Todd Merrill:

Hi, welcome to Tales from the SkyLounge. It’s a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world, we talk to people who are making it happen, and we get their stories. If you could like and subscribe, it makes our producer, James, very happy.

So, today’s guests in the SkyLounge, John Yates and Gregg Bedol. Hi guys, how are you?

Gregg Bedol:

Hey, good morning.

John Yates:

Hey, Todd.

Todd Merrill:

So, who are you and what are you working on? John, you want to go first?

John Yates:

Sure, and thanks again for this opportunity. I’m John Yates. I’m a partner in the law firm of Gunderson-Dettmer, which is headquartered in Silicon Valley. But I’ve lived in Atlanta now for over 44 years and focused almost exclusively during that period of time on representing tech companies of all shapes and sizes, but most particularly companies that are growing from small to scaling up to some of the largest companies in the country. So, it’s been a great opportunity to really grow practice in a part of the region of the country in the Southeast. It’s probably the fastest-growing area for tech.

I actually got involved here back in 1981, which the folks on this podcast will remember, but many people listening may not, because they may not be around. But 1981 was a pivotal year for the technology community. The second half of 1981 was when the IBM PC was announced. And IBM opened up the architecture, Todd, to be able to let software companies right into the IBM PC. So, you can think of it as the beginning of time, the genesis of the tech community, and then spent a great 44 years since then getting to be involved actively in the community.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Gregg, who are you, and well, what are you working on?

Gregg Bedol:

Well, I’m Gregg, it’s actually Bdal, but that’s okay. I answered almost anything. I’m currently working on a project called TractionBD. And I know we’re going to get into that because it’s related to business development for professionals. But the story goes back about as far as John’s. I started my career with what used to be the management consulting division of Arthur Anderson. That takes me way back, but John and I have known each other for about 35 years now. We’re friends, we’re neighbors, and I’ve been in consulting various types for many years. I’ve also been an executive in some tech companies and a serial entrepreneur.

Over the last year, John and I just found ourselves talking literally in the driveway about some ideas that John has been playing with for 40 years, specifically, how do you do business development and, more importantly, how do you use AI in today’s world to actually enhance that process. So, we came up with an idea. I basically call it putting John Yates in a box.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha. Okay.

Gregg Bedol:

And it’s the whole idea of taking what John has developed over 40 years of expertise. And if anybody knows John, they know he’s the best at it in the entire Southeast and maybe beyond. How do you take what he has learned, what he has developed, and how do you make it available to others through an application? And at core, that’s really what we’re doing with TractionBD.

Todd Merrill:

Wow, okay. Well, let’s talk about business development in general. So, the world is changing rapidly. AI is making really great people even greater, but it’s also magnifying deficiencies as well, right? So, you’ve got to really be on your game. You know, we talk about there’s no mulligans in this economy. You really have to hit it right down the middle of the fairway. What do you all feel are the critical success factors for business development? What has changed? Actually, what are the fundamentals? There are certain things that never change, right? Relationships, or what would you put right at the top of a business development function?

John Yates:

Yeah, I think relationships are at the top. I’ll let Gregg sort of amplify this because it’s very important to understand the history of business development, at least as I’ve understood it over the last four decades. And really, business development for professionals. And you can think about anybody who is basically selling their time. So, people who don’t make any money when they’re sleeping, and there’s another way to think about it. So, that’s just a profession that we have chosen, whether it’s accounting, whether it’s legal, whether it’s a fractional area, whatever it might be. But this has really not changed in business development as far as this process for centuries.

I mean, it’s been traditionally a situation where you start as a student, a pupil, a mentee, a protege, and you are then looking for your mentor, and your mentor teaches you, you learn over a period of years, decades. You hope your mentor will then one day retire and give you their business, their clients, and relationships, or maybe your mentor passes away and you inherit that information. And it’s a long, arduous process. And so one of the things that I know Gregg and I have talked a lot about, I know you’ve had a lot of experience with, is how do professionals take that and bring it into the 21st century? And thank goodness that AI is really what has given the supercharge to that whole business development process. It’s taken what were previously very, very significant obstacles that you had to follow along the course of your career, and just accelerated that entire process. And so it’s really become a radical change in the way business development occurs. And with that AI, it probably wouldn’t even be possible.

Todd Merrill:

Well, Gregg, you want to comment on that?

Gregg Bedol:

Well, I was going to say that the core that John emphasized is that fundamentals haven’t changed. And we know that’s true in so many areas. And the foundational work hasn’t changed. The question is, what tools can you leverage to make it more efficient, faster, easier? And we talk about it in terms of its all relationships. As you’re a professional, you’re not selling a thing. You’re selling your trust and your credibility. You’re selling the fact that people expect you to do the right thing when they hire you. But one of the hardest things about selling as a professional, to start with the word is something that people don’t like, is you may not be selling something that anybody needs at a particular point in time. It’s all about being top of mind. It’s all about being there when the opportunity emerges. So, the question is, how do you do that? How do you stay visible and top of mind with people without being obnoxious, without being to the point where people say, I don’t want to have anything to do with this person. So, it’s gentle. It’s gentle. It’s nurturing. And yet you’ve got to do it constantly. It’s a tough balance.

Todd Merrill:

Mm-hmm. So, we talk about top-of-funnel brand awareness kind of activities as the basis for business development versus selling, which is maybe a different process. It’s a machine that gets you leads from marketing.

