Webinar recap: building pipeline in 2026 with Close

On Thursday, August 6, Close hosted a 45-minute panel I helped pull together: Building pipeline in 2026 and where AI closes the gap. Michael Taylor moderated. Liz Stephany (Close), Jesse Ouellette (LeadMagic), Ilija Stojkovski (HeyReach), Mina Draskovic (Instantly), and I covered what is actually booking meetings — and where AI is noise.

The short version below is for skimming. The video and transcript have the full conversation.

What actually worked on the panel

Warm intent, not clever AI. Liz cut Close’s human speed-to-lead from ~14 hours to under a minute with Chloe on inbound. Lift showed up on fresh trials and demos — not expired lists. Same stack, different results: chase the moment of intent; don’t spend the AI budget resurrecting ghosts. Jesse’s wins at LeadMagic were similar in spirit — support and sales-support agents that know the customer, plus sharper paid decisions — not cold spray.

Ask AI to think, not to write. Mina: personalize the problem, not the first sentence. Ilija: go wide for brand awareness or hyper-relevant on timing; the mushy middle dies. Template-ized prompts are the new shared email template.

Concrete plays. Jesse — pull language from job descriptions as intent, then validate before send. Mina — one-variable campaign experiments and patience. Ilija — tier the TAM first, then wait for signals on accounts you already want. Liz — for high-velocity SMB teams, system design beats hustle: next steps and quiet-deal follow-ups happen without the rep inventing them. OutboundSync — meet operators in Claude and Cursor, cut friction, and hand replies into Close; I mentioned reply relay publicly for the first time (setup in the reply relays docs, not a launch post).

Close as the place activity lands. Enrichment and outreach only compound if every touch shows up on the Lead. OutboundSync writes into Close as a beta, one-way integration with guided onboarding — see the Close integration page, partner spotlight, or App Marketplace listing. Instantly and HeyReach: /integrations/instantly/, /integrations/heyreach/. LeadMagic is planned — named on the panel, no invented sync URL. Book a demo for Close beta onboarding.

Watch

Transcript

00:06 Welcome, welcome everyone. As you’re coming in, feel free to jump into the chat and let us know where you’re coming
00:12 in from today. It’s always fun to see where everyone is all over the world. We just uh this awesome panel we were just
00:19 chatting. Sounds like we’ve got anywhere from uh Cape Cod to Minnesota to Denver
00:26 to I’m going to miss it all. Uh, Macedon, Macedonia, and then Oh, Mina, where were you calling it from? Mina,
00:32 Belgrade, Serbia. Serbia. So, neighbor to Macedonia. We’re like United Front here. [laughter]
00:39 Representing. Representing. That’s what we like to see. Cool. All right. We got a bunch coming
00:45 in. Well, we’re going to kick. We’ve got 45 minutes today to talk about building pipeline. And I’m sure we’ll have more
00:52 and more people coming in. They can be they can jump in as we’re uh discussing. But want to welcome everyone, welcome
00:58 our live panel and welcome all of our attendees to building pipeline in 2026
01:04 and where AI closes the gap. I’m super excited about this group to share their experiences and tell us one what plays
01:11 they’re seeing that are actually booking meetings. Uh two to help us understand what’s real with AI, where they’re
01:17 seeing value and not just noise. And then lastly, actionable strategies and tactics that will help you find new ways
01:24 to build your pipeline. Uh, I do want to give a special shout out to Harris Kenny on our panel um here today. He brought
01:30 this whole group together and we’ve been working behind the scenes for the last couple months to uh present this panel
01:35 for everyone. So, we will we’ve got questions that are uh we’ll go through and answer, but I also want to see
01:42 questions in the Q&A. I’ll do my best to to weave them in uh into the panel so
01:48 that we can get their get our panel’s thoughts on them. Um, but we will have everyone introduce themselves. And I
01:55 just want to say before we jump in, uh, one note personally is that I use every single platform. I’m looking down. Uh,
02:01 close, OutboundSync, HeyReach, Instantly, uh, LeadMagic. I use all these platforms. I don’t want to say
02:08 every day, but all the time. And they’ve all brought so much value to my role in a prospecting role with our partnerships
02:14 team. And so, just want to shout out uh, that all these platforms are amazing. So, we’ll kick it off with Liz. If
02:20 everyone wants to introduce introduce themselves by telling us your name, where you work, what your role is there,
02:25 and then um not necessarily like a pitch of your product, but maybe like something about your product that not
02:31 everyone would know, your favorite feature uh that uh you’d like to share and let people know so that um everyone
02:37 can understand what what your experience is coming to the table and talking about building pipelines. So Liz, if you want
02:42 to kick us off and then hand it over to another panel member and then after that we’ll dive in. Sure, happy to kick things off. Uh, I’m
02:49 Liz. I lead customer experience at Close. Um, close.com if you haven’t
02:55 heard of it. It’s the uh CRM built for small sales teams. I love working here and I’ve been here for over 10 years. My
03:02 world is basically everything that happens as a lead is coming into the funnel. So, I lead our sales success and
03:10 uh help you know work with support teams and lately I uh do quite a lot with
03:15 operational uh and AI. So over the past year, I’ve been running our own funnel,
03:21 uh, as a lab, putting AI agents on our inbound, auditing different things, uh,
03:27 you know, learning and, uh, iterating. Um, so yeah, that’s what I’m here to
03:32 share. All my lessons, uh, mistakes, failures, and successes. Uh, so Harris,
03:37 why don’t you intro yourself? Absolutely. Uh, my name is Harris Kenny. I’m the founder of OutboundSync. Uh,
03:43 we’re a connector product. So, you know, we integrate with um all the platforms here and um you know, for teams that
03:49 want to get their outbound activity really deeply integrated into close and they want their sales reps handling replies and they want people working out
03:56 out out of close, you know, our job is to try to get that data in there so it’s easy to do. Um favorite thing about our
04:03 platform or product or whatever. Um
04:08 you know, probably we have a new feature we haven’t announced yet. Um but it’s called reply relay. Um it’s technically
04:16 um I think in production right now, but we haven’t like posted anything about it or talked about it. So this is the first time I’ve talked about it publicly. Um
04:21 and yeah, it’s it’s an exciting one where we’ll basically be able to make it easier to do that handoff to the sales rep and then like in close use Chloe to
04:28 have AI help you follow up on things like that. So we’re super focused on this like closing the loop between starting these outbound conversations
04:35 and then actually turning that into revenue. So anyway, excited to chat. Love it.
