The Transaction

TT - 060 - Justin Michael & Charles Needham
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Matt Amundson: . [00:00:00] And, uh, and just Charles, where, where are you at today? Physically?

Charles Needham: Uh, Knoxville, Tennessee.

Matt Amundson: Oh, Knoxville. Okay. Awesome. Tell the folks at FedEx I said so.

Charles Needham: I can, I can swing by and drop that. You have a lot of sway there.

Matt Amundson: No, I just have, uh, uh, one, uh, once upon a time I worked at TIBCO and we closed a huge deal at the end of our fiscal year there. sales rep, uh, the sales rep actually moved to Knoxville for the last 90 days of the year to get the deal done.

Justin Michael: That's awesome.

Matt Amundson: So

Charles Needham: that's commitment right there. Knoxville's pretty cool though. There's worse places you can move to get a deal done. I'm sure Justin has some stories about that.

Justin Michael: Oh yeah.

Matt Amundson: Alright. Uh, well let's, let's just kick things off.

​

Matt Amundson: [00:01:00] Alright everybody,

Sam Guertin: Hmm.

Matt Amundson: uh, so. It is my distinct pleasure to be joined by both Justin Michael and Charles Needham today. Uh, they are the, uh, I think formerly known as Sales Borg, uh, currently known as, uh, Amazon Bestselling authors. Uh, Justin's been a part of both the Justin Michael Method. I don't, I guess it doesn't, it's not called one if it's the first one, but also Justin Michael, method 2.0. Uh,

Justin Michael: Okay.

Matt Amundson: just extremely well read, uh, sales books. And they've got a new project that they're coming out with, uh, upcoming here on the ninth, uh, the cold calling Algo, and I'm super excited to jump into that.

But, uh, before I get started. I just wanna say thanks for joining us. I know you guys have a very busy press tour in front of you. Uh, Justin's coming in, uh, uh, from, uh, from Europe and Zurich, Switzerland. [00:02:00] And, um, and, uh, Charles is coming in from, from Knoxville, uh, the home of FedEx. So, uh, welcome guys.

Justin Michael: Glad to be here, excited to, uh, you know, talk shop fans, fans of the

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: known, uh,

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: for a bit. So, yeah. Let's, let's get into it, man. How do you wanna

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: in?

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Craig Rosenberg not present today. No excuses. No, no reason why he couldn't be here, but he's not here.

Justin Michael: OB one Kenobi, you know, he is sort of still with us at all times.

Matt Amundson: He's with us in spirit. Yeah. And, and if you strike him down, you'll, he'll only become more powerful than, than ever before. So, uh, so

Sam Guertin: So

Matt Amundson: we usually like to kick off the show, uh, Craig refers this as the, uh, uh, what is it? Uh, Sam, the Matt Amundson.

Sam Guertin: I believe it's the Matt Amundson, uh, 2.1 ABX, um,

Matt Amundson: question.

Sam Guertin: yeah, for the transaction.

Matt Amundson: So one of the things that we love here and our audience loves here is, is storytelling. [00:03:00] So, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna kick it to, to Justin and Charles here, just. Think about, you know, you guys have been a part of, uh, so many great organizations and helping organizations improve, uh, their cold calling, their selling overall, and their ability to, uh, to scale. maybe you could tell us about. customer story that you had one that stood out where maybe there was massive improvement. There was something that they were just doing fundamentally wrong and, and, and, and they needed to root that out to make a big change. Uh, anything kind of jump to mind for you guys? I.

Justin Michael: Yeah, so, um. What's really interesting, I've been doing, um, sales consulting now for five years. I've been in sales since 2001. Um, you know, before the internet I used to sell packets of vehicle auctions, like Miami

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: You know, people,

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: uh, freak out. They're like. working really hard and like back in my day I'd sit in a folding chair waiting to cold call.

They'd like [00:04:00] throw red Bulls at us, like humming the sharks, you know. And then we'd get in there and then like a queue would hit from like some TV ads and we all jump on the phone and read the same nine minute script and there's like compliance listening in and we're trying to take credit cards and it was pretty crazy.

But, um. Yeah, I've been in the game a really long time and, um, the last five years, the stunning revelation is in over 200 startups that I've advised a hundred percent are setting the majority of their, uh, meetings via phone and generating

Matt Amundson: Mm. Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: via

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Justin Michael: never, I've never seen otherwise. I had a marketing team where. head of marketing was like, we write all their sequences and we don't let them cold call. And I think I was like young in the process of this and I'm like, here's what I'll do. I'll pay you my fee and I'll get on the phone and I'll prove to you. That this is gonna be more effective.

And, uh, they never called me again. So I, I was like, I over, I over challenged the Challenger, but hey, I did have a champion down at [00:05:00] HubSpot, uh, Australia, and I ended up coaching about 65 reps there and certifying them. There were a couple really cool things. I've written a lot of books in methods. One of the things was, um, the responsiveness of C levels.

There was this pervasive

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Justin Michael: like, they don't answer the phone. other one

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Justin Michael: they're not on LinkedIn, and one of the ways I figured out everyone is on LinkedIn is I, I took the lyrics of, what do you mean by Justin Bieber? And just every 10 minutes I would just send the lyric. Like, what do you mean you nod your head?

You know, yes. You mean No, and I just send it. within like five of these, they're like, Hey, take me off the list. Go away. Like you, you will get shut down. And it's a very, very

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: So, you know, um, we proved that that team could just call CMOs, could just get CMOs to interact right over LinkedIn.

Dms like long DM flows, like I've never seen this, that there would long conversations. I, I don't know. I mean, one awesome. Moment I had is I read an article in Wired magazine it was, uh, the CMO of [00:06:00] Marriott at the time, and she was

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: the, their app and how you could like, you know, go to the room and unlock it. I had this really cool geofence technology. I read the app so. I like, I think I called her number in DiscoverOrg and left a message and, and referenced the quote and did like the triple from combo prospecting. And then I sent the email, it's like, Hey, we this tech where you can geofence the resort and there's a different offer at the pool in the front desk in the parking lot.

'cause normally you just geofence the entire area.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Justin Michael: so, um, I. You know, I tripled in, it was probably like a Friday, late afternoon New York Times. She responded within five minutes I had put her whole quote in the subject line or in, and she just sent me to England to like this vet. So then the next day I like hit the European dial.

I called London, um, and I, again, no one picked up. I left a

Matt Amundson: Yep.

Justin Michael: there, I tripled again, uh, that vetter got to me and, and then sent me to Plano, Texas. And within a week just sitting there reading a Wired magazine and picking up a phone, [00:07:00] I landed this amazing meeting for our whole team to fly

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: Texas.

And now I'm here in Plano, Texas. The coolest thing happened in Texas. This lifted truck like came outta nowhere, this massive truck, it, it was, it came to a stop sign and I'm walking by it and it just started to accelerate. And I did like a full roll. I just was like, like, and it just, it like, it, it was like an untouchable roll, you know, like two seconds of the thing would've hit me.

