The Antidote Ep 2 - Building AMP with Morgan J Ingram

📝 Episode Summary

In the second episode The Antidote, Morgan J Ingram, Founder at AMP, joins Alex Olley for a conversation about being more human and thinking outside the box. Morgan delves into the Three A’s framework, a three-step approach that allows GTM teams to double down on what works (amplify), focus on tactics that help them grow (acquire), and lean into existing customers to drive additional revenue (advocate). Morgan reflects on what it takes to be an excellent seller, the challenges of building AMP, and how he found gratitude as a way to live a happier and more fulfilling life. 

🤓 What will I learn

✅ How the Three A's framework can help you build a more robust pipeline and turn customers into advocates
✅ Why the humanization of marketing efforts is essential to guarantee the effectiveness of any marketing channel
✅ What differentiates B2B and B2C influencer marketing and why B2B organizations should lean into these types of tactics
✅ How having an "anti-why" mindset and focusing on continuous learning and adaption can help any seller reach the top

👀 Key Insights

1. The Three A's framework

We all know the market is crowded. Being able to differentiate your business from the competition, grow your pipeline, and keep your customers is proving to be harder than ever. And sometimes, teams focus on the wrong things. The key? Amplifying, acquiring, and advocating.

“So essentially when you're looking to go do something, it's not that you don't have it already there, you just need to make it look different or be better. So that's the first “A” which is amplify. So we take what you're already doing and we just make it look better. (...) Then there's acquire. So everyone, when they do a marketing activity now, it's not just, oh, we're just doing marketing and get to do marketing. Especially with this market right now. So we're pinning things towards like, how does this attribute to pipeline? How does this advance the pipeline? (...) And then advocate because they had such a good experience in the buyer journey through your marketing, cause you did it differently than everyone else, they now become advocates that will then have word of mouth so that you can get more pipeline on top of that.”

The Three A’s framework can be applied to almost any marketing tactic - events, digital marketing, content, etc. The key is being able to elevate and differentiate what you’re doing, tying it to your pipeline goals, and cultivating relationships post-sale that can help your customers become advocates.

Everyone loves events. But event marketing is broken - most events nowadays are boring, long, not engaging, and - more than what marketers like to admit -, a waste of investment. So how can GTM teams turn them around? They need to develop a game plan, focusing on standing out, creatively engaging their audience, and taking action before, at, and post event!

“Please stop buying booths for 50 to 70 grand, sending reps there and not giving them a game plan. And they're twiddling their thumbs. This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. I've been to 14 events this year and 90% of the booths are the same. What are you doing right to be different? I just don't understand this. If you think about it, if you run six events, you pay half a million, $600,000 in events and your reps are just sitting there doing nothing. You have no creativity, you have no traffic. This is the dumbest investment in the entire world. But how can we fix it?”

Instead of relying on traditional and mundane methods, for your next event think outside the box. How can you engage your target audience? How can you leave a memorable impression?

3. How to be a better sales rep

One thing Morgan regrets not doing when he was a sales rep? Collaboration cross-functionally, especially with customer success.

“I thought that I just knew how to reach out to people because I would listen to the sales podcasts back in that day and be like, okay, I got it. I got the techniques. I have the frameworks. I can just do it. That's a problem because there’s like the missing pieces, the person I'm talking to, the customer to figure out what they actually care about.”

As a seller, knowing the tools and techniques at your disposal is only going to take you halfway there. To really become the best of the best and drive the best possible results, you need to know who you’re selling to. So take the time to get together with other teams in your business and ask questions. Why are your customers buying? What differentiates you from your competitors? What are your use cases and pain points that your product solves?

▶️ Watch full episode on Youtube:

📖 Transcript

Alex Olley (00:02.64)
All right, Morgan. Well, nice to see you, mate. Welcome to The Antidote. What's been keeping you busy?

Morgan Ingram (00:05.79)
Yeah. So building AMP, my company has kept me plenty busy to say the least. Uh, and then also I have a PS5 and there's been a lot of awesome games that have come out. Spider-Man 2, I've been killing it. Y'all that's, I've been killing in that game. So those are two things that keep me busy.

Alex Olley (00:24.79)
I love that. I haven't had a PS5 for ages. I've been asking my wife if my four-year-old son would want one for Christmas, but she keeps saying no. All right, well, look, thanks for joining me today. The first thing that I always ask everyone is that everyone out there has a big challenge that they're trying to solve. We call this the poison. What we want to do is give listeners an antidote.

