Hello everyone and welcome to today's webinar on the side of prospecting and effective outreach and maybe even more importantly exploratory strategy. So what's important for us when we do our explorations. So with me here today, my ever partner in crime, Thomas Karlsson. So it's back to business as of old or wouldn't you say? Oh, definitely. Always nice to be here. It's you and me. Yet again. Yes. So today we're gonna talk about so I thought we'd start with the prospecting side of things and then kind of move through it as we would in sales. Yeah. But just to frame everything. So I mean, you and me between us, we have what 30, 35 years of experience doing this. I'm hosting up. Yeah, something like that. I'm rustling up 20 on my own. So it's, it's kind of bizarre to just think about back on how old I'm getting. But but starting with prospecting. So for the people who don't understand the term, what is prospecting, Fredrik? Yeah, so basically, it's the finding and nurturing potential prospects to becoming leads and then becoming opportunities and hopefully becoming clients at the end of of that process. So, and it's basically what we did back when I started in sales. It was basically the yellow pages and just call from A too Z and have a bit of a chat, right? That's an old time way. Maybe not how we would do it today, would you say? No. And then we had an era pre GDPR, at least here in Scandinavia, where you basically just bought like contact lists from other companies. And, and that was your list and you started plowing through it. Exactly. We graduated from the phone book to a board, not very well kept list. And, but also, and we were quite usually hear a lot about cold calling. And that was, of course, the main method of yesterday. We're going to get back into cold calling, because I have a fair few things to say about cold calling. But there has been a lot of technologically or technological advances in this area. Right. So tech has progressed. So we don't only have the phone today, we have social media and social selling is a big thing, right? And of course, maybe actually email, because that is actually still or still now after a fair few number of years, the top one deliverable or deliver deliverer of actual prospects. But how would you say that prospecting has evolved? And what would you say that the big important things are now with the new technology we have and also with the new legislation that we have? I would say actually, so, okay, let's start with the legislation. So GDPR, yes, it got everyone to have their knickers in a twist, right? No one know what was going to happen. But then, over time, we've seen, yeah, we still have some rights. So GDPR was never meant to make it make prospecting unavailable, right? So every company needs to sell their service. And yeah, they need to be able to reach out. And that wasn't the aim of GDPR. And then to block that. Some companies I would say have gone further than the GDPR. So it might be harder in some countries, but overall, yeah. So I think that has the first kind of has kind of lessened. And now we see so it's more about actually taking care of the data and also very much respecting that person on the other end, where, like, if we go back to the early, where it could be in your face. 2000s, we were not allowed to do that. And that would be penalized for. But from a tech perspective, I very much see, like, we went from the phone and it being quite personable into everyone like, oh, yeah, I don't have to use the phone anymore. I can use tech and basically hide behind my keyboard. Yeah. And preferably automate the living heck out of it. Right. But now I see a turn back here, which I'm actually excited about because we're bringing humanity back into prospecting. And because let's face it, neither you or me or most people won't shop anything from a computer or a bot if it's more than a pair of socks. Right. But I mean, if you're some kind of title like us being on Facebook, LinkedIn, you're getting swarmed by prospecting and outreach AI tools like. Right. Yes. So I didn't say we had complete the switch. I said we are starting to see. So the ones who do it actually right and are also having success in their prospecting, we see them bringing humanity back into it because. I basically this leads me into the next section when it comes to data segmenting and all of that, which is a big part of of your prospecting to actually know who you're reaching out to, because we come from an era where it's about pushing product or service. Right. But prospecting done right. It's you need to realize it's not about you. It's not about you in any way, shape or form. It's all about that prospect or that potential client of yours. It's about their problems, their needs, not your feature sets. And that is also when you actually can become relevant for them. I don't know about you, but I get so many messages on LinkedIn. People, they lead with their product like it's the best thing invented since. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like, yeah. And you're ascribing me pains, which I don't necessarily have because you're basically making big sweeping arguments. I don't recognize myself in your message. And that's one thing I see a lot of because let's face it. The more senior the sales rep, the more crap they are going to be at prospecting Because prospecting is a skill. It's like all skills. It's like going to the gym, if you stop doing it your muscles will disappear And it's the same here, you won't be as skilled as you were five or ten years ago if you don't keep up with it But let's go back to the segmentation thing, because I don't know how many times I've seen people like, yeah, I've done this segment. It's this industry code with 500 to 5,000 employees. I'm reaching out to this title. I don't know. I want to use the word lazy. It is lazy, and I'm going to be foul-mouthed here, but it's pretty daft. Because would you say that a 500-man company are facing the exact same problems as the 5,000-man companies? And couldn't we possibly break that down even more to actually – because I'm not saying – basically, you don't have the time to be extremely personal and research every single – you can't do that, because your outreach will be like silch, right? Of course. You need to group people, but you need to group people smartly. So basically, getting smaller target groups, and then you can address them in a very personal way, even though it might still be 50 people in that group. But they are so much alike, and not only based on size and industry, because you're still lazy. You could probably find a fair number of other factors, right? And another thing I see a lot with vendors, especially technology vendors, is like, these are our five ICPs, right? It's the marketing director. It's this and this and this. And then it doesn't matter. They just reach out the same way to that title. Yeah. I don't know what you feel there, but I prefer the prospecting in the segmentation where it's a bit more like R&D-based, sort of. Like, what are we good at? What problems are we solving? What kind of companies do I know from experience that has these kind of problems, right? Yeah. And then, but I don't know what you think, but I think that the industry codes are way too wide, right? Yeah. I mean, the so-called SNI or SKI, depending on where you come from. I mean, it's like trying to do surgery with a bat. It's not really a scalpel you're going with here. And I mean, just take a look at us, Omnitas. The code we are supposedly in, it's like, yeah, it basically covers most professional services companies or consultation companies. Take the example, like we are in the same industry code as Accenture. Yeah. We don't do anything. It's any of the same challenges as Accenture has. No, no. It's us, Accenture and McKinsey. It's like, hi. Not really the same problems, I would say. Yeah. What I like to do is like, sort of be a lot more narrow and find like five, 10, 15, maybe even 20 companies where I feel like, yes, this is a good fit. And then instead of having 50 companies where I reach out to one ICP, I reach out to 50 or 60 people within those 10, 20 companies. Yeah. I would say that is a really good strategy. Of course, the more of one or two in a larger amount that works, but you still need to be. And in your case, I would say you're not going to be going to have the same messaging for the CTO as versus the CMO. So because also, and I'm also seeing one dialogue popping up a bit, and maybe I'm guilty myself at times. We're talking pains, right? And that is fine. But maybe we should talk problems, right? Because a prospect who has already identified their pain, they're probably about to solve it anyway. So you're kind of late to the party. We need to talk about problems that we can is leading to that pain. And I think that's the main thing, not pushing. And that's what I see. I mean, both you and me, how many do we get a day? Like between a slow day, 10 and a fast day, 50 of those. And you kind of see directly. And here comes a number of features. It's not much. But it's really interesting because the kind of outreach that I'm getting is literally, here's my product, book a 15 minute call. Yeah. You're already giving me the product. I go to the website. I check it out. I spend two minutes. And then I say, okay, this is not for me because I don't have any problems around this product. Yeah. But if they actually got on a call with me with a proper exploratory, maybe they could help me understand that I actually have some problems. Yeah. But I think that's a part of the laziness, so to speak, that we're trying to run before we're able to walk, right? We need to establish a few things first. And we need to kind of appreciate what's the goal of this outreach, right? Is it to sell directly? No, it's not. It's about making the connection, right? Starting a discussion with someone. Yeah. That's the main point. And that's what we're doing here. It's not about you. It's not about your product. It's about them and the problems they might be facing and just starting the discussion. The main goal here is not to book a demo call. No, it's about starting the discussion and having that leading into that maybe first exploratory of tell me. And it's also so transactional because if you jump on a demo call, there's a preconceived notion of my product is good for you, but I don't know anything about you. Exactly. You're basically saying we can solve the world's problem and I don't really need to know what's up with you. So how would you advise to like adapt messaging, maybe channels and timing around your actual segment? So, I mean, I do myself for life a fair bit on experience and I know you do the same. So it's about getting that smaller group because it's when you get that smaller group, you can actually have a sit down and have a think. Okay, what kind of problems are they facing? How can we message around these? Which one of these problems do we actually solve for? And then I would communicate around that and I would try to make it as personable as I can. And here we can also use tech. And I have seen a lot of companies doing really well with AI personalization. But mind yet again, that works best if you have a smaller group. Otherwise, the AI can just run wild. Yeah. So, but