PopcornGTM Video
In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, Jeremy Julian hosts a conversation with Paul Molinari and Michael Beck, co-founders of PopcornGTM, a company focused on delivering bold, intentional sales and marketing strategy to help restaurant technologies break through and win. They delve into the challenges of getting noticed in a crowded market, underscore the importance of resonating with target audiences, and share valuable insights on the utilization of sales and marketing strategies for success in the restaurant tech realm.
Introduction
Michael & Paul Introduction
Background and Industry Experience
Birth of Popcorn GTM
State of the Restaurant Tech Market
Brand Messaging and Sales strategy
Conclusion
PopcornGTM Video
In this episode of the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, Jeremy Julian hosts a conversation with Paul Molinari and Michael Beck, co-founders of PopcornGTM, a company focused on delivering bold, intentional sales and marketing strategy to help restaurant technologies break through and win. They delve into the challenges of getting noticed in a crowded market, underscore the importance of resonating with target audiences, and share valuable insights on the utilization of sales and marketing strategies for success in the restaurant tech realm.
Introduction
Michael & Paul Introduction
Background and Industry Experience
Birth of Popcorn GTM
State of the Restaurant Tech Market
Brand Messaging and Sales strategy
Conclusion
This is the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast, helping you run your restaurant better.
Jeremy Julian:Welcome back to the Restaurant Technology Guys podcast. I thank everyone out there for joining us as I say each and every time. I know that you guys have got lots of choices on how you guys spend your time and energy, so we appreciate you guys spending time with us. Today I am joined by two very special guests and it's always fun when I get when I get the opportunity to have two co-founders on the show and we can talk a little bit about what they get to do, but. It's even better when they get to talk about how this whole thing came together. So I'm gonna let Paul introduce himself. Then he can bounce it over to Michael
Paul Molinari:so my name is Paul Molinari. I am co-founder and CMO of Popcorn, GTM. We're a, new kid on the block, well, a couple of old kids swinging around with a, with a new solution for restaurant technology. And this is my partner, Michael.
Michael Beck:Hey guys Michael Beck here. I am a co-founder as well. And I guess you called me a Chief Revenue Officer for Popcorn, GTM. This is such a great opportunity, Jeremy to have us on the show.
Jeremy Julian:paul, I know you alluded to it, you guys have been in and around the industry. Just for those that haven't run into you guys elsewhere, why don't you guys talk a little bit about your background, talk, Paul, you and I met, I don't know, five or six years ago. I know we were talking about it before we hit the recording button when you were at your previous role, and Michael, you and I have known each other since. Before you move 3000 miles away to the opposite coast when we're both living in California, we both escaped. So Paul, why don't you talk a little bit about your history, just'cause I think it'll play well into the conversation we have about about what popcorn's trying to do to to solve industry issues.
Paul Molinari:Yeah, absolutely. You know, my, my career is funny. before.My, my previous role, I was the head of marketing at CrunchTime from 2013 to 2021, so the better part of a decade helped really go to market and not just go to market, but win a substantial amount of business over a period of time where they were kind of locked in a startup mode for for many years. What I would help the company do was essentially position themselves as the back office restaurants and tell a, tell a story about how back office, back office solutions can really help save on inventory and, and food labor costs. But before that I had worked in advertising agencies and consumer electronics and automotive and and healthcare. Working for brands like General Motors, AstraZeneca Thomson Reuters large consumer electronics chains like tweeter. And so career had kind of prepared me for, for helping crunch time, break through and Yeah. And so it was a pretty amazing ride. And I think what a lot of restaurant technologies go for, at least what they can only hope for, is to, you know, capture some lightning in a bottle, And, and understand, you know, kind of what that lightning is and, and why it's so attractive to to restaurant brands and, and, and to be able to package it. and tell that story and, and have it resonate. so found some success with, with crunch time. And you know, during that time actually is when I met Michael kind of across the aisle as a competitor.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah. No, and I, and that's, that was where I was gonna parlay that.'cause I, funny enough, Michael, when you and I met you were competing with Paul's previous organization, CrunchTime at formerly, I think Restaurant Magic was what it was called at the time. Restaurant Magic Data Central. So for those that don't know, your your history I'm probably more familiar with it, with your total history than I am with Paul's, but I know at least when it started in hospitality, I know that you started on the restaurant side and then turned into tech. So why don't you give everybody a little bit of a background before we jump straight into to popcorn and what you guys are doing to help restaurant tech brands.