04:41 Harris, you want to pop? Oh yeah, popcorn. Sorry. Uh, popcorn. I’m going to go to Jesse, who has a fake
04:47 background, I think. No fake backgrounds here, buddy. Uh,
04:53 Jesse Ouellette, uh, LeadMagic, founder, and really excited to be with you guys
04:58 today. It’s a pleasure to uh, you know, close such an awesome product. I’ve used it before, uh, quite a bit actually. Uh,
05:06 so really excited to be here and, uh, looking forward to hearing from everybody.
05:12 Oh, we just lost Harris. So, Ilija or Mina, Jesse, you got a popcorn. You’re up.
05:18 Let’s go with Ilija. Awesome. Thank you. I was hoping that the ladies would have like the first,
05:24 but Okay, cool. Cool. Hi everyone. My name is Ilija. I am the CRO at HeyReach and
05:30 I’ve been building out HeyReach revenue since day zero. we are pacing pretty nicely and we’ve established our tool as the
05:37 go-to tool in this modern day outbound for at least covering the social part.
05:42 I’m not going to really pitch about the product itself. Coming from Skopje, North Macedonia. If you have not heard
05:48 of it like just check my last name. Don’t try to pronounce it. Your desk will start floating. So aside from that,
05:55 happy to share the insights of how AI actually fits in inside of our pipeline these days. And additionally, I’m going
06:02 to try to help everyone understand what the most successful agencies and companies are doing to generate some uh
06:10 leads and pipeline through social. That’s all from me and yeah, excited to chat. Mina,
06:17 thank you, Ilija. Hi everyone. Um I’m Mina. Um same as Ilija, I won’t even
06:22 bother um trying to pronounce my last name for you because you’re not going to remember. It’s Slavic. Um, I’m an
06:29 account executive at Instantly. Um, I spent my days working with founders, sales leaders, u, GTM teams, helping
06:36 them build predictable outbound systems that generate pipeline. Before sales,
06:41 um, my career took a few unexpected turns through fashion, PR, diplomacy,
06:46 but communication always kind of ended up being the common thread there. Um,
06:51 when it comes to um, I guess my favorite parts about instantly, I would say it’s
06:57 my team. It’s nothing, it’s not a feature, it’s my team. But, um, I guess an interesting interesting thing would
07:03 be that I actually cold emailed my way to the company and getting this job. So,
07:09 I guess that means I know a thing about a thing or two about um, cold emailing.
07:14 So, I’ll leave it there. That’s awesome. Love to hear that. Sweet. Well, we will dive right into the
07:19 first question. Um, and we’ll let’s just uh what if we go in the same order that
07:25 we did introductions. Um, so we’ll keep it nice and consistent, but we we I’ve got a handful of questions, but for this
07:31 first question, let’s have everyone answered because I think it’ll be relevant for everyone. Um, and they’ll all relevant for everyone, but this
07:37 one’s a good one. So, what is one thing that you’re seeing that actually works in building pipeline in 2026? It can be
07:44 using AI. It can be what’s you know what’s trending now. But Liz, if you want to kick us off. What are you seeing
07:50 work at close? Yes. The honest answer for us, the thing
07:55 that’s working isn’t necessarily like a super clever AI thing. It’s a really old school sales truth. Um, but AI has
08:04 finally made this uh probably more affordable for us and actually uh something that we can uh really work on.
08:10 And it’s speed to lead. So, we put uh our own uh Chloe AI voice agent on our
08:16 inbound funnel. Um when we first turned it on, we weren’t totally sure if this was going to make a huge impact or not.
08:23 Um but we reduced our uh speed to lead from, you know, our human speed to lead,
08:29 which was probably around like 14 hours. And over time, we’ve gotten it down to under one minute at this point, which is
08:35 pretty amazing. And it is really working. So, brand new trial signups, people who are signing up for a demo are
08:42 all getting uh called within a minute and uh we’re seeing the results just in
08:48 um both, you know, the number of demos we’re booking, our uh new MRR and revenue just kind of keeps going up. We just had
08:55 one of our best months ever at close. Um, and I can also say that we tested
09:00 this on both our inbound like warm funnel and then also uh expired trials
09:07 and we really saw that there was a huge difference in that. The lift came with
09:13 the warm leads with qualification real conversations. People were like absolutely wowed and that expired list
09:20 we just didn’t see the same type of results. So for us it the takeaway isn’t necessarily like AI calling works. It’s
09:28 really about where you’re focusing the AI calling. Um and it’s speed works and
09:35 uh dead intent is still really hard to raise from the dead but AI on warm uh
09:42 just you know it really really works. So for us our AI budget is chasing like that moment of intent and not
09:49 necessarily trying to like resurrect ghosted leads. So that’s been a a really big learning for us.
09:55 Love that. Love speed to lead. Tail as old as time. Harris, what about you?
