The Chat- Building GTM Engines That Drive Inbound on Autopilot with Harris Kenny

Episode Title: The Chat- Building GTM Engines That Drive Inbound on Autopilot with Harris Kenny

Host: Terry Wilson – CEO, Chatmetrics

Guest: Harris Kenny – Founder, OutboundSync 

Episode Summary

In this episode of The Chat, we sit down with Harris Kenny, founder of OutboundSync, to unpack the hidden operational flaws that stall inbound growth-and what to do about them. From his early days scaling LulzBot to $20M, to building systems that clean up CRM chaos, Harris shares actionable tactics that any RevOps, sales, or marketing leader can implement today.

If your GTM stack feels like a pile of duct-taped tools, this is your blueprint for scalable, synced, and smart inbound.

Outbound Drives Inbound (But You Won’t Get Credit)

[00:03:00]

• Cold emails often lead to brand discovery, not direct replies
• Inbound isn’t random. It’s reactive to outbound touches
• Track pageviews, not replies, to measure outbound performance

Why Chat Crushes Cold Forms

[00:05:00]

• Chat outperforms forms on outbound-heavy sites
• Replacing the “Talk to Sales” button with ungated chat boosted leads 21x
• Visitors convert across multiple touchpoints. Chat makes them feel heard sooner

Gating = Death for Cold Traffic

[00:10:00]

• Email gates led to 96% drop-off on a high-intent page
• Humans want conversations, not forms-especially at the top of the funnel
• Simple fix = remove the email requirement

Widget Design Impacts Conversions

[00:11:00]

• Switching from full widget to icon-only chat dropped engagement by 33%
• Bot imagery killed trust-human-first visual = more chats
• Real faces drive trust → especially for early-stage buyers

OutboundSync’s Inbound Flywheel

[00:15:00]

• Grew a hardware company from $1.7M → $20M using inbound & channel
• Used real positioning: compliance, reliability, partner marketing
• Every dollar in was tracked-what got measured got scaled

Positioning = Conversion

[00:33:00]

• Website changed from generic slogans to functional clarity
• “We connect SmartLead to Salesforce.”
• Result = Fewer questions, shorter sales cycles, more demos

Pricing Simplicity Wins

[00:34:00]

• Usage-based pricing tied to outcomes → made it easy for buyers to say “yes”
• Charge by value metrics, not features

Lean Growth Stack (That Actually Works)

[00:54:00]

• Stack = Smartlead, Clay, Make.com, Close CRM
• Only 3 people, but the team lives inside the GTM motion daily
• They dog food every tool they promote

Partnerships > Paid Spend

[01:02:00]

• Inbound from integration and agency partners fuels growth
• Co-marketing = next step (especially with Smartlead, Instantly)
• No outbound SDRs – all sales is inbound driven

GTM Advice for Founders

[01:03:00]

“Don’t dabble. If you’re going to test cold email-test it.”

• Run the experiment fully.
• Most GTM strategies fail not because they don’t work, but because teams go halfway.

Key Takeaways for B2B SaaS & Agencies

• Outbound is the trigger-chat is the conversion.
• Gated CTAs destroy cold traffic performance.
• Buyers don’t trust bots. They trust humans.
• Attribution is broken-but intent data is not.
• Your positioning copy needs to say what you actually do.

Links & Resources:

• Connect with Harris Kenny on LinkedIn

Learn more at outboundsync.com

Terry:

Today on the chat, we’re joined by Harris Kenny, founder of outbound Syn. He’s built everything from factional sales teams to multimillion dollar inbound engines. Harris has scaled hardware company from 1.7 to

01:00-

$20 million, built a HubSpot Gold partner agency and now runs the SaaS that keeps your CRM clean and your GDM stack humming if you care about turning revenue systems into inbound machines.

Terry: 

This is your episode. Welcome to the chat.

Harris:

How’s it going, Terry? Good to speak with you.

Terry: 

Good to see you again, Harris.

Harris: 

Yeah, for sure.

Terry:

Let’s jump straight into it. You’ve worn every GTM hat, founder, AE marketer. What’s your personal definition of a winning outbound strategy in 2025?

Harris: 

Well, I think that there are probably a couple of things. When we see people winning, we work with a lot of companies now that are essentially like scaling up, and they’ve got some traction, and then when they use our products, it’s because they want that data into their CRM. So I do think we have a pretty good vantage point about working and scaling in terms of approaches where you’re generating leads for teams.

Harris:

The first thing is point solutions. People are getting an edge by choosing specialty tools that do certain things really well. I think

02:00-

There was a period where the all-in-one was working, but deliverability and data quality and other challenges, I think that. There’s at least one, if not a series of point solutions that people are adopting to either land in the inbox or keep their social connections and automate some social activity or build better lists or whatever.

Harris:

So I think that’s one thing. I think the next is omnichannel. So people aren’t just relying on a single channel anymore. They’re testing multiple channels and then connecting multiple channels. So if they get a positive reply to an email, they’re calling them immediately. And we have partners who, who have even hired people to do that, to show, Hey, look, you know, we’re gonna treat a reply to an email as a, as a signal, but it’s not the end.

Harris: 

It’s the beginning of now. It’s the end of the beginning,

Terry: 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Harris:

Have this process to try to convert that. Lead and using every channel available to do that. and then having visibility across channels, knowing that they may come in through another way. They may come in inbound, they

03:00-

came, may come in through chat, they may come in through some other way, but they had gotten an email or they had gotten a cold call.

Harris: 

And so we wanna be kind of cognizant of that. So those are probably the two things. And then, the third thing I, I can’t not say it, but it’s just volume. just who are winning a lot are just taking a lot of shots, you know, I mean, and that’s like a trope back to name the famous athlete. They’ve said something along the lines of, you know, you gotta take a lot of shots, kind of thing.

Harris: 

And so those are probably the three things right now that I’m seeing across our users. And especially just looking at what we’re seeing with agencies. And each of our agencies are serving, you know, anywhere from a couple to dozens of clients or more. Um, so yeah, that’s, that’s what I’m seeing right now.

Terry:

And so you mentioned inbound. I asked the question specifically about outbound, but inbound. Are you seeing anything specifically in inbound in terms of a winning strategy?

Harris: 

Well, so outbound and inbound are connected more than ever. I think that what’s happening now is people are, you know, to borrow a phrase, they’re doing their own research. So they get a reply or they get a cold email and they go to the domain directly. They

04:00-

Check it out, and then they’ll forward it through Slack to someone on their team, then that person will come inbound and engage with the chat or book a meeting or download a piece of content or something like that.

Harris: 

And so we definitely are seeing inbound and outbound are converging a bit. Now that, that’s a little bit of where we sit. Obviously we work with a lot of companies on HubSpot and Salesforce, and so they do have these integrated systems. But I think that. The companies need to be able to connect the dots there and see, hey, this is where this lead came from.

Harris: 

This is the context. It’s not just a random lead. It’s actually someone who, we built a list to engage them. They got a very specific offer and they’re expecting maybe a higher level of engagement from us because, ‘ cause we’re the one that started the conversation. and so we, you know, we see that as a rule of thumb for every 10 leads that one of our agencies are generating for their customers.

Harris: 

There’s often another 10 that are being influenced by outbound and converting in some other way or engaging in some other channel. so yeah, I definitely think there’s a convergence happening between outbound and inbound and it, it makes that attribution conversation a lot more

05:00-

Complicated and, and it raises the stakes for engaging with those inbound leads, because that cost of that lead is actually a lot higher than clicking a single Google ad.

Terry: 

Absolutely. We’re actually, you talk about a convergence where we are seeing, I mentioned before that we’ve launched a new offer really for websites with under a thousand visitors. Well, it’s probably more aimed at websites and businesses that are only doing outbound. ‘ cause what we’re finding is that when you’re doing outbound, exactly what you said, they’ve, you’ve peaked their interest.

Terry: 

The you’re only gonna be outbounding to your ICP. You’ve piqued their interest. They come to the domain of the website. If there’s chat there, they’re engaging with the chat. We’re finding the conversion rates through chat on those websites with less traffic is, that is purely an outbound play organization, is phenomenally higher then your traditional, you know, one to two, 3% depending on the, the quality of the traffic that’s coming in Overall from advertising and SEO, it’s been quite an eye opener for me.

Harris:

So we didn’t coordinate or discuss this ahead of time at all. So

Terry: 

No, no,

Harris:

For

Terry:

No.

Harris:

Who’s like, what’s going on here? But, but, but I mean,

06:00-

That doesn’t, it actually doesn’t surprise me to hear that, and I think it’s a really sharp play by you because I mean, we totally see that happen. People, they take that domain, they forward it internally and basically, I mean, there’s like a basic attribution problem where most of these sales engagement platforms, they don’t have a company object.

Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris: 

They just have leads. And leads can be members of campaigns.

Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris: 

And so just like at the most basic data model level, there’s not this idea of, oh, well, I’m engaging with multiple people within a company, or there might be a conversion event that happens with a different person at the company. but where that hits reality is when that second person visits the site, hits the chat, and then that new contact has created in the CRM and the c m’s.

