Future Ventures: Scaling with Clarity
Future Ventures: Clarity at Scale is the podcast for founders, operators, and investors who are building companies worth owning for the long term — and who need to think clearly about capital, structure, strategy, and growth to get there.
Each episode cuts through the noise around scaling: how to structure a deal, how to position a business for institutional capital, how to build operational leverage without losing control, and how to make the high-stakes decisions that compound in value long after the moment has passed.
Hosted by Maxim Atanassov — a four-time founder and the Managing Partner of Future Ventures Corp. Since 2018, FVC has invested in, incubated, and scaled companies across sectors — with a focus on platform opportunities that compound in value. Maxim's background spans executive leadership inside Canada's largest energy companies and senior advisory at Deloitte and EY. He's a CPA-CA who has sat at the table where capital gets deployed, governance gets built, and hard decisions get made. Now he helps founders get there faster.
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Future Ventures: Scaling with Clarity
Scott Finkelstein — Why Personalized Sales Will Kill the Sales Playbook | Future Ventures Podcast Ep. 019
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Most founders try to scale revenue by adding tools. Scott Finkelstein argues they're solving the wrong problem. After four decades in sales, $6 billion in career deals, and a stint as Chief Revenue Officer at PeopleFax, Scott has seen the same pattern destroy growth-stage companies again and again: founders hit a million in revenue, panic, and hire a VP of Sales to fix what's actually a systems problem. The fix doesn't stick because there's no engine underneath — no repeatable cadence, no clear ICP, no honest read on what's working.
In this conversation, Scott unpacks the engine metaphor that runs through everything he teaches at Sales Scalers, his Austin-based AI sales coaching platform. He and Maxim get into why most sales methodologies are 85% the same, why founders should bring go-to-market in on day one (not after the product is built), and how the best salespeople he's ever worked with treat selling as a listening exercise rather than a pitch. If you're a founder trying to move from founder-led sales to a scalable revenue engine — or you've already made the wrong hire and you're trying to figure out what broke — this one is for you.
Topics Covered
- Why founders hire a VP of Sales too early — and what it costs when you bolt a senior leader onto an engine that doesn't exist yet.
- The ICP intimacy gap — most founders can name their ICP but can't describe them like a friend sitting next to them, which is where outreach falls apart.
- Goals vs. standards — the distinction Scott uses with every salesperson he coaches, illustrated through his own son's quota structure.
- Buying signals beyond the obvious — how the depth of what a prospect shares tells you whether you have a real deal or a polite stall.
- AI in the sales stack — Plaud, Whisper Flow, Replit, and the rule Scott never breaks: a human reviews anything going out to the world.
Key Insights
The engine beats the tool stack every time. A junky engine that only goes 10 miles an hour will still grow your business exponentially if you run it consistently and score yourself against it. Most founders don't have a junky engine — they have no engine at all, and they're trying to add fuel.
Honesty in outreach beats warm-up. Three months ago, Scott rewrote his cold messages to lead with something like "Hey, I know you're busy, so let me get straight to it — yes, I'm selling something." He started getting more no's. He also started getting more actual replies, including a LinkedIn message on a Sunday from someone saying they were finally ready to talk. The people who said no said it because he respected their time enough to be direct, and a no with engagement is worth more than a yes you had to trick out of someone.
Bring go-to-market in on day one. Scott told a story about being on a panel where someone asked when founders should start thinking about go-to-market, and he said day one. The tech guy on the panel pushed back. Scott's answer was that you're building because you think you know what the world wants, but you don't actually know — you have to go find out. Five conversations with the right people, before you write the spec, will save you from building two months in the wrong direction.
Links
- Sales Scalers: https://salesscalers.com/
- Scott on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/scott-finkelstein-08026914
- Future Ventures Corp: https://www.linkedin.com/company/future-ventures-corp
About Scott Finkelstein
Scott Finkelstein is the founder of Sales Scalers, an AI-powered sales coaching platform built on the idea that systems should adapt to how each salesperson actually sells. He has spent more than four decades in sales across investment banking and SaaS, including
Welcome to the Future Adventures podcast on Scaling with Clarity. Today we're joined by Scott Finkerstein. Scott is the founder of Sales Scalers, an AI-powered sales coaching platform built around a simple but very powerful idea. You don't need more tools, you need a system that adapts to how you sell. An AI that listens, learns, and evolves with each other's person's voice, style, and momentum. In today's conversation, we are unpacking what happens when you move from playbooks to personalization and why the future of sales might look a lot more human and powered by AI. Scott, welcome. I'm super excited to have to have you on the podcast and talk about sales because uh, as we say to all of our founders, revenue solves all problems.
SPEAKER_00It certainly does. Good revenue, though, right? It's got to be the right thing. Uh it's great to be here. I appreciate the opportunity. I'm looking forward to diving into some of the good things we've talked about.
SPEAKER_04Why don't you just why don't we start with uh giving us a bit of the origin story on who is Scott and how did you come to what you're doing today?
SPEAKER_00Sounds good. It's uh I'm I'm an old guy, so it's a long story. We'll try to keep it short. Uh grew up 40 minutes from Wall Street and uh was the youngest of three boys in Connecticut and you know, good good life. And I always said I've for some reason I want I want Wall Street. I'm gonna be a stockbroker, and this was in the 80s and 90s, which meant a lot of different things than it does today. And you know, ended up getting my first job in in with a hedge fund in in Connecticut and didn't know what I was doing. And a couple years into it, I realized I was in sales, I wasn't doing investing really, and and I loved it, so it didn't matter to me. And I had a great mentor, Tony, Tony Vendetti, was one of the first mentors in my career, and he was known as Mr. Relationship. So he taught me how to how to build relationships, how to connect with people, how to how to listen, how to listen, how to really listen and not just try to sell people. And something that's really key in in my philosophy is if you just listen and you can show them you understand their problem, you can solve it, you never have to sell with them. And and that took me from investment banking all over the world into the SaaS world for many years. Then eventually, six years ago, I moved to Austin after my last company was sold. I was chief revenue officer of People Fax. And I said, What am I gonna do now? And I started my consultant, sales scalers, consulting, advising. Uh Austin obviously is a great place for a startup community. So I get to work with amazing founders and see some incredible things that are being built. And obviously, in the last couple of years with technology coming out, so you know, I I love working with startups. I'm a growth guy, you know. For all you who have a good value company, God bless you, that's great. It doesn't excite me, though. Um what you keep doing what you're doing, but the ones who want to throw some rocket fuel on and put their hair on fire, that that's me.
