- Duration: 69 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JS00TGAJ8TKZKDPVZPKCQQFS (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JS00TGAJ8TKZKDPVZPKCQQFS)
Transcript
[Catherine McCollian]: Now that it’s nicer weather, I’m trying to be more consistent. It’s just, commute is hard in the snow, you know? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, it gets pretty cold for sure. [Catherine McCollian]: I don’t want to leave home. [Catherine McCollian]: No, exactly. Well, I’m glad. It seems like we’ve got most of the gang here. Should we just kick off and then if people join in later? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, Rena’s based in the Philippines, so we need to find a way for her to get connected, probably async, and then, The other Blake is probably gonna be tough to get on a call. So I would say if we could get that ASIC, that’d be good as well. [Catherine McCollian]: Yeah, you got it. So we’ll get everyone else kicked off and then you guys will get the call recording. And obviously I’m always here to help too. So what I typically like to do when we start is just get a general understanding of where you guys are at with LinkedIn, just so that I know baseline. How things are going, what your expectations are for Valley, and then that can guide the rest of the conversation. So I’d love to start there and just hear about what you’re currently doing on LinkedIn and how that’s working or not working for you. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, so we’re not doing anything right now. I had built an audience on LinkedIn over the course of a couple years, but sort of stopped that, I’d say about a year or two ago at this point. It’s a very cold audience there. I’m starting to do more posting and things like that again, but it’s very cold and very, very sort of new to get back to that. So DM strategy-wise, we’re not doing anything. We’ve previously done DMs on Twitter and they worked pretty well until we sort of had sent too many and my account got suspended and all this stuff. So we’re not doing any of that on LinkedIn for sure. But yeah, I mean, in terms of expectations, I would just see where this goes over the next couple months as we, I think we’ve committed to the three months or whatever. So we’ll see how this goes. We run a ghost trading agency that, you know, we do a couple thousand per client per month. So if we even get, you know, one client out of this each month, that will be a success, but it won’t feel like a success, right? Like financially it’ll be net positive. But I think that like, okay, for this would be if we’re converting one new client per week, I’ll feel really good about it. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay. And when you say converting, you mean closing a deal, not just converting from outreach to book meeting? [Michael Houck]: Or do you mean outreach to book meeting? No, no. I mean full funnel. If we book a bunch of meetings on my calendar, but none of them convert, it’s actually worse. [Catherine McCollian]: So how What is your conversion rate like currently? How many meetings do you need to have to get to that one close deal? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we do one call close. [Catherine McCollian]: I’d say my close rate is like 60, 70%. Okay. And what would qualify someone as like a good meeting for you? [Michael Houck]: They have budget to spend on content creation. So typically this means Venture-backed founders is our core demo, I’d say, at the earlier stages, like anywhere from pre-seed through series A We’re open to working with later stage folks as well. We just find that by that point, they probably have their own marketing department and things like that, so better to start that early. So yeah, that’s the primary thing. We can work in any industry, any niche. We have a strong team of writers, so that’s not really a concern, but it’s founders. Specifically because we like to go one-on-one with the founder and it’s venture-backed folks. Okay, perfect. [Catherine McCollian]: Do you have like, I know you said you can work with pretty much anyone, but do you find that you have a majority of your current clients in a certain industry or niche? No, it’s spread across the board, okay. And then you said it’s a couple what is the, you said it’s a couple thousand a month, but what’s that like, Is it more of a, they sign on for a certain amount of time or they keep you on retainer? [Michael Houck]: How does that work? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. So it’s, it’s a month to month contract with 30 day cancellation. So it’s effectively two months to start. Uh, and you know, at the low end we’re charging two K a month at the high end, uh, we’re charging like seven to eight K a month, uh, depends on sort of what they included. Their package. And so I feel like I’m missing some of the question. What would you say the average like lifetime customer value is? Um, I mean, it’s hard to say, because we’ve only been in business for a year. But of the folks who are active, I think our, you know, our longest client was with us from like the second month that we were a company. [Catherine McCollian]: And then it’s a little hard to say, because growth is really spent since I say january 1st so I don’t want to like include those folks as much in like a calculation of average but um yeah I don’t know um it it’s too early to really have a good number for that okay that’s okay I’m just you know it’s it’s helpful for me to know um just so we can make sure like if we’re talking roi right we’re hitting the numbers um but that’s totally okay I totally understand um cool uh ben blake Any questions for me before we really jump in? Is it helpful if I give you guys like a 30,000 foot view of Valley in general? Have you received that already? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I mean, I’m an investor in Valley, so I know the product pretty well. [Catherine McCollian]: Perfect. I just want to make sure we all are aligned there. So I am going to share my screen. So really, we need Um, get a few things filled out first before we can move too much forward. So I’ve started in your product. I ran your website through, um, so this is the brain alley. Sorry, Catherine, I’m going to, I’m going to cut you off there. [Michael Houck]: I think that, um, did, did you add the founding journey stuff? Cause we actually, that’s not the product within our company that we want to be talking about. [Catherine McCollian]: I just grabbed your website from your company. In fact, because I saw it wasn’t, this wasn’t done yet. So what’s the website you want to run? [Michael Houck]: So I think something might be wrong then because I filled out all the settings pages like an hour or two ago. Is this the workspace? I only have one workspace as far as I know. I didn’t create any, any others. [Catherine McCollian]: This is, this is you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s me. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: That’s me. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay. Did you hit save? [Michael Houck]: Uh, yeah, I just reloaded it and it’s loading for me with the, the other. [Michael Houck]: in our company info page. [Catherine McCollian]: All right. Very weird. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, I see in the company info the right website. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay, hold on. Let me log out and log back in. And it’s really odd. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: No worries. [Catherine McCollian]: I don’t have any. So can you share your screen with me? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, for sure. [Michael Houck]: Let me do that now. [Michael Houck]: OK, wait, can I? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: How do I do this? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there we go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: OK. [Michael Houck]: Can you go to the studio? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Catherine McCollian]: OK, so I Maybe there’s a little miscommunication. So, um, I see that you have your company info set up, but the product and the writing style is like the next step that we need to set up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So you want to use megaphone, not founding journey. [Catherine McCollian]: Yeah. So I’m going to just regenerate the product now. Um, I can take back over screen sharing. I think maybe. I just misunderstood what you were saying. So yeah, so this is the brain of Valley. So before we can like upload campaigns or talk about training AI, we need to get this part set. Sorry, Catherine, I’m going to cut you off one more time. [Michael Houck]: I’m so sorry. The brief description, if we’re analyzing it based on that, that’s going to be wrong because the description is for our startup founder newsletter that’s unrelated to Megaphone Studio. And again, I didn’t fill this in. [Catherine McCollian]: I’m not sure where that came from It hasn’t regenerated yet. [Catherine McCollian]: So I need to, we need to regenerate. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It hasn’t regenerated yet. [Catherine McCollian]: I’ll just delete and start over. [Catherine McCollian]: So I would say, you’re reaching out to founders. What’s the, what’s your preferred approach? We have our best practices, but I always like to blend best practice with like your natural tone and style. Right. So would you say that you want to be more direct and move through people more quickly, or are you wanting to have these sequences spread out for a little bit longer and build rapport over time? [Michael Houck]: It’s a good question. [Michael Houck]: Um, I mean, it’s a high ticket sale, so generally you want to be relationship driven. [Catherine McCollian]: It’s not like we’re, sas products or something like that journey you know but at the same time we do see quick closes so what do you guys see as best practice for linkedin dms because I don’t have a lot of experience with it so um typically the best approach is to not be too direct right up front um hold on one second I need to just follow something to the team. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay, so typically what we find is that the too direct in the connect message is not usually the best approach. [Catherine McCollian]: So I think that addendum to that is the higher up you go the more direct you want to be because they’re busy it’s not that they don’t want to network they’re just busy and especially with the connection request right you’re gonna have to wait for that back and back back and forth conversation with valley um my recommendation is to for for you guys um I would either take a no pitch approach to the connect message or I would take the um solely focus on them and then sort of a softer like have some ideas or Have some ideas about how you could take xyz to boost your content strategy Let me know if it’s relevant or top of mind for you right now, and you could take more of a light uh Approach that way, but I wouldn’t go too direct with like this is who we are and this is how we can help and and make a first ask I think based off of what you do in the connect then you either want to like slowly build up to a direct pitch, or you want to keep it short and sweet through the follow-ups. What feels like the best balance to you? [Michael Houck]: I think that the bigger concern that I have is that by the time we get people on a call, they should be high likelihood of potentially ready to go. Because if we fill up my calendar with low likelihood meetings, I’m it’s not going to be sustainable for us. And so that’s top concern. So I also think maybe we would probably have a different strategy per account. So for example, you know, I have like 43,000 followers on LinkedIn, most founders have heard of me because of my last company that had got a lot of press. And so if I’m DMing somebody, I might be able to be more direct than say if someone else on the particularly like, you know, Rena or someone like that who doesn’t have any real credibility in the tech space outside of working with us, would be able to do. So I would like to tailor it per person as much as possible. And regardless of sort of the tone that we take, by the time the call, they should be interested, like actively interested. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay. So I think, I think key there is like, with Valley, Valley is going to handle that end-to-end conversation, meaning it will generate replies. So if you message me and I reply back, Valley is going to generate that reply back to you. But that is going to be a human-in-the-loop type situation, so you’re always going to be managing that. So that being said, we can take an approach to the follow-ups where it sounds like we take an approach to the follow-ups where we’re doing more discovery to open up that conversation so it’s a bit less yes or no I’m interested and more teeing you guys up to have like a thorough conversation in the DMs that then moves into a booked meeting. So open-ended leading questions about either maybe not their challenges but like their current needs, the go-to-market plan that they’re working on right now and things like that. Are there certain questions that you like to ask or topics that you like to hit in that discovery conversation before you get to a booked meeting or have you not thought about that yet? The main thing is just if they have budget or not, right? [Michael Houck]: Like a lot of people are like, oh, you know, I’d love to grow on social media, right? Easy sales pitch, get more customers that way, build my personal brand, all that stuff. But then you get to the budget question and they’re like, oh yeah, I don’t have $4,000 month to do this. Right. And so some way of checking if they are financially qualified is really the biggest thing. Because what we find is that once they get hit, once they’re past that hurdle, the rest of it, I can sell them on on the call. Okay. [Catherine McCollian]: I think honestly, that’s probably a conversation that that’s better had in the active like back and forth with Valley. So I don’t think we need to worry about that too much. I won’t I wouldn’t want to send that in a follow-up, just unprompted without an active conversation already happening. So I think we’re good there. As far as tone goes, are you guys more casual using abbreviations, kind of like Zade, all lowercase, or do you prefer to be a bit more professional? [Michael Houck]: Not quite as casual. [Michael Houck]: I mean, I think everyone sort of has their own voice maybe, but for me, not quite as casual as Zade. Case letters, but I’d say overall on the casual side, very direct. I don’t know, how else would you guys describe my Slack comms? [Ben Ornstein]: I would say direct for sure. [Ben Ornstein]: There’s not extremely verbose as in like you can explain what you want to get across in a very short amount of words. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay. So directing concise. Yep. [Michael Houck]: That’s the word I was looking for. [Catherine McCollian]: So let me show you, I’m going to share my screen and just show you like why I’m asking these questions. Um, so I’m building out the writing style for right now, and this is going to be how Valley takes on how you want to write. So you’re going to put all these instructions inside of do’s and don’ts. So there are some really good best practices that we have and I want you guys to watch this because it sounds like Ben, Blake, you guys are going to want to have your own writing style. I mean, I can always, we can always share this across all users on the workspace and you can use each other’s writing styles, but it sounds like you might want to have your own. So I want you to see how I’m doing it. That way you can go back and create your own when you’re ready. So some best practices, right? Using the research to connect with the prospect and all of the messages. We would say be direct, be concise. Things we probably don’t want to happen. Don’t sell or mention our company by name in the first message, right? We probably don’t want to send the calendar link in the first message. Down here, this is where if you have example messages, you can put things here for consistency. That will help Valley. It won’t turn it into a template where it’s doing it word for word, but if you have like certain stylistic choices, bullet points, things like that, it will really help that Valley consistently do it. I always say if you don’t have anything that you want to put in here yet, wait until you see a message sequence that you really like with Valley, and then you can just copy and paste it. Just use what value is already generated. Don’t reinvent the wheel. We also have advanced questions down here. So, you know, if you like Zade prefers to write in all lowercase. So in here, you know, we would say type in all lowercase, use dashes instead of commas. These are just more, if you don’t know how to fill out the do’s and don’ts, these questions will get you pretty much all set up. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. No problems. [Catherine McCollian]: What I need to set up your product and I’m kind of running into I’m low-key a little trying to stall a little bit Looking into an issue Um, I’m running into an issue where I can’t create your products like it’s just not generating So I might ask you to try this The team is telling me they can do it. I can’t do it. I don’t know. Um So I’m going to ask you, I’m going to stop presenting it. I would ask you to give it a shot. Um, and if you still can’t get it to work, we’ll move to, we’ll move to, um, list creation. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Catherine McCollian]: Let me, let me add in all the details here. One second. You should just need to pop in the URL. It needs to be HTTP or HTTPS in the but I’ve tried all combinations and it is not running for me. [Michael Houck]: I’m writing in the little description now. [Catherine McCollian]: So give me a, give me a second here. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay, cool. [Catherine McCollian]: You shouldn’t need to fill this part out or are you just going to fill it out? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I do. [Catherine McCollian]: It’s, it’s, it’s required. The description is required. [Michael Houck]: So I’m going to do that. [Michael Houck]: Oh, I’m okay. [Michael Houck]: So you’re just going to manually fill it out. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Catherine McCollian]: It’s shadow AI. Generate it for you. [Michael Houck]: It’s just that. I’d rather it didn’t. I was putting very simple stuff. Oh, yeah, there’s a lot more here. [Catherine McCollian]: Yeah, that’s why I typically like to use the AI is a jumping off point and you can always edit later, but I don’t, I was trying to stall and it’s fine. Success can’t help us at all, other than probably make me seem like I’m distracted. I’m just gonna add something very simple, so I can edit this later, right? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, absolutely. You can edit it at any time. Okay, I’m just throwing in some random stuff for a couple of these. [Catherine McCollian]: I’m gonna while you do that, I’m gonna keep filling out your writing style and I’m gonna go back to sharing my screen Just because I want you guys to see so down here We have this little chat bubble knowledge base. And if you type in writing style There’s going to be a writing style doc that has our best practices and So when you’re setting up yours if you want to just copy and paste what we’ve got in here You can always do that. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Super helpful. [Michael Houck]: Okay. Product should be… I have to edit the name. Temp. There we go. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: There’s at least like a temporary product in there. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay. Perfect. Perfect. Let me just grab these in. So, key thing with do’s and don’ts in the writing style, you don’t need to say don’t. It does it on the back end. So, if you type in don’t oversell, don’t use generic phrases, it will become don’t don’t and then that will become a do. I see that so often and then people don’t know why it’s not listening. Cool. So now we’re ready for campaign upload. Do we have lists made? Do we need to make lists? How, what is your preferred way? Do you use Apollo or a different tool or just sales nav? [Michael Houck]: We’ve never used sales nav before. Um, I had a question in the channel about what I should buy. Uh, so haven’t done that yet. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay. No problem. So, um, you just need sales navigator core. And so if you want to get that set up now, we can, we can make your first list. Otherwise I can, I can make the list here for you and, um, you, but you do need sales navigator in order for Valley to start pulling in people. [Michael Houck]: Okay. I’m going to upgrade for myself right now. [Michael Houck]: Um, and then we can, can do that. [Catherine McCollian]: Cool. Um, yeah, just sales navigator core, unless you’re planning uploading files to Sales Navigator, there’s no… Sorry, it’s not letting me upgrade for some reason. [Michael Houck]: Why does nothing work? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nothing ever works the way that it’s supposed to. [Michael Houck]: I don’t understand. It’s because we’re all watching right now and it’s, you know, I don’t know. [Catherine McCollian]: I have this thought. [Michael Houck]: I’m clicking the button and nothing is happening to upgrade. So I guess they don’t want my money. So no, I don’t think we’re going to be able to do this right now. [Catherine McCollian]: I’ll have to debug this later. Okay. Why don’t we do this? Why don’t we build the list together just so you can see how you make a list. I can send it to you. That way you have it. You’re not going to be able to upload it until you have SalesNav, but the actual campaign creation process with Valley is pretty straightforward. So we can just do a SalesNav crash training. So key thing, when you’re navigator, it’s going to look like this. [Catherine McCollian]: What we need are lead filters. [Catherine McCollian]: We need a lead search list. So there’s a few different ways you can make lead lists, account lists, but the key thing is this has to say sales forward slash search. Otherwise, Valley is going to throw an error. So you come to lead filters. From there, best practices, things you should always have filled out. Under best path and connection, you’re going to want and third degree connections. [Michael Houck]: Can you do it with first degree connections too? Because we have a lot of those. [Catherine McCollian]: Yeah, Valley right now is not compatible with first degree connections. Okay. They have been slowly adding names to the list of everyone that wants first degree connections, which is the majority of users. I’m hoping we can get that built for you sooner rather than later. But right now it is just net new. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, that’s fine. [Catherine McCollian]: So second and third degree connections and then sometimes if you can I always recommend posted on LinkedIn This is just going to give you the people that have posted in the last 30 days. So we know that they’re active Sometimes this will make your list too small. So Take it off if needed, but if you can build around it, that’s ideal From there. It sounds like for you, right? We want company headcount Small I would say probably less than 50 or would you want to say less than 10? No, less than 50 is fine. Okay. And then there’s not really a way to filter for venture backed, but you can do company type and you could do privately held or self-employed, self-owned, public company, obviously like that stuff would be, would be too big. So I would put those filters on and then there is a that you can run that is fundraising history. So you could at least have value research on their recent rounds and what those were. Cool. [Catherine McCollian]: From there, are you only within the U.S.? [Catherine McCollian]: Do you work with people outside the U.S.? [Catherine McCollian]: What’s that like, We work with people outside the U.S. [Michael Houck]: I’d say, you know, you’re going to find a higher density of venture-backed founders, especially a higher density of them who understand the value of content marketing in the U.S. [Catherine McCollian]: So you could put like the company headquarters location right as United States You could do personal geography wherever that doesn’t matter Then you’re gonna want to put your current job title. So this would be Founder Co-founder You could do chief executive officer, CEO, anything else I’m missing or you just want to stay with those. And then I would say from there, you’ll want to probably filter by industry. So this is where you want to think about how Valley can give you really clean insights into like what’s working and what’s not working on LinkedIn. So Valley will, be able to tell you ICP fit, prospect score based off of all the information it has on you and then you can use that information to build lists for the future. So I recommend people segment their list in some clean way where they’re testing a variable, whether that’s industry, whether that is location, whether that is company size, that’s up to you. I think industry for you guys is going to be easiest, right? Maybe you come in thinking that you’re going to have great results with B2B SaaS and actually you have like even better results with manufacturing or retail or something. So, Valley will be able to give you data if you, in that way, if you segment really cleanly. So, from here, we could just do pick a, pick a, pick an industry, any industry, which one would you want to start with. [Michael Houck]: Well, do we have to pick industry? [Catherine McCollian]: So you’re going to want to segment because you need your list to be 2,500 people or less. So right now our list is at over 300,000, which is pretty small. And the maximum size is 2,500. But quite frankly, I’d recommend going smaller because then you can move more quickly and iterate on what’s versus what’s not working. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, I guess let’s pick software. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay. So now you’ve got, Oh, well, I guess it wouldn’t be software development. [Michael Houck]: Cause that’s like, that’s what it is on LinkedIn. [Catherine McCollian]: It’s either software development. You could also do, um, or is there technology? There’s like internet tech and media would be the other one, tech information and internet. But those are like, if you look up a software company on LinkedIn, for example, if we looked up Valley, right? We’re under software development. If you looked up Salesforce, They’re going to be under software development. That’s just what LinkedIn categorizes that as. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Let’s roll with it. [Catherine McCollian]: Um, the technology information and internet will also get you software companies. So you could throw that one in and then now we’re at 40 K. Okay. So we’ve got to whittle it down a little bit more so we can go even further and we can do, I only want to target people in San Francisco Bay area, right. Or New York or wherever. You’re at if you want it to be okay so now I’m at 5k so now I gotta get it even smaller okay what does that look like well we could do let’s get off let’s see right no no let’s let’s add that back okay let’s go to second connections instead of third connections okay we can do that now we’re at 4k okay can you scroll down sure Um, what’s under industry I can get rid of this one if you want. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, sure. [Catherine McCollian]: Let’s do that Now we’re at 2k so this would be a This would be big enough. [Catherine McCollian]: This would it’s not too big to load into valley. So now you got dozen people Um, so then the next step would be all you need to do is you just need to grab this url straight out of the browser And then you’ll come over to Valley itself. You’ll click create campaign. I’m going to do it. It’s just not going to work until you get sales navigator. Once you get sales, now we can re-trigger it. You’ll click Valley AI. And now the key with Valley for every list that you have, you’re going to upload both campaign types. So you’re going to create two campaigns for every singular list. So I would call them. [Michael Houck]: I’m so sorry, Kat. I think you’re specifically sharing the Sales Navigator tab. Sorry. [Catherine McCollian]: I’m not looking at you guys, so I can’t see. Perfect. Okay. So let me start over. So you’re going to grab the URL out of Sales Nav. You’re going to come over to Valley. You’ll click Create Campaign. You’re going to run Valley AI. For every single list from Sales Navigator that you create, you’re going to create two campaigns, one for LinkedIn message and then one for InMail. So we’ll just do LinkedIn message to start. I’m going to do Founders San Francisco second degree connections. You can name it whatever you want. I like to name it what’s on the list so that I know looking at it at a glance. Then you’re just going to copy and paste that URL right into Valley. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Oh, interesting. [Michael Houck]: So for the source type it you had the option for LinkedIn post URL. Can you explain that That is brand new. [Catherine McCollian]: Yes, I can. This is brand new. Um, okay. So what that means is you could take a post that you made, um, or a post of someone else’s. And again, it has to be second and third degree connection. So not everyone will be able to be contacted, but you could upload, like if I went to, Let me do this one. If I went to Zade’s page, and then I went to his most recent, his go-to-market stock post, I could grab this post URL, and it would pull in the people that have interacted with it. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So it would create a list of people who’ve interacted with any LinkedIn posts and we could then set up a campaign specifically for those. That’s great. I love that. Awesome. [Catherine McCollian]: That is literally shipped while we were on this call. Cause I have not seen that or seen this. [Ben Ornstein]: Most that you shared with Rena this morning, that would have been perfect for this. Exactly what I was thinking. Yeah. [Catherine McCollian]: So if you want, I can keep going through with this, like founders, or if you want to like stop and do the post. If you think that’s the move to make. Oh, I mean, you can use whatever. [Michael Houck]: We’re not gonna take this live or anything though, right? This is just like, we’re just testing. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s helpful if I just show you the walkthrough. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, yeah, we can walk through, just don’t click the send button, obviously. [Catherine McCollian]: Well, we can’t, because you don’t have Sales Nav yet, so no one will pull in. So yeah, so you can do posts now, and if you wanna do, that’s another good point, if you do a post, you could even go so far as to have a different writing style for that post where you’re training Valley to talk about the post or talk about the content on the post and tie that content to your product and to your company. If you wanted to be more strategic in that way, that’s how you would do it. That’s interesting. I like that. [Michael Houck]: Could we make it so that like, if let’s say I make a post on LinkedIn and it goes viral, And I want to reach out to the people, but I don’t want the rest of the team to reach out to those people. [Catherine McCollian]: Can we set it up that way too? Yeah. So, um, the cool thing about Valley is that once someone’s in a list, they can’t be brought in more than once. So if you run that as a campaign, those people are automatically blocked from being pulled in on anyone else’s campaigns. [Michael Houck]: Oh, wait. So, okay. So campaigns are at the account level. So I have different campaigns than Ben has, for example. Yeah. [Catherine McCollian]: They’re at the account level. Level, but you can’t have prospects between accounts. Okay. [Michael Houck]: So I can reach out to the same person that Ben reaches out to, but on different campaigns? No, you can’t. [Catherine McCollian]: If you reach out to me and then Ben creates a list and I’m on that list, I’m blocked from Ben. Got it. Okay. Makes sense. [Michael Houck]: And then is there a way to set up a campaign where like, let’s say we have like this founder list that we pulled from SalesNav, and I want all five of us to be reaching out to that list. [Catherine McCollian]: Does it work that way too? No, because once someone uploads that list, it belongs to that person. You would have to split the list prior to putting it in Valley. You can’t round Robin in that way. You could round Robin with website intent, but not campaign lists. [Michael Houck]: And that’s probably because it’s based on connections. Like my second, third connections are different than Blake’s, for example. [Catherine McCollian]: Yeah. And we, we also, we, we want to prevent like spamming people, which is why we have like the duplicate prospect protection in place so that you’re not all five of you reaching out to one person on the same day. Right. Yeah. [Michael Houck]: I just would think like, I would probably have the same goal and want to reach out to the same people that we want Ben or Blake or Rena or other Blake to reach out to. And so it would seem to make sense that I could set that up once and then all five of us could sort of round Robin through that same list. But I guess since it’s based on people’s connections, that there’s like, that was a logical thing that I needed. [Catherine McCollian]: To be honest with you, I don’t know if it’s to be totally honest with you. I don’t know if it’s because of second and third connections, or it’s because that’s just the way we built it. And we didn’t consider that use case. So I can bring that to the team and see if it’s, if there’s a reason. And if not, like, I don’t see why we do it for website intent. [Michael Houck]: I don’t see why we couldn’t build. Yeah, because I guess like, if I’m uploading 2500 people, and then Blake is uploading 2500 people, and like those people are you know, like 40% of them are the same, right? Then I’m going to be sending 2,500 messages over the course of some period of time. Blake’s going to be sending significantly fewer messages over a shorter period of time. It would make sense to split that in half and split it across both of them, you know? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, that’s a good idea. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I can bring that up. [Catherine McCollian]: Okay, cool. No worries, but just a thought. [Catherine McCollian]: No, it’s definitely a good idea. And especially if you’re, we’ve got multiple users, it makes complete sense. So just real quick, right-hand side, this is settings. So you put that source in, you’re gonna leave this alone, profiles to be included. Just when in doubt, don’t touch. This is because we separate, when you upload both campaigns, you’re using the same list, the same link. We’re gonna separate those people between the two campaigns. Based off their profile. So if you touch this, it will not load in correctly. Okay. From there, you’ll select the product that you want to run and the writing style that you want to run. And then you’ll select your language. You can turn on autopilot, you can leave it off. Daily sequence volume, this is the number of people that you want to contact every day. And then this is the timeframe that you want to contact them within. We see a lot of success a little before nine, a little bit after five and including Sundays I think that will be even more important with your demographic reaching out to founders and startups. They’re definitely working odd hours all day every day. From here over here this is your sequence builder so this is where you’d schedule your follow-ups. So if you wanted to do two follow-ups it’s going to auto default to two. I really do recommend three to four over two to three weeks if you want it to be a bit slower. If you want it to be short and fast, you can just leave it at two. You can adjust follow-up timing here. And then if you wanted the first follow-up to send immediately once they accept your connection request, you can just set that to zero days and it will trigger once they accept. [Michael Houck]: If we’re sending a connection request, is the first follow-up like the message inside the connection request or is it like a separate message that gets sent later. [Catherine McCollian]: No, when you send a connection request, there’s a message in the connection request. That’s the first message. And then follow up one is separate. So this would send once they accept, but before they reply. [Michael Houck]: Okay, cool. Okay. And then we’re probably like, my guess is that the majority of the outreach we can do, like, you know, 70% plus of the outreach we’re gonna do is based on the same sequence, just with different people’s voices and from different people’s accounts. So if I set up a campaign for myself, and I have like a sequence that I really like, and I’m like, hey, Ben, let’s use the same sequence for you and your lists. Can I just like templatize that and have Ben use basically the same campaign that way? [Catherine McCollian]: Or do we need to set it up from scratch for Ben too? So you are going to need to set it up from scratch. Now, that being said, what we can do on the back end is I think there’s two you’re speaking to here there’s the sequence itself of how many messages and what day they send and then there’s the training of the ai which is like the actual style of each message and the overall story arc no I was just talking about the first part I I the second part makes sense to me okay so no short and sweet answer is no you would need to setting up individually that being said I have been working on a project where we’re going to start bringing we’re going to give you access to writing style templates and with those templates come sequence templates so I think you’ll be able to do that in the future just very cool yeah I think sharing writing styles doesn’t matter at all to me because each one of us is going to have our own writing style I think it’s just the uh the sequences like I would love to just have like hey you know blake is plugging his writing style into this sequence for a campaign and I’m plugging my writing style into the same That would be great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah, no, that makes sense. [Catherine McCollian]: And I, when we have those sequence templates available, I think you’ll be able to like probably create your own too. So I’ll double check and make sure, but that is coming soon. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay, cool. [Catherine McCollian]: Sounds good. Yep. [Catherine McCollian]: Um, days of the week from here, you’ll just click next. And then this is the research agent section. So you get up to five agents that you want Valley to run for each of your prospects and prospect research. Is selected. So you don’t need to worry about that. It’s five additional. This is where I said we had like financial performance. We also have fundraising history. So while there’s not a way to filter for that on LinkedIn, you can have Valley run the research. And then if it’s there, it’ll use it. You could instruct in your writing style to prioritize certain research agents if you wanted in certain messages even. And then we also have some industry research agents down here and then we have media and just regular news articles the blogs and newsletter search is a really fun one that will get you the like podcast quotes and youtube videos and kind of the random stuff um so that’s a really really fun one to use and then I also personally love the customer reviews one I’m not sure it’ll be super relevant for you since your demographic is is Um, if they have it, it can generate some really great messaging. And I, I do love to run that one when it’s relevant. [Michael Houck]: Blake, I think you and I should jam for like, you know, two, three hours on Friday, just going through all this stuff and setting up a bunch of stuff. [Michael Houck]: Um, I think there’s a, there’s a lot here and we can just, we can just kind of go ahead. [Catherine McCollian]: Yeah, this is awesome. Um, real quick, I’ll show you, I’ll pop over my account real quick and just show you the little bit. I know we’re slightly over and I want to be mindful of the rest of your day. We’re not slightly over, we’re at time, but I want to be mindful of the rest of your day. I am able to stay though if you are and cool. So I’ll show you just on my account what a live account looks like, That way you can see the inbox and you can see the training center. So once you have your campaign launched you’re going to it’s going to ask you to train a section of like a sample message so you’ll be brought to the campaign screen and it’s going to give you one person to train on um hold on one second Now it looks like Valley is not loading. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Any questions on anything we’ve done so far? [Catherine McCollian]: Any ideas that you’re getting that you want to talk through while we wait? [Ben Ornstein]: I was thinking about the post feature, like the new one that was just released. You were saying that first degree connections it doesn’t work for, but if I’m having on my post, you’re saying those wouldn’t get included? [Catherine McCollian]: So yeah, to my understanding, the messaging will fail. Again, brand new feature that I don’t have all the details on yet. I will find out though, because ideally they just don’t even pull in, which is why you can sort for it through sales but let me find out how that would work with a post filter. [Catherine McCollian]: Got it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thanks. Yeah. [Catherine McCollian]: It should, if you pull in the message should just fail to send. [Michael Houck]: Ben, I feel like we could set something up where you have Venus like trolling social and like finding posts that go viral that could be of interest. And we just pull in those URLs and stuff, campaigns for them kind of on the, on the fly. [Ben Ornstein]: Yeah, no, absolutely. Absolutely. And I mean, I’m doing some of that, of course, for viral examples. But that is, that’s true. It would be different, right? [Michael Houck]: For viral examples, that’s like formats that we want other people to replicate. This would be like content that founders who might want ghostwriting are interacting with. That’s true. [Ben Ornstein]: That’s a different subset. Yeah, no, that’s, that’s really interesting, actually. [Ben Ornstein]: I agree. [Michael Houck]: I guess you could have Angelica do it. That might be more relevant actually. Yeah. [Catherine McCollian]: Do you know, we also, another fun way to create campaigns is through events. So I don’t know if that’s necessarily relevant to you guys, but like, if you say you’re attending an event on LinkedIn, it will give you access event to everyone else that says they’re attending. And then you can upload that to Valley through, through the URL functionality as well. [Michael Houck]: Sorry, I must be like a total dummy. I didn’t even know LinkedIn had events. LinkedIn has events. Yeah. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So you can host events on LinkedIn. Let me show you. [Michael Houck]: It sounds like the world’s worst event to go to any of any event hosts on LinkedIn. [Catherine McCollian]: If someone’s running a webinar, like we’ve done it a few times. With, with like, you know, outbound AI or like outbound sales, right? Like events, you can say, Hey, I’m attending this event. And then once you attend the event, it will give you access to every single person that’s attended that event. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Wow. Okay. [Catherine McCollian]: Um, yeah, I’m not saying the event’s going to be any good, but there’s people that are interested in that topic, right. [Michael Houck]: That you could then reach out to, um, That actually sounds that sounds like a potentially fruitful source or something like that because somebody’s spending the time on an event. They might be higher intent for like a high ticket. Yeah, I think so. Yeah, Blake, we should have Angelica do that to like scouring for events, I guess that are related to us. [Catherine McCollian]: The thing is, you have to say you’re going in order to get the list. [Michael Houck]: So it’s kind of a double edged sword. [Michael Houck]: We can have somebody on the team say they’re going. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s no big deal. [Ben Ornstein]: How I could see someone like Greg Eisenberg do like a live stream on LinkedIn. He probably does something like that from time to time. Like those would be probably the type of people that you’d want in there. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Like anything about content marketing or growing on social media or anything like that. [Catherine McCollian]: Yep. So once you launch campaign, you’re going to be prompted to train what that’s going to look like, That’s going to be found inside. I’m not going to do it because I don’t want to mess up my AEs work here. All this stuff, this is new too. This is what happens when I’m on Zoom all day. They are busy bees. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: They ship stuff. [Catherine McCollian]: They’re shipping. [Catherine McCollian]: I love to see it. So you’re going to be prompted to train a sample set of messages. And how you do that is through what we call the training center. So there’s three ways to manipulate the AI. And I want you to think about it like a waterfall. So at the very top of your waterfall, you have the studio. The studio should be doing the heavy lifting. Then in the middle, you’ve got the training center, which is specific to a campaign. So the studio is going to be at the account level and any campaign that you run using that style or product, the training center is going to be only for the people on the campaign. You’ll see, here’s everyone that has messages that haven’t been approved yet. I can pick a person. It’s going to show me the full sequence, and then I can give feedback down here. You’re going to want to give feedback all at once. So that would look like rewrite message one, two, blah, blah, blah. Just so I’m sure what’s going on here. [Michael Houck]: So these are messages that we have sent to Wes. And now we are giving feedback to the AI about how good or bad they were. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Nope. [Catherine McCollian]: These are messages that have not sent to Wes. These are messages that I’ve generated for approval, but have not been approved yet. And so we’re giving feedback on So when you first launch a campaign, it’s gonna say, hey, your campaign’s not launched yet, right? When you first create that campaign, it’s gonna say, hey, your campaign’s not launched yet, please review a sequence. It’s gonna bring you to this view, but you’re only gonna see one person. You’re gonna give feedback, you’re gonna click approve and launch messaging, and then that will trigger message generation for everyone. And then you can preview everyone and say, okay, me train a few more people. When you send feedback in here, and it will regenerate the message based off of your feedback, you’re going to want to send it all at once. Because the thing with AI, and you probably know this, but if you don’t, right, less is more. And it’s not less as in fewer words or say less to it, it’s the amount of times that you regenerate. So if you send each point of feedback as a single message, by the time you’re done, it’s gonna stop listening to the first few ones that you put in, and you’re just gonna be in this like endless cycle of feedback, and you’re never gonna get it out, and it’s gonna start looking really bad. If you ever get there, don’t worry, we can reset it for you, but the way to avoid it is to just send the feedback all at once. As you do that, it’s gonna regenerate all these other messages, and it’s gonna regenerate everything, approval so when you’re ready to approve messages to send you’re gonna go to the messages section you’re gonna come into new approvals and you’re gonna see them all queued up here and any training that you did will be reflected in anything that hasn’t yet been approved okay so then for approving it do we need to manually approve