Join Jordan Crawford, the founder of Blueprint, as he takes us on a deep dive into the world of strategic marketing with a focus on Ideal Customer Profiles (ICPs). In this comprehensive guide, Jordan reveals how blending data science with go-to-market strategies can transform how companies approach their market segments.
Whether you're a marketing professional looking to refine your strategy, a business owner aiming to enhance your customer targeting, or just curious about the impact of data in marketing, this video will provide valuable insights into making smarter, data-backed marketing decisions.
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Jordan:
So imagine if you had a tool that was like an MX toolbox or whatever, that was designed to tell those things. You don't have to wait until someone comes to you, find the people in the market that have that problem with publicly identifiable data and deliver them the value before they ever log in. And if you can do that, suddenly the conversation changes because you bring them to your product where they are, not where you are.
Andy: Today, I'm super excited to introduce you to Jordan Crawford, an entrepreneur who's totally shaking up how B2B companies think about their go-to-market strategies. Jordan is the founder of Blueprint, which is an amazing agency that's a real game changer for data-driven decision-making and figuring out your ICP or ideal customer profile. Now, what really blows me away about Jordan is his innovative take on leveraging data in the B2B world. He's not just another tech founder. He's a visionary who's realized that the old school methods of defining ICPs and targeting customers just weren't cutting it anymore. And with Blueprint, he's created a tool that uses data in incredibly smart ways to help companies find and engage with their perfect customers like never before. But that's not all. Jordan is also an advisor to Clay, one of the hottest AI-powered tools in sales and marketing right now. And he's right at the forefront of using AI to supercharge all these go-to-market strategies. He's got some amazing insights on how AI and data analytics are really transforming customer segmentation, lead scoring, and personalized outreach. In this episode, we're gonna dive deep into Jordan's journey in how he defines ICPs, how he scales email campaigns, and we're gonna explore how he's changing the way companies use data to define and redefine their ICPs. Now, we're also going to chat about his unique perspective on blending data science with go-to-market strategy and how he's helped companies move beyond traditional firmographic data to create more nuanced and effective customer profiles. So whether you're a startup founder looking to nail your ICP, a sales leader aiming to improve your targeting, or a marketer interested in the latest data-driven strategies, this conversation is packed with valuable insights and practical tips you can start using right away. And hey, if you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and follow us on your favorite podcast app or right here on YouTube. It's the best way to stay in the loop on future episodes, and it helps out the podcast a ton. With that said, let's jump right in. Here's Jordan Crawford. Andy, what's up my dude? Oh no, no. Okay. Now I can hear you. Yeah. Yeah. You're a couple minutes late, but look, I'm going to assume what happened is you're deep in the clay making a crazy workflow on like how to conquer the world and why the meaning of life is number 42.
Jordan: I really, is that where you were doing? I really am embarrassed. Uh, I'm embarrassed that that's a true statement.
Andy: Yeah. I figured I'm like, he's just, he's neck deep in clay right now. And, uh, you know, so he's, he's making a crazy table. So, you know, is this live? Are we live? No, we're not live. Oh, we're live, man. We just, we just hit record and we go. Yeah.
Jordan: We keep it. Oh yeah. So this is, uh, uh, it's not live, but it's recording is what that's right.
Andy: Yeah. Oh yeah. We're not like broadcasting the like LinkedIn right now, but yeah, we're recording. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, no, I just, I click play and start recording. Cause like, yeah. Um, the listeners are going to laugh because I say this every time it throws people off, but it's like, when you, when you like plan it and you're like, all right, we're going to hit record. Like people just change their whole tone.
Jordan: And they're not as like, yeah, that's true. It's like, well, and then, um, I've been on podcasts before where I sit through, uh, like, Hey, you know, there's an intro and then there's like 20 minutes of commercials. I'm like, what am I doing here? It's so strange.
Andy: Like, what is? Yeah, exactly. So I'm just like, even me, right? Like, I personally, like, if I do that, it's like, I changed my tone in my, in my toot. And I'm just like, I don't want to do that. So just want to like, come on, like, we're having a, you know, we just having a conversation. So I think people appreciate it.
Jordan: Hopefully, if not, I always tell people, I'm like, they're like, a five hour video, who's gonna watch a five hour video? I'm like, I'm like, dude, you get what you paid for. It was free. Yeah. Like, like, I know I'm a gun to your head. I'm like, watch my YouTube video or your kids aren't coming home. It's like, just, there's plenty of Mr. Beast videos online.
Andy: Like you don't need to be watching. You know, I've never watched the Mr. Beast video. Really? Like I've seen the thumbnails, but like, I've never watched the Mr. Beast video. I think I've seen a few hooks, but like, I've not, cause I don't have it. I don't have any, I think he's a fricking, You know, crazy, most amazing person of all time as it comes to like social media, but I just, I don't know. I've just never like watched it.
Jordan: Yeah, Mr. Beast. Mr. Beast answers the question of if you could create a headline that would get a lot of clicks, but it was a very hard to create the content, what YouTube channel would you create? So that's just what he does.
Jordan: Yeah. So it's like like I dropped off to 20,000 people in a den of sharks and one of them had the key to unlock the shackles on your you know, it's like and he's like, yeah, I was willing to make that.
Andy: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then I think he spends like a million dollars on a video or something. Yeah. It's very expensive. And that's why he's got a moat, right? Like, but he, you know, it's like, what, what, you know, who has a million dollars to spend on a video like that? But, uh, I guess that's your stick, which is crazy. Um, but dude, all right. So we, I've got my notes here and we were chatting on what's happened. We wanted to talk through a couple of things. The first thing we wanted to chat through was you organize an event. And I think people need to hear about this because it's super interesting. You organized an event called a cannonball and for, I don't know what it is, but it reminds me of a coding hackathon, but like Jordan's crazy version of that for go to market. But what, like, is this a thing? What's like cannonball mean? Or is this like something you made up?
