[00:00:00] Oren Klaff: Daniel. I can see you. Okay. You are alive. Hey, welcome. I'm Grant Cardone and I'm here with Lewis Howes on the podcast of amazing greatness. Hey Lewis, how are you today?

[00:00:12] Justin Michael: I'm good. Yeah, I was going to go with like LaVar Burton from reading rainbow.

[00:00:19] Oren Klaff: So, no, obviously this is John I'm Oren. Klaff. This is adjusted Michaels.

[00:00:22] Oren Klaff: And the amazing thing about Justin to me is he has unpacked and put back together the ad tech, marketing tech sales, tech sales stack, all the, the API APIs that you really need to do outreach today. In a way that you can reach your prospects, connect with them. And I think w w you know, one thing we have to talk about is how much you're offending people when you're using a full AI, you know, machine learning, integrated stack, and breaking in, you know, on their dinner with a FaceTime call and trying to convert them in.

[00:01:04] Oren Klaff: Cause a lot of people would say, Hey, look, I understand, right? You're selling warrant, car warranties, you're selling you know, things that are outside the box. You're S you're selling seats on the next space launch with space, billionaire you're S you're selling something that sort of Alps and NFT of a random basketball game with LeBron James on a Wednesday night in a non-critical game.

[00:01:29] Oren Klaff: So you're breaking into people's head space using your tech stack, which something that just has this. Outwardly incredible appeal. And I get having a conversation, but motherfucker, I sell it. Yeah. Insurance. Yeah. And, and so I a need to be credible because I work for a company and we can't just walk up to somebody's house, virtual house with a virtual baseball bat, bang on the door and say, Hey, what's up?

[00:01:58] Oren Klaff: Oh, you're having dinner. Sorry. Need to talk to you about whatever I'm selling. So I, I have an infrastructure above me that needs me to behave in a certain way. Number two, I feel I have a belief system that if I'm breaking through the barriers that people have set up the defensive barriers, if I'm breaking through them with technology, multiple touches messages, weird, crazy, unusual messages that I'm, I'm freaking them out now.

[00:02:26] Oren Klaff: And I don't know how to overcome that. So. There's I feel like when people feel like you're using these fancy, next generation tools to break through the defensive barriers and shock people into a conversation, how do we have that conversation? Is that sort of the, the pushback you get, or some of the initial experiences people have when they use a full tech stack to do outreach,

[00:02:57] Justin Michael: Those are all really great points.

[00:02:59] Justin Michael: It's like D all the above one, when initial reading the book some of the old guard authors said, you're, you know, you're like John Connor and Skynet. My advice to you is don't release this book, rip it up. It's bad. It's like, it's, it's it could be used for evil. It had almost like an anarchist cookbook feel.

[00:03:15] Justin Michael: It's like you send

[00:03:17] Oren Klaff: Emails when, when you're on a plane and someone's reading your. Right, but they've taken the cover off.

[00:03:23] Justin Michael: Exactly. They have the Bible, the Bible around it. They have it, you know? Yeah. It's but it's, we put a heart in a soul and a conscience in it, you know, it's, it's, it's fun holding these up because I get compared to this guy or, you know, an iron human so I can bring everyone to the table, but I also get compared a lot to these folks who weren't so fun, but so I have a community called sales Borgs, which is a seller and a cyborg.

[00:03:48] Justin Michael: The truth is insurance agents can use this tech, but not all of it. There's a lot of dialer tech that allows them to dial the phone faster and frees up their time. So it doesn't matter, which actually we're at a point of peak tech stacks, no matter what industry you're in, there's something in my book that would be appropriate.

[00:04:04] Justin Michael: The weaponization of the tech stacks in startup companies. When you really get a blank check and you get to go nuts, right? That's the goal. There is actually almost a Turing test. I want my automation to be so good that you don't know what's on it. That's the artistry and the craft. Most people can't get to that level.

[00:04:22] Justin Michael: It's identifiable and they know they're getting buffet. It's like, oh, you're Banting me. You're saddling me. You're sequencing me. It's like, Hey Oren. I noticed your company grow by 31 people. And you just raised $21 million. It's like curly bracket curly by somebody as a curly brackets fail. And you can see the automation like the Frankenstein, the wire pops out.

[00:04:41] Justin Michael: Yeah. Yeah, so, I mean, that's, it's multifaceted answer. It was great.

[00:04:45] Oren Klaff: This is where I think there's the most amount of challenges people have. So by the way, just to put in context, like my world is I, Daniel and other people you've met here, do the tech stack and the technology, the world I live in is the human psychology of messaging.

[00:05:05] Oren Klaff: So when you say, Hey, people can see, you know, the, the you know, this is science fiction book, but people can tell the monster or the machine, right. Or the cyborg or the Android from a human very easily. That's the world I live in. How do we humanize no matter what technology that you're using, how does it feel like this is not a robot?

[00:05:32] Oren Klaff: So the first thing. That I want anybody to see in any messaging at any level that I deliver is I am not a robot to your point, the way to signal. I think I'm not a robot is to pull something out of their world that, that, you know, a robot wouldn't have enough. Perceived intelligence to know or pick up on,

[00:05:57] Oren Klaff: Right.

[00:05:57] Justin Michael: You just nailed it level, which is what I call hyper because personalization at scale has failed. It's something that was used as a marketing gimmick by LinkedIn. LinkedIn has billions in revenue and 750 million users. And they said, just personalize. So we have all this InMail and we said, well, Oren, you and I both know Daniel Berger.

[00:06:14] Justin Michael: And you'll be like, yeah, a lot of people know him or we know max Altschuler and we both know Manny, the CEO of outreach. Okay, great. That's good. But it doesn't make you take the meeting, but if I go in to your book, flip the script and then page 210, I pull out an insight. You, first of all, you're like, okay.

[00:06:29] Justin Michael: He actually read my book, he's pulling the quote. You might still be skeptical. But if I go and I hyper-personalized and I try a little more. Like we can program a machine to read your book and pull out nuggets. You could, we could do it, but it's not going to happen. You know? And if it's like, there's an emotion to it.

[00:06:43] Justin Michael: There's a flavor to it. There's a sterility to pure AI where you can tell that they didn't really research you. So to your point, if you hyper personalize and then use this tech stack to amplify that signal, it's extremely powerful. You're not fooling the prospect. You're giving them a quality experience at scale.

[00:07:01] Justin Michael: That's a lot better than the 999 people that just sent them the, you know, bullet point email, the HubSpot template, or, you know, we all get these like a number one, a crocodile EG number two, and are more felony, number three pounds down, you know, you get these crazy. And it was like from 2012, it's not modern and it's not funny and it doesn't work, but it's everywhere.

[00:07:20] Oren Klaff: So I think we're coming at this from different worlds. The world, you know, the, that I live in unfortunately is, you know, we can create a pitch deck or a pitch or an email message that we blast out. Two, I would say around seven to 12 people. Right? So, because we're just, we're trying to get into a private equity group, or we're trying to get into a CEO of a highly verticalized industry with a very specific deal to plug in.

[00:07:47] Oren Klaff: And so the visualization that I always use for our business, I want to get back around to you. So we're not doing it at scale, right. W what we're trying to do is we're trying to dock the Russian space station and the American street station. And one thing is obvious. There's a clang, and then they spin off into space and we've destroyed both.

[00:08:06] Oren Klaff: So the docking mechanism, we put a huge amount of thought into how will the CEO of a $500 million company open this email and go this, the stakes are high. I have to look at this. It's easy to respond. I can't ignore this because it's just going to come around through some other channel. This has to be paid attention to, by me, those are my goals, right.

[00:08:34] Oren Klaff: Because I don't have the scale that you have of, of not to insult and not, you know, not to, but I can't, I can't you know, a, B, C, D E F G, test that email right on my, a test there's only seven guys. So, so, so absolute certainty is where we have to be for, for outreach because we can't blow. W w now no, but we do find those same skills about how to raise the stakes, make it relevant, make it on ignorable and communicate that this is not going away.

[00:09:08] Oren Klaff: Right. And it's just going to pop up through some other channel if it's ignored and they have to flag it even, you know, CEO of, of, of you know, a company with 2000 people in it. But, but those same techniques work when or work even better when you do get to go out for scale. So maybe we could just slow down a bit and say, w w before we get into content, what are the baseline technologies today that do, you know, do allow you that, that, you know, a average person with average intelligence work in an average speed could you could use today to, to do multi-channel.

[00:09:47] Justin Michael: Yeah. So first the big companies like SalesLoft and outreach have semi-automated modes where you pull out the C-levels and you would take the Oren Klaff approach of a very deep dive and, you know, four hours to sharpen the ax, then hit the tree. I would not send the chief marketing officer of Verizon, an automated email ever, even if I could.

