Ep. 7: Mastering Top-of-Funnel with Alex Vacca

Anis Bennaceur (00:01.879)
Great. Ladies and gentlemen, very excited to introduce you to Alex Vaca, the co -founder of ColdIQ and growth expert over here. Alex, it's a pleasure to have you.

Alex (00:16.846)
Thanks a lot for the invite and it's really appreciated.

Anis Bennaceur (00:20.727)
Absolutely, absolutely. So Alex, would love for you to first of all, introduce yourself to our audience and then maybe answer this question that I love to start with, which is, what are the three pivotal moments in your career that got you to where you are and who you are today?

Alex (00:44.109)
Sounds good. Cool. Then for the quick intro, I'm a COO at ColdIQ. So to give it like a brief summary of what we do, we started as a website, we were just comparing all the best sales software on the market. And then due to all the SEO traffic we got, we started to receive more and more inbound requests from companies that needed help with either tool implementation or outbound services. So we kind of like spin off an agency.

out of it early 2023. And now we want ColdIQ to be the go -to place for everything GTM related. So we also created the ColdIQ Accelerator where we teach participants how to leverage the best sales tech tools to improve their sales process. Then for your question, three pivotal moments in my career. I would say the first one was moving to Berlin.

just after I graduated when I was 22. I'm originally from Brussels in Belgium. And then a taxi is pretty small. So when I graduated from my business school, I had the option between Paris, Berlin and London decided on Berlin. And I think working for a lot of very hyper growth startup taught me a lot. Cause I think everyone, when you're really young, everyone want to be an entrepreneur sounds really cool.

but I think there is still a lot of things that you need to learn in your early twenties. So I'm very thankful of like all the experience I had in bigger companies. So that would be the first one. Second one I would say is one of the most important discussion of my life was the one I had with Michel, my co -founder. So when I was still working at Worldcoin, one time he gave me like a pretty strong pep talk because we've been friends for almost 10 years now. And at that time I was like,

very happy in my job, but I was also 27, kind of like having the nudge of entrepreneurship started to get like bigger and bigger. And then Mish one time called me and he, he mentioned that he always saw me as like the biggest potential competitor to him in terms of like the size of the business we could each build. And then he told me, if you stay an employee, you will never be a competitor of mine. So what are you waiting for? Like, come on, like leave your job. It's time to do something. Like if we don't do it now, we will never do it.

Alex (03:01.998)
And so I left my job thinking I would start like my own business. But then after having like multiple discussions with Mish, we ended up deciding to work together. So I joined him at the time we already had three clients and then yeah, the rest is history. So now we grew to a team of 13 people full time in less than a year and a half and still growing. And then maybe the third one, which I think is quite interesting is that when I joined Mish,

Both of us wanted to go through the good, the entrepreneurship routes because we wanted a lot of freedom. Never wanted to have like a manager above us. We always wanted to be able to work from anywhere like on our own schedule. And at some point we had the discussion where we had to decide, do we want to make it a lifestyle business or do we want to build a real company? And I remember that that was like a real like pivotal moment in the, in the business where we're like.

living in Bali, having a very comfy life. We had, I think, five clients. We were already making decent money. We were living really well. And then we just started to receive more and more inbound. And we were like, OK, now if we want to keep accepting new clients, we actually need to hire people. We really need to build a process. We need to build operations. We really need to make it a real company. And then I think both of us kind of be like, OK, living in Bali is great. But come on, we should really go and aim for higher.

And that's how we decided to go for it and try to make it the biggest business possible.

Anis Bennaceur (04:36.695)
What were the main traits that you think Mish, your co -founder, had that you thought were missing in you and why did you decide to be his co -founder?

Alex (04:48.814)
Yes, I think it's probably one of the main reasons why businesses are failing is kind of disagreement between co -founders. And it's usually come from a lack of matching personality, but also in terms of skills. And I think why me and Mish have been working so well together is that we have two archetypes that I feel are very important in the success of our business. I think that's the two most important. One, you need someone that's kind of the visionary, and then you need someone that's what I call the firefighter.