Michael Beck:Yeah. If you go way back, my, my family lived like Bob's burgers. We grew up above the restaurant in Long Beach, California, at a little place on the peninsula. and my dad would make the food. And we'd go down and help out in the restaurant and go back upstairs to our own little quote unquote sitcom. And then, so for the, my whole life food has been part of this. My family's had bars and growing up and worked in restaurants my entire life. And then outta the Army, I decided to go be a chef and use my GI bill to, to go to culinary school. And then somewhere along the way I had a catering company and somewhere along the way a market crashed and things I was selling for high prices weren't quite the same. And so I decided to go into restaurant tech. And that long twisted road took me to where we are right now. I think the funny thing is every time I sit down with Paul and we start talking about the origin story, and I get to hear him talking about him being in the leading back office platform in the industry, and I'm like, wait a minute, that's me. I was in leading back office platform in the industry and that that's really such a cool. Genesis kind of thing, so we're both scrapping it out at our respective companies. And like you said, we'd known each other loosely along the way, but, both of us were fighting the battle of our lives in, in a sense, right? Everything's, big when it's in, in your yard. And is, I was thinking about how we were selling restaurant magic. It was the, the battle of the ages between restaurant magic and crunch time. And so we'd go after business and they'd win it, and they'd go after business and we'd win it, and it'd be this back and forth. And so you even came up with this fun analogy about Ralph and Sam, the Wiley coyote and the sheep dog analogy. The shepherds out there tending the flocks. And every morning the coyote and the sheep dog cordially punch in and say, M morning, Ralph Mour Sam. all day long they kick the living crap out of each other. And at the end of the day, they're battered and bruised. Actually, the coyote is the one that's battered and bruised, and Evening Ralph. Evening Sam. And that's always who we were. We'd always been really cordial and professional but we also were highly competitive. And that mix is interesting. And when Paul was talking about how Crunch time was at a plateaued stage, it was the same thing for Restaurant Magic. And this is a story that you'll hear over and over again. You have these great brands that are out there doing good work. And they hit the cruise control moment. And both of us experienced that, on restaurant magic. They'd been around for 10 years and they were where they weren't, it didn't seem like they were going to any big growth mode moves. And that was also the same thing that was happening in parallel at CrunchTime. And that kind of what brought us here is that we both re as a result of the teams we were on, and the chemistry in that moment,
Paul Molinari:Yeah.
Michael Beck:because you can't claim it all yourself,
Jeremy Julian:Yeah. no, there's nothing gets done in a vacuum. You guys both know that and I know both of you guys well enough to recognize that you guys are beholden to the team that you guys were working with to, to make sure and both found really good success. That's the cool part. And Beck, I know you and I talked to offline about how, you guys have known each other. You guys have been in different businesses. You guys have watched people. Fail. You guys have watched people succeed. You guys have watched, founder struggles, even get outta their own way in both organizations, quite frankly that we just talked about at times. And then other times they found better ways to solve those things. Where did popcorn come from? Beck, I'm gonna, I'm gonna give it to you for a second. Why don't you talk a little bit about where did popcorn come from, because I think it's a cool origin story and you guys I always love talking to founders that have scratched the niche that they've seen for some period of time out there, and they're really solving real world problems of things that they've seen and or experienced on their own.
Michael Beck:Thanks. It's interesting'cause when you look back, it's hard to actually see the moment in time unless you look at it a couple of times. in the rear view mirror. At first you think it was, Paul on LinkedIn, it was like five, six months ago shared this thing about blur, no blur, It was hashtag no blur. And as somebody who has an office the way I do this is a pretty heavy duty subject for me, right? Because I have a literal museum of comics behind me for anybody that's watching. And You got to start making some deliberate choices with who you're gonna get on when you get on a conference call and I'm on with the CFO, I'm tempted to blur it because they might not make the best impressions about my financial decisions. anD so Paul had written this thing about Blur and Noble and I chimed in and we started talking about it and that kind of stimulated conversation.
