From Cold Calls to Creativity: The Future of Outreach | TFOS E18

Cold outreach is broken—and this founder has a plan to fix it.
In this episode of The Future of Selling, we explore what happens when you stop spamming inboxes and start respecting your prospects.

Our guest is Ryan O'Hara, founder of Pitchfire, a paid-prospecting platform that flips traditional sales outreach on its head. Instead of begging for time, reps pay for responses—and it’s working. With reply rates up to 60% and meetings booked in just 3 pitches, this is not your average cold outreach conversation.

🎯 We cover:
– Why reply rates have plummeted and how to turn the tide
– The difference between buying a meeting vs. buying a response
– How creativity (like sending piano songs!) builds trust
– What “zero-click marketing” and personal branding mean for sellers
– Why paid prospecting could actually be more ethical
– The future of B2B sales, AI, and buyer-led deal rooms
– A real story about how a cold call led to a life-changing conversation

Whether you lead a sales team or carry a quota, this conversation will challenge the way you think about outreach.

Connect with Ryan O'Hara https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryanmohara/
Connect with Pitchfire https://www.pitchfire.com/

Connect with Rick Smith https://www.linkedin.com/in/rick-smith-094b29b
Connect with Conquer https://conquer.io/

Creators and Guests

Host

Rick Smith

Chief Customer Officer at Conquer, Host of The Future of Selling Podcast, Eternal Student

What is The Future of Selling?

The Future of Selling is the go-to podcast for sales professionals looking to sharpen their skills and stay ahead in the competitive world of B2B sales. Each episode features expert interviews, real-world case studies, and actionable tips to help you navigate the complex B2B buyer's journey. Whether you're dealing with long sales cycles, multiple decision-makers, or rapidly changing technologies, we’ve got you covered. Tune in to discover the latest trends, best practices, and proven strategies for closing more deals and building lasting relationships in the B2B space. Perfect for sales leaders, account managers, and anyone aiming to master the art of B2B selling.

Rick Smith (00:01.699)
Hey, welcome to the Future of Selling podcast where we dive into challenges. We dive into trends, innovations, anything that's impacting the future of sales or the sales landscape. I'm your host Rick Smith. I'm so appreciative that you decided to join us today. I think we're going to have a great conversation. I hope it's something that you can kind of take with you back to your industry, your company and your life and it makes some nice improvements. Our guest today is Ryan O'Hara. Ryan is the founder and the CEO of Pitchfire and Ryan believes that traditional cold outreach is irreparably broken and we've got to change that to survive. So we thought that was a really interesting point of view and that's one of the reasons we want to get Ryan on. know, pitchfire is revolutionizing B2B prospecting through what he calls paid prospecting. So I can't wait to find out more about that. Ryan built pitchfire to make cold outreach more respectful, I think that's a really cool way to think about that, more respectful and effective by compensating prospects for the time and intention. His campaigns and marketing insights have been featured in some really cool media, Fortune, Mashable, The Next Web. And I'm just excited to have you on today, Ryan, I appreciate it. And I'm really looking forward to the conversation, but also, the things I can learn based on what I already know and doing some research, buddy. So Ryan, welcome to the podcast and really appreciate your time,

Ryan O'Hara (01:34.328)
Thanks. I appreciate it. And I like your company a lot. A couple of years ago, I got a cool Yeti mug from you guys that I still use almost every day. So excellent. Yeah. Love it. Unbelievable quantity. Incredible. It makes it so I don't overdose on caffeine when I drink coffee in the morning. Everybody.

Rick Smith (01:42.817)
beautiful. The little half mug.

Rick Smith (01:52.515)
That's good. That's a good fun fact right there, you know, so yeah, we

Ryan O'Hara (01:57.076)
Everybody gives everybody gives the big one, but I like the half cup. That's that's the classy hack here

Rick Smith (02:02.255)
Yeah, yeah, no, I agree. We still give those out, by the way. So maybe we'll maybe we'll get you another one headed your direction. You know, as we get started, I always like to think about, know, kind of some fun facts, one or two fun facts about you that we've either, you know, we've kind of done some research and things like that. But just to give people an opportunity to find out about who you are, right, make it a little more personal. So

So one fun fact I just found out about you is that you were in the process of recording yourself Singing with a piano and you're actually going to send these things to prospects in order to you know Gain attention get get there get get them get them talking to you. So that sounds kind of fun. How's it going?

Ryan O'Hara (02:45.902)
It's it's so far it's been pretty good. So I have on LinkedIn, I've been sending LinkedIn messages to people and up until a couple months ago, you could only record in real time and then send it to someone on LinkedIn. And what they've done with LinkedIn video now, if you have premium is you could actually record a video, save it to your gallery, then attach it and send it afterwards. So what I've been doing is recording videos that are actually edited. And what I've been doing right now is I have a piano, I have this microphone, and I've been

Rick Smith (02:58.413)
Okay.

Ryan O'Hara (03:15.856)
looking for people that I'm trying to sell to usually mid-size 200 to 500 employees and B2B. And I'm trying to get them to get their whole team on pitchfire. And so I've been sending songs to them. I did three so far this morning. I do them in batches. So like, I'm like going to go block off time and do like 12 in one sitting. Then I move. Then usually my voice is trashed after that because I'm not a good singer. But

Rick Smith (03:35.511)
Yeah.

Yeah, all right. That will make it even more interesting if you're not a good singer, you know?

Ryan O'Hara (03:45.07)
I've had I've had some people write back and say, dude, get auto tuned. But here's the thing. Here's the thing, guys. I'm raw. Okay. I'm like, I'm like, I'm doing like punk songs. I don't need to like, I don't need to do share or Celine Dion stuff for you. But anyway, yes, I've been sending that on LinkedIn messenger. It's been pretty good. I get I usually can hear back from like, like, if they see it 30 or 40 % of people, the hard part about doing it is like, it obviously takes a lot of time.

Rick Smith (03:59.192)
Yeah. All right.

Rick Smith (04:12.355)
Yeah, yeah, that's really strong though. And I think that goes right along with our theme today we're going to be talking about, right, is outbound, how to make that more effective. So anyway, that's one fun fact. A couple of others, right? You were a guerrilla marketing prodigy. I found out that in college you created a Super Bowl TV ad that went viral on Mashable. And this actually kind of landed your first job in college or out of college, it sounds like, which is kind of cool.