every single one or how does that work you do unless you have autopilot on my goal is to get you to autopilot as fast as possible so that you’re not doing that But if you don’t have autopilot enabled, you would need to approve the sequence for every prospect before it will send. You approve the full sequence at once. So that way, once it’s approved, you don’t have to worry about approving the followups in time and all that stuff. It’s just person by person. This is the third way you can manipulate the AI. You can regenerate individual messages, regenerate full sequences or edit directly. Oftentimes what I see people do is they spend all their time in here and then they get frustrated that they keep giving the same feedback over and over and over again. But that’s because waterfall doesn’t flow backwards. It flows one way, right? So if you’re finding that’s happening, just make sure like do it in the training center first and then come back to your approvals and you should see all those changes made. Cool. Sounds good. Once you have autopilot enabled, you only have to worry about your inbox. So active conversations will always be human in the loop. Once someone replies to you, autopilot is turned off until you reply back. [Michael Houck]: And okay, so just as a point of clarification myself, in this inbox view, we will be able to, anyone on the team will be able to manage all of the correspondence back and forth with the leads, correct? [Catherine McCollian]: As long as they are an admin. So we would need to make And then you’d want to turn on admin view here. And then you get a global inbox. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. [Michael Houck]: Like I added you as an admin already, so you should be able to, to, to do this. [Catherine McCollian]: Yeah. So now you can see like I have actors 3000, right? So this is what already does. He goes through global inbox. There’s like 3000 people. Right. And then what you’d want to do is you’d filter by, um, you’d go to your inbox. You’d filter by status. Let’s let it load. You filter by status and you’d want to hit response ready. And that’s going to pull all the pending response or pending approvals to the top so that you’re not sorting through that. Okay. And then you can see like here is someone. Okay. So in-mail message sent to you. He said, hey, this is good, but we’re not interested. Okay, great. So then you can approve Valley’s response. You could edit the response directly if you want it to be a bit more persistent. You could stop outreach altogether if you didn’t want to reply back to him at all, and that’s going to pull this pending approval out of your inbox. And then the key thing here you want to make sure you’re doing is tagging the prospects. So these are manual tags. Valley does not do this for you. Mostly for organizational purposes, so you can keep track of things. But there are four tags that turn Valley off. So for example, not interested is going to be one of them. And that’s going to take away that response, as you can see. Human handover, this will turn Valley off. This is great for if the conversation leaves LinkedIn, the humans have stepped in, right? Leave it alone. Stop outreach will do the same thing. And then meeting scheduled. Scheduled is probably the most important one because if you have autopilot on, say you send a message back with your calendar link, they book a meeting, nine times out of 10 people won’t tell you that they booked a meeting, they just do it. If they don’t respond back to you within three days, Valley’s going to follow up and you’re on autopilot. So now Valley’s following up with someone that’s booked a meeting and it looks like it’s coming from you. Right. Scheduled is probably the most important filter just to avoid that in general. We do have a little hack so as you’re approving responses if you send a message with your calendar link and you tag them scheduling link sent that will trigger an email which you can then save and on that email there’s a yes or no button and it asks you if they booked a meeting. If you hit yes it will automatically tag the person as meeting scheduled so that way you don’t have to like Okay. [Michael Houck]: Okay. We’ll, we’ll, we’ll figure our own sort of workflows up around all that, but that’s helpful. Um, yeah. Wow. There’s a lot going on in here, but it seems very powerful. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It is. [Catherine McCollian]: It’s a, yeah, there is, there’s a lot once it gets kicked off. And, um, I think the biggest learning curve for people is training the AI. So, um, once you do get sales navigator set up and you have campaigns in there, if you want to meet again to talk about training, I’m happy to do it. If you’re familiar with like prompting AI and using AI models, it shouldn’t be too difficult, but we do find that that is the highest learning curve. So don’t wait too long to reach out. I’m happy to get on another call or just help async in Slack, whatever’s easier for you guys. Cool. Okay. [Michael Houck]: I think we’ll probably jam on this a bit later this week. And then if we run into anything that’s like, hey, we just don’t know, we’ll reach out. And can go from there. [Catherine McCollian]: Oh, and I will find out about sequence templates and I will find out about that post feature question and first degree connections. Is there anything else that I am missing that I need to do and find out for you? [Michael Houck]: Blake, Ben, anything from you guys? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: I don’t know. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, but I’ll definitely be reaching back out to you shortly. Yeah, I would imagine. [Ben Ornstein]: I feel like I need to digest a bit more first. [Catherine McCollian]: thank you for uh normally we don’t normally it’s a little bit more seamless I appreciate you sticking with me through the little hiccups and the product issues um but I’m excited to have you guys on board and um yeah there’s a that little chat functionality too at the bottom I know you guys are in slack but all of our guides are in there and then the ticket the chat system there comes to everyone you probably don’t need to use it since you have a slack group with us but keep that in mind in the back of your head if it’s like super, super urgent and you need help right away, that goes, it notifies every single person. [Michael Houck]: I’ll just, I’ll just text Zade. I’ll be like, yo. [Catherine McCollian]: Sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, but okay. And Catherine, thank you so much for the extra time to do everything with us. [Michael Houck]: We really appreciate it. Um, and, uh, we’ll let you know if any roadblocks come up as we get started the next couple of days. [Catherine McCollian]: Perfect. Sounds great. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Looking forward to it. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Thank you. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: you