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Small bites of insight to unlock your pipeline strategy
Where GTM Leaders share their secret ingredients for modern pipeline generation—a flavor for every diet.
Andrew McGuire:
Our guest today is redefining how we think about go-to-market strategy. Stefan uin, a former Microsoft managing director turned go to network enthusiast has managed billion dollar portfolios and LED teams of 450 people, a top ranked social seller on LinkedIn and sought after advisor. Stefan brings a fresh perspective on turning networks into real business value. Get ready for some game changing network insights as we welcome Stefan Umin to the show. Guest today is just the perfect person. So Stefan, welcome to the show. I
Stephen Oommen:
Appreciate it. I'm glad we're starting off on this note. It'll be a little bit provocative or hilarious, but for those listening, the way you pronounce my name is actually Stephen and everybody, and so I mess with Andrew on purpose. So it was a setup to make sure everybody we could have this conversation. So I'm going to just let people know the background. So it's actually Stephen Umin, but
Andrew McGuire:
Stephen, most
Stephen Oommen:
People don't pronounce it that way. They pronounce it with a V. So there's your little interesting fact of the day.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. Well, welcome to the show. And I always ask people how to pronounce their name and I'm terrible with names, so I ask multiple times and then I get it wrong. And somehow there's people that just, they remember everyone's names and that's part of networking and I know there's some politicians that can't remember if I met you or not. So always go up to you and it's good to see you is the line because you're not sure if you met them before. And it's interesting for me, that's the way that I've been handling things. So if I come up to you and say, it's good to see you, I don't remember if we've met before.
Stephen Oommen:
That's transparent and that is one of the biggest keys to networking is just being honest, walking up to someone and saying, Hey, I am literally blanking out right now and I can't place your name for the life of me. Please forgive me. I actually say that all the time because sometimes I'm good at remembering, sometimes I'm not. So I'm glad that you're being transparent and honest.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah. Well the objective of today was to talk about exactly that you are the go-to network enthusiast. I have been leaning into what Mark Cassel Glow is doing around the great ignore and the opposite of what I'm hearing Adam Robinson doing around sending millions of messages to people to try and capture a small percentage and really leaning into networking and human relationships as more noise continues to be created. And I love to just start with getting your perspective on what it really means to you so we can figure out where to take the conversation because it's just getting noisier and noisier
Stephen Oommen:
And that right there is the foundational principle of why it's so important, but not necessarily the foundation. So here's what I mean by that. This is what it means to me with the way the go to market, the world has been turned on its head the last decade, right? You see a lot of outbound, you see a lot of noise, you see a lot of quantity over quality. Well, the truth of the matter is, the reason I say it's not the foundation is simply because the foundation for me is I genuinely want or have the intention to go deep with almost everyone that I meet. That is not mathematically possible though, but when you have that intention and you show up that way, people know that you care. But it is the truth. Can every single person a mile deep? Probably not, but people can smell your intention from a mile away. So the foundation is do you generally want to know someone else and do you generally value another human being? And when you do, I think it changes the way that you show up and it honestly changes the world.
Andrew McGuire:
So how do you internalize that and think about that because it is impossible to know everybody a mile deep. And how do you then make a decision on who you're going to spend the time with to go that extra mile with? Is that just something you keep in your mind? Do you have a notebook full of the people? How do you do that?
Stephen Oommen:
You're spot on. So there's a couple things is I don't know and that's why I've tailored or coined this term no agenda meetings. And you'll see me write a lot about those on LinkedIn where my goal is if I meet you, there's no agenda, there's no barrier because barriers and focus end up actually reducing creativity. But what happens is the conversation will naturally lead itself to a course where we both say, Hey, I can help you or you can help me, or we can't. And it's when you take off the barriers that that happens in terms of how I structure it or how I track this, I actually finally created a Google doc and I just know
Andrew McGuire:
That
Stephen Oommen:
Anyone new, I put a note there of what they're looking for, anything. So it stays top of mind. I also make sure I get people's cell numbers, I put a little note in there, I make sure I get their birth dates, just something of that nature. More times than not sometimes I forget. But as a general rule, there's those three things that I do. And the third one is actually try to connect on LinkedIn or just have some sort of social media presence. But if I do those three things, typically the course of nature runs itself for me so I don't actually have to think about it.
Andrew McGuire:
So before we hit record, I was walking you through an agenda. Feels like we just need to throw that away because I'm putting a podcast together. You inherently, at least I feel like maybe this is an opportunity for you to have the no Agenda podcast, but help me with going the direction of talking about these relationships and whether or not we should just throw out our agenda and talk about something totally different or if we should stay on track here.