10:01 Yeah. So I mean for us the biggest thing is that we’re I’m just seeing like how people are working is changing a lot. Um
10:08 people want to be inside of Claude. They want to be inside of cursor. They they don’t necessarily want to use software
10:15 in some of the ways they’ve been using it in the past. So for us, like we make kind of a weird product. Um all the all
10:21 the other tools here have like a really strong UI and if you work for a software company a lot of software products out
10:26 there have a really strong UI but we’re kind of like a pipes product. So for us we’ve done some repositioning and a lot
10:32 of engineering work to be useful in this in these new uh development environments
10:37 where people are working. Um there’s there’s really not like um
10:47 there we go. Sorry, my microphone gets disconnected there. Um, my phone is trying to take over this thing. Um, but
10:53 anyway, um, yeah, so so that that’s been like the sales story for us is there’s a
10:58 lot of momentum people wanting to work a certain way and so we need to ourselves in that in that space and repositioning
11:03 to fit into that space and then we’re seeing a lot of growth from that specifically more than anything else. So, so is it fair to say almost like,
11:09 hey, what is our how are our users wanting to use our platform? And that’s by making it as simple as possible or
11:16 meeting them where they’re at. That’s helping you book more meetings because it’s more natural for them to say,
11:22 Yeah, I want to work within Claude or Cursor or whatever.” And OutboundSync makes that as simple as possible.
11:28 Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. You know, and so it’s not a great like sales story to be honest. It’s a little bit it’s more of a product story just but but that is my
11:34 honest answer. Yeah. is that for us some product changes were needed but that and but so I think if you’re in a sales role
11:41 that you know the answer might not be you know you you may not be doing anything wrong it might be that your
11:46 company has to product to reposition a little bit that that’s been the answer for us from a revenue perspective that the that’s the honest helpful webinar
11:53 answer and not the like you know get out there and work hard everybody [laughter]
11:58 love that. All right Jesse what about you? Yeah. So, I think right now for us, it’s been uh it’s really come down to
12:05 audience uh selection. So, when we’re running ads, when we’re doing outbound,
12:11 we’re trying to like we we’ve really tried to focus on unification of all of our uh you know, pixels, you know, all
12:18 of the stuff that you need to do to make sure that the audience is getting the consistent message, right? And that’s
12:24 just because we sell more probably similar market to close, uh which you have a lot of companies, right? You gota
12:31 you got to kind of like let it come in a little bit and then try to figure out where some of the people stand out in
12:36 like a product like growth movement. I think that’s that’s been our biggest uh
12:41 part of it. And then focusing a little bit on more on reach than we focus on uh sort of conversion I think is the it’s a
12:49 little counterintuitive but I think we’re more about grabbing that wide net and then sort of taking that inbound and
12:56 then seeing what happens after that. So there’s a lot lot of similarities to what uh what uh Liz said, but just in
13:03 general that’s been uh you know just getting those like really early on signals like where did they come from
13:09 when when they landed did we pace the initial you know UTMs and things like that then going at them so you know why
13:16 you have the understanding of it and and that’s been sort of what’s been working for us mostly. Nice. Cool. All right we’ll go Ilija and
13:24 then Mina. Yes of course. So here at HR reach obviously like well from a product
13:30 perspective where where do you increase your pipeline if that’s the first question then the thing is like you have
13:35 to listen to the market. So what the market is essentially doing to what Harris is essentially saying is that
13:40 people actually like to leave in that cloth chat. So if you’re running a product you basically have to be there
13:46 inside of their that clot chat if you want to be relevant for the future things that they’re doing. So money is
13:52 no problem but then adoption is going to become a problem if you are not connected to their usual work
13:57 environment. So we released a couple of features um that went in line of connectivity with LLMs such as MCP CLI
14:05 so on and so forth a little bit on the technical terms where you essentially can run your social outreach through a
14:10 more streamlined more organized and and with AI assistant more tailored made for
14:15 you. Now the second part where pipeline is essentially just being increasing again it’s like a trivial reason
14:22 although everyone will say oh we needed like a AI BDR that closed deals for us no like we I still believe that sales
14:29 has to be done conducted at least uh human to human because people like like to buy from humans really so
14:36 [clears throat] what essentially helped us a lot inside of the pipeline itself was the moment of
14:42 well we had a problem essentially we’ve grown from 20 people company to 45 people company and now you’ve added a
14:48 lot of people in sales, success, marketing, so on and so forth. So you have all these great big accounts that
14:53 you are targeting one way or another but you don’t have a streamlined way to actually understand okay these are the
14:58 interactions that are happening cross channel so you can pay more attention and lead them either to sales or lead
15:04 them to a better adoption of the product. So what we’ve did was uh streamline our proper attribution.