also being very not salesy, not transactional and really getting into the mindset, why am I here? I'm just offering my two cents. I'm just here trying to help you. And I'm also make damn sure I try to deliver some type of value in any interaction I have. I'm adding to the discussion. So even if you're not talking back to me yet, I'm going to try to add something to share my knowledge, share my expertise in the area and basically give you that freebie because it's not about selling a product. What people are looking for, especially now we're talking to B2B space here. But we're also looking for a trusted partner at the end of the day, right? Yeah. And a trusted partner is a trusted advisor, not someone who's just going to sell me a lot of stuff, but also help me because the product in the end of the day, that's not really interesting, right? So what does that mean for the cadence? So for the cadence, one, I see a lot of people being really lazy. Oh, I sent an email. I got no answer. Well, on to the next one. That's like your first fault, I would say. I mean, sales studies have been ongoing for quite a number of years now. And we see you need a lot of touch points. Actually, 80% of all interactions comes after touch point eight. What would be a touch point for the people that are not as familiar? It can be basically anything, but it can be a profile view, going into their LinkedIn and checking their profile. It can be making the phone call, even if you don't get a response. It can be sending that email, sending them LinkedIn message or Facebook message, whatever channel you kind of select for, or just without basically any game into it being like, hey, actually, my marketing team just put this white paper together, just thought it would be a nice read for you. There you go. I'm not even mentioning I want to book a call with you or anything. It's like, oh, yeah, by the way, this freebie from me to you, all of those are touch points. But we actually see that it actually requires a fair number of touch points. But if you have those many touch points and you want to gauge that sort of journey, that puts certain requirements into your CRM or outreach program because most outreach programs are, as far as I'm aware, very email focused, right? You send email one, email two, email three, email four, even email five sometimes with X amount of weights between, right? Yeah. So you have these more newer sales engagement platforms and stuff bringing some other features to the table. I mean, both you and me, we are proponents of monday.com, of course. So monday.com, it does parts of this, bringing more on more and more ever online, but at least helping us to, it won't make the phone call for you, but it can at least remind you of making the phone call, right? Stuff like that. But yes, many of the old platforms, they are very like email sequences and that's it. But that's actually something I see a lot of good outcome from is actually mixing, because you don't know, because by only sending email, you're basically saying this is the one communication channel. Yeah. And going with, like with you, you're actually rather good at fairly promptly replying to emails. So that would probably be a thing. The most common reply I write is no thanks. Yeah. But if you go to me, my inbox is a mess at times, right? Most times, I would say. Yeah. So with me, you're probably going to be more lucky with actually sending me a text message or. Yeah. Whereas if you call me, you need to, you could just as well have won the lottery because me not being in a meeting when you call, it's a one to 5,000 chance. Yeah, exactly. So that is also the thing with a cadence because we're actually trying for what is your communication channel of choice here, basically. So actually giving people the time both to, yeah, first time. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Next time. No, second time. Okay. Now I'm actually starting to reflect on what you're saying, but we're also trying different channels to basically gauge where do you want to communicate with me? Because yet again, it's not about you and where you want to communicate. It's about them and where they want to communicate. And that's a very good point. I still think that a lot of companies rely on either email sequencing or even like multiple sequences over LinkedIn, like text first kind of ones. It would be interesting just like having a quick, like what's a bad and a good cadence. I mean, I, my, my favorite bad one I think is, and I wouldn't be surprised. I actually want to start like open a trial on one of these outreach softwares because I feel like people are just taking the free emails that already exist in a prebuilt template because you know, you get one, the first email is literally, we are this company, we have this product, you need a demo, but that's literally 90% of all first emails I get. Yeah. Or, or the biggest cliche of them all. Oh, I found you on LinkedIn. And 95% of all second emails or second follow-ups I get is, Hey, did you see my previous email? Oh yeah. Or just bumping this. And then you have the hail Mary at the end. It was fucking unengaging. Yeah. It's like, yeah, I saw that your bot just emailed me and I didn't, I couldn't be arsed to reply. And that's also what I mean or what I meant previously with bringing the humanity into it. So basically it's directed to me, right? I mean, in our position, you, you can spot those email a mile away. And they do stink. So it, I basically just need to read the subject of the email. I go like, no archive. I don't even read it. Yeah. And I think it's even worse than LinkedIn because I could, I could, I