Gregg Bedol:

Mm-hmm

Todd Merrill:

So, what do we do? So, John, you mentioned, hey, you go find a mentor and then hopefully have a book of business they want to pass down to you. Society is getting more and more coarse. There aren’t as many people who want to help the next generation. Unfortunately, not everybody’s got a business they can plug into; lots of businesses are cycling, you know. We find ourselves a lot of times in places where we have to scramble and make our own destiny. What types of activities can someone do that don’t necessarily have that book of business handed to them or what, you know. Surely, it’s the same kinds of activities, just you’ve got to do more of it.

John Yates:

Well, first of all, there’s a very simple equation here that I’ve concluded applies in building your book of business as a professional, whether you’re a lawyer, accountant, consultant, whatever. That’s prospects plus actions equals clients. Now that sounds really easy. And the thing that AI has done is to sort of put brackets around it and multiply it by a thousand. But how do you find prospects when your job is to practice law, is to be an accountant? Is to be a consultant, is to provide services in the marketing and sales area, and something else? So, where do you find the time to do that? And so finding prospects and building your pipeline is not an easy process. And unfortunately, most professionals find that they get waylaid into their existing work, which is working on the assembly line, billing those hours, taking the time, and selling their time. And then you have to find breaks in your day where you can take actions with the prospects you have, once you’ve found the prospects, and then eventually turn them into clients. Well, that is a process that, traditionally, for professionals has just become elongated. It can take weeks, months, years in some instances.

The other element of that is you think about that equation, actions, it takes a lot of actions. On average, we’ve concluded, and I’ve talked to Gregg about this, and I know what he’s done in developing his TractionBD platform really addresses this concern because it generally takes, from our perspective, 7 to 10 actions to convert that prospect to a client. Well, guess what? Most professionals give up after two or three, if you can even get to two or three. And then they move on to something else. So, building a system that’s simple, easy to use is really important.

Now, the other element you talked about – building the pipeline of prospects. How do you do that? What’s really hard, especially in the old days before social media, because you just had to do it by going to meetings and events. It was a very slow process. It takes time. Now with social media, it can accelerate that. And so one of the things that I think a lot of professionals need to do more and better is basically building that social network. LinkedIn obviously is a key there, but there are other ways of doing it. This is a great example, Todd, of what you’re doing with the podcast is an excellent way to communicate a message and then promote it.

So, when you add social media, you add AI, and you add a platform like TractionBD, what you do is basically supercharge this whole process, which means that professionals can see results quicker and are more likely to be able to have success in building their book of business.

Gregg Bedol:

But be careful because it’s not just about being there. It’s adding value. What you’re doing, Todd, adds value. You’re providing information to people that is of use. I’ve watched John over the years. He’s not one of those people who just say, “Hi, how are you?” There’s always something associated with it, an article, an idea. Maybe it’s just something acknowledging their background.

Poor John, he went to Duke. Now, he’s recovered from that over the years, but he looks for people who went to Duke. And he always has something that he can say that’s related to it. So, you’re making connections, and you’re deepening the relationship. And that’s the key here, it’s not just doing the touches. It’s doing it in such a way that is relevant and meaningful and adds value. And that’s hard. That’s really hard for a lot of people.

Todd Merrill:

Mm-hmm

Gregg Bedol:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

So, I was fortunate to be in telecom during the 2000s, roaring 2000s, and we were a big public company that went around buying Silicon Valley startups. So, I got to go hang out, out there and have a couple offices. And one of the cool things that they do out there or they did was that it was a social construct. So, if you said, hey, I’m trying to do blah, everybody in the room wanted to help you. It was a moral obligation to say, hey, you need to meet so and so. You need to go do this. You need to plug into here. And then, you know, I always thought that that was a kind of cool. Like, even your competitors would help you plug in because it was that fabric of society. You think that’s unique to Silicon Valley? You know, can we do that here? Do we need more people to do more of that? And then, you know, maybe you think AI can or just using practical solutions can help us do more of that. It’s a matter of just being aware. Hey, I’m about to go talk to Todd on a podcast. Let me go do a little research, or let me go pull up that last conversation we had about that kind of thing? Is that what we’re talking about?

John Yates:

Yeah, so let me comment on that. Silicon Valley is unique, and there’s no other place on the planet that I’ve been that’s like it. And so your point about Silicon Valley and your experiences is very telling about your success in that era, but also about the nature of that geography. I mean, you go to any restaurant, and you’re probably going to find half a dozen venture capital firms there. Coffee shops, whatever. That’s just not the way it is, not just in Atlanta, but any other place in the world, frankly. Maybe some areas of Boston, but by and large, the rest of us are, we have to go find these things. And so I think the idea of working together and helping the community is very much true in Atlanta. We’ve got many tech organizations here, many groups that are focused, but one of the things that we’re trying to do also is to help create a greater sense of identity for our community, not just around enterprise software and cybersecurity and fintech, which have all been great, but also around Applied AI. So, putting together, actually, an Applied AI summit and hopefully utilizing that as a way of bringing together folks to help one another. Applied AI is such a general horizontal concept, but it covers everything from what TractionBD is doing in business development to every other area, too. And what it does is great, pointed out is that it adds value to companies. It’s an ability to say, “Come to this summit, come to this event that’s helping Atlanta.” We bring venture and private equity funds here. We bring our Fortune 500 headquarters execs here who are focused on AI. And we bring thought leadership from Georgia Tech, Duke, and other schools here.

You know, how do we do this? It’s not the same as Silicon Valley. I wish it were. But I think we have to have an event that basically plants a flag and says, “Okay, companies need to come here.” Companies like TractionBD want to be there. Companies that are anywhere in the community want to be there because they want to be a part of this Applied AI conference, which is where Atlantis planted its flag.