But, uh, I'm recalling

Matt Amundson: Whoa.

Justin Michael: I also evaded death. So you've got cold calling. Which proves, I'm like a, you know, an immortal vampire. People have speculated, is it the cyborg? Is like, is the real living organism. Let's go to Charles.

Charles Needham: Man, how do I, how do I follow that one up?

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Good luck, Chuck. Chuck.

Justin Michael: got, you got a cool hat. You got

Charles Needham: Got the machine. Yeah. My wife got this from me two days ago and I haven't taken it off my head since.

Justin Michael: looking

Charles Needham: I feel like this is more of a Justin hat though. You know, the sales board.

Justin Michael: Yeah, what's your story though, [00:08:00] Charles? Because you're doing some awesome stuff at Titan X and you came outta Wall Street, so I'm sure you have some, uh, pursuit of happiness type moments.

Charles Needham: Yeah, I mean, I think it's helpful to sort of understand the, uh, the nature of the relationship in this book, right? Justin obviously has a ton of experience in mobile marketing, 20 years, everything from call centers, coaching vp, being the rep himself, and we're going through a really interesting time in GTM right now.

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Charles Needham: basically phone is the last channel standing, and you know, we did it to ourselves. Email sequencing, LinkedIn automation. We're now in this world where the phone is the only thing left standing, but ironically enough, everyone's trying to kill the phone as well. You think of ai, SDR as you think of parallel dialing.

The irony seems to be entirely lost on everybody, that they're going to kill this channel as well. And so part of what we reimagined in this book is how do we redefine the way buyers and sellers communicate? We have so many broken [00:09:00] KPIs that you see from the board level, you know, encouraging reps to push meetings, leading phone scripts with just features and benefits, and just drumming buyers to death.

And you know, I'm a poker player, so what I see is that there's a sort of interesting feedback loop, right? uh, sellers adopts these tactics. Buyers then develop defense mechanisms. Sellers come up with new ones. So it's this sort of like awful race to the bottom. And so what we're trying to do is redefine a world where sellers and buyers have conversations again, and sellers first and foremost catalog the market.

They understand their buyers. They take that feedback to improve products that then improve customers' lives. So it becomes a virtuous feedback loop, but it starts with awareness around the idea that cold calling is a mechanism to survey the market and have conversations rather than going in there like eight mile em and M style, one shot, one opportunity to book a meeting.

And so that's sort of where this all ties in [00:10:00] together. I.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Love that. I mean, it's amazing to me as an operator now, like, um, you know, I typically will answer some cold calls each week. I just want to hear what's going on. I want to hear if, like, there's somebody who can actually convince me to take a meeting, and it's shocking to me how many times I'll just say, oh, you know, well, I'm not in that category, or I don't have that problem.

Uh. And they're like, well, would you still like to take a 15 minute meeting? And I'm like, I, I don't know why I would. Right? Like, I think people are so conditioned to end every single cold call with this, like, will you take a meeting with me? Even if they hear that I'm not qualified, even if they hear that I'm not in the right category, even if they hear that I'm not the right person, like, hey, I'm not a CFO.

Like I don't make decisions around. know, our ERP solution or something like that. They're like, yeah, but like, you should really see this. And it's just, it's a little bewildering to me 'cause I began my career in tech, uh, leading an SDR team. Uh, and so all this stuff was very [00:11:00] near and dear to my heart.

Like over, you know, for the first, you know, five, six years of my career, and I, I still have a BDR team that, that's in my remit now. Um, and it's just crazy to me the way cold calling has gone and what I, what I hear on cold calls nowadays. I mean, this is. For decades, there was all this great information being pumped out on LinkedIn and it feels like people have, you know, sort of either shut, shut their mind off to that in favor of technology or, you know, their, their, their, their brain has gone to, well, we need more volume based metrics.

It's more calls, more emails or, or you know, maybe just the proliferation of, of tools that allow you to do so much volume and so, so little time. Um, I guess I, I, I'd like to ask you guys, like, how did we get here to this point where, you know, there's just the, the, the quality of cold calling has, has declined so rapidly

Justin Michael: I might like let it rip now. [00:12:00] So,

Matt Amundson: go,

Justin Michael: uh,

Matt Amundson: let's get into it.

Justin Michael: I do this

Matt Amundson: Let's.

Justin Michael: destruction with, with a, in a loving way? Okay, we'll, we'll start here. you look at the canon of all the books ever written. And you look at it like a funnel and you just start chopping it down. You're like Sandler, right? There's some semblance of a top funnel, but it's not really focused

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Justin Michael: tofu.

You know? It's more of a

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: bofu, and if you don't know what that means, you're probably new to the pod, right? Then you go to things like challenger. This kind of assumes you already got the fish on the line. Right.

Matt Amundson: Yep.

Justin Michael: to the very top of the funnel though, you, you kind of lack the rigor of the full cycle systems, like, you know, Taz Challenger, force Management.

There's so much rigor in progressing through the bow tie to put in Jocko parlance at the very top of

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: you get almost more of a B2C motion, where you've got Wolf of Wall Street boiler room stuff. You've got the Grant Cardone, you got the, Some of the traditionalists or phone people and there's good stuff.

We love Arts SOB Check. I mean, he's amazing. [00:13:00] He's

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: He is somebody who's been the game, sort of the godfather, but it was really kind of missing a rigorous system. That one was enterprise grade. How would you use the phone to penetrate C levels to go after a multi-threaded, highly matrixed account?

Fortune 1000. We're in an era where there's 11 decision makers, even for a startup company sometimes.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: you've gotta

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: adept at getting through. Number two, um, no one has ever put out a book about AI powered cold calling, and this is why we call it the cold call algorithm. First of all,

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: for ask level. Glitch offer, which is an ask based opener, not permission based necessarily. It's I throw you off guard with an insightful question. You are talking first versus me saying the reason for my call. And so really, here's the technical reason. We had to write the book. One Gmail allows 50 messages a day. So does Outlook.

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: rep and you're an enterprise company now, Midmark company, they give you one email, maybe you two if you're lucky, so you [00:14:00] can send 50 emails a day. Now, I don't even know which vendor says it. I think it was maybe Outreach, but without the help of sophisticated personalization and rev ops and email warming and multiple domains, people are setting one meeting out of a thousand emails if they're lucky.

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Justin Michael: It's like

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: banner ad now. So the agencies get, you know, five domains, 10 domains, 15 email addresses, warm 'em all up, put 'em through Clay, build NAN flows, get all this like techie, VTM engineering stuff. And that's what we predicted in tech powered sales is that they would look like, uh, sales engineers. And they, they are, they're quite technical.

