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Proof is what GTM leaders need to make fast and furious decisions that keep their businesses alive and thriving.
The Proof Point hosts conversations anchored in the reality of day-to-day life as a revenue leader. No algorithm-hacking, talk-track headlining buzz statements around here. We’re hosting conversations between GTM leaders so we can gather the facts and provide you with the tactics and tools you need to bulletproof your strategy.
Join host Mark Huber every other week as he invites the best GTM leaders into the conversation.
Kyle Coleman [00:00:00]:
The best sales reps get really entrenched in what the process is of doing the work or creating the outcomes that their technology supports. And so we can just keep using Mutiny as an example. So they spent a ton of time with our team and with our web agency to understand how are we thinking about personalization and experimentation. And then they created the roadmap for us, which was here is what you need to do to make this deployment successful and effective.
Mark Huber [00:00:28]:
Here's what Go to Market Teams are Missing Proof. That's what I think of every morning when I fire up LinkedIn and scroll through boring manifestos and endless lukewarm takes. Opinions are cheap and proof is gold. I'm Mark Huber and this is the Proof Point, a show from user Evidence that helps go to market teams, find ideas, get frameworks, and swap tactics. Each episode includes an unfiltered discussion with the biggest names in B2B SaaS to help find the proof points that I'm in search of. You'll learn from sales, marketing and customer success leaders in the trenches where I ask them seriously, what actually works for you. One of our guests actually told me this felt like we were having drinks at a bar and talking about work without all the bs. And that pretty much sums it up on why I'm so excited for this new show.
Mark Huber [00:01:13]:
Join us every other week for new episodes. Hot takes always welcome.
Mark Huber [00:01:19]:
SDRs are useless. SDRs don't know how to write their own emails. Cold calling is dead. Every time I fire up LinkedIn, I see @ least one of those takes every single day and I don't know what's real from what's not. So I sat down with Kyle Coleman, the CMO of Copy AI, at Exit 5's Drive event, and Kyle has a front row seat leading marketing for an AI company in B2B and he grew up as an SDR. Kyle admits at our core we have a huge SDR problem industry wide, and he shared some really honest thoughts about how we can fix this issue at its core. And spoiler alert, it's not replacing SDRs with AI spam cannons. This was a fun one.
Mark Huber [00:02:00]:
You started to react to the report, which we'll talk about in a bit, and I stopped you because it was an electric reaction. I just wanted to button that energy up and save it for later. All right, you're already prepped, so give me the quick rundown on Copy AI. Just because I followed you from afar and I feel like I know what it does, but you obviously know much better than I do.
Kyle Coleman [00:02:20]:
Yeah, so Copy AI is a go to market AI platform that allows any member of the go to market team, marketing, sales, sdr, operations, finance, customer success, whatever, to basically open up your playbook to any page and codify that play. Using AI without having to be an AI expert, and that's the rub, and that's where most people typically go wrong, is like, manipulating these LLMs is hard. And so defer the AI expertise to us and our platform, you retain your domain expertise and then make sure that your best practices are actually getting extended across your company. That is the value of our platform.
Mark Huber [00:02:56]:
So were you a big believer in AI before you joined Copy AI?
Kyle Coleman [00:03:00]:
Well, yeah. I mean, yes and no. I knew it was going to be a thing. I've been at Copy AI since January, so I'm not like, you know, I wasn't in this in 2020, but I sort of lost faith in the ChatGPT experience because I didn't know how to use it. And I went to ChatGPT and you see the blinking cursor and you're like, write me a blog post. And the blog post sucks. And you're like, ah, AI. Yes.
Kyle Coleman [00:03:23]:
So once I actually saw Copy AI and saw like that codification of a process where a content marketing person can go in and say, I've been doing SEO for a long time. Here is my process for writing a really solid SEO piece. Here's the research I do, here's the brainstorming of the people also ask questions. Here's the other keywords I hit. Here's the pillar post outline that I do. Yeah, on and on and on and on. And they can codify that. And now we inside Copy AI, we publish three blog posts a day because we have all of the processes codified.