Gregg Bedol:

And I’ll add on top of that again, the fact that John is with Gunderson-Dettmer, which is the leading tech-oriented law firm in the country, if not the world, is making a huge difference. All of a sudden, the Atlanta community is far more visible to Silicon Valley and elsewhere because Gunderson-Dettmer has opened an office here, and that office is being led by John Yates. And those things are meaningful. As a result, we’re getting interest from places that we really didn’t get a lot of interest before. Don’t forget, John was one of the powers behind Ventra Atlanta when it was emerging. John has been one of the powers behind the Technology Executive Roundtable and any number of organizations. You can’t name a tech-oriented organization in the Southeast that John hasn’t helped build.

So, in addition to John being my SME, one of my SMEs that really is helping us define what it is that a tool like TractionBD needs to be able to do, John lives this every day. He has been spending 40 years working to build this kind of community that you’ve described in Silicon Valley. And I’m seeing the difference. I’m talking to people through an introduction from John that I would never have met before, and they’re helping. They’re here to help. Some of the best VCs in the area, some of the greatest technologists. And interestingly enough, an introduction from John here led me to the CTO of a private equity fund here that pointed me to a fractional CTO in Los Angeles. And the combination is really working. It’s really very interesting.

Todd Merrill:

Neat. Well, let’s talk about, so practical AI is kind of the label I’m putting on this. It’s a confusing time for a lot of people. I’m seeing this great divide where half the people are going, “Hey, this whole LLM generative thing is bunk. It’s a Ponzi scheme. They’re all investing in each other.” You know, you hear all the arguments of why it’s going to collapse in on itself, and it’s horrible. And then on the other hand, you know, I’m seeing a lot of people going really fast. They get it, and you go, yeah, this is going to be an interesting freight train collision. There’s going to be the haves and have-nots, and it’s going to go really, really fast. It’s kind of the playbook I’m playing out of. And I’m trying to help as many people as possible up that learning curve. A lot of people aren’t ready for it yet. Right? And then I thought, okay, we can teach people these practical AI skills, you know, how to do it yourself. I don’t think people are ready for that. I think people want kind of your approach, which is here it is, you know, talk about what, you know, let’s put BD in general for a second. And then very specifically, okay, there’s a problem in the market. AI can help. How do you, as experienced entrepreneurs, think about this problem and then break it down for us, what led you to this, and then kind of how are you going about solving the solution, and then what’s different this time around because I know you’ve started a couple things. It’s super different this year than it has been, even last year how you go about starting a company.

Gregg Bedol:

Mm-hmm. Yep.

Todd Merrill:

Maybe kind of walk us through that. Like, okay, what’s the napkin story like or you like raking leaves or what was going on in the driveway when you say, “Hey, you know what we ought to do.” What was that moment like?

Gregg Bedol:

Let me dive in. There are ups and downs in independent consulting and the other things that I have done over the years. I describe it as I’m heads down on an engagement. I’m working 8, 10, 12 months and focused on it. All of a sudden, I look up, there’s about a month left, and I’ve got no pipeline. So, my story is the roller coaster that many professionals experience. John, as a friend and neighbor, has heard it ad nauseam. Well, his is the opposite. John is constantly doing business development. And we’re talking about it. AI is the difference, Applied AI.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Gregg Bedol:

All of a sudden, it dawned on us. We can use tools that were not available a year ago, as you said, to actually execute on this concept that we’ve been talking about for years. It’s not that the idea is new. It’s that the underlying technology that allows us to do it has evolved. And we’re doing enough. Yeah.

Todd Merrill:

And it kind of, yeah, drilled down into that a little bit. Like, what is it, and then kind of what’s different.

Gregg Bedol:

Well, I’ll give you one example. TractionBD is a voice-enabled tool, and it’s a mobile-enabled tool. We know that professionals do not want to come back to a desktop and sit and type a whole bunch of stuff in. That’s been there for years. It’s called CRM, and it doesn’t work.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Gregg Bedol:

People don’t like it. CRM is a repository for data. We were figuring out how to actually leverage CRM. They’ve been capturing data for a long time. How do you leverage it? How do you get data into it? How do you get data out of it? How do you work if you don’t have a CRM? And all of that becomes enabled when you say, I can talk to my phone. I can talk to my phone, and I have AI behind it, and AI can parse what I’m saying. AI can determine what I do with that information, and then it can go from there.

Todd Merrill:

Mm-hmm

Gregg Bedol:

I’m literally holding back a little bit because there’s a lot of stuff we’re doing that I think is really fascinating, as well as proprietary and potentially patentable. And I don’t want to talk about all of that.

Todd Merrill:

Sure, yeah.

Gregg Bedol:

But I will tell you that from a technical standpoint, we couldn’t be doing what we’re doing right now without AI. I’m also going to tell you from the business development standpoint, AI has become my staff. Things that would normally take a team of people weeks and months to determine, to work on, I can sit and talk to AI, and in a matter of minutes, I can get responses that are 80% there. The time it takes to get things done has been incredibly compressed.

Todd Merrill:

Mm-hmm, for sure.

Gregg Bedol:

And things that I am not good at, at all, I can ask the AI about. And it’s good. It will tell me, and it will give me hints and tell me where to go and what to do, and that’s the thing I know I’m often running.

John Yates:

Let me comment on one thing, too, that I think might be interesting in that regard. I think one of the things, Todd, that’s a big challenge for professionals is that we think about this equation. We think about prospects plus actions equal clients. The problem we talked about earlier was that it takes these two, it takes, let’s say, 7 to 10 actions to convert that prospect to a client. Well, the problem with that is, again, people give up after two or three. Why do they give up? Because they can’t think of anything else.

