Why your outbound is missing the mark (it's not your reps, it's your strategy) - with John Barrows

Val Riley: This podcast is brought to you by Unmount's Go to Market Solutions, which includes Insightly CRM. Insightly is the modern CRM teams love. Unlike legacy platforms, a uh, modern CRM is easy to use, flexible, affordable and scales with you as you grow. With a proven faster go live and shorter time to ROI, Insightly delivers more for your CRM investment, helping you build lasting customer relationships. Visit insightly.com to learn more. That's insightly.com now let's get to closing time. Welcome to closing time, the show for Go to market leaders. I'm Val Riley, head of marketing for Insightly and Unbounce. My guest today is the one and only John Barrows. He is founder of JB Sales. He has trained sales teams with brands such as LinkedIn, Google, Amazon and Slack. And he created the filling the funnel framework for prospecting and pipeline generation. He's also a fan favorite on closing time. John, welcome back to our show.

John Barrows: Hey Val, thanks for having m me. I appreciate it.

Val Riley: Before we get into the five steps of the filling your funnel framework, what problem were you seeing that led you to build this in the first place?

John Barrows: I mean, pipeline. Well, it was an evolution, right? I mean I've been selling for 30 years of my career and you know, building my own process and I don't think a lot of people have a process and you know, it was either before all these kind of cadence tools came out, it was just a lot of spray and pray mark almost marketing find, uh, replace, send or you know, just hammer and cold calls at volume. Even back then though I, I knew that quality mattered. And when ah, I got introduced to Basho, which was the training organization that I joined before I went off on my own, they were very in very specific about like doing research and having a reason and it included business acumen. And even though it was slowing way down, it was, I was getting way better results and so I really leaned into that. And then as I kind of evolved my own career, I figured we had to put a structure in place here because there's no single technique that works or if it does, it works for a few months, especially now. And then it just doesn't work anymore. Especially, you know, as soon as somebody posts something on LinkedIn, oh, look at this technique, it now becomes overused. So I really shifted towards more of a framework that people can use to adjust and become a lot more agile in their approaches. Because what works this week is not going to work next week. What works for this Persona is not going to work for that Persona right so it really depends on who you're going after. But the framework, you can play with different techniques, which is what really drove me to evolve it in that direction.

Val Riley: You know, it's funny when you say that, uh, I was just on LinkedIn earlier today, and a salesperson posted how they make their subject lines all lowercase. Cause it looks like it's more from a person. And then some, like, people just piled on and were like, yeah, that doesn't work anymore.

John Barrows: Exactly, exactly. And, you know, and that's why I just always roll my eyes at anybody who says, like, cold calling is dead or email's trash. It's like, nothing's dead. It's just you have to adjust and you have to evolve. And so I think that's, it's. It's not any one channel anymore. It's all of them. And that's why you almost have to look at outbound in a lot of ways as marketing, as more of a marketing function. Because it's impression point and that type of thing that creates the familiarity. Because right now, cold anything is just brutal.

Val Riley: That's true. You know, I think it's, um, also very interesting that you say, um, like, nothing works all the time. Because the truth is, sales is hard. Right. And if it was as easy as cracking this one code, then everybody would be great at it. So it really is a matter of constantly evolving what you're doing.

John Barrows: Yeah, especially not right now. I mean, I'm currently reinventing myself yet again. You know, I mean, I've had to reinvent myself multiple times throughout the years. And now with AI, you absolutely have to, like, for me, you know, a sales trainer, that, that doesn't resonate too much anymore because you can go into AI and ask it any question about anything and get training, consulting, whatever you want. So, you know, really elevating to more of a transformation leader. Somebody to help guide through this process is, you know, for me, I have to readjust my messaging, I have to meet the moment and all that stuff. So it's the same thing with messaging and output. I mean, there's some fundamentals that I don't think ever go out of style. But how you position and how you evolve is. Is critical right now.

Val Riley: All right, well, I think that's a great segue to going step by step into the filling the funnel framework. So, um, we'll start with icp. You said it should live within your CRM, not a spreadsheet, not in someone's head. Um, why does it matter where it lives?

