Chad Oda is a conversational AI and workflow automation consultant. Chad joins the show to discuss how he built Chat Mode’s partnership with Microsoft using the power of podcasting, LinkedIn, and relationships.
Chad gives tips for succeeding in partnerships, including mining your existing accounts; understanding your partners’ KPI’s; not being afraid to break the rules; and utilizing podcasting for relationship building.
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Highlights
- How did you get started in partnership? 3:47
- The importance of partnerships and certifications. 9:43
- The power of podcasting and influencers. 15:54
- Integration and integration partnerships. 20:03
- The importance of seeing is believing. 24:42
Transcript
Ben Wright 0:03
Howdy partners welcome everyone to another episode of the howdy partners podcast where we give you tactical tips and tricks on how to become a great partner professional. We've got a nice girl on the podcast today excited to dive in, but Tom festival longtime to see how you doing How's how's life?
Tom Burgess 0:24
I'm doing pretty good. As I was mentioning before, I'm flying solo as a parent this week for six days. Tomorrow's the last day. It's going great, but it is. It is the real deal. And then we'll was in Denver yesterday for Catalyst and ghosted me on meeting up so we've got a bone to pick with him when he gets back on the pot.
Ben Wright 0:48
He's a social butterfly man. You can you can look him down. Right?
Tom Burgess 0:52
You the guy talks about relationship building and building trust so much that you know, I think we've got to have him give a statement. So we'll see what happens next up soon.
Ben Wright 1:02
Yeah, for sure. And we have another you know, another great guest in the podcast today. Really excited to get into the conversation. We have chat over on the core chat Gianna, give the audience a little bit of an introduction to who you are.
Chad Oda 1:15
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first off, pleasure to be here. Love what you guys do been following the podcast for a while now. And you guys are hitting it out of the park? Yeah. So quick intro with me. I'm an entrepreneur and go to market leader who consults fortune 500 companies. You know, I've consulted companies like CVS, health Microsoft, specifically on conversational AI and workflow automation, also have run my own podcasts previously, which I'm sure we can kind of chat about in regards to some of the near bound angles, I've run, you know, meetups with, you know, 1000s of members. So that's just kind of the short and sweet pitch to me.
Ben Wright 1:48
Cool. While they may. Yeah, and you mentioned the word near bound, which I think we're gonna get into in some depth on that on the podcast. I'd love to start off kind of, you know, as a partnership, make the podcast just on your journey into partnerships. I know you already mentioned the term near bound would love to kind of understand and explain to the audience your background in partnerships.
Chad Oda 2:09
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been an entrepreneur for a long time. And when you are the non technical person in, you know, a technical startup, you know, the onus is on you really to lead all go to market efforts, right. So, you pretty much necessitates that you have to go out there and figure out partnerships, sales, marketing. So back in 2015, this was one of my earlier companies. We were essentially doing software development, web applications, mobile apps for small businesses. And at the time, my kind of introductory foray into partnerships, I didn't even realize it was partnerships at the time was, I used to go to a lot of business networking meetups. And, you know, I think like most people, they try to do that, you know, one to one to one to one, you know, talking to all these people individually. And over time, I just kind of learned, hey, well, if I just make friends with the guy that he is hosting the meetup, then I can better get signal to who I should talk to, in that meetup. And then over, you know, that kind of, you know, that initial journey point, you know, from there, I went on to, you know, running my own company, another company called chat mode, which is, you know, where we primarily focus on conversational AI and workflow automation, you know, ran podcast, ran meetups recently worked at another web three startup where I was managing a $40 million partnership. So you know, I kind of stumbled my way through this. I think like most entrepreneurs, then you kind of find out what works and you experiment with stuff. And sometimes you kind of learn really neat things that often scale really nicely.
Ben Wright 3:47
Yeah. And I think we all kind of stumble into partnerships, to be honest with you. And I think that's a that's a red path. I think we've talked about before I came from customer success into partnerships. And Tom, I think you sales correct sales partner?
Tom Burgess 4:00
No, I was on the agency side. So kind of kind of CSM strategy, manage the video production department and then into into SAS. And it's, it resonates just crazy. There will be a time where there's going to be partnerships, specific majors at universities, there's going to be a time where we're actually hiring people that have true partnership experience, but it's fun to learn about everyone's background and kind of how you got there.
