Cold Outbound Isn't Dead (It's Just Brutal Now)

Think about the words "go to market." You're going to enter a market that already exists with a really big incumbent. Calling it "go to market" puts this framing in everybody's head that I need to do really good sales going to market. Remove the phrase. You don't necessarily need to build the new category, but you do need to think differently as a company.

>> All right. So Andreessen Horowitz, we always start with a scenario that's going to put you on the clock. Here you go. Stop, turn, pivot. They're a $25 million B2B SaaS company, Jared. Every rep is running the same sequences, using the same AI tools, and hitting the same ICPs with the exact same messaging as every other company in their category. I don't know, we see this all the time. Response rates, shockingly, are down 40% year-over-year. And the VP of sales is telling the reps that the market's saturated. The CEO thinks it's a people problem. You've built a massive community of revenue professionals watching this happen in real time. Who's right, and what's the real fix?

>> First and foremost, reply rates are down. Everybody's using the same thing. It's easy to jump to conclusions that it's because everybody is saying the same thing, and it could very well be. If I'm a guessing person with the limited data I have, that's the only guess I can make, right? So, understanding how the org's structured, understanding why they're sending the same thing, understanding and diving into if the company is doing the same thing, if they're positioned the same way in the market, understanding how the reps perform before—is this a net gain? Is it down, but these were new reps, and there was nothing a year ago on them? Right? So is it an enablement problem? That they just didn't ramp, and they're just all plugging into the same thing? Were they great last year, and now they're down this year? Let's understand. So the person who's great and they're not great anymore, why the heck are they buying into this new system? Because their commissions are going down. So let's talk to that person. Let's understand why they're buying in, and then we could find out the root cause of it. Because if you had somebody that, as averages show, like 20% of the team above 100%, or let's hope, or half the team above 100%, or whatever it is, and their stuff's down also, understand how their meetings look, their qualified meetings. If their reply rates are down, but their meetings are up, let's celebrate that. Let's cut the outbound all together for a minute as we figure out what's working. Let's double down what's working if things are up. So I think it's important to understand fully the layout, because we were just given one channel, one thing wrong. So from the information given, outbound email isn't working, but we don't know if the whole strategy isn't working. And I think you got to give grace, and then also diagnose year over year. Down year over, but is it down with the same people, or down with new people? And then look at the product's evolution, or lack thereof, because there's a chance if it's down 40% year over year, everybody's sending the same things. There's a chance everybody sent the same thing last year and it worked well, right? And it might just be that we had—

>> With a client, the product had changed, and then this year went down.

>> It might be lazy that they're not diagnosing it quick enough, but it's not necessarily wrong if it worked a year ago.

>> Sure, they're being lazy.

>> Understood, but if it worked a year ago, got to give them a little bit of not all the way grace. Their stuff's down, but—

>> But you have to dig. You have to dig deep. You can't just look at one metric and assume that you could solve the problem.

>> No, and as we've seen, there are teams that were really good last year that are really mediocre this year with the same product, the same process, because the space is more competitive than it's ever been by a long shot. It's funny. I was talking to an early-stage founder that raised a hundred million dollars yesterday.

>> Talking to him yesterday, or he raised it yesterday?

>> Talking to him yesterday. And previously, this is a founder that raised a hundred million. Previously, he brought a company to three plus billion in revenue, not valuation.

>> So a company, if I were to mention, you would have heard of, right?