John Barrows: Well, I mean, I think there's the why behind it. Right. And help educating the reps on what you know, we all give them. Hey, here's your tier one accounts. Go after it and then they just start going after it. So I think there's an education component to this before it even gets into a system. It's understanding the nuances of icp. And the problem most companies have is they do the very baseline basics of industry size, number of employees. Right, there you go, there's your, that's not. There's so much more to it now and there's. And with existing customers we can really profile them and find that sweet spot. So I think going through the process with your team as a, as a hands on exercise to really dig into the details of where we fit best so you can truly tier out your accounts and then time management. Right, because tier ones are quality, tier twos are quantity, tier threes or practice then sitting inside your CRM, your system of record so that it can be uh, and updating it quite frankly. Right, because that's the thing. Sometimes a tier one could shift to a tier three because they might look great, but for instance they're in a three year contract with your number one competitor. So it's just, it's not, it's not worth it going after that account. So it has to be dynamic, it has to live in a system so it can constantly be updated. The other part of this is if you look at all the different potential criteria of what could be involved in a, in an icp, like what's their tech stack look like, who's the competition in, at what stage of the business, all these different things. Well, that way when sales reps, I mean ideally we can enrich that with, with the tools that we have now. But now as a sales rep is calling, they're not just looking for the meeting, they're actually trying to gather additional information from those conversations that they can then enrich the database with so they can be more targeted moving forward. And last but not least, we can now tie ICP to conversion ratios, time to sale, you know, sales, you know, sales cycle length, all those different things. Because ICPS will move faster through the pipeline and others won't. And we need to get reps focusing on the right accounts. Right now I think there's a, uh, some stat that's always out there. I don't know if it's overused but it's, you know, only 5% of anybody's addressable market is actually in market. The other 95% is somewhere from never needing your stuff to all the way through. So we got to figure out our time is. We got to figure out where to spend our time. And if we're going to do research, if we're going to spend time, you know, thinking through a plan, it better be on the right accounts, because otherwise, we're just wasting our time.

Val Riley: That's a great point. I've always used 3%, so 5 feels optimistic, but I like your number better. Um, so next step in the framework you layer on is Personas. What context actually needs to be captured there to make the outbound sharper.

John Barrows: I mean, this is where I think so many reps fall apart, right? And this is where business acumen comes into play and I think is sorely lacking in our sales culture right now. You know, do trainings all the time. And I'll. People who sell technical solutions to technical people, and I'll be like, oh, yeah, business acumen. You guys got this, right? They're like, yeah, yeah. And I'm like, all right, cool. Who in here can tell me the difference between a CTO and a cio? Crickets, right? Or, hey, what's the difference between a CIO and healthcare versus a CIO and manufacturing? Anybody know what those differences are? Because those nuances matter. I always say you get pushed to who you talk like, right? And if you talk features, function speeds, and feeds, you're going to get pushed to people who talk features, function, speeds, and feeds. And. And these days, the idea, I think the three most insulting things you can say to somebody in a conversation at this point is tell me about your business, what are your priorities, and what keeps you up at night? Those are easily answered. Right now, I could be able to go in and be the cio. Health care, what keeps them up at night? What are their top priorities? So instead of walking in and asking you generic questions, I can say, hey, you know what? We're working with other CIOs in health care, and they're telling us that right now, some of the top things on their plate are X, Y and Z. Are you on? Are you seen the same stuff? Like, just that alone, that credibility alone to have that conversation shows them you know them before, helps them articulate what you know, where you go and whether you're right or wrong. So I think it's critical to understand the Personas, first of all, the buying committee, obviously, who the influencers are, and then how to speak the language of those different influencers. And what problems do you solve for them? Because right now, I am heavy into, like, if you can't, like, these are the three things everybody does, uh, everything. Right. But what are like the top two or three things you do that are better than anybody else and for that person?

Val Riley: Right.

