Welcome back everybody second growth. I'm your co host Cassidy. I'm here today, of course, with none other than Carl. Carl, how are you?
Hey, I'm doing it's a Tuesday. So I'm pumped, excited, pumped about our guests. Cassidy, I haven't told you this, but been secretly using new sass tools. One of those built by the one and only Nate fluids.
So I, it's been my superpower, man. So I close so many deals and you don't because I've got things in my belt here that I'm using that you don't have access to. And I kind of like it that way. So here's a tip for those out there.
Carl asks every month for more budget than my sales tools. And I say no. And so what that forces Carl to do is go off and twist the arms of his friends in order to get free tech. And so I love it, Carl.
So the great way to try something is out for free. I just constrain your budget so you can't buy anything new. We get to talk to new innovations. You force me to take tech away from people like Nate who are trying to build a business and I can't pay him properly.
It's not cool. He's got a three week old too. Anyways, Nate, how the heck are you, man? Welcome.
I'm I'm doing great. I've been looking forward to it so much so that I intentionally did not trim down my beard because I knew Carl was going to be on the show and I had to show up presentable. But I'm doing great guys. I've been looking forward to this.
And I will say, Carl, you are the founders perfect candidate to give a product to because Cassidy, I talk about Carl behind his back as Salty Carl. Like I know I'll get the real candid story when Carl gives me feedback. So I've been digging all of the good points that you made that were folded into the road map and billing. So Carl number one, thank you and Cassidy.
Log in details coming to you afterwards so we can get your own as well. Level the playing field. I appreciate that. I appreciate that.
But like this Carl try to compare everything that you see with your product, the HubSpot because that's what he does with every other tech conversation. Let's go back to HubSpot. Look, I sold HubSpot from years. I just have a high bar and I feel like that pushes Nate and the team appropriately.
So yes, however, the very first time, this was maybe back in like January, we were taking a look, he pulled up HubSpot, but he was like, here's what I like differently about the flow that you have. I don't like this in HubSpot. So to his credit, he was Salty Carl, but Salty Carl towards HubSpot and it helped guide us toward kind of a good UX. I don't discriminate.
I'm salty all the time towards anyone. And I've given Nate a lot of great feedback or not great feedback, but yes, I hope some might be back to me. But I'm not sure if I'm going to break praise because Fluent does some stuff that others don't do because I'm pretty, I'll leave it at this and Nate, I want to hear the origin story, but like I'm pretty salty towards deal room type of software, whatever that category is, I've been a pretty big critic of that space because I think it's largely useless. But Fluent changed how and why you would do like, you just totally change, right?
Most deals room software is just like checklists. Like, hey, I've demoed most of them because I'm like, what am I missing? Everybody seems to love these. There's all these great logos.
All my sales and floor friends are advisors of all these companies. Like, what am I missing here? And every time I go in, I'm just like, this is a useless checklist. I'm sorry.
That's what it is. I don't need a checklist. Like, this is not going to increase my win rate to have a checklist in my vice very seller's metric buyers room where I'm just like keeping you accountable to the things that you said you were going to do for me as a seller. Enter.
And then the second category that I'm really critical of is CI software, right? And how it's not really oriented towards anything actionable. I have to just, it's just like transcripting. And I have to go in there and find stuff and it doesn't like, it's just not, it doesn't connect the dots to any context.
Enter fluent. I'll say this by the way, I linked it. No paid promotion needed. Fluent now comes in and brings like the best of both of these worlds together.
It's like finally a collaborative space that moves the needle forward on an opportunity and a deal and helping the buyer to make a good business decision and brings in the transcript and actually does something meaningful with it instead of just letting me comment on it. So well done, man. You've definitely changed my mind because I was a salty skeptic always. So well, and it's great because what you're touching on is some of the kind of point of view of like does sales tech actually need more software?
Like there are a lot of tools out there. And I've been through the full founding journey from startup through exit before and it's hard. And so I'm like, am I really stupid enough to go back to the early stage and do this all over again? Does the world need another sales platform?
And the point of view that I started to kind of land on into your point around these categories is all of it is so focused on the premise that it's the sales rep and the sales meeting that is closing deals and it totally forgets about everything that is happening behind the scenes when the rep isn't even in the room. And it's the champions selling their own team and their own words without the rep there. And that's where all of the most meaningful conversations are going down. And so the question that we had to settle on with the enterprise team that I built down and was leading was, well, what are we doing about that?
Like we like to think of sales enablement, helping reps pitch land, a meeting, thoughtfully, hey, here's our product, here's what it does and then follow up really fast. Hey, here's a link with all of these materials that you can check out. It's fine. Seller efficiencies, you know, how the seller has a conversation fine.
But it actually makes no difference on the outcome of the deal for the champion inside of their meeting with the rep isn't there. And so that's where we started to go debug. Okay. When we are winning deals, some of the most valuable deals, what was the rep actually doing?
Into your point on like, services enabled your, your big advocate for, hey, services companies are cool. Like you can do some pretty sweet things delivering services, not just software with customers. And so kind of my point of view and why I was like, okay, maybe I'm crazy, but I am actually going to go out and build this company was saying the highest before performing reps. The thing that they would do is they would sit there, listen to these car recordings, try to find the buyer's words and they would write everything so that it was totally native to the champion.