Paul Molinari:Well, I think that, you know, carrying on for no blur for a second. You know, the impetus for the article was about connection. And, you know, so much, so much of our meetings nowadays are, you know, are or over, you know, a Zoom call. You know, we're, we're constantly in conference call mode, and we're seeing each other on camera. And I had always felt you know, it was kind of secretly disappointed I would get on with a call on a call and I'm talking to somebody that has a blurred out background or maybe just some computer generated background. And, and disappointed in the sense that that, you know, it's a choice they make, of course, but. I just kinda wanted to peek into their world a little bit more. I saw it as an, as an opportunity to connect with, with people particularly during a time when, you know, we're not in the office as much, we're not really connecting on a daily basis with each other physically. that's kind of like why I wrote the article and it was funny because I had posted it and it went semi quasi viral. Like, I had around 600 comments
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Paul Molinari:it. It, it, it really kind of stirred people up. And so that was that was and, and that's where Michael kind of Michael and I reconnected because we do kind of share similar philosophies there. Like, you know, this is kind, this is who we are and what makes, I think popcorn special. you know, the peanut butter in my chocolate, as you know Michael would like to say is that, you know, I'm marketing That my entire career. I've been in this, you know, I've been in marketing for over 25 years. You know, Michael's been in sales for almost 30 years. That's what we do, and we both understand that when sales and marketing are together in lockstep, it's a much more powerful tool, So The purpose of popcorn. You know, the why why do we exist? You know, we want to deliver bold, intentional, sales and marketing strategy, you know, to help restaurant technologies break through and win. That's why we get up in the morning. We, we want to, we want to take our superpowers. And lend them out to, you know, the founders and co-founders out there of these great ideas that are, they're stuck in the weeds. you know, they're trying desperately to, to get noticed, you know, to, to tell their story to prove their, prove their methods.
Michael Beck:Yeah, and that's actually how we started is we, the, my last company, we had a partner. And they were actually struggling from, they were doing great in, with our partnership, but they kept coming back asking about, how do I do this? How do I do that with regard to sales? What are your thoughts here? And so at one point they were looking for help in a sense and said, listen, can you look at my system and see how I'm doing and what our pipeline looks like? And it turned out the pipeline wasn't really real. There wasn't much there to see. And if you scratched beyond the surface, you knew there wasn't a lot of activity. And then the next conversation was I. what are you doing for marketing? And at this point, Paul and I were already talking and sharing best practices on AI and different things and that no blur conversation had evolved to more just talking about stuff. And so I said, Hey, would you mind if we brought in somebody that I think could really give a good look at this from a marketing perspective? And that's literally the moment when Paul came in and we started collaborating in the sense and realized at the end of that conversation we had something we could do for other businesses in that sense.
Paul Molinari:Right.
Michael Beck:that's the literal moment Popcorn happened.
Jeremy Julian:That's awesome. That's awesome. I'm gonna and I'm gonna I guess I use this this this analogy from time to time. I'm gonna double click a little bit on, on that topic because I've heard my entire career, which does span back close to 30 years myself, is this whole idea of. Some really good product sits on the shelf and doesn't ever get into the hands of the people that it needs to, and I think that's both a sales and marketing problem. I also think it's a restaurant tech adoption problem. So why don't we talk through, I feel like we've got a good idea of where we're going and what you guys are trying to solve for, but talk to me a little bit about the headwinds, that you guys struggle with as you guys have even experienced it in your previous. Roles, what are those headwinds? Is it, is it restaurant operators? Is it restaurant technologists? Talk to me a little bit about kind of those headwinds and why you guys think that you guys have a unique way that you guys can solve some of those problems for people.
Paul Molinari:Yeah. I'll take a stab at that Michael, if you
Michael Beck:Go ahead.
Jeremy Julian:I.
Paul Molinari:so I think we need to first step the stage for what restaurant technology companies are up against. You know, the reality is, is that, I think Brita from Vita Partners has this really great circle, this wheel right, with about 250 logos in it. And it's labeled, you know, the, the restaurant technology ecosystem or ecosystem rather,
Michael Beck:I put. Head up on screen just for backdrop,
Jeremy Julian:Yep.
Paul Molinari:terrific, right? This is a pretty crowded market scape, but here's the thing. This is only the top 250. Restaurant technology companies. The reality is, is that they're well over. You know, heck, if you go inside of ZoomInfo and you type in hospitality technology, you'll have over 14,000 companies, literally over 14,000. But, you know, when we're creating this slide, I was like, I couldn't in good conscious rate,
Michael Beck:It was too big a number.