John Barrows: So, like, for a CRO, I solve very different problems for a CRO than I do a VP of sales. And I solve different problems for a VP of sales than I do a VP of enablement. So I need to know what those problems are in their industry, in their region even. Right. Uh, again, US versus emea, Germany versus France. There's different challenges going on in every region. So the more we can know that, the more we can speak their language and the more we can resonate. Because now relevance is the key. That's why people talk about when they're outbound is like, you know, personalization, personalization. Uh, I disagree. I trust me. And I was the personalization guy for years. But fake personalization is worse than no personalization at all. So personalization and relevance is the key. But if you force me to choose between personalization or relevance, I'm going relevance all day long. You know, just because, you know, I went to the University of Maryland does not buy you any points these days. But people still send me emails, John, I see you went to U, MD. Go Terps. And then it harks us some dumb value proposition. You know, I'd much rather have you say, hey, John, as the CEO of a sales training organization, how have you integrated AI into your training so that after you leave, the sales reps have something that they can integrate and you can drive recurring revenue with? Like, that is a very relevant question you can ask me. And you can ask that to 50 other CEOs of sales training organizations.

Val Riley: Yeah, I feel like personalization is like a party trick now. You know, everybody's got it, so you've got to move on to something deeper.

John Barrows: Yeah, well, generic person. And I know this sounds weird, but it's almost an oxymoron. Generic personalization? Yeah, like the whole, like, oh, you know, look at, you just hired some people and you just went through this. No, but real personalization, when you can kind of show that you care because you spent the time looking at their business, you didn't just operationalize it and automate it was one of these personalization at scale crap solutions that's putting being pushed out there. That's. Yeah, that's overplayed. But real personalization, when you hit it right from a timing and an insight and a value standpoint, you don't need 16 touches to get a response, you know.

Val Riley: And in your example, you said, well, you know, I'm talking to CIOs of healthcare businesses. Um, you know, you can get that from Claude these days. Even. Even if you're not actually talking to CIOs of healthcare businesses, you can get enough perspective to make a hypothesis to have a decent conversation with someone. So there really is no excuse anymore. Maybe a year ago or two years ago, you needed to do a ton of research to be able to create a hypothesis for someone in that role. But Claude can get you pretty close.

John Barrows: Uh, I mean, we used to do this report every year.

Val Riley: We.

John Barrows: And it was a really valuable report. People would love it, Clients and everything. It was the top priorities of top executives in the top industries. So it was the top 10 industries like oil and gas, manufacturing, all these CEO, priority one, two, three, CFO. And we would release it in January every year. And I would pay some kids who are way smarter than me to go do that research. Usually cost me three to five thousand dollars to put that whole thing together. And it was a massive, like, value added to my clients. Now, I can do that in three seconds in clutch.

Val Riley: Crazy.

John Barrows: Yeah.

Val Riley: Um, okay, well, let's keep going with the framework. Um, your third step addresses trigger events. Reps notice these, but, you know, they don't do anything with them consistently. So let's talk about that in practice and associated, um, with our relevancy conversation.

John Barrows: Sure. So, and I want to break this up into a couple of different buckets, right? Because I think they're getting conflated. There's signals and then there's triggers. Right. So intent data, if you will, where somebody is actually searching for whatever you have and whether that's through G2 or whoever you want to use on that. But that is something that says, ooh, maybe that 5% of that addressable market, they are actually interested. So we should. But that doesn't mean you reach out to them with that signal. Right. So it's like, oh, they just downloaded a white paper. Uh, don't send the email. So you download the white paper. I'd like to talk to you about it. That signal should be used to prioritize who you go after and who you spend time researching. So then you look for the trigger that might have caused that signal. And that trigger could be a merger and acquisition, a new client, um, opening up new offices, whatever those are. But you have to understand, this is again, another thing most reps, what they'll do is that, oh, okay, merger and acquisition. Here's my merger and acquisition, uh, template, if you will. Mix those two together, put a little bit of flavor on top and then send it. Okay, well that's better than mass blast emails, I guess. But do you, do you understand what happens in a merger and acquisition? Have you ever been through one? If you're reaching out to a CRO who's going through a merger and acquisition, who is the acquired company? Do you know what that person is going through at this stage of the acquisition? Because there's everything that happens up until the acquisition that nobody knows about. There's the announcement, which is when the, that's when all the generic sales reps pounce. Right. Because, uh, but everybody knows that who's been through one. Nothing's happening at that point. Like there's no decisions being made. Then there's three months out, six months out, 12 months out, and there's certain milestones there. So if you're just a generic. Oh, merger and acquisition. We help people going through merger and acquisition, you're not going to get anywhere to that. But if you think through, okay, what does a CRO of a $10 million company who just got bought by a hundred million dollar company, what are they going through at this stage of the merger? And if I have a solution that can help them in that moment, then yes, you should reach out to them. If you cannot help them in that moment, do not reach out to them because they' is no chance they're going to engage with you. So it's about time. I think the trigger is about timeliness and value. And I think we need to go back as leadership and educate the team on what are the top five, 10 trigger events that happen within businesses that we can add value to what happens. Let's, let's dissect each one of those and then let's look at our Personas and see what happens to that Persona when that thing happens. Well, how does our message align with that?