Jordan: Okay. Well, so what a cannonball means. Um, I got really, there's a YouTube channel called Vin wiki and it has all these great car stories. And I'm like, I, I love driving. I wouldn't say I'm a car guy. Like you talk about like leaders and displacement and like, those are like sports ball references to me. Um, which I've got a sports ball trick. If you ever get into a sports ball conversation, you're not a sports ball person, but, um, but really there's a great video that talks about during COVID. There was someone that made a cannonball run, which is a drive from like LA to New York as fast as possible. And so, so they like modified this Mercedes to have like two gas tanks and they stopped like twice. And it was like, the whole point is go as fast as you can from LA to New York. And they call it, it's called a cannonball. And so I was like, I love this. I love, love, love this video. And the guy is so well-spoken. And I came across a product called Shovels, which is a permit API. So you can call it and see the permit history for any given property. You can see what contractors are doing, et cetera. And I was like, I know exactly what I want to do. Um, and it's not hard to do it. Um, it's just, there's a lot of steps involved and I think I could do it in a one singular long run inside of clay. And so that was the idea with the cannonball to, uh, to try to make that happen.
Andy: Okay. Got it. And so you, you basically organized like, uh, a cannon, was it like a hackathon with you and friends or, or a cannonball? I should say with you and friends where you tried to do it. And like, what was the outcome of that?
Jordan: Yeah. So, uh, I didn't originally have friends, but I'm like, yo, man, I can't speak for five hours straight. So I called my friend, like, okay. I mean, look, I love the sound of my own voice. Don't get me wrong. Like, I like, look, you and I both own microphones for a reason. Right. Uh, yeah. I always joke. It's like, they don't check your ID. Like they just let you go to the store and buy a mic. They're not like, what are you going to say? Uh, which is like a crazy be like, Oh, you got that microphone. So I call my friend Doug, who's just like an amazing fractional CMO. He was the CMO at Lean Data. And the guy's just a good friend. He drank me under the table. And my friend Andreas was in town. He's a clay guy like me. And then Kellen, another good friend of mine, clay guy like me. And I was like, okay, well, let's get a bunch of people together, livestream this thing, and then just walk through all of the thinking from the beginning. Just like, what does this company do? Who are they going after? What's the value prop? Who should we target? How do we do it? How do we find the leads? What do we say? Everything.
Andy: So every piece of the go-to-market moment. Every piece, yeah.
Jordan: Beginnings of a go-to-market moment, I should say. Yeah. I mean, the goal was at the end of the cannonball to be able to ship a message to cold email and LinkedIn. And we did set up some infrastructure ahead of time in that time period. And we got to a message. It took me another couple of hours to get to both the leads and a message that I felt amazing about.
Andy: Wow. OK. You guys are such spammers, man. You're such spammers.
Jordan: Well, no, you make a very good point because a lot of these people that run cold email agencies, Eric talks about this, Eric Nowoslowski, that it's ads. These cold email agencies are running ads. They're running free ads to your inbox.
Andy: That's how I think about cold email now too. It's literally just an ad impression. That's all it is. Yeah.
Jordan: And so this was not the goal of that. And let me like kind of expand what we did so that you'll have a kind of an understanding about the goal here. Generally, the problem with a lot of B2B SaaS companies is like, who do you sell to? And it's like, I sell to your mother and everybody else's mother in the country. And so it's like, okay, that's not a segment.
Andy: My mom did mention, she's like, why did I get an email from Jordan Crawford?
Jordan: And I'm like, wait, Jordan what? I don't know if you know, but I bought this fine water bottle with her money. So please thank her.
Jordan: So basically the key kind of insight here is that What is a message so good that you would pay to receive it? That was the true thing that I was trying to answer in this cannonball, right? The problem that we have with a lot of go-to-market today is that people are trying to stand out. They're trying to get your attention. I have a different bar, and that bar is what's an email you would pay to receive? So let me tell you about how we did that. So we've got all this great data for Shovels, right? Across the country, they've spent time like crawling all the permit data across the country. It's like not easy work, right? Well, the question is who can benefit from permit data? Well, we started, you know, when I was chatting with Ryan, he's like, well, any prop tech company. And it's like, Okay, not really. That's not true. There's a bunch of prop tech companies that don't give a shit about permanent data. So I said, that's going to be hard because we have to then filter the world and is this a real estate prop tech company? Do they deal with lawns? It's like, who knows, right? Um, but I said, what about like a parent type? So we settled on roofing. Okay. So now you can imagine that roofing companies are very similar. It's not like a roofing company in Toledo, Ohio is like vastly different than a roofing company in San Francisco, California. Um, you know, here we just put broccoli on our pizza. That's the primary difference between when you're waiting to install the shingles. I was going to take you off my top eight LinkedIn friends, man. That that's just, uh, that's like peak San Francisco. You can find broccoli on pizza here, but, uh, I, I wouldn't recommend it. So, yeah. Yeah.
Andy: I mean, it's, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a
Jordan: So basically, we said, OK, well, roofing companies across the company are pretty similar. And we have actually data on construction companies, like local roofers. And we know the size of job that they're doing. We know the material that they're using on the roof. We know how many of them they are doing. You got to pull permits for that information. Now, it's not easy to get that information. It's not that it's not public. So we said, OK, well, who would find that most valuable? So we honed in on GAF distributors, which is GAF is the largest manufacturer of roofing materials in the country. Now, if you're a GAF distributor, you're selling into local contractors, right? So you can kind of start to see where this is going. So what we did is we said, okay, great, let's go scrape all of the GAF distributors. And we know they're GAF distributors because they're listed on the GAF website. So I don't have to be like, oh, dude, is this exactly a good fit? Then I know where they're located. Well, the thing about selling local roofing supplies is it's local. It's not like if you are a local gap distributor in Toledo that you're going to be selling to Portland. And they probably have more broccoli on their pizza than we do. So then what we did is we called the shovels API in that region. And we said, give me all of the contractors with the most amount of permits that they have pulled sorted by gaff usage and size of jobs. So Andy, I could send you a message that is. As a gaff distributor in Atlanta, you probably care about knowing the contractors that are doing a shit ton of roofs and are only using GAF in 5% of their jobs. Andy's Construction Company has installed $500,000 of roofs in the last three months, and only 10% of those roofs use GAF. You might want to call Andy as a great upsell opportunity. And by the way, I got 10 more Andys in your area that are already on your roster. You sold to them before because they do use GAF, but they're not using enough of it. And you could get so much more money if you had these permanent sites. So I'm sending you an actual lead, and maybe I go get Andy Construction Co. 's contact information for you. I'm like, here are the top three contractors in your area sorted by amount of roof spend, where they've used at least one GAF product, and they're not using GAF in most of their roofs.