What's there might be one, there might be two, but what's the big challenge or challenges you're on a mission to solve?

Morgan Ingram (01:00.71)
So I have two. So I might switch it up from the other guest here. I got two. So let's go with the professional one. I'm looking to solve the pipeline problem in the GTM space. I have done a ton of work with top of the funnel and sales development, but I think it actually goes bigger than that. The traditional marketing and the traditional sales methods just aren't working. And I'm looking to show people how you can do this in an innovative way to get even more pipeline and more quality leads.

I even actually just recently read the Pavilion study that just came out. And a lot of the stuff that we're looking to solve aligns directly with that. People are like, we want more high quality leads. We have to find new strategies to do that. And that's what I'm on the mission to do.

Alex Olley (01:43.12)
Nice man. Okay. I'm gonna dig into that a little bit in a second, but you said there was another thing. What could that be?

Morgan Ingram (01:48.38)
Yeah, so personal. So some of you might vouch for this and you probably have seen this gone wrong. And I know a lot of there's a lot of bad apples out there, especially in our space. I want to be able to build something with good moral, upstanding conscious. I don't want to do things that are shady, underhanded tactics that just to get to the top. Like that's just personally not me. And that's not what I stand for. I want to be I want to show people what it looks like to lead a group of people to the finish line and do it in the right way from beginning to end.

Alex Olley (02:22.03)
Oh, that's powerful. It's really hard to get right. I've been trying to do this for the, well, since we started building Reach Desk, it's all about like transparency and making sure that people are aligned with the purpose and the vision and what you're trying to do. And, Mary, that's very cool. That's very cool. Well, I'm wishing you all the best on that one, man. That's not an easy one to pull off, but I know there's some business out there that have done it. Let's come into this, what you were talking about before with pipeline and not using traditional channels. What are you seeing that is working right now, what should people be thinking about when it comes to this?

Morgan Ingram (02:56.70)
So at Amplify we work with our clients, we have a framework called the three A's. Amplify, acquire, and advocate. So essentially a lot of things when you're looking to go do something, it's not that you don't have it already there, you just need to make it look different or be better. So that's the first A which is amplify. So we take what you're already doing and we just make it look better, right? This podcast we're on, already like five minutes in, this is different than any other podcast I've been on, right?

So I'm more engaged, I'm more interactive. We have a better conversation, right? We also see as well within events, right? We've actually have started to do in-person activations, filming podcast shows like we're doing right now, but the people are there. This is gonna make you laugh. Think about all the people where they're like, oh, we should create better content, but you know what? Let's not do content at the event.

That's where probably all your buyers are at, where you could probably have the most content. It doesn't make sense to me. So we're helping you amplify that. Then there's acquire. So everyone, when they do a marketing activity now, it's not just, oh, we're just doing marketing and get to do marketing. CROs involve, CFOs like, okay, there's gotta be something, right? Especially with this market right now. So we're pinning things towards like, how does this attribute to pipeline, right? How does this advance the pipeline? More middle of the funnel content, essentially.

And we're getting people inside of the productions that can help advance the pipeline, bringing them on the podcast, bring them on the webinars. That's an example of that. And then advocate because they had such a good experience in the buyer journey through your marketing, cause you did it differently than everyone else. They now become advocates that will then have word of mouth so that you can get more pipeline on top of that. So when we, when we think about that, those are the three A's that could be, again, in-person activations, how you do virtual events, which we've done with clients. And then also influencer marketing, which I have a whole different take on that than other people right now. I actually think most people are doing it absolutely wrong, but we can dive more into that, but that's the different channels I look at.

Alex Olley (04:54.34)
Interesting. So what you're focused a lot, it sounds like it's kind of that human connection, you're doing very visual, very human content, as opposed to like, are you suggesting people move away from digital and trying more human channels or is it something else?

Morgan Ingram (05:12.19)
I think digital could still be human. It's just the way you go about it. Most webinars that people sign up for are just absolutely boring. It's like basically like an infomercial. They're not good. Like y'all are gonna get mad, but like they're not good. They're just not. So they're like infomercials. You can still make a virtual event good and human. The problem is, is that most webinars are, hi, can you introduce yourself? Here are five slides we're gonna go through. And then can you check out a product at the end? That just doesn't work. It just doesn't.

And also webinars are too long. I have a poll that's out there. It's got like 1500 votes. And I asked people, what was the, what, how long would you actually stay during a webinar? Average answer was 30 to 45 minutes, 60 minutes. Nobody wanted anything to do with it, but still people will run our webinars. And it's like, well, how would you do that? That's not, that's not what the market wants, but people still do it. And so yeah, that's an example of that. The goal is to make things more human because that's where we're at. And people will connect with more human marketing or human sales, but inevitably more human GTM.