could just fill a whole wall of screenshotting LinkedIn messages and you can, they basically are all the same email one, two, and three. Yeah. And it's different, but the messaging is all the same. Yeah. And it's always the same thing. Oh, someone wants to connect to you. And like two minutes after you accept that connection, you get bombarded. Yeah. And it's like, it's like also slow it down. Take your time. Rome wasn't built in a day. So that is also one thing. So spacing in your sequences is actually important because otherwise you're basically just that sales rep, like everyone else, just hounding people. Yeah. And also I feel like sometimes you have this big, like urge to do a data dump because I only get one chance to talk to you. So I want to get you everything. I, I don't know how valuable this is, but I, I always try to, when I reach out the first time, if I do it on LinkedIn, in my opinion, most people check their LinkedIn on the, on the cell phone. Right. Yeah. So my kind of like guideline there is my message should be contained on one screen. Most of the outreach is I get, I have to scroll three, four, even five screens, which is basically in today's age, like reading an essay. Oh yeah. Yeah. No, no short and sweet. And that's, that, that's what I see a lot. You, you know, you get those emails or those LinkedIn messages and I'm like, oh, I'm tired before I even got started. It's like TLDR too long. Didn't read. Yeah. So keep it, keeping it short, providing the value. And obviously it's hard as a generic thing here. Like how do you provide value? It very much depends on what company you are. Yeah. Definitely. But, but think about that. It's also okay to challenge them and say like, we see X. Is that something that you have experienced as well? Yeah. Or how are you dealing with it even? Yeah. And, and taking that route, because I think one, one big thing, one thing that people tend to miss is the chance to position you as an expert in your space. Yeah. What is it you work with? Why should they be talking to you? Is it because you sell a product or is it because you're actually quite knowledgeable about this area? Yeah. I can go to myself and I can say, yeah, I'm going to know by, from the guy who's actually, or girl for that matter, who knows what the hell they're talking about. Yeah. Right. Sure. Especially if you're in the it sector. Yeah. I know this is exploratory and prospecting, but the worst even one is, so you do actually take the time and you say, yeah, of course, let's have a meeting. And when you get on the meeting, the first thing that they put in front of you is a PowerPoint slide. Oh yeah. Then you're no, this is not going to be a good meeting. It's not going to be a good meeting. It doesn't even know what they're talking about because otherwise you wouldn't need a slide. No, no, no. They're going to read off the slide and read their script. And then you could have sent me a recording. Speaking about recordings. That's something we have tested as well. Right. So I think based on the data, like some kind of personalized recording, yes, it takes a lot more time, but it's definitely proven to increase the response rates. Yeah, definitely. Especially one of our guys. He's, He's gone a bit with it and he's got really good response rates with it. So we can actually, on a very small empirical, say that, yeah, video works. But he actually took the time and actually recording a quite personal video for everyone. And if you want to scale this, yet again, there are techs available. So we can actually use AI to help us and basically record it once and then I will personalize it. But yeah, it works really well. And it works both on LinkedIn and email and all of those platforms. So also taking things away from text and getting it into the audio visual space might actually help you there. And also, I actually want to just kill one myth. And that is cold calling is dead. No, it's not. It's very much alive and it's very much kicking, but it needs to be done the right way. And also, the myth is not actually from a result perspective. It's more from this has become a truth because people don't like doing it. Yeah, I think that's pretty much spot on. But I can always say and what I'm seeing right now is that if we talk home turf, so Sweden or Scandinavia, it's maybe the Danes. They actually do cold calling because that is actually one of the countries where it is a bit harder to mail. But going for Sweden and Norway, I mean, Swedes, it's like no one's calling anymore. So you can actually have that as a chance to stand out. Hi, I'm actually calling you just to trying to connect. I think that's a good point. I mean, thinking about back when we started like 2017, I probably had 10-ish cold calls a day. Yeah. Today, like 2024, maybe one or two a week. Yeah, I would say that that's a busy week almost right now. So yeah. So actually, I would say that's a great chance to stand out having that cold call and also having that personal connection. But I also want to say that I think it has to do with like resources and time, right? So it's not that digital because it used to be that you had a cold calling company or something like that. The only way to scale was with more headcount because you could only pick up the phone and make X amount of phone calls every day. With emergence of better outreach tools, with emergence of AI, you can scale this immensely. Whereas it used to be that one cold caller maybe could use two 300 calls in a day. With one person, you can run five companies campaigns with AI outreach and reach five 10,000 people a day. Yeah. But what we see in our data is also actually