Ryan O'Hara (04:34.667)
yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (04:42.176)
Yeah, so when I was in college senior year, I interned at a company and during the Super Bowl that Google launched their first Super Bowl ad. And it was this whole story about a guy falling in love with a girl in Paris and like they just showed his Google search and like they told this love story. Honestly, is really good ad like made you feel something like I gotta go Google something. Holy crap. But that night I couldn't sleep and I was like, I'm just gonna stay up.

I'm going to make a parody of that and make make fun of the fact that like, you can Google people to be a creep. And so I did told a story about like, this guy being a creep to this girl and like stalking her and trying to like, like, it looked like like him trying to, it was like the opposite of the love story. Basically, he's just this guy that wouldn't leave this girl alone. And I put it up online, I woke up the next day and had 200,000 views.

Rick Smith (05:16.856)
Right.

Rick Smith (05:28.139)
Right.

Rick Smith (05:34.391)
Wow.

Ryan O'Hara (05:35.404)
Yeah, so like, and then like, I had a bunch at the end of the video, I put a link to my website that had my resume because I was looking for work. And I had like a bunch of people call me about work and jobs and stuff afterward.

Rick Smith (05:43.032)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (05:47.556)
That's incredible. That's awesome, And then probably last fun fact to share, a philosopher of conversation stages. The reason I like this is because I was just talking to our last guest on the podcast about, I think this topic, right? So what that means is that conversations evolve from small talk to shared experiences into deep emotions. And kind of what we talked about last time was how you hear some people say,

Ryan O'Hara (05:49.068)
Yeah, it was cool.

Rick Smith (06:12.035)
man, don't give me any small talk, just tell me what you know and I'll make a decision and don't engage with CEOs in small talk. And I just completely disagree with that point of view. So I'm looking forward, maybe at some point we'll just kind of go through the conversation today. We can talk more about small talk to shared experiences to deep emotions. So, hey, gentlemen, we're here right now. Yeah, tell me what you think.

Ryan O'Hara (06:32.493)
Do I jump into that now or wait? Like, I don't want to. Yeah. So I obviously got my start in working as I wanted to do marketing when I got out of school, but I graduated 2008, 2009, when the economy was like kind of tanking. So all the entry level marketing jobs were getting scooped up by people that were a little bit more senior. And I was like,

Rick Smith (06:46.872)
Yes.

Ryan O'Hara (06:52.374)
What am I going to do? And it turns out that ad ended up getting me some momentum and I got hired as the first BDR of his development rep at this company called Dine. And I just prospected a ton and I tried to start writing down things that worked when I had prospect someone with a cold email or a cold call and

Rick Smith (07:02.125)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (07:10.478)
One, I kept track of all these things and eventually they turned it into training at Dine. So like we hired, think probably over 90 reps when I was there and I trained them all on things that worked for prospecting back then. And a lot of that stuff never went away. Like that was like now probably 13 or 14 years ago, but like it still works. you, what we typically find is that you have to start with something which is like small talk, obviously that's like kind of stage one of conversation. You start with like, how about these things?

Rick Smith (07:15.297)
Okay.

Rick Smith (07:38.018)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (07:40.464)
But when you get into the shared experience stuff, that's usually how we make friendships in real life. So like, one of the examples that I always like talking about is like, who your friends growing up, maybe you went to college with them, you lived with them in a dorm.

Rick Smith (07:43.907)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (07:53.964)
you would both were on the track team or did hockey or something, or your parents are friends with each other. These kinds of things that create these common interests allow you to make friends with people. And it's actually the same thing that you can do in sales when you're doing outreach with somebody. It's one of the ways that like, I've always been able to get really good conversion rates when I used to prospect and send emails out to people. I still do it today as a founder, but like, it's just a little bit different than it used to be when you're an SDR and AE.

Rick Smith (08:21.227)
Right, right, gotcha.

Ryan O'Hara (08:22.414)
And then if you get that, if you get that common interest, what ends up happening is you build rapport with them and get that going. And the third piece of the puzzle turns into they actually, if you start sharing your feelings with them afterward, they'll start sharing their feelings and you end up getting to a point where you're not having so you're not being uncomfortable. So I went to that person because you both poured your hearts out to it. I actually have a really good story. I could tell you right now if you want about this.

Rick Smith (08:45.655)
Yeah, go ahead.

Ryan O'Hara (08:47.33)
Yeah, so I talked about this, I guess lecture and do four classes on prospecting at the University of New Hampshire every semester. And I always tell this story to students, but I remember there was a guy that I was calling once when I was working at Dine, he had a startup that he made and the on, but his day job was working at a company called StumbleUpon, which was a really popular app that people used to use, like where you could like just go to random websites and it would find cool websites for you to go to based on your interest in your

Rick Smith (09:01.827)
Okay.

Ryan O'Hara (09:17.314)
browsing history and stuff. So this guy was working there as a system admin and I wanted to sell to him and I cold called him.

And I remember when I cold called them on the call, I was like, Hey, I saw that you have a startup that you do with us. Like that you're used that you started on the side. Tell me more about that. I want to start a startup someday. Funny. I eventually did. I'm now working on my own startup. But anyway, I use that as common interest with them. And we talked about startups for like a couple of minutes on the call. And I was like, so the reason I was calling you is I wanted someone to stumble upon, but I don't know anyone there. You're the system admin. You're usually someone we sell to. I know you're doing the startup thing, but would you be

Rick Smith (09:32.525)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (09:53.414)
open to talking about this and long story short, we talked for a little bit and it was right before Thanksgiving and at the end of the call, I was like, Hey, what are doing for Thanksgiving? And on the call, the guy revealed to me that he was going to go home to his parents and come out to them. And I was like, like he had he had figured out that he was gay recently and was like, I'm going to actually tell them this weekend that I'm gay and I'm like, Holy crap.

Rick Smith (10:08.161)
Wow.

Ryan O'Hara (10:19.054)
You could do it, man. That's huge. And I'm just a rep that lives in my mom's basement blown away that he's telling me this, but I'm like, you could do it. You know, I'm sure they'll be fine. Like it's okay. All this blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, next week we get on the call of handing the deal off to the AE and the beginning of the call. I'm like, Hey, Brian, how'd it go? And he's like, it went great. My parents understood everything's great. I feel so much better. Blah, blah. And I'm like, that's so good. I'm so happy for you, man. And like we ended up making that connection because he let out his feelings and emotions.

Rick Smith (10:23.597)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (10:28.579)
See you in the US.