The visionary is someone that can really think about the future of the business. It's like, okay, we have the business today, but what do we need to do in like three months, six months, 12 months? And I think Mish really has that kind of like sparks of genius sometimes where he's just like, he has an amazing idea. And then for him to have the mental space to do this, you also need someone that can manage the business how it is today and just like fix problems because managing a business is just solving problem after problem. And I think.

I'm very well organized and I'm a really good operation guy. And so the way we split the business between us two is that mission is to be left alone. Like it doesn't need to be like interrupted with like client meeting and like sales meeting. It's like, it just needs to be left alone to have enough mental space to think about what's to come and where do we go? And I'm managing the business how it is today. Like whenever there is like a really big fire like arising in the, in the company.

I go in and I fix it. And I think I see it with a lot of our friends that are also managing like other agencies that also in the urban space. It's very difficult to do both roles alone. Like we see it a lot with like solo founders. It's very difficult to be both the visionary and the firefighter at the same time. Because I think if you just kind of like play catch up and try to fix problem after problem during the day, it leaves you very little mental space to think ahead and kind of see the big picture.

Anis Bennaceur (06:40.31)
That makes a ton of sense, but how are you organized today to take basically all the learnings from customers, what customers are saying, and bridge the gap with the big picture strategy that Mish is having?

Alex (06:56.782)
Having one big decision that we took in the business was also that starting an agency is great because you don't need any funding. Like it's very easy to bootstrap an agency. But then once you start growing the business, it's also becoming very difficult to scale without hiring headcounts. And so two months ago, we ended up deciding that we should keep growing the agency like linearly.

But then we should also think about new revenue stream that would be much more scalable. And so for example, that was the idea of Mish to kind of like think about having also a done with you program and not only a done for you service. And so that's why we decided to launch the accelerator where we could kind of like gather all the learnings, all the insights that we are getting at the agency and try to distill it to make it like the best program possible to teach people that might not have the budget to become clients of ours or that also want to keep it internal.

And us sharing all the insights that we learn in the agencies, packaged it really well and just teaching the participants of our accelerator program, like all the best tricks and insights to run the most successful outbound campaigns.

Anis Bennaceur (08:05.463)
I love that. So out of all the learnings, all the insights that you're getting and you're teaching other people, a lot of these are, you know, kind of like hidden secrets about the world, right? My question to you is what is, you know, a hidden secret? What's an opinion overall? You know, it could be about outbound, just anything in general that you strongly believe that most people might disagree with today.

Alex (08:29.806)
A big one that I love to repeat is that personalization is very trendy at the moment. When you're just browsing LinkedIn, everyone is always raving about, yeah, you should personalize and use AI to personalize your emails. And now with Claire, you can do crazy personalization where you can find so many data points about someone that you can do crazy personalized email. And I think that sometimes people are losing the big picture that relevance should always be placed higher than personalization.

A lot of people are trying to do the most complex, clear workflows and with a lot of different data sources, writing crazy copy. But at the end of the day, if you have a bad offer and if your offer is not relevant, you could add 20 personalization points. You still won't get any positive answer out of your outreach. So I would say relevance above personalization. And the second one is that everyone hates volume and everyone is saying, yeah, spray and pray is the old way. You shouldn't...

blast emails and they also tend to disagree that like in most cases volume is the answer with email. Like in today's world in 2024, if you want to get results with outbound, you need to send a lot of emails. And I think people are trying to kind of show that with very personalized and like with like very data rich outreach, you can get like great results. But I think that at the end of the day, now when you look at the ratio, the golden ratio when you do outbound is

amounts of leads contacted per positive answer. Typically, you're like above 300. You need to contact more than 300 leads to get a positive answer. So you can directly imagine the amount of people you need to contact per month. If you really want to book a lot of meetings through your outreach, volume needs to be like enormous.

Anis Bennaceur (10:17.943)
So how do you thread the needle between extremely high volume but also maintaining good deliverability and open percentages?

Alex (10:29.326)
Yeah, so deliverability is a tough one because the rules are changing very often. There is a lot of regulations coming from Google and Microsoft where most B2B businesses have to email addresses either with Microsoft or Google. So whenever there is new regulation, it makes it very difficult. Right now, the rule of the game is just to keep the daily sending rates really low.