Alex Olley (06:14.15)
Nice. I'll come to the influence of my question in a second, but so I love what you're saying here. You're essentially saying don't do anything new. Just I love the amplified thing. Why don't people do that? And I suppose, where do they go wrong?

Morgan Ingram (06:28.43)
So this comes to another piece that we've identified is it comes down to three things, which is distribution, talent, and content. So most people after an event or all of these things I just said, they don't think about what happens after the thing. So you do a webinar, how are you continuing the conversation? It just dies there with sales follow-up, you probably get this, right? You go to a webinar and they say, "'Hey, thanks for joining the webinar. You probably didn't even go.' Then they ask you for a demo and it's like, "'Well, I don't even know what that means' and you're gonna delete it. There has to be some type of distribution for marketing and sales after something happens to continue the conversation and most people aren't thinking that way. They're only thinking about their job as in, I did this event, it's over, I'm going to the next thing, right? Then it's talent and talent is twofold. Talent inside the organization itself and a talent on who you're actually bringing into said activity or event. So most marketers are product marketers and B2B. That's how they, that's how they grew up. This is how they learned. Most marketers aren't creatives or content creators. So you're not thinking about how do I go beyond what I'm doing? And most people don't have a production or media background. So they're not like, how do I get attention from a media or awareness standpoint? So most people are just living in this world of product marketing, which has this one playbook.

When the marketing playbook is now gone beyond that, it's how do you understand media, content creation, creative, how can it be out of the box? It requires more of a thought process because you have to get people's attention differently. So that's where the talent comes into play. And then talent is influencer marketing, which we'll talk about, like, how do you add influencers or subject matter experts, which I like to call them more, into your actual messaging. And then the content. When people think about content, unfortunately, most people that are marketers have never spoken to their buyers.

So how can you market or create content for someone you've never spoken to? I mean, it's real. People are like, okay, yeah, I'm a marketing to salespeople, but I've never spoken to any of their customers. So anything that you're saying is actually not that relevant because you've never talked to that person, which is why, you know, how we even got connected. The SDR Chronicles back in 2016, 2017 was successful because I was an SDR. So like, I knew what I was talking about. But the problem is, is most marketers, they just have never spoken to their customers. They don't know what they actually do day to day.

So yeah, everything, their topics aren't gonna land because they haven't had that conversation. So DTC is what we call it, Distribution Talent Content. That's where most people falter and they falter typically on all three. Most importantly, distribution, which is the biggest, biggest gap.

Alex Olley (09:04.23)
I love that. So I've tried this in the past. I think we're kind of, we're good at this at Reach Desk. We listen to like gone calls. We do speak to our customers. We sell to ourselves in many ways. How do you get marketing teams to speak to the customer, actually leverage, get what they need to be able to turn it into really good marketing?

Morgan Ingram (09:26.01)
So the thing is, you can, again, goes back to the one of the A's, amplify. Okay, you're probably running webinars right now. I found this probably, it should be true as well. I find it's very difficult for people to do new things. Hey, I want you to go do something crazy. I've tried to pitch that to people, it just doesn't work, right? I learned that in the beginning of starting this, I was like, hey guys, we're gonna do this show, people were like, they just weren't ready for it.

But if I'm just like, hey, look, you already are wording a webinar, I'm gonna show you how to do it differently. It's way easier to tell people that. So from a marketing perspective, okay, just get more of your customers and potential clients on the webinars and listen to them. You're already gonna market these webinars. You already have to listen to them. You should be listening to them to provide feedback to your sales team anyways. So the easiest way for them to talk to customers is get them more on the webinars that you're already watching, right?

And then I would also have some custom around tables as well. This is something that I'm actively doing right now at the company. Like we actually have a conversation today. I'm having a round table with former clients and people that I know very well. To the buyer persona we're going after. This is not a meeting to sell them, by the way, don't do this. I'm losing, we're not selling you. We just want transparent feedback on what we're building. If this is even correct, I would actually take it the next step. If I was in, if I was a VP of marketing or CMO.

I would hold quarterly meetings with my five to seven clients and I would show them what our content calendar is and say, does this resonate with you or not? Before we even do this campaign, does this even hit a pain point for you? Cause if it doesn't, we need to get back to work. I highly doubt anyone does what I just said, but if I was a CMO, I'd be doing that at a court easily. Cause then I know what we're actually talking about.

