ve-BINAR - The Revenue Tornado Methodology: How 3 Power Sources Create Exponential Growth

Welcome everybody. Welcome to this next edition of our webinar. Very happy to have Mark Stu here and he'll be introducing himself shortly. We're here to talk about the revenue tornado methodology and how the three power sources in the tornado create exponential growth. Mark is not the first guest that we have here that talks about an AI based methodology, that talks about something that they have used in their own company and now are making available to others. We've had a few of those scenarios here in our webinar and I always find it extremely interesting because we're able to pair the theory of AI and the theory of implementing in your business with a real practical approach, especially for sales leaders, which is our target audience. A few housekeeping notes. We're recording this session. It'll become available later on our website. Please keep your microphones muted until we do a Q and A at the end. You can also put questions in the chat and I'll read them out and ask them towards the end. But there's definitely going to be a Q and A session in about 25 to 30 minutes. And until then I have the privilege of talking to Mark exclusively. So welcome Mark to our webinar. Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Who are you?

Well, hi everyone. Thank you Henning for the invite. Very excited to be here. So yeah, I'm Mark Stu. I'm an industrial engineer from Argentina based off Buenos Aires alongside with my co founder David Moreira, we are founders of Automateraps AI. We are also Clay.com certified experts and part of their solutions partner program. And over the past year we've been helping individuals and companies to leverage Clay and this modern test tech stack and also leverage AI automations to set up intelligent systems that accelerate their revenue. So that's a quick intro.

And you are currently down in Argentina and calling in from there, right?

That's correct, yeah. Right now I'm in Buenos Aires. I came back from New York last weekend, but now I'm enjoying the beginning of the spring here.

Good. Well you already mentioned your company name and talked about Clay and we'll come back to Clay in a little bit. How did you get into this space? Right. Nobody grows up saying I'll do AI or I'll start a business that does rev Ops. How did you get into this space?

Right, so we started as B2B lead generation agency about four years ago and of course we started from Argentina with Latin American clients. All of them looking to get clients in the U.S. as you know, most of the of the business in the World want to do business with the U.S. so what would happen by then like two to three years ago, especially during the pandemic, is that so many people started launching cold email campaigns and automated outreach. So it became a very saturated channel. So it was really difficult to stand out, especially if the offers of these clients were not unique or like different enough, you know. So we found on, on Clay a secret weapon to start molding go to market motions by picking up market signals and reaching out to prospects when they were more ready to buy. So and also personalizing messages at scale, which at the beginning was something, you know, that was not there yet, but that time. But now we have mastered how to, how to do it right. You know, and that's what we are also helping our clients to, to implement. So that's our background, right? We, we come from like the lead gen space and about a year and a half ago we transitioned to revops.

Okay, you already mentioned Clay twice. For those who are unfamiliar with Clay, can you quickly describe or put out an elevator pitch as to who or what Clay is?

Absolutely. Yeah. So Clay is serious C startup, also data orchestration platform that has simplified big time our backend for scaling with a very lean team. And it has multiple different use cases and features. For bigger companies, probably the most powerful use case is the CRM records, data enrichment and the data activation. And for smaller companies, the most powerful use cases are related to go to market motions that are smarter than what we are used to using the traditional Apollo or the sales navigator stack.

Okay, so it's a data platform with client data that is smarter, better, deeper, more personalized than those other platforms that you mentioned.

Yeah, it looks like a Google spreadsheet, you know, where you store your, your target accounts databases and your target prospects databases. But you can also connect those data sets with pretty much all of the data providers in the market. One of the powerful features is the waterfall enrichment. So for instance, if you're looking to get the validated phone number of a list of prospects, Clay would not only look for the zoom info data, but also if it doesn't find it at zoom info, it would look up in clear bit and it will continue to check if that data point is available in multiple different providers until it finds it or not. But it's like a very innovative way to maximize the coverage of finding each data point that you need for your enrichment processes.

Okay, so on the basis of Clay, you built the revenue tornado or you developed the methodology. Can you, can you explain what that means? It's a fancy not, not a fancy. It's a powerful word. But what does it really mean? And I know you have a graph or two that you can share so that you can illustrate what, what it actually means.