SPEAKER_04Um at what point uh um at what point things start to break and kind of like what are the most common challenges that uh grow companies encounter? Like we call them scale companies, but uh, I mean, essentially it's the same thing. Like, how do you how do you grow your company? How do you scale your company? Uh what are the challenges that founders encounter when they're trying to uh move from to trying to grow revenue, trying to move away from founder led sales to maybe bringing in a chief revenue officer or factional CRO in place. Well kind of walk us through some of the common pitfalls that you that you see in our challenges.
SPEAKER_00So the biggest thing that makes companies when they start to you, hey, I'm at a I'm at a half a million, I'm at 10,000 MRR, I'm at two 10 million, whatever it is, I've got something going. And you can get there with a lot of luck. You can get to 5 million with a lot of luck, you know a little bit, but you can't scale meaning. So, what does scale mean? I consistently have revenue coming in, I'm at a consistent growth rate, whether that's 20, 50, more. They don't have a true what I call engine, whether it's in and by way, you need the right engine in your financial aspects of your, you know, the finance group, the operations group, the dev group, and obviously we're talking more my specialty, the go-to-market group. If your engine's not solid, a true solid engine block, it it's gonna fall, it's gonna break on you at some point. And so, what's that gonna cost you? Is it gonna cost you customers? Is it gonna you know shut your business down to something to that level? It can for some. So when specifically to the go-to-market, which is what I work on, they hire too quickly. To your question, is all right, hey, we we're at a million, we've got investors who want us to get from five million to 20 million to whatever that big number is. I gotta go get the VP of sales, I gotta go hire the CRO. But while yes, the founder's right in saying, I gotta take that hat off my head, the sales hat off my head. Yep, they don't have the right, they're still, like I said, back to us, they don't have the engine in place, they don't really know how their go-to-market really works. And they're gonna bring in someone that's gonna sit there and either has to be smart enough to say, Maxim, this is not what works. I've got to create a new engine, we really don't have one, or they try to add fuel to an engine that's leaking oil. So, you know, at that point, what do you get? You get choppy choppy, you know, the roller coaster look at forecast, and and in the end, you have unhappy investors and you're not gonna get to where you want to be.
SPEAKER_04So, Scott, can we just unpack what this what this means in practical terms? Um hard too quickly, hard too quickly for me. It's like it's it's it's kind of the symptoms. Um, obviously, I believe what you're referring to is like these maybe the product market fit is not clear, the ideal customer profile is not clear, the assumptions are not clear in terms of like having that clarity. If they apply like we we have a saying in our company that like what we do is help found a skate stand on the gas pedal, but in order to stand on a gas pedal, you need to know where you're accelerating to, otherwise, the the car is going to green and go out of control. So I think you say the same thing. So, what are those foundational blocks that need to be in place before um companies start to stand on the gas pedal?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so typically when companies come to me at that point, and I think you've you they've got product market fit good enough. So when we come in, we wanna we wanna we we still want to tweak it a little bit, make it you know, even better, more defined, truly understand. And from that, it leads into the next thing. Who truly is our ICP? I meet with my clients all the time. They go, Oh, I know my ICP, it's the VP of this or the CTO of that, dah dah dah. And I go, okay, you kind of know them, but of a million-dollar company, a billion-dollar company, what is it? You know, somewhere in between, uh, what industry? Yeah, you know, what what are they specifically working on versus other CEO? You know, as you see, we get into a very detailed conversation on ICP because once I know ICP as well as I know my best friend sitting next to me, now I know how to talk to them. Communication. So now when I can communicate the right way, I can start creating an engine that has the right outreach that's gonna start having people respond. You know, we're gonna have the flow back, and that's where it really starts. And so I can bring an outside VP of sales in or whatever the title is, they don't know that yet. And when I come in, you know, when a client comes, when I go to a client, you know, I'm I have a few clients I'm fractional CRO on. If they can't explain to me who their ICP is good enough, yeah. Imagine if they try now, my job is to help them get there. So I do of course imagine if you hired the full-time VP of sales and you can't explain it to them. They're they're just spitting their their tires in the mud at that point.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, no, it makes sense. What if um what I've seen with some of our clients is they would actually give a persona, they would actually like name their ICPs. It's George in this and this company, this is what George looks like, or it's on the consumer side, it's Debbie bedroom, or whatever it is. Like they like they literally humanize the person or the company that they're selling to, and so that like I mean it's colloquially within the company, that's how they refer to their customer. I mean, the the famous example is obviously Jeff Bezos living in an empty chair in the in a boardroom, intentionally so because that's a client, everything has to be in service of the client. So, what what are some founders doing, or what should founders be doing in terms of getting clarity around that ICP?