They're vibe, coding and cursor, and they're doing all this stuff. Well, some, this poor rep is like, you know, sending 50 emails, nothing's happening, and then they get on the phone.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: of that data is bouncing. Right. And then the

Sam Guertin: Right.

Justin Michael: the data's bad after the pandemic and all the job changes,

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Justin Michael: LinkedIn API is still closed. So the

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: and premise of AI fully replacing [00:15:00] the top funnel is impossible. It can scrape LinkedIn. It can't fully automate. APIs closed. The rep doesn't have enough volume coming off the email. To set meetings. So all they can really do now is use artificial intelligence around the phone. And now here's the kicker, and I

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm. Right.

Justin Michael: still sitting in 20, 20, 70% of the top funnel can be automated. It is impossible to a hundred percent. I see companies all the time doing the twin, cold calling, and it's fully illegal. So

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Justin Michael: that climate, we thought, well, what's gonna happen with increasing regulation between 2025 and 2035? It's gonna be the AI powered phone. And a lot of people throw rocks at the book. They're like, you shouldn't AI call. But this book's about empowering the human. AI from the [00:16:00] targeting to the analysis to how to personalize what to pinpoint C-level strategy and matrix strategy.

And it's all the ways to put AI as an exo-skeleton around the collar. Now, I won't mention any books on the market. Cold calling sucks. Uh, this is a suck cut. It actually sucks, you know, Wayne's world. But anyway, that book is very B2C and those approaches proliferated in the nineties. It's an old stack for B2C, right?

It's in

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: not the enterprise grade stuff. So I'm looking at their like permission based opener stuff like, um, Hey Matt, I'm calling from Justin Michael, consultant. Does that name ring a bell? Uh, Right. spoken before. Hey, I was talking to people on your team. Uh, I checked for the team.

You didn't call him like, it's just like quirky gimmick type stuff. And that stuff really will sink you if you try to call A CFO. So I'm gonna give the mic

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: uh, I'd love to hear Charles' dissertation and, you know, his views are his own disclaimer. I'm, I'm a little outspoken, like Mark Cuban of B2B. So what do you think?

Throw, throw

Charles Needham: Yeah,

Justin Michael: Charles. I mean, I did, I offend you.

Charles Needham: [00:17:00] not yet. Not yet. We still got plenty of time though.

Matt Amundson: Yeah, we got 39 minutes left.

Charles Needham: In any case, it seems like if we go back to the earlier conversation about. Sales reps destroying their own channels where you have a real opportunity to use AI for either good or evil. And on the evil side, we've already seen the outcomes of this AI writing, messaging, AI personalizing things with M dashes.

We, we've all gotten those emails in the last week, I'm sure at least a hundred of 'em. But in any case, there's a very real opportunity to be signal inside of that noise. There's a sort of reversion effect where being the human that is powered by AI that you can use to synthesize insights, suddenly personalization at scale is not out of reach delivered by voice.

And so what we're talking about is not a binary situation where you either have a human calling without the assistance of AI or full on AI calling, but a world where these things can actually work together [00:18:00] for the benefit of both buyer and seller. And so I think that's sort of the foundational component of the book and what's, what's so important that we want to get across.

Matt Amundson: Yeah, I've heard Justin say before that like the ultimate, you know, sort of os for AI or the tech stack I guess, but AI in this case is still a human being, Uh, and like. I think one of the things that everybody's a little bit worried about, and especially like coming on the heels of, uh, the anthropic CEO saying, Hey, 50% of white collars are go white collar jobs, entry level white collar jobs are going away, is people are scared, like, you know. I have kids, many people who work in tech today have kids. They know if, you know, if their kid's not gonna be a, an an engineer or a finance major, like they're gonna get their start as like a BDR. Is that job gonna exist? How are we gonna break them into the market? So, uh, maybe we could talk a little bit about like, what you are seeing as a winning strategy when you know you're, the human being is being employed as the operating system [00:19:00] for, for a lot of these AI technologies.

Justin Michael: Well, we're in the fourth industrial revolution and every industrial revolution has created jobs. And so it's funny,

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: Lee wrote a book called AI Superpowers about sort of the rise of the dragon in, in China. So my book Sales superpowers, I think was a sub subconscious or Freudian slip to that. and so there are 750,000 SDRs. to 10 Bound and Dave Delaney. I believe that number instead

Matt Amundson: Love Dave.

Justin Michael: Instead of shrinking at 200,000, I believe it's gonna grow to 2 million. Now, will it be called an SDR? Maybe not. It may be a human operator that has the output of 20 or output of a hundred, I think we're gonna see, because the ification of everything SaaS is eating the world. I still feel like there's a lot of movement. uh, more SaaS models and more predictable revenue and more need of supply chain. So I've taken a really controversial stance. For the longest time I thought that, [00:20:00] um, know, sellers were gonna go away and I'll be replaced from buying and selling bots, long as LinkedIn has a shut, API billion people on that thing, and as long as Gmail is heavily restricted. As long as the data providers don't have clean data. Now, one thing I will say is Charles works at this company called Titan x.io.

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: May seem like a shameless plug, but there's a couple vendors only. What's funny, in 2007, I was a BDR. I. At the

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: sales and all I did

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Justin Michael: day of my life, I just dreamed of connect and sell.

And I knew a guy who knew someone over there and I would, my founders, they were like, they sold the company to Oracle, so they were doing well. And I was like, just buy it, you know, it was a stratospheric cost at the time, but I was like, it'll just do

Matt Amundson: Oh yeah.

Justin Michael: and hot switch me, you know? So, um, yeah.

Where am I going with that? I mean, this company basically, they. Do algorithmic hits against the API. Like they test the numbers, they get you, they [00:21:00] enrich your list and they get you a list that's already clean. So they're like, these 200 numbers answer the phone and then you

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: to parallel assisted dial.

Like why would you call it 15 ways from Sunday? Like I have Matt Amundson cell phone, I'm just gonna

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: seven times until he picks up or texts me pound sand. human verification, channel validation, having a combination of VA like VA's algorithmic scraping to tell you the list is clean, like the list

Matt Amundson: yeah,

Justin Michael: And that's something that Chris be

Matt Amundson: yeah,

Justin Michael: and it's been echoed by Joey Gilkey who's the, you

Matt Amundson: yeah. Up.

Justin Michael: of, of Titan X. And Ryan Reiser said it so. I know I kinda like segued all around and plug some technology, but we're also really heavily looking at prioritization and also tech stacks where it's a power dialer and a parallel dialer and a

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: and then omnichannel under it.

So this is sort of like a, the, the era apparent, right? Prometheus style. This is sort of the, uh, baby [00:22:00] alien of tech powered sales. Um, what would you say

Matt Amundson: Bluish, bluish, bluish hu to the, the skin tone too.

Justin Michael: be a face sucking alien is all I have to say.