Alex Olley (11:15.19)
Oh my God. Yeah. We've got our marketing offsite for next year, next week. Once we've got that content calendar plan, I'm taking it to our customers. That's such good advice. Um, mate, let's talk about influencer marketing because this has been a big, big thing for like B2C companies for ages, right? Past decade. It's been massive. I'm seeing it becoming more of a thing in B2B.
You must have a point of view on this. You're actually not calling them influencers. What are you calling them again?

Morgan Ingram (11:46.75)
Subject matter experts.

Alex Olley (11:48.68)
Okay, so you're saying SMEs, how do you get this to work for B2B?

Morgan Ingram (11:53.29)
Okay, so here's the biggest problem. You're a B2B marketer, you maybe haven't been a creator before, which is fine. Maybe you haven't, maybe you even saw the B2C campaigns. You're like, oh, that's cool, let's do the same thing. So the obstacle becomes, you want to do the same thing as a B2C influencer and to say, hey, let's do a sponsored post. And I'm not calling one out because I've done the sponsored post. So I'm not saying don't do that. I'm just telling you why this actually doesn't work after like doing them because I wanted to see if it worked or not and prove this out before I told you, hey, you should consider it differently. You go do a sponsored post. Now, the thing is that works really well in B2C because guess what? They're selling toothpaste. Hey, I have this toothpaste, go get it. That's an easy decision. All right, toothpaste is like five bucks. Like if I want the toothpaste, I'm gonna go buy the toothpaste, right? Hey, here's a pair of socks I just tried out. You should go check it out. That's really easy for someone to go buy a pair of socks. But to assume that someone is gonna like do one post and you're gonna get like X amount of deals, and your sales cycle is like six months, four months, how are you gonna expect one post to do that? And I've realized the expectations towards what people are doing, that doesn't work. B2B is not transactional, unless you sell something transactional, but that's few and far between from the influencers that I've seen do these things. It just doesn't work that way. So what should you be thinking about?

In order for this to work, and I have use cases of this because I've been doing this, so this isn't something I'm just saying randomly, like I've been working with people and this is where we're moving towards, is a subject matter expert integrator.

And the reason I say integrator is because in order for someone to be successful, that's an outside influence. They actually have to be working with the organization in line with product or whatever that may be just doing a sponsor post that's great for awareness. And you could go do those things, but you have to have someone who's actually integrated in that business to see those results. And I think that that's the way it works. Because if you think about it, a B2B influencer has to have some type of credibility or some type of expertise versus the B2C influencer. Now I'm not hating on the B2C influencer, I'm just saying if you're on TikTok and you're just funny, then like you're an influencer, right? But you can't just be funny and on B2B, you gotta have something of credibility to speak on. Otherwise an organization is not gonna work with you and you're not gonna actually be able to influence something. So that's the way I think about the influencer marketing piece. You actually have to be more selective on who you work with and you have to work with them on a more personal level and partnership and it has to be integrated into what you're doing. They should know what's happening at your org, not just like, hey, we're gonna have this person post just because. And I think a lot of people are missing the mark on that and they're not thinking about how does this actually tie to the business goals and how can this person help us because they actually could do more than just creating content. That's my piece on it.

Alex Olley (14:47.29)
Mmm. I love that. So it's about integration. Such good advice, man. All right. Well, look, let's move on to what I call the personal section, which can, which can reveal a lot of things, but I think people want to get to know you a little bit. You're a very successful guy. I remember really some of your STL Chronicle stuff, years and years ago, and you've built up a big audience. You've been part of some amazing companies. You're now a CEO of your own business. You've been through a lot. So I suppose what did you...

Morgan Ingram (14:56.06)
Yeah.

Alex Olley (15:16.84)
What did you have to do to get to where you are today?

Morgan Ingram (15:21.39)
You know, I've been asking myself that a lot lately. It's a lot of sacrifice that people will never see.

I think that's what sucks about it. You have to be direct with people in ways that you don't want to. You don't wanna be the bad guy, but you know kind of what's, you see the writing on the wall. A lot of relationships have been very difficult because they don't understand what your drive is. And then, yeah, I'll work really hard on something and then people will be like, why are you working so hard? And it's like, no, it's because it's for you. I think that's actually the hardest part, man. Makes me very emotional.

Because like, you put all the work in, not for just yourself, but for the other people around you, but they think it's a detriment of your own self when it actually is for them. And so then it's hard to explain that to people if they don't have that drive or they don't have that fire because I've just had it. It's just what I have. I can't really get rid of it. Maybe some days I think I wish I could, but then I can't. Like I just go.