Todd Merrill:

Okay, yeah.

John Yates:

I can only invite this person to play golf so many times. I mean, how many times do they want to go to a football game or whatever? And so what happens is you lose track of it. And therefore, there are these diminishing results that occur over a period of time, that you just lose the connection. So, you try to build it. But if you’re not enhancing that relationship, either doing something, taking some action, it just diminishes and degrades. So, one of the keys that I think I’ve explained to Gregg in TractionBD that’s so critical. I mean, a couple of things. I’ve said it’s got to be simple. It’s got to be easy to use. It can’t take much of my time because I have to go off and do the other stuff that I’m getting paid to do, you know, every day on that assembly line. But it’s also got to be creative. It’s got to give me ideas about what to do. And so one of the keys, and this was something I had thought about, but Gregg and his experience, he said, “Look, John, TractionBD helps you build this sort of ideal client profile.” And so I said, “Well, good. Well, how do I do that?” And the interesting thing about AI is I don’t really have to build it myself. AI, in this case, Gregg’s platform, goes in and looks at existing clients, looks at the kind of people I’ve been working with, and it can extrapolate the ideal client profile from there.

So again, I’ve saved myself time. I know I sit back and think about it myself. And then it’s giving me real-time actions.

I mentioned to Gregg when he was building the platform, said, look, what if I pull up an action early in the morning, I pull the phone off of my charger, I’m in bed, I’m looking at it, I want to take two or three steps in business development before I jump out of bed. I don’t have but a minute and a half. I hit an action. I can actually do things right there on my phone. And if I don’t like the action that’s been proposed, I can go to another action. It gives me suggested new ideas. So, it’s just supercharging, not just what the value of information is, but the timeframe. Because this timeframe, for most professionals, it’s not 30 seconds or a minute and a half in your bed before you get up and take a shower. It’s like a year, if it even happens in some instances.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Yeah.

John Yates:

It’s completely revolutionized the way we should be thinking about business development because that’s a critical element to the success of a professional.

Todd Merrill:

You know, I talk about this a lot with what is practically AI good for, and it’s removing grindy parts of your job. And then it’s providing that emotional lift. So, if I have to go, if you’re in bed, you know, or somewhere between bed and in the bathroom, right? And then, you thought about it, and then, you have to read through a month’s worth of email to go review whatever, you’re not going to do it. Right? Cause it’s just emotionally draining. I just want to go to the bathroom. But if it was like, hey, shower, thought, shower, thought, shower, thought, yes, no, remind me at noon. And then boom, you’ve done three positive actions that are micro, you know, little, little bitty steps that are going to advance the sale or advance something. Right? That’s the way we’re thinking about the world; it sounds like we’re all kind of in agreement.

Gregg Bedol:

I want to add one thing to what you were just saying. Think back a hundred years to the beginning of the assembly line. One of the things that the assembly line taught us was that robots and people can do the same thing over and over and over again, and it’s a very valuable, productive way of performing. Well, humans, as you were just talking about, you need that emotional lift, and you need that response. Computer doesn’t need that. So, one of the biggest differences in what we’re doing is that the individual human becomes persistent. It becomes a very consistent process to get to those 7 to 10 actions that you’re talking about, but it’s got to be authentic. So, one of the things that we’re really focused on, and again, this is something that AI enables, is it can actually execute in your voice. You can train it so that it can sound very much like you, and over time, it gets better and better and better. So, it’s one of those things that you look at the specific components of what makes business development so difficult for so many people, and you fix those and you address those things. We don’t change at all the overall concept and philosophy of business development. We just go after the weak spots.

Todd Merrill:

You know, back in the day, you used to have to show up to an event, and then you’d hand a piece of paper to people, business cards, right? And then, if you’re really clever, you had like a little scanning machine back at the desk that you handed your secretary the stack of cards, and they would scan it into the CRM, right? And then if you’re really on your game, but boy, like I have stacks of cards. I still haven’t thrown away because I’m not sure if I might call him one day. I’m not going to call him. You know, it’s in a stack of cards way over there, right? It is the reality of it. And then we’ve gone from that to now, you know, hey, I go to a dinner and unexpectedly just three or four people, where you go, my God, I got to follow up with these people. And then, you know, you lose it if you don’t write it down or something, and I used to carry around like a little pocket notebook.

Now, we’re at a point where we have a shot at recording stuff, you know, under your watch or in your phone or something, right? Where you go, hey, follow up with blah, blah, blah about so-and-so. And then it can enter a workflow and get enriched, and then off… You guys are taking notes. Yeah. So, are we there? Like I’ll buy that, you know, if you have that. And then is it creepy? Like, if you show up with the lapel pin or like the weird Ray-Ban glasses, you know, that are recording everything, is that where we’re going? You know, nobody wants to sit in a clubhouse room. Everybody wants to have a nice dinner with people and focus on the human conversation. Nobody wants to be recorded for later processing, but we all kind of want to do that. You know, so there’s this weird line, right? Where are we heading? Where is this all going?

Gregg Bedol:

My opinion, and that’s all it is, I’ve seen devices that are out there now that are inconspicuous and record everything. I’m uncomfortable with that without some kind of acknowledgement, some kind of discussion or way of saying, you know, we’re recording this. I am not uncomfortable. I’m very comfortable with the idea of meeting somebody, talking to somebody, and then, after you’re finished turning around and recapping what you talked about into something that will capture it for you so you can then do something with it later. I think the recording everything option is going to emerge. I’ve seen too many devices, too many things right now that enable that to think that there won’t be some pocket where people do that. But think about the people we’re working with, lawyers and accountants and others. The idea of recording everything is anathema.