Charles Needham: That's it. That's all you need to know right there.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Charles Needham: Um, I guess helpful to sort of highlight the channel segmentation piece and hit on that. So what we found as an organization is if you take a random distribution of people, and I'm actually, I want to go around the room 'cause I'm kind of curious. You guys get a call from an unknown number.

It is not marked as spam likely, but you definitely don't recognize the number. What are you doing? Are you picking up.

Sam Guertin: 50 50.

Matt Amundson: Almost never. Only when I'm prepared to get a cold call, unless it's local. And I think it could be coming from one of my kids' schools, but like I live in an area where like I have a, I have a phone number from, from Los Angeles and I live in the Bay Area, so like I usually, I can tell when it's a. bunk cold [00:23:00] call.

'cause even if it doesn't say, you know, uh, a high chance of spam or whatever, it's like it's coming from a, a Los Angeles area. 'cause trying to match to me.

Justin Michael: Hmm.

Charles Needham: Interesting. So you actually see the local area code as like an inverse indicator,

Matt Amundson: Yeah,

Charles Needham: right? So we go back to the earlier conversation about tactics that have now been sniffed out.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Charles Needham: That's a good example of it right there. Okay, so Matt, you're not picking up, Sam, you pick up sounds like sometimes 50 50. I'll say yes, Justin, I know the answer for you, but if, if you want to explicate for the good people here.

Justin Michael: I, I don't have a car. I don't use a phone. It sits in there, play mode. It's like a dumb pipe. Uh, you know, Jason Bourne of, uh, executive coaching on the running in Europe, not in the Witness Protection Program. Here I am on the call, but maybe, but no, maybe, I don't know.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Could be.

Justin Michael: just play with that, but

Sam Guertin: We will disguise the voice.

Justin Michael: it is actually, my mom's 75 and she just leaves these voicemails like crazy and it's like the best thing ever.

'cause she [00:24:00] can't, it literally, if you call my

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: like, like, it's like out of service. But it does work if you text it. Anyway, Charles, where are we going with this?

Charles Needham: We're, we're gonna go with the fact that you are not a phone picker upper, we'll go with that, but. What we found is that there is a, there is an interesting power law when it comes to reach, so there's about 20% of the population that will pick up cold calls. They see an unknown number. They think it's kind of interesting.

They're happy to take a call. The problem with that is, and I'm sure you guys know people like this, 80% of the population treats cold calls like jump scares in a horror movie. They see their phone ringing, they're like, they're freaking out. They're Googling the number. They'll do anything but pick up.

Doesn't matter how many times you call them, what area code you use, what time of day doesn't matter. So at the end of the day, unless you're equipped with that information in advance, what can you do but call everybody. And so this is where the parallel dialers have come in, right? They've [00:25:00] basically just said, you know what?

Pickup rates are low, so we're just gonna bomb. Absolutely everybody. Which ironically drives pickup rates lower, but you know, that's neither here nor there. But at the end of the day, the root cause issue is that you're calling people who don't pick up the phone. You're emailing people who don't answer emails, and you're sending LinkedIn messages to people who may not even been on the platform.

And so the amount of noise in the channels or just is just getting exponential. And so at the end of the day, if you know who picks up the phone and who doesn't, and you just call the people that pick up the phone. Suddenly you're meeting everybody where they are. You're calling people who wanna pick up the phone.

You can have a conversation with them, and then you can action other people separately. So that's sort of how we look at it. As opposed to just going at the volume approach,

Matt Amundson: Mm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: that's being achieved via AI because the

Charles Needham: I.

Justin Michael: to clean that data and to target it and understand. And intent is, you know, obviously the special sauce of vendors like Titan X. There's another one called cloud lead.co, but [00:26:00] it's rare, just like the parallels assisted dialers. And now you even see Orum saying, Hey, use this boost connecting, which is like predictive time of day singled out like we know Matt sell and we know when he picks up the phone.

Why on earth would we call him like four times in a row on a

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: area, presence of her? There's no point. Let's just. It's actually just call him and,

Matt Amundson: Yeah,

Justin Michael: think the thing that tech powered sales got right is the return to innocence is at the end of the day, we have

Matt Amundson: I,

Justin Michael: literally a million hunters and they don't talk to humans that often.

They sell

Matt Amundson: yeah.

Justin Michael: of the time and they talk to five people every week. So I remember, I think Charles, our building the content, he's one Friday he goes, he is like, I just got on the phone for two hours and had the output of a month. Of a normal SDR team. And I was like, yep. 'cause he's getting 25% connect rates. And I,

Matt Amundson: Right.

Justin Michael: was the connect and sell value prop. And they've got some good data too. So I invite people to look at all these platforms 'cause they now have analysis [00:27:00] anonymized of

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: you know, a hundred million calls they've made. But imagine a paradigm where the rep, instead of dialing eight hours and getting five executive assistants, dials an hour or two and has a thousand, you know, a thousand dials a day and 20

Matt Amundson: Right.

Justin Michael: Or in the case of this new data source like Titan X, you know, you literally just talk to 25% of the people you call. Which

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Yeah.

Justin Michael: And you know, it's funny, it's just a time machine. It's hot tub time machine that that's what it was. And in 2002, 2005, when I

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: the phones, I called executive directors and nine outta 10 would just pick up. where

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Justin Michael: good at it because I did like 10,000 hours talking to people and doing the

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: so if their sales floor is silent and you're sitting in a sequencer and you're programming clay, that's badass, but that's marketing. That is

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: sales is two-way flow what we're doing now, you know, I truly believe in the purity of natural selling.

So in the future, if they can fix the top funnel, even if it's buying and selling bots, ultimately the human option has to [00:28:00] come in, in the strategic element. One, it'll be like a record player it'll be like vinyl records. It'll be a premium expensive thing, like choose the.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: And maybe they'll repeal the calling, uh, with bots, but it would be like the Tipper Gore explicit lyrics, you know, like, so I'll call you and be like, you have a call from Justin Michael's bot. This is not Justin Michael

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: one. You know, like getting a call

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: Quentin or something, you know, like, oh, okay. You

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: this thing. And that was, I want to give credit there to, um, to John Gerard who was, uh, the CEO of science. He kind of sourced that

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Justin Michael: and I'd never seen it. So wherever you are, uh, and it's funny, uh, that my, my friend over there, um. Thomas Cornelius, he's bullish on all the SDRs going away. He thinks it's going to 10%. So it is really like doom and gloom or, and I don't hear a lot of people thinking there's gonna be more jobs, but I'm going there. There's no vested interest there. I just saw the wave with mobile and saw the wave with social, and I was in

Matt Amundson: [00:29:00] Yeah.

Justin Michael: revolution, 92, 93.

And it creates these new economies and new skill sets. People are really going crazy over learning clay and learning all these systems. If it takes you 20 hours to become a coder. Again, now you're an engineer, A GTM engineer,

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: if you're

Matt Amundson: Right.