Val Riley: Yeah, that's a huge reframe of that because you're right, the uh, I just saw you. I mean, we, we've. I've been acquired during my career more than once. And uh, you know, I just noticed you got acquired. Yeah. If you really understood what that meant, you'd realize that we are in a paralysis mode right now trying to figure out what the heck we bought.

John Barrows: Or I'm in a freakout mode right now because I just got acquired by a private equity firm. And everybody knows what happens with private equity. It's, you know, slam it together, profitable, probably fire Half of us and flip it over. I mean, uh, right. And if you understand that, you can speak, you can have empathy at least a little bit. You might not have true empathy because you've never been through it before, but you could at least have sympathy for that person and say, uh, m. This is what I'm betting they're dealing. And if you can speak to someone's problems in the moment and they can feel heard or seen, now all of a sudden you're going to start to see people pay attention. Right?

Val Riley: Yeah. You're establishing trust. Right. Okay. Um, step four, uh, messaging. So you said the best outreach you've ever written came from five minutes in a CRM reviewing account history before picking up the phone. Tell me, in those five minutes, what are you looking at?

John Barrows: Well, now it's easy again. It used to be hard to go look at the history and all this other stuff, but now I can collect almost every piece of information from CRM, all the contact history, all the intent stuff that has happened from, you know, where they've gone, and really come up with very succinct. I call it sales ready messaging. I have a specific formula that I, that I go through where it's, you know, pick the Persona. So VPs of sales, sales and SaaS, and, and there might be a trigger event or it could be a problem or a priority or a challenge. So what is that? So VPs of sales and SaaS, what are their main challenges and priorities? And then based on that, what component of my solution aligns with that? And what would the value look like? Right, so it's this equation that gets us pretty close. And by doing the research in the account, you can find those kind of components of their priorities. You can find those potential trigger events or past conversations and then align. Not your solution. Hey, generic elevator pitch, this is all we do. But what aspect of your solution can help in that scenario? Right, I always say that. You know, I wrote a blog post a while back called sell to the 20%, which is my fundamental belief. If you pick any product or service you own, I guarantee you you only use about 10 to 20% of whatever that functionality is. Right. So because most, I mean, take your clothes, your car, your phone, LinkedIn, you know, all that fun stuff. So because you only use 10 to 20% of what you buy, that's how I believe people buy. They only care about the part that's most relevant to them. And so you, uh, you could give me an elevator pitch that includes everything you do and it could all sound fantastic. But it all drops down to average. We need to throw darts in sales because also, not only darts to wake you up, but also so that we can tell a story. Because if you put everything in one email and I. And you don't get a response, well, then, what's your next email? Here's me again, touching base, checking in, bubbling this one up to the top.

Val Riley: Right.

John Barrows: That type and that not gonna work. So I need to figure out, out of all the insight that I have from CRM, our, uh, past conversations, where are you now? And I'm going through that process right now. I'm literally going back through all of my old accounts and scraping what happened to them, where we, what I sold to them, where they were at that time, how things have changed for them, doing deep research on their business and their executives and who's changed, and then putting together some context that says, hey, I want to reconnect here. Lots changed. Notice you're in this role, understand these challenges for you. And actually, I've updated my program to be able to address that. Would love to chat.