Ryan O'Hara (10:49.008)
And I shared some emotions and feelings that I had about going to my family's house for Thanksgiving also in a different context. But moral of the story is like the rep that I had on the call was like, what the hell did you guys talk about in that cold call last week? So like, if you, but, but if you do it, you open up and they, became a customer and eventually he went on to go work at a company called bump. worked at eBay. He worked at Dropbox and he brought, instead of filling out a lead for me, he came back to me and like went through me every time.

Rick Smith (11:01.163)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (11:18.948)
I got credit for these opportunities because they built a relationship with them.

Rick Smith (11:21.857)
Yeah, no, I think small talk is so underrated, right? Simply because as human beings, our nature, I don't know if DNA, but our nature is to try to figure out whether I can trust you or not if I don't know you. That's the first thing we're trying to figure out. We're casing, right? And so the first thing we're doing is we start with the safest place we could possibly be, small talk. And if that small talk goes well, then to your point, it turns into commonalities.

And then if that goes well, then, know, of sky's the limit. So I think it's a great story and I think that's a great approach as well. But let's kind of use that to jump into our topic today. So I want to talk about kind of how to breathe life back into cold outreach, right? And, know, kind of your point of view on this is, hey, man, it's broken, it needs help. But you're already telling us some ways to improve it.

Ryan O'Hara (12:00.214)
Yeah, thank you.

Rick Smith (12:19.947)
Let me ask you this. So what originally kind of led you to believe that cold outreach is broken? there a moment or an experience that kind of pushed you over the edge and like, OK, this thing's broken. I have to do something about it.

Ryan O'Hara (12:34.702)
Yeah, so when I first joined Lead IQ as the VP of Marketing and Growth, I was doing prospecting and we used to do this state of prospecting every year. We'd ask people what their average reply rates were, what their average connect rates were. And they would, you know, go look in a tool like yours or someone else's to see like, what am I getting for a reply rate? Connect rates were a little harder to measure, but they'd keep track of it sometimes with data providers and third parties and stuff.

We found that in 2016, the average connect rate on a cold call was close to 10 % and the average reply rate on a cold email was close to 6%. In 2021, we did it again and only this time lead IQ was much bigger. Like we were series B back, like had way more customers and way more partners in cloud. And so we got a lot more people to take it. We asked the same question, almost sent the same exact survey out to publish the state of prospecting.

Rick Smith (13:28.76)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (13:29.26)
The average reply rate on a connector, a connector and on a cold call drop from 10 % to 3%. And the average, the average reply rate on a cold email that dropped from 6 % to 0.7%. And so I saw this and was like, because I'm working in a company that's selling prospecting software. I'm like, what am I going to do? Like we were making software for you to get contact data and stuff. And I was like, what are we going to do?

Rick Smith (13:43.809)
I'm just y'all.

Ryan O'Hara (13:53.422)
if these numbers hit zero. And so I started to do a deep dive into that. And I was like, everybody's looking and talking to all these top 1 % salespeople on what they're doing that's making them perform still. And I thought about doing the opposite. And so what I did is I went and talked to the top 1 % of buyers that were getting prospected the most.

And what was one of the advantages I had is at Meet IQ, I could see what people were getting captured the most using our tool. So I just went and asked these people how often you get cold emailed, how often you get cold called. And one of the big things that I learned is that everybody switching to using templates and blast and not doing any personalization and stuff had actually just trained all these people to ignore cold calls and cold emails.

Rick Smith (14:19.64)
request.

Rick Smith (14:36.567)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (14:37.718)
And so I started to see this and think like, you know, writing a cold email on a cold call is almost like yelling at a football stadium. When it used to be like yelling at a library, like you'd really stand out and do something to get in front of someone. Now, even if you're a good top 1 % prospector and you personalize your outreach, you're sending piano videos to people.

Rick Smith (14:49.026)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (14:57.004)
you're still gonna have a slim chance that actually hits the inbox and gets in front of that person because reps have ruined it with spam and bots and inbox providers have cracked down. so I started to see these things. I'm not trying to besmirch sales engagement because you still need to do that stuff. It's just the game of how you use it is really different than how it used to be.

Rick Smith (15:18.901)
Right, right. Gotcha. So that was a point in which you were like, this thing is broken. We need to do something else. Is that what kind of led you to, and I want to know more about it. Is that what led you to found a pitchfire? And was that the answer? so just tell us, tell us about pitchfire. What is it? How does it work? You know, what makes it effective?

Ryan O'Hara (15:38.722)
Yeah.

Yeah. So what ended up happening was I talked to them and I was like, well, what would make you actually go back, go back and hit up these reps? we started to find out a lot of the people that were getting prospected were actually people in marketing and demand generation. Those people get prospect. Actually you probably do too. You're you like run a, a whole client success team and stuff. Those three buckets were the people that were getting prospected the most. And when we investigated that, we found out that people were actually willing to go and talk to these people if they're getting

compensated. Unfortunately, the first iteration of the business failed. And the first iteration of the business was you just go buy meetings of people. So I'd get a bunch of people to agree to list their calendars out on our marketplace and they get paid to take meetings with vendors. And what we found out is if you buy a meeting with someone about 10 minutes in, they'll know they're a bad fit, but they have because they're getting compensated, they hang out for another 20 minutes and waste the reps time. And then a lot of them actually felt bad telling the rep that they weren't interested. So they hang out, they go do another call

Rick Smith (16:34.904)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (16:40.336)
on a third call, and it just ended up not working. So we did that for about two years before realizing like we went and dug deeper. And what we found out is that like, if you buy meetings, it's the porridge is a little too hot. The actual sweet spot is buying a response off of a prospect.

Rick Smith (16:43.437)
Yes.

Rick Smith (16:52.792)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (16:56.27)
and paying them less. instead of paying $200 for a meeting, you could pay someone 50 or 60 bucks for a response. And the ratio ends up being better and more economical. And you qualify or disqualify out that person right off the bat paying for the response instead. And that's kind of what we did and what we shifted to.

Rick Smith (17:11.299)
What?

What's a response look like when you say response versus a meeting? are they, paying $50 for a response. What does that mean?

Ryan O'Hara (17:23.086)
Yeah, so responses can start as low as $25. If you're a sales rep listening to this, you can go on our marketplace and find someone you want to pitch and you bid for getting them to respond. You can pick $25. You can pick $2,000, whatever your company has for pricing. If there's ROI, do whatever you want to get a response. But a response would be, yes, I'm interested. Let's meet. Here's what I'm interested in. Or no, I'm not interested. Here's why I'm not interested. And they have to give you a reason why they're not interested.