Justin Michael: you should be studying psychology, neuroscience, behavioral psychology, like Freud, things like Cialdini, this tech stuff is gonna put you in front of someone. That's where, so this book is really heavily on C-level communication techniques, objection handling, positioning status frames. Because if you do what's in the book, you're gonna start talking to a lot of people. And if you use the stack

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: and then you're not gonna know what to do, 'cause your job's gonna change.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Well, I wanna get into it, right, because I, I was doing a little research and I was reading one of your most recent LinkedIn posts and you know, there's, there's kind of five things that you called out. [00:30:00] algo trains reps to do. So maybe we can, maybe we can go through each one of those. Uh, and if you don't know the answer to what those five are, don't worry.

I will read them aloud for everybody. Uh, so, uh, first one, start calls without sounding like one.

Justin Michael: Well that's, that's pretty good. Um, Charles, do you wanna take that one?

Charles Needham: I believe this was your post, my friend. I, I don't want to do it a disservice.

Justin Michael: I am a, I'm an egalitarian of podcast airtime. Um, I don't know. I mean, uh, just take anything and put it in a dating context and, you know, so I'll give you a couple debates here. One, um, I. Matt. Um, is it okay if, if maybe like, let's just do Julia Banana, the guy Sini or whatever he is like, would it be a terrible idea if I pissed you right now?

It's a horrible thing, but I'm cold calling you. And he is like in a

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: and he is going, you know, he is like dressed as a a, you know, he is got what, uh, [00:31:00] Jenga going and he's ironing. It's hilarious, right? And it does work

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: army, but I, I kind of go like this. If you say. Can I get 30 seconds?

You're kind of going, I'm doing a seven figure deal. Is it really 30 seconds? If you say you're gonna hate me, this is cold call. It's a negative connotation. Right? So, and

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: I get into these constant battles about tonality and permission-based openers. And I took a hard line against PVOs forever, and now I'm sort of like, it's really more about status, the frame and the tone.

And as Charles says, it's like calming down system one, the amygdala, the fight or flight so that the front brain can take over. But the battle about tone versus verbiage, here's how I call. Like you're on a date with someone, like what do you do? It's like, oh, it's so great meeting you. Like you wanna come see my meth lab? Right,

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Right.

Justin Michael: get your tone right, you know it's not gonna work. So what you say really does matter and C levels need you to get to the point. And if you're waterboarding someone and talking over them, you're not really controlling the call. So [00:32:00] the

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: is everything in the book we have this thing called like a high status PBO or a hybrid PBO, because Jerry Hill from Connect and Sell is like, I can use PPOs or rot Ruin, multiplier, any opener and win.

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: was a unified theory of everything, because if you get on a phone. You know, get an executive's time, open an opportunity, and close the deal. The full thing. You create a piece of business, you're right. it doesn't matter if you're, you know, reciting blues clues or, you know, singing the

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: pinged banner.

You know, uh, that's the first rule of everything. And we needed a, we needed an ophere ology to explain it all, like e equals mc squared. There's nothing in

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: book, there's nothing you can do on a phone that the book doesn't explain or account

Matt Amundson: Hmm,

Justin Michael: But weak approaches that perform averagely and, and behaviors that really repel buyers are very much demonstrated.

Matt Amundson: Hmm hmm.

Charles Needham: I will, um, I'll jump in there because I think when we talk about the unified theory of everything, a big part of the reason [00:33:00] that we wrote this book together is Justin and I have had endless debates about cold call openers, uh, PR Prior to writing this book, he was very heavy on. Not using permission based openers.

And we had seen people use that successfully. And so there was this sort of dialectic that we were trying to resolve of, you know, there are people who use this successfully and there are people who don't, who are also successful and what reconciles this. And so part of what Justin and I figured out, and this is Townsend Ward law has talked about this forever.

Interruptive communication is fundamentally different from planned communication. And successful interruptive communication has a couple principles. One, you have to create curiosity. So imagine if you go up to somebody in a grocery store, you're like, did you see what happened outside? You immediately hook them, right?

So the curiosity is a big element there, but you also have to draw a fine line because the human brain is constantly scanning for threats. I think Townsend calls this the [00:34:00] crocodile brain. But it's that sort of very primal system one, system two, um, binary. And so with the system one, you're scanning for threats.

And so you have to generate intrigue, but you also have to calm down somebody enough that they're willing to listen to you. And so a part of that is tonality. Part of that is control. But at the end of the day, the reason these p bs fall flat is because if we go back to that buyer and seller. Uh, strategy sellers have heard that so many times before that you're not engendering curiosity anymore.

You're engendering irritation. And so if they're able to bucket you, then regardless of whether it's a PBO or a non PBO, you're dead in the water. So generate curiosity with your opener and then also calm them down. You have to be able to do both.

Justin Michael: This stuff is so rampant. It's become like pickup lines. It's like, I make, I make jokes about it because you know it. Aaron Ross had, did I catch you at a bad time? And then like when I [00:35:00] hit the

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: 2012, like, or in 2015, I guess the book was out. Everyone was saying that, and why it's cool is

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: did I catch you at a bad time?

It gets them to say no. So like, I, I think it was Josh Braun or, and maybe it came outta Chris Vos, but it was like, Hey, would it be a terrible idea to meet? And then I had one where it'd be like, would it be an excruciatingly painful idea? Like meet and just like turning that up to 11, you know? But these things become tropes and they become

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: out. It's like, Hey, this is a cold call. Wanna roll the dice? And all of those humor approaches go back to Sandler because his, you know. phrase from the sixties, I think was, Hey, this is a cold call. I hate making them you. You hate getting them. And the prospect would laugh, and that

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: opener still goes back.

But it's time for refresh. We need some new ideas for how to open phone calls. This book has like 25 different openers and some fundamental shifts, so let's go to the next one.

Matt Amundson: Okay, let's go to the next one. Diffuse objections before they form.

Justin Michael: Well, pre-handling objection is pretty powerful. [00:36:00] If

Matt Amundson: I.

Justin Michael: know they say the Mike Tyson quote, everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Trained fighter is planning on being punched in the mouth, so if you know the top 10 ways people object, you can kind of use social aikido and pre-plan for them.

You can bake it into your script. This was in an ancient technique called feel, felt, found like, well, others felt that way. I mean, one of the first ways to diffuse that is just agree with everything. They're like, it's too

expensive. I totally agree, but you know, what does ROI mean to you, it's kind of a cash

register, not a cost center.

You just flip it around. I've seen Cardone promote that. That's what it means to me. But Charles, how do you interpret that?

Charles Needham: Yeah, so I think this comes back to what we were talking about when it comes to seeing cold calling as an intelligence channel, rather than a means to book meetings. Because if you see it as a means to book meetings, there's a very binary definition of success. You either booked the meeting or you didn't, and so you haven't really learned anything.

