And we are live. Hi, everyone. Just going to let everyone log in here. So we'll start in just a couple of seconds. Hi, everyone. I hope you all enjoyed this morning. Getting ready to learn how to book more sales meetings. So the chat works. That's pretty good. With this music here, a lot of energy will love it. Yeah, it was quite fun to see. We actually have lots of people signing up for this session. So I guess it's interesting to fill your calendar with more meetings. Everyone want to have more business. I'm broadcasting here from Stockholm, Sweden. And with me here today, I have Thibault. Yeah, thanks for being here. Yeah, it's my pleasure here. And where are you today? I'm based in Berlin. So right now, I'm in my office in Berlin in the Bergmann Kitz, which is like a nice area of the town. Wonderful. And I can see here in the chat, there are people from the UK, and Copenhagen, Bosnia, Poland, Madrid. Yeah, it's crazy.  Yeah, I have some public speaking events. So yeah, but I haven't been on these big stages abroad. But that's the thing that is pretty cool with this is that we get like a crazy audience. But it doesn't feel like it because we're just talking here at me. So that's for me, I always call it the most chill public speaking experience ever because, you know, you get in there and it's just I find it so nice because you just don't have the stress of public speaking. So I think it's cool. Exactly, that's perfect. Maybe that's a good idea for webinar vendors. They should add, let's say, a virtual audience so you can have everyone's cameras and create like a fake audience. That would be great. Then we can see the reaction of all, I mean, all of you guys logging in and see if you like the content or not. So but let's get started. And once again, welcome to today's talk about prospecting and sales outreach. As I said, with me here today, I have Thibault Soy, a prospecting expert and a person behind a new outreach system. Welcome Thibault. Yeah, thanks Fred. Thanks for having me. I'm really excited to share basically how I booked one outdoor meeting every 50 minutes. So we're going to be super tactical in there. We're going to share some frameworks. So yeah, I guess we also have some time for Q&A. So I think if everyone you have questions, drop them in the chat and we'll answer at the end. Super. So before we get started, can you tell me a bit about yourself? How did you end up working with sales? So I love telling this story. So basically I started doing sales when I was 15 years old. So I basically wanted to do my pilot license. So I wanted to be a private pilot basically. So you have your teenager, you have this passion. And I went to my parents and I say, hey, can you pay me a private license, a private pilot license? It's 12,000 Swiss francs. So around 12,000 euros. And they say no. Basically, if you want to do it, you're going to have to pay, just find the money yourself. And I went to my grandfather and I asked him and he said no. But what you could do is actually go and propose to aircraft owners in the local airfield to clean their airplanes to make money. And so that's basically what I did. And then I started going and basically prospecting aircraft owners and cleaning their airplane for 20 Swiss francs an hour. And basically at 19 years old, I got my pilot license thanks to the savings before I even had my driver license. So that's basically how I started in sales. That's a quick story. But then I studied in Montreal where I started like a startup that didn't work actually like a private aviation startup. And then I learned and I really landed in me to be sales in 2015 for a company called Laplace, which is a crowd testing company. And there I basically grew the French market from zero to 2.5 million of annual recurring revenue, sales team from zero to 10 people. And then at some point, I felt tired of making others rich. So I was like, I'm going to do my own business and I'm going to try and coach and train salespeople to do what I've done. And that's how I kind of landed in that. So I have a podcast. I have a community also. I do terror training for tech salespeople and coaching, mostly online. And I'm also like an advisor for a company called Tolstoy, which is a video prospecting company. Great, great, great backstories. That's interesting to hear.  I work as the CMO of Superoffice, CRM for mid-sized B2B companies. We have a heavy footprint in the European market. And bringing new business to the table is of course crucial for us and our customers, mainly. So that's why we're hosting this kind of event where we want to share some tips and tricks and ideas. But let's get right into it. And some practical information, feel free to use the chat to comment or ask questions. And we will do our best to just pick it up. We will cover a couple of topics already. So first of all, why we need to do outcome prospecting and how to build your personal brand, how to define your best fit customers, identify key decision makers, craft the messages, and also we will look into some efficient cadences or sequences. But first of all, so why do we need to do outcome prospecting to build? So good question. Love this one because sometimes we actually do outbound because we just feel like we have to do it. But the idea is that I like to compare relying only on inbound needs like being a Petromonarchy, for example. So if you're, I don't know, in Saudi Arabia right now, great, you're making good money with oil. But at some point, it's going to dry out. And this is what happens all the time with inbound leads. What you have is that you have organizations that have very strong marketing teams or that generate a