So like, if they say they use another competitor, we make them tell you what competitor they're using. And when does the contract expire? If they say that they're not not interested, they have to give you a reason why they're not interested. And we give them a character limit that they have to do it in. If you buy a response and the person gives you a bad response, you bug us, it will refund you. It's not a big deal. But generally speaking, we actually have only had to do that like twice ever. And so instead of paying $200 for a meeting and flapping your gums at somebody

Rick Smith (18:00.162)
Okay.

Rick Smith (18:09.315)
Okay.

Ryan O'Hara (18:22.936)
for 30 minutes and realizing it's not a fit. You just can get the person to qualify or disqualify themselves and get onto a call. I can share the metrics with you you want to know about it after to

Rick Smith (18:23.277)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Smith (18:32.931)
Yeah, yeah, well, I'd love that as a of fact, because a lot of sales leaders obviously still look at metrics like meeting, how many meetings were booked, discovery calls were conducted, but do you have new and different success metrics that you're tracking now based on the way pitchfire is approaching this outreach?

Ryan O'Hara (18:53.932)
Yeah, so when we did some studies on this, saw that on average, if you use a sales engagement platform, you'll have to do about 220 activities to generate a meeting. On Pitchfire, you have to do three.

So it's, only have to send three pitches on pitch fire one in three of the people that get a pitch on pitch fire will actually take a meeting with you. this tell like, that's the crazy part about this whole thing is like, when I started this journey and we were originally selling meetings, I didn't, I was like, I'd rather just get a meeting for 200 bucks. That's a no brainer, but buying responses is actually better because you could send three responses for let's say you make three, you send three pitches for $25 a pop. You might only spend $75.

dollars to get one meeting, which is way better than like an average enterprise company spends $3,500 to produce a meeting in real life outside of pitchfire.

Rick Smith (19:43.992)
Yeah. So fine. So just so I get it and it's clear to me. So if I'm a seller and I'm utilizing your platform, Pitchfire, right? Would I basically would I say, hey, here's 10 people that I would like to contact. And then through the Pitchfire technology, it actually reaches out to those 10 people and says, you know, basically ask them if they want to participate. Is that how is that how it works?

Ryan O'Hara (19:54.626)
Yep.

Ryan O'Hara (20:12.918)
Yeah. So with paid prospecting, we have a couple of different ways that you can do it. The most popular way is our marketplace. So we get a bunch of people think of us almost like a data provider. We go get, except all the people that we have data on have opted in to receive pitches from us. So what they'll do is they'll opt in. We, they make a profile. They'll tell you what vendors are using quick description about themselves. You can go browse into the marketplace, find their company and write a sales pitch to them. And when you write that sales pitch to them, we'll go.

Rick Smith (20:27.842)
Hmm.

Ryan O'Hara (20:42.832)
that pitch the person that's appropriate based on the department you want to sell to. They get an email where they go in and they see all the pitches that are waiting for them sorted by the dollar amount. So if someone offers them more money, that pitch gets higher in their inbox inside pitchfire. If they get offered less money, those go to the bottom of the inbox, but they can look at them still. And most people answer all of them to be honest with you, like the response rates like 60 % right now. But in inside that pitchfire instance, you literally just go pick one by one who you want to pitch. And the neat part is because you

Rick Smith (20:46.232)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (21:05.175)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (21:12.752)
you know that there's a 60 % response rate, you could do a lot more cooler stuff with your pitch. Like if I wanted to send piano video, the problem for me is I can't prospect people that are that are on pitchfire because they're already my customer. So I have I have to do like, set, grab a piano and a microphone and make music and send it to someone over a LinkedIn message or something. Because if they were already on pitchfire, I would just send that. But if you're someone watching this video and you're like, I want to get someone to respond, you know, don't just copy and paste your

Rick Smith (21:31.831)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (21:42.624)
your email that you'd be sending them into a pitch on Pitchfire, you have a thousand characters, write something knowing that you're actually gonna hear back from them. Go research them a little bit, read about them on LinkedIn. Find something you can bring up about them and lead with that in your framework. I can share the framework too that works really well on it. But.

Right now it's pretty healthy. About one in three pitches will turn into a meeting. It's actually a little closer to one in two, but I don't want to oversell it. It's about a third of the pitches that you send. You could, yeah, go ahead, sorry.

Rick Smith (22:11.821)
Yes. where do you, how do you get your, so again, I'm the seller. I've got these prospects that I want to make basically pitches to. Where do they come from? mean, do they just sign up themselves? They're like, hey, you know, or do you guys?

Ryan O'Hara (22:23.885)
Yep.

Ryan O'Hara (22:28.648)
Yeah, that's the hardest part about doing this is we're building a marketplace. So like you have to only sell one side. We're not really trying to go after sellers. I'm really trying to go after buyers and buyers being people that get prospected.

The way we've been getting them mainly has been we do word of mouth. We do a lot of stuff with people in the B2B marketing, sales and demand gen space. Like you guys honestly would probably be, you'd probably clean up in our marketplace. Cause like you're going after that market a little bit, but.

Rick Smith (22:52.546)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (23:00.086)
That's kind of been our sweet spot that we do really well in. We've been, we've been actually one of the things that we've been struggling with full transparency is we've been trying to get full teams on because if I, what happens is every person that installs and uses pitchfire and joins our marketplace, we give them a plugin they can use in their inbox. And anytime that they get prospected, they could send that person to their pitchfire listing. So we're trying to regulate and make a place where the buyer

Rick Smith (23:17.73)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (23:30.0)
the buyer get can not get called and emailed 100 times and just keep ignoring it and instead get incentivized to answer the prospecting and the seller on the backside gets paid I'm sorry the seller on the backside actually gets an answer from that prospect

Rick Smith (23:44.984)
Yeah, okay. Do you feel like this approach is more like, I mean, I could see some people saying maybe it's a little more kind of tactical, if you will. I mean, are you still in this approach, are you still able to maintain more intimacy and authenticity in the process? You think it's more, you think it's less? kind of what's your thought there?

Ryan O'Hara (24:10.924)
Yeah, the cool part is there isn't a conflict of interest, like a lot of people, they hear like, I gotta pay a prospect to pay that seems unethical. The neat part is, it's actually more ethical because we're paying them the same amount of money to say yes, as we do know. Like, there's no we're not like, pushing you if I were for example, if you're like, hey, I'll go send you I'll send you a $50 gift card if you take a meeting with me.

Rick Smith (24:26.455)
Okay.