SPEAKER_00They just do the research. I mean, literally, if you listen, if you're at 10,000 MRR or 100,000 MRR and more, you have people you can call and ask, understand why do you like my product? Let's figure out why they like this. I know this is simple stuff, this isn't rocket science. Yeah, but then take the conversation to another level. Hey, hey, George, if that's what they're calling them or Jane, whatever they're calling them. I like the humanization, by the way. I love that. That's great. What's your day look like? Can I buy you lunch? Can I buy you a virtual coffee? What's a day in your life? Like, what are you really facing? And and how does our product or service help? Yeah, but what else is going on in get to know them? You're gonna start learning how to talk to them, yeah, right? Okay. Um I I put a post out the other day on on this is you you can, you know, we get all this LinkedIn outreach, right? On the BSB side. But unless I feel you understand what what's going on in my seat as CEO of self-scalers, you know my pain. Listen, yeah, I'm a go-to-market specialist. I stuff coaches too because I have my head up my butt too much in my own business. I can say that. But for my clients, I think everyone should have a coach, right? Yeah, okay. And so, do you know my pain? Do you know my challenge? And maybe it's not pain challenge, you know what I'm trying to get to. Hey, this has worked. I don't know that you know. If you're just saying, hey, do you need help with marketing? Delete, you know, talk to me. Listen, don't be afraid to sell to me, by the way. But yeah, again, sit down with me. I love when people reach out. I love when new companies reach out to me or people are founders. I've got a young kid, a young kid, I call him. He's a senior at uh at um University of Florida, and he's built this amazing AI product. Actually, I've got a meeting with him next week. He reached out to me about nine months ago, he goes, You're founder. I don't know, can you help me? I'm I'm trying to figure it out. And we talk all the time. I love that because he also knows, by the way, I know I am one of his ICPs. I absolutely am, you know. So he was smart in how he reached out to me, but he's also smart in how he came at me. And now he knows how to talk to me, which means he knows how to talk to a thousand others like me when he goes to market this this summer, when he fully goes to market. He did the research, he he he asked for people to sit down with him, and I don't think he can do that enough.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah. I I completely agree with you. I mean, um we uh we we obviously we work with uh partners like you because they're super important for um serving our portfolio company, serving our clients. Um, but we we consistently publish content just to be able to help founders. And our most popular thought leadership is on forward deployed engineering model, which was popularized by Palantir essentially. You take somebody with founder level mindset, put them in a company, the customer, and then through the process of constantly dealing with a client, they kind of understand what's needed, what works, what doesn't work, what are the problems they're facing, and then build out the product now, build a product. Um, and and so to me, this is a clear signal that if this is the most uh we write constantly on venture capital and private. If to me, this if this is the number one article on our website and we have close to 200, to me, this tells me that this is probably the most vital problem that companies have to solve first before they solve anything else.
SPEAKER_00I agree, I agree 100%. You you gotta have an intimate level of understanding of who you're selling to. And part of that, too. I mean, we can go further back into, you know, I was on uh I was on a panel last week for a uh a group out at Divide that had a whole bunch of people, and and the question was to founders and you know, when should you bring go to market in when you're building your idea? And I said, day one, yeah. And a few a couple a couple people who are like you and I with our experience, like, yeah, day one. And one of the tech guys was like, Why? I go, you're building something because you think you know what the world wants. I forget it was Steve Jobs or Bezos, one of us who said it goes, You don't know what the world wants. You know, you think because you need to go find out. And okay, when you bring go to market in that early, they don't need a big seat at the table yet. I get that. Yeah, but now we can start saying, Hey, let's go test this a little bit. I built out MoveWell AI is my my health and wellness company we've been working on for three years, still in stealth mode. I write it down again. I'm a go-to market guy, not the tech guy. I knew what it looked like, but I started reaching out to people. Hey, Scott, what are you working on? Hey, by the way, I'm you know, Maxim, I'm thinking of building this. Can I run it by you? Yeah, I knew my ICP was, you know, it was a fitness app to start. But and so now I could go back to the dev team and said, Yeah, we thought that was good. And five people I just spoke to, and I'm only talking five people, by the way. No, we need to shift maybe a little bit or a lot bit, it depends. Yeah, and you know, if they all did that, maybe that put you and I out of a job because they would they they'd be further along, but but that's what you need to do, and it's never too late to do that. And I think that's where companies go wrong, is they just they really don't do enough. You know, there's companies out there that do the product market fit research, right? You can go hire a bunch of them. I haven't found one that gets the intimate level that you and I, as you and I have talked many times now, of what we help our clients with.
SPEAKER_04Uh I'll give you um something that they I had to do out of necessity. So um I'm a CPA by background, I definitely'm definitely a lot more on the business side. That's what I've done. I've been leading risk compliance functions, I've always been on the business side. Uh yes, I do have a technical band because it was part of the technology and security researches group of EY. Uh so I kind of understand technology, but this year I felt like I have no choice but to go back into coding. And when I was a kid, grade seven, I think is when I first started to dabble into coding. I'm not a developer, I'm not a coder. But this year I was like, no, no, I have to get back into coding. The reason for it is like typical product development, right? You would have like a founder, if it's not a technical founder, they go have the same conversation and understand the problem really well. They're the subject matters experts around the domain, then they relay this information to a business analyst, business analyst, it turns into business requirements, the business requirements get turned into a functional requirements, passed on to the technical development team. And it's like along the value chain, uh, the development chain, there's always noise and there's always loss of information. So, in order for me to build, we're building a product from capital intelligence, in order for me to do so, I needed to learn how to code. So, if our development process, I'm constantly having conversations with clients, but I'm actually the one writing the plans in Visual Studio. My dev team is reviewing the plans, we have a conversation, but it's like essentially, how can we bring this um conversational development path from here and make it like super narrow? And so out of necessity, out of necessity, it's it's to like remove as much of the noise within the process as possible. Um, I want to click on something that you said, Scott, um, because I think that um it ties very well with what you said on the panel last week. The day that you bring GTM is day one. Now, um I apologize, apologies, I don't remember the name of your mentor, uh Tony Levente.
SPEAKER_00Tony Vended, yeah, Tony Van Dead.
SPEAKER_04Tony Vended.
SPEAKER_00Way long time ago. That was the early 90s.
SPEAKER_04And and by the way, Vende means to sell in Italian, right? So that's an absolutely fantastic name. So, but you said that he instilled in you the importance of relationships, and so if if it's GTM, it's it's kind of like you're building a relationship with somebody like in terms of like understanding what what you're trying what problems they have and how to solve it. Walk me through kind of like your path in terms of uh or you you're thinking around building relationships.