lot of inbound leads. And then at some point, if they want to keep growing, they're going to plateau. And they won't be able to actually keep growing at the rate they want if they don't do some outbound. And you have other ways to generate leads. But outbound prospecting is really a simple way, a very structured way to actually go and create pipeline. And if you, I don't know, you have a goal to generate, I don't know, 20 meetings a month. And you multiply that by the number of salespeople you can hire who will actually do that. You'll be able to really expand the number of leads and opportunities you'll generate. And you'll be able to kind of like fuel the growth you want to have. And outbound prospecting is also one of the fastest way to go to market and to understand what is your value proposition, whether the problems you're trying to solve for your customers. And it's just a really good way to have control over how many opportunities you generate in a specific time frame. Great, great one. So I've seen a couple of reports stating that, I mean, a majority of salespeople claim prospecting to be the most challenging aspect of sales. And most sales reps put too little time and attention to outreach efforts. So why is this the case, you think? Can it be that humans by nature tend to avoid things that you feel you're not good at or you're not comfortable with? So there's a few things you have, like maybe you can take two types of SDRs who are often, or sorry, two types of salespeople who are often prospecting SDRs who are just often responsible for generating opportunities and AEs who are responsible for closing them. But also they're always kind of responsible for generating their own pipeline. And so what happens is in a lot of cases, if you're an account executive, what you're going to do is you're going to focus on closing deals and then you're going to lose track because you don't have time or the organization to prospect. And what you see very often is that you have pressure, let's say outside pressure, for example, company invested in an event. We could take an example where the CMO invested like thousands or tens of thousands of euro in an event. And then, you know, they're like, okay, we need to really leverage this event and make as many leads and opportunity out of that. And so what happens is these people work like crazy. They send 200 messages a day, you know, day two they would do the same. And after day three, they're just like overwhelmed with work and they just like give up. So that's the thing is prospecting is a very repetitive activity. It's just like going to the gym or working out. It's something that is healthy, but we all hate doing it because we, you know, it's something that is not like natural or fun as such. It's a very repetitive activity. And we just love doing other things that are more interesting. So that's very often why people don't prospect every day. I agree. So, I mean, Tibor, I've seen that you have claimed some impressive numbers about your hit rates. And I mean, how you're able to book one outbound meeting every 50 minutes. Can anyone master outbound? And in that case, what's your playbook? Would you like to present maybe the key chapters or content pieces of this new outreach system? Sure. So basically, for me, there's like a few steps that are very important. Prospecting first, you have to understand it's not that complicated. So you have to do the groundwork which is really understanding your ideal customer profile. So ideal customer profile is a mix of the type of people you want to talk to and the type of companies you want to talk to. So I don't know if you're going after a specific organization type, let's say startups that are over 50 employees and raised over 200 million or whatever. And then you want to talk to a specific type of person in the organization. Can be VP, CRO, whatever. So you may have like different type of individuals which I call primary target and champions. And these people care for different stuff. So once you have an idea of who these people are and what are the differentiation, what you need to do is go and start to find what I call triggers. So you need to be able to find good excuse. So public information that tells you that these people have a problem you may need to solve or an interest in speaking with you. And on LinkedIn, for example, it's gonna be people liking a post, commenting on a post, can be your post or someone else's post. There are so many of these kind of digital footprint you can use to find triggers. And basically once this is there, you have this, you have the trigger, you have to also find the leads around this trigger. So an example, I did a post yesterday about 99% of SDRs not using video prospecting, got 180 likes on this post and I found three, four people who were VPs of sales, reached out to them and I say, hey, see you like my post, that's the trigger. Curious to know, is your team also not prospecting or not using video prospecting? And basically when I do that, I have the right person I want to talk to. I have a good trigger to get in touch with them. And this allowed me to find some leads. And once you're in there, what you need to do is to build a structure, a sequence to make sure that you contact these people. And if they don't reply, you have a follow up sequence that is structural and cadence, really structured basically. And once this is done, what you need to do is to make sure you execute every day. So you need to build the prospecting routine, meaning that you show up every single day, every morning or every afternoon or whatever you want and you do follow ups, find new prospects, add this new