cold calls leads to faster results. Yeah. So you're much, much more, you're going to convert much more quickly because you get that personal. But I'm not arguing that point. Why are people moving away? Yes. But I also think that's the wrong reasons, right? Because it is a resource and a money thing. And it's only very short sighted. That analysis is done. It's not being done for the full pipe, for the full client journey. Yeah. And I think also people are still in the mindset of cold calling as it was 10 or 15 years ago. Right. So that's touch point one. Yeah. And I would argue it maybe shouldn't be touch point one. Maybe touch point three or four, perhaps. Right. Because then it isn't a cold call. It's going to be a lukewarm call. Right. So we have some introduction. You have some idea of who the hell are you. Right. So going in with that approach, then we actually see the response rates opening up. And also, actually, one thing that people are missing, and I had a webinar on this a bit back, text messages. They're brilliant. Oh, it's perfect. Especially if you call that they haven't picked up. Yeah. The best way to qualify or unqualify a lead, send them a text message. Hey, I tried to reach you because I wanted to talk to you about X. Because a lot of people, let's face it, they won't answer if they're not in your phone book, unless their title is basically salesperson or CRO or something. I'm a client colleague. Exactly. So, but the rest of people will be like, I don't know that person can't be that important. Right. But sending them a text message might actually from because actually text messages is like the only channel which has basically a 100% open rate. I mean, how many unread text message do you have in your phone right now? Never. Never. It doesn't happen. It doesn't happen for anyone. Only when you wake up in the morning. Right. Exactly. But then you've been offline for seven, eight hours. Right. But that's super effective. And that's something that I would really implore. A few emails or even mixing emails and LinkedIn, depending on what businesses you're going after. One phone call. Yes, you could try another phone call. But I think this is a place where you can actually speed up the disqualification process by after the first phone call, send them a text message. Hey, Fredrik, I tried to reach you because I wanted to talk about project management. Or I wanted to talk to you about how you manage sales today. Yeah. And they will answer like, thank you. You can call me at 3 p.m. or not interested. Cool. And then when we hopefully have gotten this together and we can hopefully getting those first connections, then we can hopefully get people to accept to join us for an exploration. Right. But there's one ugly thing that I also want to highlight. I've seen that a lot. People are trying to. And I think this is a really shady practice. I want to highlight that. And people in our position, like business owners, we do pick up on this. So I don't think you should do it. That there's a new thing like with guilting that has started to come in with with the emails as well. Like in the first email, this is the first time someone even approaches me. There's no missed phone calls or anything. I tried to call you. You weren't available. So now I'm sending this email. But that basically because that is a great way to destroy any kind of trust you have. You open with lying to me. So if you haven't called, don't say you did call. No. People tend to have a great and also now with cell phones. Right. I can check. It's not that hard. I think that's. But I think they're playing on kind of like the guilting part of it. Yeah. But if you're going to do that, make damn sure you have your feet in the dry, so to speak. But we're at that time. But I really do want to talk about exploratory because that is an important part. So I'm going to actually let you have most of this. But from my end, I just want to iterate. For me, exploratory, it's what I usually tell all our sales reps and all sales reps I've trained. You have two ears and one mouth. Use them proportionally. This is not a meeting that's about you. It's not about you telling how great your features or your services. This is about you asking questions and listening. This is all about the prospect. Yeah. And I think it's the important thing about exploratory. It's also framing it in the right way. Like, yes, I reached out. Obviously, I have a product, but I have no idea if my services or product is actually a good fit for you or not. So that's why we need exploratory. And this is what really distinguish a good salesperson from a bad salesperson, because a bad salesperson will assume that clients want my product. So I'll go straight into a feature puke or I will jump into a demo. What we need to do with exploratory is really need to frame it in that way as well. Like, thank you for taking the call before. I mean, it would be very arrogant of me to assume that you need anything. So if it's okay with you, I would like to talk a little about your situation. Yeah. We literally say that. That's an awesome way of building trust. Yeah. Because who do you trust at the end of the day? The guy who assumes he knows everything or the guy who actually say, let's see. And then, of course, you need to have smart questions, right? You can't just say, okay, tell me about how you guys work. No, this is all about open questions, but also then honing your open questions into more closed questions to actually. But it's also, it's not actually only about listening because it's about asking the right question and actually leading this meeting and this discussion to