Harris: 

Like, wait, hold on. This company already exists. We sent them a cold email today, this morning.

Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris: 

so, so the CRM is where that reconciliation happens, you know, between the two, between the different data models and, and so to, so to, to me, like that

07:00-

Chat touch point or that immediate inbound touch touchpoint, becomes really important because that, that, that, that’s where an outbound program can go from losing money to making money.

Harris: 

You know, it just takes a couple of converted leads and all of a sudden, like everything that you did actually was right, and it made sense, and you built a good list and you had good copy. They just weren’t like. Sitting at their inbox, waiting for your email, and then immediately being like, can we talk right now?

Harris: 

You know what I

Terry: 

Surprise, surprise,

Harris: 

Yeah. Yeah. They

Terry:

Surprise.

Harris: 

have a life or a family or what some other loser things going on

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Harris:

Waiting to hear from us, you know? Which is, which is shocking and disappointing, but apparently people are busy and so yeah, I mean that like totally tracks and frankly, I’ve not seen a lot of great,solutions for that.

Harris: 

I mean even when we see this problem surface,it’s just the beginning of them becoming problem aware. So, so to me that’s like a super smart angle for chat metrics.

Terry: 

I, and you know that your comment then, and again, we haven’t prepared this, before, but your comment specifically around, they’re only just becoming problem aware. We’re finding they’re not necessarily converting on the first

08:00-

Chat. They’re not, we can tell when it’s the same person coming back. Obviously we ask for their name, but we certainly don’t ask for any contact details or anything along those lines, which might scare them off.

Terry: 

And those anonymous conversations, they share so much more information with than once they know that they’ve been identified. And so on that basis. We see people come back 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 10 times in some cases, where each time you can see that the questions they’re asking a little bit more advanced, they’re asking, you know, going from the initial feature set questions to what does onboarding look like, what earlier they’re locking contracts, et cetera.

Terry: 

You know, you can see the psychology of the person as they’re doingtheir research. it’s been really interesting. It seems to be much more obvious on those web, smaller websites, or the companies that are only doing the outbound because you see people that come through that journey.

Terry:

The only reason they get there is because there’s been a cold outbound reach. And so they are very often, very early in that stage of awareness as opposed to clients that have, you know, big advertising budgets and, and SEO actions going on

09:00-

Where, you know, there’s people coming in that are already well down the funnel in many cases.

Terry: 

Yeah, so it’s been, it certainly has been interesting from, that perspective. You mentioned

Harris: 

I mean

Terry: 

the.

Harris:

Totally. The idea of the anonymous engagement being higher, giving them a chance to kind of kick the tires a little bit. I mean, for sure. It’s a process. People have to go through a process to get to know you, and if you start the conversation from scratch, you know, you gotta give them time to work through it.

Harris: 

Right.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah. And look, there’s three pieces of shocking information that I’ve found in the last, I’ll call it 12 months, but more recently, like two of them came in the last six months. Firstly, we were sitting in qualified software for one of our clients, 15,000 visitors a month.

Terry: 

And, we’re de generating two to three leads a month. And I said to the cmo, there’s a disconnect here. We’re not getting the level of engagement we should be. Can you please check your chat bot? They had the chat bot set up on the front end, did you wanna speak to support? Do You wanna speak to sales?

Terry: 

And they speak to sales. It was a case of, just give us your email address in case you get dropped off. Well, I asked them to check the

10:00-

Drop off. At that point, 96% of people that said they wanted to speak with sales were dropping off when they were asked for the email address. And so it’s like the traffic was way too early in that process to get to the point of wanting to hand over any contact details.

Terry: 

So they switched it off. We, the lead, count went to over 60 a month. We 21 times, we increased the lead generation by on that particular site. So the impact of havingan email address at the front end of anything, whether it’s in a form or whether it’s in any sort of, chat bot or any type of conversion process, has much more of a negative impact.

Terry: 

It’s not gonna be that much for everybody. Their traffic was very early stages on the sites where there’s. Outbound is driving the inbound, I’m sure it would be a very similar level because of the lower, more problem aware than, or even, you know, low problem aware, let alone solution aware.

Harris: 

They’ve wisened up to the game. They’re like,

Harris:

if I put my email in here, you’re gonna just like bombard me.

Terry:

Yep. Yeah, we’ve taught ’em,

Harris:

I just have a question. I don’t want to get like a daily

11:00-

newsletter. And you know, it’s like.

Terry: 

I don’t want some SDR chasing me around for the next six months in inbox. the other two factors were that even simple changes like changing the chat widget from a rectangle, just the old basic rectangle look that says, Hey, we’re here 24 7, or it’s a real per chat with a real person, changing that to a bubble, reduced engagement by 33%.

Harris: 

Hmm.

Terry: 

And if I went one step further and put either a chat bot, like a bot head or a brain in there to signify ai. actually reduced engagement to just over 50%, 51% less chats. and so we were talking earlier and, you know, we’ve sort of had to go through our own moment of, of, you know, do we actually have a business here with staffed live chat given AI and where it’s coming and where it’s going.

Terry:

That’s the research we’ve done across 93% of our clients. And so very, very strong correlation that people wanna speak to a human looker. Another piece just for everybody to have a look at quickly is, exploding topics. If you’re familiar with that, just Google it. You’ll find

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Them, get on their email list.

Terry: 

They’ve recently done some research around the level of trust of, AI chatbots, uh, which has been fascinating. 80, 82%. People don’t trust them. And, and yet less than 8% actually verify the source. And so the conclusion you can almost draw from that is, look, it’s a necessarily evil. We don’t trust it.

Terry: 

It’s there. We’ll listen to what it says, but we’ll take it with a grain of salt. Not that we, not, that we are gonna be bothered enough to go and trust it that way. I might as well just gone and done the research myself. So, and I think that’s a bit of a, again, that differentiator with having a human in there versus talking to a machine.

Terry: 

So anyway.

Harris:

Totally. Yeah. sure. to me it’s like these tools are converged, these platforms and these go-to market technologies are converging. And at some point you’ve gotta say that if generating new business is important, we’re gonna spend some like human effort on converting those leads.

Harris: 

I know that other people don’t necessarily feel that way. I guess for us, for our product, for our positioning, just, I think it’s valuable we get that feedback from people when they work with us.

Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris: 

I think there’s something to

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be said for it. And, you know, I’ve had some pretty negative experiences going through the whole AI thing myself as, especially in support where it’s like, I’ve been a customer for two years, a pits company, like many thousands of dollars and, the AI is making up something that’s not real, that I know is not real.

Harris: 

And I’ve, and I’m actually. Got a bug here that needs to be escalated to their engineering team, and instead it’s telling me to do something that’s not possible. It’s just

Terry:

Mm

Harris: 

I think that, I dunno, I mean, AI is, we use it in a lot of ways. We’re looking at a service tool that’ll allow us to suggest AI responses, but we’ll have a human review it and then execute it.

Harris: 

And so I think it’ll save us time, but still give us that personal touch and that like, level of qa. But maybe I’m very naive. I everyone keeps saying this is the worst it’s gonna be. And, you know, maybe, I don’t know.

Terry: 

Yeah,

Terry:

Only get better from here. that’s what everyone’s saying. I mean I hope that’s the case.

Terry: 

I mean, there are natural limits on like the physical world and AI is not magic.

Harris: 

It’s actually uses energy and

14:00-

There’s bandwidth. you know, there’s a lot of speculative money being poured into the space with the idea that it’ll all be profitable later. And maybe that doesn’t happen. I mean, sometimes things don’t get better forever. Sometimes you have this great experience and then it gets worse over time.

Harris: 

So we’ll have to see how it all shakes out. I mean, I’m an early adopter. I’ve been using Chad GPT for a long time. Incorporating it in our business in like some really specific ways, but I don’t think that like, it’s gonna take over everything, but maybe I’ll be wrong and, I’ll be crying in a year from now.

Harris: 

I don’t know. We’ll see.

Terry:

Well, we’ll all know in time, you know, whether it’s sooner or later, we’ll see. But, I guess there’ll be a point, I think, I think That there’s gonna be a turning point. It’ll be, it’ll come down to two, two factors. The organizations will be pushing as hard as they can for total adoption and market dominance and, and obviously because they’re all revenue driven.

Terry: 

I think the two fail safes for us when it comes to the government, and the regulations they put in place and ourselves as adoption, what we will and what we won’t accept and what, you know, what we’ll engage with. So I think there’s sort of the two biggest

15:00-

Obstacles that AI has gotta overcome at the moment, let alone all the other issues with energy and so forth.

Terry: 

Yeah.

Terry: 

At, at SBO you grew from 1.7 million to 20 million with a big chunk, through channel and inbound. What was the flywheel that made that work?

Harris: 

Yeah. Well, you know, the 3D printing industry was really growing really quickly at the time. there had been an open source project called the wrap Wrap project that had about, and the idea with it was to build a self-replicating. Rapid prototyper. In other words, a machine that could make itself.

Terry:

Oh, wow.