Ben Wright 4:26
They'll love it. And Chet, I think you touched on a couple of things. And, again, I agree with you like the referral type relationship that you're explaining, which is, hey, I'm going to meet with business owners develop relationships, and then as a byproduct, potentially generate business. I mean, that is that is essence is is what a partnership is and I think we tend to have this thing of making too difficult partnerships sometimes and trying to think of these really technical, you know, integration partnerships, but fundamentally, those times referral partnerships have been, you know, around for hundreds of years right in terms of in terms of partnerships. And I think that is one component of what we know as the concept of near bound, right developing relationships to get close to your buyer. Obviously, Jared fuller has been a big proponent and reveal, have kind of been touting the concept of of near bound. Maybe you could give us a bit of a, an a perspective and idea of what nearby town kind of means to you and, and maybe touch on, you know, your, your experience with near Bounders as a concept.
Chad Oda 5:29
Yeah, absolutely. So we'll touch on that. And then I'll also kind of hone in on my most recent company that I exited called chat mode, where I think we really kind of dialed in near bound without even really knowing it was near bound. But to me, you know, I think just kind of extending your point, you know, I think near bound really, ultimately, is building those relationship networks, you know, and oftentimes, you know, we build these really great networks, and we get referrals, or we get introductions, and we don't realize that, you know, this is actually near bound. We've been doing it for a long time. And over my career, most of you know, the biggest accounts, I've closed fortune 500 customers were from referrals, and from building relationships and getting introductions, and, you know, trying to figure out, like, how do I best kind of learn, you know, what this prospective partner wants, you know, and oftentimes, we really figured out really creative ways to understand that. And for me, at my most recent company, chat mode, ran that for about four and a four and a half years. And we are a Microsoft professional services provider, essentially developing chat bots all the way back in 2018, before anyone thought they were cool. And now everyone's talking about them. And also doing a lot of workflow automation, so on things like PowerPoint, Microsoft Power, platform, power, automate Power Apps, things of that nature. And I think the most exciting thing for me was like, you look at a lot of these different partner, professional services companies, and they think, Oh, well, you need to get the silver, you know, certification and the gold certification, all these cloud certifications. And we were super small and nimble. And we said, you know, hey, we don't have time to do those things. So sometimes, you know, you can break the rules, right. And we figured out a way to partner closely with Microsoft field sellers. And at the end of building those relationships, we got introduced to a number of different field sellers across the organization, CSMs account managers, account directors, and from that we drove a significant amount of revenue in pipeline.
Ben Wright 7:25
Yeah, and I want to I want to double tap on that, because, um, a couple of roles ago, I used to run partnerships, a company called brainstorm very big and Microsoft MSP ecosystem. And it's really interesting, the point you just made, which is that certifications, any, you know, big, big cloud, hyper scalar, the certifications are almost like a badge of honor a badge of trust. And so I think what you've explained there is kind of interesting in terms of you actually build up the relationship directly with the sellers and earn that trust, rather than, you know, spending a ton of time resources and energy going out and getting those those certification. Would that would that kind of be fair in terms of how you sit?
Chad Oda 8:04
Oh, absolutely. I and you know, it's funny. So you probably have seen in the partner ecosystem, it doesn't matter what partner ecosystem, but if you partner with a hyper scalar, you look at a lot of these kind of older professional services or system integrators. And you'll ask them, Hey, how has this hyper scalar ever giving you leads? And there'll be like, yeah, maybe one or two over the past five years, right. But we were getting the majority of our pipeline through our hyper scalar. Right. So I think that distinction to your point is like, really spending the time to build the relationships with some of the folks that are on the ground, talking to install base customers going after net new customers, and building that trust and rapport. And oftentimes, you just need one, you know, so for us, we built it. With one of these accounts at Microsoft, we were already in there. We discussed we got introduced actually, from the prospective customer to the Microsoft CSM that was in the account, and we ended up just building this really solid relationship over the years. And then he started introducing us to other field sellers and other CSMs. And, you know, that kind of blossomed into this really great partnership.