>> And his product is great. It's phenomenal. And we're going through, like, my suggestions to add in, and I'm like, "Listen, nobody's doing what I'm about to say but you and I both know that what I'm saying now is what people are pitching investors on today and in six weeks will announce their seed funding on. You and I both know that. So why don't you just build it into your product today and beat that? Because it's not an illogical idea. In fact, it's essentially one of these engines that takes context from everywhere and you could do anything. We've seen that a lot of places, right? And I think that they're doing it way more sophisticated than others. But my suggestion was taking all this context in. I get that you could do anything, but you need to tell people based on what you're seeing, how they're engaging people in email, on calls, CRM, everything. The workflows to automate to make your life easier now. Don't just say you could do it. And I know you can. But point out which things they are. Like, you're doing this seven times a day. You're sending a prospectus to every single sponsor that calls after. One button. Automate sending a prospectus after. You're sending—you're forwarding closed-won agreements to your partner success manager. And could tell that I'm manually doing it, right? Because there's no template or anything. I'm doing it. And this is common, right? Like you close a deal, you forward the contract to person A. You fill out an onboarding something internally, something, whatever you have. You send that to person B. Then simultaneously, you do an intro email connecting customer success to the person you got because you're a great rep. And you want to close the loop and you want to do this quick. That's great. And yes, you could automate all of that if you do the work to automate all of that, which today is less work than it was six months ago.

>> Yeah, but they're going to do it wrong because they're not going to be looking at all the different pieces they're supposed to be automated.

>> Theoretically, this context engine has all the effing nuance from the timing.

>> I doubt it. Well, I don't think—I think conceptually this sounds great, and conceptually, you know, AI engines are supposed to build working apps in one shot, and that just doesn't happen. So conceptually, all of that is great. But I do believe that there's a world where there's a reason why people are moving into context engineering, and I'm trying to understand what's happening within the context because it is nuanced into each business and each part of the business.

>> One thing I want to point out: I wouldn't have said all that if I wasn't getting that in a tool that just raised 18 million, just became public from seed, already.

>> Sure. And I think there'll come a time when that will happen, but I do believe that in general, humans will be, for the next 18 months, the contextual engine that is running behind the scenes until you can actually—and we were just talking to somebody today on this—the next evolution are all macro decisions that are made up of a bunch of micro decisions with the best data you have available today. The best data you have available today, you're making decisions on. Then, let me give you an example. We're going to build out our value proposition, ideal customer profile, and buying persona today, June 16th. Given the perfect data we have today, which is imperfect, and we're going to run a bunch of tests between now and six months from now for when we go hire our VP of sales. And so you're testing and tasting and going through all these pieces and you're iterating and evolving through that process. In the meantime, you're making decisions on texts and Slack, phone calls that are coming in from customers. Hopefully you're digesting all those pieces. Then six months later, you hire a new VP of sales and things are kind of chugging along. You're making progress. You know, it seems like sales are up, connection rates are up. And then all of a sudden, six months later, that new VP of sales comes in and is like, "I know what's wrong with you guys. We need to change up the ICP." And I did this in the past because this is where I was successful five years ago, two years ago, six months ago. And they come in and they redo everything that you just broke six months ago because they don't have all the micro decisions you just made.

>> Oh, without a doubt. And first off, ICP is one of those—the biggest—I'm not even sure it's arguable. I'm sure you can argue. But the biggest decision you make as a GTM org, I should say—the biggest decision you make as a company org is actually what you stand for. And that rolls into who you stand for, which is who you service, which rolls right into ICP. So I don't think that you can necessarily get a push notification.

For ICP, if Adam every day is scheduling an onboarding call right after and hasn't automated yet, pushing that forward like process things into one click or editable via a prompt, not editable via anything more technical than that, it's going to help you all move faster and essentially take out the redundant work for you instead of the human identifying the redundant work. A lot of times we do identify it, but we're on to the next thing already. And it's like I don't think we document it. I'm not convinced there's a machine that's going to do that for an individual with all the dimensions that we're going to run. But we'll see.

Let's jump into some community stuff because I know that's where you love it.

So a lot of companies are using communities as a marketing channel. Like we've seen this for a long period of time. You build communities that are doing something completely different. And so what do you see the difference between one that drives pipeline and one that just drives engagement numbers?

I took a lot of time reverse engineering community and thinking about community as a demand gen channel. Companies pay me to leverage our community as a demand gen channel. So I'm like, why can't they do that themselves? I think a community is comprised of users. We're a free community, so everybody in RevGenius is a user of RevGenius. So there's trust and stuff like that that's clean and easy. If you build a community outside of your customer base, it gets weird if you try to sell to them.