SPEAKER_00Building a relationship is it's you know it's not complicated. I mean, we do it every day in our our lives, you know. People who've been part of my teams over the the decades, they would always say, Scott never did sales training with us. I didn't do a lot of here's how you do a cold call, here's how you write a LinkedIn message. I taught them how to be successful in life. And one of the big things is how to build relationships to your question. Well, how do you build relationships? You you ask, you know, as grandma said, God gave you two ears and one mouth for a reason. And so ask a good question, not a yes and no question, and and listen. Don't think of the next question, just listen, and then ask a question to go deeper and truly get to know the person now in a business. And so, whether it's personal or professional in the professional environment, then understand the challenge they're facing that they're trying to solve, and understand, ask them the right questions and begin to understand where they're trying to get in their job, what's important to their boss, their CEO, or whoever they're reporting to their board. And how you know what's the one thing they need to accomplish to get their next promotion if that's what they're looking for. Find out what matters in their in their life, because their job is listening. I don't I don't work, I don't, you know, I don't work is not how I live, but it's I love what I do and it provides for the life I want to have. And so get to know that person, combine the two, and that's gonna build the relationship because you're not the person who just came in and just started saying, here's our product, here's what it does, and you know why you should buy it. Okay, do you know if I that solves a problem for me? Just because I use your competitor doesn't mean I want your product. Do you know what I like about it, what I don't like about it? What can you what gap? You know, selling is understanding what point A looks like in building the bridge to what point B is what they want. Well, point B is the ideal future state. Now, part of that is we don't always they don't always see what the future state can be because they they have blinders on from 10 years of sitting in that whatever seat they're in. So in sales, can we build a relationship where they start to trust us to take those blinders off and show them what the future state really can be? And then they trust us to start walking on a bridge that's not fully built yet. Right? But if I don't understand where they're trying to get to in their career or how it affects their personal life, then why are they gonna trust me? So again, take the time to get to know the person before you try to sell to them.
SPEAKER_04Understood. Um I mean, that's fantastic advice. Um just because we started in Italian, a rapport is the Italian word for relationship. So we need to build a rapport. Um, how like the initial conversation in terms of discovery, getting to know them, that that's important. But how do you find out like what are some of the mechanisms that you would recommend in terms of founders or or sales leaders to employ in terms of building and maintaining the relationship? So that over time, you're not transactional, you're very much strategic in terms of uh um it's strategic in terms of how you are helping them. Take career is helping you helping them succeed in their role.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so it's recognizing and go to market. Go to market isn't just new sales. Go to market is what the question has is how do I maintain the relationship? So once you, as we talked about how to build it, how to start, get that first bit of trust. Now, once they start to trust you, they're gonna give you opportunities to earn more trust. Meaning, I'm gonna buy your product, I'm gonna bring you into a meeting, things along that line. Where a lot of companies, in my opinion, they can get really good at that, but then they have nothing afterwards. Oh, we got the client, we're good. Yeah, we got if they have a password reset, call her 800 number. Or send us a map. Yeah. That's not relationship. That's yeah, that's it's important. You got to do that, of course, but that's not relationship to your question. How do you keep talking to the client? Do you reach out to them and find out how things are going? Do you, depending on the size of your company, and you can't not all you can't do this without relationship, but some of the things you can do is do you bring an advisory board in of clients for bigger B2B type of companies, uh, or even B2C? You can do it. Do you bring in a bunch of clients in and talk to them, whether it's virtually or in person, depending on where they're located? Uh for your really big clients, is someone in senior leadership building that additional relationship, reaching out, not a formalized QBR type of thing, but just reaching out and having a relationship with them. Hey, Maximum, you know, if we're in the same city, hey, do you want to go grab a coffee or come buy you lunch? We should catch up. Haven't talked in a long time. By the way, when you have that conversation, do not start with your business. Do not start with how's the product doing? No. What's going on in your life? How are the wife? How are the kids? How's the husband? How's the how's the dog? I mean, you know, if they're a sports fan and you're a sports fan, talk sports just like you would with your best friend. Of course. At the end, you need five minutes to talk about your product with them and get what you need to know on the product. That's it.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00You know, but again, have a relationship. Don't be the salesperson all the time.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely. Couldn't agree more with this. Um, with um with regards to um sales, like one powerful example that they've that they've seen when it was early in my career with EY. Uh it seems that for some reason we had acquired the entire sales organization from Xerox. And Xerox has an like a really amazing sales development counter. And so I remember going on a call with um physical call and attending uh a company, uh companies event. And we went to see this senior leader, and we walked into his office, and within I think swear, I swear, within 30 seconds, my BD person had scanned the entire room and he had a clear lay of the land around all of the personal areas of interest for this senior leader, and then our conversation was very much around this and kind of building out the trust, the relationship, the warmth, the relationship. And to your point, we only received the very back uh portion of the of the conversation for actual this talk shop. Um, I was like, to me, this it was super powerful. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00I I miss going to, I mean, I still go to offices sometimes, but I mean, back, you know, as I build my career the first 20 years, it it was you walked into someone's office, and that's exactly what what pictures do they have? Is it a family? Is it is it them catching a fish? Is it a sports team? Is it an award they won for what they do, their their degree? There's so much there that I would tell rips, don't ever tell me you can't walk into someone's office and not know how to have a conversation with someone and go rapport. You know, so how do you do that now on Zoom? I wrote an article recently on this. Is well, someone like me, you can look at my back my virtual background, and there's a lot of information about me in there. There's a lot of information, right? You've got you got my two books that are up in the corners there. You've got the books. I specifically did the books that I read. Simon Cynic starts with wise, what you know. You can find a lot about me. Now, not everyone has that, but what's in their LinkedIn? By the way, I'm not a creep, I promise, but I'm gonna go stalk them on Facebook and Instagram and LinkedIn everywhere, so I can find out some things that are gonna help me build rapport. You know, yes, can I meet a stranger on the street and build rapport? Sure. I can do that, but there's so many places to find information on someone. I've got I got a lunch with a new prospect that just literally this morning someone reached out who referred, hey, they're in Austin, they would love to meet you. Um you know, they're interested in you know, you know, sales scalers. I go, Great, send me their LinkedIn profile. So I've already worked at the LinkedIn profile, I saw where they go to went to college. We have a connection there. I, you know, and and that was just in 10 minutes before I popped on our podcast here. Now I go into that meeting when I'm walking five blocks to where we're meeting and lunch there in Austin, where I am. I'm gonna pull up a couple other things. I'm gonna cyber stalk him so I can go in. In one, by the way, it's not just to win the business, I want to know if this is a client I want. I don't want everyone, right? And I know you you're the same. Some people you want sitting to me and you're like, I wish you the best. I don't think we have a good fit here. Maybe I don't have a specialty you need, or we just personalities don't mix.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00I want to know all that before I go meet them. Now I'm not judging the book by the proverbial cover. I've already read the first couple chapters. Now I can go in and we can get down to getting to know each other at another level and see if it makes sense to have a business relationship.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_00Um all your guests think I'm a creep now, but hey, you know, you gotta do what you gotta do.