prospect to your sequence. Whatever you're doing that is just like if you were going to the gas station, fuel, you know, put some fuel in the car and then the car keeps rolling. If there's no more fuel at some point, the car will just like, you know, stop working. That's the same with prospecting. And so these are the five steps that are very important. You know, in my system that I always talk about is to make sure that you have the groundwork and build all the kind of like, you know, do the heavy lifting early. So every day when you're prospecting, it's a simple repetitive task. Great one. So then we have the overview of the chapters we will talk more detailed about actually. And once again, questions, just add them in the chat. I also saw that someone, yeah, Jonathan from the Antarctica Research Station, wow, that's far away and in India. So, and yes, Moritz, we will look into the cadence or the sequence and to boy suggesting. So stay tuned. But if we just start here with step one, define your ICP and their problems, if we can start with this first. Sure. So ICP stands for Ideal Customer Profile. What we do very often is if you think about your job friend, you often go and marketing and you work with personas or stuff like that.  And so, you know, if you go after this kind of person, it's cool, but first this kind of person doesn't really exist in real life. It's kind of more complicated. So what I want to do for me is to make sure I'm able to build the lead list that is relevant. So first thing you need to do to kind of like get, make sure your engine or your system works is to have some fuel. So basically some leads. And so for that, you need to make sure the leads are relevant. So ICP is a mix between the type of company. So for example, you go after startups in a certain country, another country, or you go after, let's say insurance vertical and then banking, for example. So you're going to separate and split the type of company, the ideal customer company, we call that. And then what you're going to do, once you have a clear idea of the type of company you want to go after, you need to find out who are the people, the job titles you want to go after in the organization. Because if I reach out to you, Fred, you're a CMO, you have specific problems you're trying to solve, very often related to generating leads, generating revenue, all these things. If I go and talk to a marketing director in your organization, they have maybe very different problems or very different things. They're working specifically on a project that can be, I don't know, building a lead generation engine or something like that, which is very specific whereas you are actually owning the strategy. So once we have these things, I have an idea of who are my primary target. So let's say C level, VP level, and then my champions who would be typically like the directors, managers, all people who are under that. I'm going to go and try to find what are the problems they care for? At the C level, the primary target, they care for strategic problems. So very often it's like, you know, like far reaching projects or initiatives in the organization, and they really care for that. And then, good. So a question here. So when you do this research, I mean, I started off in sales myself and was doing quite a lot of outbound and I usually use LinkedIn and I visited people's profile because sometimes when you read about their responsibilities, you can see responsible to grow our net new business or expand in a certain market. So sometimes you can get some valuable insights, but do you have any or what's your take on this? To find the problems people care for. So you go and Google, for example, the CSO problem 2022, CMO problem 2022. So that's the first kind of step to get an idea. And very often you're gonna have research from Gatner or Forrester or whatever, that gives you an idea. This is very high level, but that's gonna give you a bit of an idea. What you can do too is you can reach out or look, let's say, look for podcasts, interviews from these people and hear what they say, what is the language they use, what are the problems, the initiative they'd like to talk about. This is really like a good way to do that. Okay, that's good. And also one thing to find ideal customer profiles, I mean, working with CRM, a good trick is if you have, let's say, a history of acquiring new customers for, maybe several years back, you can go into the CRM system, have a look at closed one deals and associated contacts. And you will also see what kind of job titles they have, for example, the associated contacts and some often you can read in the notes. The reason for the purchase is that as you can get some valuable insights from your CRM system as well to help you be more specific. And another point, I guess, is you wanna have customer references that is, I mean, for example, if someone would like to get in touch with me, most likely they will use references other CRM vendors or sales tech in general, e-signature tools or someone who is maybe facing the same customers I want to address, for example. So. Exactly. And the thing is outbound often is confused as just getting new business or new logos. Outbound is just like the fact of, you could say, like proactively going after a certain prospect, but that can be from active customers. So, or lost opportunities. And so that's why using your CRM and you can do that in super office is a great way to start conversations. Just look at your current customers or past customers or people who have been close to you because these are the people who know about you and you know about their problems, you know what they're