[00:10:08] Justin Michael: Them because it's too much writing. You need a, you need, like, I read a lot of your blogs. You need to go deep. You need to get in the psychology, the research, everything you got to stand way out, even send a FedEx for $35 to make sure they sign and read that thing, you know? And then it, the stakes are everything.

[00:10:23] Justin Michael: I have a unique position because about five, six years ago, I was part of a company called outbound works. And we spent a few million dollars on this stuff really quickly. And we scaled to a $10 million run rate. It was a lot of fun. We did a hundred startups at once and I sent millions and millions of emails and I tested tech stacks and it's 17 engineers and we built all this space, age stuff.

[00:10:43] Justin Michael: We tried everything for the the lay people, the average seller. I hate this word average, but can we

[00:10:50] Oren Klaff: just, can you unpack that a little bit, like asked you can get yourself in trouble, right. By looking at a couple of tools and going, oh my God, this amazing world. Building an outbound tech stack, automated, like how, how many people, how much budget, how much intelligence would you just stumble into that world and say, I'm going to be able to do this.

[00:11:16] Oren Klaff: It, should you set your expectations?

[00:11:19] Justin Michael: Yeah. So only 15% of high growth companies even automate this. Here's the, here's the perfect umbrella statement. If you send your emails one at a time in 2020, or you dial a telephone one at a time, it is dark ages. So anyone hearing this, if you're doing that, a competitor is eating your lunch right now, the baseline technologies there, we do not live in an environment where you have to.

[00:11:41] Justin Michael: W, you know, individually do this stuff. It's all automateable. And with very high degrees of personalization getting into trouble with it is buying it and you buy outreach and you go, great. I'm gonna send a thousand emails and GMO says one 50 cap, boom, your domain shutoff. So if you go too fast, so it's actually an extreme amount of prep and onboarding.

[00:11:59] Justin Michael: It takes me two weeks to set up. One of these campaigns is brutal. It's like twenty-five, twenty-five 50 50. I'm doing like I'm testing the wall, like a painter, like white paint on the white wall. Oops. It's blue. Okay. Let's try that again. You know, it's right. It's it's like formula one. You got to test these engines all year.

[00:12:15] Justin Michael: Now we're on the track now we're testing the tracks. So there's so much that goes in behind the scenes. You know, people ask me, well, Justin, it took you eight hours to set up that personalization at scale sequence. Why is it worth it? Because now that I've set it up. I can send thousands and it's perfect.

[00:12:31] Justin Michael: One-to-one it took eight hours and I just saved 50 hours. So there's more upfront cutting. Yeah.

[00:12:39] Oren Klaff: Yeah. Here's the way I think about it. I mean, I just want to break it down. P dinosaur brain, but here's the way I think about it. Like how many friends do you have the day trade today? Oh, really none. Why?

[00:12:52] Oren Klaff: Because the computer's day trip, there's no way that you can there's no way that you can make a judgment call, find some alpha chase on alpha with your $9, right? The, the 27 PhD you know, MIT graduates at a hedge fund aren't programming, and we've worked on some of these deals, you know, a super computer with a tech stack to chase down that one trade you know, oh, about seven seconds before you decide to commit to it.

[00:13:23] Oren Klaff: So day trading today is not a thing because the computer is doing well. Okay, now I'm going to be thirsty. Now. I'm really thirsty.

[00:13:32] Justin Michael: We're the same person. I, the coffee was invented so I could blow it up on myself. Cause I always spill my coffee in my car on a couch, on a bedspread. It's a, it's hilarious. I don't drink much coffee.

[00:13:43] Justin Michael: I just spill it for a living. The,

[00:13:45] Oren Klaff: the main tech stack in in our podcasts are the laptops that I spill coffee.

[00:13:50] Justin Michael: I've blown several laptops with with, with Starbucks.

[00:13:55] Oren Klaff: So I think a hundred percent, if you find yourself picking up the phone or sending up an email, Hey, this is Jim. You know, realize that you guys, you know w you know, saw an article on you and that you guys are starting to expand into our area.

[00:14:07] Oren Klaff: We, you know, we'd love to show you how our insurance program could improve, you know, your return on invested capital by 3%. You know, maybe in the next couple of weeks, we could set up a phone call and just write. If you find yourself writing. And hitting send, I think it's the equivalency is you trying to day trade against the 37 PhD astrophysicists in the basement of Goldman Sachs and they're, they're laughing at you, right?

[00:14:34] Oren Klaff: So, so there's adjusting out there at your competitor or within the competitive set that, you know, in their minds, eyes watching you write that email or pick up the phone call and leave a message. And, and it's like it's like a Saturday night live skit to them. You doing your day job for someone else is a Saturday night live skit.

[00:14:56] Justin Michael: It's really interesting. Cause we get to study the future. We study the past and the office of the CMO chief mark. So we all have know the term growth hacking. We all remember the SEO revolution. So, you know, you're in class. So you're on the front page of Google because you're in class, you sold millions of books.

[00:15:09] Justin Michael: I have not that's very hard to do, but for a while, there's an obsession with how do I get on the front of Google and how do I growth hack? And it was this big thing and nobody really talks about it now. Cause everyone figured it out. Right. But sales has not figured out how to use tech stacks. So I was like, we're going to specialize and we're gonna have automation, artificial intelligence.

[00:15:26] Justin Michael: And then let's see the most like we did that 10 years ago, you know? So like sales is just catching up because. As far as the P and L the CEO is always looked at the sales team. Like they're expensive, we've got to fly them everywhere. Where's the revenue and they haven't wanted to invest. But the truth is in these high growth companies, $2,000 per rep, per month on sales tech stack some up to 5,000.

[00:15:48] Justin Michael: When you get things like connect and sell like these, these parallel assisted dialers that dial the phone four to 10 times. When you have VA operations where they're grooming and enriching the data off shore, all that means is they're making sure your emails and calls work or pre calling them. So imagine if you could call a list it's, pre-vetted targeted pre-calls and with intent, right?

[00:16:05] Justin Michael: People working number, working email sounds like the holy grail. You can do it. It's expensive. But imagine if your competitor in the insurance business has leads that already showed intent to buy and working cell phones. That's cutting like a hot knife versus calling switchboards and

[00:16:24] Oren Klaff: a million percent agreement.

[00:16:25] Oren Klaff: So there's two sides of this one is the tech stack, right? And the second is the messaging that you feed into. So the tech stack, so why don't we do this? Why don't we, you know, we have a I have a barbecue grill company that sells NFTs of grilling. So I have a you know, barbecue grill, awesome.com and no barbecue grills, but we sell and NFTs of people grilling the most highly rated steak.

[00:16:57] Oren Klaff: In the world, right by, you know, the, the Japanese Y go number one, 2021 winner of highest quality steak, you know, and that steak sold for $35,000 for four ounces. You can buy the NFT of that piece of steak being grilled. Okay. Okay. Not their company. Let's build quickly the tech stack. For the outreach for, for buyers of a, you know, let's just say a $35,000 barbecue grill set up, including one free NFT.

[00:17:32] Oren Klaff: And so let's build the tech stack, but then let's talk about the messaging that has to go in. Tech stack where we start in your mind.

[00:17:40] Justin Michael: That's what my book came from. So my book originally was called TQ because I realized that you Q and IQ, there's gotta be this AICCU adaptability quotient or technology question.

[00:17:48] Justin Michael: Whether you fly a 7 47, a 7 67 race, a car paddle shifters, it's a human and a machine. There's a human machine, UI UX interface. And it's hard if I write a book about tech stacks and you asked that question, the question is unanswerable in five years, 10 years with a singularity. What I realized that the modern seller today does not just have a phone and yellow pad.

[00:18:07] Justin Michael: I'm a bit old school. I'm 41. I've been doing this 20 years. I still use these nostalgically. It's like a vinyl record, the modern seller.

[00:18:15] Oren Klaff: Daniel, what the hell you put me on a podcast with a 41 year old? What is he going to know? I need, like, I need these 22 year olds,

[00:18:21] Oren Klaff: right?

[00:18:22] Justin Michael: I know. Right? Well, I've been doing it for 20 years and the thing is I was, I was early on UX UI because I came from the recording business.

[00:18:30] Justin Michael: So I used to use pro tools and logic and believe it or not recording music is nearly impossible in, in the late nineties. It was very hard just to Mike, all this stuff up and yeah, I have gen Z people. My book was I had a technical engineer read the whole book to make sure it could be done. So I realized that the tech stack is LinkedIn.

[00:18:48] Justin Michael: You're sitting on LinkedIn, looking for the people. Then you need the data because LinkedIn won't give you the emails and phone numbers. Then you can't sit there and one at a time email. So that's why outreach and sales offer big now in the pandemic you're remote. So it must be able to listen to your calls.