SPEAKER_04No, I mean, like this is this if you're a creep, then we're a creeps because we do the same thing. Like we before we have any conversation with clients, we would pull a complete dossier on their company and complete dossier on the founder. And so because to your point, like in order for you to be successful, you need to intimately understand the problems that they're likely to have, and then use the conversation with them as a validation mechanism rather than as a discovery mechanism, because then that puts you one step ahead. So I I couldn't recommend this enough to anybody else. Kind of like, can we just double-click on this? And I know your signals guy, you like everything you do is like you're taking sales to the next level and you're personalizing everything in terms of sales. What kind of signals are you looking at in terms of like understanding your customer, understanding the company, understanding the culture, understanding the problem? Like, walk me through kind of like what's your thinking process or or or workflow process.
SPEAKER_00So signals can mean a lot of things when it comes to the sales cycle. Obviously, the signals we're looking at is what's the velocity based on what we expect when we have that first week when we were like when they say yes or no. So we're looking at I'm a data geek at heart. As you can probably tell, I talk a lot with my hands. I was actually an actuary major in college for two years, and I realized during an internship, I I as much as I love spreadsheets and numbers, I do this too much. I guess growing up around New York. Uh so I went back to finance and obviously ended up in sales without trying. So um, you gotta look at your data from a sales cycle point. What's the velocity through? I also I talk about this in my book that I just published. Um wait, don't hire the VP of sales yet. What kind of responses are you getting? And a CRM hasn't been built to do this yet, so you got to do some manual work here. But it's is it, hey, let me get back to you. Um reviewing the proposal, or are they talking about bringing in something that's a hotter feel of um talking with the CEO, we're gonna review this together. Okay, that's that's a signal that we have an opportunity to win a deal. Are they talking about, hey, here's the here's the three things that are going on that are gonna slow this sales process down? Okay, but you're sharing and you're sharing details of what's going on in your life with me. So now I know one, excuse me, I have more information to continue the relationship. Is it just the fluffy I'll get back to you type of stuff? Or are they sharing intimate in quotes details of in those responses? That's a buying signal that's gonna give me confidence to say this is a deal we can win, or it might also be get with those intimate details tell me not sure this is gonna happen. And again, that's okay. I just need to know where I put my resources. So that's a lot of what I look at in the relationship. Once we have the relationship, the biggest signal to me is how much are they sharing? Is it level, which where most people start, even in a relationship they're starting to have trust in, are they willing to allow go on a journey with me to root causes to the true intimacy of what's going on? And if they're not, then I don't have a good relationship. I still might have a client for the next five years, but now they see me as a vendor, not a partner, and that's how that's the biggest question I know you probably do in your business as well. Is do they see me as a vendor or an a partner? If I'm a vendor, that means I can get fired anytime. If I'm a partner, if something goes wrong, and you know this, Maxim, if they see me as a partner and I mess up and I will mess up, mistakes happen. I get a chance to fix it as a vendor. I got fired without know.
SPEAKER_04Okay, okay. I mean, for us, um, and and this is probably a perfect segue in terms of sales methodologies, but um the sales methodologies we used to use at EY was Miller Hyman. And so uh the the green sheet for the co-prepression, the blue sheet for everything is the gold sheet is only for account planning. And if you can do gold sheet population, if you go, if you can do like account planning with your client there, then you knew that you were you had the relationship at a strategic level rather than opportune level. And so I couldn't agree more. Do you have Scott? I mean, there's Metic, there's MetPix, there's Miller Harman. Like, do you have a methodology to you recommend to growth stage companies, companies that they're really scaling? Because like some of those methodologies are enabled in some of the like native AI CRMs like ATO, kind of like what would you recommend? Kind of like in terms of forcing the founders handle the found or the leadership team down a tractured path of the drafting sales.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I love that question, and and a lot of people don't like my answer. It's a mix of all of them. I mean, four decades into sales for me, it's a mix of all of them. I think if you took spin selling, um, you know, how to influence friends, and you know, you take all these, you know, uh sandlers out there, which is a good one. I brought that into one of my companies many years ago and named 20 other ones, they're 85, 90 percent of the same thing. Okay, okay. And it's it's so you've got to then figure out your industry. And I guess the better answer to that is is what are you selling and who are you selling to? And is it spin selling, is it Sandler, you know, etc. When you really dive into them, some of them are better for B2B versus direct to consumer, some of them are better for software versus you know financial services or tech, you know, other things. So you gotta, it's it's not a simple question to me, in the sense of which one. You you gotta know more of which one is better for your specific industry. So, but in the end, again, build relationships, the things we've been talking about, have an engine, meaning a cadence that you go through every day. Here's what I'm gonna do today. Here's the goals I'm gonna hold myself accountable to. Here's the standards I set. So, what's the difference between goals and standards? It's a it's a big one for me. The standard is my my son's 24 years old and he's the other side of my house doing cold calling for uh an AI company, an AI tech company. That's what he does. His quota is to book five demos a month. It's stand that's from the company. His standard that he's building his financial life off of is at a minimum, I know I book 10 a month because he gets paid per besides the salary, gets paid for each one he books. His goal is 20, though. So his mindset as he comes in, he has his engine. Obviously, he has his dad as a sales coach. He has his engine, he knows what he has to execute on every day, he has a plan. The standard is without thinking, I book 10 a month. That just happens. I don't, you know, it's not something I'm shooting for. His goal is 20, though. So how do I get to 20? And so if you just do have those things in place, you're gonna be successful. What um one of the books I love, which is the 12-week work year, uh, and I always forget who wrote it. He talks about set a written plan every day, every week. If you just accomplish 75% of it, you're gonna be in the top one percent. Think about that, everybody. Write it down on a paper napkin, by the way. I'm not talking about this big five five bullet points. Write it down on a paper napkin. Here's the things I want, three things I'm gonna accomplish today, the five things this week. Accomplish, hold yourself accountable to at least doing 75% of it, and you'll be in the top one percent in whatever you're doing. That's as easy as that's how easy it is.
