Meeting Title: Brainforge Go-to-Market Strategy Discussion Date: 2025-08-28 Meeting participants: Robert Tseng, Elty’s Fathom Notetaker, Elty McMillan
WEBVTT
1 00:00:26.140 ⇒ 00:00:27.350 Elty McMillan: Hey, how’s it going?
2 00:00:27.970 ⇒ 00:00:30.029 Robert Tseng: Hey, is it, LT?
3 00:00:30.030 ⇒ 00:00:33.019 Elty McMillan: LT, yeah, like the two letters L and T.
4 00:00:33.020 ⇒ 00:00:37.599 Robert Tseng: Cool. Yeah, it’s a unique name. I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone with your name before.
5 00:00:37.860 ⇒ 00:00:51.149 Elty McMillan: My real name is… is Elton, but my dad’s name is Elton, and my grandpa’s name is Elton, so… I’ve just gone by LT my whole life. Tried to change it a few times, but people are like, I feel like I’m talking to your dad, so I’m not gonna… I’m just gonna call you what I’ve always called you, so….
6 00:00:51.150 ⇒ 00:00:51.500 Robert Tseng: That’s cool.
7 00:00:51.820 ⇒ 00:00:54.430 Robert Tseng: Are you, like, Elton III, then, or something?
8 00:00:54.430 ⇒ 00:00:57.270 Elty McMillan: Yeah, Elton George McMoan III, so….
9 00:00:57.270 ⇒ 00:00:58.060 Robert Tseng: Nice.
10 00:00:58.060 ⇒ 00:00:58.700 Elty McMillan: Bright enough.
11 00:00:58.700 ⇒ 00:01:00.460 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
12 00:01:01.170 ⇒ 00:01:07.069 Robert Tseng: Oh, thanks for hopping on this call. I hadn’t actually checked with the team. Have you… have you talked to anyone else on my team yet?
13 00:01:07.070 ⇒ 00:01:13.720 Elty McMillan: No, you’re the first. I briefly chatted with, someone over… over, ….
14 00:01:13.720 ⇒ 00:01:15.570 Robert Tseng: Email to get scheduled in? Yeah.
15 00:01:15.830 ⇒ 00:01:19.999 Elty McMillan: But, but, but yeah, you’re the first, like, actual person.
16 00:01:20.340 ⇒ 00:01:37.639 Robert Tseng: Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, I did skim your loom, like, last week, so that was great. I mean, I thought, thank you for doing that. Sure. Good energy, seems like you, yeah, have, have B2B sales experience. I think that’s, like, definitely a big, big thing we’re looking for, and it seemed like you were…
17 00:01:37.640 ⇒ 00:01:42.820 Robert Tseng: Wanting to kind of build out some playbooks and go after bigger clients, especially as we’re moving upmarket and
18 00:01:42.850 ⇒ 00:01:55.900 Robert Tseng: We have a couple enterprises now, and maybe that’s kind of where we wanna… wanna head towards. I think for this call, like, I’d like to just be helpful, kind of give you more of an overview of Brainforge, and then…
19 00:01:55.900 ⇒ 00:02:04.640 Robert Tseng: you know, I’m sure you have a bunch of questions, so happy to take questions, and maybe we’ll take… we’ll walk through, like, you know, like an actual, you know, situation that I’m thinking through.
20 00:02:04.720 ⇒ 00:02:08.209 Robert Tseng: So, yeah, I guess, like, I…
21 00:02:08.539 ⇒ 00:02:26.730 Robert Tseng: Tom and I are… we’re co-CEOs of this company. I definitely am more on the go-to-market side, so, yeah, I pretty much lead our go-to-market efforts right now, so I can tell you the structure, like, what that looks like and everything. But yeah, I would say, you know, our sales process is kind of, like, going after
22 00:02:27.030 ⇒ 00:02:34.280 Robert Tseng: a few different, ICPs. So we have, … the… like…
23 00:02:35.460 ⇒ 00:02:47.399 Robert Tseng: SaaS growing, growth-stage SaaS or consumer product company doing at least $10 million in revenue, and they’re looking to scale up their… yeah, scale up their growth and really invest in a data team.
24 00:02:47.400 ⇒ 00:03:09.850 Robert Tseng: we found that just up to that point, they have not really, you know, maybe they have, like, one, or they’ve worked with a couple of contractors before, but more like mercenaries that have kind of helped them, like, stitch together some things, to kind of give them some visibility into what they’re doing. But at that point in time, automation and data is not really, like, a growth driver for them, it’s just something to help them understand what’s going on in their business.
25 00:03:09.850 ⇒ 00:03:10.690 Robert Tseng: And so…
26 00:03:10.690 ⇒ 00:03:23.340 Robert Tseng: We kind of come in to play when we’re… when they’re around that size, so that we can really, you know, see them grow from, like, 10 to 100 million, and we have some different, like, service playbooks that we run in order to kind of help them do that.
27 00:03:23.460 ⇒ 00:03:26.379 Robert Tseng: And so that’s kind of where the consulting piece is.
28 00:03:26.430 ⇒ 00:03:37.180 Robert Tseng: So that’s, like, one… that’s one target audience for us. And so a lot of our outbound motions are going after those types of, clients. And then on the kind of, like, larger, like.
