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Kelsey Krapf 0:14
Welcome to the official podcast of The Next CMO hosted by Plannuh. The next CMO is a thought leadership podcast for those that are CMOS and want to become one. My name is Kelsey Krapf and I am the senior marketing manager.

Peter Mahoney 0:30
And I'm Peter Mahoney. I'm the founder and CEO of Plannuh.

Kelsey Krapf 0:34
For this week we have Michael Phelan as our guest, Michael is the founder and CEO of go to market pros. Michael specializes in market entry and expansion product and service launches and growing revenue through sales and marketing programs. He's also launched an ABM approach called magnetic marketing and we thought it'd be a great idea to bring him on the show to discuss this concept a bit further,

Peter Mahoney 0:57
beyond just having a lot of great exposure. As a marketing executive, Michael has, has spent many years in go-to-market planning and services as a consultant. He's one of the most sought after consultants in that in the Boston area, and probably globally if I could say such a thing. And in specifically, he's developed some really interesting thoughts on IBM, which is, of course, important for a lot of people. So we thought we'd dig into that and probably go wherever we go. But maybe we'll start Michael, by hearing a little bit about your background and and sort of what brought you to go to market pros and what you guys are up to.

Michael Phelan 1:37
Yeah, thanks so much, Peter, for that overly kind introduction. And, yeah, my I started my career in sales, and then I kind of branched into marketing. And then I branched into business unit management, companies like Reebok and staples, and then I started to work a lot with SAS and SAS bait. Basically companies. And about eight years ago, I kind of saw a high degree of fragmentation in marketing and a high degree of fragmentation in sales. Not that that's a bad thing. But everybody became very much a specialist, a cog in a wheel. And I find a lot of times that the view of the market was either not there or distorted. The understanding of competitors were really not there. And companies really didn't have a go-to-market strategy really nails. So everybody was doing little bits and pieces but not in a coherent manner. So I started to help a lot of companies around that. I do work now with the Irish governments and British governments and incubators to bring in pot tech startups from England and Ireland. And I work a lot of times we US companies as well looking to scale a mass challenge judge and mentor if you know that program. They're down to the last hundred startups competing right now for a million dollars will be the final price on that. So love helping companies grow and expand. And I love the variety of the work I do and dealing with a lot of different types of companies.

Kelsey Krapf 3:07
So talk to me a little bit about, you know, go to market pros, and you know how your experience helped you found this company?

Michael Phelan 3:15
Yeah. So, you know, when you work inside a corporation, a lot of times it's a very defined role. And, you know, I kind of been in large corporations, and I found it to be a bit stifling in terms of creativity. So part of it is looking to be able to, to do things faster and better. And I found working with smaller, nimble hybrid companies, to be a way of doing that. And I find that if you're working with 10 companies, you'll learn 10 times as much as if you're working with one. So so I really enjoy that and I enjoy the project nature sometimes of consulting, where there's a start to finish an objective and you really feel like you're digging in to get the work done, you're not sitting in quarterly updates on, you know, this practice or that practice or that policy. You're really working with a sales and marketing team. So I found that I could move faster, I could work with more nimble companies, I'm closer to the entrepreneurs driving those companies, and revenue. And I just found it to be so much more rewarding for me to be on that side of the fence.

Peter Mahoney 4:26
But one of the things that I like about what you've done is you've you build sort of a framework of best practices and tools around account-based marketing, I think you call it your magnet marketing. So I wonder if you could just explain that to our listeners just a little bit.