Ben Wright 9:06
Yeah, and it's, it's another concept of nearby and I think from like, validation. Again, badge of honor perspective, you can get a joint customer. I think that is like the old seal of approval, where it becomes like, okay, Microsoft field seller, and us together and we achieved X effect for our joint customer, I think that's where the magic really starts to happen. Because if you're able to benefit them, which is ultimately the sign of a good partnership, right, that that that mutual, that mutual relationship. Yeah, I think that's another concept of like, okay, let's build a case study on how we work together and then kind of extrapolate out across across other accounts. Sorry, Tom, I knew you're going to jump in and say,
Tom Burgess 9:43
no, no, I was just going to jump in and talk about the idea of like certifications. And ultimately, it boils down to are you focusing your efforts and your your resources in the areas that are actually going to drive value? So you mean like relationships They is key. And it's funny because like, we're in a very similar situation where, you know, like, we're very light, very nimble. And I mentioned that it was like, we don't have the resources to build out, you know, we're not we can't build the HubSpot Academy. We can't build all these assessments. And and on the flip side from, you know, like channel partners are like service based agencies. That's all it is Chad, like you mentioned, a really good point, which is, it's kind of like a badge of honor. And in what I would add to that, though, is that sometimes that is very partners, like, accreditation and recognition is is, is really like the crux of like building that relationship. But it comes back to you, you don't need a badge to do that, you know, you don't need to take this assessment, to be certified to be able to help enable your customers on this product. It's much more like how can like what's the value that you can extrapolate? And it doesn't need to be 100% of everything, to build the right partnerships. And I just appreciate you kind of mentioning.
Chad Oda 10:59
Yeah, absolutely. Maybe I'll add on to that a little bit to Tom, just in regards to like, what, what was the value that we provided, and you know, kind of why those relationships were sustainable. And also, I'll provide kind of nuance to because I think sometimes certifications don't kind of cover all of the yacked offerings, but some of the product offerings are so new, they just didn't have search. So I think that was kind of the nuance that we fell into, because, you know, we were doing a lot of like, AI stuff, and, you know, building chat bots, and doing workflow automation. And I think, in certain cases, there wasn't even a cert that kind of that. So maybe that also provided us that kind of opportunity to break the rules a little bit. But when it came to the actual, you know, go to market leaders and field sellers in CSMs, on the ground, I think, what we identified what is his was just like, you know, in some cases, they want to get a POC, and put it in front of their customers, you know, as quickly as possible. And, you know, oftentimes, like these bigger conglomerate, you know, consultancies, just, they just can't do that, or they won't do that, right. And they'll say, Well, you got to pay me this much amount of money. So we kind of identified early on, hey, if we can build some turnkey demos, get it in front of these guys, or girls, you know, much quicker, you know, that was something they really valued, you know, from us, as we were kind of working with them. You know, the other thing too, you know, is we would always ask, like, hey, what's on your scorecard, right? What is going to allow you to hit your quotas, and, you know, drive licensing or consumption, you know, it's always this two way street. The other thing I did, just taking it to the next level, and then I'll pause here was, I could talk about this for a long time. So I also at the time, I also had started a podcast, where we are interviewing Microsoft employees that kind of fit under our service offering, right. And in addition to people on the product side, so we can learn more about the product. We also interviewed people on the GTM side, too, right? So we can really get that perspective of how are they thinking about this product offering internally? What are they seeing, you know, as they talk to customers about this, so that just gives us a much better perspective in a way to kind of resonate with them, you know, versus a lot of times you have these different, you know, professional services providers just knocking on the doors of every field seller at the hyper scalar. And it's like you don't even know what we care about. Right? And you're asking us for needs, right? So
Ben Wright 13:17
yeah, it's the podcast is really interesting. And I think like, so chat, I'm starting my own stop at the moment. And we've been talking about this night, I actually think a podcast is always a net positive, even if it's not to generate net new leads, but develop relationships. And so I think when you talk about the concept of near bound, which is surrounding, you know, surrounding your target buyer with people who can influence the decision making criteria, you have somebody on a podcast that maybe isn't going to buy from you, but is able to is like a node, right, which is then able to make introductions, I think that's where the power of a podcast comes from. And so yeah, I've, I've talked to a couple of people that have podcasts for that, to that b2b SaaS business and their opinions been like, look, we haven't generated like, net new revenue, we can't really show like a bottom line figure that's attributed to this effort that we're putting in recording and editing and all this type of stuff. But what they have said, undeniably is they've got introductions through the people they've had on the podcast, and that has, you know, equated to revenue further down the line. And so I don't know if you kind of saw that from, from your experience as well.
