Marketers of Technology
00:13:26 · Matthew Lattanzio, Andres Figuera
[00:13:26] S0: I hope so. Yeah. Every new client assigned will ask for a referral as well. So it's something to keep in mind. So if you burn contacts and you burn engagements and you have no one to offer to, like, speak on your behalf of what they got in value, it's always great to have some tangible numbers, like if you were able to increase revenue by a certain stage or if you have hit certain milestones with the company, like, were able to insert you and then get this result. Those are really great numbers to keep in your kind of pocket as you're selling. But almost every new client that I've signed has asked for a referral from my past client. So that's something that I'm really proud that my clients say good things about me. There's been a few that I've sent over that I said, I hope this... I hope he says good things. But generally speaking, I'd say I'm pretty confident in my past client relationship. And and, honestly, some have become really good friends as well over the years. Some who are the same age as me, and we've really got along well and spent a lot of face time together, become really close with. [00:14:17] S1: Okay. And, Matt, I now want to pass over to another topic that is the buzzword or words of the moment, which is AI. So how are you leveraging AI for, first of all, consulting? And then once you embed yourself in a company, how do you help make it help you be more efficient and optimize what you're doing?
00:14:36 · Matthew Lattanzio
[00:14:36] S0: Yeah. I'm using it in all the traditional ways. I don't think I'm doing anything, like, miraculous. I'd say I use it as an EA to kind of summarize my emails, will do all my follow ups for me. I use it a lot for presentations. So I think something that used to take me a lot of time was having an intro discovery call with a client, having to them review the call, try to, like, pull out the kind of main talking points or work work streams that they were looking to achieve, packaging it into a proposal or a scope of work, and then pricing it and getting it out to the client. That would take me a day sometimes. Like, I would have to do a lot of follow-up, and it would take me quite a lot of time to kinda get that that together. Now Claude does that for me in minutes. It has a direct connector to my Fathom recording. It can pull out the call summaries and the actual full recording. It will... It has all of my... Like, I've done enough of them now. Like, the proposals are very professional, very clean, understands the way that I talk and the way that I communicate, can help me build a follow-up presentation that I present back to the client, and then all the legal admin stuff as well, like service agreements and making sure that those include all the client's requests and include the scope of work. So all that has transitioned from several hours to minutes, and that's been a big time saver for me. I use it a lot for prospecting, so it knows my audience really well. It can help me generate lists of CEOs on LinkedIn that I can reach out to. It can help me tailor messages so that I'm do... Still doing some of the outbound myself, like, to some of the manual work, but it helps to reduce the amount of time I spend prospecting. And then for each client, I set up a separate project file, and I feed it with all the intelligence around the client. So all the positioning documents, all the scope of work that I'm responsible for, all the Fathom recordings for every call that I have. So it kinda continues to get more and more intelligent. So if I need to draft a marketing email of a new product launch, it... It's... I don't need to do much. Like, Claude will do that in minutes. I need to do some edits, collaborate with the client. So I think it's... The work streams were just incredibly, I'd say, more streamlined. It's definitely saved me a ton of time.
00:16:30 · Matthew Lattanzio, Andres Figuera
Again, I don't think I'm doing anything that no one else is doing, but that's how I've used it today. And I definitely see a ton of value in us being able to work a lot faster. [00:16:39] S1: No. Yeah. Because AI has really changed the perspective of what a regular day of work looks like because it's what you said. It used to take you hours, weeks, or even have to look for external help in order to get something done. And now with Claude or ChatGPT or whichever is your element of preference, it just got so much quicker and so much easier. It is just crazy how many people are really being able to just create a whole company by themselves and just rock it off into the sky, man. And, Matt, now switching over to the future. What is your priority with consulting towards the, let's say, the end of this year? What would you like to say you have accomplished by the end of this year, December 2000?