I dissected what I believe are some of the best communities and I think objectively are the fastest growing, best communities in all of tech. And I came down to HubSpot, Salesforce, obviously, Notion, phenomenal, Webflow, Clay, Beehive is phenomenal. They're growing so tremendously. And I looked at who is in their communities. And I'm fairly certain there are no people in that Salesforce community that aren't using Salesforce, even if they're on the free or minimum plan. The same thing with Clay. The same thing with Notion.

I mentioned some PLG, I mentioned some sales-led. PLG communities domino into a benefit for PLG, right? You could build a community of free users. But your job in the community, thinking about this for the demand-like audience, this is where you have a newsletter. This is where you could do paid ads to grow that newsletter or that audience. You could hire influencers. You could do many tactics to grow your audience.

If you're looking at HubSpot, perfect example. HubSpot has a newsletter. They have a community. Somebody with my definition might say, "What about HubSpot? They have a community with everything." I said HubSpot spent over $20 million to acquire audience through their newsletter. OpenAI just spent $200 million. I believe you could find that number with that big media network that they just bought. HubSpot also has their podcast network for audience growth, for demand gen. They have a whole media network, right? My First Million's on there, all these others with the goal of driving new audience and then when that new audience comes in, yes, they want them to still be active members of the audience, but bringing into the community.

What's the job of community in this world? Community is for users to help other users use better. So we could go from free to paid organically. They're already in it. They're learning. The Notion free users are learning all this other stuff from people in there on the paid plans. "Oh, I could do all that?" Same thing with the HubSpot community. "Oh, I need Marketing Pro or whatever." And they're also referring.

Going further, the most active people in community become your evangelists. I was looking at when Christina Garnett, who both of you probably know either well or vaguely, was at HubSpot. She's phenomenal. She was their head of evangelist. I thought it was the active users in there, but it was actually their agencies that use HubSpot. So the agencies and people that can make money become part of that community. And Clay is a phenomenal example of this with their GTM engineers.

So you have the Clay engineers and you have all these. Do we start considering a community separated by just people that are in Slack channels versus people that are in podcasts versus people that are running newsletters or Substack? Like how do we define community because it's becoming very obtuse? I'll give you an example. One of the ones I think about is Josh from Unchurned AI. We were just talking about Gainsight buying his company and one of the big assets for Gainsight through that acquisition is his podcast that was Unchurned.

Yeah, they built like an audience podcast type. I put in the audience thing. And so my working definition, outside of customers versus prospects and customers can absolutely be in your audience as well, and when I say audience, like audiences overall communities for retention. You know, the newsletter, podcast, all of that's for demand gen. HubSpot's the perfect example of this.

But this is signal versus noise, right? So you have LinkedIn, you have newsletters, you have podcasts, you have Slack communities. There's so many different things. Owned audience versus rented audience. The LinkedIn algorithm, everything could be taken away from you in a second, which we're seeing can now even happen with your AI model, but I digress. Fable five, every revenue leader is being pulled in 15 different directions. Like how do you figure out which channel is worth someone's attention?

So as a software company, you want to get everyone into an owned channel. And Dale, you mentioned something like I don't want to discount this like Slack versus something else. Let's just say an owned channel where they could communicate with cadence outside of you throwing an event, with any sort of cadence. That could be anything like that. That could be text message theoretically in this definition. And owned versus rented, rented is a necessary evil, right? Because that's where people are naturally in the space. This is where they're consuming content whether they like it or not every time they log in and they are logging in. That's why it's a necessary evil.

So how can you build a following there? I think it's important to. But then how can you bring that to an owned channel? If it's in the demand function, newsletter's very easy. If they're already users, Slack is one of Gainsight's. Another right? Like Gainsight has that functionality. I don't know if HubSpot uses Gainsight or something else, Circle, whatever. Because when you bring them in, let's use the newsletter channel as an example. If you have 100,000 people on your newsletter, you have a chance for 100,000 impressions every time you send it, assuming good deliverability. Let's take all the factors out. Let's say you have a clean 100,000. And if you're at 40% open rate, and yes, I get it, 100% is not feasible. I get it. 80% you need to say I'm giving away gold to have a chance. But by the way, think about what your gold is, right? Like to get it higher. But you have the opportunity to try different things to get a higher percentage of impressions. You do. You could optimize that.