Absolutely, yes. So yeah, we came up with this name recently after implementing over 50 different like isolated and automated motions for our company and also helping over 50 clients implement for their companies like custom workflows. At some point it became hard to manage so many workflows running at the same time. So we really needed to understand how each one of them relates to each other and work together as a system. So revenue tornado refers as the typical marketing and sales funnel. You know that it looks like an inverted triangle but when you embed a flywheel on top, which represents the revenue acceleration effect of using AI automations for accelerating revenue. So yeah, I can share my screen real quick so you can have some visual support on what I am explaining. But yeah, this is the front view of the tornado with the top funnel, the mid funnel and the bottom funnel. And here is like a top view where we have the revenue I, which is the, the command center. Actually what we do here is integrating each company CRM with Clay as a system that would allow us to monitor our total resolver market, to monitor all of the records in our CRM and monitor specific signals and events that would trigger actions. Okay, so here we work on the CRM integration. We also help our clients map down the their first level connections on LinkedIn. We believe that LinkedIn is a huge opportunity right now because it's still a platform that is giving really high reply rates and it's very undersaturated compared to the cold email channel. And this revenue tornado has three power sources as Henning was introducing. So the first power source is the attraction engine, which has to do with content. Nowadays it's known that content is a revenue driven activity and the more valuable content you put in front of your audience, the more this qualified prospect would be engaging with it. So that's like the first step of the, of the tornado or the first power source to set up an automatic, I'm sorry, an automated system that puts up content in front of your audience. So once these qualified prospects engage with your content, we use Clay to identify out of all of the people that engage, which ones qualifies or matching our ICP criteria. And we trigger personalized messages to these people. Right. On the third power source of the tornado we have the opportunity radar which means going out to the total addressable market that is still outside of your funnel. So probably the portion of the market that still don't know you. And through mass email campaigns or through ads, we approach these cold audiences with lead magnets or upfront value assets to bring them into our attraction engine, which would be our content, just to exemplify, because this could get a little bit abstract. For example, this event is an inbound activity. It's like a systematic lead attraction engine, right? So if we set up this type of systems, we would be able to identify the qualified prospects that are attending to this event. And after maybe tomorrow, the qualified prospects should be receiving an automated personalized message from Henning. Right? As of course, like we have to work on the copy, what is relevant, you know, what type of asset we can deliver to these prospects to open up the conversation. And on the third power source, the application for this example would be to launch a mass email campaign where we invite this cold audience to join the future the following episode of this event. So you can replicate this same methodology with LinkedIn posts, with blog entries, even with people visiting your website with LinkedIn comments. So there are so many types of contents that you can monitor when your prospects are engaging to trigger personalized messages. So besides this explanation, I also want to introduce this and then I want to stop sharing because I don't want it to be too long. This outreach purpose matrix has two aces. So the first ASICS has to do with the brand awareness or how much these prospects know your brand and or know you as a personal brand. And the the second axis has to do with how much or how, how ready to buy these prospects are. So the idea is that with these systems you are able to identify the prospects that are more aware of yourself and more aware of your solution and also that are more ready to buy. So then probably not all of them would be ready to buy right now, this second, or this week or next week. So the idea is that we set up a system that re engages with them month after month after month after month without burning this, this audience because we really care about these, these people, but always approaching them with value, you know, so that's another important asset of this system. What is the lead magnet strategy and what is the lead magnet development roadmap that we think it's relevant for this audience. So then we become like a good reference, like an authority in the field and the first company or the first person that comes to their mind when they actually need a solution like the one we provide.

Thank you for that explanation. I think the visuals illustrate the tornado effect as you put a third dimension around an otherwise two dimensional funnel. Now let's talk about outcomes, successes. So what can you share about what this methodology has delivered for yourself and for your clients?