Kyle Coleman [00:03:54]:
And so it's that type of thing that like really made me a believer in AI was like, oh, just like, if you were building a website right now, would you go learn HTML? No, of course not. No.
Mark Huber [00:04:04]:
God, no.
Kyle Coleman [00:04:05]:
Yeah, that'd be crazy. It would actually be irresponsible for you to think that that's how you have to go build a website. And AI is moving much faster than HTML, so you don't need to be an AI expert to get value out of AI. And once I actually saw that and it clicked for me, I was like, this is the future. This is how every Go to Market team is going to.
Mark Huber [00:04:23]:
So how do you get your audience to have that same kind of click moment? Because many of them are like me, where you use ChatGPT a couple times and you're just, I don't get it, I don't know how to use this.
Kyle Coleman [00:04:33]:
Yeah. So we show them basically in real time how to build what we call a workflow. And a workflow is basically a series of actions. And that action could be a prompt that you send to the LLM, or it could be an API integration with another system or something like that. We show them how easy it is to build a workflow and then to run that workflow. So given a keyword and given a transcript from my podcast or something like that turned it into a long form blog post. Boom, boom, boom. Ten steps of the workflow and you have everything you need.
Kyle Coleman [00:05:03]:
So every podcast episode you do now can become long form in the snap of the fingers. And once they see it and they're like, oh, that was easy, that's the light bulb moment, that's the aha moment. And then they start asking, well, can I do this? And what if we did that? Like, yes, we can do that, yes we can do that. And then basically just take down those use cases on the value journey.
Mark Huber [00:05:22]:
So I got to think that the companies that you're selling into expect to see some sort of business case around this or like, how do you quantify it? So without giving away the secret sauce, like, how do you do that and sell it to companies?
Kyle Coleman [00:05:33]:
The big problem that we're solving, Mark, is this problem of go to market bloat. These teams over the last few years in particular, so many tools brought on, so many specialists are spending so much money and it's yielding pretty disastrous results a lot of the time. And so the business case is relatively simple. It's like you're spending or you have this cabal of freelancers and writers and agencies and all these people that you're spending five, sometimes six figures a month on all of these external, like my mind is blood. I know six figures is crazy, but it's not uncommon to hear of a marketing team, you know, mid sized marketing team that's spending 25k a month on just outsourcing this kind of frankly like run rate content creation. What if you took the time to codify your process once, run it over and over again, and now you're getting four times the output for a quarter of the cost. It's a no brainer. And so we have those types of the cost out conversation happens a lot.
Kyle Coleman [00:06:28]:
But there's also the productivity stuff that ends up happening, especially with sales teams.
Mark Huber [00:06:32]:
So talk about that. So how do you position that, you.
Kyle Coleman [00:06:34]:
Know, SDRs are a prime example of this. They, and I'm the biggest SDR I know.
Mark Huber [00:06:39]:
That's why I asked.
Kyle Coleman [00:06:40]:
And I'm by no means saying that companies don't need SDRs. I think that the role is evolving in a really useful way. The problem and why so many folks have lost faith in the SDR model is because they've trained SDRS to do the wrong thing. They've trained them to do research that nobody ever ends up really ever using or looking at. And so the skill gap ends up being created between what an SDR is trained to do and what they need to do to be an effective sales or marketing person. There's a huge gap that exists there. So what if we, instead of having humans do all this research, let's outsource that to AI. And now the SDR is trained on how to execute on that research, and that closes the skill gap.
Kyle Coleman [00:07:17]:
So now you have a team of people that are much more efficient, much more productive, like generating two to three times as much pipeline per rep in, like, the first 90 days of deployment. It's crazy, insane. And then you're actually building a talent bench for whatever comes next in their career because they're doing things that are much more closely related to the domain they want to move into. And so that's a business case that we end up making. It's productivity, it's about pathing, it's about efficiency. It's everything under the sun.