Stephen Oommen:
It's funny because you are spot on. The best podcast I've ever done have just been conversations. And it also depends on the guest. And this is the thing about networking is remember if I were to say this is what we want to throw, this is just me. If I were to throw GTM on its head and say everyone's going to do this wrong this year, here's what it boils down to. There's a couple basic premises or things that I believe
Number one is cold outbound doesn't come first. It comes last because who in their right mind would choose to cold call someone instead of trying to get a warm intro? Just logically it doesn't make sense, right? So I think that's something that people fundamentally get wrong, but when I think about networking specifically, it's not about me or if I'm talking or consulting or coaching someone, I'll say it's not about you, it's about the other person. So just like in this no Agenda podcast, if you want to throw it out, some people need that structure because that's who they are and they're not easily adaptable to speaking on the spot. That's fine. We all have values and different ways and strengths that we do things. For me, I have just found that having no agenda sometimes is helpful for my creativity, but there are other podcasts where that creativity would not make sense. We would go off in tangents all
Andrew McGuire:
Over. Well, part of me wants to say let's just throw it out and start talking about basketball. But the point of this is supposed to be short snippets and have an agenda, but part of me is now thinking, well, maybe I need to rethink this whole podcast strategy. But so you're right though, I'm going to agree with you that cold outbound should be last. I see people blasting and burning their tam and just sending messages out and obviously you're not going to come back with a really articulated message six months later after you realize you should never have done that because they're going to remember that first impression because that's another thing. The first time we met was you having an no agenda and coming in with what's happening and it was great. The first impression we're still talking to each other and building a relationship. And I think that for me is also really important to keep in the context of building pipeline is what's the first impression, whether that's a post on LinkedIn, an email, a cold call gone wrong or whatever the thing is, which I know you have a framework of talking about how to maintain those relationships, but to me there is a key point which is that first impression that starts at all.
Stephen Oommen:
Well, here's the thing about first impressions. This is why the maintenance is so important. If you think about how to build a valuable network, I write about this all the time on LinkedIn, there's three components, network creation, network activation, network maintenance, network creation. Obviously it's easy to understand what that means. Self-explanatory network activation is how do you actually get them to act on your behalf, sends you referrals or reach out to them and they'll take your call so you can actually do business together or whatever it is, network maintenance. But when you have such a vast network, how do you continue to maintain? But what I always write about is the secret is actually the maintenance because most people don't realize every human being has a network. If you are born, you at least have a network when you graduate, you have your classmates, you have sometimes family. And so if you don't understand how to maintain what you have, how do you intend to create and grow? And so that's the key right there is just maintain what you have and here's where that first impression comes if someone introduces you. So because I knew you,
I met Ratchet and I really got turned on him from centralized because I saw you guys connecting online and that's what allowed me to reach out because I knew you, there was automatic credibility when I reached out to Ratchet just to get to know him. I liked what he was doing and I could give you story after story after story. And so that first impression when tied to somebody else's trust, that's the golden networking and most don't know how to do that effectively.
Andrew McGuire:
Okay, so if I'm going to summarize what you just said, the key to networking is network maintenance, and I don't know if leverage is the right word, but leveraging someone else's trust to build a new relationship and extend your network and your web further.
Stephen Oommen:
It's a never ending cycle, but most people think network creation, and I even write it that way just to be a little bit facetious with network creation. But the truth of the matter is it actually starts with network maintenance that leads to more creation, that leads to activation, which leads to more maintenance, which leads to creation and so forth. You can see that cycle that continues to grow.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, I appreciate you walking us through it in that way, and I think we could have a whole other session just on network maintenance. It sounds like that is part of a keynote, I'm sure. And as we wrap this up, I always ask, I guess the question of what's the number one, what's the number one belief about pipeline generation in 2025 that you think the market has completely wrong? And I think you've already answered this cold outbound, but help me with how you feel like companies can, what they should be thinking about and how to do it differently to unlock their next big opportunity.
Stephen Oommen:
Yeah, I think you install a change in culture, which is what exactly is that I do for companies and teams, and it's simply this. It's the mic drop moment of asking an executive, when was the last time you gave a sales meeting off of a cold email or a cold call to you, right? Oh, that's interesting. You haven't in forever. You can't remember that. Then why are you having your sales team do the same thing? If every person in a company becomes a referer, a warm referral partner, that's going to be the company that wins in 2025.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, thank you for being here. Is there anything you want to leave the audience with,
Stephen Oommen:
Man, Andrew, I'll leave this with the audience. Listen to Andrew. He knows what he's talking about. I know he did not pay me to say this, but I watch his stuff. We are friends now, but I will tell you he understands pipeline strategy. So tune in, refer more people to this podcast and make sure you get ahold of Andrew when this is done. He knows his stuff.
Andrew McGuire:
Alright, well thank you sir. I appreciate that. Network maintenance at its best and we'll see you on the next one.