Sounds good. Yes. So thanks to applying this methodology in our company, we grew 300% over the past year. We started with of course 100 people subscribers list. Now we have 4,000 subscribers in our newsletter. And that's all thanks of, you know, acting upon this methodology. This methodology has helped us to understand what to build first, what to build next. You know, prioritize. Understand what to prioritize in terms of automation roadmaps. So yeah, those are some numbers related to our company's growth. Then if we speak of success stories, we have helped companies of different sizes. For example, some examples that come to mind. Apical.com is enterprise Dutch company that streamlines and improves the onboarding process onboarding process for new employees and we help them to automate their lead generation efforts. Also we have trained one of their account executive and transformed him into their Revops manager. So that's one important case for us. Also we have collaborated with a thriving startup called Kittl.com in the graphic design industry, helping them set up an evergreen campaign as well for maximizing their opportunities generation as well. And right now we are focused on also Salesforce integrations. You know, we're working a lot with Revops agencies that have been many, many years in the market and we are helping them to leverage these new tools as well.

Okay. Obviously there are many other companies in this space, in the space of lead generation, in this space of managing a client journey in a sales funnel. How do you see yourself being different from others? What is sort of the standout that makes you different from everybody else in the space?

For a question, I think that many of the people that is leveraging this modern tech stack come from the outbound space, from the lead generation and, and purely outbound. And I don't think that most of them are seeing the relation between inbound and outbound. And that is something that we are very strong at as well as our focus on the LinkedIn growth pillars which are besides the LinkedIn profile optimization. We're speaking about building systems around the content creation. So for example, we help our clients to automate their content out of the sales calls, transcripts. You know, when you go to a sales call, you're handling objections, you are sharing insights, you're defending your proposal. So from that transcript you get like a really valuable data that translates into content ideas that we take them through an enrichment process and we get posts for all of these automations, we always recommend having a human in the loop that we trust. So there is always a human in the loop for most of these automations. But continuing with the LinkedIn growth pillars, we mentioned profile optimization, we mentioned content commenting is another big one that we don't see many people approaching it as a system. But there are ways that you could automate and delegate the commenting, for example, for like a 100 people salesforce, you know, and imagine how big of an impact it is if 100 people Salesforce or sales team without moving a finger are consistently posting on LinkedIn and commenting on their prospects and also on industry leaders before even connecting on with them, seeing a 30 plus increase on the acceptance rate because it feels way more organic, right? It feels more real. So yeah, we work with different tools that, you know, they are built for like streamlining and optimizing the comment creation with AI, but with a really, really robust system that has a feedback loop. So the more you comment, the more it learns on how to make better comments to the point that the comments that system makes are better than better than the comments that I could come up with. Sometimes it's crazy. And then you can automate, you know, if someone replies to your comment with a positive sentiment, reaching out to them or something that you could do is to let your sales team know by sending a notification on Slack or a notification on by email or any, you know, communication platform that you use with your team. So that way we transition into a more signal based outreach or signal based prospecting and the sales reps would be only reaching out or engaging or even calling prospects that already know you. And that's a huge difference and impact rather than doing the typical cold email, sorry, cold calling. Right. So that is definitely an opportunity that it is here now and we don't see many people approaching it. The last growth pillar of LinkedIn, I would say, is the inbox management. And yeah, so the automated messages that we trigger out of the qualified prospects that engage with our content or our comments or visit our websites or register in our newsletter or whatever inbound action they make, that's another growth pillar that we approach systematically.

Okay, we'll open the microphone soon for Q and A. But let me ask you just a quick other question. What do you think is next? Right. Where does this industry that you're in, where does this tool that you've built, where does this go? What's up for next year and what might be up in five years?

It's a such a difficult question because the landscape and the speed that things change is really crazy. The disruptions. I believe that Clay, in particular, we are advocates of the tool because of how much value provided to us and the outcome, the results that we achieved through it. But I believe that it's still early for these type of technologies and probably this technology has a lot to improve. Also to be robust enough for the biggest corporations still has some challenges in terms of technological challenges, but. Yeah. And then right now we have the AI agents as well. But I feel like there is a lot of noise and there is a lot of information. Like we are in a landscape of over information, I would say. So it is a challenge to understand what are the actual tools that are going to help me, you know, maximize the revenue output. We're going to help my team to. Yeah, to. To generate more with the current roster. So I feel like we are going over, like, instead of the typical digital transformation that we went through a few years back, right now we are going through the AI transformation or the AI automation transformation. I feel like most of the companies are still behind and need to go through this transition process right now.