SPEAKER_04Okay, okay, okay. Uh, you can't see, but uh like beside me is my whiteboard, and on it, it's three things WMGT, what must get done today, my Eisenhower matrix in terms of prioritizing everything is on a quadrant, and then there's a saying at the very top that says, never do things that artists can do for you. I quite often have the tendency to get my hands and do well because I know it, but I can do it faster. Well, I gotta delegate to the team.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. That that's of all the three, that's that's the most important one. It really is. I mean, even if you're the side hustle person, listen to us today, you're the solo entrepreneur, you've got a micro business, or you're running a billion-dollar business. You can find things that you shouldn't be doing anymore. Now, maybe you can't afford a human a human being to go hire and do that for you, but what can AI do for you? What what what things can AI do for you that you can at least take half of that off your plate? I agree. You know, again, how do we become more efficient? You know, as I tell people, if you can learn to get a team around you, which now today, think very different from five years ago, Max, right? Now today the team is a combination of humans and technology.
SPEAKER_04Agreed.
SPEAKER_00I have to say you can do one of two things, you can get more done, or also as important, you can go go check out and be with your family, go do your self-care, go play golf, go jump in the water, whatever it is. Just because you can give yourself more capacity doesn't mean you have to use it all. Some of that capacity also needs to go to your self-care as well.
SPEAKER_04I agree. One of my most favorite tools at the moment is WhisperFlow. Oh, uh you have covered it. Amazing, amazing. Um, because like I was I was meeting with one of my colleagues today, this morning. We we have a uh Monday's camp, just him and I, and he's like, Well, how are you producing these documents that are so precise? It says, Look, my prompts are really, really long. Whisperflow cuts you off at five minutes. Quite often I would butt against that five five-minute limit in terms of what I'm prompting. And the L's are designed that more information is better in terms of more context, is better in terms of driving precision. So I'm absolutely confident in this. And I told him like my you my user interface is no longer my keyboard, my input interface is my voice. That's how I communicate with my computer.
SPEAKER_00Uh I'll give you one other tool since we'll talk about tools. Not that are we getting paid for these? No. No, we're not. We shouldn't reach out to Wisp or say, hey, okay. Is my plot advice device? Okay. I so uh one now I don't one uh my typing and my handwriting are getting worse by the second as we use these advice devices, but my output is significantly better. Uh blog's great. I just hit record, it's better than even what Zoom has and and Gmail has. And then to your point, now with Whisper, you go into your AI and you say, here's the transcript as part of the context, da da da da on your prompt. I mean, I do things for my clients that norm used to take two months I can do in a hundred percent.
SPEAKER_04Um sometimes we intentionally slow down or we tell our clients to slow down because to your point, we use different recorder. Uh we're primarily focusing granola and auto. We don't have physical device, but we'll we'll we'll probably get plot. Um but from a conversation to a proposal, because everything is built in our LLMs, like um, and we have um offline LLMs that we use, but we also use like clock, and we have like skills that they build. I can get from a conversation to a highly customized future ventures proposal within two hours.
SPEAKER_00Like that's how it looks better than anything ever produced five years ago.
SPEAKER_04I agree, I agree, I agree. Do we ever send it without review? Absolutely not. No, but it speeds up the process tremendously.
SPEAKER_00And I think I want to make sure people heard what you just said. Human reviews it before it goes out. Human always has to review it. Nine out of ten things that AI does for me, there's a human reviewing it. There's a couple of things that, you know, if I set up a spreadsheet where it just takes the data and it does it, there's a QA that will go on on a one every now and then, but it's not all the time. There's certain things I can trust technology enough with. But anything, especially that's going from me out to the world, there's a human, whether it's myself or one of my VA, who's gonna look at it before we say, did AI get it right?
SPEAKER_04Scott, I mean, I couldn't agree more with you. Um we're talking scale-ups, we're talking growth uh growth companies. Quite often, uh, they don't have the brand permission that established companies have. How do they overcome this challenge in terms of like let's say it's it's a it's a new AI company trying to compete against a juggernaut? Like um it's it's kind of interesting because uh I come from the B2B B2B world. Like I was with EWA, I was with Deloitte, I was with corporate. Um, and so there used to be a saying that nobody gets fired for hiring IBM, right? Now we're seeing this slowly change, and nothing against IBM. IBM is an amazing company, but enterprises are more willing, although not to the same extent because career risk is still present, they're more willing to give smaller new work uh entrants in the market a chance. So, how do growth companies overcome this career risk association or maybe like market permission and win?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, and and and what you just said at the end was true. Now everyone's willing start, there's a bigger willingness to I can go look at a non-IBM or Microsoft. You know, this question came up on uh an event I was at over the weekend, and simply the the best way if you can make this happen is there's someone with credibility who will vouch for you. So, what does that mean? Obviously, in the B2C direct to consumer, that means influencers. Whether they should have credibility, that's another conversation for another podcast, but they do. Uh in the B2B world, are you going in through a marketplace? You know, I've sold a lot of different softwares where other, you know, let's use the human capital space, you know, you've got uh work day in UKG and ADP Stradium, day four, yeah. I can be a startup software, they're gonna vet me. Their clients trust that if I'm in their marketplace, that I've been vetted a pro so that can start getting me traction. So that's one way to get in. Is is there a way to get validation of me from someone who they already trust? And if you don't have that, then it's you just gotta build your client base and then go to your clients if you're doing you're doing a good job for them, and you ask them for you ask them for for references, you ask them to be a reference, you ask them for quotes you can put on your website. You maybe you gotta pay them by giving them a gift card, or maybe you gotta give them a hey, I'll give you the next month off if you're not a million-dollar type of subscription, you know, so we can use you. Would you be willing to those things you do? Start bringing in with your client bases, you're slowly building advisory panels, as we we talked about that a little while ago.