Mark Huber [00:07:41]:
All right, so we'll get back to the good stuff in a second. This is probably going to be more funny than good. Maybe both. Craziest SDR memory that you have because you grew up as an sdr.
Kyle Coleman [00:07:50]:
I did, yeah.
Mark Huber [00:07:51]:
Craziest memory that is appropriate, worth sharing because I've seen responses and people just get put on blast and they do not deserve it.
Kyle Coleman [00:07:59]:
I've made every single mistake you could possibly make. I was the first SDR at a company. We were six people when I joined. I ended up interviewing the president of the company who came and joined like three or four months after me. And one of his first things was the old school way of doing lead gen and buying lists and everything. So he was like, we're going to spend $20,000 on this list of 6,000 people that are squarely in our ICP. And I was like, awesome. 6,000 leads.
Kyle Coleman [00:08:22]:
Wonderful. And so we spent $20,000. We had 2 million in the bank, so that's not nothing. And we spent a lot of money to get a curated list. And I thought I was the hot Can I swear? Hot shit. Doing all the marketing automation, weep that out and trying to get it all figured out. And I end up sending them all a blank email. And then the next email on it called them all Jim.
Kyle Coleman [00:08:44]:
And then the third email was blank again. So I was like, I had to go back to my president and be like, so Frank, remember that $20,000 we spent? Here's the thing. Totally messed that up. So that was on me. And it's so easy to make those mistakes. But then the thing that sticks in my mind the most and why maybe I have so much empathy for SDRs.
Mark Huber [00:09:02]:
Is because it's the hardest job in B2B SaaS.
Kyle Coleman [00:09:04]:
It's very hard. I hesitate to say anything is the hardest because, like, everybody has their cross to bear and all the rest, but it's certainly the one that gets beat up on them. Yes, no doubt about that. To that end, I was reaching out to this guy and selling to a technical data audience, not always the most friendly people in the world, and sent him, like, researched him, was following him for a couple weeks doing all the social selling stuff and write a really thoughtful note. And his response to me was five words. Go die in a fire. I was like, great, all right, so you're not going to be a guy.
Mark Huber [00:09:36]:
God, I've never heard anyone respond like that.
Kyle Coleman [00:09:39]:
It was amazing.
Mark Huber [00:09:40]:
Oh, my God. So the SDR kind of model and just that role is changing more than it probably ever has before. Where do you see it going? I see you posting all the time about AI SDRs and whatnot. Give me your little crystal ball.
Kyle Coleman [00:09:56]:
Yeah. So there is not a buyer in the world that is asking for the buying process to be more robotic. There's not a single one.
Mark Huber [00:10:04]:
We're clipping that.
Kyle Coleman [00:10:05]:
And the problem is that a lot of over the years and even now to today, sales teams are optimizing for how they want to sell instead of for how buyers want to buy. And that is forcing them to do things that are. They're trying to find silver bullets that are never going to work. There is no silver bullet. If there was a silver bullet, we would all be doing it and then it would no longer be like, it doesn't make any sense. And so the AI SDRs of the world are just introducing more roboticism into the selling process. Why? It doesn't make any sense. It's not what buyers want.
Kyle Coleman [00:10:38]:
It's not going to work. And the reason that this is such a problem is because these AI SDRs, they have reduced the SDR role to sending Emails and booking meetings. And that is not what the SDR role is. It never has been. Unfortunately, it kind of became that with the rise of sales, engagement, technology and all the rest. It just became easy to smash the send button. But that's not what's going to sustain in the so the evolution of the rule do not outsource your strategy to AI. We want to codify strategies as best as we can and try and outsource a lot of the execution of those strategies to AI, but always have human like QA human on the back end.
Kyle Coleman [00:11:14]:
So the way I think about it is like you've got a human that defines the strategy or group of humans. You outsource as much as you can to save time and efficiency, productivity, all the rest. And then there's human QA on the back end. So it's like this little AI sandwich with humans on both sides. Delicious.