Okay, now let's open the microphones. Let's see if there are questions coming from the audience. Just unmute yourself if you have a question and feel free to ask it. Corey, I see you unmuted yourself.

Yes. Hi, Henning. Hi, Mark. So this is something that's very timely for me. I actually started looking into this a while back and got sidetracked. But one of my main issues is in bringing together my lists of my icp. It only gets me so far. And this being specific to sales.

Right.

One of the things data I can't seem to. To get my hands on is when I run a list and I ask for companies in this revenue range. Give me the CEO, partner, owner, president.

Right?

I get all that information. I get emails, I get phone numbers, I get everything. The one thing that I'm finding when I connect with these people and I may engage with them is that a lot of the people that I'm engaging with don't actually have sales teams or don't have salespeople.

Right.

So they're kind of like, all right, so we're connected now. And, you know, what can I do for you? Or how can you help? And I'm like, I can't because you don't have any salespeople, therefore you don't have a sales leader. You know, so I'm trying to. Somebody told me that you could basically take the output that I already have or A CSV file and feed it into Clay and it can, you know, do that AI covert mission of a deeper understanding of all that data and be able to smoke out who has salespeople or who has. And. Or a sales manager.

Exactly. Yes. That is something that.

Have you come across that yet? Has anybody asked?

Yeah, it's a typical challenge. Yeah. Some important feature of Clay is something that they launched at the beginning of this year, which is the integration with LLMs. Right. Like, for example, you connect the OpenAI API or the Anthropic API into play. So the enriched data set that you have with the company information, you can process it through an LLM with a specific prompt to determine an answer or a response. So for example, you can set up a process for qualifying a list of companies. So before, before going through that qualification step, you would want to enrich the company's data and understand how many people do they have on the sales team, identify probably their names, their roles. So then when you build this prompt right on this instruction, that would be replacing you or your, your rep when, when they qualify, whether this company is target or not. That way you would be automating that process. So we always recommend you to start off this list with a broader audience. So the initial search that you do is not aiming to be 100% accurate, but broader audience. And then enrich the data points that you need to run the automated qualification step. And once you have the data, you run it and you have that process fully automated. So you can start off these target accounts list from static database as sales Navigator, for example, or you could be automatically scraping target accounts from companies hiring for a specific role. Right. You can be scraping companies that are, you know, for example, raising capital. There are multiple different market signals that you could be monitoring to populate accounts into this table that then it will determine if that account that just posted a job post or raise capital or whatever.

Right.

Also matches your ICP criteria. And then you reach out to them or.

Yeah.

Or not.

Yeah, that would even be a, a better validation of. Yeah, they actually have job postings for a sales manager or you know, a VP of sales. But then prior to that, you know, having. Just by looking at the employees that are listed under the, the company and you know, as soon as it sees sales executive, salesperson.

Right.

Account manager, it's automatically going to say, okay, yes, they have salespeople. Right?

Yeah, that's something totally feasible. And a great example of the capabilities of this tool, as I mentioned at the beginning, is a data orchestration tool. And it's super flexible. That's why it's also overwhelming because when you open up a blank table, it's just blank.

Well, yeah, I tried that.

To where to go. So we normally coach our clients to start outside of the platform. You know, normally work on a workflow design on. They work on a flowchart to understand every step of the process and what are the tools that you're going to be using for every step of the process. And then when you dive into a tool, you just start deploying and executing the plan that we agreed on. The, the strategy and ideation. Ideation phase.

Okay.

Okay.

And this is something you, I'm assuming this is something that your company does. Do you set these up for clients?

Yes, yes. We normally coach teams because we believe that clay is wonderful for improving, you know, outbound campaigns. You definitely get a better result by leveraging clay, but clay has way more potential and use cases beyond just the go to market motions in terms of automating repetitive tasks of your sales team from crafting personalized messages. The qualification step that we just mentioned, automating the research. You know how many times we have asked our reps to look up for like visit each of these companies websites and see if they are selling this specific product or if they are selling. You know, every company has a different criteria but there is always like a research phase. So that's another super powerful feature. What it's called Clay Gent, which is an AI web scraper.

Right.