[00:19:01] Justin Michael: So you have gone of course, yesterday ZoomInfo, which is the second tech stack, but chorus, which was the fourth tech stack. So I have this core central stack. So sales, at least 7 million people that sell software is that core stack is not a phone. And that's what led to the book and this whole revenue operations revolution.

[00:19:19] Justin Michael: So if you're doing the BBQ, NFT and the tech stack, what is the messaging? Well,

[00:19:24] Oren Klaff: let's, let's nail down the tech stack. Okay. Sure. Okay. So the, so the core, so go through the outreach. So we have

[00:19:31] Justin Michael: sales navigators, we have LinkedIn, but the business version of LinkedIn sales navigator, it's like a hundred bucks a month.

[00:19:36] Justin Michael: Like a cell phone, maybe 80. That's going to give you self healing, CRM, where you raise your hand and say what companies that yeah. That's no, it's really amazing the economic graph, but they do not let you have emails and phones at scale. So zoom info, the second, the data layer, and there's so many great platforms that do this.

[00:19:53] Justin Michael: You pay another fee so I can get yourself and your direct email. The third is I need to automate, I need to make calls and I need to do emails because now I have the ability to do it, but I would rather be able to do 150 emails a day or 300 emails a day. Then only get 50. Right. Cause I, you know, I'm a full cycle seller.

[00:20:14] Justin Michael: I've got my mid funnel and my down funnel. Now I'm remote. I'm not in my office. So how is my boss going to figure out what I'm doing? We record all the calls with gong and chorus and run AI and benchmark, listen to talk ratio and all that good stuff. So that became the essential stack, those four components.

[00:20:31] Justin Michael: And that's the revolution that I talk about in my book, because I can't find, I mean, I can't find anyone selling that doesn't have that.

[00:20:39] Oren Klaff: So I love it, that we slowed you down enough to hit that because norm we just let you go at your natural pace. It's like talking to Marshawn Lynch, Marsha, Marsha, you know, in a game in the, you know, find a super bowl.

[00:20:52] Oren Klaff: You know, when you scored the game winning touchdown, you know, can you tell us about the strategy and you run through a motherfucker face? Well, what was behind the thinking, you know, when you received the ball on you looking down the field and you see 11 players facing you and you have to sort of figure out how to, you know, what goes through your mind cause you run through a motherfucker face.

[00:21:13] Justin Michael: Yeah. I mean, just do, how do I explain it? That was the difficulty of the book too, is I really wanted to show. People, you know, my seven year old mom has a tech stack cause she's got Gmail, she's got, you know, zoom, she's got Facebook, Instagram, she's got a better phone than me. She has like a better iPhone, but she's 70.

[00:21:33] Justin Michael: So I realized, so I call it MacGyver tech stack, or MacGyvering your tech stack. And then I call them Frankin stack because LinkedIn has a closed API. What I mean by that is LinkedIn. Won't integrate with anyone. And that's been the biggest thing. That's broken the ability to really create these harmonic stacks, because imagine having like a race car, but you know, the pistons can't talk to the computer.

[00:21:57] Justin Michael: I feel like that's difficult. So we have this problem. It's similar to what apple set up. The walled garden issue is. Certain vendors are walled gardens and certain vendors are open source. And so the sales ops leads. These rev ops leads. They're like Jetta wizard, you know, tech engineers. They come in and have to glue it all together.

[00:22:17] Justin Michael: To get the data out of it and get the reporting layer. So that's the base stack, the messaging you asked me about, I want to get into that. It has to be done

[00:22:24] Oren Klaff: the messaging cause that's where I spend my whole life thinking about what, what messaging is going to move the reader or the receiver off of the status quo, which is ignore or save for later, which is also ignore.

[00:22:40] Oren Klaff: And so I have very firm thoughts on this and I'm committed to, but let's take, so I want to compare and contrast, well, actually I just want to prove that I'm right, but compare and contrast. No. That, so an email comes in, right. And so let's break down the components of it. Okay. Cause I think a sales guy, I think, oh, I'm sending so many an email.

[00:23:03] Oren Klaff: Okay. Well, hold on. There's multiple components, you know, any of there's a subject line, there's a time of day delivery. There's, you know, name, no name. There is you know, the first line, there's the length, there's the the setup, you know, the intrigue, the reveal, the call to action. The, the, you know, the credentials, the source of the email.

[00:23:21] Oren Klaff: So when I look at email and there's layers in an email, it would call, I call it the layer cake. So there's layers in an email. There is also a lot of variables that come in with an email that trigger different routes in the human mind of how to process that email. So I'm interested to hear, you know, you're thinking of like, what are the components of an email that, that are even variables that you have options to even tweak it.

[00:23:48] Justin Michael: Yeah. So I'm in a quote or in class and say don't trigger the crop grain. And what I mean by that is I was the first person in 20 years of software as a service to say your email should look like a text message. And here's my big tombstone realization. Email is visual. Yeah. Words are pictograms comes from cave, painting your brain struggles to read them.

[00:24:07] Justin Michael: My six year old daughter struggles to read them. And it late at night when we're tired and we're reading a book like maybe dune can wait for the new movie. We get tired and our artists are getting bleary, but we can go in a car and we can see the sky, the earth, the cosmos. And it's fine because what's happening.

[00:24:22] Justin Michael: So you're sending someone that's going to trigger their fight or flight. These marketing emails, these long expository emails and the F look at the F curve. Look at how they're shaping up there going, should I delete it? Is it safe? Is it from the IRS? Why is it long? Should I get, you're actually triggering an executive a really negative way when you send that 13 second to process email.

[00:24:38] Justin Michael: So if you can first get them mailed delivered, we can talk all of. You didn't have a deliverability and sender score, but let's just say I haven't managed to get an email to, or in class. And he opens it. I get 18 characters between the subject line and the preview text. That's it. So the vast majority of all business, you must let's hope you're doing well.

[00:24:55] Justin Michael: And so 99% of business email is just a waste. You would you ever put an ad on the internet says, hope you're doing well on the side of Facebook. No, you boom. You have to hit it like a journalist.

[00:25:04] Oren Klaff: So I want to drop back. You, you go too fast, right? I know you have a very smart, you know, audience. My audience needs this to go a little bit slower.

[00:25:17] Justin Michael: I'm

[00:25:17] Justin Michael: sorry. I got excited. I don't get to talk to a class every day, but yeah.

[00:25:22] Oren Klaff: So the Neanderthals that I come with, including myself, need to unpack this stuff more slowly. No I don't think it's that at all. I think that we, the, the, the folks that code that are, you know, I'm dragging, you want to take this hour, that they've invested in uni and.

[00:25:37] Oren Klaff: Oh, yeah. Utility. When we, that just tends to be like the the guys in my cohort are working on a deal, are working on a sale, are working on a program they're on sort of the you know, the philosophy, the stoic philosophy of how to be business, you know, work in the business, not on the business. Great motherfucker.

[00:25:54] Oren Klaff: Now, what do I do? Okay. So we're, we're sort of out of philosophy and actually wanting to do stuff. I can slow it down, so, no, but, but here's, here's the way I look like. I feel like the person who figured this out was the New York times in, you know, 1893. Exactly. So to me, this looks like something that I know how much time to invest in and get information out of.

[00:26:24] Oren Klaff: So if you look at the New York times, big headline, right. The so you asked, pulls out of Afghanistan, Subhead. Okay. Just by the existence of the subhead, if that's enough for me. Right. Then, then th that's all I need. I've got the big one. The subhead is but we'll stay involved, you know, with air combat and continue to reach, you know, our security goals.

[00:26:51] Oren Klaff: Then there's a sub subhead, right. Which starts to mention some of the people involved and then I've got copy. So this just looks like something that I know how to get information out of. And so to your point to me, an email should look like it should pattern match to something that one of my partners would send me.

[00:27:13] Oren Klaff: And that would give me some information and ask me to make a decision about what to do next. So, so the V it's a visual pattern match to something I get from people I work with day to day. Agree or disagree.

[00:27:28] Justin Michael: Yeah. So I love how you break that down because I have this whole theory called journalism. I remember I was like the one class I took in high school.

[00:27:34] Justin Michael: Cause I was just kind of, I left school at 15 and tested out and my guidance counselor, like you're not gonna amount to anything. So I probably did get turned down by Salesforce and LinkedIn 200 times, but I ended up working for both of them because sales, they're not looking at your MBA. They're like, what have you sold?

[00:27:47] Justin Michael: And I had the references and I finally got there and it took me till I was early thirties to get to those style companies. And I killed myself in incubators for the first 10 years. And I was more than no one sell anything, sold shoes, sold, you know, widgets, actual widgets. But to your point think like a journalist.