Rick Smith (24:36.866)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (24:37.548)
I, you're kind of, you're kind of asking them a lot for me to go to a 30 minute meeting with you and hear your pitch. But if I'm asking someone to take one or two minutes to go answer a pitch and I'm putting it in like an intake process where that vendor is now saved some more and I can go look for vendors that have, that I've talked to you before. You're like not just buying that response. You're getting listed into a place where they can go and find you again, if they're looking for a vendor. like there's incentive on that end too. But anyway, the, the way that we get around,

it is like I think a good way to think about it is like most companies will spend somewhere between five to ten thousand dollars per person in a year on technology to try and get in front of somebody and get their attention and follow them with advertising online wouldn't you rather give that money directly to your prospects so they can like

pay off a credit card debt or, or send their kid to college or whatever they want to do it. I have one guy who actually used the money to buy a flight for his father to come here because he lived in Australia. And he made, was like a CMO of a company. He's like, I can afford it, but like now I'm actually getting my pitches in one spot and I'm able to go do this and not even break a sweat doing it.

Rick Smith (25:26.851)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (25:39.336)
wow.

Rick Smith (25:50.316)
Yeah, well, that makes sense. know, I talked to other, you some people that I've interviewed, right? They tend to do these, you know, Friday at two o'clock, I do demos, you know, of different companies and different folks. And so it kind of goes into that, right? So to me as a seller, the value of it is that I've got really a somewhat warm audience. So may, you know, to that I'm working with here and to get that response rate or that meeting, you know, rate down to

three to one versus 230 to one, it's massive. mean, it's just, huge.

Ryan O'Hara (26:24.6)
Well, the other cool part is you should still do normal prospecting. Cause the neat part is if you run paid prospecting campaigns, it's just another channel. You run paid marketing, you run prospecting and you do paid prospecting is like a third bucket of something that you do. And you start putting some budget. If you collaborate with marketing on it, you can do some really cool stuff. My vision for this thing is the reason that we don't put a ton of effort into doing crazy prospecting stunts to get in front of somebody. Like why don't we make a Superbowl ad for one account

Rick Smith (26:28.791)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (26:54.544)
at a time, right? Reason we don't is because the probability of the member seeing that out is super low. But if I do something creative and different that makes that prospects feel special, and I know that I'm going to hit that hit here back from them at a 60 % clip rate. Now my quality of the pitch and effort I'm going to put it is going to much higher.

Rick Smith (27:15.511)
Yeah, that makes sense. are you guys at Pitchfire, how are you kind of using AI to impact what you're doing? I mean, is it all just kind of manual or do you actually incorporate AI? Any kind of personalization, all that kind of stuff?

Ryan O'Hara (27:28.32)
Yeah, so so

Yeah, so a couple of things that we do, we have a Chrome plugin that people can use when they get prospected and you can, we actually will look at the email and predict if it's a cold email or not for you. So buyers can do that on the seller side. One of the things that we work on is when you go into our marketplace, once you start setting 10 or 15 or 20 pitches inside pitchfire, our marketplace will actually show different people that we think match up more with the people you're trying to sell to.

Rick Smith (28:01.868)
Okay.

Ryan O'Hara (28:02.3)
And that's all being done with AI. Trust me, I couldn't do that. I'm not as data scientist. I would need AI to help me out with that. So that's one of, that's kind of an element that we're working on, on that end. There's other, our vision for this eventually is I actually want to build it so that you're not just going into pitchfire and doing the prospecting and getting a response. I want to turn it into a full place where you live and you do the whole deal inside pitchfire. you don't have to, seller doesn't have to worry about a deal going cold after you've had the

Rick Smith (28:06.925)
Right. Yeah.

Rick Smith (28:20.995)
Thanks.

Rick Smith (28:31.265)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (28:32.122)
first response. So we're actually going to like we're going to be shifting more into like a chat interface almost almost like a buying room that you do your full conversation back and forth. And the incentive for the buyer not dropping off is they get paid every 30 days to keep talking to you. So

Rick Smith (28:39.981)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (28:46.805)
cool. So it's almost like trying to build like a deal room, like a virtual deal room.

Ryan O'Hara (28:51.118)
Yeah, but but think of it inverted. So it'll be a buying room and for the buyer instead, the buyer will invite the seller into that room. And then the seller and the buyer can have all their vendor communication anytime a vendor wants to go back and talk to that that buyer they've had a conversation with, you pop back into that room and you talk and if that person doesn't respond, hit a button add $30 to the pod, we'll go email them and be like, Hey, this person's trying to contact you for $30 to get your back for them. You're up for renewal in 90 days. Can you respond please? So like we're gonna

try and turn this into like a full way of life for you to have buyers and sellers communicate.

Rick Smith (29:26.391)
Yeah, got it. you guys, do you have a, and you don't have to use the company's name, but you have a really specific success story, you know, that's taken place in the last quarter of six months, year, something like that?

Ryan O'Hara (29:37.175)
Yep.

Ryan O'Hara (29:40.8)
Yeah, one of I'll give them the shadow because I think they have a great service to there's a founder. There's a company called spiralize and their CEO, Sahil Patel has been using pitchfire regularly whenever we get a new person that comes in that works in marketing or demand gen. They run an agency that helps you with website conversion. And so what he'll do is he'll actually go log into pitchfire and he'll go rip off like six or seven pitches every time that he logs in. He actually offered he went in and offered

Rick Smith (30:08.248)
Right.

Rick Smith (30:19.009)
Right. Yeah.

Rick Smith (30:27.49)
Wow.

Ryan O'Hara (30:30.244)
He's also he's amazing at sales. Go check him out and follow him on LinkedIn to help a tell he he's he's he's doing he does a lot of cool video content about like website.

conversion and positioning your website and stuff to get get clients but he like he's been really successful with it prior to working with us they were actually doing a campaign where they would go send steak knives to people so like they'd get a nice knife made and send it to people in the mail the thing that sucks is they'd spend three or four hundred dollars on that knife and some of them never got back to them on this they're only paying money if they respond

Rick Smith (30:51.947)
Right.

Yeah.

Rick Smith (31:04.481)
Right. Wow. That's incredible. So thinking about AI, right? Do you think that as we kind of move into the future of AI and, it's changing so fast all the time, right? Do you think that is outbound prospecting? it going to be all AI at some point? Do you think it's always going to have this kind of human nuance to it that requires that human touch? What's your sense there?

Ryan O'Hara (31:30.542)
There are two things that I think are still not mainstream yet with AI prospecting. The first is replicating the AI model to be you. Every person that we talked at the beginning of this podcast, everyone's got a different way of connecting with people. have different life experiences.