Paul Molinari:was just like this, like insane. So even if you were to be extremely conservative say there are 4,000 you know, hospitality technology companies out there that are helping brands and, and, and the like that's in, that's a gigantic obstacle to overcome. But again, you know, to even break through into the top 250, all of these folks are You know, they're all being pigeonholed into, all into these different categories. You know, there are these finite, Michael, if you could just go back to another slide.
Michael Beck:Yep.
Paul Molinari:You know, there are these finite categories
Jeremy Julian:Yeah.
Paul Molinari:that people are, our companies are being wedged into, and, and the reality is, is that they have to, in some ways adopt that. yOu know, okay, you might be a point of sale that does, you know, AI voice and chat and, and inventory management and everything else, but you have to be known as a point of sale, you
Michael Beck:Yeah. Who are you?
Jeremy Julian:Yeah.
Paul Molinari:it's kinda like, you know, who are you, how are you positioned? You know, what is your unique value proposition? Why should companies even care? THere's a lot, there's a lot to it. There's a lot going on there. And what makes it all the more, in some ways insurmountable is that every single one of these companies are all vying for the same eyeballs. They're all looking for the same stakeholders. So it's a, it's, it's a daunting task. It's an ex extremely daunting task, task for a founder or even co-founders to try to overcome and to do it all. Right? So that's where, I think, you know, your, your story, your reason for being needs to really resonate. It has to, you have to make that visceral connection with the target or, or, you know, with your audience. And that's what we're helping them do.
Michael Beck:Yeah.
Jeremy Julian:And you've gotta cut through the noise because to your point, Paul, there's 14,000 different, options out there of different tech. And I've said this a number of times, our average client, and for those that know me outside of restaurant technology guys I, work at a company that, that sells. Restaurant technology. And so with that, our average client has 11 pieces of tech that we integrate to that's outside of the tech that we don't integrate to. So every restaurant probably has 20 pieces of tech within their brand that they're having to manage and having to deal with. And so just on the point of sale side, we've got an average of 11 different connectors that we have to connect, whether that be to the back office, like where you guys both used to work or so even getting the message out there and then. secondarily. Having the value proposition, which I think is really where Beck comes in after they hear about the besters, and know that they have the problem and know that the solution even exists, number one and number two has a way to solve it. Michael, on the CRO side, you guys help, get them to a place where they can adopt that technology and understand the value proposition. Let me just take a step back because I think it's something that that a lot of our listeners know intuitively, but we don't necessarily talk about it all the time. Talk about why there's 14,000 pieces of tech in restaurants. Are huge, hospitality is huge and people don't completely comprehend it. People don't comprehend the breadth of just even the domestic United State states restaurant market. And some estimates say there's upwards of 700,000 food service. Venues in the United States. I guess talk to me a little bit about that TAM and why you guys think that getting things out there to these segments Yeah. Be I know. For those audio listeners, why don't you talk through this slide a little bit, because I think it's important for people to comprehend how much of a penetration. Food service has in the world today because I don't think people truly understand it that are out listening. That might be running a bar and grill in, Des Moines, Iowa. That they've got just their single restaurant and then they might not understand how large and how big of a breadth of of the industry it is.
Michael Beck:It's an absolute massive market, right? Was the 10th largest employer in the United States. There are some 846,000 plus locations out there that are operating as restaurants. And if you, if for those that are looking at the illustration, we have it broken down into three segments, right? Segment one or companies that. Have that, that are between 21 locations and a hundred locations. And in that there's 70,000 businesses that are out there doing that. And then the next level up, you have about 3, 348 companies. The slices get smaller, but the businesses get bigger, right? So you have 348 companies that control 75,000 locations of business. And then you have at the very top of the spectrum, or what we all call tier one, there's 152 companies. They have 617 or so thousand locations that they're managing. And the reality is all of'em are in a different part of their journey. All of them look at the world differently, right? The ones that aren't even in these sliced off segments, the independence, you call them, the zero, the one to the twenties, they're in a different conversation in a different way of looking at things. So if I'm a technology company and I wanna talk to these guys, right? And I'm trying to break through, I have to speak the language for each section.
Paul Molinari:Mm-Hmm.