So the difference with that, with a traditional scraper is that this AI web scraper would visit a website. So for instance, if you have the list of your target accounts, websites, you can automate this agent to visit each website and retrieve specific information and determine if they are qualified or not.

But that will have to be programmed into clay, right?

Yeah, this is already programmed in clay, right?

Yeah, that's. That's kind of where I got stuck. So I have all the work done prior to clay and all the lists and everything generated and I know what I'm looking for. But in trying to set up that, trying to set up on the clay side to go and find the information about salespeople within each one of the organizations, that's where I just got stopped and was stuck. And I'm like, all right, you know, I don't really know a lot about programming, although I'm pretty technical. But it got really kind of deep into it where I couldn't do it, you know.

So yeah, yeah, it's a typical pain, you know, that you get Stuck. That's why we set up dedicated channel for communications and support with our clients. So then they can drop us any questions and we help them unlock. But yeah, we believe that it's totally worth it to own this workspace and we don't think that CLAY is just another prospecting tool as Apollo. So we don't really agree with outsourcing the CLAY workspace to an agency for example because two years from now or one year from now, I believe that that would be just a crazy idea is like you would be outsourcing your CRM. It makes no sense. So Andrew.

Hi Mark, thank you very much. Fascinating topic. I really want to know how you can send me some empanadas from Buenos Aires. But that's a subject for another day.

I forgot to ask that.

A mistake.

Yeah, there's a market for Argentinian empanadas here. Greetings from San Francisco. So can you just, just clarify please, Your, your company, your service. Do you teach and train and coach companies how to do what you're talking about themselves or, or, and, or do you also have a, any kind of a full service offering for companies where you do all the outbound with your tools and expertise for them and then pass them the leads?

We don't do down for you, we. We just do coaching. Sometimes we do some done for you like implementations or like for example, if you want to speed up the setup of the system that we agreed on building, then we can do it for you and then hand it off to you, you know, but on a retainer basis after this two month program. We normally stay as consultants and we also extend the, the support channel. Okay.

And what your clients range from what to what, what's your, what does your smallest client look like and then what's an average client look like in terms of revenue, number of salespeople, etc.

Yeah. So the smallest clients are typically consultants. You know like normally sales consultants, that's that their market is on LinkedIn because of all of the, the, the hours Invest invested on LinkedIn growth systems. So that would be like the, the smallest typical client. And we have had clients like apical.com that I don't really know how much they are generating right now. But it's like an enterprise company. So every, every project has very different challenges, you know, depending on its nature. But yeah, we have worked with all, all different sizes so far.

And, and how do you charge for your services?

We charge the like a 1:1 time upfront fee for the 2 month engagement where we define the scope of A system that we help develop and implement and run. And then that varies depending on the company size, but starts at $5,000. For the, for the two months depending on the company size we have some tiers because of the impact that it generates. But for enterprise companies, that same engagement reaches up to 25,000 depending on the impact that we generate. Because for example, if they have a 30 sales rep team or like a 50 and we first of all audit their daily routine and their processes and we build efficiencies for 40, 50%, then the revenue output that they get out of that is pretty big. So that's just the proof of concept of our service. And then after those two months we stay as consultants on a six month or one year contract and we also have a talent pool of operators which are people that are all, you know, play enthusiasts. Different seniority levels from different parts of the world as well, depending on what our clients need. But many times we, we help our clients upskill their current employees. For example, if they have some revops guy in the team or like a marketing guy or like the most tech savvy person of their sales team, we help them to transition into this new hot roll called Go to Market Operator or Go to Market Engineer which is this person with a high leverage on the AI automations that is focused on multiplying the revenue output of the current team.

Gotcha. Great. Thank you very much, please.

My pleasure.

Thank you. Mark, thank you for joining us here. And since Andrew and Corey were big on the empanadas, you and I when we talked earlier identified the fact that the only soccer jersey that I own is from Bucker Juniors in Buenos Aires and I send you a picture of me wearing it.

So.

And you shared that their season right now isn't going so stellar and they finally won a match after losing 10 in a row.

So that is right.

A lot of connections. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for sharing and educating us. Thank you Andrew, Corey and everybody else for joining. If you're listening to this later, thank you for doing so and for right now, have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you.

Thank you. Take care.

All.