[00:28:04] Justin Michael: So when it comes to fundraising and I love this about your work. The purpose of the headline is the first sentence versus first sentence. The second is to get to the call to action. When I do AB testing, I'm testing, subject lines and the first line, and then different calls to action. I'm using a sequencer to run that.

[00:28:22] Justin Michael: So here's a hundred people getting the first subject line. Here's a hundred in the second. Well, how many replies it again was a negative positive and running them through. And it's, you know, it's interesting now about cnn.com and the MarTech on there is cnn.com go load it multiple times. All the, everything on the front page of cnn.com is an AB test.

[00:28:40] Justin Michael: It's all rotating. You know how it is little cliffhangers. It's like this celebrity just got caught, but it's like, just tell me, is it Alec Baldwin again, like, you know, click and you have to go in, it's like click baity, but it's actually good with email to not give it all away. And it create the intrigue and to pull them in.

[00:28:56] Justin Michael: I let us a lot of your work and I know you believe in this stuff.

[00:28:59] Oren Klaff: Yeah. Wait, this is, if you know, if you come here or we spend time with you, what, the number, one thing that will sort of pick on somebody for, or, or criticize is you're starting with the reveal. There's no setup, there's no intrigue.

[00:29:17] Oren Klaff: And so you don't have the benefit of the reveal. So to your point, celebrity gets in trouble for the third time. In one month, you won't believe who it is, right? That is has, I mean, they tested at scale, but, but that's going to have a higher click rate than, you know, Alec Baldwin gets a parking. All right.

[00:29:37] Oren Klaff: So now, I mean, this is a different subject, the, which we'll get to later. Well, you know, unless it goes on for four hours anyway, we have a time limit, but the entering hook can't be significant. You know, what makes your emails? Clickbait is the intrigue hook is way higher in intrigued than the actual content reveal that will hold

[00:30:00] Oren Klaff: you over, but

[00:30:01] Justin Michael: value payload.

[00:30:02] Oren Klaff: But I think for me, listening to you, I hear you starting to break down the components of an email, right? The subject line, you know, the entry hook, you know, the opener. The call to action. So what do you call these elements? So you've got the, the AB test in the subject line. Then you've got the hook.

[00:30:23] Justin Michael: I created my own method and because of how funny it is, I've actually met Alan Parsons from the Alan Parsons project.

[00:30:30] Justin Michael: I'm from the music business. So I met most, I'm an Eric Clapton. So Alan Parsons is in Dr. Evil. He goes, we're going to call it the Alan Parsons project. So I call my method, the Justin Michael method to make fun of myself as a dark guru. So,

[00:30:44] Oren Klaff: yeah, sorry, sorry. No, one's gonna appreciate this, but you know do you know the band ugly kid, Joe ugly kid, Joe.

[00:30:51] Justin Michael: Yeah. They're actually one of the only bands that got famous from Santa Barbara.

[00:30:55] Oren Klaff: Oh, wow. Yeah. So, so there's a band. I love the origination story cause it's the same of ugly kid, Joe. Right? So they were opening for, you know, the story.

[00:31:03] Justin Michael: No, no, the story, no shot,

[00:31:05] Oren Klaff: man. They were, they were the opening act for pretty boy Floyd.

[00:31:09] Oren Klaff: Okay. Got it. They were called something else, you know, the light posts project or whatever you know, Santa Barbara, the wave sisters, whatever they were called. And so they got in a fight with pretty boy Floyd just before opening with them. So they announced their name changed to ugly kid Joe, as they were opening for pretty boy Floyd.

[00:31:32] Oren Klaff: So yeah, naming yourself after other bands is a real thing. Yeah,

[00:31:37] Justin Michael: it's so funny. The only other real there's toad, the wet Sprocket came out here and the other really famous band was called snot. You can imagine it was a heavy metal band. I was, I mean, it's just funny. It's a little town. Well, I don't go to Santa Barbara.

[00:31:48] Justin Michael: Yeah. Don't write a book. And but if you come here, it's this, I always say I'm living the life of Don Henley lyric because you can, you can check out every time you can check out anytime, but you can never leave. Don Henley also said kill all the lawyers, which he's actually quoting Shakespeare. Those are my two favorite Don Henley quotes.

[00:32:05] Justin Michael: Going back into cold email though, and the components I call them Spears. Basically, I'm trying to do visual prospecting. I want, I want emails to look like text messages. I want emails to deliver product marketing visuals. So I use these vendors. And I know that's in your work too. And I, you know, I you know, have a lot of respect for you and Daniel Berger.

[00:32:23] Justin Michael: And we have a channel in a discord. I have it like a club called sales boards. It's in a discord server. Imagine if slack and zoom had a baby they've raised a hundred million dollars just for gaming. It's, we're all gaming together in a server. Well, we use it to tear down email and so we test these methods.

[00:32:38] Justin Michael: And so everyone just starts to make these visual diaries. And you can send it and it can be wrong and you send it in the second or third email, you send a Venn diagram. So what do you think of this diagram? Well, the diagram is processed 60,000 times faster than words, 90% of what we retain. So I'm, I'm kind of this armchair neuroscientist, right?

[00:32:56] Justin Michael: It's a, it is kind of a Neanderthal ask because I'm not studying rats or Schrodinger's cat or, you know, but what are they studies like? You know, there's there's no knife in the room, but there's a puddle on the floor, but they're dead, but there's no window, you know, these crazy like interview for Google word problems.

[00:33:14] Justin Michael: It's not like that. It's more like, okay, How does your brain want to work? What I found is email is visual and I found that phone is about power. 90% of the people thinks about tone, but phone is actually about power transfers. It's about something called polarity shifts. So if I got, if it was on a tombstone and said, what is the Justin Michael method?

[00:33:34] Justin Michael: It's email is visual. You know, phone is, is power dynamics. And that's what I figured

[00:33:39] Oren Klaff: out. So let's go back to the barbecue and company and let's get a subject. So we agree that the email coming in is first processed visually, and we have to pattern, match it to the kinds of emails that we think need to get processed and responded to.

[00:33:55] Oren Klaff: So in your world, what's the subject line.

[00:33:58] Justin Michael: The one that worked for me the best is one to three words. I use the subject line growth, lower case there's growth, marketing growth hacking. I came from, I was in mobile advertising for 15 years, and there's even a conference called grow.co. And I can't think of anyone who doesn't want to grow.

[00:34:14] Justin Michael: So I use the subject line growth and it tends to get a very high response. But,

[00:34:19] Oren Klaff: yeah. So I'll tell you, I mean, I don't, the problem is I think telling people what works, then everybody starts doing it and then it will stop working in factor

[00:34:28] Justin Michael: for that. I'll tell you how,

[00:34:29] Oren Klaff: but I, but, but I also, yeah, well, I, I also don't think, you know, our reach is, is strong enough.

[00:34:35] Oren Klaff: But here is from, you know, I would say maybe 150 million emails. What we found with my group is the number one poll is they're on a cold.

[00:34:51] Justin Michael: Yeah, the name is John.

[00:34:53] Oren Klaff: So, so that, I mean, to me, that could be your mom. That pattern matches to somebody who know no business sends you lowercase subject lines with your name.

[00:35:07] Justin Michael: Yeah.

[00:35:08] Justin Michael: Aaron Ross, you started right. All of all the time and lowercase without punctuation, that's a good pattern interrupt. So I go through all pattern of, so what I realized by releasing templates to the industry is there's got Incruse burger, it's called the Cruz burger problem. He released a template called appropriate person with a waterfall effect.

[00:35:22] Justin Michael: And you know, I'd started to organize Daniel and everyone organization and mentioned to people, you get all confused. I confuse you when everyone started do it. And so I used to check my CEO's inbox and they had a probate person that preppers in the person. So what I came up with is this thing called numbness.

[00:35:35] Justin Michael: This is a really crazy word, but I'm gonna use it until everyone wanted it. It's called heuristics. It's from engineering. But think of it like Metta, just think of like, here. The email template. And here's what it means. So if I'm gonna use a humorous statement, you know, Hey Warren, I hate sequencing to you.

[00:35:53] Justin Michael: It's like a humorous fourth wall statement. Or if I use social proof, I say, you know, I work with top authors to get them on page one of Google. Now I'm using a heuristic of social proof. So I got my brother's an engineer. What I decided to do is say, well, copy my templates at your peril. Because once the Justin Michael methods out there with the book, similar to how Aaron Ross and predictable revenue actually did, I catch you at a bad time because Aaron said to do that and it's become so stale, it's dangerous to use because it's expected.

[00:36:24] Justin Michael: So what I want people to do is look at the meta framework. This is so similar to what I see you teaching in your courses is think about the meaning of this messaging, the architecture, and why you're using it and then make it your own. So you build a hook and you build a social proof and you build a CTA that's going to work.