Michael Phelan 4:39
Sure. Yeah. So as a kind of look at the pipeline and how it develops both my sales background, my marketing background, I see this kind of chasm that developed between the generation of what I would call a marketing download lead, or some people would call it an SQL or an SQL and a meeting and an opportunity. And marketing likes to tribute all the way to revenue. And I think that's a great process. And I think ABM is a great process in general, but this chasm is who is responsible for driving prospect meetings, or who's responsible for driving customer meetings, and how important that is. So I give ABM a lot of credit for defining the accounts to go after looking at intent signals for mobilizing sales and marketing. But in the world of enterprise selling, the sale doesn't start until you have at least one meeting, probably several meetings with the buying teams. And I think that metric of net new customer meetings or net new prospect meetings is lost. So what I started to do is to dig in and actually go and interview sales teams and do what I call net prospect new prospect meeting audits and find out what's going on. And a couple of things are fascinating. best in class didn't seem to follow the scripts. They Given it all, they take all the tools marketing gives them but they have a highly personalized approach to their prospects and through getting meetings. There's systematic ideas that they have. And the companies are starting to realize, if you design a program with one goal to deliver meeting, you can be much more effective than if you try and drive a series of different touch points to deliver incremental brand impressions as in classic nurturing, so as I started to study these people, I find that they were doing things that the other reps are not doing. So one of the things they did was share competitive insights with their prospects. So classic sales says study your prospect, study the personality of your buyer, go on their social media, you know, find out their basketball player, where did they go to college and, and some of that is good by making some connection, right? Some resonating, but really, they know all that. Not giving them anything new. If I played basketball in college, I know I played basketball. I know what my company does. So you're not telling me anything new. But if you came to me and said, you know, your target, and I studied the best practices of Sephora, and support as the most advanced marketing personalization company in the world, and I can give targeted insights into what support is doing, and I just talked to them, and they reach out to targeting I know, market personalization is very interesting to you. I'm doing this study on best practices on that. I have actually interviewed support on several top firms. We'd like to share some of the findings from you. And we'd like to show you where you are versus them and show you the gap and a bridge to that. So that's the essence of magnet marketing came from that and the way the program works is I reach out to my prospect list that my client gives me, I send in a best practices study. If you participate. I'll give a donation to COVID-19 healthcare of $100 and you'll get invited back See the best practices. And people love that discussion of where they stand versus their competitors. And then if you compare that to the plastic marketing of, let's send out our case studies, see the case studies are about the company. The best practices in the competitor are about your prospects. So your prospect doesn't care that you did a work with a bank seven years ago. Case Studies tend to be out of date, they tend not to be the set of companies that they respond to and engage with. So study your prospects, competitors, best practices, bring them unique insights, allow them to show that comparison and then help them bridge the gap is the concept of magnet marketing. So what I do is I use a research driven methodology. I bring my sales team I find sales team in on each of these falls. I asked them for more questions. And then in the second half, they get an opportunity to share their product, get some feedback on their products. I was just on a fin tech one today, where the venture arm of a large consumer products company took a look at their platform. This is what we like this, what we don't like, here's how we would use it, and so forth. And this is tremendous because the company is trying to validate a new market extension and expansion. And this gives them an opportunity to have both research and sales combined together. Does that make sense? how that works.

Peter Mahoney 9:27
That makes a ton of sense. It's, it's a bringing a bunch of important principles together, Michael, and I think that that's what makes this a comprehensive, integrated approach that probably is pretty effective, invaluable for your clients, because as you said, they're getting research out of it. So independent of anything else. They're they're gaining insights and research about the problems they're trying to solve or that their products or solutions try to solve. And then of course, involving prospects in that discussion is a great way to to bring them in. So I think that's, that's a great idea. I, I started my career Early on at IBM and in in sales like you and in then back in the day IBM actually told you to really focus on it wasn't about your, your prospects It was your prospects competitors that you had to figure out how to how to speak to because that's, that's the thing that could get them to listen. So bringing that together is, is is really interesting. It's it's a great approach. Do you find no that? does that fit every customer? I guess is the question or do you have to be a certain kind of customer, maybe a certain industry approach, you know, to take this magnet marketing approach and have it work for you?