15:09 Obviously OutboundSync helped on this one um a great deal and close is obviously the the tool to actually have
15:16 visibility because what’s action without visibility doesn’t make sense. So what we’ve did is we’ve streamlined on the
15:23 processes and this is where AI actually helped out to map out the most important uh basically accounts that we should be
15:28 focusing on regardless of the channel that we are using. So the channels essentially became like not a CSV expert
15:35 imports but it’s more like like an AI agent is actually deciding whether this should be introduced in a separate
15:42 channel because it’s working on the first one. So yeah, that’s great. That’s it’s interesting,
15:47 right? Like you got to think about your product for, you know, all of our attendees because Ilija’s like, “Hey, we
15:53 got to have that targeted account list. We got to focus on this target account list and what what is, you know, whatever their intent signals that they’re looking for.” And Jesse is
15:59 saying, “Hey, we just like reach like how do we just continue to push and increase reach.” So think, you know,
16:04 think through what what is your product? What does your market look like? And it, you know, you may fall on one of those
16:10 two sides of the coin. U Mina um I would say the one thing I am
16:18 constantly seeing and you know it’s been like this for for a while now is relevance. It’s just that uh before it
16:24 used to be volume and I do understand that I mean the rule is always quality
16:29 over quantity. However you even if you do bigger volumes it still has to be
16:35 quality. So you know the targeting, copyrightiting and all that. I feel like the the teams um consistently building
16:43 pipeline aren’t necess aren’t necessarily sending most emails. They’re just spending more time deciding who
16:50 actually deserves um an email in the first place. So I guess targeting comes in as number one thing there. um they
16:58 know their ICP, they understand buying signals, um they segment better, uh they
17:04 speak u to problems more than actually speaking um instead of features, you
17:09 know, that kind of stuff. Um I think in general, just to connect kind of with
17:14 the general topic, AI has made it easier than ever um to to create outbound,
17:21 right? You plug it in, let it roll, especially with, you know, some features that have been launched recently. But I
17:26 think um it’s also made it super easy like easier than ever to create outbound
17:32 that’s bad like poor quality because you know it’s fast and it’s still better
17:37 than doing nothing. I guess some people actually think that way. So I think the companies um standing out are the ones
17:45 that use AI to scale relevance. So that would be like one thing. If I had to
17:50 like choose one thing it would be relevance. That’s awesome. I love that. And we’ll touch on that in a minute here in
17:55 another question, Mina. So, uh, you’ll get to dive deeper in that. Um, so this next question, we’ll have uh Jesse and
18:01 Liz share, but everyone’s under a lot of pressure to add AI to their sales stack right now, and just love to hear where
18:08 are you actually seeing AI spend uh pay off in real pipeline versus where is it potentially burning budget? Uh, so let’s
18:15 start with Jesse and then we’ll go to Liz. So uh where we’re actually seeing the
18:20 most lift on it is actually on our support side uh just by uh really having
18:27 uh answers. So what we’ve done is we’ve connected it to our development platform or just like where we’re building our
18:33 software and when people have bugs or if they have issues with the platform or whatever if there is a bug or if there’s
18:40 features that start to come in through support what we do is we kind of have it triage out and then starts to build the
18:46 PRD for that that functionality. So, I think it’s it’s probably uh we’re seeing
18:51 more success there for us just the size just because we’re not going after the um you know the enterprises or anything
18:58 like in an accountbased model. Uh but we’re we’re seeing a lot of uh just just
19:03 the fact that we’re able to kind of get to people quicker to discuss pricing even uh we’ve even got it where it can
19:09 negotiate for us for sort of annual contracts and things like that. So we we’ve really optimized it out of that
19:15 just because that seems to be the front line for us. I think we’re also using a lot in ads. So all of our ads now we’re
19:22 running with an AI uh in the back end. So uh you know and I got a guy on the
19:28 team that’s kind of managing that and and and what’s nice about it is we can make really really detailed decisions on
19:34 our paid ads. That’s another thing that’s really helped. and then just being able to get to these people
19:39 quicker through support and then you know the reach and the communication that we have with them. So, so by support you mean sales
19:46 support? No, I guess I’m thinking almost like uh tech support but it’s well both really actually. So it’s more
19:51 like you know sometimes what happens is people come into the support but it’s really more of like hey how do I buy
19:56 more or like whatever it is. So it’s it’s a little bit of both. It’s more of like a sort of an agent that um you know
20:02 answers our our checkpoint but it’s we’ve really given it a lot of uh
20:08 access. So you know it has access to to really customer you know read only access to the customer details. We’ve
20:14 had to put a lot of security measures in place just so it doesn’t you know have too much access as you know but just
20:20 usage and it kind of has an understanding of the customer before they come in like what their pattern is what their usage is and we’ve given it a
20:26 lot of like prompting around that just to see. So this is something that we’ve we’ve been able to use quite a bit and
20:32 it’s it’s converting quite quite well for us right now and even outbound towards customers that are either using
20:38 it or even like uh win back or or you know retention type situations those are
20:43 helping us a lot too. That’s great Liz
20:49 unmute I would say. So some of this I talked about a little bit. First is the instant
20:55 kind of AI call back on fresh inbound. That has been um very impactful for us.
21:02 Second is a little boring um but it’s really useful. Enrichment uh lead
21:07 scoring uh has been profoundly helpful for us. Uh part of our monetization
21:13 strategy has been how can we get leads into our platform quicker which means asking them less questions about
21:20 themselves. But our sales team still really needs to understand, you know, who they are, what they care about, do
21:25 they match our ICP, uh, to Mina’s point and AI enrichment and lead scoring has
21:31 been really beneficial for us to, you know, better route leads to, you know,
21:37 salesmanaged leads. Uh, make sure we’re, you know, giving our sales team high priority who they should be reaching out
21:42 to, who they should be booking meetings to. It’s been really useful. And then I would say AI as an analyst as well. Um
21:50 Claude and I are best friends. Feels like I constantly have it uh working in the background. So Claude is looking
21:57 quite a lot at our um our data warehouse. I have Claude analyzing and mining our own sales call transcripts
22:04 for you know where we’re losing deals. Uh what my reps could be doing better. Um and that’s all information I try to
22:11 give to them as quickly as possible so we can kind of turn things around. you know, if we have a competitor that’s
22:17 suddenly popping up a lot more often than it used to, how can I get them the information that they need to directly,
22:23 you know, talk about that competitor? And things change so quickly these days that really feels like the AI analyst
22:30 has been um a key to our success and being able to kind of be flexible and adaptable, move move quickly. Um there’s