SPEAKER_01Okay.
SPEAKER_00And and now say if you're gonna be part of the advisory panel, what's the benefit? Give them a benefit for all that. And again, now you got content you can use to the world and say, here's what our advisors are saying to us who are our clients, too. So, but the easiest way is get someone who has validation to your ICP to validate.
SPEAKER_04Okay. Um, what importance does uh uh physical events, analog events have now uh vis-a-vis kind of like in the past? Have you seen any kind of shift or change or trends? Um you talked about uh an advice report or um how do you uh um how do you create a bit of a catalyst with with people that are advocates and people that they already could converted to your product or service offering?
SPEAKER_00I love events. I love getting people in person. You know, think of the pandemic's over. So we're through those couple of years that really slowed things down. As you know, this, you and I think talked about this the other week when we first spoke. People buy differently, right? They're they're not, they're not, you can't cold call the way you used to. Um, people already know what they want to buy, so they're coming to you with the research done. You're one of three vendors they're looking at. But they also go to events. People do go to trade shows, people do both on the B2B and B2C side, be there. If you don't have a budget, then find a way to get a free ticket or a discounted ticket. So you might not have a booth, but you can walk around and start shaking hands. Uh live events are great. I love them. I really do. Whether it's big events at our trade show or a conference that you're not hosting. But once you get big enough, start having a small conference. Start having an advisory board. If again, if you can do it in person, you can afford from a budget standpoint. There's a lot you can do there that helps. Again, back to your question a minute ago, credibility. Let people meet you. If you don't have credibility yet, there's just something about the fact that they get to shake your hand, have a have a have a drink with you, you know, things like that. It really does, it helps elevate you.
SPEAKER_04So for uh girl companies, that maybe to your point that can't can't afford to sponsor uh an event or have their own event or uh buy a booth, what's the best way for them to max out the value that they unlock from attending an event as a participant rather than as a as a sponsor or or a vendor?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, this this is whether you have the booth or not, you need to have back to what we said an engine. What's your follow-up engine that you're doing with them? And by the way, you should go prior to the event, you need to have that engine ready to go so that when you're at the event, again, whether you have a booth or you're just walking through, you know, it's gonna help you have the better better conversations. And you know, again, nowadays with my plod, it's easy. I can just press that and just go, and I don't even have to think about it. I just have conversations then, obviously, with the AI stuff. But even if you don't have that, you you've got to have a follow-up engine. You and you gotta one of my clients was just at an event on Thursday. We're already the follow-ups are already starting. We've got the list from him, and we we've already um today we're meeting to who are the five people. It was a smaller event. Who are the five people that you already got their cell phone numbers? What are you doing? Da-da-da. And then and by the end of this week, we will have the follow-up that's already been the first, the first email, whatever text message has been sent. You gotta be hot, right? Because people still remember the event. Once you get two weeks out, and in three weeks, you know this it just who are you? I I forget you. Yeah, strike while the iron's hot.
SPEAKER_04Is there anything that you can do when during the event to make yourself memorable?
SPEAKER_00Besides dancing on the tables.
SPEAKER_03Um, I mean, some people wear crazy glasses, so they would have like crazy hair, or maybe they wear a cravat or a scarf or something or like be your personality, number one.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, for me, that's that that's probably not my personality. So, how do I be memorable? Is was I someone that actually cared about you and in and got to know you and then just try to pitch to you? Because you go to these events and everyone's pitching something, right? Yeah, who actually wanted to get to know to me? Wanted to get to know me, sorry. That I think, at least for me, I walk out with the people who, hey, they got to know me, they asked about me, not just my business.
SPEAKER_04So is your advice fewer conversation but more in-depth conversation based on already research uh customer list, uh, versus like going out and heading out uh carts like crazy?
SPEAKER_00If you can do the research, and especially if we're talking about events, go in and know I've got these 10, these 50 people in the next three days. I want to find a way to say hello to. Yes. Because again, you get to go shake hands and you can book right there. By the way, here's one other thing to your other question. Don't meet, hey, hey Maxim, great to meet you. Yeah, we should meet. I'll follow up with you next week. No, you've got your phone, I've got my phone, our calendar's on it. Let's book a meeting. Let's book it right now.
SPEAKER_03Okay.
SPEAKER_00I don't understand why people still try to walk away. Give me, you know, I'll now it's an e-card, great, but it's still the same as throwing it on the ground. Book it right then. So, but yes, go again. What you're talking about is going with a plan. That's always the best way to go. Go on with the plan, do the research, and know what you're doing. You're gonna get a lot. Listen, if you go in with a plan on a three-day event for the first day, you probably don't need to be there the next two days. So you can go off and go do something else because you're gonna go on the plan, you're gonna meet the people, you're gonna get what you need.
SPEAKER_04Okay, okay. I mean, uh again, I I was raised in an amazing sales organization, and um a lot of the sales folks wouldn't even like the BD folks, um, wouldn't even bother going to any of the sessions. They just constantly they're meeting or roaming the halls, or or if they're going to an event, they go to an event, but they're sitting next to a prospective client or a client, and there is there to reinforce the relationship. Um, couldn't be more. Um what does your tech stack look like? Do you mind sharing? I mean, we could have for me personally, yeah.