Chad Oda 14:23
Yeah, so I have two separate cases. So initially, when I was getting into chatbots, and AI, I started a podcast called The bot podcast. And I was writing that for about six months. And then at the end of six months, I think I probably did like 15 podcasts. And then a couple months later, I got invited to essentially moderate a panel at one of the top chatbot conferences in Berlin, right? So it's just that acceleration of not really knowing anyone in the ecosystem, you know, putting in six months of time meeting this wide variety of, you know, really smart subject matter experts. And then you know, that kind of gives you that social proof and ability to connect with people that you otherwise wouldn't be able to get access to, right, and then given all these opportunities to your point, and you know, I definitely also resonate with that point of hard to correlate a bottom line, oftentimes a podcast, but oftentimes getting in those rooms with these executives, you know, or the startups and these founders that have run kind of nine figure businesses is just an amazing opportunity. And then the second podcast, I was running when I was running chat mode, which was Microsoft focus. You know, I think a lot of people often think about, you know, when they run a podcast, it's like, yeah, let's let's interview our customers, or let's interview other partners that we work with, you know, but for us, it was like, because we were Microsoft partner. The obvious one was, Let's interview Microsoft employees. And I don't see that as much with professional services or consultancies that, you know, let's say they work really closely with Amazon or Google, it's like, instead of trying to interview
Ben Wright 15:53
is genius. I mean, it's a technique I've never seen. But the more that I'm thinking about it, it's it's so clever to do because the other thing about podcasts is it's like, it's non transactional. And in actual fact, you're giving them something which is like, look, I really value you as a person, I value your experience. And so I'd love for you to come and teach it to the rest of the world, which gives them kind of another badge of honor to my point earlier, right, which is like, now I get to come on a podcast, talk about stuff that I know about. And so I think it's genius from a couple of angles, one, non transactional. So it gets you into Microsoft accounts into field sellers very easily. It's not like you're reaching out and being like, hey, buy my Chatbot is actually like, you know, come on, come on to my podcast. But then it also probably spreads like wildfire throughout the Microsoft field seller teams, where you probably would get in people email and you like, chat, I'd love to jump on your podcast, if that happened at all? Did you have the people organically reached out and asked to appear?
Chad Oda 16:46
So I had organic people. And I also had several occasions where I would get introduced to field sellers from other field sellers. And when I got when I got on the calls, they would be like, oh, yeah, we've been watching your content on LinkedIn. So like, you already kind of have that social proofing, already walking into these rooms. And it's just fantastic to do that. And to your point, right, it also you get to elevate other employees at Microsoft to so they get to evangelize their story. And maybe their boss sees that and you know, maybe that helps them get kind of promotion or something, too. So yeah, a lot of value there.
Ben Wright 17:17
I think there's a there's also a tie in you mentioned, you called out LinkedIn. But I think that's a similar, a similar play. And again, we'll get into additional tactics of near bound that I think work really well. But again, like LinkedIn is another outlet to let people know how knowledgeable you are on a certain area as well, right? And so like, if I was gonna go, if I'm a PRM company right now, right, like I'm trying to sell a partner relationship management tool, I would literally be on LinkedIn, I would pull up 30 people to talk about partnerships a ton on LinkedIn, they're my influences, either pay them or get them on his referral partners. Or then look at the top five podcasts, this being one and either get my filled sellers on the podcast sponsor the podcast. And so what you're doing and Jim McBain refers to it as like your spheres of influence or your watering holes where people go to consume content. There's actually a fairly replicable playbook. And to your point, Chad, it's like you did the same, but your angle was more tied to how do I just get more Microsoft seller attention. And your play was, well, I'm gonna get on a podcast and they know who I am. And then guess what I give, and then something which is, you know, advertisement of their skills. And as a result, that principle of reciprocity, which is now like if I reach out and ask them for an introduction, guess what, there's a high likelihood that they'll be willing to make that make that intro,
Chad Oda 18:38
I'll also really quickly tell you the other crazy tactic that we did to which I haven't seen anyone else do this before. So because we were working on like, such like cutting edge features. So we would look at the features that were still in beta at Microsoft, so they have like these, you know, not so like they have features that are not publicly available yet. So what we would do is we would go build a proof of concept on these features. And then we would go reach out to the product managers at Microsoft that own those features. And then they would get on calls with them. And of course, they want to get feedback on their features before it goes live. Right. Yeah. And then through those relationships, we were also able to get them to introduce us to field sellers and CSS. So that's kind of another backdoor tactic I haven't seen a lot of people do in order to scale that. What we did was, so a lot of people use automation, right to reach out, you know, with with messaging, you know, across different platforms. A lot of people do it oftentimes to drive, you know, net new customers, but we kind of turned you know, that lens onto Microsoft, instead of net new customers, right? So we were able to scale messaging out to a bunch of them. And the ones that were amenable, we would get on calls, I'm gonna say hey, you know, like, I know you work on this product. Here's the POC we built. Can you tell us like, you know, who are some of the folks in the field People that are going to be selling this and you know, we'd love to connect with them. Yeah,
Ben Wright 20:03
I so I think there's, there's a couple of things to pull out from that. But like, You've almost made it easy for them to, to partner with you in terms of like you've done the heavy lifting in terms of actually creating a proof of concept and building it out. And I think like, there's similar overlaps in terms of if you think about like, integration partnerships in general, right, like, if I'm a smaller company looking to integrate into a larger company, it's kind of cool if you can either build out like a proof of concept, or, you know, write a little bit of script, which you can then send off to a product manager to be like, Hey, I've already built this integration out, what do you think and so you're already presenting the vision, you're already getting them excited, and you're already getting into a stage of being like, okay, like, what they mean business, but also they've, they've shown that they're going to be a good partner, before you even partner. Right. And so I kind of liked that as a, as a concept. So that's kind of cool. Tell me about like the results. So you've talked about, like, some of the tactics you've tried? And their greed tactics, kind of what were the results for your business in terms of the baby overall, you know? Yeah, I guess.