Their words, their formatting, their brand. So that the champion was like, Hey, this is pretty dope actually. This sounds like me. I'm going to use this in order to go sell my team.
And then kind of last point, I'll swing this all the way back to your point on deal rooms and other other pieces. So I'm a big product guy. I love doing product research and some design. I also realized how bad I actually am at it once I met my co-founder, John F.
Lohman, who's very good at it. So I had an appointment in comparison. But the first thing that I did is I went out and I talked with different buyers, champions that we had sold to others, including one, there was this like aha moment where I was talking to one, her name is Amanda and she was evaluating, I want to name the name, but kind of a very large deal room kind of income, if you will. And I was like, so you're trying to sell this to your RevOps team, ultimately to your CRO to roll this out to the entire global sales team.
How are you doing that? How are you selling this deal room software internally? She's like, well, you know, they have a stack of different product X and case studies and so on. And so I'm just going through reading, copying and pasting one or two lines that actually makes sense.
And I'm putting them into my own like little internal memo. And then I'm going to bring this into the meeting with our CRO. I was like, okay, cool. And do you think that the buyers, once you roll this out that you guys are selling to, we're going to have to do the same thing.
And she was like, well, yeah, it's kind of like forcing me to go on the treasure hunt. They're going to have to do the same thing. They have to hunt down. And I was like, that's interesting.
Do you think there might be a better way in forcing people on a treasure hunt through templated content that they won't use? And she was like, yeah, but I haven't seen anything like it. And that was my like, okay, what would you think about this? That's a pretty awesome story because she was struggling to sell a software that in theory should be making that easier for correct.
And it wasn't going on. I love your framing around the treasure hunting because that's exactly the pain that a buyer goes through, even a seller goes through, right? Because both of us are experiencing this pain. I have to go on a treasure hunt and transcripts.
And the buyer has to go through a treasure hunt on all of my crappy marketing materials, right? And I'm not interested in treasure hunting, right? We're interested in business problems and solving them. And so that's a fascinating that, dude, thank you for sharing that.
So like, so then you started the company. So I got to ask you the next question, right, which is like, I've been beating you up over this on LinkedIn DMS, but you have such an amazing opportunity to I like services businesses, right? Because you can charge a lot of money. And yes, the margins are different, et cetera.
But I think it's especially helpful to early stage founders. And it may even help you not have to raise any money or raise less money, which obviously is great from like a dilution standpoint, keep more of your company, et cetera. So I'm curious how you react to that friendly, salty nudge. I mean, I don't, I believe you could go teach teams how to do because your software doesn't do that, right?
Your software is software, but the software doesn't teach me how to give you great frameworks. Anybody, but any software, it might be critical of fluent. Any software doesn't teach how to do the strategy hub spot doesn't teach me how to do inbound marketing. It just facilitates it, right?
Or operationalizes it. And so I think you could go charge tens, hundreds of thousands of dollars for that knowledge. And then the text has built it. Why not do that?
Yeah. So I'm not always the most overt about it. And we could be doing more of it. But I agree with your premise and we are doing it.
And it's been amazing. We're doing six figures in revenue inside of the first year paying developer salaries based on rolling out the process without the product first to larger teams. It's a lower bar. And so we work on a couple more, what I would call like our key accounts, where we're going real deep, global sales teams introducing the process.
And then to scale that, you know, kind of the LinkedIn economy, if you will, has this like love, hate relationships with courses and creators and so on. I've actually found it's been amazing to teach just the practices and the deal strategy through courses. And so I've done a couple in the reason. Once I saw people get into our software after they came from a course and how quickly their time to value and their time to success, it was like night and day from every other user, because they were already doing some of this, although very manually.
And now they're like, great, I can do this across every deal on the pipeline, not just a key account. They loved it. It's it's almost like paid customer success. People are investing to learn habits that translates to stick your software revenue down the line.
And I'm all for content as a lead gen strategy, which well known, well practiced, but content as a customer success strategy to help you create more sticky revenue. I think a lot of companies are only just scratching the surface on it. And we've we've kind of gone gone deeper on that. Very last thing I'll say is when we think about new feature development, I look at what am I doing with teams as a human uniquely?
A lot of times that's coaching. You got your first draft. How do you take this up based on certain practices? For example, the first two lines in your business case, break them up.
No more than two sentences. You give people the idea. This is going to be long and worthy. They're not going to keep reading little things like that.
Now we're building in ways to analyze content after the first draft to give them suggestions. Hey, change this change that. So me the human, I don't have to do the service. Now the software can do it.
And so we kind of backfill services with software as we build over time. Amazing. And you're building again, like there's this customer research bit, right? That founders like it's hard to do it, but you're charging, you're getting paid to do the customer research.
So it just brings together beautifully this idea of like, what would you even call this? It's almost like a service-led growth or it's like service-led go-to-market, right? Where you're doing like customer research and customer success and you're creating the stickiness. And I mean, after you do a workshop or whatever it is that you do as a service, like how simple is this software sale after that?