22:38 also some AI on the burn pile though. uh like I mentioned AI calling cold leads
22:45 uh tried it measured it that was expensive uh expensive lesson to learn for us um I’d also say some of some pain
22:55 we’ve seen is you know AI is enabling us to be much faster but if we don’t
23:00 connect the dots for our reps um to Ilija’s point you know people still want
23:06 to be sold to by humans so if our AI
23:11 agents are discovering a great lead for us, but we don’t connect that quickly to a human. Our leads won’t stay as
23:19 interested. They won’t want to buy as quickly. So, uh, leads can get cold if the human doesn’t pick them up fast
23:26 enough. Uh, so AI is doing its job, but we didn’t build maybe like the smoothest
23:31 handoff. And so that was a another place where we maybe burnt some budget um burnt some leads by not figuring out
23:38 that connection quickly enough. Um so yeah, I would also say like before you
23:43 dump a whole bunch of money into AI, really think about what happens in that 60 seconds like after the AI agent
23:51 succeeds, you know, how do you route that as quickly as possible to a human? Yeah, it seems like Liz and Jesse both
23:57 like both use cases from the like again touching on speed to lead, the enrichment side, the support side, Jesse
24:04 touch touched on it’s like when someone actually raises their hand, are you like
24:09 AI can make that experience so so so much better and but when it’s totally cold, that may be where more of the
24:16 budget gets burned. It’s like, not that you can’t test into it, but that’s uh you’re gonna you’re going to get a lot
24:22 more value out of the experience once once someone enters the salesunnel versus potentially pre-salesunnel. Um,
24:30 awesome, Mina. And oh, Ilija. Yeah. Okay, we got this next one teed up. So, Mina,
24:35 you kind of touched on this already, so we’re we get to dig a little deeper. Um, so we’ll start with Mina and then Ilija,
24:40 we’ll go over to you. So AI has made it trivial trivially easy to send more and
24:46 more social messages. So everything is noisier. How do you actually stand out in email inbox on social wherever
24:53 you’re trying to reach people when uh you know the term AI slop has entered everyone’s vernacular? Um so Mina, yeah,
25:00 love to hear your thoughts and then Ilija, you’re uh you next. Yeah, I mean how how do you stop
25:06 sounding like everyone else? I guess that’s the million-dollar question. Um I think uh most outreach today sounds AI
25:14 generated because people ask AI to write instead of asking AI to think I guess
25:20 and just help execute which is like two different scenarios, two different
25:26 things. I think I personally use AI very differently. Um I let it do the research
25:32 for me. I let it organize the information. I let it help me brainstorm. So any repetitive tasks that
25:40 I would bored would be would get bored doing anyway, that’s what I let AI do
25:45 for me. But I still own the opinion. I still own positioning and I think I I
25:53 feel like at least I still own the message, right? I never I like to give it that personal touch at least in my
25:59 outreach. And I think whether I mean Ilija will probably touch upon social
26:05 in way more details than me, but I I think whether it’s email or social, people do not respond to you because
26:12 your writing is like super clever. You’re the smartest, you know, person in the world. I think they respond because
26:18 they feel understood at that point in time when they have a problem. So, I feel like my advice here would be super
26:26 super simple, which is like do not personalize the first sentence, which is what most people do. Personalize the
26:33 problem. So, once you nail that, I think you’re winning either way. I love that.
26:39 Seen that myself, too. It’s like when when I’m, you know, we’re all getting these messages, whether inbox or social, and the ones that actually are
26:45 talking to like my pain points are the ones that I’m like, “Oh, they get me versus, you know, the generic, you know,
26:50 spray and prey.” So Ilija, love to hear your thoughts too. Awesome. So [clears throat] wasn’t like
26:56 the there is there was always be this templatized type of outreach like that’s always going to happen like we all had
27:03 email templates that bunch of tools shared five years ago. Then we had all the templatized signals that everyone
27:09 used for instance someone opened up a job on a job board about an SDR and you’re like well read your inbox pretty
27:16 much that’s going to happen because everyone tracks that signal. For instance, now we are moving into this era of templatized prompts. So the
27:22 prompt will always give the same output. So that’s not how you stand there, right? Um in my position, I obviously
27:29 have this uh reserved right to actually follow the latest trends of the outbound because we are predominantly working with agencies and those guys are the
27:35 most creative guys to get more for their clients. So they have to get things done. So to everyone in the audience the
27:41 way I see it and the way it has proven to be working you basically have two choices to make like a one choice but
27:47 again like you have to pick one of these things. First one is either go really big, right? And I’m going to explain
27:54 how. Not in a spammy way, not in a like let’s book a meeting type of way, but like there is a new way to do things or
27:59 go super detailed. Right? The the one reason I see everyone failing is when they go in between. Either the volume is
28:06 not that big and the personalization or the relevancy is not there. So they end up with something generic in a scale
28:13 that doesn’t really make sense. So without you being spammy and I know like everyone will say oh super big means I
28:19 have to contact a lot of people but then again you have to contact the right people and again the right people can be
28:24 a lot of people let’s be honest unless you’re working in a super niche market uh and then again or you have a super
28:30 tailor made uh niche offer so when I say about that you don’t really go into the
28:36 typical outbounding uh type of uh momentum because everyone is doing that. So what the guys who actually do and win
28:43 at big numbers, they actually move the outreach to a brand awareness type of environment, right? So get your audience
28:51 in a quarter familiarized with your with your brand. So you’re delivering the message. So essentially you’re treating your outbound as ads, right? They might
28:58 click on it, they might like it, they might don’t like it, but again they will be exposed to a type of content. The
29:03 other audience that essentially it’s it’s conducting very successful outreach these days are the ones who do not
29:10 really go at a big scale but then again they at the same time I’m and I’m going to talk about this specifically uh play
29:16 in in a bit here but they essentially go in not so orchestratable way but the most relevant timing that they can find
29:23 right and let’s be honest like these days the hyper personalization is like nobody cares about that thing so
29:30 everyone should focus on the hyper relevance So the hyper relevancy why now
29:35 right because one thing that you cannot really determine with even though there are like millions of tools at your
29:41 disposal whether the timing is right now for them to make a decision for the purchase itself. So that’s why in in the
29:48 outreach that is currently working on social is especially like the ones that that goes in line of we notice that
29:55 this might be a problem for you guys right now. And the thing is why it’s not orchestratable because it’s very hard to
30:00 determine like obviously to to have I’m going to reach out to 10,000 people 10,000 companies that have this exact
30:06 problem. Companies change right? So they might have this problem this month or might not but the next month they will.
