Ep.26- Jack Porter Googled 'What Is an Account Executive.' Two Years Later WhiteWhale Ran 1,500+ Demos

Hello, everybody. Welcome back to Presales Unplug, the leadership playbook. I'm Arby. I'm the founder of Elite Talent and I work with SaaS companies primarily to hire top-tier pre-sales and post sales talent.

But as always, today is not about me. This show is really about the leaders building the go-to-market teams and the strategies that actually work in today's market. If this is your first time joining us, welcome. One thing to know prior to us starting is that these conversations are live and intentionally unedited.

So what you hear here today is completely real and exactly how it happened. We stream it live, but you can also catch our replay on our podcast across Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever it is that you listen. And of course, if you do get value from this conversation, just make sure to follow, subscribe, or leave a review. I personally read every single one of them.

And if you do have questions for the guests afterwards, make sure to comment or leave us a review as well because I make sure to go back and get you the answers you need to. But with that being said, I'm so excited today. I'm joined by Jack Porter. He's somebody with a really strong track record in this space who also also hasn't been like too long in the space, which I'm really excited to dive deep into his story and his company and what got him here today.

But uh thank you for joining me. I appreciate you being here. Oh, thank you, Harvey. You're too kind.

I appreciate it. Yeah, absolutely. Jack, obviously, I'd love to just get you to introduce to our audience a little bit. Can you give us a quick story of like how did you even get started?

And you know, what brought you here? And then obviously we'll dive in from there. Yeah, so so for anyone who doesn't know, I'm I'm Jack. I'm a founder of a company called White Whale, and we help sales and marketing teams really identify who to sell to.

And not that that really means anything yet, but the gist is we started this about two and a half years ago. We're actually gonna hit our official two-year anniversary here in just a couple of days. Amazing. Um, but the process to get here, I mean, I talked a little bit about this with you before, but like it was crazy.

I mean, all sorts of twists and turns, lawsuits, product failures, like rebuilds of everything. We had one month where we lost half of our customers in a month. Like basically everything you could imagine that could have gone wrong went wrong to get to this stage, which now it seems to be knock on wood going pretty well. Uh, but it's been a fun journey to get here.

It's been really kind of just so you're telling me building a business is not like easy and straightforward. It's easy. I've been on a beach all day posting on Instagram, hanging out with my female. Yeah, it's been so simple.

Yeah, it's so easy. Um, and I I do appreciate you being transparent about that because I think sometimes it is definitely underestimated. And most of the time, especially too on social media, you see the highlight stories, not so much like you know what it actually took to get here. Um, so with that being said, I wanted to ask you and your co-founder, Noah, you were guys were completing a different product before White Whale even existed.

What was that first idea? Why did it not work? I'd love to hear a little bit more about that. Yeah, so the original origin story.

So I have a co-founder, and I've known Noah for probably 10 years. We met freshman year at the University of Michigan. So we're good college buddies. I've known Noah forever.

And like many normal people do, Noah's a very, very normal guy. He started a hedge fund in college. So, like everyone does, right? Yeah, and so Noah.

It is standard. Yeah, it's standard stuff. He definitely doesn't have like a 200 IQ and is super smart. Uh, but he wanted a tool to help his hedge fund it essentially make better investments.

How can they monitor the news and figure out what's going on with these companies before anyone else? And so he had built this software that essentially was doing all this scraping and saying, hey, this company just got a fire in their manufacturing facility or whatnot. And he was like, well, maybe we'll turn this into a business. And I was bored.

I had graduated, I'd gone off and I was doing you know a nine to five job. I was literally working in a gray cubicle. And I was like, I'm kind of bored now. Like, you got something I can work on the weekends with, put you on?

And he's like, Yeah, I got this project and I kind of want to expand it. And so we went up working on it for a couple months and we got the product to kind of work and you know, have user onboarding and that kind of stuff. And it did not sell at all. We got we'll say success.

Sorry, I'm not laughing at your pay. It's okay, laugh at it. It's it's pretty funny. Um, we ended up getting a thousand free users on it.

Awesome. I of course we started to need to make money, right? We're burning a bunch of money running this huge business and scraping our Thai data. And so I start calling people and I'm like, hey, you want to buy our software?

It's a pro plan for 20 bucks a month. And they're like, no. And like, what about 15? They're like, no.

I'm like, what about a dollar? They're like, no. And after the 15th time of calling people and basically getting uh shut down, uh, called Noah and I was like, hey, dude, I don't think we can actually sell this to anyone. Like, I don't think we can actually do this.

And we're about to shut the company down. And right as we were about to shut the company down, these two sales guys came to us and they're like, hey, we aren't using this for investing, we're using it for prospect research on like what's a what's a prospect and who is an account executive? Like, I have no clue who you are talking about. And that was actually how we got started into what we do today.

Was those two guys came to us and like, hey, we really like this. And then we did a ton of big user interviews. We did a whole journey I kind of mentioned of ups and downs and lefts and rights and rebuilds, but that ultimately got us to kind of what we do today, which is helping sales teams identify through that same kind of news and information and job through things and earnings calls. Well, which are the prospects that are best to go after?

Um, and that's what a lot of people today call like signals or intent. There's so many startups that trump in this space, um, really since we've even come into the picture. Yeah. And I'm we're gonna dive into that a little bit more, of course.

But I just wanted to say props to you guys because I know that sometimes as founders, we do get very like emotionally attached to the product or the service you're selling. And sometimes you believe in it too much and you're not listening to what the market is telling you. Um, so I'm glad that you guys weren't like, no, we're gonna figure out a way to sell this, but you actually listened to what people were saying and were able to pivot and of course, you know, build something successful from there.

Yeah. Um, so yeah, props on that end because I also know it's not easy because you feel probably like a failure, and you're like, what am I even doing with this? You know, everybody's saying no, let me just go back to my nine to five. Yeah, you feel terrible.

I mean, like it's the hardest decision to make because there are times where it is right to push, right? We've had times like where we thought things weren't going right, and you push through it, and all of a sudden you realize, like, oh well, maybe that was a much simpler than what we had thought. But there are times like founders waste years pushing on businesses that like probably aren't going to take off. Um, yeah, so it's a really hard decision to make, it's a really tough kind of balance between the two.