[00:36:42] Justin Michael: And if you love this one from this template, don't copy it, do it. So instead of appropriate person, I could say who heads up or in charge, or I could use any synonym to still run the template, but cloak it. Yeah.

[00:36:54] Oren Klaff: Yeah. So subject line, I would say, you know, for, for the cold on our barbecue NFT company, I'll just name John Michael

[00:37:07] Oren Klaff: You know, Susan, Amir, you know, whatever. And then, so then opening hook it. And so, but you wouldn't, you do that, you would say, what, what would your, what would your AB test be on this cold email?

[00:37:22] Justin Michael: So I might do growth plus Orrin. So plus adding the name and using

[00:37:26] Oren Klaff: a time. I know, but, but see, I'm trying to take you out of what, you know right.

[00:37:29] Oren Klaff: And imply your technology into a different area. But so people buying barbecue grills. That's why I want to do an actual use case. People buying barbecue grills. Aren't thinking about.

[00:37:40] Justin Michael: That's true. I primarily work in B2B and a highly with SAS and services business. It's funny cause there's this other trainer who's really well known Josh Braun and he always breaks it down to rain, gutters and barbecue meds and barbecues and grills and bikes.

[00:37:55] Justin Michael: And I feel so disassociated with that because I sell, you know, conceptual complex software, which is also another niche. So it probably limits my reach. But what, so the barbecue grill, there might be some differentiated, differentiated element about it, like an outcome, because I really believe in sales, there's only four things you can ever do.

[00:38:15] Justin Michael: Make money, save money, reduce risks, or satisfy regulation. But I also find that pain, fear triggers and innuendo are really powerful. So a lot of what I'm doing. I know it's a word like psycho sociologically. Wow. That was a lot of syllables is I'm trying to trigger you in trying to get you moved from something that's painful.

[00:38:33] Justin Michael: So it'd be like, you know, I don't know what I can do with a grill. Like, is it rusty? Did it blow up? Is there bad warranty? Are you getting, you know, ripped off somehow? Are you spending a T like a printer cartridge? You're spending all your money on printer cartridges. You're spending all your money on charcoal or on gas to flame it.

[00:38:50] Justin Michael: Is it more efficient

[00:38:51] Oren Klaff: than that? To your point for a pattern interrupt? I would just do lowercase this grill. Okay. And then some kind of weird something. Right. You know, this grill. And, and so now we've got an email in it's in lower lowercase. It gets clicked on. Okay. So then what are your thoughts on that?

[00:39:07] Oren Klaff: Right. So first

[00:39:11] Justin Michael: so my first line is very interesting because what I've found at least with what I'm selling is I tell the prospect that it's relevant to them. This is a very weird thing I've found because when we're sending all these videos, videos from vineyard, no one watched the videos. So almost like cats watching tennis, we'd say, Hey, can you watch the video?

[00:39:32] Justin Michael: So we didn't ask for the meeting, didn't ask about, so we just oriented the video. So I'll say Hey Oren, I have a product that's very relevant to you. Can I share it? It's weird. So I'm telling you that this is relevant to you, and then I'm asking you for almost an opt-in hook. So the hook isn't that hooky it's more than.

[00:39:49] Justin Michael: I'm trying to get you into agreement that it's somehow relevant. Like I read your LinkedIn profile and I have a product that's relevant to you. Can I ask you? And I do this tap out thing where I, I slightly ask when, you know, I'm not going to ask, oh, this came from Lee Bartlett from the number one bestseller he's in the UK is a fly fishermen.

[00:40:03] Justin Michael: I like this one it's unassuming and it tends to lead people in like, okay, it's relevant to me. They almost get combative and then they want to provide is or isn't. So they keep reading that, that front hook for me always works for software. What do you think?

[00:40:18] Justin Michael: What do you do?

[00:40:19] Oren Klaff: So I try and think in terms of a setup, right?

[00:40:22] Oren Klaff: So if you think of a, you know, I lived in Hollywood and so I think in terms of narrative arcs and, and, and if you think of comedians the joke format is set up intrigue and then reversed. Or reveal of the so I try and think of like, what is going to set them up. But I think the most important thing for me, Justin is raising the stakes in that first line, right.

[00:40:49] Oren Klaff: Is raising the emotional or the business or the opportunity or the you know, the, the sense that a decision is coming, you're going to get some information and a decision is coming right. And you're on the spot, but this is not information. Stakes are up and we're coming, you are coming to a fork in the road, right.

[00:41:15] Oren Klaff: And when you come to the fork in the road right now, I don't have a call to action. I'm just forcing you, unfortunately, you know, down the road, you know, and I'm projecting a forest fork in the road and I'm pushing you into it and you have to choose left. Right. So I'm trying to set up that scenario where they know there's a fork in the road, you know, Yogi Berra.

[00:41:37] Oren Klaff: That's where I got it from, you know, w when you come to a fork in the road.

[00:41:44] Justin Michael: Yeah. I quote him

[00:41:46] Justin Michael: a lot,

[00:41:47] Oren Klaff: so I'm trying to raise the stakes. Yep. And so, so now, you know, we're, we're trying to make it relevant. It's not a robot. And so it would just be sire profile. Right. I know you're in you know I know the highest of the high-end grills or something. You keep an eye on. We've got an allocation you know, we've got an allocation of, you know, a Nica Moochie you know, meat and grill coming up.

[00:42:19] Oren Klaff: And I would just finish that email question, mark question. Yeah, remove your move, right? So that is a setup intrigue call the action for a fork in the road. And if you, if you, I think if you break it down by a character count or word count, that thing probably taps out at 35 words.

[00:42:43] Oren Klaff: So we're the same as trying to reduce it.

[00:42:45] Justin Michael: I say, when, when you, when it's at a length where you're scared to send it, where it would offend your CMO or your marketing team, wouldn't let you, that's when you send it, you, you have to be like afraid. It's so short for me because. So I love it. Some of the products that I coach people on are transactional, meaning you could one call close it it's under $25,000.

[00:43:04] Justin Michael: It's something that it's low friction. It's like, you know, like assume it's 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, let's sign up. You still got to sell it. So for those, I use social proof early, so I unpack it quickly. So sometimes I say, I kill the open I have. And I just go, you know, based on your similarity to client, our client, that's very similar to you.

[00:43:23] Justin Michael: You know, we could probably help you do this. And so I have this thing called the BS test where I go in as a skeptical executive and I sent an email to myself. So so let me break down these bad emails. So I get this email that says 200% ROI. Okay. Nothing is round ROI. So that's fake false claim, 212%, 213%.

[00:43:40] Justin Michael: That's interesting. So now it's like social proof. Okay. We did this for Adobe. Yeah. But they're Adobe. It's like everything. Maybe I'm just bait and tackle shop, you know, I'm just the grill place. So it's it's if you use social proof on the hook, like based on how we're helping Acme Corp, do you. We probably could be doing a lot for you.

[00:43:58] Justin Michael: Let's talk about the wine, the house, there's a cliffhanger where a hold back, like don't spill the candy Sandler theory, like right there. Another thing I'm using a specificity, so I want to know a specific similar customer and then a specific amount of make money, save money, reduce risk, and then I need a specific technical differentiation cause otherwise it's just BS.

[00:44:17] Justin Michael: Hey, I help authors get on the front page of Google. They usually get, you know, two X the traffic. It sounds like every SEO pitch. Well it's because I developed a proprietary algorithm that has a patent MIT. Okay. Now that's interesting. So like for me to get hooked, I need social proof specificity. I'm not pushing on a rope.

[00:44:37] Justin Michael: And then I have to see myself in the social, in the case study. Although there was one use case when I used to do this. Where my clients were literally Starbucks, Amazon and Uber. So I'd would contact mobile companies and say, I do this for Starbucks, Amazon, and Uber. Do you want to learn now? And boom, they just took meetings because even though they weren't that big, everyone wants to know why people going to Starbucks, open their app and use it as money.

[00:45:00] Justin Michael: And very few brands in the world can get that kind of loyalty going. So to start to do this with barbecues maybe I could preface the bad barbecue they have, or use an image of a barbecue blowing up or something painful. The last piece in my system's called emotional resonance. And I call this the Paul Ryan P90X.

[00:45:19] Justin Michael: So funny, like we all know that Paul Ryan was the speaker of the house and he was big on P90X. It's kind of weird, but what did Paul Ryan looked like before he got the P90X? So I like most of them is the result. I mean, I don't know, was he like really out of shape and dejected and he wasn't, you know, he has no vigor, but nobody asks, so the problem is if I send you this email at this better state, I've never highlighted to before.