00:17:19 · Matthew Lattanzio
[00:17:19] S0: That's a good question. I think, like, there's some revenue milestones that I have for myself that I've been able to hit last year and this year. So I'm really proud that we're able to have some consistency there despite... Actually, intentionally, this year, I actually took almost two months off. I took the whole summer off, basically, with the kids. So I was able to intentionally grab that time, which had been life changing. Like, honestly, I highly encourage anyone, take a sabbatical. Like, I'm 37 years old. I hadn't take that much time off in my entire life since I was probably 20. So to take that really dedicated time off is really recharging for me personally. So I think that's actually one of my goals for the end of the year is to close-up the year with better mental health, I'd say, better better well rounded stress management and being able to manage incoming clients more efficiently. For the end of the year, I think I'm... I basically have, like, two new, I'd say, scopes that I've been attracted to. So one is more of a early stage startup where I am an embedded CRO. I get to make all the strategic decisions. I have typically a little bit of a team that reports to me, whether it's the account executives, the SDRs, or a marketing leader. And then on the inverse side, I've been working with lately a lot of larger organizations. I'm talking, like, 10... Like, thousand employee organizations, and sometimes actually just replacing a director level role. And I find both interesting in different ways. And I'm actually enjoying the pace of having really strategic work on one side with two or three clients and having sometimes executional work with two or three clients, which feels sort of refreshing. It keeps me keeps me sharp and I've been very hands on and I'm able to work with a lot of stakeholders within the org. So, yeah, that's my goal, I think, is to continue that that cadence of having both because having, like, five, like, really embedded zero roles I found was difficult because your context switching so often and you're sometimes blurring the lines a little bit of, like, which client is which. When the scope is delineated in the way that I have it today, I think it's more manageable long term.
00:19:08 · Andres Figuera
[00:19:08] S1: Amazing, man. Now... And after hearing you speak, I have no doubt that you'll be able to accomplish all of this. And first of all, I also wanted to note, I've asked this question 200 times in the episodes I've done, and you're the first person that's told me that they really wanna take care of their mental health and make sure that they're able to give themselves that rest time, that connection time with the family. So I really feel that's a very important aspect that people sometimes forget about. So very glad that you're being able to give yourself that time to be with your loved ones and really get to connect with your children in... At another level. Because when you spend so much time with them, it just... It's something different than really just seeing them at the end of the day or just over the weekend. So that's so cool.
00:19:45 · Matthew Lattanzio
[00:19:45] S0: Yeah. Well, I talked to so many CROs in my stage of the career where they've done two or three stints as a full time operator, and they're all burnt out. Whole and some romantics are gone, man. Like, no one gives a shit that much anymore, I think. And that's the thing that's hard is, like, to find an experienced operator who wants to... Like, you gotta be crazy to join a early stage startup at my age to... And all that comes with that. Right? Like, board meetings, fundraising, like, the building and the product market fit catching up to your go to market fit and, like, how... I've done it several times. And it was fun when I was doing it. I'd say I wouldn't take it away. Like, I'm glad I went through those experiences, but I have no desire to do that again. And I think that's where fractionals have actually become a better fit for some organizations because you can get the experience that you would look for, but in a trade off capacity that is mutually beneficial for both parties. Like, I'm not an equity partner. I get paid cash for the time that I put into the business. They don't have to pay me equity, so they have some balance on that, but they're getting really experienced leadership. And I think it's a good trade off. So to my opinion, I think the fractional work is gonna become more and more common if companies are are going to want to hire experienced leaders versus developing leaders. And I think that's the trade off that they'll have to decide on is do you wanna take someone from a VP role and groom them into a CRO and all that comes with that, or do they wanna just get immediate value? And I think it's gonna be harder and harder for these organizations to find talent that is gonna wanna join that early stage environment because as I said, I think you have to be crazy to do it. You gotta be a little nuts. And I'm... I've been a little nuts, I think it's been fun, but I just... I can't imagine going back again. And I hear this from so many people that I talk to that are in the same stage of career that I'm in. I'm done career building. I'm done title chasing, like, all that sort of behind me. I just wanna, like, have a balanced lifestyle and then make a good living for my family and then be able to service my clients as much as I can. So that's sort of my goal.