I think what we're going to do is we're going to get more comfortable with having AI do outbound, but have it replicate being the person with their individual experiences. Because one of the things that we've learned over the past 10 years as general knowledge is you can't prospect someone just based on where they work anymore. People change jobs too much. So like if I go prospect somebody and say, I love that your company did this, one of the three people that you prospect is going to be out of that job in the next six months.

Rick Smith (32:05.666)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (32:17.872)
at this point. So like you have to find a way to relate to that person individually. My vision is I expect to we're going to see AI buying and AI selling both be done together. So maybe it'll be you log in on pitchfire. Company might go and write and share like, what are our top pains and priorities this month? And the person actually sending the pitch and paying the company money to respond is an AI bot. Like that might be where we're heading with this. I don't it's changing so much over the past couple months to

Rick Smith (32:47.297)
Yeah, yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (32:48.354)
What do you think? What are you seeing,

Rick Smith (32:51.543)
Yeah, I think from an AI standpoint, I I've been in a lot of, know, gone to a lot of different conferences on it and things like that. I think that that human piece is, gonna be tough to completely replace that, right? Doesn't mean that we, good point, we won't eventually, maybe sooner than later, have kind of AI working on both sides, but some of it probably has to do with an individual's age as well.

I think, right? Because the younger generations that's grown up into AI, they're not gonna know the difference. I mean, it's gonna be so natural for them that they won't even care, but you get a little older and it's a new technology that other people are having to adopt and I think it'll be a little bit harder for them. So I think that human element is going to be there for a while, but over time, I think it may become less necessary.

to have it as dominant as it is right now. That's what I think is happening.

Ryan O'Hara (33:49.004)
Yeah, that's definitely something. think a lot of them are committing money to it not seeing the ROI or return because humans are still on the other side receiving those emails and calls and stuff. You know what I kind of, the way I'm picturing it is like, have you ever bought anything off Facebook Marketplace?

Rick Smith (33:58.338)
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Rick Smith (34:05.34)
no, I've, I've used it, but I've never, don't think I've ever actually purchased anything.

Ryan O'Hara (34:08.803)
Yeah.

Yeah, you've been the seller, like selling something or you've just glanced at it. I've, this is crazy, but I've used Facebook marketplace, probably way more than the average person. bought a lot of my film equipment and Facebook marketplace. bought my last car off Facebook marketplace. Like I literally use it all the time. When you buy stuff on Facebook marketplace, you do all your qualification stuff back and forth through chat. You don't go in like,

Rick Smith (34:15.097)
Just glanced at it, you know? Yeah.

Rick Smith (34:26.754)
Okay.

Ryan O'Hara (34:41.004)
you don't go and like call the person up on the phone and do a demo and do a screen share and talk through that stuff. like my

Rick Smith (34:45.377)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (34:49.934)
Cars are big purchases and people do that all the time. That's one of the, that's like the second biggest thing that people buy. I think the first one on Facebook marketplace is actually apartments. Like people get apartments and rent and stuff in big cities. That's kind of their biggest market, I think for it. But they've basically taken this security risk that people used to run into using Craigslist and shifted it over to Facebook. Anyway, I think that's actually where a lot of B2B buying and selling is going to go. It's going to be more like, I'm going to go as a human, talk to another human, but

Rick Smith (34:58.648)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (35:19.948)
might not be over face to face. It might be over chat. And you might have a full conversation with somebody. And the whole reason that you want to get someone on a call is you have their attention for 30 minutes, but it's now touch and go people are info gathering. Like a lot of people don't go through your form and then attribute it back to the sales rep, they're going back and just seeing your brand to get online somewhere. They're going to see our podcast and then be like, I'm going to go check you out again.

Rick Smith (35:24.108)
Right.

Rick Smith (35:34.381)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (35:44.365)
Yeah, yeah, got you.

Ryan O'Hara (35:45.592)
So that's kind of where I feel like this asynchronous going back and forth thing over email and text and phone is probably going to go away and it's going to shift to being a designated place to actually do your buying.

Rick Smith (35:53.474)
Right.

Rick Smith (35:57.922)
Yeah, yeah, which is kind of what you've created with with pitchfire, right? I mean, it's basically a Yeah, yeah

Ryan O'Hara (36:01.25)
I'm sure I'm trying. I'm trying. We'll see right now. We've got prospecting cornered, but like getting to that full cycle sales philosophy is actually really hard to do. And you got, but my point being like,

The other part is it's also going to open up buying because right now when you prospect people, about 45 % of the people that get prospected are introverts and they never want to talk on his phone with a stranger there. It's uncomfortable for them, but they're okay. Breaking up with their boyfriends and girlfriends over text message. So like,

Rick Smith (36:22.647)
Right.

Yeah.

Rick Smith (36:31.267)
That is true. That is true.

Ryan O'Hara (36:33.538)
You gotta, so like there are a lot more comfortable hiding behind text and being thoughtful with what they're saying. And you can do all that stuff today. Is the hard part is getting the person to stay and keep talking to you and not drop off. That's what we're trying to fix with the monetization part with paid prospecting.

Rick Smith (36:37.731)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (36:48.631)
Yes, gotcha. How does that kind of, you what you're talking about AI, we're talking about, you know, what pitchfire is doing. You talk about three things that you can do as a seller besides cold emails. I kind of saw this kind of going through some of the information where, you know, just a little bit of research on you. Talk about those. I think one of them was zero click marketing, personal branding. Talk about those a bit.

Ryan O'Hara (37:16.15)
Yeah. So I've been like completely blown away with this talk that ran fish could did back last year called zero click marketing. And he does, the spark Taro people, Amanda and that whole team, like, they basically coined this phrase, but the concept is all the channels that we use to go and market to people today are don't reward you for clicks. LinkedIn. If you put a link in your post, they punish you. don't put it the newsfeed.

Rick Smith (37:41.303)
Okay.

Ryan O'Hara (37:41.674)
Instagram doesn't even let you post links unless you're doing a story. Facebook, it's the same thing. All these platforms will actually link tracking on email today. You got like, I read something you guys published about this, I think a couple of weeks ago about like, hey, you don't necessarily want to have link tracking on all the time on your emails, right? Like there's stuff that could impact that.

Rick Smith (38:01.943)
Okay.

Ryan O'Hara (38:05.526)
We're kind of moving toward this culture that people are hanging out in a certain place and that's where you need to reach them. Your inbox is one of them. Your phone's one of them, obviously, but...

in the future, you might not even need a website for your company. You might just have a LinkedIn page and that's what they're looking at. Or you might just have a Facebook page and that's where they're looking at all your assets and all the information about your site. And that's what's kind of crazy is all this attention is getting rewarded for it being in places that don't have clicks. And so if you're a seller, I've actually been thinking about what if I could cold email people and instead of asking for a meeting, just share information. Hey, bubba, I saw this.