Harris: 

at the University of Bath in the UK as, like a kind of an academic experimental project. And it started to really get momentum and then it, it basically created what is today the desktop 3D printing industry. And, we were a player in that space. We had a specific positioning around reliability.

Harris: 

Our machines were made in Colorado at the time. Now the company’s in North Dakota. But, we had a positioning around reliability and just that like the machines would just work and that they

16:00-

Were open so you could understand how they worked and you could modify them and things like that. We had very good customer support we had also invested in compliance around testing of the equipment.

Harris: 

Which very few companies in the space had been doing at the time. And so when enterprise buyers would come in and they would have requirements around what electronics they were allowed to purchase, it turns out that a lot of the machines that were on the market didn’t pass compliance standards. we had invested in that and we had had some really great electrical engineers who us meet those standards.

Harris: 

So, I think that we had like a spot. And then because of that spot, there were partners in the market that wanted to carry our machines because we met those requirements as a manufacturer. we were really successful on Amazon, which is a pretty tough marketplace, you know, with reviews and things like that.

Harris:

But I think because of the quality, we were able to be pretty successful there. and the people would buy one machine and then they would see how well it worked. And, you know, a school would then want to outfit like a whole lab. we would come back and say, okay, we got a grant. We wanna buy a pallet of machines.

Harris: 

We wanna

17:00-

Get like 12 of these things and we’re gonna fill a room with them and we’ve got little Chromebooks that’s gonna, that are gonna control ’em and, and we’re gonna have all the kids be able to 3D print something in

Terry: 

Mm-hmm.

Harris: 

or whatever. So there, there were a lot of kind of drivers of the growth there.

Harris: 

I think that we had really great people and I think we had really high quality. And I thinkthat was why we had the position that we had in the market. because there was a race to the bottom in terms of cost. And I think that there were people for whom these parts, these prototyping parts were really valuable.

Harris: 

And so they were willing to pay a premium to get the that were gonna be up and reliable so that they could print them and a lower cost than machines that they had been buying before, which were a factor of 10 x more expensive. And so

Terry: 

Hmm. Hmm.

Harris:

When the desktop machines, if they were at a 10th of the price, people were willing to take a shot on it.

Harris: 

On them versus the more industrial enterprise machines that started at 20 k and up when we were like, Hey, this one’s 2000. They were like, you know what? Honestly, that’s so cheap. We might as well give it a go.

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris: 

So yeah, there were a lot of factors. that was five years of a a lot of

18:00-

Work. building that thing up, that was tough.

Harris: 

We did CES, we scaling to 150 people. that was a whole thing.

Terry: 

it’s easy when you say it fast, isn’t it?

Harris: 

Yeah. Yeah. Totally.

Terry: 

very interestingly, so I mean, from a marketer’s perspective, There was almost a little bit of a perfect storm there as well because at the particular point in time, when I say perfect storm, strategically, you guys saw an opportunity, there was demand in the market and not just demand to solve a problem, but something that was getting a lot of publicity at the time, a lot of people were speaking about it.

Terry: 

So the awareness of not just the problem, but also the solution, this solution was, was growing dramatically. and so being able to be in a position strategically where you took that extra step to get the specifications at the right level. And meet the codes and requirements, open the market that you had access to.

Terry: 

And so then, I mean, look, that sounds like a, a perfect storm on the front end. Obviously you have to get everything right on the back end then to deliver. it’s everything in an organization where you’re selling actual, a real

19:00-

hard product. There’s the logistics, the manufacturing, the delivery, the inventory levels, availability, stockouts, et cetera, et cetera.

Harris: 

We did well, I’m trying to remember. We, Like one of the partners that we had, this is kind of in your neck of the woods, but we sold through U Mart. so you know, we had a location, we had a distribution center in Sydney, and we actually did a little bit of, got some traction in the Australian market.

Harris:

We got some traction in Canada and the UK market. I think that we had a, a cool position. I think the timing was right. We also had venture backed, competitors who helped grow the market

Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris:

A lot of money on PR and getting people excited about 3D printing and custom fabrication.

Harris: 

And we were not venture backed. and so, you know, we had to kind of stay in our lane and we could only do what we could do. was just certain as we grew, we were able to take bigger and bigger bets, but in general, we, we had constraint and buying

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris: 

ahead of time and putting ’em together and then putting ’em in boxes and shipping ’em around the world.

Harris: 

We definitely had, we were definitely capital constrained for sure, which was tough.

20:00- Terry:

And, and so then what do you see the main differences in penetrating a market with that business to now, your current business without bsy? What, what are the main differences you see then?

Harris: 

Yeah, I mean, gosh, nobody’s asked about Wbos in seven years, so this is just like a fun, fun thing. I mean, truly, like I haven’t done interview or a conversation about Haven a conversation about this in, in seven years.

Terry:

Maybe it’s because you, you know,you’ve been in, in like the SaaS world, the tech world for, for the last seven years. I spent a long career in the steel industry in Australia, so I’m always fascinated by real products. You know, something that, is actually moving around, you know, packs of steel as opposed to packs of data.

Terry: 

So it’s like,

Harris: 

I mean, for sure. I would say my heart was definitely, it was awesome. I mean, the manufacturing floor, seeing the opportunity that that creates for people

Terry:

Hmm.

Harris-

who didn’t even graduate high school. And then after they worked for us for some time, they were supervisors, you know, and their pay went up accordingly and created great

21:00-

opportunity for themselves.

Harris: 

I mean, it’s a really interesting thing if, if people haven’t worked in a manufacturing company before, you know, you see all the different parts of the company come together, you’ve got marketing means a very different thing when they’re needing to talk to the engineer about physically what packaging is actually possible.

Harris: 

Right? And then you’ve

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris: 

to the assembly folks, about like, well, I’m not gonna put that together, that’s gonna take me way too long. Like we, you know, and so you have a different definition of constraints in that environment in a way that I thought really gave a lot of different people really exciting opportunities.

Harris:

And so, it felt very, it was very rewarding for sure. It was very hard, but it was very rewarding work and it really felt like we were creating opportunity in ways that, felt great. Like you really felt you went in every day, and you were doing so.

Terry: 

You know, you’ve, you’ve mentioned, probably the single most rewarding aspect that I found of my role and my career grew, you know, dramatically. I started off as a, an accountant, then a backward step into a sales role. And the sales manager that I used to give a hard time about not hitting his budget, all of a sudden he was

22:00-

My boss and then drew along, you know, a career, executive management.

Terry: 

I ran businesses, ran regional businesses, ran state businesses, general manager of a $300 million business with,within national sales and marketing manager, a billion dollar business. So you really get to see a lot of the business and understand everything from, you know, all aspects of the process.

Terry: 

And when you’re in, in manufacturing environment, it starts with real product to customer, you know, strategic account management. Sothe exposure you get across the board is just phenomenal. But the most rewarding thing for me was exactly what you’ve mentioned, and that is seeing people that don’t necessarily fit the right model for a particular role, but they come in and they just shine, and then you’re able to promote them and see their own careers flourish.

Terry: 

And, you know, they might have had their educational opportunities that, others have had. And yet when you see them actually performing in the workplace, you realize that sometimes it’s not all always about the educational opportunities that they’ve had. You know, it’s a lot about what’s inside as well, so.

Terry: 

Mm-hmm.

Harris: 

Yeah, absolutely. It was really, really meaningful for sure.

23:00-

Well, I’ll tell, this is a little steal steel fact for you. My first, deal that I closed back, so I, I had been doing like policy work and then I switched to, I took myself like kind of a step backwards into his, basically an entry level sales role in 2013.

Harris: 

But my first deal that I closed was with Nucor Steel,

Terry: 

Ah,

Harris: 

Steel

Terry:

yeah, no,

Harris: 

went down there to close the deal and we went into the office and I had, they, they had like, they have like smaller, facilities. They have like kinda more specialty steel that they make. But I, we were in like our suits and they were like, Hey, you know, we don’t really dress like that around here.

Harris: 

You know, after lunch you guys should go to the hotel and you know, please change it into something more comfortable and we’ll wrap up our meetings for the day. And, you could tell like they, they weren’t telling us what to do, but they were definitely like. You know, we, this isn’t how we operate. So,

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah.

Harris:

But so I turned to the, sales who I was working on that deal with, and, I was like, Hey man, like, I don’t have, I don’t have any other pants.

Harris: 

Like these are the only pants I have. So I went to, we went to a feedlot

24:00-

Store I got a pair of jeans at this, like basically, you know, feed store and I remember like asking the CFO like, Hey, can I like expense these, these, because at the time I was literally not making money. I mean, I was skipping lunch to save money.

Harris: 

I mean, I was like, it was tight, tight, tight, tight, tight money situation. And anyway, we ended up closing that deal. I’ve still got like a copy of that check, you know, somewhere sitting around my office. but it was so cool seeing that steel facility. I mean, it got so dang hot and, that felt like, Terraforming. I mean, it felt like, oh, this is like, humanity’s ability to like bend and shape things. there was just like a raw power to it that was pretty overwhelming. I mean,I’ve never had any experience like that in my life besides that facility tour. I mean, I still remember kind of the whole thing.