Absolutely. And I wanted to ask, so you guys pretty much ran the entire business by yourself, and we'll talk about if you have any team right now, but you went from I think something crazy, like from zero to like 1500 demos or so. Can you explain a little bit like how that even came about? Yeah, so we've really taken off.

I mean, like, I feel very lucky that we're we're in the position we are. I I hope that comes through because like I did not expect this by any means of what was happened kind of over the last two years. Essentially, what we did is you know, we built this product, right? So we had the idea, we did a bunch of testing, we even sold someone and we're doing it by hand.

Like we were actually like before we had software, we were like manually Googling and researching, and we had a Google Sheet that was our product that we exported and emailed to the client every week. And so once we realized, like, yeah, there's probably something here, we got some people to pay. We're okay, now it's time to make this a legit software product. So let's automate, let's systematize, let's take this manual process we're doing and make it possible for everyone.

And so it probably took Noah maybe six months to build it. We call like from summer of 2024, I believe it was, to like the winter of 2024, is right when we started selling it pretty frequently. And we started to do the kind of usual sales process, right? Email people, LinkedIn people.

That's how we got our kind of like called first 10 customers to try it out. And then we realized that was very hard. There's only so many emails and so many sales pitches you can make. And to be honest, like we weren't salespeople, like I didn't even know what sales was until we actually started selling sales software, which is kind of weird.

Um and so what we were doing in the meantime is kind of just posting our journey. We were putting stuff out on LinkedIn, sharing the ups, sharing the downs, new product launches, commenting on people's things, and that took off, right? So we were doing all this kind of organic outbound, but at the same time, we're posting content. And the content just took off like we couldn't believe.

And that's really where we drove a lot of the demos. Um, and we got lucky a couple of times, like we had some big competitors come after us, and then we turned that into a positive, and that got us a lot of traction. Um, so we've been able to spin a couple different times where we really gained a lot of traction. I think we've done about 1800 demos in the last call year and a half um with our product, which is amazing.

And by the way, I wanted to um to dive a little bit more into your product because I I've seen I've actually followed you for a while. We've like briefly chatted in LinkedIn here and there. Um, and then just recently I was like, wait, why have I not invited this guy to my podcast? Because I feel like I need to have him here and just ask him a bunch of questions with how successful you guys have been, and uh selfishly, but of course I know the audience will also gain uh value from this.

But what is or how is Source Whale different from other, you know, signal intent um softwares out there? Yeah, the biggest thing. So when we started the company, when we started White Whale, it was it was really kind of this big transition that was going on in the market, and we had no idea. Like we were completely blind luck, like Squirrel found a nut that they shouldn't have found, kind of situation.

Because we had come up with the idea for the signals, right? We had done it without really being in the sales market. What we didn't know is that there was these kind of huge companies that had come up over the last couple of years, and most salespeople would know their names, but they they sold what you call intent data, and they sold this huge promise that they could essentially predict everyone who was going to buy from you. Now, that promise turned out not to really be true.

And so Are you kidding me? Yeah, I know pissed a ton of people off, a ton of people off. And so what we didn't know is that we were essentially building a new product in the same space that a bunch of people just got pissed off in. And so we actually came out of a different approach.

We realized after talking to about 300 salespeople, we like literally cold emailed everyone who went to the University of Michigan and worked in sales, and we're like, How do you sell good? And the pattern we essentially saw was like research, right? The thing no one really wants to do in sales, and like everyone kind of says they do, but no one really does it. Yeah, and we're like, okay, well, maybe there's something here if we can like automate it and systematize it and flag good accounts when there is good research.

That was our unique approach. So most sales tools came from it kind of with this intent approach, which is basically like, did this company search something like Google? It's essentially an educated guess. The issue is you have no idea why, you don't know what they really searched that for, you don't even know who searched it.

And so for us, we can go and say, hey, with confidence, this company just hired three new roles for this, they launched a new product in Europe, and they brought in new leadership to lead that. And we connect the dots kind of between those, what we call signals, to actually build what we call stories. So we actually build stories on these accounts of what's going on inside them. Um and that's what we deliver to sales teams.

So not saying that they're gonna buy from you, but saying, hey, this is what they're working on, here's how that relates to what you sell, here's the kind of potential angle you can take if you want to go after them. Um much more research-driven approach, it's kind of our unique differentiation. Um, in addition to like there's so many nuances if people are really into it, but that's the gist. Yeah.

Yeah, I love that. And do you guys uh specify, like, if if, for example, I'm in recruiting, right? So do you specify like what is important for a recruiting company versus a I don't know, a CRM, you know, or an actual tech sales company in terms of those signals? Yeah, so the cool part is everything we do is custom.

So the big issue with a lot of our competitors in the early days, and I think this is really just because AI wasn't so popular. Not to say that our systems are really that much AI, it's really not, but all the signals were standard. So you and your 500 other competitors all got the same notification that this company just searched this or this company had a job change. And so you end up basically in a lineup behind all these other people who just emailed them using the same intent.

That's a problem, right? Funding rounds, job changes, champion track, and these are all kind of the same signals everyone else has, and you know, everyone emails. What we've said is well, what if you only had signals that were unique to you? And so this is where we came up with the idea for custom signals.

So looking for things that no one else can find that are very unique. Like, does the company still do manual reporting in Excel for their HR team, right? Could be a great signal for a company like Workday, which automates that, but is not useful for a type manufacturer in Kansas City. And so that's where we think about building unique signals for each kind of customer.

Yeah, it's and that's where the real kind of unique edge was. I love that. Yeah, that's so good. And that that's why I wanted to ask that question because at the end of the day, even if I have like a direct competitor to, you know, as a recruiter, just because I'm going like after a specific buyer or a specific, you know, company doesn't mean that they necessarily go after that same company.

Sometimes we have like really specific niches. Um, and I agree, I think every intent signal that I use out there is generic, it's you know, just like, hey, they got a founding route. Okay, great. Then now recruiters or you know, whoever else is just rushing through.

And they probably don't get hit just by us, for example, they probably get hit by all the other companies and vendors that want to sell them. So um that's that, yeah. I'm sure you probably deal with that as a pain point a lot when you're talking to your own customers. Very much so.