[00:45:43] Justin Michael: So, what I love to show is, and I use innuendo. It's like a movie theater you're sitting and they're flashing popcorn at me and I just get transported at 12. And I suddenly been craving sour patch kids, and like what's happening. I've, you know, I don't want to eat sour patch, kids poison, but I'm dying for it because I'm being hit subliminally.

[00:46:01] Justin Michael: So what I do, I use that in email. So I do trigger words. I go, you know, they were tearing their hair out. They're frustrated, it was painful. They were hemorrhaging money. And then we put in the solution that automated their files. So I actually pepper in pain words and fear words subliminally to get it to convert.

[00:46:18] Justin Michael: Cause when I got the text messages, I got the open rates at 60%, but then I couldn't get the conversion rates. So I just had to do that kind of before, after I know I'm blasting a lot at you quickly, but I'm also curious, it's not a barbecue,

[00:46:30] Oren Klaff: but if I, if I, if I jump up a level, I mean, one thing that I just want to highlight is is how much, I mean, we're talking, so we start.

[00:46:39] Oren Klaff: Talking about a multichannel, multi exposure tech stack sort of went through that right now. We have to talk in 30 minutes on one piece of that tech stack. I mean, this is, so I'm not suggesting that you put this much effort or geek out to this level on the psychology and the technology and the tech stack.

[00:46:59] Oren Klaff: I'm not suggesting you do that. It might not be your thing, but I can tell you, there are people in your business who are doing this amount of work. I mean, the people that come to us and they're 75% of the way through, maybe they don't have the messaging and the final piece of the tech stack done. I mean, they are obsessing on these elements.

[00:47:14] Oren Klaff: The reason they come to us is because they're obsessing so much, they've just gotten stuck and they needed to break through. So sometimes, you know, in this, you know, this is pretty cool. If I have to send a longer email. And you can try it. I will send the entire email in the subject line. I'm kind of, whoa, that's crazy.

[00:47:32] Oren Klaff: I'll send a 200 word email in the subject line. Their sponsor rate is 175%. Why is it so high? Because they'll send it to other people and go look at this shit, send me an entire email data on us. You know and, you know, call the action and contact information in the subject line. So there'll be a more than a hundred percent response rate.

[00:47:59] Justin Michael: Well,

[00:47:59] Justin Michael: this is what I call tiger woods theory, you know? Okay, tiger. Give me your exact clothes and your exact golf clubs. I'll put me on the course. Okay. You know, I get worse. I slice harder and faster into the trees and I sweat more. Cause I can't, I'm not a pro golfer. So what we're talking about is the bullets in the weapon.

[00:48:17] Justin Michael: If I'm firing blanks, who cares about how it serves. So, you know, garbage in, garbage out, if you don't master the psychology neuroscience persuasion game theory, if you don't go in and think about the human brain. Now my first version of the book is to be 1910 because the human brain in 1910 and 2010 is the same.

[00:48:34] Justin Michael: There's kind of Todd caponi, who was my trainer at Salesforce. He's a sales historian. He's found out that most of the systems in sales today are from 1890. It's just what you said because the human mind isn't any different. So if you don't figure out the triggers and the copywriting piece, and what's really crazy is the prevailing systems in sales, our marketing copywriter.

[00:48:57] Justin Michael: And they're not sort of the tactical groundwork that great sellers figure out executives, C-level executives. They write in short form for considered purchases. I remember I sent a CEO this super long email and he goes rad at like 10:00 PM. I don't know where he was probably wrote it with one hand read, but here's the thing though, deeper into the sales cycle, you really do need to learn to write.

[00:49:22] Justin Michael: And I wrote a 270 page book with Tony Hughes. I mean, I will do a 3000 word email, so I did a 600 K deal. 236 emails on the thread. Many of the emails over 2000 words, and my CEO is looking at me like, what are you doing? You're writing the great American novel, because this is a very smart person on that end, trying to consider a very elaborate set of technology.

[00:49:44] Justin Michael: And by the time I captivated their attention, I've peeked into set the hook and I've got them. Now they need meat on the bones. Like if for any of you have leased a luxury car, it's pretty funny. Went to lease this a pretty nice BMW in San Francisco. It was like, oh, your boss comes here. I was working for Salesforce.

[00:49:59] Justin Michael: So hilarious. I won't say who that is. But they sent, they showed me on a piece of paper, 12 pages from the ceiling floor. I had to initial my name for this car 62 times. And then they gave me a thumb drive of all the confirmation commitments I've made. So I use, I took this in enterprise sales and I was, I was not long.

[00:50:15] Justin Michael: Yeah. It's not, let's make it look like that. BMW lease. Oh, 500 K. You want to do a million dollar deal. We needed a 12 page proposal and it just thickets of information from John, because then they feel like, damn, we're getting all this. But I'm getting off the field. I don't want people to think that the solution for fundraising or getting meetings is short form, but it certainly is for the very top of the funnel I found.

[00:50:37] Justin Michael: And if you're going to automate.

[00:50:38] Oren Klaff: Yeah. And so in your mind, is that, so the sales stack, the messaging for the top of the funnel let's just talk about touches, cause I know you have very well-developed thoughts on number of touches and angle of touches. We can wrap up talking really about escalation from.

[00:50:57] Oren Klaff: So what I find is it's very easy to show someone how to open a pitch right. In a meeting. Right. And that is basically to say, oh, Hey, thanks guys. Thanks for coming for the 10 0 3 meeting. What do you want me to catch you up on the 10 o'clock. Right. So that's the opening and it works a hundred percent of the time.

[00:51:17] Oren Klaff: I mean the more higher status the people in the room are the better it is because those guys know the value of time. And then you start with the big idea. Hey, look, everything's changing. Meteors are coming towards the earth. It's going to create a nuclear winter. If you don't perform underground bunkers, when the nuclear winter hits, you're going to freeze to death.

[00:51:38] Oren Klaff: All right. So basically the first people to figure this out where the billionaires, second people figured this out with a 500 millionaires, the a hundred millionaires are building bunkers right now. You're up next, right? If you, this is your, when you can buy a building materials, you can buy real estate and you can buy the people, build bunkers now, but in about six months, it's going to skip you and go down to the next level.

[00:51:59] Oren Klaff: And you're not going to survive the nuclear winter. So that's the opening, right? That's you know, the answer. The openings are easy to show. As you get further into a sale, the sale becomes more nuanced and complex, more given directions. So I think the best thing we can do here is really help people on top of funnel.

[00:52:19] Oren Klaff: But I want to talk a little bit more about escalation and getting down you know, downstream of it. And then let you go back to your day job going down and in

[00:52:29] Justin Michael: my day job, trying to catch up to Oren Klaff, you know, 10

[00:52:34] Oren Klaff: years canaries into the coal mine. So, so so, so let's just go back quickly to tech stack number of touches in which channels to maximize just getting somebody into that top of funnel.

[00:52:52] Oren Klaff: Response. We're not talking about conversion, we're talking about getting them from out there in the ether to, into the top of the funnel.

[00:53:00] Justin Michael: Yeah. So I've been, I've been nicknamed the machine, the Honeybadger and the hummingbird, you know, I've had colleagues who said, Justin, I don't read any of your emails, but I do is I create a folder.

[00:53:10] Justin Michael: And every Friday I look at them and I was shocked when I finally opened them and read it all. It was all really high quality stuff. Can you do me a favor? Could you once a week, give me a digest of the summary of the emails that you send me. Like I've had insane stuff. Like, so I would say that my systems work because they're 10 X to a hundred times higher activity than you think.

[00:53:26] Justin Michael: So I created these systems that are clusters and bumps and they're omni-channel and this is how crazy it is. I call it beast swarming, and it becomes out of mobile technology. The first day I contact you, I call you, then I leave a voicemail. Then I send an email. Then I connect with you on LinkedIn. So I wrote this book called combo prospecting.

[00:53:42] Justin Michael: I co-wrote it with Tony Hughes. So call voicemail, email LinkedIn. That's a quad. So we have a triple. Quint, I hit your Twitter for a like you know, and so I'd four or five touches, but they to bunk with the word thoughts, day three image bump. So we're now at about nine to 12 touches. Now, typically it takes five to 12 touches over three weeks to unlock a meeting I'm hitting the nine to 12 Delta in the first two days.

[00:54:07] Justin Michael: And then I'm using visual cues for the 60,000 times processing. So I have, I have my payload of frequency of messages in 24 hours exceeds the normal payload of a 30. Sequence. Yeah,

[00:54:20] Justin Michael: the thing,

[00:54:20] Oren Klaff: by the way, if you don't, a lot of, a lot of people don't know this, but if you don't answer, Justin's, you know 30 day, four week multichannel, 19 bumped, text, email, barrage, a hail, just fucking slashed your tires.