Harris:

it was really something powerful. It was cool.

Terry:

I’ve been blessed to have been in the steel industry in Australia and seen everything from raw materials right through to finished product. as much as I’ve been in our large port, steel making facility over here at Port Kemler where it’s

25:00-

literally, you know, the old fashioned iron ore co coal make steel, pour it out of the, of that into make the big ingots.

Terry:

And that was impressive. But there is something that was even more impressive. And that is a small steel making plant, owned by Com Steel at the time in Newcastle. I had a meeting with the general manager there, and it’s an electric arc furnace. And so there is a rod that is 30 centimeters in diameter.

Terry: 

It’s a carbon rod that gets lowered from above into a large pot of scrap steel, and they use an arc of electricity to melt the steel. And the general manager said, come, I, I wanna show you something. And like, we were 400 meters on the other side of the plant. He said, come with me, I wanna show you something.

Terry: 

So we walked all the way through the plant, up and down the walkways, the stairs, and, you know, with the high vis stuff on. And we went into the room, the control room, which is virtually 20 feet away from wherethis rod goes down into the, and, he said to the controller, I’m in, I’ve got control of the person, you know, the safety aspect of it because you’re not

26:00-

Really supposed to open that door while it’s going.

Harris: 

yeah. Yeah.

Terry: 

And he opened the door. And to feel this shaft of electricity that was 30 centimeters wide, that’s been driven from the electric arc down into the steel, the energy that you could feel on your chest as each, you know, it was like a lightning bolt that was 30 centimeters around. It was the, to this day, steel is the most impactful thing I’ve ever seen in my life when it comes to human beings.

Terry: 

Being able to generate o ongoing stuff to manufacture. Sure there’s bombs and explosions and that type of thing, but actually controlling that amount of energy to create something was phenomenal. For me, it was phenomenal. Mm.

Harris: 

To very different but very parallel

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah,

Harris:

I mean, I remember, so the facility we went to was in, uh, jut Texas, but they, I remember like, they had a big safety culture at Nucor. And so every time, you know, when you went to Wherever’s, like there were these certain points where they would have pictures of everyone’s families and kids and spouses and different people who, you know, basically it was like, Hey, these are the people that we’re working for that we want

27:00-

to get home to.

Harris: 

And there’s really, really strong safety culture, around that industry. Because like, to your point, like, I mean, you can, can really, I mean,

Terry: 

There’s no, second chances with steel. If a ton of ton of steel drops on you. you are dead. It’s as simple as that.

Harris: 

get

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah.

Harris:

And uh, it’s game

Terry:

Yep.

Harris: 

So yeah, it was really interesting. And so the funny thing about some of these experiences and then kind of bringing in some of that like intensity to kind of what we do today, but I do think that like there are similarly important outcomes for the work that like we’re doing now, especially around new business development.

Harris: 

And I remember when that deal closed, back in the office and I told the team like, Hey, like the deal, this deal’s moving forward. And I remember over the cubicle, the person who was like assigned the analyst who was assigned to this ERP project, she, I remember her like starting her work and being like, she’s working because of me, because I closed this deal.

Harris: 

I mean, obviously like it’s the brand and it’s a team effort, but you know, it was my account and I went in and I convinced them that we could help them on this project. And I’ve, so, you know,It’s like levels of multiple, levels of

28:00-

abstraction away from what some of these things feel a little bit more like elemental, like literally, you know?

Harris: 

But, I do think the work is still important. Uh, but it is, it’s so abstracted away. Sometimes it feels so abstract that it’s hard to wrap your head around, okay, what are we doing here? But when you see, okay, you know, the team’s hiring or someone just got a promotion or they can go do this thing for their family, that’s when you kind of drive home like, okay, yeah, these are tangible outcomes.

Harris: 

But it’s not the same thing as seeing, you know, slapping something into a box and shipping it out and being like, okay, this is going to Brisbane or whatever, you know? So yeah. Anyways. Interesting season of life for sure.

Terry:

It look, and I think a lot of it comes down to, what is your why? Like, our why in business is a million jobs. You know, we, through our own business, it’s growing. We’re employing more people. As much as AI is there, we’ll use AI to multiply, not to eradicate, but helping other businesses grow as well through what we do.

Terry:

You know, it as part of our mission to help generate a million jobs. I mean, we’ve got an internal, you know, academy ourselves where we take people that haven’t got an education and we’re

29:00-

Actually teaching them skills, web development, graphic artistry, et cetera. We pay them while we teach them and we use them for project internal projects to make that work.

Terry: 

And then we teach them how to commercialize that themselves, whether it’s through Freelancer or their Upwork. They wanna go and, apply for jobs. We show ’em how to do a resume. They don’t, they haven’t left, nobody’s left us yet. They’ve stayed with us, which is great, great. And that’s the preferred outcome for us.

Terry: 

But we still teach ’em the entire skillset. They need to be financially independent. So,

Harris: 

Well, that’s like the classic LinkedIn. CFO, like what if we invest in our people and they leave, and then like, CEO, well, what if we invest in our people? What if we don’t invest and they don’t, or whatever.

Terry:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, And they stay Yeah, that’s right.

Harris: 

or whatever. I obviously haven’t read this LinkedIn

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris: 

Times to remember it, but, I think that, that like skill building and stuff, it’s really tangible and I mean, obviously it says a lot to the culture, the fact that you’re retaining great folks there, right?

Harris: 

I mean,

Terry:

Yeah, yeah,

Harris: 

to do. I don’t think

Terry:

It’s not. And I think, you know, the

Terry: 

First and foremost, I remember, I’m not gonna say the date. No, truly. It was,

30:00-

in in 1996, I think it was, I was in Sydney at a, at a conference. very early in my career and I’d seen, I was there to see Bob Ansett speak about, you know, he, the founder of budget rent cards. And, I was there to see him speak about his business philosophy.

Terry: 

And I’ll never forget the one thing, the one thing that stands out the most of all the things he said. He said, you know, first and foremost we’re in the people business.

Harris: 

Hmm.

Terry: 

And that has just sort of stuck with me my entire life. It just resonated at the time. And, I’ve had a fascination never since with behavioral science.

Terry: 

You know, you wanna get the best outta people. How do you do that? And it’s all about, Treating them the right way.and, sometimes you have to be assertive and you’ve gotta be blunt and say things that people don’t want to hear. If they need to adjust what they’re doing for the best outcome of themselves and all stakeholders, whether it’s the organization, even family, but, I think you know, we can never forget that, we are a bunch of humans sitting on this big rock.

Terry: 

And so it’s always gonna be about, first and foremost about the people. so.

Harris: 

I

Terry:

Look,

Harris: 

I think so. Definitely. I, I would say I totally agree.

31:00- Terry: 

You mentioned the link in the quote before. what role do you think your own content, whether it’s LinkedIn or podcast, plays in driving inbound, demand for outbound sync, inbound demand for outbound sync? it’s almost the, just the position.

Harris:

It’s huge for us. It’s huge for us. I mean, our business is built on relationships. We work with, sales engagement platforms. We work with growth agencies. We work with their clients. We work with, CRM, you know, and, developer relations and partner relations teams. so having a personal brand around that and a name and a face, matters a lot.

Harris: 

I think it’s a really big part of our success. So there’s this concept of like founder market fit that I think that applies. I mean, I, I’m not saying I’m the only person that could build outbound sync or at least have started it, but I do think that it’s at the convergence of a lot of things that I was working on for quite a few years.

Harris: 

And so it makes sense that I started it. And so I just have a lot of experience, you know, I mean, I was one of the first clay experts, one of the first smart lead experts, just one of the

Terry: 

I remember. I remember

Harris:

Tools.

Terry:

You go through all of that process. Yeah.

Harris: 

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

32:00-

So, so I think that the personal brand represented through content matters and the storytelling and just the perspective and the experience and the credibility and the trust that comes with like, Hey, I’ve like been doing this for a little bit.

Harris:

Like, we’ve thought about these things and this is why we’re approaching it this way.I think it’s really important, for sure, and I think it extends through to our CS team as well, who, we’ve got a really strong, person there working with customers and they love working with them. And so, yeah.

Harris: 

I, I think it’s a big part of our success. Definitely. I can’t, can’t, deny that and just say, the product itself is so exceptional that it sells itself, that is not the case.

Terry:

What’s the smartest thing that you’ve done? To increase, inbound pipeline velocity. So it’s to get inbound is one thing, but obviously, you know the velocity, the speed.

Harris: 

Well, I think that probably from an outbound sync perspective, the most effective thing we did, and this can probably be traced back to some earlier experiences as well, but it was niching down our positioning to make it really clear who we are and what we do and trying to use really plain language to describe what we do.

33:00- Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris:

There’s a guy, Anthony p on LinkedIn, who talks about positioning a lot. Leanna Patch is also a copywriter. She’s really good who I follow on LinkedIn and I’ve had a chance to hear them both speak at MicroComp and, think that that because, ’cause people can sort of slot them in themselves into what we do because, because we’re explaining to them in plain terms, we’re a small company, to make a very specific product and therefore we’re not making this like grand, lofty, ambitious promise that we’re gonna like help you run revenue.