When you're on social, if you have 100,000 followers, the chance of 40,000 of them seeing it on a typical everyday post, that isn't in your control. So how can you bring that to something you own? And this is just math, guys. Like I don't have the exact math for LinkedIn, but I know you feel it. You feel it. The exact math of newsletter, you know.

And then what's great about owned, so there's all these signals. Everybody has access to everything that's public, whether they know how to capture that or not, it's another story. But theoretically, they could find a guy or a girl to help them capture any sort of signal out there. There're the obvious ones, the job change, the hiring, the new roles, all of that that come out of the box. There're the custom ones. I just read in a group, does somebody have a UCC scraper, you know, looking for violations and all of this. But everybody has access to that theoretically. Or everyone can have access to that.

If you have an owned audience or community or you have an owned channel, whether it's your customers or otherwise, you have access to signals everybody else doesn't have. You could see who's opening more emails, who's clicking more links. You could optimize for those people. In the community, you could build infrastructure to do the same. And then if you want to layer all your commoditized signals on top, well, great. That becomes exponentially more powerful. And you might actually be able to predict things. You might. But the point is a great growth person in-house can optimize that beyond belief if you're looking just at GTM.

Here's something I keep seeing sales teams I work with. Generic sequences don't work anymore. We've all gotten so good at turning out the noise that even your own buyers aren't hearing you. The problem isn't your reps. It's that your sequences are static and your signals are somewhere else entirely. That's why our clients use Nooks. And the thing that stuck with me is that their sequences actually stay fresh because the signals update them automatically. Right buyer, right moment, with no manual babysitting. If your outbound feels like it's shouting into a void, go check them out at nooks.ai/bridgethegap.

So we work with a good amount of founders.

# Community Building Transcript

As you talked to who want community, Jared, but don't want to invest in it or don't know how to invest in it. Realistically, as someone who's built more than one massive community, what does community building really cost as far as time, money, attention before you start returning anything? Do they want to build a real community or do they want to throw a dinner series?

So it's a tremendous amount of time. It's a full-time commitment. I used to say the unlock is doing it full-time. You don't need to do it 100 hours a week, but getting 40 in is good. Because the biggest unlock, in community—let's take the community word out—in magnetizing people in general is to help them.

I joined what was interesting was this community, Nucleus Ventures. They have a founder dinner series, they have investments, they do intros. Right away, the founder got on a call with me and gave me an intro and I got on a call with somebody else. Somebody that acquires companies just like me, actually. So it was kind of interesting. It was like a media slash community type roll-up guy. And I thought that really shocked me. Even more than using a boardy or a member matching, it was the human aspect.

I don't think many aspects of community can be automated more than I think I'll say that. But I think not all of them can. Having a person communicating—that's how we became friends, right? And that's you building your own community. I mean, I've probably introd Dale to five people because I know—when I say five people—in the last month I got somebody else for you and an early stage head of GTM. I haven't told you yet. If he has time to mentor all of them, that's another story.

That's why he's never working on the real business. Now I get it.

He does a lot. It's because Dale, since the beginning, has been a community guy. Not just because you were active in RevGenius early, but because you raised your hand to give. Dale and you, Adam, as well—you know, roughly what it takes—and that's why you might not be as active in RevGenius or not because you know it can be a full-time job to do it well.

It is a full-time job to do it well.