Michael Beck:And we hear things like buyer personas and things like that. But what the reality is if you look at somebody in their journey as a business they, they just think differently, right? When before you have 50 locations, you think about the world differently. After you have 50 locations, you think about the world differently. And so these guys in segment one they're just about to break over, go get over the hump, and they're just about to explode and enter that growth mode. And that's the golden number when they get there. And so there probably have some attributes that are common, right? You have, they're probably founder led still. The founder's definitely in the mix. are starting to dabble
Paul Molinari:That's right. And even though you have a, a technology solution that may be appropriate for anybody in any of those, of these three segments, the conversation and the messaging, needs to be different, For, for each of these things because they're thinking of it differently in a way that Michael just articulated. You know, the number of stakeholders goes up. So, you know, the rationale for your solution needs to be communicated differently to the, to the different stakeholders. It's, it's a formula. mean, there's, it's a lot of work. it's, and it's not easy. particularly, you can have the greatest idea in the world and, and the greatest solution. But without having proof points, you know, without having success it's going to be a very difficult and rough road to, to break through, to go up the ladder, to, you know, the, the rarefied air of, of the large enterprise. You know, and, and it's gonna be different frankly, for everybody. Every, it's not that this is, there's no cookie cutter here. You know, you, you have to take into account, you know, what the brand is. You know, what, what that, you know, what that flavor is that you're bringing to, to the, to the equation and, and, know, and how you want to be represented and how you want to tell your story. But the mo, the key is, you know, consistency and doing it in a way that that resonates with, with each and every one of these targets.
Michael Beck:And for tech companies too, they have to be honest about their product fit.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah.
Michael Beck:Like really? Because that, that literally changes the Tam Salmon song if we like these great acronyms, right? Because your serviceable market is gonna be di different than your attainable market because of what you sell,
Jeremy Julian:Yep.
Michael Beck:right? And then that has to also fit.
Jeremy Julian:And I think the, your guys' unique background, having been in the space for quite some time, you guys get that, that all of these integration touchpoints also need to talk to each other.'cause if they don't, we run into, they run into, this tech spaghetti where nothing talks to each other. And ultimately it's a point solution that was brought in by marketing. It was point solution that was brought in by operations. It was point solution that was brought in by finance and it doesn't talk to anybody else. The second thing that I'd love to talk a little bit about, because I think it's critical for us to talk through, is that some of these founders they look at that that last segment, Beck that you had up there, and they go, oh, I'm only gonna talk to somebody if they're 400 stores or more. Not realizing that,
Michael Beck:Have you ever done 400
Jeremy Julian:Yeah, Number one, Have you ever done 400 Do you even, have you ever sat in the boardroom with, because those are board level decisions. When you're talking to a 500 store chain, they oftentimes aren't just somebody That's gonna be like, oh Yeah. let me throw in your new AI solution because you're a really smart guy from Harvard or from Yale, or from,
Michael Beck:that moment where their heat, energy, and intention that brings to life that idea that's been sitting there dormant that the founder had and has been carrying around with him. How do we break it outta its shell and it's not from inside. It's an outside influence that stimulates that and creates that energy and creates that chemistry and brings it all together. It's not saying the founder can't do it, but the founder needs to be a visionary.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah.
Michael Beck:He needs to keep doing what got him there and fire himself from so many of the things that he's holding onto tightly.
Jeremy Julian:aNd I'm gonna try and wrap here just for a couple minutes'cause you're getting close to time. And I just know from the stats that people, about 45 minutes in, they start to tune out. But we went through a very similar process about a year ago within our own business. And interestingly enough, and I wanna talk through both our experience, and it wasn't with popcorn. Popcorn at the time didn't exist. And so we, you. Maybe something later. But I think that idea of truly looking in the mirror, but giving an honest look of ourselves in the mirror, we all look in the mirror every day, brush our teeth, look at our, the hair. And my goatee continues to get more and more gray as time goes on, But just in general, we look in the mirror and we get used to what we're seeing, bringing in somebody else from the outside and truly having an objective view of how. You are seen internally who you think you are, and then what your customers and what the world see about you. Who are those other people that you're competing with? And the other 14,000 people out there. And then how do you get your message to resonate as clearly as possible, both on the sales and the marketing side is what we were able to experience. Talk to me a little bit about what that looks like because it has been transformative for our sales team and our marketing team and our messaging. To be really clear as to who we are. How do our clients see us? How does the market see us? Who are those people that we're up against and we're fighting against to deliver that message, both on a sales and a marketing effort to truly start to accelerate the, at least what the images, a lot of people think about marketing and sales as. A lot of the old analogies is marketing is just posting a bunch of stuff on social media or having an email campaign that goes out and sales is buying people nice dinners and drinking a glass of wine together. But you guys know in today's day and age, that is not at all what this is. And so I'd love for you guys to talk through that because I think it's really critical for people to understand there is so much more that goes into it. People are inundated with. 10,000 different messages every day, all day, whether it be through social, through their web browser, through television. They, you need to cut through the noise to get clear on who you are and what problem you're solving, both on the sales and marketing side. Paul, I'm gonna, I'm gonna pass it back to you and then you can pass it to Michael to round us out on not only. How critical it is to do these things. And I guess even, quite frankly, challenge me if there's stuff that I missed on what we're doing, I'd love to understand that because I think there's a lot of people that are gonna be listening that don't get it and haven't gone through this journey that that we most recently have.