Rick Smith (38:29.452)
Right.

Rick Smith (38:35.863)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (38:47.608)
and thought of you blah blah blah blah blah blah send don't all you're doing is get them get your brand in front of them and they'll eventually go to your website and click and convert and guess what when they go look at the CRM and see that you've been reaching out to them they'll assign it to you with the lead scoring and the lead routing and stuff like that's not a yeah

Rick Smith (38:48.855)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Rick Smith (39:05.699)
Yeah, it's kind of like the ping strategy, right? Just, I mean, pinging people on a consistent, I mean, but not just with, you know, not just with email, but it sounds like what you were talking about was actually reaching out to people with on a topic of interest, asking for nothing, just, hey, saw this, reminded me of you, you know, wanted to send it to you and not asking for anything in return.

Ryan O'Hara (39:30.38)
Yeah, what if you cold called someone and the goal of the call was to share information, not to actually get on a meeting with them?

Rick Smith (39:36.301)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (39:37.26)
What we're already training to do that. People go on LinkedIn or Tik TOK and spend hours scrolling through video. mean, I'm not a big active Tik TOK user. I, put Tik TOKs up, but I use them on my computer. like the, people that spend hours scrolling through social media and stuff, they're not asking for anything in those videos. They're just making content. You could do, what do we do the same thing one to one to all these people that you're trying to reach out to as a seller. And by the way, your platform is a great spot for that. Like you could do stuff like that. You could also do

on pitchfire if you want to give a really cool content piece that you think would convince someone like, maybe I'll go sign up for this, you could pay the money to go look at your content or piece that you'll get and get a response on there. But you don't have to ask for a meeting. So that's what I mean by the zero click marketing trend is like, maybe it's not a meeting, maybe it's just getting air coverage to get some content and get the person familiar with you so that you inception them into going to your website and signing up.

Rick Smith (40:30.883)
Does that does the zero click marketing approach, is that kind of dovetail into personal branding as a sales strategy for you?

Ryan O'Hara (40:39.982)
Absolutely. Yeah. So like with personal branding, the thing is if you're going to cold email and cold call people, you're more likely to hit hit back or hear back from somebody if they recognize your name. So like you got to put effort when you email someone on a phone, for example, the three things you see if you're using Gmail or Outlook is the subject of the email, who the email is from in the first sentence of your email. It's going to look at those three things. If they've never seen your name before, they're probably

Rick Smith (41:04.589)
Gotcha.

Ryan O'Hara (41:09.986)
less likely to swipe and go look at the email. But if I got an email, I have a new England if I got an email from like, I don't know, Tom Brady, when he was on the Patriots, and a rep named Tom Brady, you bet your ass I'm going to go open that email and the top Brady's running me an email. Don't use fake names. That's not what I'm saying here. I was just using example. But like, I see a lot of people's content online on LinkedIn, that puts stuff out there and they're just sharing nuggets. If I follow those people, and then they email me and I recognize their name, I'm

Rick Smith (41:23.107)
Yeah.

Thanks.

Rick Smith (41:32.141)
Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (41:39.878)
I could open the email. We actually did a test of this at lead IQ where I swapped my cold email Account with someone else and I wrote as them and they wrote as me and they had a higher of pirate writing on my account because I Like a little bit more of a brand online versus them. I don't remember what the number was. It was so long ago It was like 2018 we did it but like

Rick Smith (41:52.835)
Yeah.

Yeah. OK.

Ryan O'Hara (41:59.866)
So that's kind of part of why you want to build a personal brand. If you want to build a personal brand easily, you want to be known for one topic. Like don't go and like pick a hundred different things. Like I'm to be known for sales. Like that's too vague. It's better to pick one niche and hang in that lane with most of your posts.

Rick Smith (42:16.163)
Yeah, so just a small niche. Yeah, because otherwise you, I guess you kind of either you overwhelm people or they don't understand the message that you're trying to communicate. I was going to ask you about kind of online presence mistakes. I if you're trying to build this brand, then you're definitely doing that online, LinkedIn. What are some common mistakes you've seen sellers do when they're trying to build an online presence?

Ryan O'Hara (42:46.786)
Yeah, yeah, exactly. that you it's important for you to do. And the other cool part is, as you build a following, it allows you to enable using LinkedIn without using in-mail because in-mail, unfortunately, will go into a different inbox on LinkedIn versus a normal email. So like, if you like for me, I have 19,000 people I can prospect that follow me on LinkedIn that I there are first three connections and I don't have to like, worry about my message going into a second inbox somewhere.

Rick Smith (43:13.528)
Got it.

Ryan O'Hara (43:13.644)
So like that's kind of nice, like that's good for me that like I have access to those people and I don't have to worry about even having an email address.

Rick Smith (43:20.429)
Yeah, okay, gotcha, gotcha. Talk a little bit about these go-to-market camps. I saw that and kind of read a little bit about that. You are you still doing them? First, tell us kind of how it started, the whole, you know, s'mores and bunk bed thing. And I think that's really cool. And so tell us about what it is. Are you still doing them? And, you know, and I guess really about how you build that community.

Ryan O'Hara (43:35.136)
Yeah, yeah, yeah

Ryan O'Hara (43:46.764)
Yeah, so I got this idea in 2018. I was doing stuff with the AISP and I hung out with Bob Perkins one day and I was like, man, we should just do like, you guys do these retreats and stuff. I'd love to do a summer camp for sales. And so I had this idea and then the AISP got bought by another company and it got shelved and put on the back burner. And like, I just had it in a notebook for a long time. And so what we're doing this year is we're actually throwing a go-to-market summer camp.

Rick Smith (44:00.152)
Yes. Yes.

Rick Smith (44:10.147)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (44:16.514)
Okay.

Ryan O'Hara (44:16.698)
rented out a campground with beds and a bunk and we're, we're going to mainly focus on rev ops sales and demand, our marketing and demand gen for this one. But I'm, we're going to try and do this event. I don't know if it's going to work or not. It's crazy. It's hair brain, but like I'm renting out a campground and we're literally going to do like a whole workshop that's like wrapped around planning your go-to-market strategy for 2026 and

Goal is to, I'd love to have 100 people there, stay overnight. You get a bunk bed, you get friends, you get to share your problems and gripe, but you also get some solutions. And I'm gonna have camp counselors that are experts in all these different marketing fields. They're doing talks and workshops to help you with all the different channels that you use. Cold email is totally gonna be one of them too. Like we should definitely talk about that topic.