Andy: So I have sorted and structured the world for you. Got it. Got it. Got it. And so this is a, was this a go-to-market business for like a business you were going to actually start or were you just going to send leads to these companies?
Jordan: No, no, Shovels is a real company that has, it's an API for permits. Like I just picked, this is a real company, they sell real product. And so I actually delivered the data. Like I did this at scale for the whole market. Like I didn't make up the data. It's like, actually this is Andy's construction company in Atlanta, Georgia. And he only used his GAF in 10% and he has 50,000. So we called all the APIs. We basically built a data workflow inside of Clay to actually deliver that message at scale.
Andy: That's crazy. That's great. And that's where you've you basically like ultra defined, like an amazing ICP.
Jordan: Yes. You know, you hit the nail on the head. Absolutely. And that's the thing is that we have this all wrong. We we think, what should I say? Oh, Jordan, like you have a microphone. I have a microphone. We're basically the same person. Like, do you want to buy my sass garbage? Like, no, like, like it's not, you could, you could tell me, Jordan, I, I know you woke up at 8 41 in the morning today, you lazy son of a, uh, and you, you made a really shitty cappuccino and, uh, you put on two mismatched socks. That has nothing to do, it's very personal, but it has nothing to do with my buying behavior, what I need. It has just nothing to do with any of that. And so we get all obsessed with that personalization, but the more personalization doesn't help you with prioritization. And that's where ICP definition, segmentation, can absolutely help you because if you're narrowing in on a really, really small segment, you can say something to them. And if that segment is ultra well-defined, you don't even need personalization. You can actually send them something uniquely of value because you know that 10 people on the list are like the next 10 people on the list.
Andy: Wow. You just dropped the bar that I think we're going to make sure we highlight it.
Jordan: Wait, I dropped the bar?
Andy: Wait, that's- No, you dropped a bar, like, you know, like bars, you know, like a rap term, you know, which is- Yeah, yeah. You just dropped- Maybe there's a pun in there because we're talking roofing and I don't know, but yeah, you dropped the ladder. I don't know. Well, anyways, we're getting wonky in this pod, but you dropped the bar, which is like people focus on prioritization. Or I'm sorry, on personalization when it's really about prioritization, which is like, oh damn. But to get to that point, it's hard, man. It sounds hard. Like it sounds like you have to know what you're doing with clay and like this ICP filtering. Like how does like a, yeah, a normal person like me, like do that.
Jordan: Yeah. That's a great question. That's a great question. And the, the problem here is that if you go like go to most B2B SaaS companies, websites, they have a hundred thousand pages and they're like, The best chatbot to do these 8,000 things. Now, the best way to start is to have empathy for your buyer. And there was a company recently that launched called Operator, and they talk about this, the great ignore. And all these people are ignoring us. And I'm like, no, no, no. It's the great ignorance. And we have just immense amount of ignorance for the lives of our customers. And so what you need to do first is you need to understand what is their, what situation are they in? Now, if you come to me and you're trying to sell me drift, a chatbot, and you say, it's a chatbot, it's on your website. There's 392 different chatbots on G2. How am I supposed to have an understanding of why you are different? And so that message comes down to like a bunch of base features or like these other people. I mean, how many times you got a message like we work with Salesforce. I'm like, dude, I don't own a tower. That's a terrible case study for me. So think about in the inverse, which is What can you uniquely say to a very niche segment that none of your competitors can, that your customers care about deeply? And so even though your product could be used by everyone, which is the problem right there, it could be used by everyone, You need to start at the very other side, which is what is the niche that you have the most traction in, where people use you in the same ways, and what is the insight that they have, not that you have, about your product? And so let me give you an example of this. I work with a company that does AI camera systems. And we talked to one of their customers, and I said, well, why did you buy? And he said, well, Um, uh, well, Jordan, uh, it wasn't the cheapest in the market and it wasn't the best in the market. And like, you never want to hear that. You're like, Oh shit. Okay. So don't go for price or quality. What am I going to do now? And I said, well, well, that doesn't seem rational. Why would you purchase this product? If you didn't believe that? He said, because to go with ADT, which is the name brand in the space, they're a franchise model. And I have to contact, I've got 12 locations across 12 states. I got to contact 12 people anytime I need anything. And so I love the ease of being able to buy online, to have the system at one place that I could go for my entire system across all of my locations. And that's an insight, right? And so if you start to say, okay, great. If I'm trying to sell security solutions to people across the board, one thing that I might want to say is like, look, a lot of other security companies you buy from are local security companies. You're not a local company. You're a national company. And so are you truly going to try to coordinate if you're at central headquarters and someone's breaking into your Atlanta location, are you going to have to figure out who the Atlanta ADT rep is to get support? Like, no, you're not going to do that. And so you can't invent that insight. You just have to chat with the customer and you hear it two or three or four times, and then you develop a segment around it. And then the messaging is just what the customers told you about why they bought.