Harris: 

We’re some of these other taglines that some of these big go to market technology companies position themselves on because they have such broad set of jobs to be done. You know, we say look, we connect, if you’re using Smart Lead and Salesforce app on Sync gets the data between those two systems. That’s what we do.

Harris: 

We connect those two systems. We’re an integration between those two tools. Like that’s it. here’s what you can do with it. You can route replies, you can build reports and get attribution. You can manage block lists. Like there are things that you do with that connection, but fundamentally it’s a data sync.

Harris: 

We provide that as a service and I think that increases the velocity because

34:00-

People understand really quickly like what is we do. And I think the better we, I’ve been at telling that story through our website, the better. Inbound quality. we get,

Terry:

yeah,

Terry:

And the velocity of course, when people can see, when your messaging is clear in terms of what you do and who you do it for, then the people that need it, that fit in the who component come in bound. Of course, velocity is gonna improve. I mean, you’re talking to the audience that needs what you’ve got, know, who you are and that fit your buyer profile as well.

Harris:

Definitely. And

Terry: 

Yeah, of course.

Harris: 

Pricing was part of that too. We overhauled our pricing and that made a big difference too, of like, therefore this is what we charge for.

Terry: 

Mm-hmm.

Harris: 

between here and there. You’re sending emails. We charge you for how many emails you send. what our billing is. Before it was like very complicated and people just didn’t get it.

Harris: 

And so. That I, I would say the positioning combined with pricing is a change we did in the spring that has made a really significant difference in terms of our inbound efficiency, velocity and inbound

35:00-

Quality. Because like, okay, I get what you do. I get what you charge. I have a couple questions kind of thing.

Terry:

So just on the pricing, where did you come from? Was it a subscription based model or what, what was your pricing model that you’ve shifted now, obviously to usage based,

Terry:

Which is VA value based.

Harris:

At the very beginning it was 500 a month because when I started building this two years ago, I wouldn’t take a project for fewer than five. Fewer than $500, basically. So it’s like, all right, well let’s try that. I mean, it was just totally arbitrary really in a lot of

Harris:

And then we moved into tiers and I was trying feature gating where it was like, okay, well if you need this specific feature in Salesforce, you need to be on our. Enterprise plan or whatever. I just found that that didn’t really track with reality. It was basically people who send more, pay more.

Harris:

That number makes sense to them. It tracks with the number of inboxes they’re creating with the size of the lists that they’re building, with the size of a sales engagement platform account plan that they need. And so our metric is kind of more attached on that side than it is

36:00-

On the CRM side where it’s per user seat because

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris:

Have a user seat con like situation.

Harris: 

That’s not how our product works.

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris:

Looked at other bigger data provider products and how they charge. So even like all the way up to like Snowflake and Twilio and it was like, okay, this is kind of what we do. It’s different, but it’s close enough, and how do they bill? And that was kind of how it, it ended up making more sense to be like, okay, you know, we’re an infrastructure product essentially we should charge accordingly.

Harris: 

Um, yeah.

Terry: 

You know, it’s fascinating, our pricing. So we’ve been in August, we’ve been running for a decade.

Harris: 

Wow.

Terry: 

Our pricing level has changed over the years. And even now, it’s often customized depending on the demand and requirements of the customer. So we don’t have set pricing. We’ve got one offer that we have set pricing on that for the, for the predominant outbound place, you know, with less than a thousand visitors a month.

Terry: 

But the per lead pricing and the no locking

37:00-

Contract we’ve had for a decade, and it’s been the core pricing all the way through the price we charge per lead changes and the price we charge for setup changes depending on the complexity involved. But we’ve found that, and even now it’s, I laugh. I see, uh, Manny Medina who’s moved out of, outreach and started his own business now where he is helping SaaS businesses.

Terry:

Change their billing from a subscription model to a value delivery model. And it’s like, this big new thing, and everyone’s gotta put a spin on what they do. I get it. And I couldn’t help myself. I did one comment on his post, one of his first posts that says, Yeah.

Terry: 

We’ve been doing this pricing for a decade, man, you know, you’re just catching up, type thing.

Terry:

But it’s one of those things that, again, drawing on my experience from the steel industry, very low profit, product. and so it’s vertically integrated, but the, the distribution then where we were very extraordinarily low profit, product. And you’re competing, with an Australian made product, against imports.

Terry: 

And so the whole focus was about delivering value and how do you make sure that what you’re delivering from a service perspective, from a quality perspective, from the whole experience is,

38:00-

And, and where can you add value over and beyond. And so they’ve brought that into this business that the whole focus is about delivering value.

Terry:

And if we’re not delivering value, then you. I don’t wanna have somebody in a locking contract for 12 months that doesn’t wanna be there. Um, you know, they’ll tell 10 people how bad it is versus, you know, I’d rather than just tell one piece of one, one extra person how good it is. And, uh, I think that charging for value model resonates and looking strategically was we made the call on the basis that we wanna make sure that our sales process has as little obstacles as possible.

Harris: 

Yeah.

Terry:

And when you, when you charge on a value process, model, people get it, like you said, they get it. We, I use it more. I should be paying more, I use it less. I wanna pay less. and so that was, you very aligned with what you just said with regards to your pricing and is the new pricing, obviously it’s resonating, you’re saying that’s helping you.

Terry:

Are you finding any areas that you still want to tweak? Are you getting pushback from anywhere?

Harris: 

Uh, on pricing specifically,

Terry:

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Whether it’s the model or the, the level.

Harris:

I think that, well, we have agency

39:00-

pricing, and then we have direct user pricing. And so our agency pricing is, is different because they’re adding a lot more value for the clients. And those, and their clients are also already. Paying a lot for a lot of other things. And so pricing is different On the agency side.

Harris: 

We charge per client generally, rather than on a sending volume basis.

Terry: 

Mm-hmm.

Harris: 

I mean we’re, I’m always testing different price points and like, does it make sense for us to have a, a plan that’s lower volume and lower price basically. I think that there’s a version of the product where we’ll be able to stop being so hands-on right now to use our product, you have to get on a sales call with me and you basically have to get onboarded by our CSM and I think that we could, I think we’re approaching the point where that won’t be necessary that’ll open up a different motion for us in terms of go to market and

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris:

I think there will be some engineering required to get the product there from just a usability perspective. People are very sensitive about their CRM as you know. And so we built some friction into that process on purpose just to make sure that we’re not, even though it’s not our

40:00-

Fault, if people associated it as being our fault, then that’s a problem.

Harris: 

And so we built some friction into kind of protect the customer and protect ourselves from them being mad at us, basically.

Terry: 

and dealing with those upfront objections and concerns.

Harris:

Exactly. I mean,

Terry: 

Yeah, yeah.

Harris:

like we, like we’ll get, people will, will blame us on things like, I’ve got duplicates in my Salesforce account now and it has nothing to do with us. Like,

Terry: 

Mm.

Harris:

we’ll, we’ll chase it down and be like, Hey, it’s this other SaaS app, go talk to them. You know, I’m not saying we never make mistakes, but like that has happened multiple times.

Harris:

So, you know, we’re in a particular business. It’s why we got sock to, and it’s why we invest a lot in process because we, you know, people are paying us because they care about these systems and therefore our job is important. So. Yeah, there’s some movement around there, but at some point, we have to charge it enough, enough to be able to do those things well.

Terry: 

Uh, that’s one of the main reasons why we only have a one-way CRM sink. We are only pushing. Yeah. We, the, again, when you think about the objections and concerns, just like you mentioned, people are very sensitive about their CRM data. And we’ve had a couple of clients that once we’ve been operating with

41:00-

them, you know, they said, look, it’d be really good if you could see, you know, whether this is an existing customer or not, that you’re talking to.

Terry: 

And, my position is, look, we don’t want to have the responsibility of having access to your CRM data. And quite frankly, it let us sit another two months and watch what the outcome is. And over time, as we start to sit in and understand the product instructionally well, we. End up better than their own, you know, SDRs and early, early, salespeople we’re able to determine very quickly, whether it’s an existing customer or even if it’s a contact that’s come back and, and, you know, responding to an, or chatting from an email somewhere.

Terry: 

There are ways in the conversation that you ask early on, you know, it’s almost like that, how did you hear about us trying to get that attri help with the attribution? Because attribution is so difficult in so many cases. So.

Harris: 

Yeah,

Terry:

There’s ways around that’s why wehave a one-way, a one-way sync with, with CRM.

Terry: 

So, yeah. Smart, smart.

Harris: 

sense.

Terry:

You’ve built productized services, SaaS and channel plays. What’s the common, GDM motion that always works when launching something new? what’s the framework or steps

42:00-

That you, would you always, enga put in place when you’re launching something new?

Harris: 

Well, I, I mean, I think the, my, my go-to market success

Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris:

is, has been partnerships over the years.

Terry:

Mm-hmm.

Harris:

When we were back in the 3D printer company, we sold through channel partners, but we also had material vendors that we partnered with. So we were unusual because most of the 3D brand companies would white label the materials.