29 00:03:37.180 ⇒ 00:03:55.139 Robert Tseng: mid-market enterprise kind of side, you know, 100 million plus revenue, organizations that are 500 plus people, you know, this is more kind of meeting a market need, where, you know, everyone… a lot of the leaders have, like, AI directives now. It’s like, hey, bring AI into your teams, and, like.
30 00:03:55.140 ⇒ 00:04:06.410 Robert Tseng: they don’t exactly know what to do with it. And so, obviously, kind of the dust has settled. You know, actually, I can send you some studies, but they found that, like, it’s something like 80% of in-house,
31 00:04:06.590 ⇒ 00:04:17.419 Robert Tseng: driven, like, AI initiatives, like, don’t move past the proof-of-concept phase. And so, I think it’s just that teams are not resourced internally to be able to, really
32 00:04:17.510 ⇒ 00:04:27.979 Robert Tseng: make AI solutions that actually are helpful for their team. And so that’s kind of where we’re able to kind of meet the need there, and …
33 00:04:27.980 ⇒ 00:04:38.090 Robert Tseng: and work, you know, basically go in, take the proof of concept, and take it a step further, actually implement it across a real workflow, and I can give you some examples of things that we’ve done.
34 00:04:38.090 ⇒ 00:04:47.500 Robert Tseng: But yeah, that’s… that’s the… that’s the other, kind of, like, main ICP that we go after. So, we are vertical, kind of, agnostic at this point.
35 00:04:47.500 ⇒ 00:05:00.309 Robert Tseng: Although I would say, on the CPG side, we’re really working with, kind of, so, like, the fastest growing e-com vertical that we’ve seen that we’re active in, you know, telehealth.
36 00:05:00.310 ⇒ 00:05:09.950 Robert Tseng: health e-comps, like GLP supplements, we, like, work a couple companies there. So it’s kind of what you would expect, like, from looking at the market on what brands are kind of picking up the most momentum.
37 00:05:09.980 ⇒ 00:05:26.680 Robert Tseng: And then on the SaaS side, it’s all these, like, AI, kind of, like, SaaS tools. So, voice AI products, or we’ve done, like, you know, basically chat with something, build an app, like, stuff like that. There’s, like, there’s a lot of different, kind of, you know, products that are in that space now.
38 00:05:26.700 ⇒ 00:05:35.630 Robert Tseng: But we’re able to serve. So, that hopefully gives you just, like, an overview of, like, the types of organizations that we work with. Totally.
39 00:05:35.980 ⇒ 00:05:41.490 Robert Tseng: Yeah, maybe I’ll just pause there and kind of see if you have any kind of questions or kind of reactions from that.
40 00:05:41.920 ⇒ 00:05:45.969 Elty McMillan: No, I mean, sounds great. How… have you guys had any…
41 00:05:46.300 ⇒ 00:06:05.039 Elty McMillan: struggles being vertical agnostic? I know sometimes, as, like, a growing company, like, not having one where you say, we’re, we’re, like, super good at this specific vertical, and we’re kind of focusing on that, was there thought to be, like, to moving towards vertical specific, or, you know, because sometimes there’s challenges with the vertical agnostic.
42 00:06:05.330 ⇒ 00:06:09.689 Robert Tseng: Yeah, great. No, I’m glad you brought that up. So, I think for us, …
43 00:06:09.890 ⇒ 00:06:25.340 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I think… I think there are definitely challenges with being agnostic. It’s kind of hard to be everything to everyone, and especially because we’re a services company, we can’t run exactly the same playbook, because everything we do is kind of bespoke. Like, we’re not… nothing is straight out of the box.
44 00:06:25.340 ⇒ 00:06:25.720 Elty McMillan: Awesome.
45 00:06:25.720 ⇒ 00:06:41.209 Robert Tseng: give. Yeah, like, I think that’s something that’s challenging about selling technical services. As far as, like, where we’ve tried to specialize, I think what we’ve done… we haven’t been able to make, like, a…
46 00:06:41.280 ⇒ 00:06:45.430 Robert Tseng: concentrated longer-term investment in a vertical, I would say. So…
47 00:06:45.430 ⇒ 00:07:08.440 Robert Tseng: you know, the campaigns that we run, we typically evaluate within two weeks, and, like, if it’s not working, we kill it. So, like, we haven’t been able to run something that’s really been able to last, like, an entire quarter, or, like, two quarters, which I think is necessary to break into some of these, industries. So, it’s something we always talk about, because there are, you know, if I were to kind of set the vertical of my deal, I think
48 00:07:08.720 ⇒ 00:07:16.060 Robert Tseng: we probably will play better with, like, antiquated, like, kind of industries. So I was just speaking with,
49 00:07:16.060 ⇒ 00:07:40.089 Robert Tseng: a firm that’s been in business longer than ours, like, they’ve been around for, like, 6 years, but, you know, they… they kind of… we’re about 2 years into business now, and around year 3, like, they kind of narrowed their focus, and they just do, pretty much what we do for utilities companies, and so… Sure, totally. Yeah, like, now they’re dominating that niche, they’ve, like, they’ve blown up a lot. So, like, great. Like, I would like to, you know, have that type of vertical, like, clarity, and…
50 00:07:40.300 ⇒ 00:07:44.579 Robert Tseng: what we run, and … yeah, I think we’ve… we’ve done…
51 00:07:44.720 ⇒ 00:07:51.119 Robert Tseng: you know, I think one of our… we’ve done some work in, like, legal services.