Michael Phelan 10:53
Yeah, I've worked across about 1010 different segments, and some are more challenging And then others. I think the one that can be a little bit challenging is people that are highly secretive in nature. And and the one that I find is the most secretive are the, the PE guys are specifically the PE guys who are the Raiders. So think about someone who buys you know, Sears for like a nickel on the dollar, right? they go in and they you know, they're very, very secretive. They're New York guys. They do big deals. They're interested in new stuff, but they will not tell you anything about what they do. But outside of those guys, legal people can be cagey and credential people can be a bit cagey. Interestingly enough salespeople and marketing people are very open to having conversations about what they think so your VP of sales, the VP of Marketing CEOs So I think anybody that's in the commercial business side is very good, but it does apply across the board, you know, to enterprise systems.

Kelsey Krapf 12:12
So I guess one question I have for you then is how do you take this info that you gather understand, you know, the value prop firm the prospect side and build it into your go to market strategy?

Michael Phelan 12:23
Yeah, that's very good. And, you know, one thing I find is interesting is, it's very hard for marketers to spend a lot of times with customers and prospects, especially now as we've eliminated a lot of face to face type meetings. So this kind of brings kind of both sales and marketing into what I would call moderated meetings with customers and prospects. So what typically will happen is we'll determine what are the five questions we want customers to answer, and we'll capture those and document them. Then on the back end, I'll produce a report to help marketing here so we found out here's what excites customers most don't here's resonates most and that gets turned into then content marketing will often do like a report out like a kind of a, a white paper of types or an infographic or video. We do webinars and we invite the, it's interesting, we invite the people that participate in the study to come back to the webinar. And we also say to them, would you like us to come on site and present the results of the study to your team, and in some cases, we get invited back into the company to share with a broader set of people. So the webinars a very good way of doing that. I like short form visual infographic short videos, some companies prepare, you know, like a white paper type format, and then we'll do a press release. The other thing about the media is the media love this. Because if you said hey, I talked to these, you know, 50 retailers about how they're handling, say bogus, which is buy online, pick up in store, do a lot of work in retail, ad tech, and so forth. You know, the media love that because that's what they used to To do, and now they can't do it anymore. And I actually bring marketing people in on these meetings to a lot of times the product marketing people will sit in, sometimes quietly, sometimes the content marketing will sit in, because they don't always get invited to a lot of sales meetings. And this is a very friendly environment. We're not necessarily playing around with pipeline. We're having early escapes discussions. So the marketers really love that I had one cmo that was very excited to get a new marketing campaign. And I said, What have you talked to any prospects and customers? And he said, No, but we're ready to launch. And I said, Well, let me get you in front of a few customers. And he did. And the customers came back and said, this is relatively undifferentiated, and you sound like a lot of other vendors to me. He didn't like to hear that. But actually, he went back and rejiggered everything was in a better position. So I really believe that content marketers, and corporate marketers or dimension marketers need more time with customers and I think they will come to this and it actually helps them do their job. In the end of the day, incidentally, the assets that get produced from this kind of research perform well, because if you show the logos of all the companies you talk to, the prospects really resonate with that. So it's just by showing the logos, you get the credibility. So you, you're using an element of an analyst program here, where you're using it in a way that's more focused that the company can leverage.

Peter Mahoney 15:28
So it's interesting, I find that one of the biggest challenges when companies look at implementing an ABM approach, as an example is, is the first part which is defining who their target customers should be. And a lot of that is about step one in building your marketing plan is about defining your target market and audience and what that's all about. I think people struggle a lot with that and and I don't know if you found that is doing Engage with new clients are people typically at the point where they really have a tight understanding of what their target market is? And then following up that, is their ABM strategy a subset of their market typically? Or is it's a perfectly aligned to the market that they're that they're going after? So let me know your thoughts on that, Michael.

