Michael Slawson: Professionalizing Sales at First Institutional Capital

Speaker A: Foreign.

Speaker B: Ventures. I'm sitting uh, down with Michael Slauson, President of Apparel Advisors and the guy PE firms call when their portfolio companies need a little boost in their sales agent and it isn't working. Michael's path isn't anything but typical. He grew up in Beijing, co founded a clean energy company in Kenya, uh, cut his teeth at Deloitte and at the World bank, then went deep into hypergrowth at hum, um Capital and Clipboard Help before launching Apparel where He now builds GTM systems from scratch for sponsor back B2B companies. We're going to unpack why most portfolio companies fail at go to market, what a real go to market system looks like versus just hiring a VP of sales and how AI is fundamentally changing how B2B companies find and close deals. Michael, thanks for joining us today.

Speaker A: Happy to be here. Thanks for having me.

Speaker B: Of course. Of course. Michael, what we like to do is we'll get a little bit into your background initially. We'll talk about how you got to where you're at. From there we'll transition into some of the really cool systems you've been building and some of the learnings you've done there. Then we'll talk about some controversial topics of what's happening so far and go to market things from. Is the SDR role even relevant now? How that's evolving to other areas that I think our users would find very interesting. But you might have the best stack. But why isn't it still working? Right, like what's going on here? What are the things that they're not thinking about? And finally I would love to just jump into where you see all of this going and things are changing so fast. Uh, I think last time we talked was four or five weeks ago and it's already changed so much since then and how do you, how do you keep pace and all of those great things. Does that sound like a good uh, hour of today for you and I to dive deep into?

Speaker A: I think we're aligned. Let's do it.

Speaker B: Awesome. So Michael, you grew up at the, you grew up at the International School of Beijing, studied international relations at BYU and a job, Hopkins consultant at the World Bank. Most people with that resume end up um, in diplomacy or policy. Honestly, what pulled you in sales and go to market?

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean I think I would have thought I was going, that was the path I thought I was going down all the way up through grad school. Uh, I think one thing was I grew up with my dad working at Microsoft for 20 years. So I was Always like ambiently absorbing uh, tech company news and early Microsoft days or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean he was there for like 20 years. So, so I was just kind of grew up around that and, and after grad school I was working inside of consulting and I just found the, the pace to be the pace and may sound cliche to say it but like just the level of ownership to be not aligned with what I, what I came to understand I wanted and needed. And so I just had the bright idea to you know, take the first, the first seemingly interesting tech company and just jump and go figure it out from there. And um, I think, I think I came to understand also you know, aligned well with my, my personality to work on um, to work on growth and to work on business development and uh, I guess I, I maybe my friends would make fun of me and say I have a little bit of a promotional attitude. So it was just, it just kind of lined up with, with uh, my personality. So I said okay, I'll run with this for a while.

Speaker B: Awesome. And then it looks like you co founded a clean energy charcoal company in Kenya at 26. So talk to me a little bit about that.

Speaker A: Well, the, the big idea there uh, is that deforestation due to um, basically illegal deforestation is at the, was at the time like caused because, because of charcoal production and kind of what, what you, what you might consider black market or gray market charcoal production, um outside of, outside of the technical regulations of especially where, where I was focused in, in East Africa. And the idea was there if you look, if you look at the agro waste that is being spun out of a lot of agricultural production, uh in where I was focused was on Kenya, uh a lot of that can be through a process of pyrolysis used to create much less carb CO2 emitting uh, uh, cooking char cooking grade charcoal. And so I had a, I had a friend, a family friend who spent a bunch of time in the coal business actually and had developed a lot of patents around reducing the emissions uh, from coal production. And he kind of wanted to bring some of that know how into an emerging market and we decided to partner up and uh, we, we, we, we got up, got together with a, a microforestry foundation that had a lot of aggro waste and um, and um, yeah, and eventually just handed them, handed them over. It was kind of like an aqua hire, you know. You know on LinkedIn when people say I'm a 2x founder, but both times it really means like I, I don't, I Don't, I don't say that I like was a huge successful exit, but definitely, definitely a good learning experience of uh, setting something up. Uh, going from extreme, knowing, knowing that you don't know a lot to knowing the things that you don't know and, and setting up like if you, what

Speaker B: was the one big lesson that uh, that that experience brought you that has kind of carried you forward. You know, everything in life we go through there typically is, you know, a lot of our listeners like to hear growth mindset and, and yeah, and I, I got that from the first time we met. I'm like man, this guy, this guy has that in space aids.