52 00:07:51.120 ⇒ 00:08:07.839 Robert Tseng: Like, in… we’re working with medical practices. I think medical is probably, like, the more consistent theme that we’ve… we’ve, had. We’ve always… we always have an active client that’s in the medical field, and so, there is some, like, expertise that we’re building up there. But yeah, I think, you know, that’s a long-winded way of saying
53 00:08:07.840 ⇒ 00:08:20.769 Robert Tseng: No, we don’t have a… yes, I think there are challenges, and I would like to specialize, but we just haven’t really, like, spent enough, I think, time and, to figuring out how to… how to do that.
54 00:08:20.770 ⇒ 00:08:25.399 Elty McMillan: Yeah, and I think to your point where, like, I think most places kind of start off
55 00:08:25.860 ⇒ 00:08:50.859 Elty McMillan: vertical agnostic, and then they get enough clientele in one vertical, then it makes sense to specialize, just because word of mouth is always the biggest growth driver, no matter… no matter how many LinkedIn ads you run, like, word of mouth is going to be your biggest growth, and so once you start developing logos in a certain industry, you kind of just naturally verticalize as you get a specific consumer base. So, I don’t think it’s… I don’t think it’s, like, a negative not having a specific vertical you’re after. I think it actually makes
56 00:08:50.860 ⇒ 00:08:51.710 Elty McMillan: tends to…
57 00:08:51.870 ⇒ 00:09:06.099 Elty McMillan: to stay relatively agnostic and let, kind of, the market dictate to you where your services are most needed, and then as you… as you’re finding specificity in those verticals and… and high growth in a specific vertical, then… then just attacking those ones. So it makes sense to me.
58 00:09:06.730 ⇒ 00:09:18.889 Robert Tseng: Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think if I were, you know, this role is like the go-to-market lead, right? So, I think, you know, having, ideally, having somebody come in, kind of, able to take reins over, like, making sure that we’re still hitting, kind of, the…
59 00:09:19.000 ⇒ 00:09:34.320 Robert Tseng: the benchmarks that we are… that we know that we can hit, I think that would allow me to go and make more kind of a focused effort on going after a couple niches that I think that we would do better in, that I’ve already kind of mentioned. So, yeah.
60 00:09:34.690 ⇒ 00:09:40.509 Elty McMillan: Yeah, that makes sense. Also, to your point of, like, starting and stopping in them as well, some of it is, like…
61 00:09:40.510 ⇒ 00:09:55.910 Elty McMillan: can we afford to go after a specific niche just because their sales cycles are so incredibly long? Like, utility companies is a great example of this. I worked at an agency that sold, essentially marketing services to utility agencies.
62 00:09:55.910 ⇒ 00:09:58.680 Elty McMillan: Okay. Their RFPs were, like, 9 months long.
63 00:09:58.680 ⇒ 00:10:00.040 Robert Tseng: Yeah, long time.
64 00:10:00.040 ⇒ 00:10:19.790 Elty McMillan: insane how long it takes for them to make a decision, because they have to ask a bazillion people. And so it’s a… it’s a profitable vertical, but you have to have so much runway to land enough clients over a significant amount of time that sometimes other verticals with… and this is the same thing in health… healthcare, where sometimes those
65 00:10:19.790 ⇒ 00:10:33.120 Elty McMillan: those sales cycles are just so long that it’s hard to… it’s hard to get established in that vertical, so having other ones that are a little bit shorter term, tech, SaaS, stuff that can spin up and spin down faster is, is easier.
66 00:10:33.450 ⇒ 00:10:42.999 Robert Tseng: Exactly. Yeah, and, you know, up to this point, we’ve been a bootstrap company, and so, you know, every… the runway that we’ve got is just to figure out our revenue, so we’ve been profitable since day one.
67 00:10:43.000 ⇒ 00:10:56.290 Robert Tseng: But, yeah, that also means that, you know, if we are to go make an effort to go after, like, utilities or something, like, we would probably have to raise growth capital to do that, in order to, like, actually buy us, like, a…
68 00:10:56.380 ⇒ 00:10:59.129 Robert Tseng: You know, one-year experiment to go after them, you know?
69 00:10:59.130 ⇒ 00:11:11.250 Elty McMillan: Basically, yeah, yeah. You gotta hire, like, specific people who’ve done the RFPs. At the agency I worked with, they would bring back the same people every, like, five years as consultants, specifically for the RFP. So they would bring an expert.
70 00:11:11.650 ⇒ 00:11:24.890 Elty McMillan: landed them the business the previous year, or the previous time, even if they had moved on from the company, they had, like, bring them back as consultants, basically, to help them re-win the RFP. So, it’s just a… yeah, it’s just a whole… it’s a whole game.
71 00:11:24.890 ⇒ 00:11:25.250 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
72 00:11:25.250 ⇒ 00:11:26.420 Elty McMillan: Not specifically, but….
73 00:11:27.130 ⇒ 00:11:37.850 Robert Tseng: Okay. I’d love to hear a bit more about you and, like, kind of your background, so I kind of… maybe you have a sense of, like, the stage that we’re at in terms of… Sure. … like, from a go-to-market strategy perspective, but…
74 00:11:38.250 ⇒ 00:11:40.060 Robert Tseng: you know, I’m…
75 00:11:40.290 ⇒ 00:11:48.969 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I would like to know, yeah, like, kind of, your experience of building, kind of, leading go-to-market teams, …
76 00:11:49.150 ⇒ 00:11:54.189 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I mean, I’ll leave it open-ended, we can kind of go deeper into any area at first.