Paul Molinari:Yeah, that thank, thank you, Jeremy. And you know what? You're right. It's what, what it goes back to what we said earlier, that it's, it's not easy, but it should be the easiest thing in the world, because the reality is, is that every company out there knows exactly what they do. A lot of company knows know, understand how they do it, but a lot of companies are actually, you'd almost say most companies don't know why they do it.
Michael Beck:And it's not just to make money.
Paul Molinari:This is not exactly, and it's not just to make money. You know, what is your reason for getting up in the morning? Right. And this, these are not new things. This is borrowing, frankly, very heavily from Simon Sinek, right? The, the best I think modern day business philosophers in the world. the, where you have to start with is the true understanding and belief that your brand what's driving sales.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah.
Paul Molinari:brand drives sales full stop. If your brand is explaining why you're in business, what you offer, and how you do it, and that is all in balance. Sales happens.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah.
Paul Molinari:It's critical to get those three components together, your brand position, your value proposition, and that and that customer demand. once that once those three p and, and there are different certainly there are different strategies and tactics for each one of those. Like, well, how do you do your brand positioning and, and how do you really identify, you know, what your value proposition is and what is your value proposition for this person versus that person or this co or this segment versus that segment
Jeremy Julian:or the stakeholder. Or that stakeholder, or even within the business.
Paul Molinari:that stakeholder, right. And then then there's also a certain amount of technology that can help give you a lift to make all of this temp come together. Like do you have a CRM? you using your CRM the right way? You know, are you, are you disciplined in that respect? One of the things that, you know when Michael and I got together and we both, you know, I'm HubSpot certified and Michael's like a, an absolute wizard you know, with CRM and is extremely disciplined with it. And you can start to identify those goals and those targets and those milestones and you know, what's going on with this conversation and, and what does this deal look like, and, and encapsulate it, it all together. Because once your brand is telling the story for you, I'm not gonna say the leads, I'll say that the, the customer demand starts to generate.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah. But you can screw that up pretty well, Paul, if you don't have a good follow up strategy and your sales strategy has to match that messaging because if you come in and you're talking about how awesome this product is, and then a sales rep or a sales engineer or somebody on your customer service team goes, what is that? What are you guys talking about over there? I have no idea. Or they're telling the opposite message or they don't have the confidence in the product and the wisdom to understand how that solves this brand's problem. Those leads are all, essentially are for Naugh. So Michael, talk me through that, that second side of it, because I do think the messaging out is critical, but then you've gotta follow through to have it turn into revenue or it doesn't work.
Michael Beck:It, a lot of this comes down to training, right? Just across the business, whether it's technical training or just messaging. And I can't tell you how many places I've been where the salespeople are making their own messages. And it's okay to write something, right? But is it, yeah. Is it on brand? Is it even what we're talking about? And so Hey, who said you could even send this outta the building? This doesn't make any sense. You just went off the reservation completely. In fact, we don't do this or this.
Jeremy Julian:Yeah.
Michael Beck:And so one is, like Paul was saying that message, the branding isn't just about a logo. It's the language you use. It's the words. It's what our repeated statements are. What's our win statement? What are the things we repeatedly say as an organization? If I talk to you, Jeremy and I talk to art, or I talk to Chad or anybody else over at CBS, they're probably, if it's doing right, they're all saying the same things in a certain way. Other is, the follow-up and the execution of sales. You can have a really great marketing side of the business and dump leads off on a, on an incompetent sales team. Not say that they're not Good at something, but they're not managing it correctly. Whether it's the follow up, whether it's some levels of automation that at least keep that engagement moving and flowing. ANd the other part is, and I, your eyes will roll back every time I talk about CRM'cause I'm such a fanatic about it, right? My, my most recent analogy about CRM is a, is just think about Ironman.'cause I'm a comic book nerd, right? And when Ironman puts on his suit, what happens? Images, flash on the screen, threats, opportunities. This, that, it, and it really is the Ironman suit of the salesperson. It's them being able to have a heads up display on what's going on. I can't tell you how many times I'm gonna pull up my hair. If I'm on a call and somebody says, remind me what you're using again. Really, we're gonna waste this guy's time to tell us stuff we already knew.