Speaker A: So yeah, well I, when, when I ran the numbers on who, like how, where can you sell this charcoal? The domestic market wasn't a high enough, didn't have a high enough price point to support the more advanced production process. There's actually a strong demand for charcoal in the Middle east, uh, for hookah. Uh, but at the time you have to first navigate getting export licenses uh, from in, in Kenya and then shipping it across. At the time Al Shabaab, uh, Al Shabaab controlled waters. And basically my risk calculation of I have to ship this charcoal past pirates to get it into the Middle East, I was like I understand where the buyers are and now I understand why the price point is high enough to maybe justify investment. But it just didn't fit my risk profile at the time. So um, I guess take home lesson was who is actually going to pay for this and make sure you're building your profit, um, your profit margins around what is the true willingness to pay. Uh, was a thing I will never forget.

Speaker B: I love that. I love that. So uh, your first real sales job was door to door at ah, Active Entertainment. Um, obviously very humbling experience. Yeah, I'm actually trying to get my son to do some door to door by the way. I'm trying to, yeah. Get him to go around the neighborhood and sell bread. His uncle is a really good bread maker. I can't get him to get out the door to start the process.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: How much of what you do now trace back to some of those early days of like you know, going door to door, getting rejected, the whole go to market sales process or, or how has that become transformed in the digital age?

Speaker A: So uh, that was door to door pest control sales. And what's important to know about that is pest, uh, control sales are what you might call a one call or a one knock close, you knock on their door and the odds if they're going to buy the odds that they buy in that first conversation, probably 80%, 90% and then the odds you get them if they end up buying for those who end up buying the odds you got them in like a follow up conversation or a follow up call probably 10 to 20%. So um, in some respects not reflective of an enterprise sales motion where you have very long sales cycles but in the sense that you have inputs and you have outputs and your inputs are volume uh plus quality. And you just have to think of whatever your sales engine is as it's some dimension of what is the volume of what input and what is the quality of that input. Um, uh, that may be something that's very easy to measure like number of phone calls or number of emails or number of doors knocked. It may be a more difficult to measure input, um, like impressions or people um, who attended the dinner before the conference. That is the right conference for you to go to. Uh, but in terms of helping me understand that at the end of the day it's inputs, outputs is, is the way to think about your sales engine, uh, that, that persisted for sure.

Speaker B: Awesome. So let's kind of jump into uh, you're starting to get into it now and I love that into uh, your go to market frameworks and thought process a little bit. So your tagline is GTM is in a slide. It's a system. Love that by the way. So I want to, I want to go into that a little bit. Walk me through what you mean by that. What is a GTM system look like versus what most companies have that you're typically talking to.

Speaker A: Well the first thing is I just personally don't like slides as a medium of information communication. I like to write and I like to use documents. Um, I picked that up while I was at Clipboard who modeled their business off of the Amazon way of doing things with memos. Um, so in part I say that just because I don't want my clients to expect that I'm going to be making decks. And uh, but what I mean by it's a system is look at the end of the day I try to keep it as simple as possible. You have and maybe you, maybe you see this differently but for the clients that I work with it's who should I be selling to, how should I be reaching them, what should I be saying to them and what is my process for keeping track of all of that and making it run more efficiently. So accounts, channels, messaging and system, uh, that you build around that, you wrap around that and I think that you can easily divert and get into like I have a nail, I have a hammer. Where is the nail? Especially when it comes to like what is being shipped with, with the new frontier models, um, where it's like very powerful stuff. But if you're losing sight of the plot of really your question should be going back to accounts, channels, messaging or the rev ops that, that wraps around that. Um, like that's just the way you should always be think. I think you should always be thinking about go to market.

