiment. So like, let's wrap this up by kind of walking through, you have a framework, the Carl framework. Let's walk through that framework and decide what you're going to run as an experiment next week.
I don't know if I promised next week on the LinkedIn post. I don't think you're adding that in there. But as soon as I do start this experiment, it's going to look like two things out of the gate. One is going to be the list, right?
The target, clean list. Who do I want to talk to? Choosing those wisely. We already have a little bit of a head start.
Before running this for a fine line, just not for one of our customers, we already have a little bit of a head start because we have a lot of really awesome research and insights ready to go in the vault, et cetera. So there's no shortage of we've done the heavy lifting there already, which most companies would have to get something like that built up first. So I've got that piece and it's the list. And then it's the invitation, right?
Then it's the message. There's no reason that I can't have some kind of early results in the next couple of weeks. So I'm going to ask my boss maybe for some extra time off, and see what he says. But yeah, I think that's the first part of the experiment.
Then maybe who knows? I get wild and kind of shared the deck that I'm going to be using to present these insights with the audience. I don't know yet. I'm going to put you on a spot.
Like who's your top three subject matter experts who are going to try to get from refined labs to run this experiment? Now I've got some faves over here. So I don't want to butter you up or you like to your horn, but I definitely want to put you to work here. So you're definitely one of my top three SMEs.
You're coming up with your boss. I'm going to say that. I'm going to go with Cassidy's shield. I'm going to go with like, who would you put a number two?
I'm going to go ahead and skip and tell you who I put in number one. I'm going to put Sydney Waterfall at number one. She's legend. Sydney's definitely my number one.
Yeah. Sydney's number one. I don't know who I put in number two. I think it's based on maybe availability.
You know? I'm going to go with my buddy. I'm going to go with my buddy. Yeah.
So he's number one. I don't know who I put in number two. I think it's based on maybe availability and willingness to do something experimental here. But Eric's busy.
Can't bring him in. You know, I think, you know what? I have an answer for you. I'll bring in Allison or Lenny to be to be numbers just to be my number two.
Yeah. So they've done some incredible work with some of the companies that I brought to the table. So yeah, I can't find that list. That's a good one.
There's no shortage of folks. So the question I guess I have is like, why haven't you done this man? What's what are you doing here? I guess I've been doing to make a capture the whole time.
I'm just sequencing the hell out of huge lists of people. So I need to transition my game. Now, you know, I've just been running reports, you know, forecasting coaching calls, you know, I'm just the same busy over here. So I guess that's the luxury you have when your company creates demand.
You don't have to worry about, you know, going outbound. You don't have to worry about capturing it. That's what he said. Like, oh, man, all inbound.
Like, wow, sales must be super simple over there. It's like, all right, whatever you say. Well, I think this is great. You know, we've been talking about this for a while.
I actually find this idea novel, like we need to test out how this might work. So let's give it a shot. We come back in a month or so and kind of report out what you found. And I'm sure you'll be telling your fans on LinkedIn how this went.
But let's do it. What else, Carl? Anything else you want to wrap up on this? That's it.
We'll see you in a month Cassidy with some hopefully some positive signals and findings. So we'll unpack it. Carl's create demand outbound strategy. Book it right here.
Get an interview with him someday. All right. Thanks for hanging out on Friday. Carl, appreciate it.
That's a wrap for Stacking Growth. Catch y'all.