But what we always recommend and what we recommend in the book is have [00:37:00] 50 completed conversations. And when we say completed, we don't mean, you know, I call you and you say you're not interested in hang up right away. That's not a conversation, but an actual two-way dialogue where I simply seek to understand what your relationship with our service is whether it's something that you think it would be helpful, and if not genuinely, why not?

And if you look at a sample size of 50 or a hundred of those conversations, you will see trends. And then you can take those trends and surface them at the top of any script you have. I know you're probably going to, and you can even get really, really geeky with it, right? Like, I had one there, I was like, I'm, there's prob, there's a 70% chance that you're gonna tell me you already have a vendor.

But that said, right, like you can call things out upfront if you have the intelligence and if you listen to your buyer. So that's sort of at least how I look at the, uh, handle objections upfront.

Justin Michael: I

Matt Amundson: Yeah,

Justin Michael: going back to the very

Matt Amundson: go.

Justin Michael: So,

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: is one of the, the, the tale's, oldest time. So I'm coaching this team in the [00:38:00] Philippines and they have an accent and I've always said that the accent doesn't matter. I can change any team anywhere in the world. calling CFOs all day on the ERC, that like tax credit you get back for co COVID.

But the problem is a hundred percent of the people they call. did the tax credit. So like they have access to these CPAs to sort of re-audit, look at it again and see if there's more on the table. we created the script, which was pre handled that objection. They would literally call and say, Hey, I bet you already got the refund on your tax credit. Yeah. Well we have all these CPAs. No risk to you. And they can look through it like the average customer is seeing $400,000 in savings average. Like, shouldn't you look at it again? And they, and, and they were taking the call 'cause it was just like taking the

Matt Amundson: Oh yeah.

Justin Michael: pre handling the objection.

So we talk about that a little, but that's a, a perfect example of something where, how would you do that in an email? you, you literally have to use the phone to get the live

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: to get the objection and get around it. So,

Matt Amundson: Yeah,

Justin Michael: let's keep [00:39:00] going.

Matt Amundson: yeah. Okay. we talked a little bit about tone, but the third bullet here is a just tone without overacting.

Justin Michael: Go find the Jordan Belfort, uh, YouTube, where he

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Justin Michael: tone, like I think it's entertaining. He's, he's like, he changes tones five or 10 times mid, so he gets really close like that and then he gets loud, you know, he is like, he's so animated. I'm known for being really monotone. So just be funny on this call 'cause I've just in a good mood and it's late, but, um. Look, if you're fired up and passionate, you're gonna seem salesy.

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: you're dull and boring, it's not gonna work either. So there's this middle ground of almost a neutrality, and I'll take this to poker. It's a poker face, tonality that's sort of like a consultant or a lawyer or a doctor, or uh, a pilot, right?

You wouldn't wanna be flying around, you know, in the jet stream. And the turbulence have, they're like, woo, that is some serious turbulence. It's a more like, like. We all fly, you know, for sales. And it's like, [00:40:00] it's going crazy. The ships are coming off, it's flying like a suitcase fell down and it's always like little bit of turbulence, like nothing, like it's no big deal.

And I'm like rattling, you know, like praying, you know, it's like I've been on this crazy flight. So it's, the other thing is, you know, tonality, go to the doctor and they're like, my knee's really killing me. And they're like. we're gonna get a serious premium for that. Like we should operate, you know,

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: excited.

So the profit motive, motive creates commission breath. that's where

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: true zen detached, trusted advisor is like, we might be able to help you. We might not. Let's just assess it. I'm not really excited. You're here. We work with Coca-Cola, you're Pepsi. Let's see if there's something here. So that's how I approach tonality, really neutral, in the mid range.

In fact, you know, when I listen to someone like Ryan Reiser call, it's also their tone is quite in the mid range and they enunciate really well versus

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Justin Michael: wars here. So if you're Barone,

Matt Amundson: Sure.

Justin Michael: were going, [00:41:00] uh, Charles, what are your thoughts?

Charles Needham: One of the things that I never hear about when it comes to tonality is slowing down your talking enough, and we talk about this in the book. To account for delays implicit with voiceover over ip, right? A voiceover line. In most cases, there is some small amount of delay and so when you're talking, you want to make sure that you're spacing out what you have to say such that the person can absorb it.

Not to mention that there is a world happening on the other side of that phone. Somebody's in the grocery store, they're driving. And so you want to stagger out the information you give them so that they can process it. And if you don't do that and you get all excited and you run on, then you also run afoul of the salesperson stereotype.

So when I open a call, I say, Hey Matt, this is Charles. [00:42:00] You were not expecting my call. It's the first time I've reached you. So I'm like really dripping things in slowly. Right, because when you, when somebody picks up the phone, their mind's going a mile a minute. Is it my kid's school? Did I miss an appointment?

They're, they're freaking out. And so step one with your tone is it's a mechanism to calm them down. And you can even see me demonstrating it like a little bit here, right? Like you're staggering things out, you're using pauses, and there's this sort of calming effect that comes from that.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: Now I have another way, and I like that too, is, uh, you know, somewhere along the line in 2007, I, I was like, okay, Dale Carnegie said the most beautiful sound in the human language is, is the name. So I use the full name. So I call and I

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: Matt Amundson. And you know, it has an effect like this. this, the FBI like is did someone die Like it?

It, it also has a system one triggering effect, you know? But being that I'm me, I kind of. [00:43:00] Like to do things that are a little, you know, edgy. I, I'll call be like, is this Chad Altrics? Alek? But they're always stoked that you try. So, like these big, like, you know, Slavic names are the best. It's like, uh, you know, I'll, I'll go for it, I'll just go for the name.

And they love it and they correct me and they forget. It's a cold call. So this is awesome. Like pattern interrupt right up front. Also you call you like Chad Alek. They're like, this is Carrie Newman. Chad used to work here. Oh yeah, I've been talking to Chad. You know, like, or you get the referral right off the top script.

You're like, Hey, you know who heads up? Your, uh, social media strategy, like, oh, that's, that's Pam. Talk to her. I mean, I think in doing this book, you really realize that there's just different personality types and you, you know, when you're doing cold calling, you gotta calm down the crock brain and let the front brain take over. The inverse is true for emailing. When you send all these dull emails that are generic, it hits the front brain in email. You really have to use storytelling and pain and fear and

Matt Amundson: [00:44:00] Yeah.

Justin Michael: the Netflix formula to get people to respond. So what always holds true is people love to buy, they hate to be sold.

And we call it the polarity shift. And we talk about in the book, it's been a lot of my work, um, people buy emotionally, they justify with logic. So you have this brain. The way it works is not aligned with the way people cold call and follow up. It's all misaligned and we fixed that in the book. Um, it's a really short read.

I I would compare it to like the Terminal list or Jack Ryan. I mean this is a very, uh, Navy Seals sort of Jocko Willink memoir type of book. We're living in the writing, uh, era for this book to even exist.