Andy: Huh. And this is like getting into, you know, why, you know, I know it sounds super cheesy, but like why everyone in Silicon Valley and, you know, the, the, the SAS gurus are like, talk to your customers. Right. Because it's like, it's more than like to build a great product, but it's, it's to build a great narrative as well around what the hell do we say? Not only, you know, to current customers, but to new ones that we're trying to acquire. And, and there was a, I was, I was talking to a friend recently, who's like a Facebook ad guru. And this reminds me of this as well. And he goes, and I go like, what do you think about ads? And he goes, man, I go and look at where people are talking about your competitor and look at what they're saying that's not good about them and frame how your product is actually better in that area. Truly if it is, right? And I'm like, oh, and he goes, yeah. For example, he's like, I worked with a, like a mushroom coffee company. And he goes, and the main competitor, we just went to their Facebook ads. And the main comment that people were saying on their ads and on all their content online, and this could actually be a product idea, by the way, is to go filter all the comments from all different social platforms from competitors. But maybe you can build a clay table for that, Jordan.
Jordan: I have actually for G2. I've looked at competitors.
Andy: Oh, for G2, there you go. You've already got it. Yeah, pull G2. What am I thinking, dude? Of course, you've already got it. Yeah. Um, so, so I would actually love that table for G2. Um, but, um, side note, what if you could do that for all social networks? Cause this is, this is what he's doing manually and he finds the common thread. And for this mushroom company, what he said is, Hey, everyone's saying that it works well, but it tastes like crap. And so what he did is his whole positioning for his client was finally a mushroom coffee that tastes good. Yeah. I mean, and he's like that ad prints for me because every other one tastes like crap. Yeah. And everyone says they taste like, and I'm like, that's it. And he's like, that's it, dude. He's like, that's, that's what you do.
Jordan: And by the way, this is how Amazon builds products. What they do is when they came out the fire TV, they looked at all the negative reviews of Roku and Apple TV, and they built a product that just was the inverse of all those negative reviews. It's expensive. It doesn't have enough connections, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so that's how Amazon basically uses the reviews on its own site to create its products. And of course, it makes sense, right? You have the data, you actually have customer sentiment, AI is making that easier. And let me talk to you about the way that I see this, which is that it's one effort to build a product. It's a totally separate effort to Talk about what your product does. And it's another actual effort to say something that customers believe about your product. And those gaps are widening, which is it's easier than ever to build a product. So you just throw in a bunch of features. So you can just keep adding, adding, adding, adding, adding, right? But, but the more, the stuff that you say, customers are smart and they understand that there's more crap that is easier to build. So there's a widening golf between what you can, what you can build and what you should say, which is, which should be really narrow actually. And And if you just say all the things that you can do, the customer is like, I don't know what, what category does this exist in? How do they compete? And even if you get that right, you still have to have this other lens, which is like, what will they believe? And, and so we, on all these websites, I mean, what you'll see is like, here's the 87,000 features. Good luck customer. Like, and that's exactly what that exercise that you talked about. That's positioning. Right. Yeah. That is exactly what he did. He positioned the company. It's like, look, like everyone knows that eating raw mushrooms is like good for you, but like no one wants to wake up at eight in the morning and put a bowl of mushrooms in their mouth. Like that would be deranged, right?
Andy: So maybe it's San Francisco, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Jordan: It's called biohacking now.
Jordan: Yeah. I think people are smoking weed at eight in the morning here.
Jordan: I think, yeah, they're just taking it to the next level.
Jordan: All that California sober.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah, OK, so this is good. I like this, because you know this conversation. I think it was going to go one way, which is like let's talk about advanced clay workflows and now we're talking about. What's more important than I think all these crazy workflows and doing it is like, you got to know what you want to say before you, like, you have, you have to know, you, you, you can't know what to say unless you know where to start.
Jordan: And if you start in the wrong place and that's the hardest thing people, and, um, there's a great quote, which Ivan and notion, um, uh, uh, shared with me and I, it stuck in my head. We shape our tools, and thereafter, our tools shape us. And that is to say, we'll log into Apollo or to Zoom Info, and we'll try to filter our way down to an ICP. But that's not where the best lists usually come from. They usually come from these niche websites, the top 100 training companies, the roofing distributors, et cetera, because those lists, when they were built, had an opinion when they were built. Apollo is trying to structure the world. And I'm not saying there's not value in that data, but if I contact someone on the GAF manufacturing, on the distributor's website, and I say, like, you're distributing GAF, I can know for sure. Now, if I go to Apollo and I add a keyword that says GAF distributor, who knows? And so that's why you need to start out with this niche customer insight where they're saying the same things. And you're like, it's mushroom coffee that tastes good. So who are the people that want mushroom coffee that tastes good? These are actual people that drink decaf. And where people hang out to drink decaf is not in San Francisco, but where is that niche? Where do people Where is that tight group of people where even if I had no personalization, I know that that list has prioritization in it by default? And I can send a non-personalized message just literally about an insight. And I shipped one of these today. I was with a client yesterday, and I wrote some sales message. And he's like, I hate this. I was like, yeah, I understand. And then what we did is we automated a LinkedIn campaign that was like, hey, we're going to directors of engineering at larger companies. Are you responsible for CRM integrations in your team? Workado is the 800-pound gorilla in the room here, but we have heard that developers don't like it at all. But I'm curious to get your thoughts, having actually implemented this type of technology. I didn't tell, I didn't say anything about me. I just appealed to, and I know I, by the way, I know that you're doing CRM integration, so I know you're doing Salesforce integrations. I did my research. Um, I sent an AI agent out and I scored 20,000 companies. So these are the companies that have the deepest Salesforce integration. They talk immensely about their Salesforce integration. They also have a lot of customers. So one of the kind of insights is that every Salesforce integration at that scale is its own custom. It's a tenant. It's basically its own custom code. It's like writing a different piece of software. Yeah. Yeah. And so, so we basically, um, we, we played up the person's ego. Like, look, I don't know, you know, you're an expert, right? Like I want to have you come to my podcast. I'm like, yeah, sure. I'd love to talk about it.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan: So, so if you, so, and that is a, that's an insight about the market. We know that these are tenant management and no, no one else really understands that. And it plays to your ego. Like you're the expert here. I'm not the expert. You actually are on the ground implementing this stuff. And so if you segment your customers, right, you don't have to worry about personalization as much. You just really have to think about what's the insight, what's the, what's the thing that is going to be ultra valuable.