To do it exceptionally well, right? You can throw a good event as a one-off or hire somebody for an event here or there, but to build that connectivity, it happens all the time. I'm about to make a post tomorrow. Our first 5,000 members—and Dale knows this—I personally invited 4,000 of them. And actually I invited 40,000 to get to that 4,000. I invited 40,000. Ten percent conversion rate, maybe a little higher, but 30 to 40,000 to get to that. And those 4,000 people I had at least a DM conversation with—a quick one. And what that did was when they came into my community, our community, there was some level of activation. And I might have done other things that needed improvement from there on, granted. But that's a good thing to double-click on, right?

So then at that point, me being an acquisition person, how do I cater to these 4,000 people? It's very, very hard. You watched the other community, Pavilion, raise money and bring on a lot of people at one point. I mean, I think it might be lesser now and how they've activated other people in the community to help foster it. I don't think SaaS companies care about building something that big, per se, and scaling that. But they need to realize they need to be friends with all the people outside of their business model.

Totally agree.

And so many people are so myopically thinking just towards the pipeline. And that's going to churn people faster than anything. If you think towards them getting value, period, it's a different conversation. The pipeline will be slower. It'll be slower. But when it comes on, it's going to be more potent.

Your career—like you worked at FedEx—that's kind of like at the end of that, that's when you and I were meeting up. You've been in the field.

There was a gap in between there since FedEx and when we met up, but yeah.

Yes, yes, 100%. But you've been in the field. When you hear community, when you hear content about sales, how often do you like reflect on your own selling? Are you like this is totally just missing the mark? Are you like the content that you're reading—as a bag handler, like you're carrying your bag and you're going through the process—like these people are just like, don't even know what they're talking about?

I don't think they know how to talk to people. Forget like knowing what they're talking about. And I'm beyond disenfranchised. I saw a company just launch about giving taste to AI, even. They raised $18 million. And it's somebody who's going to do well with it. And it's not just a funny idea, but it's somebody that's going to execute it based on her background and the spots she led marketing in and being in the VC world and all of that. And it disenfranchises me with the future.

I think, looking at the history now, I remember selling in tech 10 years ago when I got into the field—or jeez, 12 years ago when I got into tech after FedEx. And our head of growth said, "We're going to hire SDRs." And I'm like, "What? Does this mean less money for me?" Right? Like that was my first thought. They said, "No, no, no, it's the same money, whatever." All right, cool. That's how it started.

Then we got the tool Outreach. Bought it straight from Manny Medina on LinkedIn. I remember that. One of maybe unknowingly one of his earlier customers. And then it became automated. Then it became way, way, way more like away from being human. We talk about AI ruining the humanity in sales. It's been ruined for some time. It's been ruined since SDRs came out.

Yeah, it's 100% true. But AI is ruining sales at a faster pace. So the question, again, going back to someone who runs one of the largest communities for sales professionals—with all the AI that's putting content production and even comments in these communities on autopilot—I've got an AI bot inside of RevGenius. How do you keep the conversations worth having?

One, it's being stricter qualifying people coming in and looking for signal right down to their LinkedIn profiles. I manually catch about 30 profiles a day. The ones I don't catch, I don't want to tell how it's getting through on a live conversation because anybody could get past it if I said it. The ones I catch, I'm going to their LinkedIn profiles. I'm looking at their background, their followers. Is the profile real? Is the email real?

I had, before I set up the stricter policy, when I first saw it, I had like 10 people from leadassist.io sign up on the same day. And I'm like, okay. And let's also kick out anybody with anything with "lead" in the URL. Anywhere. Lead helper, lead whatever. Cool. Never knew you, sorry. Did I make some mistakes? I haven't heard from them that the mistakes were made. Probably. But it wasn't a big thing.

And right now, we have a community team moderating some stuff because humans make a lot of the mistakes too. The obvious stuff. If somebody DMs you selling you—whether it's AI or not—they're out of the community. Period. If somebody posts something like "Hey, we had a new product launch" or whatever it is in the wrong channel, we'll delete it. We're building AI now just to moderate easier. Take the humans out of that. But it starts with getting the right people in.