And another one is to also not share the IP address between the different domains that you purchase. So typically when people set up email infrastructure, they might put 10 domains under the same Google workspace, for example. And that's very dangerous because if you burn one of your domain, all the domains sharing the same IP will be burned too. And so now what we do is that we set up domains by hand.

where we are just going to buy one domain, set up two mailboxes, and we are going to rotate the IP. So each domain is going to have a different IP address. And I think that helps a lot with deliverability. And you kind of minimize the risk of contagion that all your domains are just burned at the same time.

Anis Bennaceur (11:36.279)
That makes a ton of sense. And generally, when you warm up and you domain, how long do you make it warm up for? What are the best practices that you see there before deciding to start outbounding?

Alex (11:49.07)
Yeah, so it's two weeks of warmup. Ideally, if you can afford it, I would even recommend three weeks. What you want to do is ramp up the amount of warmup email that you send. So you don't want to send 40 emails on the day that you create the mailbox. So ideally, you want to ramp it up five emails per day. So you start with five, going until 40. And then you want to have a reply rate of 40%. That's typically the...

Yeah, the settings we're using for the warm up when we set it up for clients.

Anis Bennaceur (12:20.535)
Is there a great emailing tool that you want to shout out that you love using specifically for deliverability but also a lot of other use cases?

Alex (12:32.974)
At the end of the day, the best thing you can do is set it up yourself. Like it takes a lot of time because you need to create like by the domain, setting up the mailboxes, setting up the DNS records. But then you can really do a great job at separating all the different domains with like a very specific IP. But what I really like, what I've seen like two weeks ago, instantly released a new product feature inside of the product where to take care of email infrastructure for you. And I think that kind of...

Dictating what the market is gonna do. I think all those email sequencers all those outreach tool are probably gonna imitate them Because it's a real pain for the end users like most people are not deliverability experts It's kind of like a massive black box people have no idea what they need to do to read a lot of different things like when we get like Prospect on a call that I just saw over one because it's like they read one thing there and then this for YouTube video and then this or something else in the newsletter So people are very confused. So I think inside of the products

like letting the users not having to worry about deliverability and email infrastructure. I think it's a massive win and I think a lot of tools are going to imitate what Instantly did.

Anis Bennaceur (13:42.455)
Yeah, 100%. If you go from 80 % deliverability to 40%, then inevitably your response rates are going to get divided by two, and your revenue is going to get divided by two as simple as that. And so we're seeing a lot of tools pop up today, or platforms pop up with AISDRs, right? I'd love to know what your thoughts on these are.

Alex (14:10.35)
I think the idea is great, but I think the technology is not there yet. It might come in the maybe coming months, years, I don't know, but what I see right now in the market is that what works best is leveraging AI for some snippets inside of an email. So what we do a lot internally when we do outbound for clients is that we're still going to have professional copywriters that are going to write the sequence. And then we're going to have AI variables inserted in the emails.

The idea is that we want to use AI to personalize, but only some parts of the email. We don't want to have an email that's fully generated by AI. And that's what those AI SDRs are doing, is that they're kind of creating entire sequence that are fully AI written. And I think the prospect can probably see it. And I think it can reduce the perceived value of your product and service, because it looks a bit cheap that AI wrote the entire email. So what we do right now is just

leveraging AI for some specific part. If we need to summarize something, like if we need to use some data points, we're going to use AI to write maybe a few words, between six and 12 words at different spaces in the email, but we will never use AI to write an entire email.

Anis Bennaceur (15:25.975)
Have you ever had a case when basically the AI variable will not match the actual sense of the sentence that it's placed in?

Alex (15:35.566)
The great thing inside of KLEI is that you can set up some guardrails to make sure that the final output is going to match. You can use some conditional formulas. You can play with a lot of formulas. For example, you can only push the AI written parts only if it starts by that letter and ends with a bullet point, for example. You can use AI to check the output of the AI to make sure that you only send

like the desired outputs in your email.