where you actually wanted to go for qualifications reasons. So because there might be a no in the end of it, but then you want to know, right? Also do not spend your time because then it's much better to be able to say to this person, you know what? My services are not the correct fit for you, but you should probably talk to these guys over here. That will deliver a lot of trust. Even worse, if you're more or less recommending them a competitor of yours and you're saying they can actually help you with this. And I have some, I have actually some really interesting statistics there. I think that I don't have every single call recorded, like every single call recorded, but I do that a lot of the time for like, no, I don't have every single call recorded. I'm not a good fit. You should go talk to them either because I know the service or I know it's a competitor and that alone also build trust. So it's quite a high percentage that actually comes back later on and said like, Hey, we talked like six months ago, felt really like trustworthy. I want to like jump this problem, like talk about this problem with you. And then it could lead to a sale. But I also think that it's easy when you do the exploratory because we're being taught, identify the pain points, right? So it's also very easy that we just sit and ask negative loaded questions. Oh yeah, definitely. Tell me what's not working today. Tell me what, what pisses you off the most on a daily basis. Those are not bad questions, but all of your questions can't be with a negative connotation. To pull out negative answers. No, because at the end of the day, we are emotional creatures. And if you frame your whole meeting in the negative space, that is also the aftertaste you're leaving, right? But I also like to like, but what is working well? What do you like with the current software that you have? Because that also becomes a benchmark because yes, the software I represent might be better at addressing your pain point than the current software, but it might not be as good with the other features that you actually love with your current software. Yeah. Oh yeah, definitely. And, and there's one final thing I have about exploratory calls. However much it's that tingling sensation in your fingers and, or in your whole body to, Oh, let's start talking about solutions or move slightly into a demo or something like that. Don't, don't, that's another meeting and you need to have that fixed in your mind. No, if we're moving to that, we're going to have that discussion with the client right now. You know what? I think I actually can help you solve for some of these, these things. Let's book another call. Yeah. And I also want to leave like some tangible recommendations here because I think that most salespeople have gotten on, on exploratory calls with a quite unengaged person in the other end. You're, you're asking open-ended questions, but you're basically getting yes or no replies and stuff like that, where it makes my work really hard. So one way, and usually what happened then is that you don't have any buy-in. So you have not anchored yourself in their mindset. They don't understand at all how you can be beneficial to them. You're basically just wasting time. That's why they're not engaging. Definitely. And one strategy I have to get past this is to start making statements. Yeah. Not presenting them as truths, but presenting statements or observations or conclusions. Normally when I talk to companies like you, they have a problem with X. Yeah, but exactly. It's framing the question, right. And putting it into context, which might be easier to relate to. One other thing that I do at times, and not every time, but it might also actually be calling them out on it and say, I don't feel I have your focus right now. Yeah. Because that can actually spur like, Oh, so sorry. Or, or you will actually get, no, this isn't really my thing. Okay, perfect. Why the hell are we wasting each other's time? Bye. But, but I mean, I think that's a big part in the whole prospecting exploration kind of thing. People are so afraid of getting the no. You shouldn't be, but because you don't want to be like pulled along with something that will never materialize anyways, because you're just wasting your time. So getting the no is probably the best thing you can, because then you can focus on the opportunity to actually have the option to generate revenue. Yeah, exactly. And also I think people put a lot of prestige on this, but I can tell you no one, and I can tell you, I for sure don't have a hundred percent close rate and it would be weird if I had, I would, that would basically be me not doing my job at the end of the day. Yeah. Because I would only go for the most secure ever. So basically looking at that data later on in my CRM system, that would be, yeah, basically about as reliable as it is. As well as a weather forecast from a fortune cookie. So everyone's going to have no. And also it's nice to have no. And in sales, a no is a no right now, but it might not be a no six months down the line or whatever. Right. And you can still get part of the exploratory. So you know what you can reach back out about as well. Exactly. And that's also one thing. Always deliver what you promise. If you say I'm going to reach back out in six months, be sure you do because that is still building that trust. This is someone who delivers on what they say, even on a small thing, like just sending the email and say, hi, is it a better time right now to discuss this? And one other thing, like a lot of, obviously we have a lot more SaaS services, license based products on the market right now. So