Mark Huber [00:11:27]:
We're going to have a great graphic for that.
Kyle Coleman [00:11:30]:
And that's what, what the SDR role is becoming. It's more strategic, it's much more thoughtful, it's much more creative because you have more time to be those three things. Strategic, thoughtful, creative. And the mistake I think that a lot of people will make is say, oh great, our SDRs don't need to spend two hours building an account plan. They can send more emails. No, no, that's not the goal here. The goal is to deliver information about how can we position our product or solution or whatever in a way that connects the dots. So what matters to an account, what matters to a person? And how can a human deliver that human touch that shows that person that we understand who they are and that's the role of the sdr.
Kyle Coleman [00:12:05]:
Now if that's done well, a couple of things are going to happen. One, that skill gap that we talked about is going to start to close because the SDR rule is going to actually put the S back in sdr, which is sales. There's going to be more sales acumen and not just hitting send. So that's one really important outcome. And then the second outcome that I hope for is if we have more sales acumen from an SDR standpoint and your company has some sort of down market presence, why not give more of those run rate deals to an SDR and have a truer inside sales? So now, yes, generate pipeline for the enterprise team, but maybe be full cycle for the inside team. And that's how we're architecting our team. At Copy AI, we have eight enterprise reps. They are focused on enterprise sized Companies, we have an SDR that's supporting them and generating pipeline, but he's also going to run the small deals so that next time our VP of sales needs to hire an enterprise rep.
Kyle Coleman [00:12:55]:
Yep. Farm from within.
Mark Huber [00:12:56]:
You already know where to look. So we'll get into some more of the AI questions here in a bit. But you mentioned, without looking at that, what buyers want. Like, what do your buyers want right now and how are you selling in a way that gives your buyers what they want.
Kyle Coleman [00:13:08]:
They want to be understood and they want at least for our buyers. And maybe this is more specific to me, but I think I'll talk more about this level.
Mark Huber [00:13:15]:
Who is your buyer at the end of the day?
Kyle Coleman [00:13:17]:
Yeah. So chief revenue officers, Chief Marketing Officers, CEOs, CFO is like this C suite is making this investment in this go to market AI platform because we're telling a broader story. We're not selling a single point solution because we don't want people to get into this point solution hell that they're in right now with lasers.
Mark Huber [00:13:31]:
We're trying to get out of it. We're all trying to get out of it.
Kyle Coleman [00:13:33]:
This is a big problem. The go to market bloat that I mentioned is you have all these technologies. We have this one product that dots I's and crosses T's. And you're like, why? This is crazy. We have technology to manage all of our SaaS. Technology.
Mark Huber [00:13:45]:
Where do we go wrong?
Kyle Coleman [00:13:46]:
This is crazy. So we're trying to avoid that. And therefore we sell to the executive team. They're the buyers. And what they want is they want to buy technology and work with people that understand their strategic initiatives and the techniques to support those strategic initiatives. So we are not selling an AI technology that helps you write better blog posts. That's not what we're doing. We're selling technology that helps you actually manage your customer acquisition cost and run a sustainable business.
Kyle Coleman [00:14:13]:
It's totally different conversation. And so now we can understand, like, what are your hiring goals, what are your expansion goals, what products are you launching? And here's how we can support all those different things. And that's the type of positioning that is really hard to do. It takes finesse. It takes deep understanding. It's hard to connect those dots between a value prop you might see on our website and those initiatives that those companies are running. But that's the human element and that's what great sales does. So that's how we're trying to.
Kyle Coleman [00:14:39]:
And that's what buyers want. They want somebody who understands what they're trying to make happen and shows them that they can help make that happen. And that's what sales has always been. But it's very easy to lose sight of and it's very hard to do.
Mark Huber [00:14:51]:
So AI is obviously moving faster than probably everything that we've ever dealt with in the past. How are you keeping up from like a competitive intel perspective? Like what are you looking for in the market? How do you enable your sales team?
Kyle Coleman [00:15:02]:
Yeah, it's a really good question and it's very easy to get distracted. Like this point solution pops up over here and now with this competitor was mentioned on this deal, like let's overreact to that. So first and foremost we have a workflow. We created a workflow that basically says what does the best competitive intelligence person do when they're researching an account and building a battle card? And so now anytime a rep needs something, they just put in the URL of that company and boom, they get a battle card 30 seconds later. It's like, it's insane. Yeah, that's first of all. But probably a more important answer is like this comes back to positioning and we are a go to market AI platform and so basically any time we come across a competitor, like they're great for this and if all you want to do is lead enrichment, like great. But if you really want a truer systematic approach to infusing AI across your entire go to market engineering, you need to talk to us.
Kyle Coleman [00:15:50]:
And 10 times out of 10 people are like, oh yeah, we don't just want lead enrichment, we also want to power our outbound engine. We want to do real account based marketing and we want to do deal coaching and we want AI forecasting. We're like, great, let's figure out the right sequence to do those in and we'll go take those down one at a time.
Mark Huber [00:16:05]:
You mentioned real ABM and I'm laughing because I used to work at an advertising company in the past and swapped.
Kyle Coleman [00:16:10]:
Out logos, called it abm.
Mark Huber [00:16:12]:
Well, just like this whole notion of, and this is no knock on copy AI or where I came from, you don't always need an ABM platform to do ABM Like I'm doing ABM here at this event without a platform and without a budget like that. So I just laugh because people assume that you need to spend well into the six figures to light up display ads to target accounts that people are probably not even going to look at or click on.
Kyle Coleman [00:16:32]:
People are just obsessed with finding things that no one will ever click on. Finding things that scale yeah, and that's like, you can't do people say that they're doing ABM to 10,000 accounts.
Mark Huber [00:16:42]:
They're like, no, no, you're advertising. You're picking filters in LinkedIn and you're advertising to 10,000 accounts. That's not ABM.
Kyle Coleman [00:16:51]:
Right.
Mark Huber [00:16:51]:
I feel like we could talk about this for a while. All right. You mentioned the word overreaction, and when we started rolling, you kind of overreacted once you saw one of the findings in here. So we just released our first original research report the other day, and I wanted to stop that overreaction so we could actually catch it on camera right now. So show us what you saw and then why you kind of freaked out.
Kyle Coleman [00:17:14]:
Yeah. There's no page number. So it's this page of what do buyers typically? Where do they begin their research? And number one on the list with 54%, these numbers don't add up to 100. So I'm not exactly what we learned.
Mark Huber [00:17:26]:
Fair critique. The way that the question was worded was where it's a multiple select question. So you can pick multiple answers of, like, when you start your search, choose as many of these places that you look at. So a little bit of a learning for us in the second time around. But still, that finding shocked me, I'd say more than anything in the report.
Kyle Coleman [00:17:43]:
So the thing that I was really surprised by is number one on the list, where do buyers typically begin their search was with analyst reports. I just cannot believe that I have never, never talked to anybody right here first. Yeah, I go to this, you know, whatever. If it's Gartner or if it's Forrester or something first, like why? Yeah, Well, I just don't understand why people do that, especially because there's so much more information that's available now and.
Mark Huber [00:18:09]:
Years ago, maybe it made sense. Not now.
Kyle Coleman [00:18:10]:
Right. Exactly. When before information was really democratized and the analyst firms really were the keepers of opinion and things like that, it's like, okay, that makes a lot of sense. But why would. I don't understand why people go there first. Because it's so transparently pay to play. That's the thing I don't understand is like there's. It's not organic by definition.
Kyle Coleman [00:18:29]:
It's not organic. Like, oh, here's our total economic impact report that we commissioned from Forrester. It's like, you commissioned it from Forrester. What do you expect them to say? Oh, the customers actually lost money when they invested. Like, what? Makes no sense.
Mark Huber [00:18:41]:
You need to cherry pick the three outliers of your customers that have the best performance and it's going to spit out the made up number that you wanted to see.
Kyle Coleman [00:18:48]:
And then you're like, yep, Mark, I've been in these meetings.
Mark Huber [00:18:52]:
I've done one too. Tell me about your experience doing it.
Kyle Coleman [00:18:54]:
And they've been like, you know, I have said to the Forrester analyst, I want my ROI to be above 500% because my competitor is over 500% and I can't go back to my CEO and tell him I spent that quarter million dollars on this and our ROI is worse than the competitors. And they're like, great, tell us about a few other knobs to turn or levers to pull or tell us about another customer you could go talk to. And I'm like, Jesus, God, how, how is this legal? Like, it's so transparently off. I just, I'm surprised that that's where so many people go. I expect that this is a trend that will start to flip pretty quickly. And there's this divide where I think about a lot of marketing. I'm influenced by a person named Christopher Lockhead who, yeah, category pirates. And he wrote Play Bigger.
Kyle Coleman [00:19:39]:
Co wrote Play Bigger. And he's just a great thinker and he has this line in the sand between like native analogs, people that grew up in an analog world and native digitals, people who grew up in a digital world. I think the native analog people are the people that would be like, I'm going to go to Barnes and Noble and buy Consumer Reports and look things up there. Like, that's how I do research.
Mark Huber [00:19:57]:
Laughing because that's how it used to be done.
Kyle Coleman [00:19:59]:
And I think those are the people that are probably still influenced or influenceable by those analysts reports versus the digital natives that are much more likely to do many of these other things. Whether it's customer, like real customer evidence, which of course is still slanted in a certain way, but it's like not as pay to play. Yep. Or you know, peer networks. And I think like picking up the phone, this is how I do my research.
Mark Huber [00:20:19]:
So what's the last? You don't have to name the tool. Think of the last tool that you bought.
Kyle Coleman [00:20:23]:
Mutiny.
Mark Huber [00:20:23]:
How did you buy?
Kyle Coleman [00:20:24]:
Mutiny was the last.
Mark Huber [00:20:25]:
So how did you buy it?
Kyle Coleman [00:20:26]:
So it started with a ton of research on their site. Like I cared the most about what they're saying, how they're positioning, how they're showing me that they have a depth of understanding about the problems that I have. So that's number one. Spending a lot of Time on their site and then talking to back channel references, like looking at the logos on their site, looking at the CMOs of those companies and then shooting them LinkedIn messages. Hey, five minutes. Want to talk to you about Mutiny. Now a lot of times the CMO may not have any real understanding of how they're using that type of solution because I'm a little more in the weeds at a small company than somebody, a larger company would be. But it's like, who on your team managed the deployment and implementation of this? Can I talk to them for five minutes? I just need to understand is what they're saying true and how do I get a bigger discount? Yeah, probably.
Kyle Coleman [00:21:10]:
The second detail is, so those are my two, like I care about what is on their site and do they really understand my problems? And then do they have people that will be receptive to cold outreach from me? Because that speaks volumes.
Mark Huber [00:21:22]:
So when you say do they really understand my problems? Can you elaborate on that? Like what specifically are you looking for? Is it positioning and messaging? That's like really clear and succinct. Like what else is it?
Kyle Coleman [00:21:31]:
That's basically it. It's that messaging, it's that positioning. How easy is it to understand versus how jargon filled and kind of BSE does it sound? And if I have. And engaging with the sales rep I think is probably, if not, maybe they're not in order. 1, 2, 3. But engaging with the rep is really important because I want to be able to go to that sales rep and ask them as crazy a question as I have and I want them to give me a good answer. A lot of times those answers are just links on their website. Oh yeah, we wrote a blog post about that.
Kyle Coleman [00:21:58]:
Great, send it to me. So it's that type of thing. I want to be able to get basically any question that I have answered or any question that I have answered about their capabilities as quickly as possible.