Anis Bennaceur (16:08.951)
Yeah, I love that part actually. And you set up all the examples and everything. It just makes everything work very smoothly. It is a real skill set to have though, in my opinion, and very few people really master that, right? That being said, so, you know, with so much automation being available in Outbound today and likely more coming in the short term,

What do you think are the most irreplaceable human tasks or skills in the outbound workflow?

Alex (16:42.83)
In the outbound workflows, I think the strategy, you need to have a really good business acumen. I think first you need to really understand what is a good offer, what should you actually push, what should be the messaging that you use. That's a very important one. But if we look at sales from more sales as an industry, I think there's going to be two main paths that people working in sales can take. Either you can really specialize in a much more technical role,

you see a lot of like a GTM engineer, sales development operator. So people that have like a very good technical expertise that understand API, understand web hook that can connect different data sources. That's going to be one carry part. And I think the other one is just the OG salesperson that close deals. Cause at the end of the day, you can have like the best urban workflows. You generate opportunities, but you still need to close those opportunities. So I think that right now,

there is like two parts, it's either you specialize in like becoming what was an old account executive doing, so just taking a lot of meetings and being really good at closing those deals, or you try to become much more technical and you try to generate the outputs of like a team of 10 SDR just because you master so many tools that you can really have the impact of what an entire team was doing before.

Anis Bennaceur (18:05.815)
I love that. So, you know, looking into the overall space, you have a lot of top of funnel platforms that are getting more and more technical. But then when it comes to actual sales and just old school sales, your typical account executive talking to customers and selling, it does seem like there is a massive opportunity and workflow creation from not at the lead level, but the opportunity level. Are you seeing any any

improvements in that part of the stack? Are you seeing any innovations that you hadn't thought of before or thought of and are finally seeing come out? Just curious.

Alex (18:49.678)
I mean, we use Attention at ColdIQ, so I'm going to drop a little shout out here, but I think that's exactly what Attention is doing. At the end of the day, all the annoying tasks that an account executive had to do, maintaining your CRM, inputting all the information, summarizing the sales call, all those things, I think that technology can help there. Now, with all the tools available, the AE should spend almost 90 % of his offer time.

on sales call, like now all the rest can pretty much be done through technology. So again, it's like either you go for like the very technical road, but as an AE, you should almost spend all of your time in sales calls because now with the right tools, all the tasks that used to take a lot of your time shouldn't take more than 10 % of your working time.

Anis Bennaceur (19:41.623)
I absolutely agree for Waysworth. So what do you think about some people saying that in some near distant future, an AI could even replace the account executive? Do you think that's possible? Do you think you can have an AI agent talk on a Zoom call and replace an AE? Or do you think companies will still want their human AEs to handle that part of the process?

Alex (20:10.862)
At the end of the day, I think that people buy from people, right? It's not a company buying from a company. And so when you want to close deals, when it's like for a certain amount of money, once you start to go in like high four figures, people still want to talk to someone. They want to like build the trust. They want to get sure that like, they're going to have the guarantees that are not going to be deceived. Like they want to see the face of the person that's trying to sell to them. And that part would be very...

a surprise if AI is one day replacing the AI role. One thing that I can really foresee coming is that everything that precedes an actual sales call between two humans is that we're going to arrive in a world where one AI is going to talk to another AI. All the qualification process, I could really see that, for example, if you look for a specific use case from a product, you could literally use...

one AI that's been trained with companies data to go look at all the different providers, letting the AI assess which one would be the most fitting solution. And then only then taking a meeting with that company that's selling the product. And so a lot of the research, a lot of the vetting could be done by AI, but I think that the deal closing, it's still gonna be done by humans.

Anis Bennaceur (21:27.543)
That's really, that's fascinating. Have you seen any platforms or any tools doing that today? The whole bedding. No.

Alex (21:32.91)
Not yet. But I don't think it's going to take that long before it happens. I think those AI agents are just getting better and better. So it's not a matter of years. I think it's a matter of months.