Harris: 

We didn’t. We allowed the original manufacturer to keep their brand on the product and we supported it in our software as such. And there were a lot of reasons why I think that was a good idea. But as a result, we had a lot of co. Marketing with partners through that. and mean, even back to the ERP firm, it was an independent firm, but as a result, we were looping in a lot of different potential vendors to help And, at the PC company, Linux Company that I worked at just for a little bit before going outta on my own, Linux is a super collaborative ecosystem, you know, and we, I helped establish and grow a partnership with CDW where this was in

43:00-

where we were selling GPU Nvidia, GPU systems to some pretty big companies doing machine learning at the time, which is now evolved into what, you know, what we think of as AI today.

Harris:

So, I think to me, for me, in my experience, it’s been partnerships, it’s been finding people that have shared customers or potentially, or shared prospects with similar pain points. I mean, that has been the lever, where I have been most effective and most successful growing things over the years for whatever reason.

Harris: 

But I, I think it’s. Circumstances. I mean, I know that every, that’s not the case for everybody com for every company, but for me, for whatever reason I think it has been,

Terry: 

And, and smart, and it’s something that we are actually hearing a lot more of. uh, more recently, what’s your process for building systems that qualify en route in beyond interest automatically? I mean, yet at that stage, or have you been in that position?

Harris:

We’re where we currently, no, I just look at everything that comes inbound.

Terry: 

Mm-hmm.

Harris:

We get, a lot of weird ones, you know, where they seem like they wouldn’t be a good fit and then they actually are like got a Gmail address that comes in. But you know, if you look the person up actually, they’re essentially like a software holding company and they

44:00-

Have four companies under their umbrella that are doing outbound that could be a fit, but it

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris: 

a Gmail

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris:

So I find that, I think people try to optimize this too early. it’s been, in my experience, and it’s okay to be a little inefficient.

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris: 

to get a little time talking to people. And if it’s not a fit and that’s okay. so that, that, that’s my current situation. you know, I think that everyone’s wanting to do all of this stuff with agents, with inbound, and I understand if you start to get a team that’s big enough, that starts to get really interesting.

Harris:

But, you know, it’s just hard and the signals just aren’t always out there. And, I mean, the way it’s been done in the past is kind of irrelevant a little bit to how it’s being done today because there’s so many different possibilities. But to me, I think the thing that needs to be incorporated is there needs to be better error handling and better, like confidence intervals and better inclusion of like, uncertainty.

Harris:

Think people are just like, they want an answer sometimes, and it’s like, well, the answer might not be good. I’ve been using chat bt myself for like, several years. It has a lot of memory about me, and it’ll just give answers that are just made up.

45:00-

Like, I’m gonna be on a podcast and I say, Hey, check out.

Harris: 

Give me an episode of this podcast. And it, like, the episode doesn’t exist, you know? for example, uh, which is like a real thing that very recently happened. so yeah, like a, a variable that I think that is, is a little weird right now, is that people say, okay, well I’m just gonna plug this into a workflow or plug this into an agent and I’ll get an answer back.

Harris: 

And yeah, but like, what if, what if it’s just giving you an answer? So, and people say, oh, that’s wrong. You don’t understand. It’s so much better. And maybe not I,maybe I’m just not smart enough to, to see what’s going on, but that, that’s kind of my around some of this stuff. I, I think it’s complicated and more complicated than people think, and I think people are too eager to like weed stuff out, too early.

Terry:

Yeah, I think you’re spot on. recently had an experience, and I’ll probably cut this piece out, uh, Harris, to be honest with you, uh, because I’ve said it to nearly everyone I’ve spoken to, but recently had an experience with G two, where

Harris:

Yeah.

Terry:

Our CTO came to us. I dunno if you saw my post on G two at all about that, but,

Terry: 

Did you see the post?

46:00- Harris:

Uh, I

Terry: 

Bore you with the, ah, so it’s, my CTO came to me and said, listen, this listing on G two is representing themselves as chat metrics. You know, you need to talk to G two and get it fixed. And I think it was, I can’t even remember when it was, but, might’ve been a, it was earlier in the week, I’m sure it was earlier in the week.

Terry: 

And, so I jumped on, they’ve got AI chat there, so explained the problem, didn’t do me anything, so gimme a person, there’s nobody available. I said, well, gimme a contact number. I can get in touch with somebody. And so we’d had this great big loopy conversation around and around and around. And then finally it gives me a look.

Terry: 

Here’s the support number. Go to this page. And that’s where all our contact details are. And what’s it give me? Error 4 0 4 page. So, so, so that’s the screenshot that I took. I thought this is gonna be gold for a post. But long story short, it took them two days to get back to me. It literally took them two days to get back to me.

Terry: 

And in the meantime, I’ve got my CTO, like you talk about frustration and brand damage. I’ve got my CTO banging on me saying, is this fixed yet? Is this fixed yet? It’s like, and I can’t even raise anybody there. And, and so, you know, I had a little bit of tenacity. I didn’t just stop at the chat with, the AI bot.

47:00- Terry: 

I did try and find a number. I found a number to ring. There was nobody there. I left a message, I found an email address. So I, I sent an email through, I sent a message to the CEO on LinkedIn. I sent a message to the CMO on LinkedIn, and when it was all said and done, I still hadn’t heard anything like a day later.

Terry: 

So I did a post that and, and tagged everybody in it to say, guys, can somebody please, you know,get in touch with me. two days it took. Once they were on it, they resolved it pretty quickly. and obviously I could see you know, they felt bad about it on their side, but it didn’t change the impact and experience and how it made me feel in the first part.

Terry: 

And the worst part of all of this is G two were running a workshop and AI selling their AI chat bot to, but this is the new buying experience. And it’s like, eh, got, you know, not good timing for that sort of publicity that I gave them, but it was, it was quite annoying. On the flip side, you mentioned earlier about, inbound and,you know, that you’ve got that person in the loop when your inbound’s coming through that they have to speak with

48:00-

You, they onboard with your CSO, with the new offer that we’ve launched, we’re sify what we do.

Terry: 

And so just like you said, you know, at the moment you want to talk to everybody, we’re. You know, our normal businesses, we go through a whole qualification process and book meetings for the sales team. We’re just an extension of the sales team. The new offer that we’ve got effectively turns the website into a conversation.

Terry: 

And so we only use, you know, 95% of the information you wanna tell prospects. It’s on your website anyway. It’s just they either can’t find it or they don’t have the time or whatever. And so we use that information and then we just force through existing conversion, existing CTAs, whether it’s a Booker meeting on there with whoever wants to go through and chat.

Terry: 

So it’s almost like we’re just boosting the conversion rate on the website. I’ve found that we’ve been able to, it’s very early days and we’ve only just done a very little soft launch, but I’ve actually been able to get to the stage of having a couple of, inbound, you know, no touch signups. Andfor me, that’s groundbreaking.

Terry:

It’s the first time in a decade we’ve

49:00-

Been able to get to that stage. There’s an awareness issue, like you said, in terms of awareness for what we do. It’s much earlier on, and so there’s a whole education piece there. So I don’t think that the lead magnets and, and funnel is right yet. but the fact that we’ve had a couple come through gives me a lot of confidence that we can get that in the longer run.

Terry: 

And at that lower value like that, it’s not, it’s really not worth the value of me being involved or any of the team being involved in that process, before we go live. But to be able to have someone sign up, put the code in their website and they we’re live on their website in 48 hours, like that it was difficult for us to build our processes or modify our processes.

Terry: 

And so we’ve actually got a complete dedicated team that just focus on that onboarding process now. So, it’s interesting.

Harris: 

Super interesting.

Terry:

Is your inbound working yet? do you feel that you’ve got a working inbound regardless of the scale? Have you got a, a constant inbound flow?

Harris: 

Yeah, we do. I mean, I think that it could be a, a million times better,

Terry:

The question I’ve got is what, walk us through

50:00-

The moment when you realized that your inbound is working. Was there a point where you’ve just gone? Okay.

Harris:

Well, I don’t know what working means, but I mean to me, like I’ve got meetings on my calendar most days of the week, multiple meetings on my calendar most days of the week, and so like people are finding us and discovering us and deciding to reach out. I think that, I think there’s so much more we could be doing with our website to improve conversion and do a better job telling a story of what the product can do and social proof and things like that.

Harris: 

But like at a very basic level, demand for what we’re doing is growing. we are capturing some percentage of that demand.

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris:

I think that we could also dramatically improve the way that we’re co-marketing with our integration partners, especially doing more with Smart Lead and instantly and email bison and getting in front of their users and showing their users what’s possible.

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris:

But we do have an, to an extent, some work that we’ve done there and they’ve been very generous in, in co-marketing with us. I just, I think we could be doing a better job opportunities and bring opportunities to them. so yeah,I mean, if you have leads coming in, you’re doing

51:00-

Something right

Terry: 

And if with your partnerships, is that a case of how involved are you, how do you go about setting up a, a partnership?

Harris: 

Well, I mean, I, personally, I mean, I do our go to market,

Terry: 

Yeah,

Harris:

So,

Terry:

Of course. Yeah.