Andy: Yeah. And this is where I, I, you know, if you're sending a ton of emails these days, you know, through instantly and smart lead and, and, you know, doing, and doing these types of workflows for whatever reason, you're categorized as a spammer. Right. And here's how I kind of would personally categorize the spammers. Like anyone can spin up a million email inboxes and send a million emails a month, but. if you're sending a message that isn't resonating and then sending me a million emails a month, it's spam. It truly is spam, right? It's like, you don't know, but if, if you do that and you know that that you've tested that message and it's resonated, then it's not because you know, you're being helpful and you're kind of hitting the right core. Yeah.
Jordan: And I actually, I have messages that are, I haven't got a cold email campaign running right now, which it's performing ultra well. And, and, and it, it works across the country, but we looked at every just sold property in the country. And we evaluated the text, all the property text, all the property images, and we pulled permit history. And we threw all of that into a model, and we said, estimate the HVAC repairs that are needed in this home. And so, and the listing description, sometimes we'll just say like, the HVAC's broken, it's replaced. The permits will show that it's, you know, it's had problems. Some of the images will show rust on the, or like one of the, one of the guys that I was, HVAC guys I was chatting with, he's like, oh, look, Jordan, this is a high ceilings and there's no registers at the top over the windows, which means this gets really, really hot. And so I then found properties that are like, look, this needs like $300,000 of HVAC work. Like the property was burnt from the inside. Or like the seller has said like, hey, the HVAC, it's a three HVAC system. It was just kind of based on square footage. And then what I did is I found those properties that needed the most amount of HVAC work. And I programmatically searched for the 20 nearest HVAC companies to that address. And I said, yo, Andy, 123 Main Street just sold. We use AI to identify that. They say in the description that it needs a new HVAC. The permit history shows that the last time it was pulled was in 2012, which is kind of the general lifespan of an HVAC unit. And we found rust on some of the images. It might be a good home for you to check out. If this was useful to you, let me know. This is what I sell. And I give them all the details. So it's like, oh, this is a $200,000 job. Am I going to drive down? Am I, am I going to be upset? Like Jordan, why did Jordan send me this details of this $200,000 job that I got?
Andy: Yeah. Come on, man. Get out of my inbox. Get out of here. Spammer.
Jordan: Yeah. And people are like, how have we met before? Like people like are trying to jog their memory that I'm their friend. Like that we, that I know them because like what stranger would send this information?
Andy: Yeah. What's the catch. Well, the catch is you're trying to get their business to give them more leads, but you know, but like you're doing it in a way where it's like, damn, you helped me. Yeah. Without me asking. Yeah. Yep. Yep. Right. Yep. And that's great. How's that work for, like, does that work? I'm guessing it works well for getting new contracts. Yeah.
Jordan: I was on a webinar yesterday with five HVAC companies and I closed three of them like on the call. Like they just put in their credit card on the call. It was amazing.
Andy: Wow. Yeah. Cause you've already done the work for them basically.
Jordan: Yeah. Yeah. And, and, uh, you know, this is, this product is an early stage development and I'm like, look guys, you're like, I have to refine this for you. Like the register insight, for example. And this is the thing about building in a niche. If I build this for HVAC, it's not like an HVAC person in Atlanta is going to tell me something that just like doesn't apply at all. Now, there are some things that are temperature changes, whatever. But that's the kind of nice thing about building in a niche, because if you build in a niche, every insight that you have applies to every other customer. And that's the thing, if you deploy a chatbot, and chatbots are my kind of go-to here because the people don't verticalize their go-to-market with chatbots. They're like, anyone can use a chatbot. And so they're like, oh, signals, you know, you can get signals in the chatbot and the tent, and they just like throw a bunch of shit. But like a solar company doesn't, they're like, I don't care, signal. I don't, I just want to know, like, is it going to get someone over the deal to buy a home, to buy a solar system, right? Well, a chatbot built for solar companies is going to look way different. You're going to have qualification. You're going to be like, enter your address. It's going to have integrations with other things. And so if you build a chatbot for everyone, it kind of doesn't work for most people. They're like, shit, this doesn't really integrate with Salesforce. And it's like, God, the data sources aren't quite right. And so you kind of have to kludge it together. Meanwhile, the next person that builds a chatbot does the exact same thing, and their main differentiator is half the price. And so that becomes a losing game. But if you niche down and you're like, just for solar companies, suddenly the stuff that you build becomes more and more and more and more useful for solar companies. And no one in the same breath would ever mention your chatbot solar company as they would a drift or an intercom because you're so deeply into that workflow. And every customer that use you looks like every other customer that uses you. and that type of niching down, even if your product can do a bunch of other shit. And look, people come in the door and they say, hey, Jordan, I'd like to give you my money. Take that money. Like, fine. But don't go to market that way. Don't go to market to the people that have come to you and said, I'd like to give you my money, and say, we're a money-taking machine. Will we take any types of money that you want to give us? And that's what we're doing today. We're basically saying, here's a bunch of features you figured out. We'll take your money. If you have any type of money, any color money from anywhere to solve any problem, we'll take that money. And it's no surprise that buyers are like, ugh, get out of here.