trying to do. And that's like a really good idea to get this started there. So then we have the ICP and the problems which is step one. So step two, hunt for triggers. So here the thing is triggers is, as I said, it's like a public piece of information that you can use that it gets someone may have a need or a problem that you can solve or an interest in speaking with you. Triggers can look like in inbound marketing, demo requests, the webinar download, ebook download or these kinds of things. But especially around LinkedIn, which is a great platform because it's kind of like an accurate B2B lead database. You have people who are using the social network interacting, liking and gauging and they leave that as a footprint. I call that a digital footprint. So basically whenever they go and like some comment or like some post or comments or whatever, they are showing you that they have a specific interest. So the idea of looking for triggers, I love to call that the OASIS effect is to go and try and find someone who attracts the customers or the prospects you wanna talk to. I'll give you an example. I was in Mexico. My wife is from Mexico. So I go often there and often we have a thing called quota on the highway which is basically like, I don't know how you call that but it's a place where you have to pay because you use the highway. I guess you have the same everywhere. And in Mexico, Mexico being Mexico, it's often very inefficient. So what happens is you end up waiting 10 minutes in line to go and pay when there's a lot of traffic. So what happens? The people who go, there's people who are selling different kinds of sweets, snacks and whatever. They go around this and they just walk down the waiting line and basically they sell their stuff. So they could go and try to prospect individually and try to find people in cities and whatever, that would be a lot of work. But in that case, they just go around the quota and they just find leads here. Just the OASIS effect where people that just stranded there, it's hot, it's warm. So they're actually looking for something to drink or eat and that's how they actually optimize. And that's the same thing you wanna do on LinkedIn where people are just like hanging out around thought leaders, influencers or people who post regularly and what they post about a specific problem, a specific niche. You know, these people may have a problem on each of us is speaking with you. And so that's really like the trigger hunting. And the good thing is when you find a trigger, so let's say someone likes a post, you know, like a thought leader does a post with two, 300 likes and you can go and check the people who liked and if they fit with the ICP, then you can reach out to them using this post as a trigger. And that's how you actually get like a lot of replies. So I've got a question here from Pierre. Can we expect results without using triggers? And Sebastia is asking if LinkedIn is your preferred first contact method. And before I let you answer, Tibou, I was thinking about when I've done some research outbound before, I also used, let's say, really Google and see that sometimes they are active on Twitter or Facebook, et cetera. And you can see, okay, they're Arsenal fans or they don't know they're a fan of some kind of hobby. So you can actually use any kind of trigger to get a reason to reach out. Just my five cents here. So basically on this type, there's different types of triggers. Obviously triggers that are like that can be useful. I always recommend to go and try to look for triggers that are relevant.  Because that's kind of like, you're trying to create rapport, which is something that is great when you're doing a call.  It shows people to do personalization. It's a good trigger, but for me it's always, can I find a trigger that is really relevant that shows that they are into this, let's say solution or problem awareness and that they are, you know, we're trying to talk here. On the question of Pierre, can we expect results without using triggers? Yes, you can, but you're gonna have lower results. Meaning less replies, you're gonna have to contact more people to get an answer. So it's always really important to kind of go and find some triggers. There's all different types of triggers. It can be company triggers, can be personal triggers. You can do assumptions based on their job title and what happens in their lives or what happened in their career. But always try and basically find a way to reach out. So you always have to find, to reach out and people have to actually say, okay, this person knows what I'm going through. This person understands my problem. So I'm gonna reply. That's basically what you need to do. Good one. And when we have been speaking before here, you also mentioned that you can use other people's posts to find leads, but you can also use these posts to add relevance to your own outreach. How is that? So I'm gonna give you an example. So it says in my industry, it's very easy to find triggers. I have like a lot of people who are talking to the same people as me. So I'll give you an example. We have a lot of people at Sales Loft. There's for example, Charlotte Johnson, who's at Sales Loft and he is very interesting because you can use your competitors. So in my case, she's not a competitor but selling to the same type of people as me. And so whenever she posts, she gets three, four, 500 likes. So that's really good. And she posts often about how to prospect, how to do a specific video or how to use a podcast to prospect or whatever. So whenever you have a post about how you can use a podcast to invite prospects in there, what I do, I go around all