It's probably like, yeah, of course we're going to buy this, you know? So set us a invoice. It's simple. Anyways, it's genius, man.
It's been such a pleasure to watch you build online. And in this way, I think the whole way that you're going to market is super innovative. So well, thanks. And you know, there's also this saying, all new news is old news happening to new people.
You know, if you were a founder coming up like, you know, circa 2000 to 2012, you'd probably be like, oh, yeah, this guy is just bringing back what we always did before there were, you were flush with VC cash as you find ways to go deep with customers, validate concepts with revenue, and then you build it. Yeah, you know, with your own money. Exactly. So it's, you know, in some ways, I'm kind of like, well, yeah, this is just, you know, a little bit of back to basics, but it's like, okay, maybe it's time to return to some of the foundations of building an adurable enduring company.
So I guess question for you, hot seat, do you intend on trying to raise eventually or raise beyond maybe, I don't know if you've raised maybe any angel funds, I look on Crunchbase, but what is your intention around fundraising? How do you, what is the next three to five years look like? Yeah, so we did a, we did a small friends and family around to get started. We still have over half of what we raised in the bank about a year later.
So we're running pretty lean continuing to basically pay the path to control our destiny. And so actually in a team meeting this morning, this is what we were talking about is, hey, by the end of the year, you know, let's figure out what, you know, what we want to do, do we want to go out, do a larger, do a larger round so that we can invest to accelerate product development, or do we want to continue, which has been a very significant pace just because of the quality of the team that we have in place, continue to operate with a small controlled, calm company environment to be determined. So ask me that same question again toward the end of the year. And I think I'll have a very specific answer for you.
Awesome. I'll ask you to ask a question, but I have one more for you that's around kind of your founder topic, which is you mentioned, you know, having, you found the company before, SaaS, the company and you had an exit. What is different, I guess? What are you going into this, what did you learn last time that you're kind of taking with you this time?
And is there anything, does it feel the same? Does it feel new? Any surprising learnings or anything that surprise you kind of going around to? Yeah, well, a couple of things.
One, I think the mistake that we made the first time around is we built everything off of just people time, Google sheets, super manual. And now we've kind of been rolling on this concept, actually a fun called NFX put out an interesting thought piece on this lately. It's called the three person unicorn. Like we could be in the decade of a unicorn being built by three people and no more.
And so what we've done differently than my first time around is early on gone far deeper into building systems and not just systems as a catchphrase, but like trying to extract us out of running the business by back failing process. Number one, number two, what's different this time around is there is a very high bar for product maturity to get into sales tech. Expectations are high in building for sales teams and sales reps in particular. Attention spans are low.
People are very picky. And so if you're not bringing polish, number one, and then to something that is very different, you just don't stand a chance. Like people will take a look and that's like, okay, see, I'm never logging into this again. And so the level of, yeah, I get polished would be the word for craftsmanship that we're investing into shipping now has gone up significantly over first kind of go around.
I was going to go in a different direction, but let me double down on systems. It'd be great if you could just elaborate a little bit more what you need by system. I think I give an example for others. I think this is a really important point in terms of kind of modern efficiency and moving forward and how to get someone with high leverage out of like the manual day to day.
Yeah, so let me give you kind of first time around. You know, if we had a bunch of customers come in and sign up for a subscription on the website, I would have gone into the billing system, looked at the new record, moved that over into a new opportunity record in HubSpot, found the point of contact, sent a welcome email, hey, hear the next steps to get started, schedule your conversation for onboarding. And I would have been driving that. Last week, we put out a launch message, hey, we're in open access, you can go sign up.
And it was amazing. We had a crush of customers come in, and I didn't have to do any of that. Every type of record was auto created inside of the CRM. They were sent a welcome email on boardings were booked on the calendar.
They received info to create their account. People were already getting started taking action. And I just had to show up to an onboarding. And I touched nothing else, but for authoring the LinkedIn post, which allowed me to put more time into the things that I can do is like, let me talk with the human users, forget all of the other stuff inside of the email and the different systems.
So building systems to remove me from those systems. I appreciate that. My next question is I'd love to take a little bit of a step back. So you and Carl are down a path of talking about something that maybe the audience isn't quite familiar with.
So maybe step back and say, what did you notice changed in kind of the sales process over the last few years that caused you to say, this is a solution I need to build, and then what is the solution? Right? So like, you mentioned you have this process and you go off and you train people on that. What is that versus the old world to give us like the older world, new world in your mind?
And then your vision of how you deliver on that from any product perspective, you don't mind. Yeah, so old world think sales enablement. Sales rep is the center of everything. You have to show up to the sales meeting in order to get information, to get pricing and have a conversation.
And then the sales rep is the one who is closing the deal with the buying team live on a sales meeting. New world, what actually happens is buyers are so far down by the time they're talking to a sales rep on thinking about their own journey. What they're often coming to the sales rep to do is to help enable the change inside of their organization, help me create consensus and get everybody on board that does in plus contacts that I need to convince this is the right way to go if you're the champion on the team that we actually need to do this. And this is the new world of buyer enablement, where the seller, the AE is no longer the one closing the deal.