And I have like a secret side project that—and Dale, you'd be great in here as well as Adam. That's going to grow very slow, intentionally. I'm starting it exactly like RevGenius. We're going to have five people as the first five people. Every one of them. By the way, what RevGenius in the beginning was great—we had five people or four people in a LinkedIn DM and I said, "All of you can invite two others that you think would get along with the group." Just like self-qualifying. If they felt strongly. And then the first four or 500 people, I personally approved every single one of them. People would be asking and I'm like, "Not yet." Real people. So I want to create something like that because we have 65,000 people. I have about 1,000 people a month coming inbound.

That's crazy.

Every month.

I think it's a massive number. It's amazing.

And I can't—so like, do we charge them? All this—the charging them is a great business model, but that creates a whole other business. Sometimes—

$1 a month.

Probably do 10.

Good, great, great amount of MRR right there.

And then I'll try to charge all the 65,000.

Away?

So of the net new that would actually be a good idea. It's not bad.

I would just do the net new and people that started in the last year.

**Adam trying to solve problems. I like it. But the only problem is you can't solve it.**

If you keep the dollar amount low enough, value can just be in the place.

So again, a gym membership. It just keeps going and you never go to the gym.

Planet Fitness.

Dude, do you know how much weight I've lost in the past year?

I didn't post it. I do. You've been working hard at it.

I lost 50 pounds.

What kind of calories are you, sir?

Almost 50 pounds. Let's look at the podcast from a year ago and let's look at the podcast today. Look at how my face looked on like this.

It can't get any skinnier. Otherwise, your eyes are going to come out.

Maybe we should rewind both sides. Cool. Let's jump over to some what sales reps are getting wrong. Let's talk about this a little bit. Go ahead.

I think sales reps aren't—what are they getting wrong?

Well, so there's a big contingency out there and I'm sure that we think through this a little bit as well and we're rethinking the way we do this, but outbound's dead. And let's be honest, a lot of people in your community in RevGenius are probably outbound dependent type people. And so what do your members believe about outbound and what do you believe about outbound?

I believe objectively outbound is harder than it's ever been.

Yeah.

Dead or alive, I don't think anybody would disagree with that. It's a tremendous opportunity. You know, you could pick different channels of outbound. Phone, if it's not being used and all that. I believe the bets I'm making that outbound isn't dead, but cold outbound is so hard that it may or may not be worth it. Okay, cold outbound is so hard that it may or may not be worth it. It's still alive, but it's just harder than ever between email deliverability, phone pick up. I'd say 80 to 90% of the cold calls I get say spam on it.

Yeah.

Right?

Do you answer any of them?

If I have nothing to do and I'm bored and they keep calling, once in a while I will. And once in a while of that once in a while it'll actually be somebody marked as spam that I needed to speak to. So I think it nets out to being a positive. And even if it's not and it's like a real person on the other end versus the pause and then start, the pause and then start don't even give me any time. But if it's a real person on the other end, I'll be like, "Hey, it's not a fit, but I want to let you know your phone's coming up as spam." So what I'm placing a bet on is building as big of an engaged audience of your ICP. And I kind of felt this while building RevGenius. I'm like, "Why are people reaching out? Let's say you have a hundred thousand or ten thousand people that you could contact at a thousand companies. They're reaching out to all ten thousand. And let's say they're getting a 1% booking rate mixed, which is probably very good."

Sure.