Todd Merrill:

No, yeah, no.

Gregg Bedol:

You’re just not going to want to do that. I believe very strongly in what John has taught me, which is that business development is not an automated process. It’s a human-to-human process. And we keep that in mind in everything that we’re doing. It’s human-to-human. So, how do you leverage technology? How do you accelerate processes? How do you make it easier to do things without losing that human connection?

John Yates:

Let me amplify on that too, if I could, because this whole idea of the example, Todd, you gave of going to the dinner or the meeting and collecting all these business cards, I suspect everybody listening to this podcast has got thousands of business cards all over the place and probably like me as I did my cleaning here at the year-end, threw a whole bunch of them in the trash can.

The old model was that you take the business cards, you put them in your desk, or you put them in your coat pocket. Three weeks later, you put the jacket on again, you put your hand in the coat pocket, you pull up the business card, you say, Gregg Bedol, who’s that?

Todd Merrill:

Mm-hmm

Gregg Bedol:

I cannot tell you how many times people have said, Gregg Bedol, who’s that?

John Yates:

Yeah, wait.

Todd Merrill:

I have a system which jacket pocket you put it in and then I’ll fold the card over if I would do or don’t want to. I want to reveal my system, but yeah.

John Yates:

Right. Well, I can see I put Gregg Bedol, flip it over and say something like, great connection, super company. And then I’ve scribbled something. I can’t even read it.

Todd Merrill:

Right, right.

John Yates:

That’s the problem. The old model was that. And it’s interesting people still have business cards, right? Which is because there’s no real perfect method. Well, one of the things that is so important that TractionBD does is the input. So, number one is input. How do you get it in there? More recently, you send it off to your secretary, and he or she types it into the CRM system. Well, that’s great. Now it’s there. You can throw your business card away, but that didn’t help you necessarily in and of itself. That’s like, as Gregg said, a CRM is like a storage device. It’s like you drop coal into one of the cars on the train. That doesn’t mean coal does anything. It’s just sitting there. But you have to have an input device. So, one of the important things that Gregg has created in this TractionBD product, you take the business card, you just scan it. Boom, you’re done. Okay, you got it. Now you’ve captured it for yourself, for you. Okay. It can also be integrated with the CRM, but you’ve got it. So, that’s number one.

Number two is, now I got that. Boom, I can determine, or better yet, AI through TractionBD determines, is that something that actually meets your ideal client profile? Where is it in that category?

And then number three gives me some action things to do. And that whole process is so much more important than just grabbing the business card, because as you say, you grab the business card, you stick it in your pocket, you think about, man, this guy, Gregg, could be an unbelievably interesting guy. He’s got a really cool company. But then, literally, most of us, you know, five minutes later, we’re off to something else. So, having a system that you can pull it in quickly, input it, not throw it on a train somewhere with all the other coal, but input it into a system that’s now going to generate actions for you and very importantly, continue to remind you because you need to be reminded about taking actions is super important. So, it just, again, compresses the timeframe of this equation of being able to take prospect plus action and turn them into a successful client.

Todd Merrill:

And you’re always going through that pile of coal on the train, right? The fuel on the train, yeah.

Gregg Bedol:

That’s exactly right. And as a matter of fact, you know, every piece of coal in our model, boy, we’re showing our age talking about coal-driven steam engines.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Gregg Bedol:

Lord. Yeah. Every piece has a different level of importance. You don’t want to just randomly grab coal. This is a metaphor I need to get off of. You don’t want to randomly just grab a name. You actually want to focus on who’s most important. And that’s not something that most human beings can do quickly and randomly, or quickly and effectively. John has developed a system over the years. He’s got spreadsheets. He’s got a hot list. I mean, he knows who he wants to talk to on any given day. And we’ve taken that concept and modeled it. And said, there’s a priority sequence. Who is at the top of the priority sequence? We’ve also said, “Look, you don’t want to touch everybody every day. That’s obnoxious.” So, if I touch somebody today, I mean, I won’t touch them again for a week or two weeks, depending. But if they respond to something, I’m going to touch them again. So, you know, it’s a very disciplined process. Real business development is disciplined.

Todd Merrill:

And we’re not talking about a drip campaign in the traditional sense, right?

Gregg Bedol:

God, no.

Todd Merrill:

Okay, yeah, this is different, and everybody you touch has got a different path through life and a different way of interfacing with you.

Gregg Bedol:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

And then soon, rather than every gets the same five emails, maybe with it, if then in there somewhere, you know, this is true.

Gregg Bedol:

No. it’s very personalized. And again, with AI, we can go out and say, “Hey, here’s an article that’s interesting to this person.” We’re going to marry those. And the AI will actually craft the message. Now, you can edit it, but we’re hoping over time you’ll look at it and say, well, that’s pretty darn good. Send. And it goes.

Todd Merrill:

Do you remember the old LinkedIn used to have, like a thing, a plugin for your browser, where, or like while you’re in the email, you know, pulling the LinkedIn little sidecar. It’s like down on steroids is really what we’re talking about. Right? And then it’s persistent over time, and it’s like, you know, a thousand times, but it’s kind of that vein of thinking, right? Where we couldn’t do it before, now we can have rich, meaningful, contextual, appropriate conversations with everybody that we talk to, right?