Michael Phelan 16:25
Yeah, no, that's a great question. And I think targeting is really the science right? getting that right is so important. If you get that right, the marketing becomes a lot easier, right. You know, it was one of the companies that came in from Ireland, they were all over the place in terms of their targeting, and we did some work with them. And he ended up at like, Oh, I need to sell to like 12 people in LA, I can manage that. But you know, he was like, What do you assume zoom zoomed in, it became very manageable. So I think that you know, they use this term on the west coast, a lot ICP or ideal customer profile, and they use term core markets and non core non core markets. But I'm working with a company right now. And they've got some core markets that they're very successful. And they're very similar to, you know, it's a SAS software type cell. And they say we're doing great on that. And then what they've done is they've looked at all the other people that buy their product. And they've kind of prioritize them and said, Well, how many of them are in this category, that category in the other category. And then they're using magnet marketing as a way of validating those. So I'll go in and set up say, five or seven interviews, which say their top three markets that they're looking to extend into, and we'll bring the salespeople into those conversations. We're not actually trying to sell them anything, that we're going to go in and validate how they're thinking. We're also trying to find out why did those segments not adopt this kind of technology before? And what might slow it down? Or we're also looking at what are the triggers for that, but I think marketers try and say, well, let's go after this next market, but that marketers Never been on the phone with anybody in that segment has never talked to any customer. Neither has sales. So so I think you've got to revisit it, but you've got to revisit it and having at least five or seven key conversations with that target. And then you get much smarter, but you also get more confident. So when they launched this new program, you know, someone in sales is going if you guys actually talk to anybody in this segment, do you really understand how that segment works? Like if you go into healthcare, for example, HIPAA is a very big deal. And is your platform, HIPAA compliant? You know, you're not going to get anywhere unless it's a compliance. Even if you're not dealing with patient data. A lot of people will go, Well, maybe we maybe we want at some point, right? But so you have to understand that you go into some segments. It's a multi tiered complex sale that's got five or six different people and lots of different partners. Yet most of the SAS companies think it goes directly from the SAS person to the boss. Right, when you have like a multi tiered distribution, their system does not work at all. So you have to kind of go in and verify Where can we apply now, where do we need the product? But I think without that you're really running blocked. And I think the dilemma is if marketing gets in front of sales, without having that level of intimate prospect conversation, and you're trying to launch a product, I think they'd become vulnerable and their credibility can be damaged.

Peter Mahoney 19:28
Yeah. And and I find it's the point you were making there, Michael, about the complexity of the buying process in some of these cases, is a really important one. And, and I've found that the most successful ABM approaches are quite holistic in in their approach to really understanding that and, you know, the whole idea if you're doing a targeted approach is if you wind down to a relatively finite set of target customers, you should be able to map out everybody they're in touch everyone as part of the process. And in i think it's it's one of those things that that is is often overlooked in a sales process. As you said, people typically they want to go just to the decision maker, but the reality is, especially if it's a complex decision, there are a lot of people you need to surround in, and you need to sort of pre influence people who are going to be influencing the decision. So how do you approach sort of mapping out on an account by account basis in your magnet marketing approach, sort of what that influencer map looks like for a client?

Michael Phelan 20:42
Yeah, it's interesting. So So, when we're talking, you know, I think one of the problems is people are targeting too high up in the organization. And I think some of the decisions about you know how to solve a problem are happening. Lower level. So so one of the things a man, by the way, I encourage I had one example it was interesting and there was a senior marketing manager. And she was kind of in this area was working on this particular process interested in talking to us. And I remember I had a lot of pushback from the VP of Marketing at that time. Now, he said, Hey, I just want to talk to people who are my peers, I want to talk to people. And I'm like, Well, you know, she's a senior marketing manager, she probably has 20 times more budget than you have revenue. And you know, she's at a $3 billion company and you're in a $50 million company, so, and he gave huge pushback and eventually took the call. And eventually, she ended up being on the buying team. She ended up playing a lead role in selecting vendors. She actually identified every member of the buying team on the call and was willing to make an introduction to the key people for the company. So so I think as vendors, we have to recognize that we can't be arrogant, we got to find out, you know, who are the best people to talk to, we got to understand that their title may seem a lot lower or higher, doesn't really matter. The other thing I've seen is, we're not looking where we should work, right? If you look at a lot of these bigger companies, big initiatives are happening through the PMO. Office, they're happening to the change management office. And I haven't met a lot of marketers that really understand that because haven't been on the inside of this. But if you find out who's the PMO in charge of this, is there a change management person and isn't going through that office, all the major digital initiatives happening in the company, somehow they end up there. And if you can find someone who's your ally, they can make things happen. They're very connected, they've really got legs all over the organization to to make things happen. So so I think that getting inside the organization having friendly conversations, so at the end of the research interview, so who else In your company cares about solving problem. That's a better question than who's on the buying team, right? Because what they'll give you is who's on the buying team is the purchasing office right and making the decision maker, which is good. But if you ask the question about who else cares, you want to get that advocates and the influencers. But people will tell you how they'll ask those questions. And it's so critical, not just the buying team, but the people the buying team trust, and take influence from, if that makes sense.

