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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:
Today we're joined by someone who's redefining modern sales excellence. Brian Lamana is a five-time President's Club winner who achieved that remarkable milestone by age 27. Currently a strategic mid-market account executive at Gong as the founder of Closed One and Freedom of the highly anticipated 2025 outbound Playbook. He's on a mission to transform how sales professionals approach pipeline Jen in an AI driven role. Brian, welcome to the show. I am excited to have you and I'm looking forward to talking about how we generate pipeline in 2025.
Brian LaManna:
Thanks, Andrew. I'm pumped to be here.
Andrew McGuire:
You're here because, or I put together a breakdown of your entire LinkedIn journey, which is completely transformed who you are and where you are today, and I was hoping to just start there and learn a little bit more about how that's impacted your ability to be at those crazy percentages year over year and how that impacted you at Go.
Brian LaManna:
Yeah, it started with just some genuine curiosity. It was about two and a half years ago, actually in June of 2022, I'd been at Gong for about a year. I'd actually seen some folks at my company that were already posting on LinkedIn. I think that helped give me the courage too. I saw another A EX, Sarah Brazier, our CEO Meet benoff, some others as well. And I'd always found it interesting and I always loved content they would share. And I got the idea just thinking like, Hey, I'm learning really valuable lessons in my role every single day. Things that are going well, things that are not going well, new strategies I'm trying. And I was like, what if I just started sharing my journey almost in a public facing journal type of way of just writing out what was going well and what wasn't and all the stories along the way.
So I began in June of 2022. I just started really small with one post a week, then I ramped up to two posts a week, then three posts a week. And it's really taken off since then. But I think it kind of fits with everything I tried to do in sales in general is don't try to perfect things out of the gate, just get started with it. If it interests you, if you learn something, put it into practice the next day and then slowly you can kind of iterate over time. And the worst thing that could come from that is maybe a month after I decided not to post anymore and could always stop. But it really took off since, and it's been an awesome part of my journey at Gong and creating my own business with Closed one as well.
Andrew McGuire:
Yeah, and one of the things I'm looking at the Breakdown, the newsletter that put together for you, and one of the takeaways was building in public works magically, right? And that is one of the things that you've been doing and sharing what works, what doesn't, which has then morphed into Closed One and this new amazing outbound playbook. And I have had quite a few people on the show who have talked about different ways of generating pipeline. And when I look and read your playbook, it really sings to me because there's people out there that now have the AI tools to send millions of messages and burn through your tam, basically sending generic, whether it's through one of the existing platforms or clay, there's a lot of uncontrolled chaos. But the opposite is actually something that I've been leaning into is how do use you lower volume, higher quality outreach, which obviously limits the number of accounts, but talk to me a little bit about your thinking around this topic and then we'll get into some examples.
Brian LaManna:
Yeah, I'll start with the results first. Each year at Gong I've been in the bottom 10 percentile in terms of total number of activities and I've been in the top 10 percentile in terms of pipeline generated and most importantly, qualified pipeline. And Andrew, it's exactly to your point. Here's my strategy. As I look at an account and an individual, I desperately look for a way to not just enroll them into a long automated sequence. To me, one highly personalized touch is always greater than a 22 step, 35 day automated sequence that typically ends in unsubscribe or some mean message back. And I think a lot of the root cause behind what is broken in the system as what you mentioned, we have these technologies that can scale out what we're doing in terms of spraying and praying and batch and blasting, whatever term you want to leverage.
But at the end of the day, think about the individual you're selling to or think about the individual at your company. Is your CRO or VP of sales or whatever persona you sell to, are they going to respond to a fully automated can message, or are they more likely to respond if a gift ends up on their doorstep or somebody in their network sends them off a message about you all? So I have a checklist that I go through that for a while is really just mental. When I would look through their LinkedIn profile and what I did is I distilled that into a playbook of little triggers that I look for instead of putting somebody in a sequence first and foremost, and putting a little bit more effort upfront that I know is going to yield a much larger result in terms of hopefully I'm responding and me booking a meeting as well.
Andrew McGuire:
So one of the things that I did while we were at duo security was helping the sales development team figure out exactly what you're talking about. What is that checklist or what are those unscalable things? Duo security was helping organizations with cybersecurity issues. Whenever there's a breach, all these security software companies just email everybody, we can help you. So we took the opposite approach, which was figuring out where their security team was physically located and then we would ship pizza. So we would have the pizza company deliver pizza and then write with on a piece of paper with a sharpie from duo security for your team. And then the email was just, did you get the pizza? And it was instant delivery because it's pizza and depending on where they are, the Eddie Bauer team security team, Eddie Bauer's based in Seattle, the security team's in Chicago. So we got really creative with sending the Illuminati's pizza. It was just doing stuff like that. And I think I'd love to have you dig into your example here that you have in the playbook and tell us a little bit more about what is your version of that, that obviously we can't send pizza to everybody. I mean we could, but it'd be pretty expensive.