30:11 So you get my point. Either you go very big for brand awareness or you go tailored made for a hyper relevant
30:16 audience. Yeah. Yeah. I love that approach. We’re I I think uh Ilija, I like Let’s
30:23 Let’s get right into the weeds as far as like puh personalized plays because I think this is where the the attendees
30:28 are going to get the most value. So, um we have a pretty unique panel here today. Like if you think about each of
30:33 these platforms, they work really uh it’s a pretty good flow from you know
30:39 LeadMagic at the top of the funnel into you know instantly and hey reach in reaching out uh outreach OutboundSync
30:46 is connecting all these tools and then close can be obviously a CRM where we’re pushing all this data having it live and
30:51 then starting outreach. Uh what this next section we’d love to answer is walk if each of you can walk
30:57 us through one specific play that you’re seeing your best customer use every single day. Um and we’ll kind of go in
31:03 that order that I just said. So we’ll start with Jesse and then we’ll go Ena and then Ilija and then we’ll go Harris
31:09 and then Liz, you can uh close this one out. So I I think what we’re seeing uh that’s working the best right now is we we we
31:15 do have the job hiring data, but what people are doing with it is they’re doing it a little bit differently. They’re pulling information out of it uh
31:23 because we’ve got about I think we got 45 million uh jobs aggregated and over
31:28 the last three years, but they’re pulling like the historical data. So they’re pulling like you know every hire that Stripe had if they’re targeting
31:34 Stripe if they’re a big company or or whatever it is. And then what they do is when they’re kind of going
31:42 or hey reach they’re they’re sort of a little bit more relevant because they’re pulling out a specific line of they kind
31:48 of know they’ve listed so many things that they’re pulling out a specific line of what actually could work. So that’s
31:55 that’s been the thing. And then they’re obviously they’re validating right before when they’re doing their emails they’re validating it like right before
32:01 they send it. I also really liked what uh Mina said about relevance. I think that is the number one thing that it’s
32:07 got to be relevant to that person, right? If it’s not if it’s not going to get them promoted or, you know, you
32:13 know, hired or get them out of getting fired or something, it’s probably not going to work. So, uh, I really like
32:18 that comment, but um, you know, that’s that’s kind of what’s working for us. So, you Jesse, you cut out for two
32:25 seconds, but just essentially using job data as intent data. Um,
32:30 and and is that specifically for people looking for jobs or is that spec like or
32:35 uh more more like if they’re you know usually what they’re doing if there’s a problem at the company they’re either hiring people or firing people right or
32:42 they’re uh jobs uh they’re posting jobs or or or sorry hiring firing and then
32:47 the other one would be technology changes right so technographic type changes. So with you’re looking at the
32:53 hiring a lot of the details that you want to look for are actually inside the description. So, if you’re looking at a
32:59 job description, pulling out like a relevant sentence is what they’re usually doing. They’ll kind of maybe
33:05 flow it into like a a clay table or something like that. And then they go sort of they go from like a like a you
33:12 know clay uh they go from like close and clay and then they kind of go through the uh the rest of the endpoints for
33:19 sending it over to HeyReach and you know getting it in OutboundSync and things like that so instantly. So that’s
33:24 sort of like what we’ve seen some of our best customers do. Um it’s pulling out specific words that were used when
33:30 they’re targeting the hiring managers. Yeah. So it’s relevant to the person who wrote it. Yeah. That’s what we’re seeing.
33:36 That’s brilliant. Yeah. Right. Like like clearly there’s a pain here. You’re going out and you’re going to put budget behind hiring someone now. What diving
33:42 into the description and actually finding out what that, you know, using their own words. What is that pain? And then using that for whatever product or
33:48 service you’re offering. It’s going to feel onetoone. If it doesn’t feel onetoone now, you’re sort of desensitized to it, right? You’re
33:55 kind of going to ignore most of it. That’s that’s what I’ve seen the change with AI. It’s really made it so you know this onetoone stuff is is is really
34:02 where we see people you know if they got this job hiring and they say something about a situation. I mean usually what
34:07 whatever’s in the you know for Moss or goals for that position that’s going to be the problem set. So versus you’re
34:15 hiring an engineer for this we place engineers or it’s more specific to the
34:21 actual description and what’s in the description. Yep. That’s awesome. Love that. All right, Mina,
34:28 I was thinking and um it’s kind of hard to give um I guess everyone’s expecting
34:34 an answer which is more like uh okay, do this and that and you know this is what you know gets you to to a um winning
34:42 place. But um we have over 1 million users and um me as a sales like we’re
34:49 doing anywhere from 12 to 16 calls every day. So we really don’t have time to dive into every single workspace, see
34:56 whatever you know someone is doing. Uh but my approach to this is actually one
35:03 thing I’m seeing from all of our best customers is the approach. So it’s not an actionable thing like use this angle
35:12 in your copy or I don’t know this phrase or whatever this soft CTA. Um I think
35:18 it’s the approach and by by what I mean with the approach here is it’s the
35:23 customers who treat um every campaign like an experiment. So they do not
35:30 launch a campaign and hope. Uh they actually launch like a hypothesis and
35:36 they test one variable at a time. So maybe one time it’s the offer, maybe the
35:42 next time it’s the CTA, maybe the next time it’s the audience, but they do not change five things at once because then
35:49 they don’t know what actually moved the needle. So the other thing they’re incredibly good at which has to do with this is
35:56 iteration. So um they do not to say it in like very um carefully they do not uh
36:05 get emotional after three days and they declare everything broken because we all have a lot of those. I’m sure Elilia can
36:11 confirm on their end as well. Uh they they look at data. It’s simple. They look at data. They adjust. They repeat
36:17 and that’s that’s kind of like what happens. And that’s why their outbound becomes predictable because they went
36:23 through all this hard work and AB testing to actually crack the code. So
36:28 there’s no shortcuts. You have to go through this. You can’t just plug it in and just expect money to fall from the
36:35 sky. It doesn’t work like that in outbound. So I’ll leave it there. I love that like that very scientific
36:40 approach. Hey, this is we’re testing this one thing. We’re going to give it time to actually bake. We’re not going to get emotional about it and then move
36:46 on to the next thing. Whether it’s the offer, the subject line, the audience, the messaging that, you know, there’s so
36:52 many different things that you but you have to be patient because to your point, you want to go and do three things at once and that doesn’t that
36:57 doesn’t Yeah. I always say like, you know what, patience always like with everything in life, it’s always patience and in
37:03 general, I think this is really the general the most common thing that um
37:08 everyone who’s doing a great job in Outbound is doing, right? So there’s no like a magical, you know, all these like
37:15 micro things like send the email at 1111 because you know magic numbers or um
37:22 insert a gift that you made with your pet or whatever. Sure, some things like that will work sometimes, but here we’re
37:29 not we cannot. I think that’s the approach you can do if you’re really like chasing your dream client and
37:36 you’re really like thinking outside of the box and doing this, you know, you’re going above and beyond to make it
37:41 happen. So you have you’re just thinking about that one client. Yep. We’re not talking about one client here. We’re talking at scale. So you can be
37:48 doing that at scale. So this is the approach if you’re really want to do it, right? That’s great. All right, Ilija.