the people who liked, I check the post likers, and then I just select the ones that fit with my ACP. So all the VPs, directors and these kinds of things. And then what I do, I craft a connection request on LinkedIn or first message if I'm already connected where I say, hey, notice you like the post of Charlotte about using podcasts to prospect. That's basically like the trigger. And then I add a teaser or a question. I'm saying, what are you doing to prevent your team from, I don't know, turning off a prospect with pushy called outreach, something like that. So that's really how you use triggers and you include them into your outreach. So this is good. I guess this is a good transition over to the step three, which is build and use sequences and how to create a sequence, a skeleton or a framework. Would that be a good fit to start talking about this now? And we have now, okay, but now we know that we have a trigger, we have the right person. So how to actually do the outreach here. Let's just go and share our slides here. Anyone, can you see our slides? I can see it at least. So yeah, you could, yes. So here's an example. First thing you need to do, you need to make sure that you're not going and writing messages like crazy. You need to first define your sequence. This is a skeleton of my sequence. A sequence is one goal, get a reply. It also has one goal, get you to stop focusing on prospect when you don't have a reply. You have people who do like 30 touch points sequence, that's too much. For me, it's like five, six touch points, that's enough. You know, it's really based on who you're selling to, but for me, it's very simple. I actually defined my steps. So step one is like a soft connect or connection request on LinkedIn. Then what is my step two? What is the place or the channel and the media? So it's going to be on LinkedIn. I'm going to drop a video. Then I'm going to be still on LinkedIn and drop a voice note. Then I'm going to switch to email. I'm going to drop a video. Then go back to LinkedIn, drop a video and then finish with LinkedIn again. So it's really LinkedIn centric, but you can add calls, whatever you want. Once you know your touch points, you have to create a cadence. So how many days are you waiting for between each touch point before you actually go and do your follow-ups? For me, it's two business days. So it's pretty simple. And you stay within, let's say two weeks like that on one prospect. That's the first thing you need to do. Once the sequence is there, you need to build the content, the script that you're going to use. And here it's very important to have like some kind of snippets and scripts that you're going to use. So you don't go and every day, when you prospect, you have to reinvent the wheel and craft a new message. So for me, I use a specific trigger. That's an example where when someone downloads my sequence, I say, hey, first name. Notice you recently downloaded my LinkedIn entry sequence for your team. Does that ring a bell? That's an example for an inbound lead. But that can be something like someone goes on my profile or the example I gave you with Charlotte before. And here, what I'm doing here is always the same where on each touch point, I have a structure. Let's focus on this one here. Question, teaser, call to action. So what I'm doing is I saying, what are you doing to prevent your team from turning off prospects with pushy LinkedIn messages? So really the idea here is I focus on a specific problem because here if I'm going out to head of business developments, this is something they know about. They are dealing with it every day. People are just prospecting and doing connect and sale and that doesn't work. So I'm say, what are you doing to prevent that? And often nothing because they don't know how to do it. So here I'm teasing your resource. If you're into it, I'd love to share a quick video on how your team can start genuine conversations with prospects on LinkedIn and I finish with a simple call to action. Let me know and I'll send it over. Let's pose on that. What I've done here, I didn't say anything about my business, anything about what I do and how we are the best and whatever. I just say, do you have this problem? If you do, I have something for you, but just reply and I'll actually send you send it over. And that's really the idea here is to tease curiosity. I like to call it the Netflix effect. For example, I'm watching Selling Sunset season five with my wife right now. Have you heard of that or not Fred? Oh, I haven't. People in the chat, if you heard of Selling Sunset, just tell me. Basically it's like real estate agents in Los Angeles like that are selling super luxury houses. And it's basically an excuse to see women fighting basically. And it's very trashy and it's super fun to watch. So basically you end up and then they just like start fighting whatever and then you're like, I wanna, you know, they cut the episode I wanna see what's happening. And that's why we do binge watching on LinkedIn or sorry on Netflix. So, you know, David has his wife addicted to it. You know, my wife started watching it and I was like, I love it. So that's exactly what you wanna create. Yeah, as a side note, I know as a marketer, I think the beauty with these messages is it's about them. It's not about us. So just to a point, these messages are 100% about those we reach out to because we care about what matters to them. So I also think this is a good way of start to build a relationship, being curious, talking about the other people. So... Exactly. Exactly. So that's basically the start. Your sequence, every message has to be optimized for that.  