[00:54:37] Justin Michael: I've never had a restraining order. You know, and it's never been a problem because what it does cause I ran an agency that did this, is it just the senior executives do this? Hey, I'm good remove, because I thought about my own behavior. If you really Badger me, I'll look at it. And if you bug me, but it's value, it'd be like, okay, it's cool to talk to Cindy.

[00:54:53] Justin Michael: I'm up high enough in the clouds at the C level with the decision-maker that I'm probably going to get delegated. So I do get a very high level of referrals, but I get a ton of responses and I work that referral queue. And because I'd say, well, Hey, Daniel orange sent me. Bam that has cloud. And I'm going in rather than just hammering Daniel

[00:55:11] Justin Michael: the whole time.

[00:55:12] Oren Klaff: Yeah, one thing I would say on this, and I don't think we can get into it. One of the problems I find that people using this tech stack using this approach but they are, a lot of them are dead ends, right? So the call to action is a dead end that if the person doesn't reply, then you have to, did you get my message?

[00:55:28] Oren Klaff: Right? Then you have to get really low status messaging to get it reinvigorated. And so what we try and do is leave it open. So it's safe to come back around. Right? So this is really cool. Like a lot of times, you know, we're the guys we're turning in your very senior email is our main channel. But what I liked is like a lot of times what we'll do, and this is so cool.

[00:55:47] Oren Klaff: We'll have conversations about the. In an email that is not directed at them. We'll just be talking about them. That's genius, but I've never seen that. Right. It's so-so and we'll have these characters within our business and we sort of build this space opera, or now they're just paying attention to the emails to see what's happening in this opera about them.

[00:56:12] Oren Klaff: And, and, you know, eventually then we'll hit a call to action and then they're right on it. So you can send an email to somebody that isn't to them, but it's about

[00:56:21] Oren Klaff: them.

[00:56:22] Justin Michael: That's brilliant. That's a totally new thing.

[00:56:25] Oren Klaff: It's really fun and cool. And so the, you know, the way we think about it is status and hierarchy.

[00:56:32] Oren Klaff: So if you come in high status, right, you say, Hey, look, we're peers. I'm trying to help you with this problem. You have it. Yeah, right. Without I've solved this problem all the time. Right. I'm trying to help you right. Then. They're not responsive. Then what I'll do is, is push them down to someone lower in the organization.

[00:56:52] Oren Klaff: Right. And then we can continue communicating to them. And so that person lower in the organization can now communicate to someone lower in their organization about them. And you've built your building this whole relationship. Right. And then if that person doesn't communicate, then you can push down to an admin.

[00:57:10] Oren Klaff: And it just admin to admin, which is Justin and Oren. We're trying to find a time together. They keep missing, right. Let's look out into September and really nail something down that works. And there's this whole now, now your organizations are built to work together. Aren't judgmental. Once they believe a task has been set, their goal is to accomplish that task.

[00:57:37] Oren Klaff: Right. And so when, when you can push it down, admin, admin repairs and saying, Hey, I'm trying to get this set. You guys seem like you're having trouble setting it. Let's just push it out another three weeks and nail it down. And now that admin is invigorated to do her job, which is to set a meeting. So, so there's lots of fun.

[00:57:53] Oren Klaff: You can have pushing things down the social hierarchy and playing with status. But so, so now you've got I'm not sure how I got off on that track, but now either your method or my method or some conjoint method, we've got technology, we've got messaging going out. Someone's responded and they're in there saying it's Justin looks interesting.

[00:58:14] Oren Klaff: Right? I'd like to learn. Yeah, what

[00:58:18] Justin Michael: now, but what now is that if you do book meetings, it's funny. I try to work with people all over the world. Thousands of reps, just to book meetings. And now you have a problem. If you use these technologies, you're having more conversations. You're booking meetings.

[00:58:31] Justin Michael: Better problems. And the next problem is that only seven and 10 people come to a meeting. So there's tech stacks now for getting the calendar. So there's thing called chili Piper. And what it does is you set at once and if they need to reconfirm, they reschedule, it sends the alerts and UIs and updates.

[00:58:45] Justin Michael: But I go further. So just like you talked about FaceTime drops, I think earlier, which is really Savage. I wouldn't do it. It's like a base jump. Like imagine if I just showed up on orange phone and FaceTime I don't think you'd like that, but,

[00:58:56] Oren Klaff: well, I think you'd like it, cause I answered it in the shower,

[00:59:00] Justin Michael: but I'd have to have a really good value proposition.

[00:59:01] Justin Michael: Like I'd have to,

[00:59:02] Oren Klaff: you mean from an unrecognized number? I swear to God I'll answer it in the shower. Hey, what's up mother fucker. What you got? Oh yeah.

[00:59:11] Oren Klaff: Okay.

[00:59:11] Justin Michael: If it's a weird time of day, if someone like showed up on my phone, like who died? You know, like this better, if you get that was so funny. I forgot the question.

[00:59:21] Justin Michael: Tell me one more. What does that say?

[00:59:24] Oren Klaff: Just when you think, you know the answer, I changed the quiz. You totally threw

[00:59:27] Justin Michael: me. I love it. What, what were you asking again? I'll I'll get ya.

[00:59:30] Oren Klaff: So yeah. The Hey, looks really interesting. Love to learn more.

[00:59:35] Justin Michael: Yes. So the problem is that what I do is I say, you know, great, we're going to set up some time.

[00:59:42] Justin Michael: And I say, I, you know, you're probably going to miss this meeting. I know busy you are. Can I just get your cell phone it to send you a reminder the day before and make sure I have the agenda? Sure. Boom legal cell phone update. Now it game over now I got WhatsApp. Now I've got cell phone. I'm opted in it's it's the impossible.

[00:59:59] Justin Michael: And once I, so I just said, once I have that, then it's game over because then I'll just get on a text message. And then past the, now I have legal texts. I mean it's 99% open rate. That's how I close all my deals. I use chats on firms. So I use WhatsApp. I use really. And ID thread. So another big problem is chaining, like break the chain, feel the pain.

[01:00:17] Justin Michael: So now we've sent the proposal in the pitch. There's six people in the chain. Well, I don't know that Orin is CEO of the company, you know, is out of town because it's sick relative, Sweden or something. And everyone's just sitting there waiting for orange to respond. These other five people have gone mute and I'm checking in and checking in.

[01:00:32] Justin Michael: So what I do is I take the chain, I D thread the chain. I have everyone's cell phone and I ping someone, says, Susan, what did or, and think, what did you think? Oh, So then I can tell my Sierra, okay, the deal hasn't really stalled. Here's what's going on. But what I'll do is I'll only let people see the open chain for certain reasons.

[01:00:51] Justin Michael: So what I would say is that this is more operational is try to get into real time platforms with people, stay professional, but that's the holy grail, because then, you know,

[01:01:02] Oren Klaff: And, and by the way, I'm learning something that I want to share. I want to wrap up with. And, and cause, cause I think we're just trying to do a podcast, not a four hour, technology summit with Justin. Oh really? How many people came? Oh no, it was just he and I

[01:01:16] Justin Michael: four hours.

[01:01:19] Oren Klaff: Thank you so much. One thing I would add is when you go up into higher stakes executives who sort of a more cognizant, or maybe even people who are in marketing and can see the Frankenstein happening, w w the one thing I would add to your method is, is have multiple people on your side.

[01:01:40] Oren Klaff: So vice president of marketing talks to vice-president marketing admins, talk to admins, CEOs to talk to CEOs. I mean, this was in flip the script. You know, I'm gonna read you the book, but it is it confuses you. The social hierarchy when you have Justin talking to an admin, right. And it's going to cause you're the senior guy trying to make a deal happen.

[01:02:06] Oren Klaff: Right. And you're also your own admin.

[01:02:10] Justin Michael: Right? Interesting. Yeah.

[01:02:11] Justin Michael: The pairing.

[01:02:12] Oren Klaff: So if you're moving, oh, a higher stake deal where the stakes are a hundred thousand dollars or a million dollars, right. It is very, very powerful to have a a hierarchy on your end that matches theirs you. So, where I learned this is you cannot do a venture deal where you have the CEO.

[01:02:31] Oren Klaff: It just, it, it causes deals to fall apart. The CEO is responding to their analysts, to their junior analysts, to their senior analysts, to their legal people, to their CFO. And you have the S the CFO plugging into all of these prongs. It just begs credibility. And every time he's answering questions from the analyst, his status is lowered because what happens is the venture group says, well, Hey, look, this guy responds to our analyst.

[01:02:59] Oren Klaff: . And they just keep pushing all the questions, all the issues to save time down to their most junior person, because it works.

[01:03:07] Justin Michael: Wow. Yeah. That's

[01:03:08] Justin Michael: really interesting.