John Yates:

One of the things really interesting about this, Todd, is that as I’ve talked to Gregg about business development in this area, a lot of what I’ve been thinking about is what you’re talking about. The manual things we do, the things that we do, the emails we write, the meetings we have, all those are important. But one of the key points that Gregg has ingrained in me is that all these steps that These things that I’ve been doing that take time in business development can be automated. And they cannot only be automated, they can be improved, and they can accelerate my ability to maximize the face-to-face value with prospects. So, it may be that the action I take is an email to set up a face-to-face meeting, or maybe to invite somebody to an event. But it just accelerates this entire process rather than what was frankly, you know, just literally a couple of years ago, where it might’ve taken four months to get that event put together. Now, it literally can be put together in, you know, a tenth of the time.

Todd Merrill:

Let me kind of throw a left, you know, a left turn here. So, it sounds like traditional CRM is just kind of going away or has to evolve, right? It’s going to happen really fast.

Gregg Bedol:

Evolve, evolve, yes. And I actually, I’m sorry, keep going.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, yeah. And then I want to talk about one of the powerful things with CRM, which involves or empowers teamwork, right? In a professional services organization, can group hunt, right? What is that kind of vector of innovation look like? You know, where’s CRM going? What would teams look like in an AI era?

Gregg Bedol:

I think that good CRMs will have tools that have some similarity to what we’re talking about, but the audience is very different. Most, really users of CRM systems are marketing organizations and professional salespeople. People who spend 100% of their time doing processes of marketing and sales. CRM is company-oriented, it’s firm-oriented, and there’s a lot of value there. In fact, we recognize that for companies that don’t have CRMs, there are certain levels of CRM functionality that we want to be able to bring to the table bluntly, so they don’t have to go out and buy a full CRM that they don’t have the staff to support, but it gives them some of that key functionality, but you can already see it emerging in Salesforce and HubSpot, and other companies. This idea of using agentic AI to be able to recommend things that organizations are going to do or should do. I think that from my perspective, one of the huge differences is we’re focused on the needs of the individual professional who actually, as John said earlier, does not sell to make a living. They deliver a service, and the selling is a necessary evil that allows them to do that. There are thousands of organizations that benefit from and will continue to benefit from CRMs.

We’re thinking, well, they’ve got a ton of data there. We’ll use the data. And we’re an easy frontend. We’ll take what we get and send it into the CRM. So, we see ourselves as a complement to and an extension of CRMs down to the individual person. But we think that our user and their user are two different people.

John Yates:

Let me highlight the problem with CRMs and professionals as well. And Gregg and I have talked about this. And Todd, you know this as well. It is time-consuming to put information into a CRM. And with all due respect to us and other professionals who are listening to this, we’re not always likely to get it right. Okay? So, we may put some of the information in there. Some of us are really poor typists. We’re not going to wait and spend a lot of time. Even if we can scan it in, okay, we get the information in there, but do we even put it in the right category?

Most of the time, I think professionals, we don’t have the time to do that. Now, if you are a salesperson for a tech company, and the only way you make money is if you put information into the CRM, you’d be instantly at night at 9 o’clock in the evening, type this stuff in there while your spouse is screaming at you because you’re supposed to be going to bed. So, this is not a happy process.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Log our phone calls, right?

John Yates:

Number one, you got to get it in there.

Todd Merrill:

Right

John Yates:

There’s a role for the CRM, but how do you get in there? And even if you scan it in there, here’s the second challenge that professionals have with the CRM. And by the way, the CRM is important. You need the cars on the train. They’re carrying lots of stuff, okay? That stuff’s important. It’s data in many instances, all right? But the second big problem is you put it in there as a professional, you don’t know who’s using it and what it’s being used for, all right? You’re trying to build your own book of business. Now you care about the firm, too, but you’re trying to build your own book of business. And now you’re dumping all this data into this car, the trains, the cars on the train, you’re not really exactly sure how it’s being used or who’s using it. Okay. And then thirdly is you don’t really have an actionable plan there. The beauty of what I’ve seen that I think is really important is having a way, having your own personal sort of coach, your own personal dashboard, your own personal TractionBD, I guess, to basically get you to take this information, which is now in all these cars on the train, the CRM train, but the locomotive that gets you moving, gets you helping to develop your plan, your business development model, and accelerate it as you go along. And so that gateway into the CRM is super important, because I want it from my own pipeline. I want to be able to have, but I want to have the cars and the train available if I want to pull that data.

Gregg Bedol:

But John, you’ve also spent a lot of time talking to me about the importance of sharing credit, getting credit, knowing who the team is. And Todd had asked a little bit earlier about teamwork and you’ve got some really clear ideas about that.

John Yates:

Yeah. It’s super important, and you talk about this, and this is something Gregg and I have talked about. How do you promote teamwork? A CRM, with all due respect, doesn’t promote teamwork in the sense that you’re putting all this stuff in there. What’s really important is also to think about the concept of you being measured for your performance in your professional service firm. And you’re measured when you sit down and have your performance review, right? We all have performance reviews. And somebody says, “Well, how did you do this year?” You say, “Well, I’ve built this many hours, and I did all these great things out there.” And if you have a, I guess, if you have TractionBD, Gregg, you’ve got to cut me, you know, it generates a compensation report where you can show how many actions you took and how many prospects you brought in, which is fantastic. And that’s something I’m really looking forward to having, by the way.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

John Yates:

Having that kind of report. But I think, Todd, the issue of teamwork is really important. And one of the things I’ve mentioned to Gregg is that there ought to be a way, and I think this is what TractionBD is doing, and I really think it’s important. When you sit down in that compensation committee meeting, or your performance review meeting, and you hand them, tell them about all these metrics that you have that you measure now through this platform, but you also show where you’ve shared origination credit. Where did you share credit? If it’s all, know, Todd claims 100% credit for everything he did; it was all mine, you wouldn’t do this, of course, Todd. But it’s all mine; nobody else helped me at all. I’m the one who gets the credit. I need to be rewarded. Well, that’s not showing much teamwork. And so, where the rubber meets the road in teamwork is that you share origination credit. And that’s something that I told Gregg is very important for TractionBD to track. Where have you tracked? Where have you shared that origination credit? And so it’s just, again, another way of showing where you really show teamwork. It’s not just go pat people on the back. It’s where you’re sharing your success with others. And that’s a really important concept that, for the first time, we can now measure. And I think people on a compensation committee or performance committee can actually not just guess on what it is, but they can actually see the metrics on it.

Todd Merrill:

So, your firm has 10 touches, who was it and when was it? And then if it’s top of funnel brand, hey, I spoke at a conference full of a thousand people, what’s that worth? I don’t know. But it’s a touch and its credibility and then you have to do those things but then how do you attribute?

Gregg Bedol:

So, well, one of the things that … there’s actually a gentleman who’s a very well-known VC here in Atlanta, and I won’t mention his name without his permission, but who took a look at what we were doing and got really excited because of the concept of being able to capture the ROI of your business development efforts.

Todd Merrill:

It’s hard. It’s very hard.

Gregg Bedol:

Using TractionBD, you can actually see how much time you spend in general on your business development efforts, as well as for specific prospects. And that’s now measurable because the backend of it is what converted to revenue. So, you’ve got that. And I guess one thing that I do want to mention, it comes all the way back to the very beginning, about what business development is. It’s not just prospects. Its prospects, its past clients, its current clients, its referral partners. It’s building relationships, maintaining relationships with all of them, because they all become sources of opportunities. And I don’t want people to think that we’re focused just on, oh, I’ve got a prospect and I’m going to talk to that person. My best opportunity for additional business is a past client, somebody I did great work for, because they might actually have more work for me, and they may know people that they can introduce me to. It’s a much, much better opportunity than a cold intro. And most of us do a really, really poor job of going back to previous clients and just staying in touch. “Hey, thinking about you. Here’s an article I saw that you might find really interesting. Hope everything’s good. Maybe we should get together for coffee one day soon.”

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. And, you know, going through my product hat on, right? So, manufacturing singles in the traditional sense of, hey, go, purchase ads and, you know, beep, you know, spam LinkedIn and do cold email outreach. All of those traditional methods are diminishing returns, right? They’ve gotten super, super ineffective because it’s so easy with all these AI tools to spam out artificial messages. And I think what’s going to be left at the bottom of the dust pile here that’s meaningful is, the interpersonal relationships, right? You get a genuine phone call or genuine outreach from somebody you know about something you care about. And that’s all that really matters. You know, you’ve got 50 emails, 49 of them are junkie, just kind of delete or maybe save for later, which is manana or never, you know. Yeah, I think you’re on something for sure.

Gregg Bedol:

Well, thank you. We’re playing with a couple of phrases right now. One is relationships drive revenue. Another one, which is similar, is relationships grow your practice. But the idea is that it all starts with relationships. We’re not saying that you go in with a hard sell. We’re just saying, stay in touch, build a relationship. Be top of mind. And when you are top of mind, the opportunities are going to come. And it’s a numbers game. If you can do a hundred versus doing 10, you’ve got that much better opportunity of being top of mind and getting the right opportunities, getting the right jobs.

Todd Merrill:

Let me bounce something off of you all. I don’t think this is limited to professional services. I think it’s very valuable. I think what I’m seeing in the early-stage software world is it’s so easy to get a product in the market. Now, the old model, investment model of go back a couple of really smart Georgia Tech juniors who are going to eat ramen noodles for a year and then get a product and then we’ll see and then surround them with a team. I think that is gone. Right? Or shortly, it’s not going to be the play. And I think it’s so easy to get a product in the market that the only thing that’s going to be left is now we’re going to have to start looking at backable founders with relationships that are already existing because you can’t advertise your way into a, you know, a new … if you don’t have existing relationships in the market as a technical founder, your toast. Like, there’s no way to break through artificially with advertising and cold outreach and that kind of thing. There’s no amount of things you can show up to, to make it go fast enough to where you’re investable. Do you guys feel like that’s the way the world’s going? Is that mid-career backable founder, someone with a lot of relationships that comes all the way back around to BD ability, I need to be able to make 10 phone calls and get a couple of bites on this new product or else it ain’t going to happen?

John Yates:

Yeah, think one of these very interesting times and maybe picking up on that is that it’s easier for the more mature entrepreneur now to grow a new business and not to say that Gregg and I are all that mature, but we are. Gregg just said his seventh decade is that right, Gregg?

Gregg Bedol:

I’m not going anywhere near that, John.

John Yates:

So, I’m getting ready to hit mine, too. So, what’s very interesting is that, you know, it’s not a situation where we just have, you know, years and years and years ago built something. What AI has done is accelerate the ability to build a new business. Social media has allowed that to happen. And one of the benefits for those of us that may be a little bit older is that especially if we’ve been using social media for a long time, we got a lot of connections.

Todd Merrill:

Yes.