Matt Amundson: Real Paige Turner.

Justin Michael: is.

Matt Amundson: Nice. Nice. Uh, all right. I've been dying to get into this fourth one just because it's so eloquently written, which is collapse resistance through rhythm.

Justin Michael: That's, that's a good one. Um, [00:45:00] well,

Matt Amundson: Sounds like it was written by an author.

Justin Michael: well here's the thing. I, um. I've been told it's like a cat on a string. Like when I do calls, I tend to be extreme economy because like presidents have economy of movement. They barely move their upper body. And Joe Biden, like he can really not move his upper body like this is the funniest interview ever.

They asked Trump once, like, why don't you work out? And he is like, look, I have a finite amount of energy in my life and I don't want to use it up. And I just love that I, I say that all the time when I'm not in the mood to go to the gym. I'm like, I'm saving up my energy. it's when you get extremely good at cold calling and you've spent hours, hundreds of hours or thousands, what starts to happen is you start getting this weird predictive effect. Where you can read the tone and you can predict how they'll object and you can pre handle it and it becomes like a dance. And so when I

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: call exhibitions on, um, on Discord and people were [00:46:00] watching me, I had this really crazy thing happen where bad data would get into my dialer and I was using Connect and Cell, and this is a slightly prior, like four or five years ago, I get the CEO on the phone, his back, he, he's like, I'm on my boat.

I just sat down on my boat and I'm going like, okay, let's comment. I'm gonna, I'm gonna run my principles. It's not an objection. He doesn't seem upset. So I'm like, you know how okay, you're sitting on a, on your boat? I said, I just have one question. How do I get a boat? This is what I said. And I think Josh Braun was like in the audience.

I don't know. He was like sitting in a discord. This really happened. And he laughed and he said, well, you gotta get old. And I said, I'm pretty old. Like I'm 40. Like. I'm sitting in my backyard in California in 4:00 PM and I'm cold calling. I'm 40. I'm not like getting the boat. He's like, you gotta

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: get really old.

And I was like, okay, that works. But what was really crazy, he opened up to me and I kind of ran some of the scripts in the book and what, what evolved into this? And he ended up. [00:47:00] About five minutes later making a referral, like emailing and forwarding an email to the right person on his team.

Matt Amundson: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: I wear this story out because people love it, like Chris Beal from Connect and Sell. Um. So the, the rhythm is the pacing and the tonality. Another thing is like BPM, like beeps beats per minute for all you elect electronic hits out there. Like if someone's a fast talking New Yorker and you're onic and slow, or someone's from the south and a drawl and you're coming in all fast, like this stuff's made in New York City, that's not gonna work either.

So the

Matt Amundson: Yeah. New York City.

Justin Michael: that really chops my head.

Matt Amundson: We are on the same wavelength.

Justin Michael: Charles, what do you think? Can you just hit us with some Barry White here with the rhythm. Rhythm

is very wide,

You. Rhythm is gonna gotcha you. Oh,

Charles Needham: I think we should just keep that going. Honestly, it's hard to top that.

Matt Amundson: minutes. We might as well just go.

Justin Michael: we've hit the lunatic

Charles Needham: Justin Karaoke our,

Justin Michael: We have John.

Charles Needham: yeah, I,

I mean, uh, the more you cold call, the more you [00:48:00] pick up on rhythms and patterns and the, the best example I give is. You know, you see these posts on LinkedIn, they kill me. Where someone's like, okay, somebody says they're in a meeting.

What do you do? How do you handle that objection? I'm like, you hang up and you call them back later. Like, what's wrong with you? Right? Like you have to be able to read situations and know when it's appropriate to have a conversation versus not. And if you look at the problem with. A lot of BDR scripting and coaching at large is, it flies entirely in the face of that.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Charles Needham: So, I mean, you know, if it, it's not not uncommon where you hear, you hear somebody driving and you hear the Bluetooth and it's hard to describe the sound, but there's that sort of like, you can hear the wheels in the background. I'll just call it out. It sounds like I, uh, sounds like I caught you driving somewhere today.

Yeah, I'm on the road. Okay, no worries. I'll try it back later. Take care.

Matt Amundson: Yeah,

Charles Needham: So there's a certain sense of yes. You, you have [00:49:00] to know when to, to push it. Like in Justin's case where an objection is an objection, I'm on a boat. Cool. I want a boat. Tell me more about that. And when it's, somebody wants to get off the phone.

Matt Amundson: yeah,

Charles Needham: ' cause you can always live to fight another day, but only if you can read the room.

Matt Amundson: yeah. Yeah.

Justin Michael: I've had like crazy experiences like that. They're like, I'm on vacation. Oh, where? I'm in Cabo. Oh, cool. Which hotel are you staying at? That's cool. Did you go to like Cabo? Wabo Cantina. Like I just start talking to 'em about their vacation and they're like, oh, you're just sitting on the beach, like, could I pitch you something right now?

Yeah, sure. What's up man? And they got full reception. They're sitting in Cabo. The other one is like, you caught me in the gym. I'm like, leg day. Oh, you know, and like I just roll with this stuff because I, I just purely believe it's a comment or it's an rejection. Um, well, we, where, where else can we go on this?

Do we have one more point or is that

Matt Amundson: Okay. We got one more point. Yeah. We've gotten through, uh, we've gotten through four, and here's the fifth surface [00:50:00] truth in under 30 seconds.

Justin Michael: Yeah, so. There has been a lot of debate over how much time you get. Is it three heartbeats? Is it five seconds? Is it seven seconds? I guess the legend in LO is that Chris Beal met Chris Voss and they've decided it was seven seconds and they said, could I get 27 seconds of time? And then I've discovered a breakthrough.

And in the book we validate that and show why that could work. But to

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Justin Michael: as I would call people, I would use old techniques. I would say like, Hey, Matt, Justin, Michael from Acme, the reason for Michael Click. I was getting tons of hangups on traditional YUY now, and I

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: everyone sounds that way,

Matt Amundson: Right. I.

Justin Michael: What we're saying in the book with the paradigm of algo and the A is, is the ask is like an insight or it's a question where you kind of catch them off guard. You're like, you know, when you're, when you're filing your tax credit, did you double check it with CPAs to [00:51:00] see if there's additional refunds?

Some kind of open question, you know, like, are

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: really getting the full benefit of ai? And I use this a lot with openers too on, on LinkedIn. Um. The problem now is most openers in the first 3, 5, 7 seconds are closed you kind of just pitch from the front where you talk over them, you know?

And so we're trying to flip that around. And,

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Justin Michael: and make the first impression count. Um, we talk about in the book, like there's, uh, Jamal Rimer has this tech called wiser.ai, and it's a, like an LLM thing. It's GPT that you can go in with. Um, you can look at the 10 K, the 10 q, and maybe the def 14

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Yeah.