[01:03:10] Oren Klaff: Move our CEO from any interaction with the venture group and they have to earn the right. To talk to him on substantive issues. So a little bit different space, but I do feel like if there's something you want to try admins, talk to admins, the, you know marketing coordinators, talk to marketing coordinators.

[01:03:29] Oren Klaff: The, the, so if you think of a CEO, COO is talk to see CEO's and CEO's talk to CEOs. If you try that, then I think it sort of gives you lots more free space to get control. Over a higher stakes deal.

[01:03:44] Justin Michael: Yeah. I love that. We called that the CEO bullet because I guess legend, has it

[01:03:48] Oren Klaff: wait a second. There's nothing you could say to Justin that he doesn't say anything.

[01:03:53] Oren Klaff: We call this the,

[01:03:56] Justin Michael: well, I've read over 200 sales books and I've changed. Alvin's

[01:03:59] Oren Klaff: yeah. He's w what he's doing naturally is maintaining the status position. Like, Hey, there's very interesting Warren. Yeah. W you know, we call that the thing I have read

[01:04:07] Justin Michael: your book, so it's not there. If anything,

[01:04:11] Oren Klaff: the second thing I learned, or the main thing I learned from all of this is never let Justin near your girlfriend, like air gap, your girlfriend, right.

[01:04:19] Oren Klaff: Because you will be on her WhatsApp and you know, and FaceTime and everything like that. And you're, you're absolutely defenseless from losing your beautiful girlfriend to, are you married? Do you have kids.

[01:04:32] Justin Michael: I, I don't want to get into my personal life on this call. So I do have a six year old daughter that is true.

[01:04:37] Justin Michael: And yeah. And and I'm spoken for, but yeah,

[01:04:41] Oren Klaff: I don't want to go into my personal life on this call, but you know, I've got a beautiful six year old daughter. I'm, you know, I'm in a wonderful relationship with a woman who had been together for 10 years. You know, we had our anniversary you know, getting together.

[01:04:52] Oren Klaff: Would you like to see some pictures?

[01:04:54] Justin Michael: We can. I T I I'm strictly business. I'm not on Facebook. But yes, I learned a lot there. I have not used the D admining or going down to the generals to generals before, but I just wanted to equate that to when I was at LinkedIn, we would save the Jeff Weiner meeting, like the meeting with the CEO for the very last bit where the CEOs would meet together.

[01:05:14] Justin Michael: It's great advice. I love the way you think everything you've come up with. It's simple. It's like, we're like jazz musicians that are in how we're both playing free jazz in a similar way. I don't know your area of venture capital. You know, a wobbly deer there, but I do know about B2B SAS, email a ton.

[01:05:31] Justin Michael: That's really been my, my niche. So I'd love to do this again is incredible.

[01:05:34] Oren Klaff: Well, what you're doing last thing maybe we can end up on is use cause because I'm just addressing this on LinkedIn now and we're putting on an email on it. Use of you. Hmm. Yeah. Where, when, if never, always sometimes at your discretion, none of it.

[01:05:52] Justin Michael: It's my brand. I tend to use IOC, like I'm like will Smith. I don't, I don't have to you know, cuss in my records, but Gary, Gary V does you know, Tony Robbins now is motivating people by, you know, loudly and Horsely using the F word at them. It seems to be working like, I mean, I'm not opposed to it.

[01:06:08] Justin Michael: I don't have an issue with it, but I use a lot of appropriate humor. That's like Dilbert, it's like silly. It's like a Chevy chase, you know, and it does backfire, but I don't care because I'd rather be funny and be myself and be corny and punny because it's just who I am in business. And so I weaponize the humor.

[01:06:27] Justin Michael: I do it personally, but there is risk, especially if you're working in enterprise. What about you are not your stuff's hilarious. Like I, I read your updates.

[01:06:33] Oren Klaff: Thank you. I think the, the one thing about humor is I love it. I think it's gotta be. Part of your personality. So there's two things about it. I don't like things that are quips.

[01:06:48] Oren Klaff: It's either funny or it's not funny. Right. So if it's like a chuckle, I don't like the use of it. It will be, but my stuff is very high stakes and I'm really looking to emotionally motivate someone to a decision tree. And so I like to really, if it's funny, then it's fucking funny. Right. But if it's just like, yeah.

[01:07:11] Oren Klaff: That's. Yeah. So one and the second thing is no jokes. Like you can use humor. You can be funny, you can point out. So humor is a topic for a different day, but humor is truth.

[01:07:26] Justin Michael: That's right. Do you know if you go study the Waynes brothers, they grew up, I think all in a one room spot like nine of them and they're all successful.

[01:07:34] Justin Michael: They have brutal childhood, but there's some of the funniest people ever. So from pain comes the hilarity, but yeah, don't tell knock-knock jokes and don't do the crocodile thing, but be witty, be witty. This one I haven't seen though, I haven't made that a policy, but you're right. My stuff is just, it's sorta funny.

[01:07:48] Justin Michael: This rep quit this big company. He sent the lyrics to Justin Bieber. What do you mean? Just the lyrics, the deal closed. He literally left the company the next day and it was one of his biggest deals cause he let loose and he just did something bold and crazy and the prospect loved it.

[01:08:03] Oren Klaff: Well, so here's what happens with humor.

[01:08:06] Oren Klaff: And we can finish on this w you know, when the dog barks and the phone rings, and it's not always the case that the dog barking made the phone ring.

[01:08:18] Oren Klaff: So, you know, I told this joke and it closes. Oh, how about the financial model and the pitch you gave and the, you know, 17 years and the $770 million in revenue you have at a 10% EBITDA on a 40% growth rate, but oh yeah, of course it was the joke that closed the deal. So, you know, whenever I hear that, you know, a joke or something funny, close the deal, I always sort of wonder if the dog barking made the phone ring.

[01:08:42] Oren Klaff: But, but I think ultimately most people are not capable. Of telling a joke in the origination process that would in any way move it forward. I mean, I think I can do it if I re I mean, I've jokes that I've told, you know, to onstage with Tony Robbins, to tens of thousands of people that have seen work in all kinds of languages all over the world.

[01:09:08] Oren Klaff: Right. And so I feel like I could get a joke to work, but it would take everything I have to pull it together and to what benefit. So no jokes, but I do love if, you know, pulling your personality out and yeah. If, if Umer is truthfully about truth and pain, it's a way to share some self-deprecating material about yourself.

[01:09:34] Oren Klaff: And

[01:09:35] Oren Klaff: I think is super cool.

[01:09:36] Justin Michael: Always make fun of yourself. And I'll say I find myself funny, but that's problematic and it's ego in a way. Cause a lot of people have described me as very weird, quirky and eccentric. That's the word I get a lot. So I think that's because I do go humor forward and just about everything and it's always witty and sarcastic.

[01:09:51] Justin Michael: So I think a lot of people receive messages from me and just think, is he a cyborg? Like what is he saying? And you know what, I've embraced that as a brand, as a little bit of zany futurist and that's, you know, that's cool. You know, I really like like Elon Musk's brand, you know how he's just what he did with the cyber truck where he pretended like he did, he really know the glass was gonna break on the truck like that.

[01:10:13] Justin Michael: That to me is masterful showmanships. If you can get to the Elon Musk, cyber truck, glass break with everything we're talking about today, that's sort of the Nirvana state. I kind of have to go, but you're in class. So it's like, yeah,

[01:10:27] Oren Klaff: I'd like to, I'd like you a lot. You're a very interesting person. Thank you.

[01:10:31] Oren Klaff: Likewise, you know, your material, the only reason I'm yelling at you is because I'm feel you know, limited in your area and I'm trying to make myself look good as, as, as hard as it is compared to your actual talent. So I appreciate you coming here today and sharing like real meaningful. I, I, well, I think here's the issue you came here today and shared stuff that you actually get paid for doing.

[01:10:59] Oren Klaff: Well, you're not afraid to do that. Like that's not, your job is to come on this podcast and tell people like what you act your product, what you actually sell. So I appreciate, you know, you're doing that on and, and going in deep into, in your very interesting person next time. We'll have you on to talk a hundred percent about your personal life, because

[01:11:17] Justin Michael: yeah.

[01:11:17] Justin Michael: You'll find every button. It's all good. You know, we all, we all can be it's hard to have a private life and you have 40,000 followers on, on LinkedIn. So these days, oh,

[01:11:25] Oren Klaff: it's much easier when you have, you know, 11. I can tell you that. Did I tell you about my son? What he did yesterday? Hello? Is this on?

[01:11:35] Oren Klaff: Hello? Fuck is wrong with LinkedIn anyway. All right, Justin, I'll talk to you again.

[01:11:41] Justin Michael: Thanks for everything. Thanks, everyone.