Peter Mahoney 23:29
Yeah, and when one thing I was reminded of, in your discussion there, Michael, is that if I had a nickel for every time a sales rep told me that they call on the C suite, and you find out that they don't write, they're actually calling somewhere else and it in reality, the C suite is sometimes not the best place to be for the reasons that you just outlined. You have to find, as you said, the person who's who you know the person And whose job it is to solve the problem that your solution solves, right? And if you can find that person whose career is motivated by making that happen faster and more efficiently, then they're going to be a super champion for you and get it through. And in sometimes in the trick, of course, is that that's not always the same person in every in every company. It could be something you know, someone has a transformation office. Sure, maybe that's fine. In other cases, it's someone who's been assigned a project. So it can be a little hard to find. So how would you find those people that are the title lists, they don't have any reasonable title, but at the same time, they've got the mandate to fix this problem.

Michael Phelan 24:47
Yeah. So I think the first thing is, you know, you don't approach them with the technology. you approach them with them. Are you playing a role in helping to solve this problem for your company? Do you care about the best practices Your industry, and you actually reach out to a broad set of people. And if they come back and say, Well, this isn't exactly my thing. He said, Well, who else in your company should we be talking to about that? So so you kind of work out a work a broader set, B define it in terms of helping the company solve a problem. So think about it, you're sitting at the same want to sit at the same side of the table as your prospect, not opposite your prospect. So I think we're used to having a more combative approach. When we want to have a more collaborative approach. Listen, our founder and our company, we want to solve this problem for the industry. We want to help you understand where you're at. And we want to help you make progress. Whether you do business with us or not, we can determine that later. But this is what we're all about this will want to do. So we want to sit at the same side of the table as the prospect. And when you sit at the same side of the table, you're collaborating and the next step in this processes, and there's a company called sail through I think Probably the best b2b marketer I've ever seen. And they sell advanced marketing personalization. And they ranked the top hundred retailers in the world from for an independent research based on consumers on how well from one to 100. You do advance market personalization. They do what an analyst might do, but the doing they're very credible. Every year when the results come out, the retailers want to know, well, what did I do? Have I gone up? Have I gone down? And I think I mentioned before, they're number one, they love being number one. They actually have it on their investor report. And when this company comes in, says, hey, you're number 17. We love to help you be get to be number 12. We're going to consult to you on bridging the gap. And you can use our technology, you can use anyone's technology. We're going to give you ideas of how you will move up that curve. That's a very different relationship, right. So I think we want to be consultative we We want to be we want to score the prospects, we want to help them evolve. And they're going to ask you, how can you help? Right? Do you really want the prospect to say, Well, how can you help? as distinct from No, I'm not ready, say how can you help so, so it's around giving a lot of value early in the process. And it's around benchmarking, and it's around showing before and after. And there's a whole series of different techniques that can that can do that. But I think the sales through does it better than anyone else, I've seen it. And the companies like sai lthr you and they, they, they literally meet the they get to meet the CC mentioned C suite. So this is a marketing company, they sell marketing technology. The C suite wants to meet with them, because there's value in this index, there's value in the ranking and their strategic knowledge behind it. So they they get invited into CFOs. They get invited into investors. And that's incredible. So I think that Every company could do something similar, maybe not as sophisticated. But every company could share best practices of the prospects competitors, every company could give them a score on how well they're doing. Like if you think about your marketing planning analogy, right? how well you do in a marketing planning, how you're using new technology, where best in classes, we'll help you evolve your score. So you know, I think that's, that's really more sophisticated. And what it is, is sales and marketing have to play a role in that. So within account based marketing, what I do see is collaboration, but there's no pro programmatic nature to it. There's no magnet marketing, for example. There's a lot of companies doing what are called calls for cause now are beat to give where you get money for COVID. So if you want to give us some feedback on our product, we'll give $100 to healthcare workers. A lot of people are delighted to do that. And they'll give you feedback and it will lead to leads and opportunities. But the difference being is companies need a much more programmatic way of approaching prospects and meetings. And today it's just around pushing out content and trying to get download leads. Nothing wrong with that some of them will convert, but I think we need a more programmatic strategic kind of approach to these prospects which is all about them and not about us in the first stage that makes sense.