Chad Oda 21:08
Yeah. So I'll give you a kind of a business metrics. So from F 2021, to 2022, I was able to drive 126% revenue increase, while opening up those, those partnerships. Also, through that, you know, I was able to, you know, scale significantly. So there was a, there's a company in the Fortune five, I won't name which one, but Microsoft was in there pretty heavily. And we were in there as well. And through that relationship building with Microsoft, in the in the customer, you know, we were able to really expand the work we were doing in that account, we were able to also run an innovation hackathon internally, which was amazing to hear all these different business use cases, which, which ultimately, we drove business for. We also were able to open up a specific focus inside of higher education. And oftentimes, we're getting brought into those meetings before RFPs went out,
Ben Wright 22:14
all that love it. And so you're, you're almost like Pippin, Pippin people to the pose, because you've already got that established relationship. I mean, right? That's the ideal use case, right? Where like, even before an RFP goes out, you're at top of their mind where it's like, oh, yeah, like these guys know what they're on about. And so, as part of that process, well, you already scoping the solution prior to an RFP being kind of submitted, is that how it worked?
Chad Oda 22:36
Exactly right. So it's just like, because like, you have the customer success managers that are already in these install base accounts. So they know the problems on a day to day basis, and like opportunities for what these existing customers are dealing with, right? So then I would have the knowledge, and then I would go into these meetings, and then we would kind of talk about it and start kind of scoping this stuff out. And formally, and by the time the RFP rolls around, it's like, oh, a lot of the points that we talked about are kind of in here. So it's always kind of a lot, you know, better odds, you know, when you get to talk, you know, in that respect?
Ben Wright 23:08
Yeah, I love that. I mean, a lot of what you've covered today is like, fundamentally, what it comes down to, we talked about a couple of things, we talked about tactics and strategies, which are like, Okay, here's some unique things that you did. But I think fundamentally, it comes down to the building of relationships. And I always go back to, okay, if you're not getting, you're not getting value out of partnerships in your partnership program, the moment the sales team can unlock that, candidly, like, if your direct sales team are on board with partnerships, then there's a high likelihood that you will be able to, to generate value and growth in your partnership program. And so what you did with like the Microsoft field sellers, I don't see enough people do with their own sales team, whether that be internal enablement, or external and everyone you're going into your partner sales teams, developing relationships during lunch and learn stuff like that. Salespeople are pretty, this is gonna sound rude. I don't mean it sound rude a pretty simple people in the way that what they want to do is close new business fundamentally, that's what it comes down to, right. And so if you're able to show them that through your partnership, you are going to help them close more business, expand accounts. It's a no brainer. And so what you've done in previous roles, which I love is like, let me develop a relationship with you Microsoft field team. But fundamentally, let me show you how I can help you, which is the value statement, right? And so, I don't know if you've got kind of any anecdotal evidence or stories around like particularly great relationships, you had the field teams and like, I don't know, any feedback you got from them or around an account or anything like that.