John Yates:

We have a lot of people and so we’ve built a lot of relationships. And I know we all get inquiries frequently from folks. I do particularly from funds and others saying, I see you’re connected to so-and-so. Can you introduce me? Which I’m happy to do in most instances. So, there’s a huge advantage that actually we have now that we’re older. We didn’t forget about all those. We may have forgotten about it in our memory, but LinkedIn’s got that information there. So, it really provides an advantage both for, let’s say, a software entrepreneur building a company, you can do it as you’re older, which Gregg has shown remarkably successful in being able to do that with TractionBD, which you can also then tap into a network of contacts and relationships and social media connections that we never had before that allow you to continue to build a business and do it with a lot less time and a lot less money.

Todd Merrill:

Absolutely. And if you can’t go that fast, it’s not a luxury anymore. You have to go that fast or else somebody else is going to do it. You got a couple more minutes. I’d want to ask you all about Atlanta. How can we help Atlanta? What does Atlanta need? What should we be looking forward to? You mentioned your summit, which is super interesting to me. I’d love to come to something like that and participate. What’s the future of Atlanta, community-wise, look like?

John Yates:

I’ll sort of add maybe mention three things that I think are really important. Atlanta is planting a flag in one major area that makes us distinguish and believe different from everywhere else is important. And Applied AI is probably a very natural area, where we bring together these constituencies, bring together the Fortune 500 companies that are AI research, we bring together Georgia Tech, you know, Morehouse, Emory, Duke, and others that basically can help to promote thought leadership. We bring together also the money folks. And we bring together a mayor and frankly a governing group of leaders who care about technology. I mean, our mayor right now, Mayor Dickens is a Georgia Tech graduate. I’ve taken him to Silicon Valley. He cares about this. So, that’s really important number one.

Number two is we have to attract more funds here and we have to do it in a way that basically educates them. We have not done as great a job as we can to let them know about companies like Great Company and others that are here that are growing that might be in stealth mode right now. How do we do that?

And thirdly is we really need to continue to enhance this major advantage we have, which is these Fortune 500 headquarters that are here. How do we continue to integrate them in? We’ve got great groups out there, like Engage and others that are bringing them together, but there should be other ways that we can continue to grow those relationships because B2B companies are selling to those businesses. And so, things like the Applied AI Summit, bringing the venture funds here, bringing these constituencies together, are really important. And so I think we’re going to have a successful summit in 2026, and maybe that will be a way to supercharge relationships.

Todd Merrill:

Well, we look forward to that summit, and hopefully it will be on LinkedIn, I guess. And if you haven’t linked to that, we’ll link it in the show notes here.

Hey, it’s been great having you guys. It’s all about getting out there in the world and seeing stuff and making things happen and seeing people. Surely, you’ve got a couple of great travel stories you want to share.

Gregg Bedol:

Well, I’ve been traveling for way too many years. Lifetime Platinum Medallion on Delta, I’ll never get higher at this point. Lifetime Titanium Elite on Marriott. I think my single, I don’t know if I’d call it favorite, infamous travel story is we were on a vacation, pseudo vacation in Italy and I had a conference call scheduled. What can I say? So, we’re driving through the mountains going from point A to point B and can’t get a signal. So, my wife, we stopped the car. I get out, I’m standing on the side of a mountain in Italy and I’m taking this conference call. Unbeknownst to me, my wife in the background is both making faces and taking pictures.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha!

Gregg Bedol:

So yeah, they have not let me live that one down for a while.

John Yates:

So, I think my travel story that is most unique to me. It’s been my trip I made to India. It’s the most interesting country that I’ve visited. A little different from Italy, but I was going to a meeting through the largest tall booth in the world. It’s outside of Gargan in India and Mumbai. I mean, this is like huge. Maybe like 50 different entrances for cars to go in. I had a driver. We were going through the first chute, and I looked to my right, and there was a horse-drawn wagon that was going through the chute next to me. And I realized as we went down the highway, there were people who were literally using brooms to clean the highway. And I thought, you know, there are a lot of people in India, it’s the most populous country in the world. But it highlighted to me that you can use people for these resources, but there are just so many people we have that are available to do these tasks. But if we automate these tasks, we automate them in a way where we may be hurting some people with jobs. And so that’s going to create some real issues for some countries in the world. But the ability to automate and the ability to create, when you think about the largest toll booth in the world, then you think about a horse-drawn wagon going through, you realize the juxtaposition of how technology changes the way we live, the way we operate. And particularly, I think the way we as professionals are going to begin operating. In many instances, we’re still that wagon going through the toll booth in many instances. What we need to do is get ourselves into a more automated manner. And so I use India sometimes as a sort of motivation to say, look, we can use technology to accelerate what we’re doing, particularly in areas like business development.

Todd Merrill:

Awesome. Well, it’s been great having you guys. If anybody wants to reach out and follow up with you after this on the internet, what’s a great way to do that, or how would you recommend people get in touch with you?

Gregg Bedol:

I think the single easiest thing is through LinkedIn. Message, connect there. My email, simply enough, is gregg@tractionbd.com. But either of those works. I love to hear from people.

John Yates:

LinkedIn for me is fine as well. It’s a good way to be able to get connected to folks. And surely the first step that I take is getting connected to LinkedIn, and the second step will be getting them into TractionBD, Gregg.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha!

Gregg Bedol:

Well, yeah, there are some tremendous opportunities there.

Todd Merrill:

That might be an involuntary process from what I’m hearing. You get in there whether you like it or not. Well, hey, it’s been great having you all here, and I appreciate the time.

John Yates:

Thank you.

Gregg Bedol:

It’s been great. Thank you, Todd.

Todd Merrill:

Bye for now.