Because in reality, like I think the funding round is a signal that people really like to rag on because it just doesn't really work that well. Because if you raise a funding round or I raise a funding round, you're gonna get 800 messages from website designers, consultants, recruiters, everyone, software companies, everyone sends you a message. So it's like, all right, well, if that's the case, that's probably the worst time to send a message. You might as well send one three weeks later when their email inbox is cleared out.

Like that's a problem. And so when we think about it is actually saying, hey, you know, RB or whoever, like, why do customers actually buy from you? Like, what is that key pain point that you solve? What is the key unique factors about what you deliver?

And then what would be the indicators around that that a company might need that? That's what we talk about when we think about custom signals and finding kind of what that key buying moment is and then identifying it. Yeah. That's amazing.

Um, I want to shift your focus a little bit onto the LinkedIn that you build, you know, obviously how you build around it and you know, that led to all this inbound flow, which is obviously amazing for a company, especially a startup. It's like a dream, right? You don't have to do a ton of cold outreach. What were like some of the pillars, or I guess what do you think made your content successful so that somebody listening to this that wants to go that same direction can, you know, try to implement implement that framework that you used?

Yeah, I think there I'll kind of explain it in two different ways. I'll explain one on like I think whether or not you should even do it, because I think that's something that's overstated. And then two, like, you know, how do you actually make good content? It's kind of a separate thing.

But I think a lot of times people see like a company like ours or some of these other businesses that have really blown up on Twitter or LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, then they say, Oh, that should work for me too. The answer is like your buyer is somewhere online, right? That might be Reddit, that might be Google, that might be an event, that might be LinkedIn, that might be Instagram. There's certain personas that exist in each one of these categories.

So if you want to sell to, let's say, moms who have two kids in the US, well, you're probably going on to Facebook, right, or Instagram. If you want to sell to B2B buyers that sell, you know, are in sales, you're going to LinkedIn, right? If you want to sell to people looking for a job, you're going to LinkedIn. If you want to sell to engineers, you're going to Twitter, right?

So there's different kinds of personas on each one of these platforms. I think that's something people overstate because there's a lot of people promoting like posts on LinkedIn and that kind of stuff. But largely, like, if your buyers aren't active on a certain platform, you should not be posting there. No matter how much you post, they'll never show up because they just aren't checking in.

So you want to make sure that you know your platform aligns with where your buyers like to hang out. And for us, like salespeople are on LinkedIn all day, right? They're selling to other companies through LinkedIn, people looking for jobs, they're on LinkedIn all day, right? So if you're selling to either recruiters or to people hunting for jobs, those are two people who are very active.

So that's when we think about you know what platform's even good. And that's essentially what we did in the early days. We're like, well, we want to make content. Where do salespeople hang out, right?

LinkedIn. That was the answer. And so that's how we decide on that. And then the whole thing comes down to each platform has a unique kind of strategy, right?

The algorithms are different, the content that works is different. Something on Twitter might be a little more crude than something that ends up on LinkedIn. And so you got to kind of play to the game of what content really works on each platform. For LinkedIn in particular, what has really worked for us is just being truly like authentic.

Like I think a lot of times people think of LinkedIn, they think of these kind of like very polished corporate posts that are, you know, the best version of me. And it's someone smiling, you know, with thumbs up. For us, it was like, yeah, our business just blew up and we lost half of our customers in two days. Like that's a much more interesting story that people want to read.

And so that was the kind of journey that we were sharing, where it was like a completely unfiltered version of what we're doing, calling out competitors who we thought weren't doing things right. And then people rallied behind that kind of emotion. It just kind of broke through the noise of what people traditionally think of LinkedIn as a kind of this cringe platform where everyone just like promotes the best version of themselves. Um that really did seem to resonate with people and just kind of sharing the authentic journey.

Yeah. I I love that because I think it's exactly what you said is people expect you to just post your wins and you know, post the highlights, and of course, everybody roots for you when you do that. But there is a lot of pain in everything that you do, right? Like, not just as a business owner, but as a salesperson too.

I'm sure that although you wrote from like an owner's perspective where you when you lost your customers, a lot of salespeople have lost customers and it freaking sucked. So they probably related to it. And I agree, I think that authenticity is kind of like also like the new word, I feel like, for 2025 and 2026. But it has to be done the right way.

I think that people can still kind of read through when they when they see it. And it's like, oh, you can tell he's just or she's just posting it for, you know, to try and be authentic. But true authenticity, you know, it definitely breaks through the noise and it can take you a long way on that end. So I love that you shared that.

And I've also seen you guys be super direct when it comes to competitors, which I love. Uh, you're calling them out, being controversial. And at the end of the day, I I think one of the posts that you not always, but I I've seen a couple of yours where you know you say, Hey, I I know I can compete with Zoom Info because they're like, you know, four or five X times our size, but here's where I can compete. And I obviously that's very relevant to somebody listening because you want to see, okay, what can Jack compete with?

Let me take take a look at this and check it out. So um love your angle. With that being said, is that something that you learned, or is it something that you know it's just like, no, I'm just gonna be me, and it just feels is what feels right, and you just post it. Yeah, I think it's think it's kind of what felt right.

I think the biggest thing was like I looked at most people's posts on LinkedIn because you can actually kind of like reverse engineer what works and what doesn't. If you just scroll through your feed, you're gonna really quickly notice some posts get six likes and some get like 500 likes. There's a very clear difference between the content, the way the hooks are written, the images, everything. It's all completely different between your best performing posts and your worst performing posts.

And that's something that I think over time, as you just watch that, essentially what I did for the first six months is like I just scrolled LinkedIn, like Doom scrolled LinkedIn, you're just looking at posts and going, oh, that one did really well. And then think about maybe why did that one do well? What was the hook? What was the image?

How did they write it? What was the topic? And after enough of that kind of just rinse and repeat, you started to actually kind of figure out like, oh, this is how a good post is written. This is how like a good story is written.