Harris:

Well, I mean it depends on what kind of partnership. So agencies they tend to come inbound to us. They tend to have a client who really wants HubSpot or Salesforce integration. And, so they find us that way. And usually it starts with one, and then it typically grows to multiple clients because we help them move up market, because their clients can see the results in the CRM and they can attribute revenue better, and they can convert leads more quickly.

Harris: 

And so they say, we want this for more of our clients. and then when they go into new prospecting calls, they tell their new prospects, Hey, we’re doing this in HubSpot and Salesforce right now, we can do it for you too. And then that increases their win rate with these higher up market companies. So there’s a

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris: 

cycle there.

Harris:

On the integration side, we on our agencies. I ask them, what are you using? do you want us to integrate with? And that’s why we’re working on Hay Reach right now. because they, that’s what they asked for. It’s like,

52:00-

Okay, I trust that you’re waking up every day. We’ve got dozens of agency partners now, and I, I believe we work with the best in the world.

Harris: 

I mean, the types of companies they work with are major know, like running campaigns for Reddit itself or running campaigns for HubSpot itself. I mean, so, you know, literally some of the best companies in the world, I

Terry: 

Yeah, absolutely.

Harris: 

And, I believe they wake up every day trying to figure out how to get results for their clients.

Harris: 

They spend time on LinkedIn, they spend time wherever they spend it, trying to figure out how do I get results. So I just ask them, how can I help you? What tools are you using that I, we could be better supporting? And that’s where, that’s largely where our product roadmap comes from is, asking them, because I think they are elite operators.

Harris: 

I believe they are ahead of the market and, I don’t think that they’re like a stepping stone ICP for us where we’ll, oh well one day we’ll stop selling to agencies and we’ll just sell to these big teams. that we will always work with them. I think they will always be kind of the tip of the spear for us in terms of going to market and, and finding people who are ready to invest in growth.

Harris:

So that’s where we get clues about where to invest our time in terms of developing new

53:00-

Partnerships and things like that.

Terry: 

And, and. With the more infrastructure type, partners, like instantly Smart lead. what are you, do, do you work with particular framework there where you are suggesting how that partnership works? How the exposure works? You’re doing joint webinars, workshops, is it newsletters or,

Harris: 

Yeah, a little bit of everything. Whatever kind of opportunities come up and however they go to market. So,

Terry: 

mm-hmm.

Harris:

knows, smartly does like some video content. We’ve been fortunate to be included in some of that. instantly they put a lot into their knowledge base and so we were able, able to get featured there.

Harris:

We’d be at a webinar with email bison. so yeah, it just depends on the platform and they have their own kind of marketing strategies and we try to to what they’re doing. We’ve got some event stuff that we’re gonna be taking the point on that we give them an opportunity if they wanna participate with us, coming up in the fall.

Harris: 

So to do as we have more resources, starting to, try to bring more value to them.

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris: 

To try to create opportunities for them and help them make the case for why their platform is unique. And frankly, we have a lot of customers that use multiple tools. So

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris:

Even like a fixed pie thing where one person wins and another

54:00-

person must lose.

Harris: 

We actually have customers using multiple tools for different go-to-market motions, which is kind of funny, but,

Terry:

Well, very interesting. That’s a question I’ve got for you So talking about tools, what does your, tech stack look like now, both from a, an outbound and an inbound perspective?

Harris: 

we use everything that we ship. So we’re, we’re using all the tools that we support. We use them all, from an outbound perspective, we’re only three people, so we’re not running HubSpot and Salesforce.

Terry: 

course, of course. Yeah.

Harris:

Person company. I. Know, we use clay a lot. we use, I use Make, I just am used to make, I know that N eight N is very cool right now, but I think they’re largely similar and I like make, ’cause I’ve just been familiar with it frankly.

Harris: 

And we’ve got some make scenarios running in the background. looking at clothes actually as a CRM for us, just for managing deals, little lit lighter weight. And so far I’ve been really happy. I was a close partner years ago and, so far that’s been a really, really interesting experiment for us. So I think we’ll have to see if that, if that keeps going well.

Harris: 

and, but yeah, I mean, those are kind of the big ones. Mm-hmm.

Terry: 

Interesting. Close. It was, we were, closed partners probably

55:00-

Seven years ago now, I’d say. and so, Yeah. it was interesting. I can’t even remember the reason why we moved. Uh, there was some gap, but seven years down the track, I’m sure things are very different now, and they, they’re a good business.

Terry: 

I hear a lot.

Terry: 

of good things about close. It’s almost like, you know, you always hear about HubSpot and, and, Salesforce, but then there’s the, the next level underneath and It’s sort of, you know, pipe drive and close. Always sort of mentioned in that next level of, CRMs active campaign.

Terry: 

Surprisingly,

Harris: 

Mm-hmm.

Terry:

know, it’s always been just an email platform, but I’m hearing that get mentioned more as in terms of A CRM. and

Harris: 

high level comes

Terry: 

I was gonna say, go high level. I’ve only heard about them probably three months ago and I’ve heard about ’em 60 times, uh, since then.

Harris: 

Yeah.

Terry:

They’re almost,

Harris: 

and

Terry:

Yeah.

Harris:

Perspective, like we could in theory, support additional CRMs. I mean, right now customers are asking us to support hay reach, so. We are building hay reach. That’s what our partners are saying. Hey, this is a, this is just obviously helpful. So it’s

Terry: 

Mm-hmm.

Harris:

But you know, if we build pipes, those pipes can go anywhere.

Harris: 

And I

56:00-

think HubSpot and Salesforce have been great. We’re really proud to support those ecosystems and proud to work with in both of those organizations.

Terry: 

And that’s really opened up the largest part of the market for you as well.

Harris:

It’s where the most money is,

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris:

You

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah.

Harris: 

And as an early stage company,we need to make sure we can pay the bills.

Harris: 

But I think that we’ll have to see, I mean, I’m very, very open to kinda what we do in the long run. Frankly, where we’re also getting requests is even above the CRM, are asking us about pushing just to the data warehouse level, so like Snowflake,

Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris:

cause they just wanna push all the data there and then go down, push down from Snowflake down to a CRM, like a Salesforce or a HubSpot.

Harris:

That I think is the most likely next like end point that we would look at just, but it’s a little early for that. typically companies that are using that, that type of infrastructure and setup, they’re usually okay with, ah, you know, just push it to Salesforce, that’s fine. biting off a, a snowflake integration I think would be a lot.

Harris: 

So we’ll have to just make sure that people want it.

Terry:

Look, and I think you talked, we talked earlier about ai, uh, adoption. I think the more and more

57:00-

That AI is adopted by organizations, it’s gonna be these large, you know, data warehouses will become more to the fore so that everything’s in one place and AI can have a picture across it. I mean, look, that’s the simplistic model to start with.

Terry:

I think the next step, uh, is, having AI that then can go and sneak into all of the different pieces of tech that you’ve got to bring together a holistic picture itself. it’ll be one of those two, or per perhaps a, a combination of both. AI needs to see the big picture to give you the right answers.

Terry:

And if, your data’s scattered everywhere and it can’t access it, then, it’s like the old outage. Garbage in, garbage out. So,

Harris: 

Well, yeah, I mean, you’re speaking my language. I mean, we don’t do anything with AI in our product. I see.

Terry:

Yep.

Harris: 

is to get the data to the place where you’re going to use ai.

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris: 

You know, I

Terry: 

Makes sense.

Harris:

We’re three people like,

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris: 

I mean, and Salesforce. They have three people working on one feature that uses ai.

Harris: 

Like, in my opinion, that we are best served getting it to the places where it can be

58:00-

Leveraged best, and our job is getting it there consistently, reliably, well labeled, well formatted so that it’s usable. In, in the ways that the platform wants it. So if Salesforce wants this to be an activity, written as a task to the lead, like, we’re gonna do that, and then we’re gonna set the task type and we’re gonna set the task status, and we’re gonna set the task date so that when, you know Einstein AI comes in there and looks at it, it knows, okay, what’s going on here?

Harris: 

That to me, is our job in this, in this moment as it relates to people deploying ai. I’m not even gonna say like in the era of AI or whatever, ’cause it seems so cheesy to me, but in this moment where people are deploying ai, like that to me is our job within that soup.

Terry: 

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. you’re a small team at the moment. Obviously, plans to grow and growing nicely.

Harris: 

Mm-hmm.

Terry: 

Um, a lot of marketing teams, chase m qls, that’s sort of the position that they.

Harris: 

Mm-hmm.

Terry: 

as their end state that they’re judged on. But sales really

59:00-

Don’t like m qls. It’s either, you know, they want sales qualified leads or sales accepted leads.

Terry: 

What, what’s your ideal handoff system between inbounds and sales and, and I guess it, is it something that you’ve already given consideration to, given the rate of growth that you’re at, and potentially, you know, you’re gonna have to look at expanding on your team at some point in time.

Harris: 

Yeah. So I mean, the next hire that we have is gonna be another engineer

Terry: 

Mm-hmm.

Harris:

When we build new integrations, we sign more customers.