37:54 Yeah. So I’m I’m going to tell this in in a manner of story. So I have this friend, right? the name is let’s call him John right
38:00 John runs an agency and pretty much he’s very successful with it and the way John
38:06 is executing on things uh he basically for client one he generates hundreds of
38:11 meetings month one month two 10 meetings month three hundreds of meetings and so
38:16 on and so forth so it becomes this form of unpredictable so if you are a service provider you basically know okay this is
38:23 like a client lost for instance but the truth is uh if the agency retainer for
38:28 instance, is like 3 to six months. John is closing deals on annual basis. So I’m just like, well, John,
38:35 what the actual heck is going on? So he says, well, listen, it’s really about
38:42 that you want if you want to be relevant, you cannot be relevant all the time or like you you’re not relevant all
38:48 the time, right? And you will be delusional if you’re thinking that you have the right offer for the right time
38:54 for everyone at once. Like it it just doesn’t happen, right? there is the company movement the life cycle of the
38:59 business that is obviously you just have to follow the trend so for instance to to Jesse’s point it’s not really about
39:05 the following one job board because a company can be hiring an SDR but what if the same company three months before
39:12 fired half of the team now is that a great company to work with or matching your ICP probably not right you see my
39:17 point like people want to see this from the best perspective ever so either way back to John what John’s strategy well
39:24 it’s it’s pretty simple really you get the temp, you get the total addressable market, you divide that into tiers like
39:32 which company like it’s has the biggest value based on like the company graphic criteria I don’t know revenue fundings
39:38 whatever it may be right but basically you will end up with T1 T2 and T3 now instead of just like most of the people
39:46 like make the mistake they try to find the signal then find the company what John is essentially doing he’s doing
39:51 this at a massive scale they he’s setting up all the signal tracking on
39:56 the most relevant companies uh which he mapped out in the first place. So let’s say a tier one company is essentially
40:03 hiring at this point a GTM engineer, a sales rep, a support rep, whatever the the whatever the takeout may be. Then
40:11 signal number two, then signal number three, then John sends a generic message, right? It doesn’t have to be
40:16 personalized. It just have to be straight to the point. Hey guys, I saw that you are hiring, firing, uh doing good, doing bad, doing whatever it is.
40:23 The reason why I’ve reached out now is that is because I think like now it’s the best line, right? You see my point?
40:29 Now that thing you cannot predict like which signal is going to yield results, right? Or which type of movement will
40:36 yield results, but you know for a fact if you know who you want to target, you just have to be there, be patient as
40:42 Mina says, and basically set up the right pointers to say now is the right
40:47 time to reach out to. So once that is generating, it’s basically hundreds of meetings one month, 10 meetings next
40:53 month, hundreds of meetings the month number three. Yeah, I love I love that too. Like build
40:58 it like tier one, tier two, tier three, and then you’re just waiting for the signals. And yeah, it’s not like, hey, this is going to be perfect for everyone
41:04 at every time. But if you have the signals set up, if you have your list ready, then yeah, people will come and
41:10 go when they’re ready, not when we like, oh, we have to we have to fill this pipeline gap. You know, we’re going to
41:16 launch this huge campaign and it’s going to work beautifully. it’s well, you know, half these people might not even be ready and maybe it’s next quarter
41:22 that they’re ready. So, love that. Love love the timing segmentation and and uh building the signals out. Harris,
41:31 for sure. Well, I just when Mina was talking about patience before, I have a little fortune cookie on my desk here.
41:37 It says, “Patience is the key to a contented mind.” It’s one of a few. Some of these are proprietary uh business
41:43 strategies, so I can’t share all of my fortune cookies, but that is one that made me think of Mina’s comments. That’s awesome.
41:48 Um yeah, I do think it’s, you know, it’s funny. I it was I was thinking because, you know, the question is like what’s a
41:54 play that we’re seeing working or whatever. And um something working right now to kind of turn things around and I
42:00 mean I don’t know about you all, but like I mean I’ve been in my career, I’ve been working 15 years. I have never seen
42:06 anything like the way work is right now. People are so distracted. they’ve got a
42:11 million things going on. I feel like sometimes even sending someone like a two sentence email is like they’re not going to read that. Maybe they’ll have
42:17 like their AI thing check it or whatever. And so I just I I mean every single person it feels like that works
42:22 in technology has one of these AI things up all day like click and prompt or
42:27 click and run, click approve, click allow or whatever. Uh maybe you know you’re starting to set up cloud agents.