Andy: Yeah, dude, I made this mistake. Like everyone, like I'm going through this right now. And how I made this mistake was distribute right is digital sales rooms. And you know, all the all the freaking, you know, things we had on our side was, you know, the fastest way to create digital sales rooms, which, you know, is an embryonic term, I would think still, you know, considering SAS and like, but What I realized is it was still very vague. And when you think digital sales room, it's like, there's a lot that can go in it. You can't really like picture, you know, everything that it really does. And so recently we, and literally we're launching this on Sunday, but we're changing the whole positioning. And instead of doing that, what we said is like, what is the one entry point workflow that will get people to initially sign up for our product? And I was like, dude, they want to just create follow up pages, like follow up quickly, easily with a nice looking resource. And so what I said is, dude, we're just going to be the one click follow up for sellers. Yeah. Yeah. And I call my friends. I'm like, what do you think about this? First thing they said was, dude, how do I get that? I hate following up. It takes too long. You know, like, it's like my least favorite part of doing sales calls, like, and I'm like, holy shit, it's so simple. But it's something that like it hits a, it hits a strikes a chord for like everyone. And then it is visible, right? Like, okay, cool. I can just do my one follow-ups. And then from there you can build on the business cases and the mutual action plans and all the other stuff. But you just start like, we're just saying nail that fricking workflow and do videos of fricking how to do a great follow-up and just like hammer the hell out of that. Yeah. Right. And my competitors listening are going to be like, all right, shit, we're going to go do that now too. But, uh, but you know, what you're saying is literally what I'm doing right now. And I'm like, shit, man, I wish I like really niche niched more down into like one particular pain point of people versus like this big web of, um, which is like creating business cases.
Jordan: And, and, and also again, where you, where you start is why you struggle. And if you start at a place that is like, well, who can use this? And the answer to that question is actually, it's kind of large. And so let's imagine if you were going back to day one, and you said, okay, well, if you're selling into a fortune 500 company, that process is much different than if you're selling into SMBs, right? Okay, well, let's take the fortune 500 company case. Well, It's really hard to, like my guess, and I don't have a lot of experience here, but it's really hard to find those contacts to know who's the person responsible. The buying committees are going to look different. The procurement is going to look different. The way churn is going to look different. I was chatting with a friend that sells all these companies. He's like, Jordan, 50% of my deals never… They pay, of course, but they never get actually implemented because people churn and it's a complex solution. And I was like, oh, super interesting. And so if you basically said, this is the best way for you to ensure that you close deals in the Fortune 500 and that product Where you start is how you win, because that means that you're going to start doing things by saying only the Fortune 500 that are about procurement. You're like, here's a way around. For example, if you can get on the AWS Marketplace, uh, these CISOs by millions of dollars of credits. And then you don't have to go through procurement because Amazon went through procurement so they can spend Amazon bucks to buy your, your solution. Right. And so if you said just the fortune 500, you would then go help them with that sales process. And you're not going to build something that helped that talks to the procurement team Because in the fortune 500, that's that said, you know, it's a two year process or whatever, right? You're going to build different things. So you become better and better and better and better, because you started in a place that has aggressive walls. And that's the thing that we're not doing really well right now.
Andy: Yeah, well, I think it's because there's this You know, it's, it's an art in the sense that I look at it too, is cause like the market wants consolidation and all in one. So everyone, well, that, that's what they say. Right. And this is where it gets interesting. So that's where my head was at. Oh shit. All in one, guess what? We can do all of this stuff, you know? And, and really though you think about, and you're like, well, the buyer might want all in one. at the end of the day, but that's not necessarily the same positioning to get people interested in the product. Oh, that's true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Right. And so you're then playing, so then you're kind of playing two positioning games, right? There's like, there's your PLG kind of positioning. And then there's like your enterprise. So when I talked to like, you know, I was just on, I'm working a big, uh, company right now. Uh, I won't say their name, but they do e-signatures and, And talking to them, they're like, you know, when I'm talking to their VPs, I'm not saying, Oh, yeah, we're gonna just do follow ups. I'm talking about the vision I'm talking about. No, you can house everything you need and throughout your deals here and that or that. But when I'm talking to a rep, it's like, Oh, no, you just manage your follow ups right here in a couple clicks.
Jordan: Yeah, one click. And you can't do that on the website. I mean, people try to do it for a little bit of everyone you can't do that on the website. And I, I do think that this, you know, there's a reason that clay has taken off like zoom info could have been that Apollo could have been that. Why they're like the best tool for everything. And what ends up happening is they dilute their value prop. Like, um, you know, like for example, there's just so much more still, it's hard to be like, does this person actually work at this company? Like, like, why is that an unsolved data problem in 2024? It's because these companies said, we're not, we're not, our data product is, I mean, I haven't seen a new Apollo filter, like, I mean, since I started this thing, it's not like Apollo's like, Hey, here's a brand new way. Here's AI for you to be thinking about how to build ICPs, right? Like B because they're, they have to, they're building other products. They're like a sequencer and an intent tool and a, and they just throw a bunch of things. And so suddenly it's, uh, and, and they dry and ever, and they dry prices down. But the thing is their competitors come in with wedges. and they will wedge them out category by category by category because you just can't build an amazing all-in-one tool. You seed ground.
Andy: Yeah. You said something interesting. You can't build an amazing all-in-one tool. I kind of agree. I mean, I'm trying to think of an amazing all-in-one tool that's like there and there's not, I mean, I think the biggest version of this is maybe a Salesforce where they're trying to do everything, but like, even them still, people just use it as the CRM. Right. Like, and, you know, if you look at the sales engagement space, that's the space I come from that space, you probably know well, right. Cause email, like everyone in sales engagement tried to do everything, call recording, sequencing, now they're all doing it. And it actually created a lot of problems. Um, and they go to market side because when you think about it, if you're trying to be something for everyone, you're something for no one, right? It's like, if you're trying to like, and you know, what's funny is I like only took that advice recently, which is, you know, call me an idiot, whatever, but- Our eyes are bigger than our stomach.
Jordan: That's a human condition.