Brian LaManna:
Yeah, I think it boils down to why that pizza example works so well is the reason it works is that it's not scalable. And of the 100 sellers that are targeting that brand that you're reaching out to, nobody else is doing that. And because there's so much noise in today's prospecting environment, that's the new number one challenge in my opinion in 2025, is simply breaking through the noise. I also think it's an opportunity because it's easier than ever to be in that top 1% of outreach because candidly, the bar is really freaking low and a lot of it sucks. I've seen it firsthand from people trying to prospect an account executive for some reason over at Gong and myself. So a couple of the triggers I look for, number one in terms of this is a stack rank, I always look for mutual connections first.
If I'm prospecting Andrew and somebody else in my network is connected to him or somebody at my company, I immediately fire them off a super quick message like, Hey, any chance Andrew Top prospect trying to break through the noise? If they say yes, even if they barely know them, awesome, have them shoot off a note. You can draft it up for them. Be super easy to work with a two-on-one like LinkedIn DM or email. It's going to have a way higher chance of responding, especially if that person knows Andrew pretty well and you feel a little bit more compelled to respond. I'll also look through things like previous users. I'll look for really unique details like, Hey, have they built a side business? Have they ever authored a book? There's a lot of cool things I can do from that realm. And then I also will look for any gifting type of opportunity where maybe off of that same vein I think of something really personalized that I can send them that I know will make them feel compelled to at least respond to an email after it arrives.
Andrew McGuire:
Got it. Yeah. I used to use Sales Navigator to do the keyword search for golf, or in an example that we could talk through is just the finding a story about a sport that they might like and being able to ship it to 'em. Can you talk to us a little bit about that example and how you went about doing it?
Brian LaManna:
Yeah. I'll share one of the examples in my playbook around ping pong ball. So I had an account that I got assigned in February, 2024. And one of the first things I noticed just doing from my account research, again, not just diving in saying, Hey, I see CRO, let's put them into a sequence. I noticed that they were using one of our biggest competitors and they were up around October-ish timeframe. So from there, my first goal is actually to connect with an account executive first at the company. So I messaged a bunch of different AEs and SDRs offer to basically buy them coffee and exchange for basically picking their brain for 15, 20 minutes, sharing my perspective around where Gong might be able to help and learning a little bit about their company. So that was step one, identify basically a couple different bullet points that's really unique and shows I've done my homework.
The second thing I did was I started researching that CRO from an online article. When he joined two years ago, it announced that he was starting and that he actually met the founder playing ping pong. So I was like, Hey, that's really unique. Maybe I can do something with that. So next, what I did is I actually went to Etsy and I simply just put their company logo on three ping pong balls that cost like $12 and I shipped it directly to his house. I found it via white pages, but I've also sent it to a company office before that can work just as well. And then once the ping pong balls arrived, I basically entered with this email around all of my research and talking with members of their team. And here's exactly my perspective on where Gong can add value in relation to his initiatives for the end of 2024. Fast forward, he was blown away that it was actually me that did all that research, put it together, took a meeting, and three months later it was closed one and we ripped out our biggest competitor.
Andrew McGuire:
That's amazing. And it just goes to show that doing the unscalable things is what needs to happen in 2025. And I know we're getting close to time here trying to keep these nice and tight. And the last question I always ask us is, what's the number one belief about pipeline generation in 2025? The market has wrong? And I feel like we've already answered that. It is doing the unscalable things, and if you want to expand on it, you can, but otherwise we can end it there, Brian, because you've given us a lot to chew on.
Brian LaManna:
Yeah, I would just double back down on that, that outbound is not just a numbers game. I think a lot of leaders tell us that, and they'll look at the dashboards and activity metrics, but it is not a numbers game. The unscalable methods truly do work and doing what 99% of other sellers are unwilling to do in terms of the research upfront, the creativity, that's what's going to help you win in 2025 and beyond.
Andrew McGuire:
Well, thank you for being here, Brian, and where can everybody find you? I assume if they're watching this, they already know, but where do you want us to go?
Brian LaManna:
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn. I can search Brian Lamana. You can also find me on my website@closedone.xyz.
Andrew McGuire:
Alright, thank you Brian. We'll see everybody in the next one.