Anis Bennaceur (21:46.935)
Yeah, 100%. Do you think because companies' websites are so different from one another and you need to use the right either scrapers or specific endpoints to capture the information that you need, right? Do you think that's where some specific platforms either like G2, TrustRadius, or who knows, ColdIQ maybe if you guys roll this out could have

a piece to play in. Have you guys thought about this? Yeah.

Alex (22:18.51)
That's really the goal for us. We really want to make it like the best place where people can come per sale software. So we're going to roll out soon individual page per tool. And there we want to make it like as information dense as possible. Like we want to have like example of workflows, having like sales tech expert, like building live workflows using the tool, having reviews, people kind of sharing the experience using the tool.

Also mentioning some people have been using the tool for a long time. So if you want to reach out to get the opinion, you could also reach out to them. So we would really want to facilitate that process that we would just have different categories, let's say five, 10, 15 tools that belong to that category and make it very easy for those like AI scraper to almost get all the information, summarize it and make it very easy for sales team to select the right tool for them.

Anis Bennaceur (23:10.935)
I love that. There's definitely a ton to do there. If someone could upload, let's say, their API documentation, their actual product FAQ, and on top of that layer, all of the customer testimonials and reviews and so on, an AI could very easily digest that. I think there are still ways you can trick

the game and get ahead of other people if you're smart about it. But I definitely think that this would create a ton of efficiency for any buyer instead of having to review either the same two old school types of players without necessarily looking at the new ones or even have sometimes a crowded category where you have 15 different companies and you have no idea who to choose from.

Alex (24:06.382)
That's a massive pinpoint in the market at the moment. I think it's like companies are getting so overwhelmed. Like it used to be five, six years ago, like for any sales tool category, you might have like two, three competitors you had to choose from. And I think now when we get prospect on sales call, they're just completely lost, completely overwhelmed by the amount of tools like on CallDiq right now. I think we have 750 tools that you can choose from. Like for some companies that used to buy

HubSpot for CRM and Outreach to send emails is just getting so confusing. Also with a lot of content being shown on LinkedIn, they're just kind of like constantly thinking that I'm missing out to see like new posts about clay, about attention, like and better contact and waterfall enrichment. And there is all those new terms, all those new categories that are appearing out of nowhere. And that makes it very difficult to follow for the buyer.

So I think having that information displayed that can then be summarized by AI, where like a company could simply write what they're looking for, what the budget, and letting the AI do kind of like all the vetting and all the research, I think that would be like a really big solution that the market is waiting for.

Anis Bennaceur (25:17.815)
I love that. I know that on your website, you have all these different categories, right? How did you come up with those? How do you just overall view the entire go -to -market stack, you are to break it down in the most updated and accurate way today, given how the world is evolving?

Alex (25:33.006)
you

Alex (25:44.494)
Yeah, for the categories is when we start to see multiple tools that try to solve the same pain points, then it usually indicate that it might make sense for us to create a new category. For the right tool stack, that's like the $1 million question, right? It's so dependent on so many factors, but for like a small companies, I would say that you can pretty much start with a CRM, a note -reach tool, and now with clay.

you can get all the best data source centralized in one single tool. And I think that's why CLEI has been so revolutionary, is that before companies had to purchase so many subscriptions, and now if they hesitate, they don't really know what they need, simply get a CLEI subscription. And then when you face the need of having to enrich your data with a specific data source, you can just spend your CLEI credit, test it out, see if you like it, and then...

If it's a solution that makes sense for you long term, you can simply subscribe to the tool and then use your API key inside of KLEI. So I think KLEI is an amazing way to discover software almost.

Anis Bennaceur (26:48.727)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. They have over 75 different API connectors and providers that you can just test for for accuracy and so on. So, staying on how crowded things are today in this space, what are your recommendations?

on best practices for how companies can stand out in the crowded outbound world today, right? Just going back into the outbound set of things and sending out emails, making sure that people open your emails, read them and respond. What do you think would work best?