Terry: 

Mm-hmm.

Harris:

Pretty straight math there. I think that, we’re SQL heavy. We don’t do a lot of marketing besides me posting on LinkedIn and then the partner marketing and relationship development with our agencies.

Terry: 

Yes.

Harris: 

I think that the next obvious low hanging fruit that we should be investing in from marketing perspective is, Partner marketing, which would be inclusive of both engaging with our agencies, but also partner marketing on this, on the integration side. And like when we have a new feature, letting instantly users know about it and here’s how they can use it, when we have a new

01:00:00-

Salesforce feature letting Salesforce users know about it and here’s how they can use it.

Harris:

To me is just like a basic thing that we’re not doing right now, that I think if we did that better, it would help with adoption and retention and, and we would get kind of a flywheel going. And, because right now we really rely on people to really have the problem, we don’t have the budget to go out and convince people

Terry: 

Yep.

Harris:

is a problem.

Harris: 

You know, we are growing, we grow every single month. We’ve been growing every month for two years. And so we’re very fortunate that the, I think the part of the market that we’re in is growing and I think we’re creating.

A little bit of demand too, because people weren’t thinking about connecting these tools before, like two years ago.

Harris: 

They weren’t asking, how do I get this? Talking into that? ‘ cause there weren’t a lot of Salesforce shops using Smart Lead when it first came out. And so I

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris:

Helping contribute to that momentum. but yeah, we’re very heavily SQL focused.I mean, I’ll get on a call with people, but if it’s not a fit, I’m not sending ’em nurture emails for once a month for, you know, we don’t have a newsletter.

Harris: 

We don’t have paid ads running, we don’t have retargeting ads running. We, there’s a lot of things that we are not doing that

Terry:

Yep.

01:01:00- Harris:

Day we will be,

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris:

Someone much smarter than me will come in and say, oh my gosh, you’re so dumb. Why aren’t you doing this, this, this, this, this. and I’ll be like, I agree.

Harris: 

Please do those

Terry: 

Make it happen. That’s right.

Harris:

Yeah. Your, your wish is your command. Like, do it. So, but yeah, so that, that’s kind of our, our internal, but like we are very different than our customers. Our customers are, tend to be actually pretty big. and go to market teams, and they’re doing pretty sophisticated stuff and, and our job is to be Robin to their Batman.

Harris:

But I do think, I had a bit of a revelation recently of like, Hey, like we’re an s and b right now. And like, that’s okay, but like, we need to go to market accordingly and we need to be really efficient. And if something isn’t worth our time, don’t do it. And like, if it takes too much effort to gather this kind of data, just don’t worry about it.

Harris: 

Like,

Terry: 

Yeah.

Harris: 

I’m not checking it and I’m not making decisions on it anyway, then like, who cares? And just focus on the, the things that really, really matter. And so that has been kind of liberating, I think, to be, to just recognize our current size and let’s fight for our weight. You know, let’s not try to be a heavyweight fighter.

Harris: 

Like if we’re

01:02:00-

feather weight, be featherweight, be fast and that’s okay. You know? And one day if we do featherweight well enough, we’ll move up in weight class, right? But if we can’t do this, then we’ll get knocked out and the game’s over. So that’s kind of been my like mindset lately around our own internal process.

Terry: 

And it’s really interesting, and I love the fact that you’ve identified very clearly who your next hire is, and the fact that it’s not actually part of the GoTo market team and to grow your business is unique to some extent. you’ve identified that, you know, naturally with more, more integrations, you do get more signups.

Terry:

If the next step, and I guess you, you touched on it in terms of your point, some point in time with a marketer, but in terms of your next say go to market hire, how should a scaling B2B company structure its GVM team, if it really wanted to double down on its inbound this year,

Harris: 

Mm-hmm.

Terry:

From what you’ve seen across your agency, your customers,

Harris: 

Yeah,

Terry:

What would be the.

Harris:

I mean, what we’re seeing is, well, it depends on the company size. But like in

01:03:00-

General, what we’re finding is that if you’re gonna run an experiment, run it. don’t dabble. you know, if you’re gonna test cold email, send a lot of cold email. And that means make sure you have the infrastructure set up.

Harris: 

Make sure you’re using a good tool, make sure you’re using good data, make sure the offer doesn’t stink. Really give it a go for a few months. Probably that means finding a partner to run the machine for you, and that your job as a brand is to make sure that they’re like getting these critical choke points.

Harris: 

Right. The biggest like failure mode that I’m seeing in go to market is this, like, it’s failure to launch much, much, much more often than anything else. So it’s like you gotta put enough gas. In the rocket even get to, you know, to even get to the atmosphere. Now, you may not make it through, but if there’s not enough gas in there, it doesn’t matter how well it launches because you’ll never have any chance of getting, you know, breaking through.

Harris: 

So that is like the number one failure mode I see. Whether that’s cold calling or LinkedIn or conferences or email or anything else.

Terry: 

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Harris:

So that would be like my

01:04:00-

General, general 2 cents is like, if you’re gonna go for it, go for it. Set some rules, set some parameters. Don’t run it forever, but you know, you gotta really do it if you’re gonna try to get something out of it.

Terry:

Yeah, yeah. Good. I think that’s good advice for anybody, mate, to be honest with you. Don’t just think about it, do it.

Harris: 

Yeah,

Terry: 

Old Nike ad, Nike adage, just do it.

Harris: 

David Goggins lately, but yeah, I mean that, you know, just do it.

Terry: 

It’s true. It’s true. I’ve seen, you know, with some of the signups we’ve had on in new offer, that there are the ones that are doing the volume of outbound, they are driving inbound. The ones that are really dabbling around and not really doing much at all. It’s a little bit of a test here, a little bit of a test there.

Terry: 

We’re just seeing what happens. I’ve given the same advice is that where I’ve seen it’s working is you’ve just gotta scale the volume. You’ll test, you’ll soon know whether the messaging’s, right. If you scale the volume and you’re not getting any results, then you know that the messaging’s not right.

Terry: 

Maybe go back and talk to your ideal clients and get a better idea of the problem you’re solving and, what resonates with them and their level of awareness and so forth. We’ll go and

01:05:00-

Hire a copywriter, a real copywriter to actually help you get that market resonance.

Harris:

Totally. Mm-hmm.

Terry:

So there’s, a spotlight series that we’re doing I mentioned before about ai, so I’ll move on to that at a moment.

Terry: 

But, just as a closeout question for the chat podcast, is there anything that I haven’t asked you that I should have?

Harris: 

I don’t know. I mean, I think, I think we covered a lot.

Harris: 

Nothing like off the top of my head that’s like, oh, we, I gotta talk about this.

Terry: 

What’s the single biggest advantage in making sure that the information is going from something like the disconnected systems, so from Smart Lead into a HubSpot, because that’s the environment that we’re actually operating in. You know, we have, play, we have Smart Lead, we have HubSpot.

Terry: 

So what’s the biggest advantage of, your product in actually bringing that data together into one place?

Harris:

Absolutely. I mean,there’s three core use cases that app on Sync solves for. I think the most valuable one in terms of immediately conversion and revenue generation is

01:06:00-

just a better context to the reps. So like in HubSpot for example, we log data, log events as timeline events, and so workflows can be triggered off of them and the rep can work from inside of HubSpot, especially if they have a phone, like a dialer connected to HubSpot, then it’s like, okay, here’s the email that was sent.

Harris: 

I can, I’ve got a number, I can just hit dial and I can engage with this lead. And we see that that has a really meaningful impact on conversion from campaigns. and then the like longer tail version of this is that attribution. So you can see which campaigns are driving meetings that are attended, and then deals that are won.

Harris: 

So you can see like into the funnel versus where smart lead will get you any sales engagement platform will get you, which is lead status and then like it’s interested or meeting or whatever. And then,it ends and the funnel ends. But you know, obviously in the CRM, because you have company objects and you’ve got associated deals and opportunities, you can have deeper visibility to what’s going on.

Harris: 

So, those are kind of the two, make more money arguments. And then the, the one, all your

01:07:00-

The customer’s argument is that we have a two-way block list. So you can go from any list in HubSpot dynamically, add it to the block list in Smart Lead to make sure that if someone converts to be a customer, converts to be a partner or whatever, that they don’t get any cold emails from you.

Terry: 

Hmm.

Harris:

And a lot of teams value that because they don’t want outbound like stepping on toes for the reps or just for their CS team or whatever. so those are like the three basic problems that people solve with our application.

Terry: 

Nice, nice. well thank you Harris, for joining us on the chat today. It’s been an excellent conversation. Obviously we’ll include all of the relevant links,for people to get in touch with you,after they’ve heard this episode of the chat. So thanks again. Appreciate it. It’s been an excellent conversation.

Harris: 

Yeah. Thanks so much. Thanks for, listeners listening to a couple old guys talk about the old days, talking

Terry: 

Rust, rust, rusty, old steel guy there.

Harris: 

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you’re a legit, I just did a tour one time, but I still have my memories.

Terry: 

Very good. Very good. Thanks Harris.

Harris: 

Thanks.