42:33 you know, we’ve got a lot of that running internally now. And so now some agent is coming and knocking on your, you know, notifying you and you’re like,
42:39 wait, who’s in charge around here? So like what I’m seeing in terms of for us
42:44 directly internally and and what I’m seeing increasingly for our agencies especially and is is just massively
42:51 reducing the friction for people. So like we introduced an our API and like I
42:57 don’t think anybody wants to read the documentation for it. And literally, I don’t think anybody on the planet wants to read what these endpoints are. So,
43:04 I’m like, “Okay, no problem. Here are skills, and this skill will will tell your agent to tell you what these API
43:11 endpoints are and how to use them.” And like, I’m very proud of them. I think they’re great. But like, I’m just certain that nobody in on the planet
43:18 woke up today and said like, “I wonder what new OutboundSync API endpoints are available.” Even though I think they’re
43:23 very interesting and they could probably help them do their job. Actually, it’s like why we made them um based on like a
43:28 lot of customer feedback and stuff. So, so to me it’s like anything that can make things much much much easier for
43:33 people. So like for Chloe it’s like use it for LeadMagic it’s like you sign up and you got credits immediately like hey
43:39 reaching instantly their onboarding flows are bestin-class and so like but I
43:45 think that these product experiences apply to sales experiences too. So can you give the customer you know a way to
43:51 for an agency like they’re giving these ways to like test our services test your TAM through a clawed skill that we built
43:57 you know that is what I’m seeing people are using to try to compress things because everyone is so distracted and they don’t know what to do and it feels
44:04 like sometimes right now people aren’t even trusting themselves like I’ve had people on calls and even in emails be
44:09 like I don’t know I’ll ask clot. It’s like yeah but like what do you what do you think you know? So so yeah I just
44:16 feel like we’re in this moment. I hope I don’t think this what I’m saying right now is going to age very well. I think it’s things are going to change in the
44:22 next six to 12 months. But that’s what I feel like is happening right now. And so these how to convert replies and how to convert these inbound leads right now. I
44:28 just feel like you have sort of have to assume that whoever’s receiving this email is like cooking dinner and there’s
44:33 three kids running around and they’re also on a conference call sort of like me mindset in terms of where their
44:39 headsp space is at. But maybe I just sell to people who like all have clinical ADHD. So that so everyone feel
44:45 free to disagree with me if you if if you don’t agree with what I’m saying. Hey, I I’m right there with you running
44:52 around trying to track my kids and I’m getting those call those uh emails coming through. So yeah, being being
44:57 relevant, being patient, hitting them in the right time. Um but making that experience, you know, great when it when
45:03 it can be great, I think makes a ton of sense. Well, we’re gonna round out with Liz. Uh and then uh we’ll we’ll finish
45:10 up there. But Liz, yeah, let us know what you’re thinking as far as what’s the what’s the play our best customers are using.
45:16 Uh, there’s so much to what Harris said that I think uh lines up exactly with
45:22 what our best customers are doing. Let me first tell you like a little bit who our best customers are so it makes more
45:27 sense. Um, they are small teams, two to 10 reps. They’re selling with a lot of
45:33 velocity. So we see coaching agencies, home services, insurance, um SMB
45:38 software. Deals are closing like really fast within days or weeks. They got a
45:43 lot of leads. Um no single deal matters so much. It’s it’s the whole game is
45:50 throughput. Making sure you’re not dropping anything. Um and I think those
45:55 who are doing really well at this, it’s not that they are like bigger or have more funding or in better markets. It’s
46:00 just like they’re doing more with the same amount of leads. Um, and to
46:06 Harris’s point, I think that the most successful teams are setting this up for
46:12 their reps so that the reps are not being distracted. So that the reps don’t have to think too hard about what their
46:18 next step is. So that the rep isn’t um, you know, sitting there and thinking
46:24 like, “Okay, what do I do next? I’m not sure what my next step is. I’m not sure which lead list I need to go chase next.
46:30 It it you would almost look at it and say like, oh, it’s must be really great discipline on the fact of these reps
46:36 like they’re they’re never letting anything drop. They’re always, you know,
46:41 touching base with opportunity that’s gone cold within seven days. Uh they’re never letting the queue sort of like run
46:48 out. But I think it’s actually it’s not it’s not willpower. It’s that those that
46:54 support the reps have removed the places where the rep had to think or needed the
47:00 discipline or needed the willpower. Uh the lead is getting called really quickly because the rep is being
47:06 supported by AI. Uh the deal has a next step because there was one that was
47:12 created by an agent and scheduled for the rep. uh quiet deals are coming back
47:17 up to the surface because we’re doing it automatically on day seven if they
47:22 haven’t moved forward. So, I think the rep’s job isn’t to think about what they need to remember. It’s the company’s job
47:29 and those that support the reps to set them up to succeed. So, I think that’s
47:35 what we are seeing our best customers do. It it’s system design. Uh the best
47:41 teams, they aren’t trying harder. it’s uh they’re not trying harder to follow up. It’s that their company and the
47:48 people that support them have made the follow-up uh have made it like impossible not to follow up if that
47:54 makes sense. Uh so that I think that’s what we’re we’re seeing. It’s like not so much the hustle, it’s what are the
48:01 systems that you’ve created for people to make sure that nothing is falling through the cracks. Uh I’m still doing
48:06 this myself on our own sales and success team. I’m learning so much from how our
48:12 customers do it. Um, iteration is key. But yeah, that’s that’s what we’re
48:17 seeing people do. Processes when when you got a process in place, that’s uh it can it helps when
48:22 you’re Yeah, to your point, there’s no amount of fatigue that can, you know, the the process won’t be able to endure
48:28 for you when we have when you have AI as a backbone that’s helping you to your point, support the rep. And I love what Ilija said earlier, too. It’s still about
48:35 humanto human connection. How can AI just make that better? So thank if everyone on the panel if you can drop
48:41 your email or social uh just give people a way to reach out to you if they want to connect um and also obviously if
48:48 they want to learn more about their your platform and how it can help them in their in their pipeline building journey. Thank you all so much for
48:54 joining today. We’re super excited about uh what you guys are going to take from this and build in your own companies. Um
49:00 and yeah, thanks again to uh Jesse, Harris, Mina, Ilija, and Liz. This was this was a great time to be together and
49:07 to chat. Absolutely. Thank you, Michael. Awesome. Thanks everybody guys. Bye.
49:14 Thanks everyone. Thanks. See you.