Val Riley: Yeah. So the final piece you talk about is that contact strategy. So you've talked about building it into pipeline stages, so the next steps fire automatically. How does that really work in practice?

John Barrows: Well, I don't know about automatically. So this is my whole. This is my whole challenge between, you know, quantity and quality. Okay. And I think this is why it goes back to ICP and why that's so important, because I think you, you should segment out by tier. Right. So the tier ones, that's the quality approach. I personally don't believe in automating any. Anything about that. If you have a tier one account, you're going after an executive account. You bet. Now, can you have AI get you really close? Absolutely. Right. But human as the last mile, please. Right. Even if, like, here's. Let's go back to Business Academy. Say AI writes this perfect email about, you know, merger and acquisition and your value to the CEO, whatever. And you send that out and it gets a response, Yay, we're all happy.

Val Riley: Right.

John Barrows: Well, now I set up that meeting with that CRO of that tech company who's going through a merger and acquisition. And they, they start asking me about my knowledge about mergers and acquisitions. And. And I have no idea what I'm talking about. But the AI wrote it really, really well. Right. So that's why I think we have to understand the messaging that's going out there, so that if we get once, we can actually continue the conversation with it. So I don't believe even with me I have everything done from an AI standpoint, but it doesn't auto fire. Every morning I'm going in and I'm approving or adjusting the message and then sending now the volume play. I think you can automate the Persona driven sequences, but I think you need to be very like very specific with at least three characteristics that are similar. So VPs of sales in the SaaS industry of companies under $50 million like, or something like that, or uh, CIOs and healthcare companies that are, you know, what, like three or four criteria. So you can get your list down to 20, 30, 40, 50 accounts that fit a very specific profile, then you can come up with a multi touch contact strategy and then you can do volume because that's where your cold calling blitzes are all kind of standardized because you're now calling into the same Persona with the same message, right? That type of thing. And it's part of a sequence. So that's where I think you can automate from a relevant standpoint. But I would recommend it being a tier two approach, not your tier one approach.

Val Riley: Right. And in that instance the reps then, then have confidence, right? Because they're having the same conversation over and over again. So they feel like they can have that conversation intelligently. It really, it's probably very empowering for them.

John Barrows: In the end, it's the biggest thing that I see as an unlock when I do call blitzes with reps. Because most what so you know, making cold calls throughout the day I think is a drastic waste of time quite frankly.

Val Riley: Right.

John Barrows: Because you can't gain any momentum anything that way. You can't learn anything that way, whatever. So what do companies do? They do power hours. Great. Power hours are awesome, right? Hyper focus problem with power hours is most reps bring their list and I'm sorry, I'm not that bright. I am not good enough to have a relevant, good conversation with a CIO in the healthcare industry, a director of IT in the manufacturing industry, a cfo. And uh, with that approach I have to be generic. I have to say, tell me about your business, I have to give you my generic elevator pitch. But if I call every VP of sales in the SaaS industry under 50 million, I can come up with a message that is super relevant to them. I can have two or three questions that are super relevant to them and I might even have a case study that I can use to tell a story about and then I can go to work. Right? Because now I'm saying The same thing. And I'm refining it. I'm getting better, right? And, and I have my key and it's. And again, it's not just a call blitz, it's part of a sequence. So it's like part of the story that I'm trying to tell them. So that's how that you see confidence come up and that's how you see people evolve as opposed to just going through the motions and making their dials.

Val Riley: Great. John, I'd like to pivot to some obligatory AI questions. We've touched a little bit on AI, but um, one thing you've said that really resonates with me is companies really need to clean up their systems before they can see any real benefit from AI and sales. So in practice, what does that look like?