So I think the hardest thing for me has just been the sacrifice relationships and then the sacrifice to certain things. And then some people just don't understand that. And it leads to hard conversations because then people see you as just a person who doesn't care because you're working all the time. But it actually just has a way bigger picture. 

Alex Olley (16:44.72)
Yeah, I hear this a lot. I've been through it myself. I'm still going through it, I think. You speak about drive there and like your motivation and I think a lot of people have to have grit and determination. What is it that's motivating you and how do you keep going?

Morgan Ingram (16:47.24)
Yeah. It's two things. One is, I don't know if you've ever heard of this before. Have you heard of the anti-Y?

Alex Olley (17:10.09)
No, I haven't actually, no.

Morgan Ingram (17:11.51)
Most people, I, when someone told me this, I thought they were lying and just trying to make something up. Like, are you just trying to go like, are you like villain Simon Sinek? Like, what is it anti-why? Like, are you just trying to be controversial for no reason? But when this person shared it with me, I was like, it's goosebumps. So people listening in, like, maybe this could be your driver, it's mine. Like, it just, it makes you look at things differently. So the anti-why is what happens if you don't do anything?

So this is like, you're near your end of your life. And this is very dark by the way, for context. This is pretty, this is very dark where I'm gonna go. You have kids, but your kids absolutely hate you. They want nothing to do with you. They think you're a terrible dad or mom, and they think you're a deadbeat and they want nothing to do with you. They don't even acknowledge that you're a parent. Whoever you married, wife or husband, absolutely despises you. They're only with you because of maybe success you've had or whatever it is, or they're just with you because they felt like it's complacency, but they absolutely hate you and despise you. They want nothing to do with you. You have no love there. Everyone that is in your family basically is like, yeah, you didn't really live up to your potential. And then as you die, the person that you were supposed to become shakes your hand and you pass away.

So if you think about that every single day, it's very difficult to not go and work hard. I don't want that reality. I want the opposite of what I just said. So I think about that every single day because I don't wanna see someone that I was supposed to be when I could just go be that person. And I'm not to say that I'm perfect and like every day I wake up like I'm ready. I'm ready to work like and work out like some days I'm like, this is not it, bro. I just want to go back and like go chill or like maybe I should go be a pro gamer again. Like some days I'm like, just, I don't want to do it. I'm going to be super real. I guess I don't. And I think that's also the hard thing about social is that like, you can see things that I've done or others and you're like, Oh, he's always on. Like dude, some days I'm just not like, I just don't feel it. Like I don't really want to do anything. I'm going to be super transparent.

But I know I have to, my feelings are my feelings, but I have to move on. So that's like number one. Number two is I just think about how can I maximize the gifts that I've been given to make sure that I don't disappoint my parents. My parents sacrificed a lot to put us through private school to get us an education. And...

They took a lot of time to not do what they wanted to do to put us in the right spot. They could have, I mean, they would have saved a lot of money not putting us in private schools, but that way, they could have been like doing other cool stuff, but they didn't do that. So for me, it's like, I feel indebted to use that information, to use the scenario that they put us in to go be successful. And I feel like if I didn't do that, that would be remiss and I would be completely dismissing the legacy that they were trying to build by.

I'm the youngest of three brothers, for the three of us to go out and do what we do. And we've been put in really good spots to be successful. So I think about that every single day. Like, I can't just like dismiss the mission that they put us on, because then again, that would be disrespectful.

Alex Olley (20:39.33)
Wow, mate, that is huge. It's testament to who you are. It makes sense now to me. I've known you for a while. I've never really known what's really driving you, but both of those two things in combination have created you to be a force to be reckoned with. But you seem quite happy as well in life.

Morgan Ingram (20:45.39)
Hmm. Yeah, so I'll tell you this man, like, have you ever been to India?

Alex Olley (21:01.54)
I have. My favorite country in the world.

Morgan Ingram (21:03.36)
Okay, which part did you go to?

Alex Olley (21:05.37)
I went all the way from Mumbai down the west coast to the very bottom.

Morgan Ingram (21:08.81)
Okay, I never been in Mumbai, I was in Chennai. So I don't think I told you this, so India was the first country I ever been to.

Alex Olley (21:16.71)
Wow.

Morgan Ingram (21:18.73)
So when I joined John, I had only been to like two or three states like Florida, Georgia, and like Tennessee, and Alabama, like Alabama. That's it, only Southeast. So when I joined, he was like, Hey, it was like three months and he's like, you're gonna want to go to India? And I was like, what? Okay, like, I guess I'll go get my passport. Like, I don't know. How do I get there? So that is a whole that's all that's a different podcast for its own thing on how I even got there.

Alex Olley (21:42.06)
Okay, alright.

Morgan Ingram (21:44.43)
But I got there, had to go to the consulate, the whole entire crazy story. Like I almost didn't get to go. And I went there, man. And it was like, there's homeless dogs in the street. Like there are no skylines in India, right? It's not like New York, right? It's not like Atlanta. It's people are doing the best they can with what they got. And every place I went into, they always bowed towards me, which was super odd. I got used to it about three days in, but that was odd. But I saw how people lived and it made me just realize, why am I even complaining? When I got social, it's just you always are playing a comparison game no matter what. You log on social, someone's like, I started my business two weeks ago and I have a bajillion in pipeline. You're like, okay, I don't have a bajillion in pipeline. How are you doing that? What the heck? And then you go online, it's like, I'm 18 and I just had a $50 million exit. And like, bro, like.

I was just barely understanding how to put Legos together. How did you get a $50 million exit? So like, it's just so hard. And like, it just, it stresses me out sometimes. Cause I'm like, I think I'm doing pretty well. Like I think I've done what I needed to do, but homey over here could barely drive and he's already a bajillionaire. So it's hard. And so when I went to India, it just gave me perspective to be like, man, like no life is good. Like I shouldn't really be that stressed about a stuff. Like I can, at any point in time, I can go anywhere in the world. And like, there's no restrictions for me.

I'm healthy, like I don't have, there's nothing wrong, right? I have the money to go do so, to go do whatever I really want at any point in time. Most people in the world can't say that. Like, hey, at any time I can go pick a trip and leave and go be here and be fine. And communicate and I can see and I could feel everything. It's just, most people can't say that. So for me, I just have a sense of overall gratitude that I'm alive, I can see, I can sense, I have skills, I can do things and...

And yeah, you know, times are stressful with the company. I get that and like other things, but like, I don't really have too much to be upset about because I have people that are in my life that are great and they are very helpful and they're supportive and that's all you can really ask for. And that's, and that's what I saw in India. They didn't have a whole lot, but they had that. And that's really the core of it, of everything that we do. And what we grind for those things are important, but the core of those relationships, I was just, I was blown away, man. So once I went to India, everything changed. And then.

Interesting enough, I don't know if you've noticed this, every time I visited another country, I felt different, but in a good way. Like I felt like more happy about life and fulfilled and just enjoying every moment because I saw these different cultures and I got more immersed.

Alex Olley (24:20.24)
Yeah, I totally agree. It's the immersion, but it's also the perspective. I remember going to India and I offered this guy twice the amount that he quoted me for a taxi. And he said, no, you give me the amount of money that we agreed. I don't have much money in my life, but I don't need money. And I'm also so happy. I remember thinking.

Morgan Ingram (24:28.58)
Yeah.

Alex Olley (24:39.64)
I wish I could live like that. And it's made a big impression on me too. So looking back on your career then, would there be anything that you would have done differently to get to where you are today?

Morgan Ingram (24:41.20)
Yeah. You know, this is always an interesting question because like I am where I'm in because I did what I did. So inherently I wouldn't change it because if I changed it, then would it be better or worse? Who knows? Right. And it's always harder to look at things that way. Um, so I, I don't think I would have done anything really different. I think, I think the only thing if I, if I had to answer the question, you're like, Morgan, you have to answer this and you have to give something. Uh, I would, I would have. invested more time into understanding YouTube during the SDR Chronicles era. Because there was a lot of things I could have done more with that, um, across the board, but again, I was doing LinkedIn content and YouTube, and I also was still in SDR, I was doing the role. It wasn't like I was just like hanging out. I would have just doubled down, tripled down into that even more. I think I just would have gone a lot harder and I probably would have taken the money I was getting from an a sales development rep perspective and I would have paid someone to like help me get better at YouTube. Because at that point in time, I didn't believe in paying people for information. I thought that was dumb. I was like, why would I pay you? Like I'll just figure it out. Cause that's always how I've been. I'll just like, I'll go watch it for free and I'll figure it out. My attitude is different on that. I'll spend, I'll spend a lot of money on just help cause I, I just want to get the person who knows it, give me the information. I'll go do it. But earlier in my career, I didn't believe in that. I was like, I'll just go watch a video and figure it out. And that would have saved me time.

Probably at the end of the day, I would have done that.

Alex Olley (26:24.25)
Interesting. Great man. We're coming towards the end. We'll finish with the quickfire and then I'll ask you for a bit of advice you might want to give to others. So let's go through the quickfire if you're ready. Okay. All right. I ask the same questions each time. The first one, Morgan, if you could have a drink with anyone in the world, either dead or alive, who would it be?

Morgan Ingram (26:35.71)
Let's go. This is so simple. Kobe Bryant, easily. Like, I mean, you kind of see it, mom mentality. I have the shoe behind me. Like, it's just everything he stands for is what I aim to live through. Like, at the end of the day, if someone interacts with me, I want them to be like, wow, okay, that's just live and breathing embodiment of mom mentality through and through. And it's just really sad that he left early because I just think that he was just starting to really impact the world. Based on his mind that people just didn't really get to see. I've watched all the interviews and listened to him. Different, so such a different perspective than just a basketball player. So that's what I pick.

Alex Olley (27:22.46)
What a legend, such a good answer. Let's bring it back into go-to-market then. What's the dumbest thing you think go-to-market professionals are doing right now? What are the big mistakes that they're doing, dumbest things, and what should they do differently?

Morgan Ingram (27:27.17)
Y'all, and pseudo, could I be biased because we offer the service? Sure. But this actually is the dumbest thing. Please stop buying booths for 50 to 70 grand, sending reps there and not giving them a game plan. And they're twiddling their thumbs. This is the dumbest thing I've ever seen in my entire life. I've been to 14 events this year and 90% of the booths are the same. I really wish I might actually start doing this. They might be wanting to be mad. I don't really care. I'm going to start filming my, I'm going to have my iPhone out.

I'm gonna film the booth and I'm a Senate to the CEO and say, Hey, what are you doing? Like your team is literally just sitting here, twin their thumbs on their foam. You paid 60 grand for this booth. You have no activation, no creativity. You don't look different than all the others of booze products are, you know, continuously coming out on the market. What are you doing right to be different? I just don't understand this. If you think about it, if you run six events, you pay, let's say minimum. 40 grand, that's like, and also that's just the booth. That's not considering travel, lodging, et cetera. You're paying half a million, $600,000 in events and your reps are just sitting there doing nothing. You have no creativity, you have no traffic. This is the dumbest investment in the entire world. And if someone wants to refute me, I'm happy to have this conversation, but if we did a vent audit, it would not look good for you.

Alex Olley (28:52.36)
Man. I'm totally with you on this one, man. It still blows my mind. Yeah, it's crazy. It's crazy.

Morgan Ingram (29:05.47)
But how can we fix it? We gotta, how do we fix it, right? So I think the main, it's like three things. So one is you need to have a game plan. Your mindset should be, how can we be the main event at the event? If you don't have that mindset as a GTM team, you shouldn't even be going. What's the point of paying 40, 50 grand if you're not gonna be the main booth at the event where people are like, that was the booth I went to and it was great. I don't see the purpose. So that's, it's a checkbox for people. 

So number two is. Think about how can we engage our audience in a unique way? You don't need to do like a whole podcast and person show like I did, but you can do other things to engage your audience. There's probably something unique you could do in creative. And three, give your reps a game plan. So me and shout out to my guy, Jim, when we were at Terminus, we scheduled 50 meetings each. So we had a hundred meetings in total. We settled 50 meetings each at one event. This is like not that difficult to do if you actually give your reps a game plan. We came in actually love this. We came in, we had a we had like a you know how like in the uh wild westerns they have like the wanted list and they have the people's photos? So we were a little psychotic, we're in sales but we would print out these wild western wanted and we put like okay here's the target contact, here's their face, it'd be like the company name and then be like and be like what their role was.

And it was in these Western water photos. So we had like a book bag of all these photos. So we'd go in the, we'd go to the expo and be like, all right, we're so-and-so. And we like go find them. And they were like, how do you know who I am? I was like, don't worry about it. But we were hunting people down and like, that's what you have to do. You gotta be proactive. You're not gonna just sit there in the booth and get that. We were actually rarely at the booth and we were pushing people towards our booth to be like, hey, you wanna know more? Yeah, go to the booth. It's over there. Like we were hunting people down.

And you have to be proactive at these events. You can't just sit down and just be like, I think people are just gonna come. So yeah, that's my whole, I got a whole rant on that, but that's my take.

Alex Olley (31:01.76)
Oh man, I'm gonna steal that, the wanted one. That is genius, that is genius, absolutely genius. Oh man, that's just golden, that's brilliant. What company are you watching right now that you think could be a future game changer?

Morgan Ingram (31:06.22)
Okay, so it's this one, and I think it's just because I'm in the creator world right now and I've been diving into this. And I think that as long as this platform doesn't get banned, they should be good. But I think the way they're going about it is interesting. This company is called ubiquitous. And what they do is they help you unlock influencer marketing and they've been hyper-focused on TikTok. However they have been starting to take that and go into YouTube source, sort from content, et cetera. I think it's interesting because they have all this back, all this crazy backend data, all these algorithms on how to actually run these campaigns successfully and then leveraging talent in there and the brands to be successful. So as I look at the creator space, I'm like, that's really interesting because most people, they'll just say, okay, this person's talented, do your own thing, et cetera. No, they have full on data algorithms, frameworks on how to run it.

Like it's pretty wild and let's all check it out. So because I'm in the creator space, I was looking at like, who's doing what. And they to me have stood out to be like the people trying to lead that charge. It's been interesting.

Alex Olley (32:28.30)
Wow, that's very cool. I can tell you how big of the implement side of things. Maybe let's go back to your time as an SDR, because I think we probably have loads of BDR managers, SDR managers, SDRs themselves listening to this. What do you think was the biggest mistake you made when you were going outbound, when you were an SDR back in the day?

Morgan Ingram (32:51.59)
Um, yeah, I think it's something I mentioned earlier. I didn't talk to customer success soon enough.

I thought that I just knew how to reach out to people because I would listen to, this is the mistake that people make. I would listen to the sales podcast back in that day and be like, okay, I got it. I got the techniques. I have the frameworks. I can just, I can just do it. That's a problem because like the missing pieces, the person I'm talking to, the customer to figure out what they actually care about. So I didn't really dive into that until about month six in month seven. And that's when I started seeing like crazy success in the role. And I wish I would have just done that sooner. Like day one, I would have been like, all right, cool. Can you hand me all? And there wasn't, think about it. There wasn't gong back then. There wasn't, there wasn't like, you know, there wasn't core, there was no call recording, right? So like you had to actually be on the calls, right? So I would have been like, I would have gone to the director, customer assessor, whoever, and be like, hey, give me on calls. Who do I need to talk to? What are our, like our use cases? Tell me why people are buying.

I would have spent way more time doing that than understanding the actual techniques of those pieces. I think you actually would have a more successful rep that just understands the customer without knowing the techniques than just like knowing the techniques.

Alex Olley (34:12.19)
Wow, yeah mate, that's such good advice. I see this all the time. Yeah, we do have tools like Gong and stuff where you can listen back to stuff, but even then, it's not an interaction. You have to, like, if you can ask them, hey, do you mind if I ask you a quick question? I encourage this all the time. Speak to the customer, like, get in their shoes and walk a mile in them. If you can do that, then your job would be so much easier. Love it, man. We're nearly at the end. Before you go, if you could in one sentence share some advice with other go-to-market professionals on perhaps who are trying to break through the noise, like what would you tell them?

Morgan Ingram (34:50.52)
One sentence? I would say this. Think about everything as an experiment. So you wanna start there. Start with experiments to prove out a crazy idea that you have and then expand on that experiment to make it the main thing.

Alex Olley (35:11.38)
Love that. Man, that's gold. Morgan, you've been an absolute hero. Thank you so much for joining me today. Where can people find you and your company? How do people follow you?

Morgan Ingram (35:22.95)
Yeah, so Morgan J. Ingram on LinkedIn, check me out there. In terms of the company, it's AMP. So if you decide AMP, we're there on the company page LinkedIn, so check us out there. And then also YouTube, I'm on YouTube, YouTube Morgan J. Ingram. I'm actually, I'm saying, hey, I made the mistake, but you also can recover and come back. So I'm actually gonna get back into YouTube. It's been a ton of fun doing that. So go check out the videos there.

Alex Olley (35:45.84)
Hey, Morgan, thank you for joining me on the antidote. This has been an absolute pleasure. I think this one's going to make it into the Hall of Fame from day one, I can tell you now. But it's been it's been a pleasure. Right, but thank you for joining me. Thank you for giving me up your valuable time. And for everyone listening, check us on next episode of The Antidote next week.

Morgan Ingram (35:54.73)
Yeah hey don't just say that he's only saying that because i'm here guys he's lying i'm just kidding. Cheers, everybody.