Kelsey Krapf 29:21
So you focus on you know, the programmatic approach and net new prospect meetings and talk a lot about you know, the success and and how this helps generate meeting so can you walk us through, you know what that is? Exactly?

Michael Phelan 29:35
Yeah. So, so I talked a little bit about magnet marketing. I'll give you another one. That's, I think, great. And it's, this one's a rapid seven an every, every Veterans Day, they do a program where they look at all their prospects or veterans and all their customers who are gatherings and I think they have some executives who are veterans and have served and they reach out to them all the civil thank you for serving. We want to work recognize our customers and prospects with a gift to their favorite charity, favorite veteran's charity. Give us a call. Let us know what charity you want to give to and we'll donate their responses enormous. First off, thank you for thanking me. I'm so glad I'm glad you did. They look at the executives, they see who's on there who served. And they tell you about their their particular charity they want you to give to it, it could be 25 bucks or 50 bucks, they tell you about it and invariably leads to tell me a little bit about you what you guys do. That's kind of interesting. I might not be the perfect person, but let me make an introduction to Joe who works with me who deals with that kind of stuff and so on and so forth. So, so it's a kind of a leveraging what's happened in COVID-19 as people want to give more, and why not the sales team, the the front, to give, give money to what your customers and prospects one Rather than anything else, right and let sales be the ones giving out the money, and rewarding their customers and prospects, and making a difference to the charities that customers love. So that gets out empathy gets out there, there, people are really passionate about their charity. So that's one program that works very well for rapid seven magnet marketing works incredibly well. The benchmarking one I mentioned with sales through works incredibly well before and after comparisons of showing what a company would look like with your product versus without your product. So anything that can visualize the difference your product makes, is a huge thing for these programs.

Kelsey Krapf 31:42
Definitely. I think it's really interesting because direct mail became so prominent and you know, marketing and sales and then COVID ended up heading and now no one really knows the address of where people are working from home. So, you know, you have to find a way to really go after and make money. connection for your prospects on a sales side. But you know, you're not sending cupcakes to an empty office. So