Rick Smith (44:44.696)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (44:49.473)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (44:58.829)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (45:02.775)
Yeah, gotcha. I think that's that. you've actually not. So have you not done one of these camps yet? This is the first.

Ryan O'Hara (45:09.398)
Yeah, this is yeah. Yeah, we're trying this first one. I've been trying to build in public. I'm going to be real with you. It's been hard to get attendees. It's actually been kind of hard, but like we've got like what I've been doing is when sponsors sponsor, they buy a set of tickets and then they go get their best customers there. So I'm trying to build this like super squad of people to come in and like do that. We haven't had problems getting sponsors, but like the normal organic stuff, I'm still like the hard part is I'm juggling pitchfire while doing this. So I'm like, I'm trying to like do all these different things.

Rick Smith (45:37.474)
Yes.

Ryan O'Hara (45:39.352)
But yeah, so we're trying to do the summer camp. It's first one I'm expecting it to be kind of a good learning experience and maybe we can do it if I can get it going. Maybe I'll do one or two of these things a year.

Rick Smith (45:49.665)
Yeah, no, think it's a really interesting idea. Love to find out. Once you do it, love to find out how it came off for you guys. that's

Ryan O'Hara (45:58.796)
Yeah, so the first one we're doing September 7th to 9th, if people are listening and you're interested, you can go to gotomarketcamp.com to sign up. It's like you get a bed, food, everything's included. It's like not a conference where like you have to go get a hotel or anything. Like we're literally staying at a summer camp.

Rick Smith (46:12.578)
Right. Yeah, no, that's cool. I love that. We're getting close to time and that went really fast, by the way. I didn't expect that. Let me ask this last question, right? So if you could kind of redesign the entire B2B prospecting motion from scratch, what would you eliminate out of that? And maybe what would you kind of double down on?

Ryan O'Hara (46:16.494)
Thanks.

Ryan O'Hara (46:40.118)
Wow. I love this question. Well, I mean, obviously I sort of was trying to do this with pitchfire. Like we're trying to make a highway for sales. It's like the attempt of it, like keep taking the back roads and using the channels that the people are hanging out in or make a place for like, it's understood the context is for buying and selling. I think the thing that I really don't like is tricks. And I, that's something that still hits me like, like

Rick Smith (46:48.333)
Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (47:08.162)
Double taps when you call a number then call it again and use a local dialer to trick someone into thinking like Like this is an emergency. I need to drop what I'm doing I don't like that because it starts the relationship off with tension with the person in the event that they do answer So that's I'd like to see some stuff like that go away I See like it's funny. I did a post about this on LinkedIn last week. I have like

Rick Smith (47:11.405)
Yeah.

Rick Smith (47:18.605)
Right.

Ryan O'Hara (47:37.454)
50 emails in my inbox that are fake forwards from founders like Michael, my colleague, Michael mentioned that you should talk to Ryan and I'll scroll down and it's clearly the SDR that wrote the email before. just like stuff like that. We should just be honest with each other and tell the truth and be like, like it's not, there's no crime in like.

Rick Smith (47:49.599)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Ryan O'Hara (47:58.858)
not knowing somebody, the thing that's beautiful about prospecting is it gives everybody a fair shake. Like if I didn't grow up in a community with like where I'm well connected, you have the capability to become well connected with a cold email, cold caller with paid prospecting potentially. Like that's what's nice about this whole game. And if you're going to do tricks, it gives sales a bad name.

Rick Smith (48:20.387)
Yeah, got it. So if we were so I always like to end with like a few key takeaways, right? So from your point of view, you know, the company you own, the company you founded, the work that you're doing, if somebody's listening to this or a sales leader, right? And they're like, man, I, this is a great conversation, really interesting. But summarize it down into three key takeaways, right? For further, for their for their outbound approach. So what would you tell them?

Ryan O'Hara (48:46.478)
The first thing is, when it comes down to philosophy, it's put your prospect first. Put the person you're trying to get in front of first. That's what pitchfire is all about. We're trying to help companies put their prospect first. If you really care about your prospect, pay them money to answer your prospecting instead of just doing the normal thing. That's kind of the first bucket. The second part is to put your prospect first. What you really need to do

Rick Smith (49:09.291)
Love that.

Ryan O'Hara (49:15.168)
is you need to build a relationship with them. And the best way to build a relationship with them is common interest, doing things that AI can't replicate. AI can't tell you what experience, they can't pretend that right. And experience about me going to Chicago and trying every deep dish pizza place in one week and having terrible acid reflex. If I'm prospecting someone in Chicago, like you're like, but I, I'm so like the big takeaway for that is find common interests with your prospect, share feelings, be vulnerable and they'll be vulnerable back.

with you. I think that's an important part of this.

And I think the third takeaway would be, be creative. Like we, every business is so stuffy and boring today. If you're bored doing normal prospecting, try and do something creative. lot of us that work in sales and do selling. Didn't grow up and say, boy, I want to work in sales. You, kind of accidentally fall into it. It's like an island of misfit toys. And we all have cool backgrounds and skills and stuff that we can do. If you play an instrument, play an instrument for your prospect. If you like to write, write something

for your prospect. If you want to write a haiku for a prospect, I'd love to see someone do a cold email campaign where they just use AI, write a bunch of haikus for prospects and then send that and see how the results would be. like do something cool and interesting and fun for that prospect so that it's not just dealing with the same exact template that everybody sends today.

Rick Smith (50:26.233)
Yeah, I love it.

Rick Smith (50:37.347)
Gotcha. So three things, put your prospect first. I love that because that's really about building trust, right? And then build the relationship. Again, kind of continuing down that building trust thing. Find the common interest, be vulnerable, build a relationship like you would with anybody else. And then finally be creative. So you kind of stand out a little bit. So those are great.

Ryan O'Hara (51:01.006)
Thanks.

Rick Smith (51:01.431)
Brian, we are at time, my man. I really do appreciate you being on today. Appreciate the conversation. I really like to know how your go-to-market camp comes out. you know, once you do it, mean, shoot it back to me. Ping me. Let me know how it goes. Maybe we'll get on and talk about it.

Ryan O'Hara (51:18.338)
Hell yeah, man, I appreciate it. Thank you very much. I appreciate you guys having me on YouTube.

Rick Smith (51:22.071)
Yeah, thanks Ryan. Have a good day.