Because there's definitely you can share a great story, but like if you write it in the wrong format or don't get the user to actually stop scrolling, well, you get buried, right? And that's the other kind of game to this, too, is that beyond just being authentic, there's an actual game to how do you one write content, but write engaging content that not only gets people to kind of enjoy it and get the value out of it, but gets people to interact with it in thoughtfulness and have conversations because that is what drives broader and broader reach and engagement throughout kind of the rest of the time that that post is out there.

Yeah. And I want to dive into something that you said a little bit earlier. You said not everybody should be writing. And honestly, I agree with you and I'd love your thoughts on it too.

But from my perspective, is I feel like we hear that a lot right now. It's like everybody should be building. Personal brand. While I agree that you should have online presence, doesn't mean and it's not always realistic, especially if you have like a full-time job, or it's not necessarily where your people are hanging out on LinkedIn, you know, like you said.

And you don't necessarily need to post every day, you don't have to build a personal presence, but it's okay if you post like once or twice a month, um, especially on a candidate side, since I'm obviously on the recruiting end, but I recommend that because especially if you're looking for a job, there's filters on LinkedIn that say, hey, did this person post on LinkedIn or engage on LinkedIn in the last 30 days? So even if it's just like once a month, I think it's you know, you can do that and pull something from personal experience, but you don't always have to have a personal brand unless you're maybe some sort of leadership and you're trying to attract something, of course, you know, some sort of founder.

Um, because I think that's also where all the bet posts from LinkedIn come from, too, because people are just posting to build a personal brand, and it's just like the wild, wild west on LinkedIn. But what's your thought process on that? Yeah, I would say like I mean, I think the recruiting angle is actually a good example, like if you're trying to find a job, because when you think about like the recruiter's position, and I thought about this a lot too when like I had a job, yeah, is that recruiter can only look at a handful of things to know how good you are, right?

They don't know, they don't know what you're doing at work, they don't they don't talk to your boss, they don't hear things through the grapevine, like people in your office would, right? So if you're a high performer, well, you look the same as everyone else on LinkedIn, right? Now it comes down to well, how do you almost build kind of a persona or or share some wins or share some experience that separates you from every single other person that's looking for a job who might not be an A player like you are, right?

So you think of all these other people, well, they all have LinkedIn personas with no posts, right? So everyone looks the same. And yeah, you can kind of proxy it between like how quickly they get promoted and that kind of stuff, but it only goes so far as to say, like, how do you separate yourself from everyone else? And that principle goes for like whether you're trying to get a job or whether you're trying to build a personal brand for yourself for your own business or a side project.

It's just how do you kind of break through what everyone else is doing because that's what people want to see. They want to see something unique, something different, something that isn't something that Claw can write in 15 seconds. Like that's how you don't perform well. But if you think of all the things that everyone else is doing and then do the opposite, that's usually a good strategy of seeing good results.

Yeah, I know I totally agree. And I'll I'll end with this, which I'm sure you've seen these before too, where it's like, you know, I uh I was at the beach this week, and here's what it taught me about business. And you're like, what? You're like, no, no, please don't do that.

It's so it's so bad. Like, you don't want to be, I mean, like this is sounds a gen Z word, but like don't be cringe, like yeah, share something real, like actually real, not what you think, like some corporate kind of generic kind of term that would look good. Like, that's not what people want to see. Like, people want to see, like, oh, I did this and this.

I really think that this is the best strategy, and you actually start educating the market on kind of well, what is your expertise? What are your unique things? That's how you actually build expertise, not saying, like, I learned something at the beach last weekend. That's oh, it's so bad.

Yeah. Um, okay, awesome. I wanted to shift your focus on the sales aspects and business development strategies. You obviously work with either sales individuals like an account executive or big sales teams.

So, what is working right now? Um, is call calling dead, or what are people doing to stand out, you know, within call calling in general? Um, explain a little bit more in terms of what you've seen in the market from all the experience and you know, firsthand um things that you've seen throughout the companies. Yeah, so I think there's actually it's it's kind of a good segue because it follows that same principle of what makes you different.

And I'll go a little deeper here because I think it's actually probably important to go more nuanced than traditional, like just kind of say generic terms and hope people kind of get the story. I think when you actually think about what you're doing, if you're trying to build a sales process, you're trying to potentially create demand. How do we identify people out there who potentially could have our problem, show them that this is the problem that they have and this could be their world if they solve it, right?

And there's some gap between that. That's the underlying principle of what you're doing, actually doing outreach, doing cold calling, doing cold emailing, sending LinkedIn notes, going to events, you're helping make that gap become aware in a prospect's mind. Sometimes they're already aware of it and they just want to find vendors to solve it, but sometimes they're not. And so when you think about what you're doing, well, you're essentially some form of marketing, right?

Whether that marketing is like bottom of the funnel, like you're just trying a buyer already knows tools and is comparing them, and you just need to compare your benefits and say this is why we're better, or very, very top of the funnel where they don't even know about the problem yet, and you're trying to highlight, hey, you need this new system because of this. And they're like, Oh my gosh, I didn't even think of that, right? Yeah, that's the underlying principle. When we get into actual tactics behind what works and what doesn't, the biggest thing is running, and this is what we see like across all of the sales teams that we work with, because we essentially get like the inside view, and like we actually see a lot of their stats because we'll see their CRMs are connected to us.

Yeah. The best sales teams run sales and marketing in parallel. Most sales teams and marketing teams run in opposite directions or don't ever talk to each other. What we're seeing the best teams do, like like companies you know about, right?

Like ramps of the world, the signal computings of the world, these really fast growing companies that are exploding. Well, what they're doing is not some secret sauce, right? They identify some kind of universe of companies that they want to sell to. Because you want that buyer to become aware from the marketing, but then you want the sales team to have the more nuanced conversations that essentially elaborate on what that marketing says.

And so that's where we see the best kind of sales teams have alignment with their marketing teams. And then when you talk about for the sales aspect in particular, well, you have a handful of options to actually reach that buyer, right? You have cold email, right? You got to make sure your emails are actually getting through spam.

Yep. Cold calling, same thing, you gotta have good data. LinkedIn, right? You got to make sure your buyer is actually active on LinkedIn, events, letters, billboards.

I mean, you could do so many different ways, send a mariachi band to their office. There are so many different ways to actually get in front of a buyer, but most people only think of three, right? They think of those kind of first three I would mention cold calling, email, LinkedIn. Now, most times what we see is people pick one, right?

They pick cold calling. Oh, I'm a I'm a cold caller, and that's all they do, right? Yeah, the issue is is well, most people aren't gonna buy on your first cold call, right? Even if they pick up the phone and talk to you, maybe they become aware of the problem, they start stewing on it six months later, they're still kind of thinking about it.

Right. You have to nurture that account. So you have to go and say, hey, email, LinkedIn note, cold call, send them a letter, have your marketing team put ads on their Facebook, because that's how they warm up to the idea and that's how they become familiar and build trust. And so when we think about kind of outbound strategies for a sales team, I mean the gold standard today is multi-channel, right?

Where you're doing multiple of these different activities to reach the buyer, not just saying, hey, I'm gonna send 10,000 emails and call it a day, because I mean largely that doesn't really work anymore. And it's becoming increasingly hard. So that's where we think about, especially for teams who have expensive products, right? I'm not talking about below, like you know, B2B, like $20 a month type product.

That you can just go spray, call an email, and call it a day. Like it's essentially a marketing game. But if you have something that's substantial costs, like call it $20,000 and above, that's where you have to start to get strategic because you have multiple buyers, you have multiple decision makers, you have kind of a larger pitch to make, it's a more complex sale. That's where you talk about kind of multi-channel and hitting these accounts from different angles and building that trust and awareness.

And we've had companies that emailed us for six months and then cold called and LinkedIn. And then two months later down the line, I'm like, oh yeah, it is good timing. Like, great job. Like, I'm I'm in for it.

So that's how we think about actually building a good process is one alignment kind of between marketing and sales. So you warm up these accounts, but then even within kind of that sales function, not just doing the lazy thing, which is just spray out a bunch of emails that all look the same. Because the real answer and the the best way to think about it is like you and I both get cold calls all day, are we? Like we also probably get cold emails all day.

We also probably get cold LinkedIn notes all day. Which ones do we actually respond to? Probably almost none. Because they all look the same, they're all very low research, they have no compelling pitch.

Half of them don't even know what our business does, and we get pitched on something completely random. I'm like, really? Like, that's not gonna work. No, that's not so the bar is so low to do good outreach.

Yeah, that's where we see the best teams performing well. There's like do your homework, show up with a reason, actually stand out because no one else is doing that, right? Despite all the AI advancements, all this kind of stuff, no one's actually putting in the work to actually make good outbound, and that's where we really see kind of the best teams stand out and do well. Um honestly, you gave such a good breakdown on that entire process.

And I personally couldn't agree more because when I first got into business, you know, obviously you get a start understanding all the aspects and all the department, and it's like, okay, so I need to do business development. And for most companies, business development is less reach out to people one-on-one, you know, like emails or uh LinkedIn messages, you know, or call calls. But what I really started realizing, even for my own business, whenever I was getting clients, it was mainly because they saw me online.

I was doing my marketing, my personal brand. They were already warmed up to it. So when I did send a note, it was more just like, oh, hey, I've seen your post. I I never really engaged, but I like what you put out.

So yeah, let's have a chat. Um marketing. Exactly. Yeah.

And I started honestly realizing the same thing. Okay, this is not about me just outreaching. I have to do marketing first. And then when I outreach, it's way easier for that person to, I don't even need a yes.

I I can just have them tell me a no, but they're more inclined to tell me a no because they've seen me, they kind of know me. And you know, it's easier for them to say, Hey, RV, I like you, but no, thank you. And that's all I really need when it comes to my outreach and my sales side is a yes, maybe, or no, right? Because if it's a maybe, then I can reach out later on.

Yeah, but I think the other thing too that I think most people underestimate is how much your offer matters. Like, almost no one thinks about their offer and how compelling it is. Everyone just says, like, if I send messages, people will buy. But the answer is you actually have to have something people want.

And so the other, like, this is very like tactical and nuanced, like, if we go deep down in the kind of rabbit hole. The best performing kind of email, LinkedIn cold calling campaigns today are not based around the principle of like, I think what everyone's done for a while, which is like ask for 15, 30, 45 minutes, book a meeting, that kind of thing, right? Because a lot of SDRs are paid on booking a meeting, right? So they're they're incentivized to make that their ask.

Well, the best campaigns we actually see going out the door, the ones that get crazy results. Like we had a team open seven enterprise deals in two weeks, like the craziest example over email, like nuts. But what they were doing was very different. It's what you call a value-driven or a lead magnet type approach to cold email, where instead of asking for kind of 15 minutes, well, you offer them an audit, you offer them an analysis, you offer them a one-page or a case study, a kind of free version of your product, a sample run, whatever that may be, a very low friction kind of offer that you can give out.

And I think the simplest example is we actually bought a our like marketing video that's on our website from a guy in Nigeria, right? Crazy story. Like, awesome guy, his name's Paul, and his outreach to us is still one of the best I've ever gotten. Well, Paul did, he didn't have any fancy messaging, he didn't have any fancy name brand, right?

He had no customers when he first reached out to us, and now we blow up his visions, which is so cool to see. Uh Paul sent us a snippet of a potential video. He actually made a marketing video for our site without us asking and sent to me and said, Hey Jack, do you want the rest of this? I'm like, Yeah, this is awesome.

Like, yeah, I can see exactly where you're going. Can we do this, this, and this? He's like, Yeah, here, sign up. We'll give you like a huge discount for being our first customer.

That is still to this day the best outreach I've ever gotten because he basically did his job and removed all the risk from me actually working with him. Yeah. Yeah. I love that.

Um, I think my newest cringe when it comes to outreach for LinkedIn messages is would you like to compare notes? Oh, and it's like no tell me what it means. Yeah, exactly. I just imagine like two people with notes, it's like, what do you have?

Okay, I have this, and obviously that's not the case. I have my notebook here. It says I need to go grab uh food for dinner. Is that that what we want to talk about?

Is that yeah, yeah. So funny. But no, I I agree. Same thing with me.

It's like whenever people um upfront some sort of work or some sort of trial or you know, any any sort of form or shape, it it definitely makes it stand out. And I will say, I mean, uh it just comes down to I think what you talked about earlier as well, as just trust. Um, I think we've turned from a product type of marketing to a trust type of marketing and obviously proof and credibility because there is a, I mean, it is what it is, there's a ton of competition out there. So product-wise, you may have very little differentiation from your main competitors, or especially if they're big companies and they see what you're doing, they might replicate that or a form of it.

So, how do you stand out? Is like, do I like Jack? Yeah, I like Jack. I think he I he's worth having a conversation.

Does he have a product that fits me at that point? Yeah, I think so. Yeah, let's move on and uh move forward. Uh, but I think trust is also a huge aspect and component of nowadays, you know, selling um, you know, when it comes to sales in general.

Yeah, and I think there's no better way to build trust than give value. That's the biggest thing. Most people just ask for stuff in their outreach, and then there's no value, right? There's no trust built.

But if you spend time to educate and work through things before you ask something of someone, that's when you build trust, right? That's love that I have a fun question for you. If you were advising a VP of sales right now that's building their top of funnel strategy from scratch today, where would you tell them to start? Yeah, I would say, and this is gonna be weird coming from a guy who sells sales tools, it has nothing to do with your sales tooling.

And this is the biggest driver of outpound success, hands down, right? You could have terrible contact data, you could be sending emails into spam. Like the biggest driver is having a great offer, right? That not only comes down to what that VP of sales can do, it comes down to product, it comes down to marketing, it comes down to even business decisions and how that business is kind of created and what that business model looks like.

Everything needs to be packaged into a great offer. And for us, like, well, we make a great offer because all of our competitors try to lock you into an annual or two or three-year deal. Whereas I can go out and say, hey, all of our contracts are month to month, cancel any time. Like if you hate our data, nowhere easy to spend 50 grand on it.

That alone, I mean, wins us so many deals. Right. So, how do you think about what is that comparison for your business? Right, how can you set yourself apart from everyone else who's offering the same thing?

Because I think there's a great example that many VPS sales will be familiar with is these kind of cold email outbound agencies. Everyone makes the same picture. Oh my gosh, yes. I want to do 10 to 20 qualified meetings for no cost, and you've probably seen that, and you're laughing because you've probably seen it 15 or 20 times right this month alone.

I was just gonna say this month alone. Literally. And so it's how do you stand out from what everyone else is doing? Whether that's, you know, obviously the agency example is kind of funny, but applies to enterprise sales too, right?

You're selling SOC too. Well, what is your unique angle that makes your offer way better than everyone else's, right? Is it time to value? Is it the easy use?

Is it low implementation cost? Whatever that looks like, you need to figure out what that is, and then that becomes the foundation of your outreach strategy is communicating that offer, then you layer on top of all the other strategies we were talking about with like the right tooling and timing and signals and lead magnets and all that kind of stuff becomes built on top of that foundation of what is your kind of core offer value prompt, that kind of thing. Yeah, that's so good.

Okay, I actually was part of a leadership group where um it was like a leadership class and they were talking about how to pitch your product, right? Whenever you would let's just say you're starting from scratch, the first thing obviously you need the product or the service, whatever it is that you're selling, then you need the offer, and then you need marketing, and then you need sales, and not the other way around, like sales and then marketing. Because at the end of the day, if I'm selling something, and actually this happened to me a couple of weeks ago, somebody was um cold emailed me and I was like, you know what, this is actually interesting.

So I replied and I was like, Yep, I'm interested. And his reply was, Well, here's a link to pay for it. Let me know when it's done. And I was like, Okay, I was like, Can I see your LinkedIn or something or a company page?

And he's like, No, I don't really uh go on LinkedIn a lot. So, and I was like, Okay, how about a phone call? At this point, I was just like, What does this guy have? And he's like, No, I don't really jump on phone calls, and I was like, Okay, like, you know, like you don't have the marking yeah, you don't have a brand and you don't have a marking for something tangible for me to look at.

So then, you know, the sale never happened. Um, and then I got hit with like 20 emails in the span in the next like two to three days, and I was like, Well, clearly this was some sort of spam. Um, so the marketing is huge nowadays, and it obviously know comes down to the trust and the credibility. Yeah, but I I agree, yeah.

The offer is also super important. And honestly, for me, you tell me yourself too, but like when I buy my software or something that I'm looking at, I really, really I'm not gonna use hate, but I really, really dislike contracts. So, whenever like they try to sell me into a contract, I'm like, hey, I'll pay the premium pricing for like the first two or three months. Let me take a look at it, then we'll think about it, even like signing up for a contract.

Because I think yeah, but also the other side to it on a buyer's percept perspective, the market is changing so much and so fast. So, how do I know that the same product you're selling me today can still serve me six to nine months to two years from now, right? And now I'm just locked in for three years. Yeah, um, so that's at least my perspective.

Maybe don't listen to me if you're selling you know long-term contracts. I think it's great. I think, well, everyone's so used to like, I think what's happening is like everyone who's now in the workforce is like used to Amazon, right? They're used to just buy something online really quick, no low effort, right?

But enterprise sales is the exact opposite of that. It's high friction, lots of calls, long implementations, contracts, lock-ins, agreements. It's literally the exact opposite of what everyone's used to day to day. So I think we're seeing more and more companies heading in the direction of like getting PLG, self-serve onboarding, low cost trials, like pilots, that kind of stuff is becoming more and more popular.

Um, all the way to just like pure software plays, which is like where we've gone is like, yeah, we used to have contracts and we used to sell big deals, and now we're just like, well, that was fine, but like you can make a way better business. Yeah, it's a you can make a way better business if you just let people buy on their own, like let them try it out, make it low effort, like little commitment. So that's what we've done. It's obviously seems to have worked pretty well.

Uh but more and more companies seem to be doing it. And I will say for enterprise sales, obviously, my advice doesn't always apply either. Um, like you said, it is way more friction. So these companies do a ton more of due diligence up front than me buying like a $50, you know, CRM.

Um, but yeah, I I agree that also those types of sales cycles now will probably have to adapt slightly, maybe not, you know, go month to month because that probably wouldn't make sense for them. But um, there probably has to be some sort of adaptation as well. Yeah, there is an adaptation, but I mean a lot of those will probably still be contracts just because like yeah the implementations to get an enterprise actual product to work in like a true enterprise, yeah, it doesn't make sense to sell a month to month contract and spend three months of that implementing because people will cancel that.

Right, right. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, there are there are things changing. Pilots and that kind of thing are becoming much more common.

For sure. Awesome. Well, we're arrived at our rapid fire questions. Um, these are Rapid fire questions, but they don't have to be short answers.

Um, what is the one tool you cannot live without right now? I can't live without condo, it is amazing. So it's have you heard of it? I don't think I've heard of that.

No, I was thinking, what is what is it? LinkedIn inbox on steroids is really amazing. Yeah. So Mitchell is the founder of it, really nice guy.

And you, I mean, I'm sure you've been in a LinkedIn Inbox, like for recruiting and stuff like that. Oh my god, it's terrible. It's like so. Is it with a K condo or yeah?

K-O-N-D-O condo. Okay. Like Marie Kondo, like that Netflix show. Yeah, exactly the same thing.

I love that you referenced her. It's it's amazing. Like it makes my inbox feel like she was just in there. It's it cleans everything up, it organizes it, you can tag it, it's super fast, and it's like 20 bucks a month.

It's amazing. That's actually pretty cool because I do know that my LinkedIn messages can get wild sometimes, and I just always try to like keep them unread so that I don't forget to respond because you just get lost very fast. Um, so that's something I definitely have to look into. What is the uh biggest growth lever for SaaS for you in 2026?

We are going pretty heavily into partnerships. So now that we've spent a lot of time building this brand and the marketing behind it, more and more of our business is actually coming from word of mouth. So, how do we nurture those relationships and foster word of mouth to actually spread the product? Um, so we're spending a lot of time building relationships with partners, people who we think are really smart, who can implement it well, and that seems to have kind of worked really well.

I mean, I just love work with these guys, they're so so smart at what they do. Um, and so it's been cool. Yeah, definitely word of mouth is uh very powerful nowadays if you can figure out a way to replicate that as much as possible. A warm intro is worth 10 times, you know, a cold outreach for sure.

So I love that. Um, what is one belief that you have that most people would disagree with? You should basically do the opposite of what everyone else is doing almost at any given time. Yeah, so good.

Because then you're just doing your own thing and not following the mass. Yeah, you should be probably questioning what you're doing more often than you are. And it's it's obviously work for our LinkedIn strategy, it's worked for our business, like everything we just applied it to. And like, yeah, sometimes it doesn't work out, and sometimes like everyone is right, but usually most people aren't right, uh, or at least the majority of people are common advice isn't usually super helpful uh beyond just doing the basics.

Love that. I forgot to mention it, but I'll say it here live. I um I think it was about a week ago or something, you posted something, and I was like, oh, that is such a good post and like the framework. So I copied the framework and I used it on my own post, and it did it really good.

I'm not gonna say, you know, I went like super viral or anything, but to me, I don't measure it by impressions, I mainly measure it by like, okay, did it drive profile views or followers or you know, the right audience? And I was like, all right, all right, I'm gonna have to copy Jack a little bit more. Feel free. It's fun.

It's very fun. Yeah. Oh, love that. Okay, I want to switch a little bit on to the hiring side of things.

Um, I know that you've recently had some posts about like AI and hiring. I'd love your take on like how is that changing, you know, what's your opinion overall with AI hiring? How do you potentially evaluate people for your own team when it comes to that? Um, just in general.

Yeah, I think the biggest thing for us, and I'll say, like, not a ton of experience here, at least for our company, because we've actually, I mean, this is probably this, you know, the real meat of the conversation, is we've been able to do a lot more than I thought we would have been able to do to get to where we are. And we still only have two people, one of them being myself. That's it. Like managing customer support, managing onboardings, managing a hundred plus demos a month, managing integration of the large sales tools with just two people, which is yeah, basically unheard of call it even like two years ago.

And so I think that's that is the biggest maybe not worry I have, but like the biggest thing most people should probably be aware of is like that's the reality of the situation, is like well, we can systematize, automate, simplify our business down so much that we're able to do probably what a team of 10 did call 10 years ago. And so that's where we see a lot of the kind of impact of hiring and how we're thinking about actually who are our next hires, and really our game plan is like end stage of our business is probably like bring on one or two more people and that's it, and just run very, very lean, very close.

Yeah, yeah. And I love that the AI can do that because I do agree that I mean it does, don't get me wrong, suck for everybody that's you know looking for a job right now, and it is a really tough market, however, you yeah, so hard. Um, you do have to to figure out how to create value outside of what you've done in the past, right? So, like a lot of people that I see that have a lot of or at least a hard time finding a position is because they're like, Well, that's what I used to do as a sales engineer, so you know that's what I'm looking for.

And I'm like, that's great, but companies are looking for something like that, plus, you know, one, two, three, four, five, because AI enables you to do that. Um, so I think that also on the other hand, a lot of people that are having a rough time is also because they're not adapting quickly or you know, implementing extra skill set on themselves. And I made a post about this a while ago, and I just speak from a sales engineering perspective because it's mainly my niche, but it's a lot of companies are acquiring more technical skill set, plus being a really good, you know, communicator and self-skill set person.

It's kind of like impossible to not learn that right now with what's out there with you know Claude or Chat GPT or all these coding tools that help you so much. Because it's I mean, it's how you can differentiate yourself. So, and then obviously you have companies like yourself that I believe that the moment that you are looking to hire, you're gonna look for somebody that can do a lot of things at once, kind of like a jack of all trades that can be willing to implement with AI or you know, do to three, do two to three types of responsibilities under one person.

And it's I feel like where the direction is heading. So those specialty, like, oh, sales engineering is just you know, my four responsibilities is just not gonna work anymore. Yeah, I think the hardest part about it, because it is really sad, and it's it's one of those challenges, I think is something I worry about a lot. But there is so much opportunity now.

Like there is as much as there's also been a lot of pain and like it's become very hard to find a job, and like even call it two years ago, like I was looking for jobs and like couldn't find anything. Like, it took me hundreds of applications to get one job, and uh I think the biggest thing is like there's so much pain, but there's also so much opportunity. Like, if you even if we talk just in the sales space, like a sales engineer who spent their time kind of building deep product expertise, how things work, building customer experiences.

Well, that position has the same skill sets as what you'd call like a good market engineer today, and that is in one of the highest demand positions right now that no one can fill, and they pay awesome, right? So you may think of yourself as a sales engineer, but you really have the same skill sets, and then you need to learn one or two more things to be a good market engineer. But there's always opportunity out there, it's just a matter of like, well, where do you look? Right, and you can't be so rigid in like this is the only thing I do, because obviously then you're limiting yourself.

But you know, as much as there's a lot of pain, there's also never been more opportunity if you are driven and can learn quickly to adapt and actually probably end up in a better position than you were called a year or two ago. Yeah. And I think one more thing to that is like a really big advantage that these people also have right now is that there is no true expert in AI or in you know the new roles that are coming out. So a lot of companies are okay with getting transferable skill set into this role because again, it's kind of like brand new, like what to two years?

So companies cannot require five plus years of experience because it's very rare to find that person. Um, so that is a huge advantage that a lot of candidates have right now, to where they say, Hey, here's what I've done the last you know two months that I haven't had a role. I've done this personal project, this personal project, that just shows initiative. And even if you don't have the exact skill set that I need you to have, that transferable skill set or the hunger is also huge for me as a business owner perspective, or of course, you know, hiring manager as well.

Yeah, 100%. I think the biggest thing, because like we get asked all the time, like by people who are looking for roles, is like again, it's kind of the same principles we were talking about with the help bound. It's like figure out a way to stand out. Like everyone is asking for a job.

Well, what is your unique way? Like I was reading a post on LinkedIn the other day from a BDR manager who put out a role, and he's like, I got 600 LinkedIn requests, I got 34 messages, I got two calls, and I got zero voicemails. That's it, right? Yeah, the bar is literally so low.

Just figure out how to call that guy, send him a letter, whatever you're gonna do, send them an email, a LinkedIn, all of it. Do all of it. But if you really want to win, you got to figure out what everyone else is doing, and then do way more than what they're doing. That's I mean, that's I think that goes for life.

I mean, I'm also just way super type A, and maybe that's a test too. But uh that's I've seen people really stand out with that. Like that is a great way to get a job or get a role in place particularly you really want to work at. It's so funny.

It as a recruiter, which I see this a lot, I'm still, you know, talking to people, or if I'm talking to somebody that doesn't have a job right now or they're looking for it, I try to give as much as advice as possible because I also feel bad, you know, and if I can help in any way, I'm more than willing to do so. But my advice has not changed. I mean, it's crazy, like stupid, simple fundamentals. I'm like, hey, send a thank you note after the call, send a thank you note before the call that I'm meeting you.

That's really what it takes, and they don't believe it, so they don't do it, and then you end up with what you just said. It's like, oh, LinkedIn, you know, uh messages and invites. So for anybody listening, the fundamentals are still the most important things on how you stand out nowadays. And as Jack said, that example, I mean, it's still a very low bar.

I know it sounds crazy to think that it's probably not, but I promise you, 90% of people are still not sending thank you notes after a call or a recap or hey, here's what I learned from your call, and that was so exciting, blah, blah, blah. Yeah, so it's so low. Like when even when I was like my nine to five, like I was hiring people, and I mean, I got one thank you note after an interview. And not that I really care, but like I for sure remember that person, right?

And they got the job, right? But it's a way how do you stand out? Because there are people like recruiters are people too, and hiring managers are people too. They have all the other crap going on in their life, and they are not going to remember some 15-minute conversation with you that well unless you made a very good impression.

So you want to stay top of mind, right? Send them a thank you, right? All these little things to keep yourself top of mind, keep yourself showing as you're hungry and you really want it, because lightly they'll just forget. Like, I mean, I could not remember half the people we hired, but I definitely remember that one person.

Um, that's that's the other thing, too, just like realize that the person on the other end of the phone is has a life and they're not here to solely remember every single word you say. Yeah. I'll I'll say I'll share two more tips that happened recently with me. Um, we uh we're helping obviously a hiring manager hire for a world right now, and one of the candidates asks me, should I send a, you know, like, hey, excited to meet you type email.

And I was like, Yeah, absolutely you should. Um, so she sends an email, she ceases me on it, and the hiring manager responds back to just me and says, I can't believe this. I've never received an excited think like to meet you type email. And I was like, What?

That's insane. And this person has built and sold two companies. And I was like, that's crazy to think that literally the bar is so low. And a fun tip to remember uh on how to stand out when you're on a call with hiring managers or whatever recruiter or somebody that you might be looking to get a job from is make them laugh.

Um, it's very underestimated how much people can remember, but you by you making them laugh because they feel good, they have their emotion towards you. Um, so making people laugh is also a really underrated tip. Now, don't go crazy, you know, but or maybe go crazy. But yeah, yeah, I guess it depends on the desperation.

Yeah, like literally just have fun. Like those are normal people, they want to get on a call and have fun. So show up excited. Like that's exactly it goes for sales, it goes for everything.

Like if you show up with good energy, people want to match it, then they laugh and you can have a good time and they enjoy that because they remember the feeling more than anything else. They like you and trust you. Absolutely. Yeah.

Um, well, I think it's a great way to end the episode. Thank you so much for coming on, Jack, and being super transparent. I know we dove really deep into some technical aspects and value. Um, so I do appreciate sharing your insight.

If anybody's listening to this now and did not turn on their note taker, or you know, if you're still a pen and paper type of person, make sure you go back and listen to this because there's a lot of things you can implement right now. And Jack, where can they find you? How can people reach out to you if they want to connect with you? Yeah, so you can either go to my LinkedIn, which is Jack Porter.

Uh, you'll see a big photo of me uh on an orange background. Feel free to do it. I believe it has a black and white whale type emoji, right? Or just a whale in general.

You look for the easy whale. Um but yeah, that's I'm always on there, so shoot me a note. It's actually me who responds, not some AI bot. Um so no kidding.

No, I'm kidding. It's crazy. It's Michael Crazy people still exist. Awesome.

Well, thank you again. See you guys on the next episode. Thank you, R.