Michael Phelan 32:07
true. True. And it's a huge business and sending cupcakes and chocolates and everything like that was a big, and I love the past around and I love the fact that say the VP of Marketing get something from your company. And it's maybe it's it's nice chocolates and they walk around and offered them to everybody say, well, who sent them, or socks or gloves in the winter, whatever it may be. So I do I do love that, you know, one of the best ones I've, I've seen and heard is go back to a time that makes the customer smile, right? And makes the customer feel passionate. So if, if, for example, you were on the hockey team, and you sent someone like a hockey jersey from their college, right? You saw something on their Facebook, maybe their captain of the women's hockey team, whatever it may be, and you send them like something from that college and say You know, oh, I see you went to this college, you know, I'd like to send you this gift. We're trying to get some feedback on our new product. And you know, which has been 15 Minutes with Us and they open it up and it brings them back to their college days. Maybe it makes them smile, it creates some emotion. And I think that's what b2b marketers need to figure out is how do you create some emotion, giving to my favorite charity creates emotion making a connection to where I went to college. And it's interesting, this is an interesting male, female one, because guys are very good at doing this. And girls are not as good and they don't really know the answer. But when I talk to the men in sales, they do this kind of sports thing a lot. Like they'll kind of make this sports connection. Some of them are they'll take like videos of the game last night, they'll take a little snippet and they'll send it Hey, I see your favorite team wants one last night. Of course, this is not a good COVID story buy because there is no sports but but they do these kind of things around sports. For some reason, women in sales are not doing that as much. But so that's one that tends to be more successful for guys and girls, I'm not sure why. But you know, making a personal connection is really what it's what it's about making a personal connection, think about, I actually boil it down to one thing, help your buyer be a better buyer. So if you think above, you know, if you want to say I'm developing a content marketing program, is this program going to help my buyer be a better buyer, whether I buy their product or not? So you think about benchmarking scoring before and after comparisons, tips on how they get better tips on how they solve a problem better, if you help them be a better buyer, and you make a personal emotional connection to them, you'll sell more. So you know, it's just so many different ways reps are doing it. And what I'm trying to get is more of a systematic approach, saying these are the top 20 ways of driving meetings. How do we turn that into a more of a systematic approach. That's data driven. So the reps can access different, different new prospect meeting programs to meet a prospect today, they can't do that. And today, a lot of pipeline falls apart, again, qL download. But I think if we put our brains together, we can come up with some fantastic programs that directly drive meetings provided to all reps rather than just one rapids.

Peter Mahoney 35:24
It does. And I think one other thing that I often tell people, especially if they're selling to larger enterprises, is there's there's a huge source of data that is often untapped when it comes to personalizing, personalizing the message to especially to an executive audience. And that's their Investor Relations communications. And if you're a public company, and you're reporting regularly, then you're going to have a quarterly report that talks about things like what are your business goals? are you growing or you're shrinking? What are the risk factors in your company? That's Great one, right? So if you look at, you know, if you look at their 10 K and or 10 Q and understand what their, what their risk factors are, those are the things that should be keeping them up at night. And that's the kind of thing that you can tune your message to, to a little bit more. Well, we're almost at the end of the time. Here, Michael and and I wanted to I want one more question to ask you one more quick question. And then Kelsey has a question to his ask that she'll wrap up with. But my quick question is just, I mean, you've been a wealth of great, very concrete ideas. How can people learn more about you and your company? So just give us you know, the URL and tell us where people can find out more?

Michael Phelan 36:43
Yeah, I appreciate that. Peter. So so my website is go to market pros. It's a geo to market ma rk t POS, or just Michael go to market pros. And, you know, I'll start off the conversation with them as to saying, Do you drive or do you know how you're driving In your meetings now, or a tougher question is how many meetings you have booked to top hundred prospects in the next two weeks. That is really where the rubber meets the road.

Peter Mahoney 37:09
That's, that's great. And we'll include that in the show notes too. And Kelsey probably has her last question.

Kelsey Krapf 37:15
Okay. Can we always ask, you know, we created this podcast. So what advice would you give to CMOS and those that want to become one?

Michael Phelan 37:23
Yeah, studying, studying. The first thing is study what's actually driving your meetings now, and then turn it into a couple of key programs you provide. So look at the behavior of the top reps, they'll tell you and really understand how they're getting meetings and then turn that into a program and supported with technology. The second thing is look at other companies who are doing fantastic like meet to give or cause for cause or magnet marketing. Look at some of those other things, look outside your company and bring programs in. But start by accelerating what you're already doing well right now, and instead of the top 5% of reps, give it to the top 95% right

Kelsey Krapf 38:01
Awesome. Well, thank you so much, Michael, you know, it's a pleasure to have you on and again, such a wealth of knowledge, excited to go back and listen to this again, but just make sure to check out go to market pros and you can find their website in our show notes from this podcast. And make sure to follow the next cmo and planner on Twitter and LinkedIn. And if you have any ideas for topics or guests, you can email them to the next cmo atlanta.com. Have a great day, everyone.

Michael Phelan 38:30
Thank you, Kelsey. Thank you, Peter.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai