Outbound that actually works in 2025 — Eric Iannello's top-of-funnel playbook

The modern outbound playbook has fundamentally shifted from vanity metrics to concrete conversions. In this episode, Eric Iannello breaks down why the old 'spray and pray' approach is dead, emphasizing that booking meetings alone doesn't translate to pipeline. Revenue leaders must pivot from pursuing an inflated Total Addressable Market (TAM) to focusing strictly on their Total Sellable Market (TSM). Eric highlights the critical intersection of sales and marketing, arguing that brand awareness is a prerequisite for outbound success. Without marketing air cover, reps face an uphill battle fighting for fractional reply rates. By integrating community engagement, multi-threading, and rigorous ICP verification, teams can ensure they are booking meaningful, high-converting meetings instead of just checking activity boxes.

Discussed in this episode

Why promising mere 'meetings booked' is a flawed metric used by failing lead generation agencies.
The crucial difference between a glorified Total Addressable Market (TAM) and a realistic Total Sellable Market (TSM).
Why the first go-to-market hire should ideally be in marketing to build brand awareness before sales outreach.
The necessity of a foundational, documented outbound playbook before sending a single cold email.
How poor cold calling habits, like dialing someone four times in a row, stem directly from toxic leadership metrics.
The value of community-led growth and building personal networks over relying solely on traditional outbound channels.
Why outbound should act as the strategic bridge between sales and marketing depending on the company's growth stage.
The importance of having an ICP matrix to understand who to multi-thread and how to map buying parties.

Episode highlights

0:00 — The problem with agency promises
2:15 — Eric's unconventional B2B entry
4:30 — Why spray-and-pray outbound fails
7:00 — Meetings booked vs. real conversions
10:45 — Marketing as the first hire
14:20 — TAM vs. Total Sellable Market
18:15 — Cold calling and toxic leadership
22:00 — Communities and network-driven outbound
25:30 — Evaluating an outbound playbook
29:00 — Rapid fire productivity questions

Key takeaways

Focus on your Total Sellable Market instead of vanity TAM metrics.
Meetings booked mean nothing if they don't convert to real pipeline.
Brand awareness from marketing makes outbound connect rates dramatically higher.
Spamming prospects with back-to-back cold calls is a leadership failure.
Never launch outbound without a heavily documented, ICP-verified playbook.

Transcript

And I think that's where I'm going to I'm going to hit them where it's where it hurts. That's why agencies fail early founders so often. These people that just are promising meetings. And again, I have friends that are in agencies and I mean no qualm to them whatsoever, but these false promises to just saying, hey, I'll book you 20 meetings in the first month.

Like you said, right? Arc my three-year-old, man. He's three and he can book you a meeting. Welcome back to another episode of The Revenue Reimagine podcast.

This one is a little bit special. Um, because while we have a guest, it is an R&R crew here today. We have Eric Iannella who is our head of outbound and we are going to talk about all things outbound. Now, the interesting thing here is Eric just isn't the head of outbound for RR.

I have worked with Eric before. I brought Eric into RR. He's someone that I've worked with previously who I have stayed in touch with, who I have an immense amount of respect for, who gets the outbound game better than most. And one of the things that we hear every founder say to us all day, every day, is I need pipeline.

But pipeline doesn't doesn't just magically appear. Eric, thanks for joining us, man. No, it doesn't. Amazing, right?

You can't You don't just send an email and book a meeting. I wish. That's like applying Rogaine and just magically sprouting hair, right? Or or in my No.

I know. I feel like I should be in the middle of you two. I feel like it should be I feel a little a bit out of place here, but I'm good. So, Eric, um welcome to the show.

Welcome to the group. Um super excited to have you in in the team. So, talk to talk to us a little bit about why outbound, why are you so passionate about it? And like that whole like We talk about origin stories a lot, but I'm curious from a outbound perspective, why you double down on the outbound motion.

Yeah, I uh I've got a six cents of humor. We'll put it that way. No, I think I think it would originate from is that I wasn't I wasn't born in B2B, right? Like I kind of moved over here as many did through the COVID expenditure when my previous life was shut down and that was working B2C, right?

I was really much that brick and mortar, I worked off commission only. And so a lot of it was riding on me, right? I was the business card, I was the kind of representation to it. And I had to generate all my business because if I didn't, I wouldn't be paid.

Um so luckily enough, I think through all my previous experience, be it hospitality, be it, you know, physical therapy and personal training and and just, you know, working on various odd jobs. I was able to adapt not only who I am as a person, who I am as a seller, but then also my tonality and how I'm able to articulate myself and to understand the person on the other side. Be it phone, email, in person, whatever that may be, in a general sense, I think that's what gives me the success and the ability to teach others like how to identify their strengths and their capabilities and how to generate, how to repeat the success. Um so yeah, a long-winded answer, but I think it's it's deeper than just just who I am and what I do, I guess.

I think the sick part is definitely true, but okay, we can move on from that. Yeah. Fact. So we've said over and over again, outbound is broken, right?

I I don't think anyone disputes that. But we still have founders, even what I I I don't want to say unskilled, but earlier in their career revenue leaders who believe that it's possible to spin up a couple domains if they even do that, um build a sequence that basically says, you know, because you are Dale the chief whatever at RR, you must struggle from this problem and I can solve it with, you know, this solution. And they think that that's going to get a response. And we could shift to phone conversations either.

With all the noise out there and there is a lot of noise, Eric, like why do people think this still works? Why do people still think you could just spray and pray with zero personalization and and grow a business? I think it's I think it's threefold, right? The market's changed dramatically and you guys can attest to this better than I can.

Like it there's the selling market or even the buying market at that matter isn't the same as it was 18 to 24 months ago. The shit ain't easy. I don't know if I can cuss, forgive me. But You Have you have you met me?

I don't know if I don't know if it's acceptable to on the pod. But anyways, point being though, it's not easy, right? You can't just point and shoot, point and click and then deliver a message and return on value. The metrics have to be changed on the way that we we measure because that's the it's a different market in it's entirety.

We can't look at meetings booked translating to revenue generated. That's not they're not a direct they're not linear by any means. What we need to be looking at, and I think this is where a lot of founders go a little bit naive to your point, Adam, is that they think that a meeting is a tangible metric, but it's not. What a meeting just says is that you've captivated attention.

Cool. What now? And this is where the outbound process needs to be redefined or re-imagine it. Got it.

Yeah. So what it needs to come in is this applicable value of conversions, right? We need to make sure that what we're doing, who we're targeting, what we're targeting to, how we're articulating that message, the pain point that at which case we're highlighting, and then most importantly, how can we get it to money, right? How can we attach a revenue sticker to that?

So where many founders lose that kind of translation between the two is the conversion, the conversion metrics, the conversion tangibilities. That in itself needs to be the bread, butter and the baseline to every foundational outbound motion, its entirety. So before you click point trigger call, say hi to an event. What converts?

I could give a damn if it, you know, books me a meeting. It's just a waste of time if it's not converted. Or that meeting that you convert into could be a waste of time for the sales reps that you're converting it over to. So there's a lot of reasons why it's not just the meeting booked, but it's actually meeting held, conversion rates, then do you really map to the ICP?

So like pipeline generated. Yeah. I say it all the time. I I could forget my I mean my 13-year-old, Dale, your your 16-year-old, your Sienna's what 19?

your your 19-year-old, like we I could train anyone to book a meeting, right? Is the meeting with the right person? I promise you and we've all seen this leading revenue teams. If the goal is to book a meeting and that's what the BDR is getting paid on, I promise you'll have a shit ton of meetings booked, but to Dale's point, are they ICP?

Are they with the right person? And are they going to convert to pipeline? But doing that and taking that approach of targeting takes longer, right? It takes longer to personalize, it takes longer to target the right ICP.

Eric, working with founders, how do you have the conversation of this is going to take time and time isn't seven days? Yeah, I uh before working with founders, man, I had a full head of hair. Let's put it that way. And I mean that the utmost respect, right?

Adam, you can kind of test to this. But needless to say, what it comes down to is is the visionary practice, right? We can give them the tangibles all day long. But if I show them the faults and the cracks basically in process, showing them pipeline fallout, the commonalities of it, why we don't translate or convert to this specific ICP, why we need an ICP matrix so we can understand who to multi-thread to, who do we convey message with, who to build around in buying parties?

If we map that out, right, and build essentially an entirety of that foundational process, it usually becomes a little bit more crystal clear, right? Color between the lines is how I kind of typically convey the message. Understanding the pathways, right? And having very finite detail, really granular process, because again, there's market, right?

It's not a buy-in market, we need to have a rock solid process both within pipeline progression, but in pipeline generation, both within reduction to churn, both within customer acquisition costs, both within speed to lead, we need that to be the core component of it. And before we even press send, right, it's just like bunch bunch of junk frat guys throwing darts, right? Like what what the hell are we doing at the end of the day? Did he just call us fat?

Frat. I said a bunch of drunk frat guys. All right. All right.

All right. So So, so let me double click on this a little bit because this is. I I I wrote a a LinkedIn post last week about, um, awareness. And I think one of the biggest challenges that most founder companies or startups have is they build out an outbound engine with limited to no marketing.

And so I've always had this hypothesis that, yes, sales can build awareness and generate that awareness piece, but it's probably going to take 12 to 18 months with doing a lot of emails, doing a lot of calling, doing a lot of LinkedIn messaging, whereas in a marketing world, even though it'll still take time, probably more three to six month uh time frames depending on what market you're in, where you're at. Talk to the audience a little bit about how marketing can actually help the outbound efforts that someone like you are are executing on to make it more effective and efficient in the overall scheme of things. Yeah, I think I'm going to hit with a controversial point, especially with three sales people in the in the call, right? And then I think the first hire needs to be marketing.

And that's simply just because of brand brand awareness, brand generation, brand buzz, just making a freaking blip on the map. I think that seems to be the pivotal point in which case the founder can obviously lead it, but that needs to be the first trigger that they pull. Thus being because sales process and acquisition costs all that has just dramatically increased over the last 18 to 24 months, right? We're talking about two different markets.

The to your point, right? Like the two, actually, let's start with two function of an an outbound generation is either to capture demand or to generate demand, depending on which step they're on. If they don't have brand demand, guess what step we're on. If you already have brand demand, guess what move you have to make.

So with that in mind, right? To capture the demand usually takes an ROI clause of about six to nine months, right? And that's simply because people don't want to be sold to, people don't want to buy, so you kind of have to figure out the ins and outs and all those fun tricks of the trade, right? The real fun caveat.

But on the flip side of that, right? The 12 to 18 months in just generating the demand, generating the brand awareness, generating the buzz, that in itself needs to be priority one. And without one, there isn't the other. Um so again, it's exhausting exhausting protocols, but again, not exploiting your TAM or your total sellable market, whatever you want to classify it as.

So it's it's a process, right? And it's a balance and I think I just bounced around that answer too much, but Yeah, I still don't so I so let's say because a lot of a lot of founders will go with the sales motion first, which I actually think it's the right motion, followed closely by the marketing motion just because you're going to get some revenue in the door. And then the the challenge a little bit with the with the marketing side is it's it's a fairly decent expense if you're not doing gorilla marketing. So if you're not getting people on podcasts, if you don't have like a face of the company, like there's some other things that you got to figure out on the media on the on the marketing side.

So I think you can gorilla push your way into sales. You could probably get the first 10 customers through just brute force that needs probably some, uh some not manipulation, but some management to get through the process, but then quickly bring in the marketing side so you can drive the awareness whether it's podcasts, dare I say webinars, content, yeah, you know, all of those types of pieces. Um so that's kind of more where I was my my head was at because someone like you going in and like trying to just cold call people, or like send emails and have conversations, if they don't know who X Y Z company is, I'm sure your connect rates and your conversion rates are a lot lower than if they have some brand awareness. No, you're absolutely right.

And we're in a world where we're fighting for 1.5% reply rates. You know, every every percentage or even right every hundredth of a percent counts. Um and where TAM is dramatically decreasing, right?

It's not in a progressive motion, it's not in an upward motion like many like to think and every founder claims. But what it needless to say is that we need to capture what is already there and then obviously exploit in stance. Well, one thing on that, yeah, one thing on that TAM like TAM is such a an investment PE VC type statement. When we when we're thinking about it, we need really need to think about total sellable market.

People that are actually going to buy from you. Like these TAM conversations are like, I don't know, I think we get stars in our eyes when we talk about the TAM and it's just to figure out from a PE or a VC perspective, is it investable or worth investing in? But like when we go to execution on to go to market, we need to eliminate that nomenclature out of our mind because if not, we're just going to get false sense of of hope. So.

Sorry, Adam, I cut you off, but No, no, no, but to your point, though, the TSM. You didn't cut me off. You might have cut him off, but you didn't cut me off. The battle the battle of personalities.

I was just going to say the TSM, right? And that is a great point that you bring up is going to be substantially lower than the TAM. The TAM is a glorified number. There's nothing trackable about it.

It basically says that, you know, there's 42,000 people who don't have hair. Well, of course, we're not taking into consideration the people who are receiving hair line, who soon to be Like it's just it's such a skewed number that I'm like, that's not again, to your point, but now VC evaluations and all of those are starting to become on their back heels because they realize that those are exploitable numbers. So again, slight tangent, but now. But this is the problem with with vanity metrics, right?

It's just looking at it in the reverse. It's the same thing as saying, oh, we we have a 58% open rate. Like big fucking deal, your subject resonates. Or or your spam checkers are opening your emails.

Like, who cares? I I don't care about open rates. I care about a few things and it's changed over the past 30 to 45 days. We talked about it earlier.

Pa meetings booked and pipeline generated, of course. But how many times does it take reaching out to someone until a meeting's booked? The data shows between 9 and 15. So if I email Dale and he doesn't respond to the email and I email him three times and he doesn't, but boom, Dale pops up on my website and I could see that through all the great technology we have, and now I could create an automated motion to take that website visit, pop it into clay, validate that he's ICP or did he push the email to someone below him and say, hey, check out this technology, see if it makes sense for us to take a call.

Now, depending on who it is, I send either a personalized video or a personalized message, whatever it happens to be, that also is generating interest, right? It might not be the meeting today, but there is an action that was taken from my outbound that is driving awareness that it's now on us as revenue leaders or outbound professionals to now take that and further convert that. The days of someone saying, man, Eric, this is the best fucking email I've ever got on email number one, and I can't wait to talk to you about your product. Please, you know what?

I forget 30. Let's book a 60-minute meeting. Those days are gone. Right, send the docu sign right now.

Those days are gone and we're all buyers and we all know it. So when we're talking about, you know, open rates and whatnot, it's the same thing as TAM. Great. You have a massive total addressable market.

The VCs might love that and that's great. What's your total sellable market? Who can you actually sell to? Who who who are you going to reach out to that should pick up the phone and have a have a fucking conversation with you?

Because I promise you, it's not your total addressable market at all. So, let me shift go ahead. No, no, no, no, no. I love I love this subject and I think I don't think I've been this raw up on an episode in a long time.

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And now we're moving away from the the modern predictable revenue and you know, plug an SDR and throw more bodies at it to a different verification process. Right? And that verification process is is bearing away from the vanity metrics. I'm not going to give an SQL to an SDR and hope that they, you know, book me a meeting.

What it needs to be is exactly your lead flow. Sorry, did I just throw that out there? But what it needs to be is exactly that lead flow through like a verification process, right? And I can actually sit here and give three BDRs rather than 12 an entirety of a list of verified ICP through a tele you know, total sellable addressable market, whatever you want to qualify it as.

And now we can reduce the steps. And everybody talks about speed to lead, right? Like that's the coolest thing since sliced bread now. Now we're reducing speed to lead.

Now we're reducing, you know, customer acquisition costs. Now we're reducing all the ideas that, you know, you know, every influencer loves to talk about a broken model. So let let's shift gears a second because we're talking a lot about email. But outbound isn't just email, right?

Outbound is email, outbound is phone, outbound is LinkedIn, outbound is any plethora of things. And I I shit you not, the other day, I got and I posted about this, I got four phone calls in a row from a number I didn't know. Now, they didn't spoof the area code and prefix because we all know that trick and anyone who's doing that, please stop. Like we all know if the first six digits match then it's spam.

But four phone calls and everyone knows I've had a lot going on with my kid and whatnot. So but like phone call number four, like I'm thinking something's really wrong or someone really needs to get a hold of me about something. And I answer it and it's a cold call. Now, you both know me well enough like when I'm not slammed, like I do take cold calls, so I'm not being an asshole here.

But at phone call number four, you can imagine I had nothing nice to say and then you can imagine that whatever that product is, no matter how bad I needed it, you're dead to me at that point. Why do people do this and what is the right way to cold call? Leadership problem. I'm calling it as I see it.

And I've been on the other side of that one. It's a leadership problem, right? They are told and most likely, it's not like everyone's incline is going to be like, oh, let me call Adam four times. Unless it's me trying to like, you know, give you shit on a on a random Thursday, which I do excessively.

But needless to say, if I'm actually trying to actually human nature is not to be over bombarded. Human nature is not to be that persistent, right? Is a top behavior atypically, right? Let's just talk about the typical motion.

It is a top behavior. When I was handed a list, right? They were going, you better call this until you're blue. that narrative is going to skew everything.

So what's happening is a leadership down method, right? Basically, VC, and we can talk about this all day long. VC is given skewed numbers. Then they're not funneling in the message properly.

They're not giving clear direction in which case it's going to be a Let's just call it a good method. And then ultimately speaking, right, it's just not going to lead to retained value, which is simply that if I cold call Adam four times in a row, hoping to make that opportunity, well now I just pissed him off and he blackballed the entire company. And guess what? He also has a presence online and then all of a sudden, now is that snowball effect.

All because of leadership's incapability of being able to funnel the message, give clear direction and teach the actual proper methodology. That's that yeah, that's the one of the things that you said in that mess message is that people are starting to have personal followings, bigger followings. You don't understand understand the downstream implications. Like a lot of times we're getting people are connecting with us to evaluate technology, uh potentially recommend technology.

And we don't we don't use any we don't recommend any technology we don't use. So I I think that part is super interesting and I think that's one place where like an outbound motion, an SDR, BDR can start figuring out like getting into communities versus just like sitting on the outside trying to do the typical, uh cold calling, emailing, um LinkedIn. Talk to me a little bit about your evaluation of BDRs or sales people getting into communities, finding kind of like the the the partnership type stuff where they can hear signals that you wouldn't hear in other places like whether it's Rev Genius or Pavilion or any of these communities. Talk to a little bit about the secrets and give the audience a little bit of a sneak peek on how they can do it even better than they're just sitting on the outside.

Yeah, I want to give a nod to our good friend Scott Leese, right? He posted, um, an incredible post a couple It may have been a couple weeks ago, if not last week. Don't fucking give that guy any credit. No.

Scott, big fan, buddy. Um, anyways, I was actually talking to him this weekend but about you. Digress. Um, he posted something about it.

He is much more likely to hire somebody un-biased to their previous experience to someone who has 100,000 followers to someone who has a hun or 1,000 followers. The reason being is because you can argue until you're blue in the face that your net worth, or your network is your network. And that is because of curiosity, partnerships that you're actually building, and relationships that you can actually tap on either behind the times, ahead of times, or whatever that may be, right? And I think, and I will say this again until I'm blue in the face, but the only reason I'm standing on my two feet today after all the shit that I've gone through beside my professional market of like being able to do outbound is again through network.

That's between connecting with people on LinkedIn, between just building relationships outside of it and, hey, if you know Adam, I would love to chat with you or if you know Dale, definitely kick rocks because I don't want to talk to you. You know, it's that kind of ideology that you want to make sure that you actually preach what you're practicing. So I'm much more likely when I when I look at somebody be it an AE, a BDR, and a leadership title, whatever have you. What is your presence?

What is your connection and how can I back channel them, right? How deep is your back channel? And just having that understanding goes same with products. There's products I won't touch simply because of experience that Adam had.

There's products I would actually give, you know, the time of day just because of the experience that Dale had. So that all plays into accountability. Right? I always joke about this, no matter how big we think that our world is, it is so freaking small.

100%. It's uh it's a very big, very small world out there. Um that's better for worse. Everyone knows everyone.

So you're talking to a founder who any any founder, it doesn't matter, whether you're let's just say you're earlier than Series B. And they reach out to you and the conversation is we we don't have an outbound motion. Most of our business has been either referral-based or event-based. Little bit of inbound, but not a whole lot.

And we want to start an outbound motion. Where do you begin? Where do you start? Oh, yeah.

My the very first question I ask is hand me the playbook. Hand me a physical playbook. No playbook. Or let's let's call it a process, right?

And they say no. And I go, well, now we know where we need to start. Right? I'm not going to just again, I use the the joke.

We're not going to be blind frat guys, you know, throwing darts and hoping for something. Because I'm not going to blindly promise them meetings. That's not the tangible. You know, we're going to be delivering repeatable process.

We're going to be delivering the foundation which they can obviously teach others and and hopefully take to scale. But the blatant question is is the who, the what, the why, the when and the where. Right? Those are just simple ideas when you come into an outbound.

Be it a TAM, be it an ICP or you know, TSM. Be an ICP. Be previously message, you know, messaging. uh success rates.

Why did this progress? Why did you contact this individual? Tell me all of those many questions and then that's when we can begin. But without those, we can't we can't even press start.

Like you said, right? Arc. My three-year-old, man. He's three and he can book you a meeting.

Obviously it would be with his gorilla, the stuffed gorilla in his room, but my point being though, you know what I mean? Like it's the same same ideology, right? It's it's the false narrative. And that's why so many agencies failed and that's why they give people the bad name for building a process because they want the false meeting.

But that that's agencies, that's consultants, that's everyone who comes in and like and Dale, you're probably going to go the same place. I'm sorry, but like oh, I can build you a strategy or I can give you a slide deck or I I can fix this. And they're so worried about getting, you know, the the 5, 7, 10, 12, whatever thousand for a few months that they're so short-sighted that it's oh, I'm going to get this revenue and then it'll be someone else's problem. Well, yeah, until Revenue Reimagine now has six clients that came from the consultant who couldn't deliver and now you have a name for yourself.

And it's not the name that you want, right? You don't want to be known as the agency, if you will, and it's one of the reasons why we deliberately decided to never use the word agency. Um who who can't deliver. And there's so many people out there who make these false promises of oh, we we all get those emails.

What if I could guarantee you 100 leads a month? Dude, if you could guarantee me 100 leads a month, qualified leads, you would be filthy rich and you would not be reaching out to me. I promise you that. You'd be a millionaire.

Yeah, 100%. Really quick, Eric, where should outbound fall? Should it fall under marketing or should it fall under sales? Ooh.

Ooh. And I say really quick knowing that this is not really a quick answer. Right, right, this is early in the morning. I was going to pour a beer for that one.

I think I think it's the bridge in between, right? And you know, even the flirting idea now is that it should should it fall up to RevOps, which is again, in no we say form. I think it depends on what stage it's in. Right?

Are we capturing demand, are we generating demand? If we have a full functioning demand gen, we have a marketing that is just, you know, plugging and chugging in all fronts. If we have a sales team that has taken progression the pipeline that is and progressed it to close, then we know where it needs to fall. And that's why I always call it's the bridge in between.

It's always going to have that flexibility. And this is where I see a lot of teams fail. This is why I don't think the agencies are going to bode well in the future of, you know, three to five years. I think they have an end date because they don't know the flexibility between working between both.

Where does it fall? It may differ between days. I may look at, you know, a marketing project being great. We're going to capture content syndication.

We're going to make that the landing page. Cool. The narration would be marketing. But if I'm looking to pilot between an ICP matrix or retargeting a vertical or Now we're talking about sales, right?

Like that's I think it's a swing I think it's a swing idea in the sense that it's not one, but it's all. Yeah, I think I think it's a uh I think they sit between, but you got to obviously kind of report up into somewhere, but it's kind of the glue I see between sales and marketing where like you're sitting front end with people with prospects, you can, you know, definitely get the insight, bring that back to marketing, but also enable sales to know what marketing's doing from like a macro perspective, like what campaigns are we running? How are we going to run them? Here's what you can expect.

And like it's that back and forth. I actually think it's a much We always say it's like a really important position, but I actually think it's more important now more than ever, especially if you can tie back to meeting conversions, conversion opportunity type of things, than anything else. Like I always think this ends up being a a compensation conversation at the end of the day. Um, that will then roll into where things fall.

Um and tie through the the buyer's journey. I think it really just depends on where the stage is for the company. Right? Early stage, it's all under one umbrella.

I think, you know, the later stage, the more separated it may be. But again, that's because the roles are defined, the lines are defined and there's not really any any gray areas in the matter, but but again. 100%. All right, let's do some rapid fire as we wrap it up.

Um, I'm going to try to think of ones that I don't know the answers for for you, Eric. Um That's hard. We've known each other for a while now. I I I know.

What's your favorite guilty pleasure snack? Oh. Trader Joe's gluten-free cookies with the salted uh salted chocolate chips. Is that guilty if there's no gluten?

I don't know, man. I'm I'm I'm old now. I don't process gluten like I did in my yesterday years. I'm I'm with you.

My wife brought me brought me some glass of green shit this morning that Yeah, Dale loves it. Dale drinks it every morning. I drink it every morning. My wife brings me the You can you can taste the ginger.

I literally thought I was like at the sushi. I've been I've been drinking this for 10 years, man. Yeah, I mean that's explains why that skin is so beautiful. That's why I have hair.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anyway, um okay, I have one that Adam probably won't Adam probably should know this one. How many texts a day do you get from Adam? What?

Is it on average or is it a weekend? I think it depends on is it work related or are we just shooting the shit? Work related, shit. Mostly over the weekend.

Let's put it this way. We we text so often that we happen to find what the criteria of the question is. Let's put it that way, right? That's a that's a better way than just saying.

Work related. Work related over the over the week. Over the week? Oh, we hardly.

Weekend. Work related over the weekend. No, I think we're pretty respectful of each other's time that, you know, unless it's like a personality. Now Dale's going to say, why aren't you fucking respectful of my time?

So, the next the next question, um the next question that we're going to ask, uh, what's your go-to productivity hack? Oh. Depends on Adam for the weekend. Depends on the founder we're dealing with, right?

No. Touché. Uh it it differs. I don't know.

I I've been nerding out on clay a little bit. Um, are we talking about tool-wise or just like in general? In general. Like for me, it's time blocking.

Oh, yeah. God, no. I'm terrible at that. Um No, I think productivity hack is um God, I don't even know.

I don't That's a great question. I'm in the midst of a shit show. I need your productivity hacks. Um There you go.

I'll put a pin in that one. We'll differ it back. What's what's the first app you check when you wake up in the morning? Oh, instantly for sure.

Instantly, yes. Yep, instantly. What's the one word to describe your startup journey so far? I can't say that.

There's kids around. Yeah. Point. No, it's been fun.

We'll that'll be the other F word. We'll we'll we'll switch between it. The F word, just fun. Just fun.

Take us home, Dale. Last one, last one. So, uh, dream vacation destination. Um, I've had my I set on Alaska for a while.

I think uh I think it'd be really fun to go out there mostly in summer and uh, you know, either fish for salmon and and look at bears from afar. I think that would be pretty fun. I love it. Love it, love it.

Eric, I uh seriously, thank you for joining. Um, you're not being paid for this, obviously. Um, but I appreciate it. I think that this is definitely something we need to double click on even more.

It's it's a hot topic, it's one that's super important. And I think it's one that not only is so crucial to get right, but if you get it wrong, you're screwing yourself. Whether that be your domain, whether that be your messaging, whether that be burning through your total sellable market, you can't afford to make the outbound mistakes that you made in the past. Um, where can people find you, man?

I'm on LinkedIn like a 13-year-old's on Snapchat, man. I it's a bad obsession. Uh but that's where my ICP is, so that's where I'm at. So yeah, just on LinkedIn.

Simple. Sweet and simple. Go find Eric. You could also find him at revenuehyphenreimagine.

com and thanks for joining, man. Thanks for having me, guys. Talk to you. Thanks, Eric.