SPEAKER_00Uh in no order of how I use them, but obviously I'm a B2B guy myself. I'm trying to reach founders that are one to 50 million in revenue. So LinkedIn. LinkedIn's a big part of it. Prosp.ai is my automated outreach to LinkedIn. It, you know, I use Navigator, build my list, dump it into Prosp. Prosp allows me to create when do I connect? How do I talk to them? How many days, you know, I use some voice text in there as well. I use I'm a chat GBT guy. I use Chat GBT to craft the messaging as well, so that I'm not, you know, again, I'll tweak a couple of things it does, but it's been taught pretty well how to talk like me. Um my VA uses a bunch of GPTs I've built. So anyone who looks at my LinkedIn, we're posting twice a day. Everyone who knows me is like, oh my god, that that's that's textbook, what Scott says. But at the same time, my VA is doing it with how I've trained AI to do it. So she uses GPTs, it creates the content calendar for the month. It gives her, it knows, hey, for this post, you're gonna use GPT one versus two and three, blah, blah, blah. She uses gamma to do, I think it's gamma to do all the the post the visuals. And then Loomly is where she my my VA gets only works about a third of the hours I pay her for every week, and because she's been with me for many years. Uh, and I tell her, I go, listen, for me, we've I'm using AI. Part of her has been my test case to how I help my clients on some.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, yeah, yeah.
SPEAKER_00I go, Diana, like one day she's like, she goes, I only work three hours. And I, you know, for this, she's supposed she's uh booked for 10. I go, charge me for 10. This is this is now becoming project-based in my mind. I'm good that way. So most but so you know, those are ones. And then with Replit, I actually I built a couple of things that I use. Uh, I'm about to put out another. I created an AI sales coach over the weekend. I mean, I've been working on it, but I finalized it over the weekend. We're starting to test it. Uh, I got what I call sales brain that's out there. Uh, I have a go-to-market fit check for founders, so I've used Replit to build them, and I use AI, uh excuse me, uh Chat GBT as my CTO, as I like to say, because I don't know how to code a lick. Yep. And it kind of so yeah, I've I've put a I've built a bunch of things that I now start using or my clients use. Um, my plod is definitely tech and whisper, as we talked about. Yeah, those are the ones.
SPEAKER_04That's awesome. That's awesome. Uh, I mean the keys, how do we unlock more of ourselves? Um on LinkedIn. Um one uh idea, and and I don't know how many people are doing this, but like when you said that you're posting twice a day, uh, people should be looking at their social selling index uh in LinkedIn, kind of understand where they stand, because obviously the the higher you SSI, the more likely is that your message is going to be viewed and um and and and receive well. Um the other aspect there that I wanted to give you perspective on, what what creates the first engagement? Like you said, if you use voice, do you send a voice message? Do you send a video message versus tech message? What's more likely to engage a prospect and most likely to get open and responded to?
SPEAKER_00I think they all work. It's just how open and honest are you with them? So if it's someone who I don't have a connection with and they've connected with me, one, I don't send them a message. I've they don't get a message for at least it's either one or two days. Because if I connect with someone, I have a message in my inbox, I know it's AI. And granted it's AI, and that's fine, but I want to at least let them wonder. So the the voice text, I can use that, or a lot of times it's it's the first message is is a message. But here's what I say to my messages. So I'd reach out to two ICPs to to not get too detailed. One is the founder, the other is uh the the investor, the venture capital PE. And obviously, I'd love to go to PEs and it's gonna let me work with your portfolio or I go direct to the companies. But I say, hey, listen, something like this. Hey Maxim, I appreciate you taking the connection and even taking a minute to read. I know you're busy, so let me get straight to it. Yes, I'm selling something. And then I just tell them what sales salescellers is. Now it's the VC, I I kind of tweak it to them. If it's you, you direct as a founder. And you know what I get? When I I shifted that about I think it was about three months ago from the usual warm them up stuff, I got a lot more no responses, but that means they engaged with me and they said, Thank you for your honesty. Yeah, don't need you right now. Maybe, and by the way, I got an email on Sunday from someone who said our LinkedIn message, excuse me, I'm ready to talk.
SPEAKER_04Nice.
SPEAKER_00They're referenced months ago. But they're like, Again, the honesty. Now, the second message and more I've already told them what I sell. I'll I'll ask them, Hey, are you facing this like other founders or private equity firms? Have you thought about it? You up to a 25-minute call with someone who sold over six billion dollars, at least you're gonna walk away with some good ideas. Yeah, so I give myself a little credibility there, of course. You can't do it. Um I get significantly exponentially more responses. Now, a while those responses are no thank you, but now they've engaged me because I showed them respect, and that's how I take it. Someone who actually says no thank you, they're saying you respected my time, I'm willing to respect yours and say no thank you. Yeah, that's okay, that's a good yes.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I don't agree. Uh, Scott, I know we come into time. What uh any kind of like parting thoughts, any words of wisdom to uh scale up founders, grow founders?
SPEAKER_00Have an engine and stick to it. It can be a clunky engine, it doesn't have to be the best engine, but yeah, in every aspect of your business today, obviously go to market as we're talking. Have an engine that defines what you and the team does every day, and then score it at the end of the day in the end, or the at least the end of the week, to hold yourself accountable to. If you just do that, even if it's a junky engine that can only go 10 miles an hour, you're still gonna exponentially grow your business.
SPEAKER_04Love it. Uh, that's that's a really good point to close off the conversation. I I love the conversation with you, Scott. We'll drop links to your books, we'll drop links to uh sales scalers, any anything else that we can do to support you. We'd love to continue the conversation and partner with you because I think you'll bring in a ton of wisdom and lived the experience.
SPEAKER_00We're looking forward. This has been great, Maxim. I appreciate the opportunity and uh I look forward to working together on some things and talking some more. My pleasure.