Alex (27:34.606)
I think the outbound world is changing really fast and I think that pure cold outbound is going down really fast. Like I think you see that a lot with sales team that are a bit wondering like, hey, I used to send X amount of emails and I was booking X amount of meetings. This doesn't hold true anymore. Same for cold calling. I used to be able to call and book meetings. That doesn't really work. I think that people are so overwhelmed by the amount of outreach that are getting that pure cold outbound.

is gonna start to work less and less. And so we are gonna enter a world of inbound led outbound. And so you are gonna need to put yourself out there, like create content, try to see a little bit who are the potential prospect that have interacted with you or the company. And so you have a lot of tools coming up like RB2B where you can do like websites, visitors identification. Those people are already on your website. So they're not completely cold. So you could...

Totally imagine creating a campaign where you're gonna retarget those people. Same with LinkedIn content, like the type of campaigns that work really well at the moment is for example, looking at all the people that interacted with your post, that liked it, that drop a comment and go do a campaign with those people rather than reaching out to a complete stranger that doesn't know your company, doesn't know who you are. Those people know you, they've seen your content. You're gonna get much better results to kind of do a lukewarm outbound rather than going.

Pure colds, I think we're going to move from cold outbound to a much more warm outbound.

Anis Bennaceur (29:05.783)
That's really interesting. One of the things that I realized, so RB2B is an incredible tool. And I remember when someone mentioned it to me very early on, we implemented it and I included it into Clay at the time. And Adam, the founder of RB2B was like, this is incredible. I never thought about it. And now everyone is doing it. But what I ended up realizing pretty early on is that

People sometimes visit your website, but then they completely forget about it and move on to the next thing, right? And I'm sure that, you know, as RB2B gets very popular and their competitors get also popular too, a lot of reps will start calling or emailing their website visitors and website visitors will have no idea that they visited the website or have completely forgotten about it because they might have spent five seconds and then moved on to their next thing.

during the day. Is that something that you start, you've been noticing at all?

Alex (30:11.022)
For sure. And I think there, one of the solution that you can start doing is to layer those signals on top of each other. Imagine if you could create a campaign where you almost going to do some account scoring, where you can attribute some points to someone that visited your website, but also follow the company page and also interacted with your posts in the last 90 days. If you can start to layer those, there is no way that that person doesn't remember what your company is doing and what you do. And so I think...

You should probably try to build campaigns that can take multiple factors into consideration, like people that have really show some like interest intent towards your company, looking at all the different signals, group them together and then kind of prioritize the outreach to those people.

Anis Bennaceur (30:55.447)
So that's really interesting. How do you build that lead score?

Alex (31:00.718)
That's something we do inside of KLEI. So we would, for example, look if we can see that some people that visited our website plus someone that saw my profile, saw the profile of me, saw maybe the follow called IQ on LinkedIn. That usually indicates already some sort of intent and that's usually the type of prospect we would contact.

Anis Bennaceur (31:21.783)
So do you have a math formula that adds a specific number of points? Or how do you end up scoring? Yeah.

Alex (31:28.142)
Yeah, so typically we are attributing like higher points for people that interact with us on LinkedIn. I think that the website visitor, I tend to agree with you that is not the strongest signal because people are browsing a lot, like they might be searching through like multiple competitors. So for us, we're going to attribute more points to someone that has been like interacting with us maybe like multiple times. And then we're also going to attribute some points based on

company size, industry, like we've also seen inside of the agency that there is like companies for which we can get much better results. So typically based on the industry and the company size, we're also gonna attribute more points. And then for those prospects, me and Mich might even like reach out personally to those people to kind of like engage in a conversation.

Anis Bennaceur (32:16.023)
That makes sense. I see. And do you put your score on 100? Do you put it like how? And at what point, what threshold do you start saying, OK, we have maybe over 80 out of 100 in terms of scores? Do you have any specific rules that you're starting to see that make a lot of sense on your end?

Alex (32:40.526)
Dan is currently revamping the entire scoring system, but it used to be out of 50. And if we can get it over 30, then usually it makes sense for us to reach out to those prospects.

Anis Bennaceur (32:52.279)
I see. And I'm sure that it gets, it starts getting tougher and tougher to update that score over time, right? How do you make sure, you know, if you keep adding points, you do not get over 50, you stay always somewhere between, you know, 25 to 50 range and things get updated. And there's a lot of math that is behind it. I'm asking because I spend a lot of time thinking about this and trying to build it and over time.