Andy: Yeah, it's, you know, it's interesting. I think in the sales engagement space, every one of these players tried to do everything. And then people like instantly and smartly and all these little guys come in and Apollo, and they're just like, no, we just do the sequencing. And we do it the best. And, you know, I was also talking to Adam Robinson, you know, a good friend of mine, we were, we were wake surfing, you know, a couple of weeks ago. And we were chatting and I was talking to this positioning thing. And I was like, shit, man, I'm having this problem. Like, should I niche down? Should I not? And he's like, dude, he's like, I'm art. He's does our B2B. Right. And Adam goes, I'm just going to do, I'm just doing one thing and I'm just going to do it better than everyone. He's like, I'm not going to do anything else. And he goes, so when people think of website visitors, they just think RB to B because that's the one thing we do well. And he's like, I'm not going to build a whole platform. He's like, I can get this thing to X million in ARR just with that little thing. Yeah. And I'm like, wow. And that's what really changed my opinion. I was like, dude, yeah, just do the one thing.
Jordan: I mean, like you think about like gong, like I use gong at a recent customer engagement, I don't know, three or four months ago, maybe things have changed since then. But I just wanted to talk to all the customers with generative AI. So here's what I had to do. I had to go into every call and export the PDFs, the PDFs, the PDFs, the PDFs. Like, are you kidding me? And I had to copy and paste the PDFs into a chat to chat bot to deploy it for the sellers to be like, I'm trying to understand what our customers say. And I'm like, why Gong? Like if your whole thing is conversational intelligence, there's nothing intelligent about a PDF. You have all the text. What is going on? And it's like if Gong just said the best way to understand what your next customer wants That's amazing. And Gong could do that. And, you know, there's Sybil and Fireflies and all these recorders that have, you know, it's cheaper and, you know, just throw them on the thing. And a lot of them use generative AI and they're writing follow-up emails for you and they're going to update the CRM. And it's like Gong didn't have to seed that. There is, there's no reason why Gong shouldn't be the first on your mind when you think about, I mean, they created the category. They did all of that work and suddenly you log in and you're like, what the, what is happening here? Like why? Why am I not greeted? I mean, hey, Jordan, I know that you're new to Gong. Thanks so much for signing up. You probably would like to understand something from the 348 seller conversations that have already happened in the last six months. Here are the key things that you should know starting your role about what customers care about. And we pulled data from your website. Here's what they don't care about. It doesn't match your positioning at all. Oh my God, thank you so much, Gong. I can't believe that you were able to surface those insights for me. And there's just no reason that Gong shouldn't be able to do that.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah. Well, this goes back to where full circle, right? Like the sales engagement category. I think a lot of people try to get into it. Right. And we're like, well, now we're all going to do everything. And they got distracted by what they do the best, right? The sales law and outreaches and that, you know, they didn't just get amazingly good at the sequencing and making sure they're doing all the new stuff and best infrastructure. You know, I think it's, it's like shiny objects render on. Yeah. Right. It's like, and, and I think it was, they were all trying to play this winner takes all kind of like, you know, narrative. Um, And so what it taught me was like, it doesn't need to be winner takes all, man. There's like, there's like plenty of business for everyone and just double down on what you're good at.
Jordan: I mean, like, and, and a perfect, and this is why, if you define your lane narrow enough, you become the best in the world at it. Right. You, your bar chart has the opportunity to go high, not wide. And so if you think about. Like smart lead is, I don't know, they're sending tens or hundreds of millions of emails a month, a huge amount of volume. They have all the bounce data. They know what emails aren't being delivered, right? So there's no reason that they can't, and I don't know if they do this, but Bob's a smart guy. Hey, we had a, I think they have a global block list. It's like, hey, this has already bounced for someone else. We don't need this email to bounce for you. We know it's bounced in the last 24 hours. And that data has a fast decay. So bounce rate should be a salt. We should not see bounces. And here's the question, how many people in that ecosystem have sent to the same email and they all just bounced? And so that's a perfect example where if you were just focused on a sales engagement tool, and that's all you were building, and it was just email, it was just email sequences, that's something that you would build. And you can imagine that compounding, right? So suddenly, and that's exactly what happened with Instilling and Smartly. It's exactly why they are, this is why outreach and Um, you know, in sales off and they seeded the, the. Entry, uh, market, uh, basically like we're only going to work for enterprises and they, you know, outreach missed the boat on the multi-domain stuff. And maybe there's a bunch of reasons why they can't do that. I don't know. Um, uh, and you know, and they sent an email to their customers, like Google's going to start classifying all your emails. Can you imagine having to contact your customers and say, by the way, using this product will land you in spam. Oh, yeah, that is not good, right? Like, shoot. And so being sales engaged is hard. That's a hard, that's a hard category, hard things to do. But, but I think that, you know, just setting those lines and saying no to a bunch of things makes you really, really, really good at one thing and makes you really hard to catch. Um, well, all the other software companies are building for the customers that bought, not the customers that should buy. And those are two different things. The customers that bought versus the customers that should buy.
Andy: Yeah. That, Ooh, that's a, that's another, that's another bar. Let's call it our ladder. We'll call it a ladder. Yeah. We're going to call that's another ladder, which is, um, yeah, like it's, it is a complete different motion. Right. And I think. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the way I've been thinking about it lately, I'll tell you is like the whole Russell Brunson kind of like offer stack, right? It's like, what's a free product you get out there. That's super simple. It gets people in your ecosystem. Then what's your low ticket doesn't cost much. Then what's your mid ticket. Then what's your high ticket. Right. And I think if SAS companies were to think in that offer stack a little bit more, right. They would, especially the ones trying to do multi-product. they would crush in an amazing way, but instead they're trying to sell everything at once. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan: And, and you're right. It's a building and building a product and building go to market or different things. And I would say that the, You know, PLG was this kind of failed motion. There's not a lot of companies surprisingly do PLG, all the companies that built for PLG have, you know, kind of winding down. You know, there's, I scored 400,000 B2B SaaS websites, there's like a couple thousand true PLG companies. But the idea behind PLG was good, which is we want to showcase value as fast as possible. Now, imagine if you took it one step further, which is don't log in. I'm going to programmatically deliver you, permissionless, the value of my product. And so A perfect example of that for the sales engagement space is like, Andy, your SPF records aren't set up. There are problems with that. Your domains aren't forwarding in this way. I can see you're on an IP blacklist. And just your technical infrastructure, I can tell externally is bad. It's just not working for you. And here's why it's not working. And so imagine if you had a tool that was like an MX toolbox or whatever, that was designed to tell those things, you don't have to wait till someone comes to you, find the people in the market that have that problem with publicly identifiable data, and deliver them the value before they ever log in. And if you can do that, suddenly, the conversation changes because you bring them to your product where they are not where you are.