77 00:11:54.190 ⇒ 00:12:09.229 Elty McMillan: Yeah, totally. So, so I’ve been in marketing for a little over 10 years. The last 5 or 6 years have been mostly… has been dedicated to kind of the B2B SaaS tech-type space, specifically in startups and developing go-to-market strategies and things like that. So, the last, …
78 00:12:09.780 ⇒ 00:12:22.070 Elty McMillan: two… two-ish, two plus years, I’ve been doing fractional, head of marketing, go-to-market strategy, so worked with a lot of… lot of really interesting clients, a lot of AI-based stuff, fintech.
79 00:12:22.070 ⇒ 00:12:34.290 Elty McMillan: Stuff in the legal sector, stuff in the health sector, stuff in the HR sector, just kind of… same thing, just kind of all over the place, kind of a lot of companies in the same spot where they have a really interesting tool, they’re just fig…
80 00:12:34.760 ⇒ 00:12:50.800 Elty McMillan: and they have an… they have what they call an ICP, but it’s not really an ideal customer profile, it’s more of an initial customer profile, and so they’re just not sure exactly who they’re supposed to target, or with what messaging or positioning that they need to get in, and then what kind of efficient
81 00:12:50.800 ⇒ 00:13:01.279 Elty McMillan: Especially now that we’re in the post-SERP era, kind of efficient marketing, efficient revenue generation, not grow at all costs, but, like, grow profitably, because there’s a pretty distinct difference between
82 00:13:01.280 ⇒ 00:13:19.449 Elty McMillan: between those two. So a lot of times they’ll bring me in to… to both in, like, the sales, and then the marketing operations and the sales operations, kind of a holistic strategy of how do we get our product with the right value prop in front of the right person to generate, especially if you’re a…
83 00:13:19.640 ⇒ 00:13:29.169 Elty McMillan: If you’re trying to be more of a, sales-led growth organization, where you’re trying to generate leads for a sales team to close, or you have longer sales cycles in the
84 00:13:29.590 ⇒ 00:13:40.970 Elty McMillan: you know, 2-5, 2-6 month range. That’s kind of my specialty in building go-to-market plans. Go-to-market plans for that. So, I’ve been relatively successful with startups, and so have kind of just kept…
85 00:13:41.130 ⇒ 00:13:47.470 Elty McMillan: Staying in that avenue, and really enjoy the… the unique challenge that comes with building a startup, especially in…
86 00:13:48.400 ⇒ 00:13:58.599 Elty McMillan: For companies that are basically category creation companies, like, their product or their service is new enough where it’s not a…
87 00:13:59.040 ⇒ 00:14:03.379 Elty McMillan: it’s not… It’s not an initiative from the company, like.
88 00:14:03.500 ⇒ 00:14:14.049 Elty McMillan: it’s not HubSpot or Salesforce. Like, it’s not a CRM platform, a new version of a CRM platform that you’re selling. It’s a, you know, it’s a specific tool that… like, one of my clients is, …
89 00:14:14.090 ⇒ 00:14:33.500 Elty McMillan: they do, website personalization, and so it’s an AI tool that does personalization for product recommendations. And so AI is kind of an initiative, but, like, it’s… it’s like a… we have to convince people that this is necessary, and then convince them that we’re the ones to help them implement it. So it’s a much.
90 00:14:33.500 ⇒ 00:14:33.860 Robert Tseng: Yep.
91 00:14:33.860 ⇒ 00:14:40.389 Elty McMillan: complex kind of marketing and go-to-market problems. So, I enjoy solving those, and so just keep, keep looking for opportunities to do that.
92 00:14:41.220 ⇒ 00:14:45.680 Robert Tseng: Cool, yeah, so what kind of role are you looking for at this point? Like, how would we work with you?
93 00:14:46.060 ⇒ 00:14:48.540 Elty McMillan: Yeah, so I work in a bunch of different ways, ….
94 00:14:48.540 ⇒ 00:14:49.100 Robert Tseng: Yeah.
95 00:14:49.240 ⇒ 00:14:55.359 Elty McMillan: Typically, what I will do is start with, … the two main ways are…
96 00:14:55.360 ⇒ 00:15:13.469 Elty McMillan: take a month or two months, depending on how much time we need, but build out a full kind of campaign recommendation, go-to-market plan recommendation. There’s usually just a flat fee. We’ll go over everything over ICP, channels, messaging, tactics, all that kind of wrapped up in a big kind of plan that I can present to you.
97 00:15:13.500 ⇒ 00:15:27.870 Elty McMillan: workshop that together, and then you guys can implement it. That’s one way. I usually do that as, like, a flat project fee. The other way that I will work is I’ll just kind of embed myself in your organization as, like, a fractional head of marketing, fractional, you know, go-to-market leader. Yeah.
98 00:15:28.330 ⇒ 00:15:36.740 Elty McMillan: And kind of work that way on a fractional basis. So, have done both. I’m super comfortable with both. So, I find that…
99 00:15:37.560 ⇒ 00:15:56.689 Elty McMillan: The upfront work is typically the most workload, but once the program starts going, it can kind of start running itself, and there’s less, like, it’s less hour-intensive, and more just making sure you’re optimizing and coming up with new ideas, but it’s less labor-intensive, kind of, once you get over that 1-2 month go-to-market strategy portion of it.
100 00:15:57.510 ⇒ 00:16:14.849 Elty McMillan: Sure. Especially if you’ve… especially if you’ve picked a vertical. You kind of have to go through it again if you go… if you then choose to focus on another vertical. That’s why I asked the vertical-specific question, because, you know, every vertical is different in how they respond to marketing and the, you know, specific tactics you want to use for them, but….
101 00:16:16.360 ⇒ 00:16:29.459 Robert Tseng: Okay. Yeah, and then as far as, like, channels, like, I think, like, our perspective right now is not to, like, kind of diversify too much. We want to just, like, pick ones that work, and stay, like, paid media, we’re not doing right now, we turned it off.
102 00:16:29.640 ⇒ 00:16:30.920 Robert Tseng: …
103 00:16:31.000 ⇒ 00:16:49.719 Robert Tseng: content we’re invested in. I think, yeah, we actually just brought in someone else to kind of… we’re trying to generate more, leads through referrals, and I think turning the content into better… turning our success stories into content, I think we could do better at. So we have somebody who’s working with us on a fractional basis, who’s basically our head of content right now.
104 00:16:49.900 ⇒ 00:16:59.760 Robert Tseng: And then, yeah, email is kind of, like, slowly kind of getting off the ground again, but I would say, you know, LinkedIn is, like, our main… our main way of getting in front of people.
105 00:16:59.800 ⇒ 00:17:16.019 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so I think… I’d be curious, like, you know, we have, like, certain… we have, like, a couple campaigns that are… they work at any time of the season, and we just keep running them. But yeah, I would like to, like, kind of just be able to…
106 00:17:16.400 ⇒ 00:17:18.719 Robert Tseng: structure, like, from a…
107 00:17:19.020 ⇒ 00:17:26.170 Robert Tseng: Yeah, you said 2-6 month sales cycle, like, I know for different types of clients, like, how fast we can close them to some extent.
108 00:17:26.420 ⇒ 00:17:40.369 Robert Tseng: Our LinkedIn campaigns are really going after those who are, like, ready to close within 2 months, and we’re not really doing… I mean, the content is supposed to be a longer-term play. I don’t think it’s very clear how it ties back into our… our sales… our sales funnel, but…
109 00:17:40.400 ⇒ 00:17:52.739 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I do think that there’s something kind of, like, missing in the middle, like, middle of the funnel, folks, because we do have, like, the awareness campaigns from the content, and just kind of making more friends with Brainforge.
110 00:17:52.740 ⇒ 00:18:03.249 Robert Tseng: And then we have, like, a… I feel like we have a pretty tight, like, when there’s the right timing, like, we’re able to close someone within a month or two months. But, like, that middle ground is, like, I feel like we’re…
111 00:18:03.390 ⇒ 00:18:06.640 Robert Tseng: We don’t have, a good… a good grasp, so….
112 00:18:06.810 ⇒ 00:18:12.960 Elty McMillan: Right. Yeah, I think that’s probably where I’d be interested in hearing, like, what your approach would be there.
113 00:18:12.960 ⇒ 00:18:30.069 Robert Tseng: I don’t know if I want to spend, like, 2 months doing, like, a full, like, strategy kind of fixed thing, to be honest, so, yeah, like, I kind of would prefer to… we already have someone on content, maybe we embed you in, possibly, on just, like, that segment that we’re trying to do work on, so, like.
114 00:18:30.140 ⇒ 00:18:47.980 Robert Tseng: maybe, yeah, if you… yeah, your scope’s more limited to just, like, middle of the funnel, and maybe, like, obviously, that connects into, kind of, our closing process as well, but, like, I would probably still be owning, like, the, I guess the playbooks that kind of work for our show.
115 00:18:47.980 ⇒ 00:18:48.700 Elty McMillan: Correct, totally.
116 00:18:48.700 ⇒ 00:18:55.330 Robert Tseng: bottom funnel stuff, and I don’t know, that’s… that’s just talking… just kind of talking through this. That’s how I envision maybe this… this could work.
117 00:18:55.680 ⇒ 00:19:15.640 Elty McMillan: Yeah, that makes sense. So walk me through… walk me through the LinkedIn campaign you’re talking about in terms of how do you find those people, how… what are your kind of markers that you are using to kind of tell yourself that they’re interested and they’re ready to close? Is this just, like, Sales Navigator type outreach, or what are you talking about? Sales Navigator, I mean, we do some enrichment off of.
118 00:19:15.640 ⇒ 00:19:23.310 Robert Tseng: like LinkedIn, so we’re not really, like… the workflow is not really out of Sales Navigator, but, yeah, I think we can… we get the lead list from there, so…
119 00:19:23.400 ⇒ 00:19:39.789 Robert Tseng: you know, just your filters by industry, organization, and, you know, there’s a couple things we run. One is through, you know, going through our mutual connections. So, you know, Udam and I both have, like, you know, probably, like, 7,000, 8,000 people as first connections in our network now, and so….
120 00:19:40.110 ⇒ 00:19:49.620 Robert Tseng: From there, there’s just, like, you know, there’s tens of thousands of people that we could go after. And yeah, it’s just kind of curating, like, who are those intros that we can get from our network.
121 00:19:49.880 ⇒ 00:19:53.119 Robert Tseng: And then there’s also, kind of, yeah, like.
122 00:19:53.560 ⇒ 00:19:55.550 Robert Tseng: Not everybody’s gonna be a direct…
123 00:19:55.690 ⇒ 00:20:01.589 Robert Tseng: lead, but, like, my thought process is that we are, … like…
124 00:20:01.940 ⇒ 00:20:12.109 Robert Tseng: we need to… as we’re, you know, doing direct outreach as well, we’re also continuously growing our partner network, or our friends of Brainforge, is what we call it.
125 00:20:12.110 ⇒ 00:20:24.540 Robert Tseng: Right. And yeah, just, like, figuring out ways how to activate them. So, they could be vendor partners, they could be other solutions partners like us, they could be operators within teams that are just not hiring, but just, like, continuing to, like.
126 00:20:24.540 ⇒ 00:20:42.499 Robert Tseng: nurture those folks as well, so, they may pass us, like, warm, like, warm, warm, warm leads, and they, and they do. So, I think those are really, like, the two things that we’re constantly running, on LinkedIn, just constantly engaging our existing network, and then continuing to.
127 00:20:42.700 ⇒ 00:20:44.699 Robert Tseng: Make friends of friends, pretty much.
128 00:20:44.700 ⇒ 00:20:50.229 Elty McMillan: Right. Okay. No, that makes a ton of sense. So then you’d be looking for more, …
129 00:20:52.220 ⇒ 00:20:59.080 Elty McMillan: You’d be looking for, essentially, like, more softer leads that you can get into that… into that network, right?
130 00:20:59.080 ⇒ 00:21:00.409 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I think so.
131 00:21:00.410 ⇒ 00:21:03.490 Elty McMillan: Okay, that makes sense. And so…
132 00:21:03.670 ⇒ 00:21:22.539 Elty McMillan: walk me through, … because there’s a bunch of things that you could do. Not everybody likes to do, but there’s lots of things that you could do. I mean, if you’re not wanting to spend money to generate the leads, obviously content is the way that you do it, so I think the content play that you’re doing is right, but to your point, it does take a little bit longer.
133 00:21:23.270 ⇒ 00:21:31.529 Elty McMillan: I think webinars are starting to come back as an interesting play, especially if you have a story still, or you have a competency that nobody else has, or…
134 00:21:31.840 ⇒ 00:21:39.319 Elty McMillan: To your point that there’s an initiative for it, and there’s not really a lot of in-house people that know how to do it, so they want to learn what exactly they’re supposed to be doing.
135 00:21:39.510 ⇒ 00:21:45.679 Elty McMillan: I’ve seen that that start to work… to work really well. So…
136 00:21:46.570 ⇒ 00:21:57.459 Elty McMillan: I haven’t been the hugest fan of gated content, because it’s typically not good enough, and people don’t want to spend their email address to get content that they’re not sure is going to be good, but it’s kind of like…
137 00:21:57.890 ⇒ 00:22:08.029 Elty McMillan: like, webinar, LinkedIn Live kind of… video content, instructional content, seems to be a really good way of that kind of middle of funnel
138 00:22:08.030 ⇒ 00:22:25.460 Elty McMillan: marketing. Getting people who might not be ready to buy, but are definitely ready to learn. And then having a, having a really good nurture email campaign on the back end of that to keep… not necessarily to, like, funnel them down to be… to being ready to make a decision, but staying top of mind.
139 00:22:25.460 ⇒ 00:22:31.420 Elty McMillan: As a provider, so when they are ready to convert, you’re the first person that they think of.
140 00:22:31.440 ⇒ 00:22:37.999 Elty McMillan: So, that’s… that’s one… that’s one thing that I’ve been seeing being pretty successful. There’s a couple other things.
141 00:22:38.140 ⇒ 00:22:40.760 Elty McMillan: That you can do along those lines as well.
142 00:22:40.930 ⇒ 00:22:42.849 Elty McMillan: But, obviously, with…
143 00:22:42.960 ⇒ 00:22:57.179 Elty McMillan: I mean, the content part’s hard, because with… with ChatGBT and with Google’s AI, like, ranking for SEO is almost impossible now. So, it’s… it’s getting a little bit… it’s getting a lot tougher to… to win in the content game.
144 00:22:58.760 ⇒ 00:23:16.550 Robert Tseng: Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think I like what you said about, just, you know, off of webinars or learning, kind of, like, more educational content, being able to activate, leads off of that. I don’t really think we do a good job of, like, doing email nurturing campaigns. We just do maybe, like, one touch afterwards for anybody that’s engaged with our content.
145 00:23:16.720 ⇒ 00:23:20.839 Robert Tseng: Yeah, so I guess, like, now I’m thinking.
146 00:23:21.180 ⇒ 00:23:30.290 Robert Tseng: I’m not… I’m open to doing paid media. I think LinkedIn ads, I’ve heard things about it that, you know, maybe it could work. It’s not, like, the first thing I want to do. I think…
147 00:23:30.500 ⇒ 00:23:38.199 Robert Tseng: yeah, being able to… because we do have the ability to, like, put out… I mean, we do interviews every month, I mean, I guess we’re kind of, like.
148 00:23:38.550 ⇒ 00:23:56.459 Robert Tseng: I’m not exactly sure what’s on our calendar right now, but we do… we do events, webinars. My business partner just did one yesterday, so, yeah, like, we are kind of, like, pushing out a lot of this educational content, but being… activating that seems like something we haven’t really done very well, so I think that’s… that seems like a really good…
149 00:23:56.460 ⇒ 00:23:59.920 Robert Tseng: immediate opportunity. And then…
150 00:23:59.920 ⇒ 00:24:12.319 Robert Tseng: Yeah, I think just from, like, you were asking, like, you know, who… how do we build our… our lists, like, yeah, outside of Sales Navigator. Yeah, we have people who are really skilled at doing, like, clay and enrichment and whatever, but they’re not really that, like.
151 00:24:12.670 ⇒ 00:24:28.880 Robert Tseng: I mean, it’s… it… I think they need… they need some direction, and I… we just don’t always have the time to, like, kind of tell them what… like, kind of what list to build, and so, I think there’s… there’s kind of a lack of… lack of leadership over how to turn
152 00:24:29.220 ⇒ 00:24:29.950 Robert Tseng: …
153 00:24:31.020 ⇒ 00:24:41.219 Robert Tseng: Yeah, like, how to actually continue to refine our ICP and translate that into leads, because, like you said, a lot of the time, it’s just, this is your initial customer profile, not necessarily our deal.
154 00:24:41.330 ⇒ 00:24:44.120 Robert Tseng: So, I… I think…
155 00:24:44.380 ⇒ 00:24:51.329 Robert Tseng: not… that… that seems more of a, like, a strategic, kind of, like, ongoing, like, maybe, like, I would, you know, you could… you could work with…
156 00:24:51.390 ⇒ 00:25:08.230 Robert Tseng: me and, you know, kind of, kind of coach, coach us through, through that. And then there’s also kind of, like, a hands-on, like, maybe you need… need to own kind of, this, turning, like, activating our, our leads off of our educational content.
157 00:25:08.390 ⇒ 00:25:15.580 Robert Tseng: Those seem like a couple opportunities that we could probably structure something around in the short… and immediately.
158 00:25:15.580 ⇒ 00:25:16.100 Elty McMillan: Yeah.
159 00:25:16.100 ⇒ 00:25:21.650 Robert Tseng: How does that sound to you? Yeah. Yeah, it sounds great. I think that that is kind of like a foundational piece of….
160 00:25:21.650 ⇒ 00:25:35.500 Elty McMillan: if you have a really good nurture campaign, all of your other marketing efforts become significantly more effective, because you don’t have to convert them off of that first touch. You’re able to nurture them and convert them at a later point in time. So all of your events become
161 00:25:35.500 ⇒ 00:25:48.960 Elty McMillan: better, because you’re not just losing the leads the week after you… you get them from the event. All of your educational content becomes better, all of your… if people are downloading case studies, or contacting you on the website, and then ghosting you, like, all of that stuff.
162 00:25:48.990 ⇒ 00:25:52.949 Elty McMillan: becomes way more efficient as a platform.
163 00:25:53.010 ⇒ 00:26:04.660 Elty McMillan: And then when you get into, like, paid media, like, LinkedIn’s an expensive platform to run ads on. I’m running ads for, for a company called Blue Onion, and they, …
164 00:26:05.400 ⇒ 00:26:16.539 Elty McMillan: they’re going after, like, it’s like, they’re going after, like, accountants and CFOs. They’re spending, like, $450 a thousand impressions. Like, their CPMs are absolutely.
165 00:26:16.540 ⇒ 00:26:16.870 Robert Tseng: Wow.
166 00:26:16.870 ⇒ 00:26:25.509 Elty McMillan: insane. It didn’t used to be that high, but, like, so if you’re going after, like, a market that everybody else is trying to go after, it’s just super expensive.
167 00:26:25.640 ⇒ 00:26:27.070 Elty McMillan: And so…
168 00:26:27.460 ⇒ 00:26:40.829 Elty McMillan: if you don’t have a good way of, like, keeping the leads that you do generate warm, it just… it basically… there’s no way to run that as an efficient outbound marketing campaign. So… so getting a good foundational element, and then your point of the…
169 00:26:41.110 ⇒ 00:26:55.850 Elty McMillan: the ICP and testing messaging and doing, like, a planned strategy for A-B split testing your messaging, and making sure you’re continually optimizing and keeping track of what you’ve tried, what’s worked, what hasn’t, not making the same mistakes twice.
170 00:26:56.080 ⇒ 00:27:01.449 Robert Tseng: that’s kind of how you ramp up your efficiency in all of those, in all of those efforts, so… Yeah.
171 00:27:01.780 ⇒ 00:27:08.459 Elty McMillan: It’s, it’s, it’s not super… It’s not, like, a super sexy ad campaign, it’s just, like.
172 00:27:08.560 ⇒ 00:27:19.859 Elty McMillan: operationally… operational efficiency maximizing over the course of time, and eventually you will get to the right answer. It’s more of a systematic approach.
173 00:27:19.880 ⇒ 00:27:30.729 Elty McMillan: It’s not quite as cool as, you know, convincing you to use Snoop Dogg to lie that he’s given up smoke, but it would probably be more efficient as a strategy.
174 00:27:31.050 ⇒ 00:27:37.210 Robert Tseng: Yeah, yeah, no, I think this is really, like, a go-to-market ops, like, …
175 00:27:38.130 ⇒ 00:27:40.920 Robert Tseng: like, yeah, I think a lot of it is just, like.
176 00:27:41.110 ⇒ 00:27:58.729 Robert Tseng: getting the scaffolding in place and being able to have the discipline to keep, kind of, experimenting and running that, and I think maybe our marketing side of the house kind of lacks that. So, yeah, I think you… I think you have a good kind of grasp of, like, kind of what our needs are. Maybe next steps, like.
177 00:27:58.750 ⇒ 00:28:06.380 Robert Tseng: I would like… I mean, if you… kind of knowing what you know now, I can answer any more questions to clarify, like, if you could…
178 00:28:06.580 ⇒ 00:28:25.560 Robert Tseng: you know, give us a bit more clarity on, like, a proposal? Like, I mean, I know, you know, the job description is what it is, but, like, I think talking through this, I think, yeah, our biggest needs are, yeah, the nurturing campaigns, having some leadership on the go-to-market side over just being able to, you know, guide, like.
179 00:28:25.710 ⇒ 00:28:33.940 Robert Tseng: How do we have that, like, experimentation engine running, so that it’s…
180 00:28:34.250 ⇒ 00:28:44.320 Robert Tseng: like, the work that people are doing is able to actually roll up into continuous experiments on ICP messaging. Yeah, like, I think it’s very much just, like.
181 00:28:44.670 ⇒ 00:29:00.360 Robert Tseng: running a campaign for two weeks, did it work or not? If not, pivot. And we’re not, like, necessarily staffing our learnings, and I feel like sometimes we’re just, like, taking circles, running in circles. So I think there’s some… some need for… for that type of leadership as an embedded person as well.
182 00:29:00.390 ⇒ 00:29:08.380 Robert Tseng: So maybe an embedded approach is the best, like, I don’t want to dictate what that looks like for you, I’m open to seeing options, but I do think that those are the, probably the two
183 00:29:08.700 ⇒ 00:29:13.860 Robert Tseng: immediate needs, … Yeah. Yeah.
184 00:29:13.860 ⇒ 00:29:23.950 Elty McMillan: I would agree. And I find that if I’m doing my job well, I’m creating good problems for us to solve. So, like, coming in… like, I prefer the embedded approach, because I get to, like.
185 00:29:24.100 ⇒ 00:29:33.129 Elty McMillan: I get to see the scope of everything that’s going on, and how marketing and the go-to-market plan is affected by the whole company, as opposed to just, like, kind of going offline.
186 00:29:33.250 ⇒ 00:29:42.659 Elty McMillan: dreaming up a strategy and then handing it off to you without the ability to, like, optimize it on an ongoing basis. But if we’re doing a great, you know, if we’re doing a great job of…
187 00:29:42.720 ⇒ 00:29:58.070 Elty McMillan: converting our nurture campaign, and then the problem becomes, oh, we’re getting a lot of people interested, but we’re hap… but they’re not able… but, like, our people are ghosting us on our demos. Like, we’re getting so many demo requests that we don’t have enough time, we don’t have a great system for getting them through and qualifying them.
188 00:29:58.130 ⇒ 00:30:15.070 Elty McMillan: Like, that’s a great problem to have, and that problem will be discovered if we can… if I can do this first part of the job. So there’s always going to be more go-to-market things to do, and if I’m doing my job well, I’m creating those great problems for us to have. So I… I tend to prefer… I tend to prefer that… that route anyway.
189 00:30:15.350 ⇒ 00:30:16.080 Robert Tseng: Totally.
190 00:30:16.410 ⇒ 00:30:28.100 Robert Tseng: Okay, cool. Yeah, I mean, this was… this was good. Yeah, thanks for… thanks for taking the time. Yeah. Yeah. I’ll look forward to hearing… hearing from… from you and what you come back with then.
191 00:30:28.100 ⇒ 00:30:47.369 Elty McMillan: Sweet, yeah, so I can write up a proposal. I’ll tell you right now, I typically, I charge $100 an hour as my rate, and then I usually do it in, like, eighth quarter or half-time, workloads. It’s a little bit cheaper as it goes up, but most people like the kind of quarter…
192 00:30:47.590 ⇒ 00:30:53.860 Elty McMillan: 10-ish, 10-ish hours a week. that’s what most people, that’s what I mostly do.
193 00:30:53.970 ⇒ 00:31:04.489 Elty McMillan: that gives enough time for meeting and then actual, like, executional, executional work. But I could send over a full proposal of kind of what that looks like and what we could, what we could tackle.
194 00:31:05.070 ⇒ 00:31:06.590 Robert Tseng: Okay, yeah, that sounds good.
195 00:31:06.590 ⇒ 00:31:10.850 Elty McMillan: Sweet! Alright, if there’s anything else you need from me, please, don’t hesitate to reach out.
196 00:31:11.040 ⇒ 00:31:12.670 Robert Tseng: Sure. Alright, thanks, Alti.
197 00:31:12.670 ⇒ 00:31:13.540 Elty McMillan: Cool, yep, bye.
198 00:31:13.540 ⇒ 00:31:14.080 Robert Tseng: Bye.