Which is probably very good. What about the 99% else that they may or may not have burned some of them? If you add one step in between, because I'm like, okay, I see this happening and they're getting 1%. I just gave you an example where I was getting 10%. And actually, if I were to do it now, I might get 20%. Why don't you bring them into something owned? Give them tremendous value, look for signals, and then say, "Hey, Adam, thank you for watching 42 of my last 53 episodes of Create the Market. I noticed you're clicking on way more stuff in the last month. Am I off base or are you like actually looking for something that I do?" Sure, that's longer. So the bet is building instead of having an ICP that you're just cold into, advertising to, and everything, have an ICP where your first goal is to get them into your audience. And then create really, really good content because I promise, if you do—if I were to outbound anybody in RevGenius community, I would have a higher success rate. I don't know how much higher, but I think it's better than if we didn't do that. So, okay, so building a 60,000 person community is hard. What's easier is building a newsletter, podcast. And I'm not saying it's easy. I am saying it's easier than doing cold outbound. And more people need to think like this, right? So like there was this one point, and this was great. I knew my—I should start doing this again. I did this experiment, and it was an obvious experiment. Dell probably remembers. I used to say, "Hey, I created a community of sales marketing RevOps. What's the best email to send you an invite?" Like that was the message. So I started to focus on teams that could sponsor us, my ICP. And I sent them those messages. I sent the whole revenue team that message even though I know I could only sell to demand gen and marketing function more or less, sometimes a founder. And multiple people would come on. And I did this with five companies. Four of them gave me inbounds. So if you create content for your people like and you invite them to read it for free and it's good, it's a win-win.

It's got to be good. All right, before we get into our uncensored questions because we are coming up on time. Monday morning move: Pick one person in your network whose content you've been consuming without engaging. Don't go like it. Actually go add a comment that adds a point of view, but don't stop there. Go DM that person with your unique point of view and tell them exactly what you took away from their content. See what comes back. If nothing does, you think you have a network, you don't. What you have is a feed. A network is reciprocity. I hate that word. Build a strong network by adding those valuable insights by sharing your point of view before you try to go broadcast across all of your channels. With that, instead of the old traditional rapid fire, let's move to our uncensored questions. You've watched hundreds of sales reps try to build a personal brand. What's the number one mistake you see and why in the hell do they keep making it?

They create the same content as everybody else right now because they don't give who they are in the content. Out of all these lead magnets—

Right.

Even the ones that are working, I have no idea who any of these people are as people. And frankly, you might not need to. There some the best ones are hitting their goals and stuff.

Hmm.

Don't offend your timidity, Jared.

100%. So I will say that I don't know. 100% of people want to get something out of the community. That could be a sale, even, right? So they're joining channels. So they're doing something right? So 100% of the people are doing something to progress their career or their company in some way.

What's the one thing that GTM community like collectively believes that you think is just flat out wrong?

I mean, I'd have to go—oh, one thing that the grander GTM community. Okay, so here's the deal. The GTM is your company strategy. That's flat out wrong. Okay? Your strategy isn't selling, marketing, RevOpsing. Those are execution layers to bring revenue on. I love that. Okay? I want to make that clear. It's tactics. Sure, you can have a strategy within GTM like how best to do this, but that's not your company strategy.

Can I give a second something there? The phrase GTM is myopic. It's intergalactically stupid. Those are Christopher Lochhead words. So let's think about the words go to market. You're going to a market that already exists with a really big incumbent. I'm going to build a new CRM or I'm going to build a better Gong or better insert company here. To be better is table stakes for starting a company. Table stakes. If you're not building better, cool, have a lifestyle business. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's table stakes. To go into a crowded market and try to out-tactical the big guy is difficult at best and really, really expensive and hard. So let's think about the phrase. I think the phrase is "go to market." Calling it go to market puts this framing in everybody's head that I need to do really good sales going to market. Remove the phrase. I'm using "create the market." You don't necessarily need to build a new category, but you do need to think differently as a company. Product has to follow that thinking different. Pricing has to follow that thinking different. Sure, sales and marketing has to follow it, but also the words you use. Words matter. Words matter. Otherwise, we get slop every day.

Yeah.

Ask your favorite question, Dale. Wrap us up.

I'm going to France for my first time in September for Mallory's 40th.

Nice.

And I'm going to be going to Paris and Saint-Tropez. So that's great. If I was to pick anywhere, I need to travel around Asia. I've never been and I'd love to, specifically Korea, Japan, Seoul in Korea, Thailand.

We're legitimately planning Japan and South Korea as we speak.

Yeah, I need to travel more. I've been doing this founder thing way too long and not focused on what matters in life.

There you go. Jared Robin, RevGenius. Thanks for joining the show, man.

Thank you for having me.