They are enabling the champion to go close the deal internally. So what that means is things that sales enablement was doing for sales reps, like coaching them on conversations, creating content, written content to help them sell. Now AEs need to be doing this for their champions. In AE, for example, needs to go deep on the art of writing a business case so that that champion has content to guide that internal conversation, keep it on track and to help them get everybody on board with going in a new direction and to make a change.
And so it's this shift from now, you can think of it as like an AE is an enablement team of one coaching content in order to guide the champion and how they sell. So that's kind of the big shift. And that's why part of what we go deep on, the car was kind of alluding to is creating written content because not every rep sees themselves as a writer. And that's what we're helping them to do because it is a part of their job description if they're going to keep influence in the sales process.
Yeah, this is interesting. So we just summarize it in my words. There's this notion of old world sales enablement, which is all about like YS products, there's our demos, these are collateral proof points, social proof, etc. There's this new world, which is kind of like what car would say like, why change?
It's all about building helping them build the case. That's what you're really enabling. You're enabling the buyer to build the case on their side because the assumption is they've done all the education on why you or why us. That's right.
And if you look at how they are actually selling their team, it often sounds nothing like what a sales rep is saying in a meeting based on their sheet of proof points and pitch this and that use this battle card in this way. They're forming their own message on how it's going to play out inside of their reality. And so there's, you know, to use kind of a shared term between sales and marketing, every deal is now becoming more and more account based. The rep has to create account based content that is new and specific to that deal that sounds like that team and how they would talk internally.
And that's where you kind of come back to this idea of the art of writing and sales that AEs need to go deeper on so that they can create all the types of account based content to enable that specific champion itself. So great summary. And one of the things that I've noticed is that like, I've learned this in my role at Refine Labs, right, is the first time I became a buyer. Is that the collateral that you get from a sales person isn't like I have to navigate a bunch of stuff, right?
And the seller actually doesn't help me really do any of it, right? I have to talk to Cassidy about the value profit in a specific way. I've talked to Chris a little bit differently. I have to frame up what this might replace internally if I'm buying a tool, why it's better, and what like one of the things I've been thinking through is like what initiative does it align with the company, right?
So again, for instance, Refine Labs, like we have like our quarterly initiatives, right? So we have the same goals as every other company on the planet, right? It usually boils down to like three things, right? More pipeline, more revenue, more efficiency for margin, right?
And so every company then has these initiatives underneath those broader global like goals that are differentiated from company to company. And so a seller a lot of times like you have to align to one of those initiatives or you're going to get pushed, right, to like another quarter, another initiative. Something I've been thinking about that my discovery or when I say discovery, I don't even mean my first call, like my entire sales process is not uncovering what is the initiative, what is already happening in this business that what change is already happening that I can align to. I think salespeople only scratch the surface of that.
They're like, oh, well, Cassidy, the CMO just got hired. So that's the change that I'm aligning to. But no, actually like a brand new hire or a firing and a hiring or some kind of headcount change or shift is actually also just a tactic that is aligned to an initiative. And so working through Fluent and, you know, your frameworks has really again helped me to sharpen my sword to where I'm thinking differently about what is happening inside of this business and what change can I align to because I'm probably not about to introduce a new initiative.
And I'm probably not about to call and I'm not going to sell to the value prop of more revenue, right? That's what everybody says. And if I go too low at a tactical level, run more ads or run better ads, it's too tactical, right? So I can middle in this initiative layer.
And again, your frameworks have really helped to like make me think and be more thoughtful about how is that framed in the context of a written business case or a conversation with the buyer. So there are a couple of really good points on here to unpack even more. So what you're talking about is the shift from selling, well, there's kind of three evolutions. They're selling products and they're selling problems.
It's where a lot of reps as they start to advance go deeper. I know I need to quantify pain and so on. Great. Fine.
But then they're selling priorities and selling a priority is where you're aligned to something to your point that the executive has already sold on. They're actively talking to their team day in, day out, we need to do this. And a part of then how you loop this back into once you discover this, you loop it back into the written business case, it signals to that executive, wow, they get it. They're already aligned with what I care about.
Let me learn more. And language is a really important piece of how to do this. And so you go back to templated versus more account-based content. A classic example of this is we were working with Sendrid.
Their CEO, Jim had this saying, make the mail move, make the mail move. It's what he talked to every single team about. I want more accounts, sending more email per account, more successfully higher deliverability. And so if you brought any type of project, budget request, meeting, invite that didn't explicitly say this is about making the mail move, you'd be like, I'm not interested.
It's not a priority for me right now. And so if in the content you're creating with your champion, you could put big headline right up front, make the mail move, Jim would be like, okay, what do you got to tell me? I'm listening. And that is a huge unlock for sellers, especially right now, because anything that is on the periphery is just getting cut.
It's on the chopping room floor. And you were language, you're messaging, and how you help the champion do this, because like, look, if you're a seller listening to this, if you're a marketer, helping to support some account based initiatives on key accounts, you're thinking about these types of content and you're learning, you're sharpening your ability by listening to this podcast, your champions have a day job, right? They're not going deep on figuring out how to do this. And so that's why it's on us to enable them.
I love it. What do you think about, I don't know if this is like a 10 gentle topic here, but on the fence, like you seem to be really big on like narrative based business case, which I don't even know if that's a term, but I just made it up. As opposed to an ROI based business case, I noticed that in a lot of your templates. I think the old way, now if we talk about the old way of buying versus a new way, we talked about like sales enablement collateral versus DBM focused or like account based business writing, business case writing.
So that's the one version of old way. Also, the content of a business case, I feel like the old way was like math ROI, you're going to get 10x. And I've never really been sold that that is the most effective way, but I haven't necessarily cracked the code on a better way, right? Until you came into my life name, right?
And so what is your position? Is there still a place for like kind of, you know, highly logical mathematics in a business case? And how do you when, how does the sales rep navigate balancing between a narrative priority based business case and the math? Yeah, so it's both and, but if you are leading with just math, which is how most people do it, you are forgetting about the way that people actually make decisions, which is all in a narrative story based fashion.
People see themselves in a certain context. Here's where I am today. I have a vision for who I want to become, where I want to go tomorrow. And there's some type of pathway that I need to walk to get there.
Everybody's on a journey. And in order to create meaning for those numbers, you need to package it up and clearly show like, look, we get it. Where you're at, it's not where you want to be and you can't stay here. Bad things are happening.
Those are only going to grow worse. That is putting you into a context where you have to make a decision. If you don't make this decision, those things will continue on. But if you do, like, look, this is where the ROI comes in.
Here's what you stand again. Here's the potential. Let me show you a way forward once you make that decision so that we can avoid those bad things, take hold of those good things. That is the basic story architecture that is present in everything.
It's how we think about our lives. Look at any movie ever made that has done anything. That's Joseph Campbell's hero's journey. It's like the basics for how humans process information and how it's sticky.
And so why I'm a big fan of the narrative structure is one, it creates clarity in the mind of the listener. Number two, it also puts for the person who's on the other side some empathy back into the role. Like you get it. You understand where I'm at in a way that others don't.
And then very kind of last one on a tactical level. The question that I get a lot is, hey, why are you writing more documents, memo type structures, more of a narrative versus slides, PowerPoint decks. And if you go and you talk to champions and buyers and you say, hey, what is going to help you deliver a very clear message internally, it is incredibly awkward to try to deliver a storyline across multiple different slides that's cut up when you weren't the main person creating those initially. The narrative flow is far easier, less cumbersome for that champion to deliver internally when they're trying to use it to guide the conversation.
So like, you know, I'm not an outright powerpoint hater, like some who are death of the deck, but you just go back to who's the person that needs to sell with us. It's the champion. How do we make this easy for them? The narrative structure.
Yeah, I'm totally aligned with that. I hate decks. But there's a digestibility, right? Of a deck where it naturally splits it up and slides a slide, it forces you to use the space given.
So it forces a level of clarity and conciseness that you can just get really long winded, you know, on a Google sheet, for instance, if you're not careful. And so it's a crutch, right? The solution there is not to use slides to constrain yourself, but to get the solutions to get better at writing a clear and concise business case. So it's a misapplied solution.
That's it, you were saying? Yeah, I want to kind of get both your inputs on this. And that is, I agree, I love writing out a narrative in a document, if I'm going to go back to the customer in an async world. Like, hey, here are my thoughts.
I've written it out for you. Take a read. Let's talk. And I tend to feel like I get stuck putting decks together if I'm going to present.
Hey, we've got a meeting on Thursday morning, can you come in and kind of walk me through the narrative, the story, which I hate doing in a deck. What's your advice there? Do you see, should I just put it in a narrative form and say, hey, listen, the first 10 minutes of the call on Thursday is like, we're just going to read this document and then we're going to talk about it. Or do you do both depending on if it's like async or synchronous communication?
So I am a huge advocate and fan of the pre read, where you take the time to clarify your ideas, print the excess, get rid of the noise and write a really sharp one, maybe two page memo on what it is that you want to communicate. Because then you can make sure that if you really want somebody to understand, have them read it, because they're not going to be doing other things zoning in and out of what you're saying. And I picked up this practice from there's an executive assistant at a big insurance company called Unum. We were working on a deal with one of their SPPs.
And the EA said, hey, by the way, I'm going to set the meeting invite to start five minutes after the hour. And if you could attach your pre read, whatever you want him to look at before the conversation, you know, send it along, I'll add it to the invite. I was like, that's interesting. Take you up on that.
Built out of one page narrative, put it in the invite, joined five minutes after. And he was like, okay, here's what I want to ask you about. And we went, boom, right through it. He got exactly what I wanted to say in a very controlled way.
And I was like, this was fantastic. And so in every future deal, we would coordinate with the EA, particularly for an executive. And so back to your question, it's a great practice internally as well. I'm a big fan of having people read through, even if it's a little silent at the start of the conversation, they get the heart of the message, makes the conversation a far more high quality conversation afterward.
Did you blow my mind? Because like, and it's so basic, right? It's just like, we've done things the same way, you know, always like, yeah, it's a presentation call or a demo call. So bring a deck, you know, it's just like what you do.
So such a good reminder of the basics. That's what I appreciate, right? I would love it as a buyer if somebody just sent me what questions are you going to ask in Discovery, you know, just answer them on a dock and then we can jump into the deep end on a discovery call, right? Like you're going to ask me about my ACB and all the stuff that I know you're going to ask, right?
Let me summarize that for you and then we can jump into the deep end, right? So it just improves, you know, both ways for the buyer and the seller. I love that model. And again, your frameworks are awesome.
How do you get better? I'm just not a great writer. And I know you're probably going to say like, well, you just practice. So don't say that.
Say something else. Something easier, I hope. But how do you get good at concise, short business writing, you know, like in all your templates in Fluent, for instance, you've got like bold, compelling title and you've got some frameworks for, what do you call them? Problem statements, et cetera.
How do you get good at saying the mode, you're just using the right amount of words to say the most compelling thing possible? Yeah, well, I guess the one thing that we've circled around that I'll just call out and underscore is like begin with a framework, have a point of you on where you want to take the message and it will clarify, you were actually just touching on this, the link between your writing and your discovery. If you don't know where you want to take the message, you won't know what questions to ask. Therefore, you won't have any input to be able to write with, you're just going to be starting at a blank page and realizing like, Oh my gosh, I don't actually know what initiative internally people care about that I would even impact.
So the first shortcut to effective writing is begin with a framework and then plug in your buyer's words, their language. The messaging that will resonate is how they already talk to their own team, coordinating your language with theirs, which goes back to the input that you start with from your conversations. Now, on this topic of writing, concisely, yeah, you're right, it is, it is hard, and what I would do is first pick anything out there, you can pick a blog, whatever that somebody else wrote, go through and highlight in green, something that actually furthers the message, it introduces a new way of thinking about an old topic, it goes deeper on that topic that you really wouldn't understand it without that sentence. Highlighting green, anything in red is anything that you don't absolutely need, then look at it afterward.
I guarantee you probably about 20% of that document will be green, everything else will be red. And if you can then first, it's far easier to do it on somebody else's writing than your own, you get so lost in your own head. So try that in another place, then go back and you can do it on yours. Another kind of tactic that I would give you that again is like, yeah, the advice is like just write better.
Here's another store up a certain series of phrases that will help you create transitions between ideas that clarifies the flow in the reader's mind, what I mean by that, phrases like which means that's because, why? In those phrases will help you link ideas, for example. Right now, content production is down month over month because we don't have enough technical writing ability, which means, organic leads have been dropping as compared to Q1, which means we're now spending more on paid ads, which means our cost to acquire our customer is rising, which means we're going to get crushed when we go out to raise in Q1 of next year. So phrases like that will help you unpack and figure out like, Oh, what is it that I actually want to say here?
You just keep a short list of those, plug them into your writing, and then it'll take you a couple deeper. Very last thing, so I don't monologue too long here, they'll call out is there the kind of the last blog post that I put up is called how to write in sales. There are 10 bullet points. If you want to go deeper on just fast, easy tips to write more effectively, check it out.
It'll take you no more than 60 seconds to read. That's awesome. Thanks for sharing that. You were ready to chat that one.
That was awesome. You just had that one queued up. I will definitely read that. Cassidy's like, yeah, hey, block your calendar.
You're more useful reading that blog than I said, it's called clearly. But yeah, so neat. I haven't pulled up Carl, but like I was chuckling because Carl, I can't get him to write anything now. It's crazy.
I don't like writing Cassidy, man wants me to document everything. I'm like, why? It's just in my head. I'm just going to go do it.
But then I don't do it. And then we forget about doing it. We forget what we're going to do. And then I never do it.
And then our business fails, you know, so it's kind of like a bad spiral that I'm in, apparently. Well, let me add one more point on that topic. I grabbed that link while you were asking your question, Carl, because I had a sense for where you were going. But the reason why I would challenge people to write things down is if you just walk into a conversation and share what's coming to your mind, oftentimes you are think talking and you're trying to work out your point of view.
And if you go back and write, you'll actually figure out what it is that you think about a certain topic. And it is startling to people to realize that their beliefs change simply through the act of writing it down, because they're discovering new pieces that were just kind of hiding and they had never really brought to the surface. So I'm with Cassidy on this one, Carl. If you go and write it down, I bet you will have a very different conversation afterwards because your beliefs will, well, not shit if you actually discover what it is you believe.
I mean, I look, I need to figure this out. And it's definitely like my top one or two things because I'm long winded. And I think that's a part of it is that I am, you know, an out loud verbal like thinker. So Cassidy knows this.
I'll just call him and be like, hey, I need to talk about something. And I don't know what I want to talk about, right? Because I'm still working through it. But it's helpful for me to process by speaking.
And my wife calls me crazy because I will pace in my office and talk out loud to myself to, because I need to say it to like work through it, right? So Cassidy is my guinea pig during business hours. And my four walls are my, you know, guinea pig after hours. So I haven't adopted the practice of writing for this, you know, to solve for this.
So it's a good advice. Well, last thing that I would maybe tell you about yourself here, Carl, is I wouldn't actually describe you as long winded. If somebody was like, tell me about Carl, I wouldn't say long winded because when there's a topic that you already have a very strong sense of conviction or opinion on, you are very precise in communicating what you want to communicate. You don't mean words, there's not a lot of fluff there.
And it's a beautiful thing. So I would just say on topics that you don't know what you think you work it out. And that's maybe where you feel you're getting long winded. Because you're like, what do I think here?
Let's figure it out. You just kind of process by talking. So you just what's really interesting? I'm just, I got this thing going on my head, Carl.
Yeah, because we have this, this is my normal MO when I'm inside a company, I write everything down, I don't put decks together, etc. Now, when I'm in the sales process, I struggle with what you do. Here's a perfect situation. I have a call with some executive team on Thursday.
And I'm sitting here, I already know the story. I've done all the analysis. I can tell you the story that I need to convey right now in five minutes. So you guys just perfectly clear.
It would take, it probably takes me two hours or more to get slides together, but I could probably run on one pager in 30 minutes. And so it would be way clear. And so like, your light bulb's gone off of like, this is why I communicate through narrative inside a company. But you're right, I just got to buckle down and do this externally, because that's what actually what people want to do.
They want to read the one pager. And yeah, you may ask the slides to say, here's our team structure and a project plan and a lot crap. But like, what they really want to know is, what's the story here? What are you going to do?
How do you help us? Or what do we need to do? You know, and verbalize that in five minutes, right in 30 and take three hours to put it on a slide deck together. So back in the context of helping champions sell their team, they want that confidence of, Oh man, I can walk into a half hour meeting, nail exactly what it is that I need to communicate versus trying to wander my way around for a couple hours, not really knowing if I'm hitting the point home.
Like that's a gift for a champion. And I'll say maybe homework assignment for you, Carl, to keep going deeper on this. If I can give this to you, I know you're a chili piper fan, your big advocate for the work that they do as well. Ask anybody at ChiliPiper about the writing culture internally, about the internal memos that they have to write in order to get a new project done.
And I bet you will learn some kind of interesting practices from them as well. So just say, Hey, if I were if I was going to go work with ChiliPiper and sell something that ChiliPiper, how would you create a memo on this internally? And I'm a big advocate and a big fan of the culture that they built around this. Yeah, and that's I will.
And that's also an interesting, like, that's a question, right? You asked that in the sales process, like, Hey, how do you do memos internally? How do you communicate internally? You guys, Slack culture, are you a zoom culture, are you a doc's culture?
Like, there's something about aligning with how that company communicates internally that man, it's just like, it's just like an untapped discipline in sales is like deeply understanding. We've, I think we've, you know, beat a dead horse in sales when it comes to like pain funnels and Sandler has taught us this since, you know, we were three years old and digging for pain, et cetera. There's you've tapped into something, you're leading the way on something entirely new, which is like, and not just like multi threading, which all the advice man I linked down on multi threading is a lot of it is so shallow, right? You're tapping into something so much deeper, it's not just about sending an email to a bunch of champions is how we communicate a message in a compelling way in the right channels to everyone involved using their words and even their, their culture of internal communication, like weaving yourself into that.
That's fascinating. And I don't like worth the tip of the iceberg with, I think this is like a new frontier of sales that you are leading. So, I man, I think you guys need to shift to like a Joe Rogan format where we can just roll for like three hours. I just dropped while you were talking, I grabbed another link for some of the notes.
This is my big gripe with the way account maps are done is it's all hierarchy based, what are the roles, what are their titles and so on. When a good account map is more about designing the flow of internal communication, who needs to say what, when based on how influence actually works in a company, which rarely tracks with the hierarchy, it's more of a social network, who delivers the message, how it's framed. So anyway, if you really want to nerd out on account maps, I might take on that, there's the deeper dive, but I fear I will take us into far too long an episode. We'll dip our toes into the Rogan waters there.
Dude, I'm down for that. But yeah, I think the topic of multi threading is fascinating. And you now again bring like a different spin on that and not a spin that commoditizes what you're saying. It's just an innovative angle on how to think about the strategy of multi threading, which I think is critical.
And I haven't seen anybody really like mail it. And even myself, I'm working through it. Like, what is good multi threading? I don't entirely know, you know, because I know that it's not just emailing everybody at the company and trying to get an intro call with everyone.
That's not it. And I know that as a buyer, that would be ridiculous if I was in a buying process and somebody just the sales rep just kind of went and emailed like Cassie and Chris, I'd be like, no, don't do that. So anyways, what's interesting just on this point is we're going through the same level of training on the account management side in our company with what is a narrative for the customers and what we're working with them and the strategic initiatives and how to put it in their language to you're always multi threading on the account management side. What is a narrative or relationship for the CMO to the head of demand to the marketing team and so forth and so on.
So yeah, I'm going to go take a look at this because I think it's as important, obviously, for the sales process as we're talking here. But to me, it's the same thing on the account management side in terms of storytelling narrative relationships, et cetera. They put on rolling out a feature set for CSMs and account managers next quarter. Also, the other department that this is relevant for is marketing.
You know what I think about case studies and how poorly written most of those probably are. That's all this is, right? This is a case study before it happens. I think a lot of case studies are framed even ours ever find labs, right?
They're framed a lot of ROI, a lot of math and some content in there about, yeah, this company was struggling with inbound demand, right? But no real like, what were they doing? What was going on? Why?
Like none of the context that you would uncover in a business case. Nate, what I guess to tie up, we'll probably talk for another hour, but we have a lot of marketers that listen. So maybe pivot to how can marketers support their sellers, but obviously more importantly, here than buyers. And do you have kind of a tangential opinion on case studies?
I do. So one of the favorite ways that we would partner with our marketing team is we would pre-write a press release that we would give to an account that was still in the sales process. And we would say, hey, look, if we're successful with this initiative and we can enable your outcomes in this way, here's what this would look like. Is this exciting enough to tell the world about?
And in several occasions, what was really fun is that was then the case study that we would be starting from early in the sales process and they would post and go live with that press release that we worked on together all started by marketing. And so sellers, like if you have especially try this on a key account, a deal that you're really excited about, like go wander over to marketing and tap them and say, Hey, go to the customer site, look at the press section, grab a pass release, skin their brand and font, work with your marketing team to like pre-write this, get a quote from your team, your exec, leave some space for the customer to add in their executives quote, like what do you want them to say? Let's talk about this. So one very practical idea that I think is a lot of fun for marketing to support.
Yeah, I love that. Matt, what a good outbound idea too. You know, if you've done some good digging and you write a nice press release and you drop it into mail to executives, like there's a lot of ideas there. Okay, so before I ramble, what else?
So we talked right there about like, you know, the press release and how can in a sales process marketers support this? And maybe it's not even tactically like writing, they're helping to write some of this stuff. But a lot of the like marketing is in a unique position that they do a lot of customer research or they should be, right? Like especially if you have like a lot of marketing team, they understand a lot of this language.
Do you think that marketers should help with the frameworks and templates? Like where would you plug in a marketing team if you had a really compelling business case playbook? Yeah, I would go back to that, that mad libs framework. So if you think about a good business case, you're starting with a clear framework, you're plugging in the customer's language.
And I just gave kind of a series of different copywriting shortcuts phrases like which means at last, no doubt you have somebody on your marketing team who knows how to write compelling sentences to craft those sentences, have them develop that framework, then give that like mad libs story builder that they've helped outline and they understand some of the things like story architecture and so on, have them start that up, give it to reps, and then they can build it out with their champions, collaborate on it with the deal. But the starting place, starting point in that framework comes from marketing. I would add that I would spend my time as a marketer in this tool versus in gone. Like one of the things I always tell marketers to do is go listen to sales calls and join sales calls.
Actually, what you want them to do is have the summary. This is the, this is how the company talk about it. This is their business case. This is the narrative that will give the marketers insight and how to better position and frame like they're messaging in the market for the next set of customers, right?
So that's right. It's like voice of the customer or listen to the customer, but sitting there listening to the entire gone calls or painting the assets of marketer, getting the summary in the right context is gold. Yeah. And you want to know what's the customer saying when we're not even there, but we're not in the room.
What's that conversation like? Let's talk about that, not just what they show up and they say when we're there. I love it. Nate will wrap up, man.
Anything else that you want to share, you just released Fluent. Are there any, what's next with that product? Anything you want to tell the audience? How do we contact you?
How do we check it out? How do we get the Carl Ferrer discount of 0% because we don't do discounts here? Give us the details, man. Yeah.
So a couple of things. Now on our blog, we have about 90,000 words of content on this topic. So if you want to go deeper on things like multi threading, account mapping, crafting, business cases, all out there, Fluent.io, int.io backslashblog. If you want a little Carl Ferrera, special access, Nate, Fluent.io, just drop me an email.
And then very last thing, kind of the things that I'm excited about coming ahead, I'll go back to a lot of the services that we've been doing is moving sellers with coaching past that first draft to something that is closing. And now we're building that into kind of like a little writing buddy, little Nate sitting in the app there saying, hey, let's change this headline. Let's do this. So suggestions, copy suggestions coming to your business cases inside of Fluent very soon.
That's awesome. And if somebody, because again, I'm trying to pump up your services business here, if a company wants to engage you and really learn how to like make your products awesome, we don't know the first thing about writing a good business case. What are some of the services that you kind of provide? Maybe outline one or a couple of those.
Yeah, so I'm kind of a short list of things that we've been doing. Live workshops, team workshops on writing, crafting frameworks, we can design and build those frameworks for you. We can continue to do ongoing coaching with teams, particularly on key deals where we'll do kind of like office hours style deal labs to write on specific deals at a very tactical level. I'll leave it at those three, but we can kind of go deeper if anybody's interested.
And thanks for the thoughtful question. Appreciate the show up there. Yeah, man. Nate, it was good to chat with you, man.
This was fascinating. Thanks for coming and sharing your wisdom and stacking growth, man. We appreciate you. Like I think Nate learned a lot.
Can't wait to take a read and learn some more. Appreciate it. Thanks so much guys. Appreciate it.
Last thing is thanks for helping try to make Carl better. So I'm doing my best. All right, man. How are you doing?
Carl Nate, we're out. Wait, this episode is stacking.