Alex (33:21.102)
Are you doing it as well? Do you do it for attention?

Anis Bennaceur (33:22.071)
Yeah, yeah, we definitely do it over here. But the problem is that after a certain point, we score it, I think, based on a score of 10 or something. And so sometimes you end up with certain clients who have been visiting your website or prospects, sorry, visiting your website every single day for the past two weeks. And the score ends up being higher than 10.

10 out of 10, right? It ends up being maybe 15 or 20 out of 10, and at that point, you need to find a way to just renormalize that score and make sure that things actually are correct. But yeah, there's a ton of other variables that we take into account, right? Like, has there been a new hire at the company for the role that you're targeting? There's...

There are a lot of things around technographics, from a graphics and then actual intent that you need to take to layer into your intent score. And it hasn't been that simple. I still think you need someone to build a really good formula, maybe a data analyst. You don't necessarily need a data scientist to build this, but still something that...

the formula will still make sense. And now when you build it into your either workflow builder, whether it's SAP or Clay or anything, the formula still makes a lot of sense for you. I know that's.

Alex (34:58.254)
What is the most relevant trigger for you guys at Attencion? What's typically the thing that indicates the most that it might be a good prospect?

Anis Bennaceur (35:07.991)
Yeah, we've seen that in our case, generally when you have a new rev ops leader at the company, that's a really good moment to reach out or generally, you know, changes in terms of leadership are one of the best signals because those people, they have to make an impact and make it very quickly within the first 90 days. So you have to find a way to get their attention.

No pun intended. Very quickly, right? But at the same time, when they get into that role there, you know that everyone's going to reach out to them. So the best way is can you, you know, A, send an email, B, send a connection, LinkedIn connection request, and C, try to cold call. And then if they don't respond to your call, wait a week or two and get, try to get an intro from someone that might know them, right?

And at that point, things might work out pretty well there. Another thing that I noticed that has worked out in the past is actually, and people don't really think about it, it's when someone leaves a specific role, right? You have a VP of rev ops or a VP of sales who has just left the company. That person is going to have two weeks to a month to maybe a few months that they got pushed out when they're not going to do anything. I think that

Having a conversation with them at that point is a great strategy because, hey, they might not be a buyer right now, but they have a lot of time to talk to you. And they're going to look into your solution today. And then one of the first things they're going to do when they get to their next job is open up a conversation about you because you're still fresh in their mind.

Alex (37:01.262)
That's smart because you catch them before everyone else. Everyone is trying to get them when they join, but you kind of even get them before that. That's smart.

Anis Bennaceur (37:10.167)
Exactly. And so, yeah, I'm not going to give away all of our tricks, but I've seen that that one worked out. And as a matter of fact, it didn't come out just randomly, right? I remember I was about to... Initially, I reached out to someone, that person said, hey, this is my last week at this company. I'm going to be off for two weeks afterwards. Maybe we can chat.

once I leave the company and I said, yeah, sure, why not? Spoke to that person, showed him our platform and then he started his new job two weeks later and he brought it in and that and I thought that was a great, great way to get into companies before.

Alex (38:00.43)
How do you track this? Typically something you see on LinkedIn or what do you use to track someone that just left a job?

Anis Bennaceur (38:08.471)
So to the earlier example, it was completely random. Now, you see on LinkedIn when people just put in the Open to Work badge on their profile. And at that point, it's still pretty manual. I don't know if there's any automation that can tell you today, hey, this person is open to work. But generally, you tend to see it because they will make a LinkedIn post about it. They'll get a lot of activity.

you know, comments and likes. And so at that point, you might as well just do it. I think if I were to automate this, I would look into, you know, any signals around companies downsizing or, you know, yeah.

Alex (38:53.166)
Good one, new trigger, unlocked.

Anis Bennaceur (38:54.455)
There we go. Anyone listening to this will most likely benefit from this. So getting back more into you, what are some of the outbound workflows using automation and AI that have blown you away recently?