Jeremy Julian:yeah.
Michael Beck:And some people look at their system as something they're a slave to. I'm gonna enter it tonight.
Paul Molinari:Yeah.
Michael Beck:I'm gonna do my ketchup and put it in there. Why aren't you like an Amazon operator? Hey, Jeremy. Great to talk to you. Hold on one second while I pull up your record. Alright, I got everything here. Let's go ahead and have a conversation and everything. I'm not seeing I'm rounding that off during every conversation. But it is not about fanatical data curation, right? What's the idea? The idea is that I understand who I'm talking to. I have the information I need available to me. Not only do I have it available to me, my tribe. as available to them. My, my leader who happens to know all these people and all these businesses has dropped in all the contacts that we could all benefit from, Right.
Jeremy Julian:I think it's even tying that message that says, this message on the marketing side resonated with this prospect. And now speaking to that, because again, there's so much noise and it's Hey, I understand that you're really looking at voice AI as a critical part of your business. You've done the research, you've got the data in front of you, and now It. turns into a valid conversation versus, Hey, somebody told me I needed to call you. That's a very different conversation, which we've all had both sides of that. There's the, a little bit of the creepy from time to time where you're like, Hey, you probably shouldn't know that much about me. But But that,
Paul Molinari:funny thing is, is like going back to the, to the beginning of our conversation, like the, we all, we're all vying for the same eyes, right? We, we have a very finite target
Michael Beck:have a very little amount of time when we interact with them.
Jeremy Julian:Yep.
Michael Beck:that has to be meaningful, right?
Jeremy Julian:And everybody has more on their plates than they've ever had. And so now being able to cut through that noise to ensure that you are delivering value is really critical. And if you don't, they will just start to ignore you and put you on the ignore list. And now you've lost an opportunity for somebody that you could have added value to, but you were unprepared or you didn't do your homework, you didn't do the right thing.
Paul Molinari:All right.
Michael Beck:And or just, you're marching in the wrong direction. It's, we're having one conversation. People coming in are having a completely different one that in the process. Aspect or the partners like, what the hell is going on? I thought we were on the right track and now all of a sudden it's blown up.
Jeremy Julian:Absolutely. Why don't you just give our audience for those that, that are hanging out, and I'll put this in the show notes as well, how do they get in touch with you guys? How do they learn more? How do they discover where popcorn's at and how it may be able to, add value to their brand and add value to their tech solution? Add value to what it is that they're trying to get to market.
Paul Molinari:Yeah. Thank you so much for that. You can find us simply@popcorngtm.com and you know, reach out to Michael or I directly. We left the information on the screen, but you can find at m beck at Popcorn or molinari@popcorngtm.com.
Michael Beck:And you can follow us on LinkedIn. We're doing blog content constantly,. We are posting great articles that will help change a little bit about how you look at the world and maybe give you some useful tips.
Jeremy Julian:I love it. And I know that both of you guys are pretty active out on LinkedIn as well, just on a, on your even your own personal profiles. And so if you guys haven't already connected with both of these guys, I would encourage you to do guys, I know we've talked a lot and audience, I know we've talked a lot about kind of eyeballs and people's attention. And I don't take it for granted that you guys hang out with us each and every week when we post one of these shows. Thank you to our audience. If you haven't already subscribed to the YouTube channel, if you're a YouTube viewer, if you haven't already subscribed to the newsletter once a month, you'll get an email with all of the content. I don't sell any of it. I don't put it out to bid for spammers or any of those kind of things. It's really just to make sure that you guys don't miss any of the fantastic content that's out there. Paul and Michael, Thank you guys so much for your time today and to our listeners, make it a great day.
Paul Molinari:Thank you
Michael Beck:Jeremy, thank you so much and happy new to you and your audience as well.
Jeremy Julian:Awesome. Thanks guys.
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