Speaker B: I love it and I'm assured varies by each type of business and segment that you are supporting and helping. Can you give me one specific example? Like here's, here's something cool that I learned that is sort of the known unknowns. Like hey, by the way, uh, I tried this but it didn't work. But when I shifted it a little bit here, I saw interesting results based off of it.

Speaker A: Yeah, we have a science, a client who sells to the construction industry. They sell to contractors. Um, so they're, they're. We, we started with the idea that we would use just kind of if you're in the GTM space, you know about LinkedIn outbound and automated LinkedIn outbound.

Speaker B: And we started with LinkedIn is flooded by the way.

Speaker A: Yeah, but it's great because you know, you, you know that that message always delivers and you're always. And every time you send a Message using your LinkedIn, your, your own profile serves as like kind of an advertisement. Right? Like that's just. They can click and see you and decide if your status is high or low. And if your status is high, they'll engage with you. So the kind of low stakes, low regrets thing that we did was activate our clients like our, the CEO's LinkedIn and get him engaging with the target market that we identified. And it was, um, it just performed very poorly. And I think we, we had a, we had a hunch that maybe his market, the construction industry, isn't on LinkedIn as much as other industries. But hey, like those who are, it's not going to hurt to engage them. Um, we. So this is, this ended up being like a channels thing, right? Where Channel One was LinkedIn. Like how do we reach these accounts that we know we care about? We had to kind of already sorted out the who do we care about now? How do we reach them? Um, so we made a decision like, well, you know, maybe we just need to do the simple thing of pick up the phone and call because it's construction. We're trying to reach project managers. Um, maybe they're not on their, maybe they're not on their LinkedIn app all day. Like that kind of in hindsight seems obvious but it, you know, at the time it was like well okay, next best idea is let's pick up the phone and call. And you know, we, we brought in a uh, we brought in a cold caller who's just really good on the phones, gave the, gave that person a script, gave them some training on, on what to be saying. And it ended up being the case that like just aligning to this new channel. 10, 10 demos out of 150 calls with the product that they were selling, just like really, really, really um, positive, abrupt shift, shift in the right direction in terms of uh, building pipeline.

Speaker B: Amazing. So the channel clearly wasn't working. They weren't active. Active. You modified slightly the um, I'm guessing the script because now it wasn't from the CEO. Mario was an actual human calling. Yes.

Speaker A: Yep.

Speaker B: But you still were hitting the same accounts and yes, going after them. That's phenomenal. Do you, do you think there, uh, if you, when you look back on it, what do you think was the reason that this channel outperformed is why were they receptive to even take the phone calls? Like sometimes what I hear a lot, uh, at least with the clients we work with, they're like dude, I try to cold call, I'm getting the wrong person. I'm not even getting through. I'm not even, I'm not even able to give my message. What do you do to help support that team that you think led to that type of results?

Speaker A: Well, I think it was one just the hypothesis that maybe these people are spending more time on the phone talking on the phone. So like maybe we just need to meet these people where they're spending their time. Also I should add we, without going into too many details, there's kind of like a core product that's like their high acv, uh, product that this business sells. We also made a decision that the, the hook, the thing that we should lead with on these calls was more of the long tail kind of get you at a much lower price point, um, but like solving a much smaller problem but in a much clearer way where it's kind of easier, easier decisioning about whether or not to use this tool, um, as, as a hook to get into, to get, to get into a conversation about the higher ACV core product that they sell. Um, um. So, so I think that also did play, play uh, a part in, in having Higher conversion on the uh, on the switch to cold calling. But to be fair, but to be fair, with cold calling you're able to switch to that because you get more words, you get more content, like you can have more of a conversation. Whereas in LinkedIn you're really just deciding based on is this person who just reached out to me high status or low status whether I want to engage with them. You can't really have like a pointed conversation about the problems you think they have just with a couple LinkedIn DMS. Right.

Speaker B: I love that. I know you're deep into using AI, using agents and when we talk about agents, we're not necessarily talking about human agents, but also agentic agents.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: Now I would love to hear your take on, you know, voice AI. And as we're talking about this particularly there's it goes, it's in two camps, right? Voice AI there, there's the appointment setters who are really trying to take inbound and kind of trying to schedule or transfer to a human salesperson. And then there's a secondary camp that is more the outbound callers that are actually trying to do the same, trying to warm up and then do the transfer over. Uh, any thoughts to where the technology is going today, where it stands and, and where. Do you think this is something that can help change things in your current go to market playbook or have you attempted and tried any of these?