Mark Huber [00:22:09]:
So one of the other things that we found in the report was that 57% of buyers struggle to find credible product and ROI stats. Why do you think that's the case?
Kyle Coleman [00:22:17]:
Because no ROI status credible. I mean like you can't believe it. And every company is different. It's very, very difficult to say that the roi at a 50 person company like I'm at, it's going to be the same as a 5,000 person company that somebody else. It doesn't make any sense. It's apples to oranges. So there's that. And then there's a second reason which is these ROI sets are all manipulatable.
Mark Huber [00:22:38]:
Maybe you just told us by the.
Kyle Coleman [00:22:40]:
Person that's authoring the stat. I understand it's important and you have to make the business case and things like that. But I've also been in the room buying software and selling software where the CFO looks at the business case slide with the ROI numbers and just totally throws it out. It's like, I don't care. Like, this has nothing to do with me. And so if it's not unique and bespoke to that company's process and forecasted outcomes, it's meaningless.
Mark Huber [00:23:05]:
Can you elaborate on the process piece? Because I think that's really important.
Kyle Coleman [00:23:08]:
The best sales reps get really entrenched in what the process is of doing the work or creating the outcomes that their technology supports. And so we can just keep using Mutiny as an example. So they spent a ton of time with our team and with our web agency to understand how are we thinking about personalization and experimentation. And then they created the roadmap for us, which was here is what you need to do to make this deployment successful and effective. And so that is the business case. Like, oh, they understand what we're trying to do and why. They understand that we're moving from this PLG motion to a truer enterprise tops down B2B motion. And here's how they're going to help us on this pathway of doing that.
Kyle Coleman [00:23:47]:
They have domain expertise, of course, for their own technology, but they also have expertise on our use case by our strategic initiatives. They have helped companies do this, make this transformation before. And that is the business case. That's what I care about. At no point did we talk about like how whatever Figma, I don't even know if they're a customer uses Mutiny. And here's the ROI that they've got because I don't care. But what I do care about is that they understand what we're trying to do and that they can map their solution to what matters most to me.
Mark Huber [00:24:17]:
Last question, Totally unplanned. Favorite Chris Lockhead moment that you've had after working with him.
Kyle Coleman [00:24:24]:
So I'm lucky enough to consider the man a mentor. If you don't. I don't know the audience. If you don't know him, he's a bit of a.
Mark Huber [00:24:31]:
Our audience should know him. I don't think they know I know Devin. So I've heard by way of Nice.
Kyle Coleman [00:24:36]:
He's not for everybody, but if you can get over the gruff sort of exterior, he's brilliant. He's a very different thinker. And a lot of times that different thinking is communicated in somewhat of a crass way. You have to kind of.
Mark Huber [00:24:48]:
That's kind of what I've heard.
Kyle Coleman [00:24:49]:
Get used to that. Get over that. I went to his house in Santa Cruz, compound house in Santa Cruz, California. And Santa Cruz is already a bit of a trippy little town. But I was going there and we were planning some category creation type stuff and planning what we call lightning strike, which is like a big marketing moment where we're trying to make a big splash. And I had my little notebook out and I was like, I'm going to learn from this three time cmo. And I'm ready to rock and roll here. And the first thing, like, got to his comp.
Kyle Coleman [00:25:13]:
He's like, hey, my chickens are all loose. We gotta get them back in the coop. And I was like, what? All right, put away this notebook. Wrangled, like, literally, like, I'm out there wrangling chickens back into a coop, putting them back in and like, didn't need the notebook the rest of the day. Oh, my God. Went on a sailboat, took e bikes around the cliffs in Santa Cruz. This is.
Mark Huber [00:25:33]:
I was hoping for an answer like that. Getting chickens in the coop was not on my bingo card. So that was awesome.
Kyle Coleman [00:25:38]:
There you go.
Mark Huber [00:25:38]:
Well, thank you for this. This was good.