one thing that we see a lot in these exploratory calls is like, how many users are you? Yeah. That's a question you're asking, obviously, because you need to understand the size of the opportunity, but the way it's framed, it's just going to be perceived as a, what kind of dollar value will you put on me now? So I think like, I like to do it a bit more dynamics. Like Fredrik, tell me about your business. What do you guys do? Right. Yeah. Yeah. We're a manufacturing company. We produce, I don't know, car parts. Wow. That sounds like it's quite labor heavy. You must have a big staff, right? Yeah. We have, it's like a thousand guys down on the floor and then it's us 100 up here in the offices. Cool. Exactly. I get the exact same answer, but it's, it was not a sales. It was more of a relation building question, right? Yeah, exactly. And because you can glean the answers and also you don't need to have the exact number in your exploratory. You need to have the ballpark, right? The difference doesn't need to be between 50 and 52. It needs to be between 50 and 200 in this case. Yeah. And I mean, let's take some other example, like event companies, right? Yeah. So like, oh, you put on events and you're even, oh, these are your clients and you do these kinds of events. That's awesome. That means that you need to have like a really big stuff. Like, no, we're just 10 people. We just hire freelancers to do all the gigs. Yeah, exactly. We're actually just the production company, not the actual hands-on people. Yeah. So all the people that are actually at the events, serving drinks, juggling or whatever they do are just hourly hires. Yeah. And that's valuable information as well. And it becomes a totally different conversation than, okay, tell me how many users do you have? How many people work in project management? How many people works in sale? Yeah. And I actually, here's, here's one place where technology can help you quite a lot and also help you to kind of start training your own head. AI is good at one very specific thing, and that is summarization and actually pulling data. Out of larger data sets, your meeting is a large data set. Yeah. On average, I would say a meeting is somewhere around like 23 fully filled word pages. That's a one hour or 45 to one hour meeting. So it's a lot of text going in there. So it's a big data set for an AI. So actually I would recommend start transcribing your meetings. If you are a non-English speaker, this might be a good idea. Might be harder unless you're basically talking French or German, then it might be slightly through Spanish. But if you're like me, a Swedish speaker might be harder, but there are solutions for it. A lot of them, and they aren't necessarily very pricey at all, actually even free, but start that. And then you can run it through your free chat GPT account or choose what poison you have, run that in and basically ask those questions or even better. Actually, Google's new AI, Notebook LM. So if you're a Google user, Google WorkSuite, it's free. You can use it. Notebooklm.google.com. And that's really, really good because that focuses just on one source. So here we can actually use AI and get some help getting those answers out without us having to be really on the nose and be like, like you said, how many users are you? Oh, that's a very salesy question. And it's basically just destroyed all the trust I had in you as a trusted advisor. Especially if it comes like in the first five, 10 minutes. Oh yeah. It might be acceptable. Like, okay, we've done the whole exploratory just so I know, like I'm going to put something together for a second meeting just as a reference point. Like how many people do you have involved in project management? Yeah. Then it's a different kind of question, right? Yeah. But now yet again, you're framing it. I'm asking this because I need to know so I can make something that's adequate for you. Exactly. So it's all about how do we frame those questions. And I think that's where like, because you might have the questions written out on a paper, right? Some companies do that and you need to have answered these questions, but that doesn't mean that you have to ask the questions in the way they're phrased on your script or your checklist. This is information that I need to gauge either directly or indirectly from talking to another person. Awesome. Thomas, we're already like 15 minutes over time. I hope that everyone that was here thought we at least had some interesting ideas and a bit of a call out now to everyone. If you feel like you could maybe stand to learn a bit more or get some new perspectives of it, always feel free to reach out to either me or Thomas or anyone at our team. And we love to discuss this more with you. And also since you're here, you actually signed up to our newsletter. Be sure to check that out. We're over the next few months coming with a few like these more sales and marketing focused webinars. So keep an eye out and also keep an eye out for our events. I know, for example, that we are planning something in Stockholm in a few months time and also in London later on during the spring. So it's going to be amazing as always. Yeah. And I mean, you just came back from the London event and it was... It was so great. People were like sharing experiences with each other. Like we almost couldn't get people to come in and listen to the lectures because they were so busy just chatting to each other. It was an amazing buzz in the whole space. Awesome. So with that, hope we get to see all of you watching from home or the office with us next time. So stay tuned, everyone, and have a great day. Bye. Bye.