Alex (39:18.83)
Let me think.

Alex (39:27.534)
Maybe not one that blew me away, but is very effective is reaching out to people that engage with your content on LinkedIn. And I think that's why it's becoming so important for literally everyone to put themselves out there and start sharing content. Because people that interact with your content are probably your most likely buyers. And we see it a lot for us when we launch or accelerator.

just reaching out to people that might have interacted with our posts in the last 90 days, the conversion we got out of this were like through the roof. Because people give you so much like trust and they see your expertise because it's like you have been sharing consistently. Like sometimes you've had people that followed us for like six months, nine months, 12 months. Those people, they don't need to be convinced anymore. Like it's just kind of like a formality of getting them on a call.

they know what you do, they know what you sell, they know your expertise, it's just where do I pay? And having so little selling during the sales call, that's just like amazing to see. Like you really see a sales call that comes from inbound or people that you reach out with that have interacting with your content versus like a pure cold outreach meeting. All the trust needs to be built during the meeting. So it's like, if you reach out to people that have seen your content,

The trust is already there and so the entire sales process is much easier. So maybe not the most crazy technically speaking, but what works really well at the moment.

Anis Bennaceur (40:59.095)
100%. I love that. It's basically for them, you know, as if they were speaking to a celebrity in a way. And at that point, you know, there's definitely, they can get pretty easily impressed. One thing that I love actually that I noticed that is if you are selling cold and you start adding the, your leads or prospects on LinkedIn and you're posting a lot and they start seeing and interacting with your

and seeing that other people are responding, that builds a lot of trust during the actual sales process. And things kind of like start changing over time. So there's definitely zero downside of adding your lead or prospect on LinkedIn when selling to them.

Alex (41:44.782)
And what we say at ColdIQ as well is that content is the best follow -up as well. Like we've had it so many times, someone that we had like on a sales call didn't close one month, two months, three months, even six months later. And then you just have one of your posts that goes viral, like the prospect saw something that he really or she really liked and then book another meeting. And at that time they are ready to buy. Like we had it so many times, like in the history of the agency.

where someone didn't close the first time. And then months later, through our content, we're like, those guys, I remember I told them, let me like rebook a meeting with them. And at that time, they like end up closing. So sharing valuable content, you don't even need to follow by email. If people are not quite active on LinkedIn, they might just see your post one day, you're gonna be top of mind. And when they need your service or product, they're directly gonna contact you.

Anis Bennaceur (42:35.255)
100%. I absolutely agree with this. Alex, I wish I had another hour to talk to you and get so much learnings from you. This has been incredible so far. My last question for you is who are three sales or growth leaders that you'd like to see as guests on this podcast?

Alex (42:57.87)
I don't know if you had them before, but first one, I would say, Guillaume Moubache from LEMList because we need to also pay a lot of tribute to them because the way that we scale called IQ is through contents. Like we really incentivize the entire team to post a lot on LinkedIn and others bringing so much business. And LEMList was kind of the first company that had so many people internally that were sharing content. And so they kind of...

He paved the way for us and that has been working really well. So I would say probably Guillaume. Then I would say Adam Robinson from RB2B. I think he's doing it extremely well as like a B2B SaaS founder. I think he really cracked the content game. He's really good at kind of like putting himself out there. It's like, you see him everywhere. It's like invited in so many podcasts, so many webinars. His content is great. His content is resonating. So I think he really understand like the...

B2B SaaS growth player in 2024. And then last, maybe.

Alex (44:11.022)
Maybe Austin from Unify as well. I think he has also a lot of learnings. you had it already. So I'm going to listen to the episode then, because I'm quite curious. Every time I told to him, I'm really impressed with all the insights. So I'm going to add it to my to -do to listen to the episode with him then.

Anis Bennaceur (44:30.071)
Yeah, he's an extremely smart guy. We love them and they're building great things over there. Awesome Alex. Well listen, thank you so much for doing this and I'll see you on the other side. Bye.

Alex (44:42.798)
Amazing, thanks a lot for having me on this, I appreciate it. Bye bye.