John Barrows: Yeah, man, I thought AI was going to solve the garbage in, garbage out problem and um, apparently not. It's actually made it worse. Right. And that's the other thing that, the challenge I see with AI right now. I think I heard a stat that like 30% of the content on the Internet right now is AI generated. So it's just degradation, you know what I mean? It's like you're compounding the problem here. So it's the same thing with CRMs, it's the same thing with everything else. If you don't have your house clean, you're not going to be able to build a house house any larger than what it is. And so I think there needs to be a very hygiene oriented approach to CRM to your contacts so that you are pulling from the right information, you're gathering insights from the right information. And so having that hygiene, if you will, is important. So here's an example. Any one of us could uh, tell Claude to create awesome messaging for me based on my website and all that. But that's all marketing messaging. And I love marketing. My background's marketing. Have healthy degree, healthy respect, right?

Val Riley: No offense taken.

John Barrows: It's fine, I played both sides. But, but marketing does not, I'm sorry, it's not sales ready messaging, right? The, the emails that are 15 bullet points long or the transparency and synergy and all that crap like that doesn't land when a sales rep is making a phone call. So that's why we go through the process of that, that sales equation that I was talking about, that, the um, the messaging equation. Because first of all it helps the reps learn, right? And solution map and then it gets you about 80% of the way there. AI can then smooth it out and then we take all that messaging broken down by Personas, trigger events, industries, all that stuff, and then we put it back into the system, and we then tell AI, hey, when you find these Personas, when you find these trigger events, that type of thing, use that as a baseline. And now all of a sudden, the messaging starts to become much richer, much more specific. And then if you use tools to track and figure out what's working or not, you can then can start to improve that as you see results. So the stuff that works, you leave it in and you keep, uh, you know, leveraging it. The stuff that doesn't work, you flush it out. And so it's the same thing with contacts. It's like, all that stuff is so critical because it is easy to turn any system into a rat's nest right out of the gate, uh, like, if you don't have a way. So I think step one is hygiene. Like, let's clean this out. Let's figure out who our ICP is. Let's figure out who our main Personas are. Let's then enrich that data with those. With that information. And then let's put some messaging on top of that. And now let's start going to work.

Val Riley: Great. I'd like to get super practical here because you had shared this tactic that, um, you kind of. You get three prospects. Claude surfaces like three prospects a day for you. And, um, I think our audience would just love to hear this. So talk us through how that works.

John Barrows: Well, this is the whole unlock that I had with Claude. Now just m. My personal journey on this. You know, I was big into ChatGPT as soon as it came out. I. As soon as I saw it, I was like, oh, my God, this is unbelievable. This is also frightening. Terminator. Yay. Right? And, you know, I created some little cute little custom GPTs that were great, right? But there was no system in place for me to do it, and I was still all over the place with. With all these tools. I was actually doing more work than less with these things. Then I was like, all right, you know, Sam Altman kind of, uh, whatever. Uh, but then I moved over, so I was like, kind of just from a value standpoint, even though whatever, uh, you know, they at least turned anthropic, at least turned down the US Government, right? So I was like, oh, maybe they have some values here. Um, so I'm like, I want to do this. And Claude, AI was. Was better. No question about it. But then when I hit, when right around that time, a cowork came Out. And I was like, whoa, what's it? Because code kind of scared me a little bit. I'm like, I'm not a coder. I could probably figure this out, but I gotta figure that out. Cowork was right in the console. So I'm like, okay. And when I figured that out, like, when it clicked and I got it set up, uh, I mean, I wrote a blog post a couple weeks back, and I called it the Matrix. Remember when Neo wakes up and says, I know kung fu. Like, I know kung fu. And I was like, oh, my Lord, this is incredible. And around that time, the MCP connectors, like, I started learning about the connectors. And Apollo, who's another client I work with, I was like, okay, you know, these Cadence tools, I like them, but, you know, I. Setting them up and getting them to do the right thing, like, I just. Okay. But, you know, we're working on sponsorship. So I was like, I gotta use this because I. I do not represent products I do not believe in. But I had it on my to do list of like, uh, okay, I gotta block off a day here to figure this out. But then they came out with a connector, and I connected it and I sat in my cloud that now knows everything about me. My business, my messaging, all of it. And I said, hey, Claude, could you go into Apollo and set it up? So with my person, you know, with my messaging and all this other stuff, I want to see, you know, here's my profile. Here's a downloaded list of a bunch of clients that I. That I want to target here. Um, I want to see three tier one accounts with a full sequence built, personalized, based on trigger events. And I want to be able to log in every day and either approve or adjust those before they go out. I want no automation. I just want that set so I can approve it. Right? And it did it. And I was like, wait, what? And I didn't even have to go into Apollo to have that happen. And that's where I think the savior of SaaS is coming. Because SaaS is in a lot of trouble right now. Across the board. Or at least, you know, you hear the cycle, sasspocalypse and all this other stuff. But if you can be the system of record that plugs into. I think we're all going to move into a world of mcp. Like where our dad. Our. Our world is going to be Claude. Our world is going to be chatgpt. Our world is going to be. Whatever. Pick your poison, right? And then we're going to say, oh, go create that sequence for me. Go do that, you know, social stuff for me, go do that. And then it's going to pull in the companies that do that and then do it for us. And that, to me is the biggest unlock because I immediately started using Apollo. I'm using it every day now. And it's one of things that if I didn't have, I would have pretended I would have gotten it to a certain degree that was good enough. You know what I mean? But I probably wouldn't have really used it the way I wanted to use it. Now I'm using exactly the way I want to use it. So that was, to me, it was, you know, the process of, of identifying the icp, getting tight on that, having that lift, putting it in there, coming up with my messaging, understanding what the sequence should be based on my Personas and everything else, and then going and telling Claude to go do that for me, me. And it did.