Justin Michael: But you can create A-P-O-V-A point of view. So you call this, you call the scariest person, you can think of the CEO, the board member, the vc, and you're like, like, I wanna run this idea by you. noticed that you had to, you know, you recently had to do some hiring in Singapore, and that's making me think that maybe your supply chain's been affected.

Is [00:52:00] that

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Justin Michael: Right, and Joe, Joe Conrad said this way long ago, I started to call him Conrad Paradox is by being consult you, by being assumptive your consultative.

Matt Amundson: Mm-hmm.

Justin Michael: So you can't be the empty suit anymore. You can't just call and say what's keeping up at night. You can't just say, Hey, I'm calling from Oracle.

You've got the best databases. You have to show

Matt Amundson: Right?

Justin Michael: with a value hypothesis. And that's how in the first five seconds they'll be like, wow, how do you even know that? So,

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Justin Michael: down in the organization and take that intel up. Um, where would you go

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Charles Needham: Another tool that I find, or at least a psychological principle, is people are always comparing themselves. And so if you bring an insight as it relates to what other people. Or even a hypothesis of what other people that share their title are seeing that's generally interesting enough to proceed in the conversation.

So I'll give you an example calling for Titan X, Matt, when I call other VPs [00:53:00] of sail or sales executives, they tell me there's more pressure than ever from the board for reps to self source pipeline problem. The reps, your reps are hitting the phone, but nobody's picking up. Does that sound familiar?

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Charles Needham: relating things that you see in the industry, which then also gives you more of that consultative perspective while generating interest.

'cause people always wanna know what other people in their industry are doing.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Yep.

Justin Michael: Uh,

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: the way, Mike Bosworth called that peer curiosity creates peer envy.

Matt Amundson: Hmm.

Charles Needham: a good one. Shout out Mike. I.

Matt Amundson: Back in the day. Back in the day, un uh, related similarly, right back in the day when I ran the SDR team at Marketo. The one thing that like I always found to be a big breakthrough for, for our BDRs on the phone was almost all marketers thought that their problems were unique.

Justin Michael: Yeah.

Matt Amundson: actually convincing them that they had the same problem as nearly all 2000 of [00:54:00] the Marketo customers at the time actually helped them feel a lot more comfortable in the conversation.

Right. It's like sort of like going to the doctor and being like, you know, I don't know if you've ever heard this before, but like there is a fluid running down my nose. Oh, you have a runny nose. Yeah, this is impacting nearly everybody in the state of California right now. 'cause it's allergy season. Oh, thank God.

Okay. Right. Like just something that sort of diffuses their fears around why they're there. They're in an uncomfortable situation, and just to say like, Hey, hear that challenge all the time. 2000 plus customers who are solving that challenge with our product or, you know, is slightly unrelated to what you're saying, but, but, but, but in a similar vein, I think people think of their problems as unique and the second that they can realize that their problems are, uh, in the macro, they're like, oh, okay, cool.

So there's lots of people thinking about this. Their vendors are thinking about solutions for it. And my guess is that you happen to be one of those,

Charles Needham: Problems are isolating by nature, right? Because force of very self orientation, [00:55:00] Justin and I talk about this all the time, the importance of other orientation, but problems have a way of forcing a self orientation. And so if you can come to them and show them that this is something that's in common, they'll also open up more to the idea of talking with you.

'cause now you're getting them outta that self orientation, which is kind of cool.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. Love it. Geez, guys. Uh, I thought we were coming here just to talk about, you know, a book. I feel like I just took, uh, one of my psych classes from being in college. This has been a, uh, absolutely amazing. This is the stuff like, uh, I don't know if you guys ever got to be in like the, that, like SDR fight clubs, uh, that here in Silicon Valley, like during like the early 2000 tens. Uh, those were like badass events where people used to talk about like the psychology of selling more than they would talk about how many emails, how many social touches, how, you know, whether or not you should use localization in your dialer, but like actual, like real selling stuff. Uh, [00:56:00] and this is to me. The fact that people aren't having these conversations is a big reason why we've gotten to the point that we've gotten to is people are trying to solve their problems with more technology, more technology, more technology. Instead of getting to the underlying cause of why so many of these things are bad, which is 'cause people fundamentally don't know how to talk to other people anymore.

Justin Michael: It is true. So gonna break the internet with this thing. We're, we're the first AI powered cold calling book in the world. And I mean, it's kind of an honor and it's cool. And, uh, Charles has been involved in, in the edit stage and ideation of a lot of the, the JM series. This is a standalone book and it's coming out on the ninth.

It's a very short read. you know, it'll be in Kindle and paperback, but you can, you can sit, it's about the length of bad boys three. And almost as good. So get the book that goes for Craig, Craig Rosenberg. Little, little Martin Lauren Resers. But [00:57:00] yeah, it's, it's sensationally crazily thrilling and controversial, the way it's written.

But what we're probably gonna do is just kind of redefine and deconstruct and kind of take the matrix down. So, um. It's just thrilling to read. It's really fun. And I think it every chapter, we have 14 chapters. Each has an AI power play at the end of the chapter. It has do this for the next 20 calls, and then it also has a tech stack.

So it says, use clay to build this, or use this data channel, or use this conversational intelligence. Then we have a giant mega stack in there and all these Easter eggs, the stuff you can get, bonuses and scripts and prompts. So, uh, right now the website is cold. Call algo.com. Cleverly disguised book is cold.

Call algo on the site is cold. Call algo.com. Sha

Matt Amundson: to go.

Justin Michael: up

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Sam Guertin: And there'll be links, uh, in the description in the show notes.

Matt Amundson: Yeah.

Justin Michael: of the

Matt Amundson: That's Sure.

Justin Michael: goes to helping mend the rift between Elon and Trump. We do want them to get along. That's a key.

Matt Amundson: [00:58:00] Oh man. Oh, well you had me sold up until that moment, but.

Justin Michael: kidding. I'm not kidding. No, I'm kidding. Okay.

Matt Amundson: Uh, gentlemen, it was an absolute pleasure having you guys on the transaction today. Uh, for, for those of you at home like order this book, it's gonna be awesome. It's something that, uh, is controversial but exciting and I think it, it represents the direction that we all need to be taking our, our, our teams here over the course of the next what you like.

Projecting out to 2035 today. So for the next 10 years.

Justin Michael: original title was I think, uh, forbidden Tactics, AI War Games for the, uh, what was it like the Killer Elites or elite reps or something. And they were like, yeah, you can't sell Forbidden Tactics to CROs. The publishers like. This is the title, you know, so we got the algo in there. But the fun stuff, like, it's kind of like the innuendos, uh, in there.

So yeah, pleasure, uh, getting on the pod and uh, so much.

Matt Amundson: Yeah. [00:59:00] Thank you guys. Have a wonderful weekend. Have safe travels. Enjoy yourselves. Everybody pick up the book. Cold call. I'll go and uh, have a nice weekend everyone.