Andy: Yeah. Ooh. And that's another bladder bar right there. Right. It's like bringing them to where, bringing them to where they are not where you are. Right. It's like, and, and this goes back to the whole ICP, like why I feel like to put a nail in this, that's why ICP is important. Right. If we were to like put it into one sentence, it's because if you ultra define your ICP, you are meeting the buyer where they are versus where you are, right?
Jordan: Right place, right time. And if you do it well, you can deliver exceptional value permissionlessly. And if you do it wrong, you can deliver poor personalization. I mean, that's really what you're doing.
Andy: Well, Jordan, I think this, Concludes our discussion and do this was one of my favorite discussions because we it was definitely we got like into the weeds with this stuff Even though it's probably the most basic. I wouldn't say basic because it is hard these days but like into one of the most Highest priority things you should do before you do anything. Yeah, right, which is like prioritize who your buyers are and you know a lot of people throw around ICP and they think it's a simple filter like People in the U S yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Jordan: Are you breathing? Yeah.
Andy: Are you breathing? And hopefully people that listen to this, what I hope that they get out of it is that like, it goes like 10 levels deeper than that. Yeah. If you want to really dig it and, and, uh,
Jordan: Yeah, I mean, I'll just I'll say this here, I have a concept called the customer insight triangle that is exactly this the go to market insight triangle, you start out with a customer interview, then you do a data hypothesis data exercise like to take that that interview, that insight to the data, and then you define a message hypothesis, and then you take it back to the customer. And if you do that, if you can make that full round trip, which is like understand the customer, figure out where that problem exists in the world publicly, develop a message that describes what the customer already knew in terms of data in the segmentation and bring it back to the customer to be like, Andy, you have been pitched a thousand million sales engagement tools. You said this in the last interview, we found data in this. Would you resonate? Would this resonate with you? And then Andy's like, you know, go take a hike. Like, you don't get it yet. And if you just follow that triangle over and over again, you will naturally define a narrow segment and you'll know what to say to them. And all of this, all this automation, the managing the inboxes, figuring out clay, it all becomes way easier because you're just taking what the customer told you to the next customer.
Andy: Yeah, the positioning, man. It's so true. And dude, I can't tell you how many people worry about the wrong things initially. And they're focused on scale before they have anything to scale, right? Like before they're ready to scale. And so like, it's crazy, you know? And this is where it comes back to looking at cold email like ads, right? And here's why I say this, because if you look at how to run an ad, just very basic, right? You don't throw $100,000 a day at an ad initially, right? You start with $20 a day, the lowest possible thing to get your results, and you test, test, test. I know people that test 500 different ads before they find a winning ad. Right. Yeah. Like, and then once they find the winning ad that has a high click through rate and then a high purchase, whatever your conversion metric is, then you start to pour the gas and scale the spin on the ad.
Jordan: Yes. And that's exactly, I call this exploration versus exploitation. And sometimes we get, I get obsessed with exploration because I love to explore. But once you've explored and you have found something to exploit, exploit it because it usually doesn't last for long. Other people will figure it out. So you have to get good at making that dance between exploration and exploitation.
Andy: Exactly. But most people want to go straight to the exploitation. Yeah.
Jordan: Well, they're just dumping a bunch of money. So you need to be able to explore. You need to be like, what's over here? What's over here? What's over here? And if you can explore really quickly segments, segment by segment by segment, you could take over a market, but you can't do it by blasting the market. You have to segment the market and then go explore, find it, exploit it. Explore, find it, exploit it. And that's the kind of motion that if you can do that over and over again, you basically can bring your product to people at scale and that will value it.
Andy: Man, dude, there's some nuggets in this conversation. I cannot wait to share it.
Jordan: Thank you so much for having me. And, uh, you know, if we do this again, um, we can get like super, super, super tactical next time. And I can tell you about AI agents and all the other cool stuff about, but if you don't do this thing first, I mean, just blow it all to hell. Like you don't have, you can't, I have tried, I failed so many engagements. I can't tell you how many customers I've turned, um, by trying to sort the world for them. and take the world and use AI. I'm using the latest models. I'm spending unlimited amounts of money. And it doesn't work. It doesn't work because you cannot filter out the world. you need to find the segment. And if you find the segment, then you don't have to do the filtering and you get the messaging for free, man.
Andy: Jordan. Thanks Andy. Yes. Let's go. My friend. Yeah. This is amazing. Um, send me those, you have writeups I'm sure on those, those triangle things you mentioned. I've got the, I got a video. What's app those to me. And then I'll include them in the email that goes out. We'll probably have this, uh, edited like next week or something. Okay, send those out to me and I'll send include those in the email. Okay, you'll probably get some good leads out of it. We'll see. I don't even know if you're doing sass.
Jordan: That's I refuse to position myself.
Andy: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Well, dude, it's been a pleasure, man. This was fucking awesome. I'm going to put this also in the pirate channel so people can listen. Amazing. Yeah, so it was a good show. So you're the man. I'll also send you this file so you can get clips from it too. Oh yeah, yeah. So you can like do content and all that fun stuff off of it. Yeah, I would love that. Thanks, dude. Thanks so much, Andrew. You're the man, dude. Jordan, appreciate you, bro. Have a good weekend. All right. And I'll probably be hitting you up for questions on Clay and shit. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course, of course, yeah. You're the man, dude. I'll talk to you soon, bro. Later. Later, Jordan. Thank you, bro.