Speaker A: Yeah, I have a lot of thoughts. So first of all, my rule of thumb is, as you might guess, or maybe not like I'm in some GTM slack channels where some of the most deep state GTM people spend their time. And my rule of thumb is I wait for five people there to positively recommend a tool. Uh, there's a channel, it's called the GTM Cafe. Um, and when five people positively recommend a tool, then I start to feel comfortable recommending it for like actual client implementations. On the outbound calling side, I still don't feel like I have a positive like solid signal on any outbound calling AI tool. Now I think that there's still a couple important caveats. I think certain industries it's going to be easier to have an outbound, uh, voice agent and other industries it will be more difficult. In part that is going to be based on how many phone trees do you have to navigate, how many smoke screens do you have to get through, how many gatekeepers are there in the cold calling process. Also, what's the complexity of the qualification that you have to do to get a meeting booked? Uh, what's the size of the tam? Uh, how many calls can you make? Like there's a lot of things that are going to drive like I think just saying a one size fits all voice outbound agent tool. I think that's if that happens it's like we're a long ways out from that. Um, I think yeah, inbound. I, I don't work as much on like inbound ah call so like I can't really. I, I would guess there's probably a couple good tools out there that are, are worth trying. Um, but then one other thing is there I've heard now of like a couple who decided to call 3000 gas stations and get like live price. Have you heard, did you hear about this?

Speaker B: Like no, no, I want to hear.

Speaker A: Yeah, so they, they used basically a robo caller to get pricing information from 3,000 gas stations. Just like call up the gas station and say hey, what's your like what's, what's what are today's gas prices? And build a data set that um, I don't know what they used it for actually but like because I think you could probably get that information other ways. But um, but I do think that the idea of using robocalling or agent calling to kind of collect survey type data at scale is something that I would expect especially like in the lower middle market where building your TAM based off of some account qualification and some data that may be difficult to get online but easy theoretically to get by phone call. I would expect to see more of that type of work to be done by voice agents. Especially when the TAM is large enough and kind of the calling is low stakes enough that it's okay if you're only getting conversion on 10% or 5% rather than needing to get like a 50% database built out.

Speaker B: Awesome, I love that. Now let's talk about just generally, uh, If I'm framing B2B Enterprise and maybe you can help self correct me if I'm not saying this clear enough for the audience. I kind of look at it and say hey, this is the account I want to go after. Right. Leading off of your framework. But most likely the account has not heard of me or knows of me. So they are really cold. Okay. Uh, or they have possibly engaged with something I have sent to them. So some email that they've opened, something that they come to my website that they've downloaded. Um, I probably classify them into warm right now and then hot man. Uh, we're on the phone, we're talking deal like let's let's cook this thing. Right. Like this is a really. Is that a simplified framework on how you also think about it or how do you think of. How do you think about not only the accounts but the contacts within those accounts and then in addition to that, how do you move them, which is the bigger question, from one stage to the next stage to the next stage. Can we talk a little bit about that topic?

Speaker A: Sure. So when I, when I think about segmenting accounts and scoring them, there's a few different ways to think about that. So you were talking about kind of from the perspective of how much have they engaged with me as a brand or with someone on my team and using that as your framework to score readiness to like the probability of close winning them. Right.

Speaker B: Uh, more like they're ready to actually have a conversation. Obviously I'm talking about it more as the go to market marketing lens of it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: We operate at. So I'm kind of curious on the sales end of it, where you live.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: How you think about it and do they jive or are we both thinking about this completely differently and that sort of. Sometimes there's that where the friction is. Right. The marketing and the sales friction.

Speaker A: Yeah, I was going to say, you know, it is. I do. Maybe we can create the synthesis here and create some intellectual property together. Let's do it.

Speaker B: Let's do it live.

Speaker A: So I think that marketing, when you think about like marketing like pipeline, you're looking at the extent to which someone has like your first party data is telling you how ready someone is to have a conversation. Whereas I think that with, um, when I am thinking about readiness to. Readiness to have a conversation or kind of likelihood of becoming a deal, I'm first starting with what third party data exists out in the wild about these accounts that lets me know that it's the right time to engage them. Uh, because when you're doing cold sales, you're deciding where you're going to spend your. You have inputs, right? You have some, you have to some degree you have scarce inputs across the channels that you're engaging your market with, with whether you're doing emails, calling, even in person visits, LinkedIn. Right. You have, you have a budget.

Speaker B: You're looking for signals, right? You're looking for conversion.

Speaker A: Okay, yes, exactly. You're looking for signals. Now I think like really good sales gtm. You're blending your, the signals that exist on these accounts as well as your first party data. Uh, how much have they engaged with your content? Have they viewed your website you know, have they downloaded like you? You ideally want there to be some scoring at the contact level as well as at the. Probably rolling up to the account level as well to help you make a determination about how the propensity of an account to become a deal. Um, but yeah, I'm usually starting with like signals and, and other truths about the account that I can detect, clues that I can detect that tell me that the account is ready for someone on the sales team to reach out to them.

Speaker B: I love that. And where are you actively looking for these signals? Are there tools you're using or are you building them? Does it, I'm assuming it varies by industry, by account, and so on and so forth. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah. So if you're selling to an industry where companies have websites, I think you can pick up a lot by reading, by parsing a website and by, and by detecting what is true and what isn't true about a website. Um, you know, if you're just as a random example, I've never, I've never done this but like, let's say you're selling to hair salons. You can go look and see is there a point of sale? Like is there a, is there a cart, Is there a scheduling tool that's already installed on the website or not? That's going to tell you a lot about how mature the company is. It's going to tell you a lot. If you're trying to sell pos like you want to see if there's a POS already there or not. Are you doing a net new sale? Are you doing a switchover sale? So I think you can, you can get a lot of clues out of a website. Um, for some businesses you can get org structures out of a website and you can be your own first party scraping of that data. You don't need to have that be intermediated by uh, zoom info or another data provider. Especially if you're selling to organizations that have their teams listed on their websites. Right. Um, beyond that, if they're active on LinkedIn or if members of their team are active on LinkedIn, you can, you can look at job changes, new hires, job postings. I think job post, uh, data, the content that sits inside of a job post will tell you a lot. If you have an agent run and try to make sense of what does the company need, what tools does this person need to be responsible for? You can get a good sense of what their stack looks like. Um, you can depending on the, I

Speaker B: mean some people might say, man, it's hard to get that data from LinkedIn. Like I'm guessing you're using like Apify or some, some intermediary that's kind of helping you through this process or, or how are you getting to the raw data itself?

Speaker A: Well, I think Clay has some great data providers that will, that have structured uh, like HG Insights. There's um, uh, predict leads. Also has great job posting data, job post content as well. You could probably build your own too. I usually don't want to go to the trouble of trying to build all of my own tools. Maybe that, maybe that itself is a hot take compared to like the GTM vibe code your way into the future, uh, world. But it's like these tools work great. Um, they're supported, they've spent a lot of time testing bugs and so uh, for a lot of use cases I'll just see what data I can uh, get out of the deals that have already been struck between Clay and data providers.

Speaker B: I love that.

Speaker A: Or plug it into my cloud.

Speaker B: Yeah. Why build it when someone else has already done all the effort, Put the engineering behind it, got the data to a usable state that you can parse through it and figure out how you want to act on upon it.

Speaker A: I think that's true. I mean I think uh, what's nice about, what's nice about Claude is that you can text comm, you can, you can chat with these uh, data sources if they're properly plugged in. So sometimes it's nice to just, especially when you're in experiment mode, like just chat with the data and figure out what's there. Um, but yeah, like for a robust build that's supposed to last for months and months, I like to, I think it's easy to build it and build it in Clay.

Speaker B: So one of the things we've been doing recently, and I love to hear what you would want to see from it is we've been creating what we call a universal user ID and uh, a full contact database. Right. So in it we have, we use smartly and instantly. So for the listening audience, those are tools that allow you to create a bunch of different emails. For my operating partners that are listening today, those are, that's how we go to market people and marketers get into your inbox is we use these different tools and we, we don't. We bypass promos and we bypass updates and we actually get it delivered into your inbox. So part of it is we at least saw this problem on the marketing side. So I'm kind of curious how we, how you See it on your side, right? As um, on larger TAM markets where there's a, uh, tons of accounts, we're talking about like 3,000 to 5,000 accounts. And each one has a buying committee of um, let's say three to four people that you are actively trying to figure out. It was hard for us to see what was happening across all of these tools. Like we know they were opening it, we knew they were clicking it. There were some. There was a ton of out of office replies. Great, fantastic. You're out of office. This. There was some initial emails that were coming in, but we wanted to graduate them from this, let's say cold level, going back to where I was to much more of a warmer level where they're getting a different set of content. And then, um, we weren't able to do this. So we started creating this version of a unified database with all that information in there.

Speaker A: You host that in like Supabase or something. Or like you basically setting up like. Like a pre CRM.

Speaker B: Like exactly like a pre CRM with the data is flowing in from the different platforms. Right. So we had data flowing in from uh, instantly or um, main. Let's just say instantly. Right. Like that tool set. And we had data flowing in from the email service provider that we were using. It could be mailchimp, Clavio, whatever that email newsletter provider is. Then we had data from the actual CRM. So whatever the sales people were doing. And then this allowed us to see the full journey from taking them from, let's say super cold to warm to then finally sales hot, kind of working them kind of. And we can provide that guidance back to the salesperson. Now, the gap we are not great at. Which sounds like you are an expert at, uh, is activation. Right. Like, hey, I know how to move them from lukewarm to based off of what signal I'm seeing to actually getting them on the call to kind of see. Hey, if we can. If, uh, if having a conversation. Right. Beginning what I call the ability to build trust, the ability to actually walk him down the sales line. That's not our expertise. So given what I just framed for you.

Speaker A: Uh, yeah.

Speaker B: How do you. Why do you think while on the marketing side it's kind of easy to get them to understand who the brand around is.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: What does the sales side need to do to activate? Because if you think about what I'm telling you is new signals. Right. Here's a new signal. Here is a new signal. There is a new sign.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: How does that can help your go to Market activation side.

Speaker A: Yeah. Okay. So without naming any names, I once knew a company that we, we ran an instantly campaign. It's probably my team and I, as we, we joke. Some of our proudest work is this instantly campaign we ran for, for this client. It large tam. We're sending lots of emails, getting lots of really good positive replies. And uh, this was kind of early days. We, we sent them this list of leads, populated their CRM and then nothing happened. And they I, it was like wait, we're delivering, you know, a golden egg on a golden platter of like please join our conference, our quarterly conference call with the board and you know, present this information. You just right. Like really good positive replies. And so yeah, um, it is, it is the case that eventually, at least in the year 2026, you know, where we're recording, I think you need to have a, you need to have a human being, uh, get involved in the process and there's like uh, a handoff. So you know, like doctors, uh, with their shifts, they go 12 hours and then they hand it off, they hand off the patient uh, to, to the next doctor who's, who's starting the next shift. And like that's actually where the reason that shifts go long is because the handover is where there's a lot of risk. And I think that between where you have agents running and you know, doing this outbound and warming up these leads and now you have a person who needs to take this football and run with it. Um, like a lot of the answer honestly I think is like good old fashioned setting expectations, creating a process and then holding people accountable to the expectations that you set and making sure that they execute well. Like this is like this is about a sales team being given the words to say, making sure they say those words. If those words don't convert, being humble enough to say like this isn't working, trying another script and, and basically just really closely managing the handoff process from marketing to sales to uh, and including things at the system level of what is our process for assigning leads to the sales team? What is our expectation of like, of an sla A time like basically a time expectation of how quickly do we want you to respond to this? How many times do we want you to follow up with this lead? Um, like you need to write all of those things down and it needs to be a part of how you evaluate someone's performance and especially if you're setting up a new source of leads that's like different from their workflow. I have found you have to win the trust of the sales team that these are good leads. Like salespeople can be very optimistic and also very skeptical. They're sniffing for value. And so if you just say, hey, here's great leads. If they call once and it goes poorly or you know, they try 10 of them and one of them is a duplicate, like you really have to kind of win them over. And that is a process that requires leadership buy in and it requires like kind of enforcement and norming to, hey, here's a new source of, here's a new source of potential pipeline for you. We want you to take it seriously. And here's how to do that.

Speaker B: I love that. So making sure that the transition from what, uh, the source is and what marketing is providing is clearly understood by the salesperson and helping maybe if what I'm hearing, iterate and refine it in some instances, but also not giving up. Right. Like, hey, I called for three of them were duds. Uh, okay, great.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And kind of it's, hey, this is not necessarily, you're not, we're not going to go 100 here. We might get 70%. Right. So keep on calling and so on and so forth. Some versions.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Huh.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yes. I mean, I had another, I have another client who just submitted to me that the leads that we've sent to them from, from a. We're doing, we're creating leads for them. They said we've only called 50% of them so far. And I said, and of the 50% that you called, are you telling me you called them one time or you called them 10 times? And you know, they have a couple opportunities that they've created, but they don't know if. We don't even know if the leads we're creating, to be honest, are good or bad because they haven't devised like an execution plan that has sales leadership team buy in yet that says each of these leads that comes in, we're going to call them ten times over a two week period. And that's what success looks like. Um, or maybe, you know, ten times in a five day period. Right. Like, you know, compress it a little bit. But uh, but yeah, exactly.

Speaker B: I love that. I love that. All right, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna throw some hot takes at you.

Speaker A: Great.

Speaker B: Do you think traditional SDR roles are dead if you're using LLM workflows to generate all of these different prospects and information? AI as it stands today, uh, what's your take on that?

Speaker A: So Jensen Huang said that the Demand for radiologists is going up as the quality of radiology AI increases. And my hot take is that the demand for BDRs will go up as the quality of uh, LLM M powered account scoring and LLM powered outreach gets better as well. Every business wants to make more money and if you have lower input costs that mean you have more high quality leads, I think you will on in the equilibrium in the long run, you'll want to have more salespeople working, uh, working your market because you're getting more of your market more efficiently. Now their job may change. They may be spending less time doing brutally menial tasks and more of that work may be done for them. But I can't imagine that you would decide, all else equal, I want to have less salespeople if you're actually having, if you're actually more efficiently getting to your market.

Speaker B: So not nuts. So the role of uh, the sales, the sdr, the assistant role. Right. Not the actual salesperson. Do you feel that role will go away and the junior level. Right, the one who's learning to do sales.

Speaker A: I think there will, I think there will always be a junior level salesperson. What the junior level salesperson does may, perhaps it evolves into more of an apprenticeship where you're shadowing a salesperson. Um, perhaps their time is spent on uh, just taking meetings. You know, depending on the complexity of the sale, maybe they're doing more qualification. But like companies need to hire junior talent and I can't imagine that the need to hire junior talent will go away. But what we might expect from that junior talent to do, I think it's a good bet to say that that will change.

Speaker B: I love that. So there's a whole industry of uh, go to marketing consultants selling different types of playbooks. What are they all getting wrong and what's the gap between good go to market advice and great go to market execution?

Speaker A: So I mean I try to give all of my strategy away for free when I'm talking to my prospective clients. Like if I'll tell you exactly what I would do and if you want to go do it, go for it. Like I don't, I don't gatekeep any of that. Um, I, I think so I think part of my answer is the depths to which, uh, the extent to which GTM consultants advisors are actually doing implementation and building for you is uh, an important thing I would look for. I guess I'm biased saying that because we're very focused on actually building and getting stuff implemented. I think also, um, I Think that people who are trying to sell like a, this is the one way to do it and, and kind of building rigid, fragile systems that maybe give you a sugar rush, but that are not built for the inevitable truth that your markets change and that any play that's going to work is going to experience entropy and revert to the mean. And in other words, you need to be building systems that anticipate that the way you think about accounts, the way you think about channels, the way you think about messaging, and the way you think about system is likely going to be different in six months, even if you're applying your best thinking today. And if you're not building for the ability to have that flexibility, then you're creating GTM debt for yourself and you're going to future you is not going to thank you for what you're doing right now.

Speaker B: Oh, I love that. So be nimble enough to adjust your current strategy. Even if it's working so constantly iterate because it might work for a while, but necessarily in the long run, some, some version of that. Correct?

Speaker A: Yeah, sounds right.

Speaker B: Awesome. Um, so some forward looking advice for P.E. operators today. Uh, if you're an operating partner, um, you just acquired a B2B company doing 10 million growth has stalled. What would a 90 day playbook look like for you? Like walk me through how they would engage with you. What are some things you would be asking? What, what would you be looking on the hood, under the hood per se? Huh. How would you come out of that and say these are the things I think we should be doing?

Speaker A: So this is really targeted advice because I work with mostly lower middle market where it's the first institutional capital has gone into the business. Right. So I, I'm going to scope it down to that so that I don't have to just say it depends. But when you're talking to that specific narrow segment, what I think is generally true is that uh, companies don't know. What I found to be true is that, is that these portfolio companies don't necessarily know their true tam. So like row by row by row, what are all the companies that you could be selling to then from there, uh, column by column by column, how do you think about segmenting and uh, segmenting these accounts, uh, for the different levels of talent on your sales team and then column by column, how do you score these accounts? Like what is good data that you could use first party or third party to help you score these accounts so that uh, you know how high priority they are. Because at any given time Only a small percent of them are in the market at any given time. Only a small percent of them are open to changing whatever they're doing. Right. They have some sort of incumbent system in place in most cases, including the incumbent of we do it ourselves or you know, we're using spreadsheets. Like you need to um, first do what you can to figure out where you should be spending the 80% of your, you know, the 80% of your time to get 80% of the return sort of a thing. Uh, 80, 80, 20. It, uh, then I think, I think setting input expectations and figuring out what is the math around how, how big should our teams be and what is the expectation? Like what inputs do we want them to do and what is the volume of those inputs that we want them to do and how are we going to measure that and how are we going to know what good and bad looks like? Uh, is crucial. Um, and then I think also along with that, I mean this all goes back to what I was saying. Like what I think are the main buckets of what go to, what go to market are, I think having an honest conversation around. Are there any channels that we're not trying that we should be setting up that are aligned with our market? Are there any channels that we have been doing that if we look at the numbers and the return on those, on that, like we should prepare to sunset them as we put new channels in place. And like what reallocation of resources does there need to be? Usually when a PE firm has acquired a company, they've done some of that work already. Like they have some sort of strong thesis around what needs to happen and go to market. Um, but uh, it's often the case that there's not a lot of embedded talent in those companies to make those choices. And so just starting to think about how are we going to embed the talent and maybe it makes sense to have ah, an advisory, uh, sitting alongside you for at least a few months as you, you know, so you can move really quickly on making your thesis of why, why you invested in this company a reality.

Speaker B: I love that. Um, Michael, you've, you said a lot of incredible things today. Um, um, I want to give the opportunity for PE firms to be able to get a hold of you, uh, and anyone else that's been listening in. What, what's the best way that they can get, can they reach you? Is it LinkedIn or.

Speaker A: Yeah, just DM me on LinkedIn. I have a website, but I'm, I'm available. Michael Slauson Apparel Advisors. You'll find me there.

Speaker B: Awesome. So I'll make sure we have that in the show notes today. You know, Michael really enjoyed our conversation. I know we went through a lot. We went from your origins, origin story, and then we got into overall, your core expertise. I love the framework that you presented today and how you think about, um, the different ways to go go to market. It sounds like honestly, you and I, we, I know we try to jam a live session of, uh, how we can build a perfect go to market plus marketing system together, but I would love to double click and triple click on that a little bit more with you and we can do. We don't have to do it live today, but I, I think there's something interesting to be said about how you're thinking about sales as a whole using technology today and how technology is becoming much more of an enabler and how it's allowing the sales process to become much more efficient. And I love the way you're framing that. So thank you for your time today and for everyone in the listening audience. I hope you enjoyed our episode. Please make sure you subscribe and comment and keep on listening and keep on growing. Have a great day.