Chad Oda 24:42
Yeah. So I think the first relationship that we built, you had he was just so incredibly happy with our ability to, you know, come out with proof of concepts, you know, every time he would pull us on a call with his customers, and it's just like, especially in some of these SEC Here's like seeing is believing, right? And it's like, he was just so happy with that he was just willing to make introductions to us to other field sellers. He knew. And then we eventually were speaking to the directors, across regions, and in discussing like running like regional campaigns. So it just really takes one, right, just do a really good job and figure out like, how do you make the sellers life easier? How do you understand what is on the field sellers, scorecard that they care about, and the in the metrics change, right, from like quarter to quarter, there will be different things they're trying to push. So just having that kind of awareness and understanding of like, you know, yes, you run a business and you're trying to drive revenue, but at the same time, it to your point, it has to be predicated on value for both parties. And then I think there was another circumstance where we were in that that fortune five company, and you know, we did, we were actually pulled in by Microsoft, to address this really significant opportunity. And there's a really tight timeline, and we were able to execute and get that thing out in about a month and a half. And there was very, very significant right executive eyeballs on this thing. And we executed on that. And then that allowed us to, you know, then do that, that internal hackathon, which was across the company. And we really got to see all these other use cases inside the company,
Ben Wright 26:25
that the Microsoft scorecard is one I know very well. So we provided lamp training software for Microsoft. And so somebody would deploy Office into their environment. And our whole Value Proposition would be tied to like, well let them actually utilize the tools that you they've paid for. But again, to your point, we had to align to their scorecard, which was tied to adoption. And so we used to get a ton of leads over because we're like, hey, on your scorecard, you need to increase team's adoption by 30%. Well, guess what's a core component of that training? And so, again, to your point, when our developed relationships with our field sellers, showed them, how we could fundamentally make them hit that bonuses and their metrics. And the leads just flowed in. And again, once you've got one good customer, you've done it with all the rest kind of follow. Right? So yeah, I know that story exceptionally well. But we've touched on a lot in terms of nearby and tactics, you mentioned podcast, developer, relationships, all this great stuff. And so I thought we could end with just maybe, what's one kind of daily practice that can, you know, make partner managers more successful? And maybe just focus on the concept of near bound? And what you'd recommend to anybody listening in to going try, you know, in order to drive their partnership programs forward?
Chad Oda 27:36
Yeah. Oh, man, there's a harder one was yo, the, you're having me give one,
Ben Wright 27:40
you get you, you can get three. Yeah, any, any tactics.
Chad Oda 27:43
So So I actually wrote four down real quickly. So I think the first one really quick is mine your existing accounts, right? If you can get introductions to other partners that are operating in your existing install base accounts and start building relationships with them, they may have visibility into other departments that you don't have, or, you know, they understand other problems that you have no visibility to. So it's just like, it's a great opportunity, especially if you have really good rapport with your existing installed base account and just say, hey, you know, what other vendors do you partner with? That's a really good opportunity to start connecting the dots, there are some other partners could be hyperscalers, like Microsoft, or it could be smaller vendors. So I think that's a start. Secondly, you know, we echoed this continuously on this podcast here, but you know, really understand the scorecard, right, and every single company or partner is going to have a different scorecard. And those things often change quarter by quarter with new product launches, and new features that get rolled out. So really have a good awareness of where your partner is trying to go. Sadly, I think this has been kind of the most, I guess, one of one of our mantras, you know, when we were running the company before exited was just don't be afraid to break the rules. And, you know, think about, you know, if conventional wisdom is saying all partners, you know, all the professional services, consulting companies, system integrators are doing one thing, maybe look at what is the opposite approach, and just experiment, you know, break the rules, don't break them too, too big. But you know, you can break some rules once in a while, especially if you can create value. And I think the final thing, and you mentioned this, as well, as, you know, if you can interview on a podcast, they're GTM. You know, that could be field sellers, CSMs, account managers, marketing, folks, even, you can just get a wealth of information, you can build that rapport, you can build the social proofing, some of their colleagues end up seeing it on the LinkedIn feed, and they say, Oh, this guy liked it. It's just a great, great conversation starter.
Ben Wright 29:42
Yeah. Love it. Cool. All right. Well, Chad, like I said, thanks so much for jumping on. I think there's been a ton of really good stuff that I've pulled from the call today. Again, everybody that's listening, find chat on on LinkedIn. If you want to follow up with some of this stuff. I'm sure you'll be happy to chat but Chad thanks so much for spending time with us today and we hope to have you on again
Chad Oda 30:05
absolutely it was a pleasure really fun time