Val Riley: So let me ask, are the outcomes what you expected?

John Barrows: So it's still not there. This is why I still, like, this is why I still haven't automated anything of going out. You know, I might do a Tier 2 approach to an, to a market that's not, you know, really my. My main market, just to kind of see what scale looks like in this world with slightly better personalization than it has been. But it's still not there. It's still not perfect. I still find myself. It'll write a pretty good email, but then I'll put, with my business acumen and my experience and all that other stuff. Stuff. I look at them like, no, that's not good. So then what I'll do is I'll take the email, I'll throw it into my cloud version because Netnodas and, and I have some skills that I've created to go. Could you go now do go deep research on this account and find out, like, also look in my CRM to see if I've ever talked to anybody of that business before. Because something's off about this and that's a little bit too generic for me to reach back out to them here. And it'll rewrite it and it'll be like, yeah, that, that's it, right? And I go back and forth with a little bit. I'm like, nope, that doesn't sound like me. Don't pretend like, you know what the hell I'm talking about. You know, sometimes it'll say, oh, I understand your qrs, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, dude, I don't know that industry. Don't pretend like I do. Right. So I have to beat it up a little bit. And this is where the trust factor is there. I do not trust it to, to interact with clients. I still don't. I don't know if I ever will, quite frankly. Um, because maybe it's because I'm a control freak or whatever, but I think that last mile, the human factor is, there's always going to be something about that human factor that matters to me and at least for me. And so it's good. Not great great. It's way better than it was, let's put it that way. And it gets me way closer, but I still find myself correcting it quite a bit.

Val Riley: Okay.

John Barrows: And it lies, by the way, all along.

Val Riley: Well, we like to say hallucinate. Right.

John Barrows: It sounds a little better than mine.

Val Riley: Well, I would love to check, uh, back with you at some point and see how you're continuing to refine that process and if you're getting the outcomes that you want. Um, but, John, in the meantime, where can our listeners find you if they want to, to connect with you, if they've liked what they've heard today and want to stay close to you?

John Barrows: Yeah, I appreciate it. So it's Jay. Website's the easiest place because it has everything that's on my free stuff, my YouTube channel, my podcast, all the fun stuff. You can also get in touch with me, but it's jaybarrows.com um, I'm obviously on LinkedIn all the time and Instagram, so my handle is John M M Barrows. Uh, you can hit me up anytime for those and I'll answer any questions anybody has all.

Val Riley: Ah, right. Thanks so much for joining us, John. And thanks to all of you listeners for tuning in for more outbound prospecting tips. Keep an eye out for our upcoming guide featuring John Barrows and other experts from Closing Time. Subscribe to our newsletter in the show notes so you don't miss it. We'll see you next time on Closing Time.