You don't wanna book a meeting.  You really wanna get a reply. Once you get a reply, your goal is to navigate the conversation. So make sure that, you know, once you share the resource, there's a thing called the reciprocity bias, which is an unconscious bias we have as humans, no matter the culture, where when someone gives us something, we feel obliged to give something back. So that's why when you go and you're in the market and people give you like a cheese to try, you cannot feel obliged to try to buy the cheese after. So, you know, that's why they do it. And that's exactly the same we're doing here. We are proposing a resource and once they're interested, we know they're interested, we share the resource. And then basically it's very easy to ask them questions and try to do a small discovery to see if they have a real problem. And when they do, they're gonna be so happy to jump into a call and it's a real opportunity to have them. Is that why you need to buy a beautiful lady a drink in the bar to get a kiss? Yeah, that can be another option. It's been a while I didn't do that. You know, I've been married for, I mean, not so strong, I stopped doing this kind of things a while ago. Ah, that's good. Okay, so step four. Yeah, so. Is this the last step of yours?  I'm basically following the example of a landing page. If you look at a good landing page, it's structured in a way, I'm simplifying here, but you have a problem statement, kind of like solution. Then you have a testimonial or social proof and FAQ. So here I'm doing something similar where I'm doing like a problem here. So in this one I kind of did the mix, but here it's kind of like more of a solution. So how you can do that. Then here it's like, I'm gonna do like an email where I share, I say, hey, I got these people and they had some really great results. So it's more like the social proof. And then I finish with this one, which is more like the FAQ. So do you have this problem? One problem, two problem, three. And then I finish with the bump, which is any thoughts, which is a really good way to get conversation because you're switching from having a lot of, it's not too much, but some text to having no text and just like, can you reply? So basically that's the idea. And by the way, I'm gonna share the sequence there. And between step five and six, you have, I should say, do you have a waiting time as well to work two business days? Two business days between each, yeah. You could do three, you can change very, but for me, I just keep it simple. So it's not too complicated there. Is this like something you have, I mean, experienced over the period you have used the sequence that like two is the perfect mix or balance, or is it just- I found that two is good because it's two business days. So let's say you start on Monday, follow up on Wednesday, follow up on Friday, then another follow up on Tuesday. So give this kind of natural rhythm where it's not too much pressure, but it's enough pressure. Because if you work two weeks, you can basically book one meeting every, I don't know, 50 months. So that's not the idea. And if we go back to, I can do like this to the first sequence here. You said type voice note and type video. Is this, are you using let's say the LinkedIn built-in feature for this or does it matter if where you- So for voice notes, yes, I use a feature on LinkedIn, which basically what's your, it's only in the app.  So I'm going to find you, for example. You have your phone with you? Yeah, I have. And there's a small microphone button that I can click here and I can talk and I can send it over. Can you show everyone what's on your LinkedIn if you have there? Here's my LinkedIn. I hope you can see it all. Yeah, we can see it too. So message from this. This is what we call a pattern interrupt. So instead of seeing a text message or whatever, you see a blue bar with a play button. And as humans, when we see a triangle this way, we know it's a play button and there's music behind. So we love music, so we click. And because, you know, that's one of the things you're messaging has to be creative and relevant. And the creativity part is like using pattern interrupts. So the type here is voice note. Video, I always recommend using a tool called Tolstoy. There's other tools or whatever, but like it's a prospecting video, video prospecting tool where you can record, share your screen, add some call to actions that's going to generate like a preview with a gift and the link. And you can put it anywhere where there's a link and people can go and see that. So that's the view there. Yeah, and I guess I see some comments here. I mean, there are many, of course, tools that help. Yeah, the yard is all great tools, yeah. And I guess you can use similar, I mean, also in your email outreach, I guess. You can also copy, paste, and then, you know, there's going to be a moving gift in your email. So it's pretty good there. So, and then you have, so voice note, you do a video, and then on step four, you mentioned email. So where do you find this email address? So here, it's pretty simple. Like emails follow patterns. There's tools like Hunter, Drop Contact, or Anymail Finder, which are great tools to find emails. So you can basically go and kind of try and get an idea. So you find the domain, you put the first last name, and then it kind of goes and ping the domain to find if it's valid. It's not always like really accurate, but you get like based on the software you use, maybe 70% hit rate where in 70% of cases, you're going to have a good email. Again, it's something you can do. I kind of like, this is an example of a sequence I used to use. I don't really use email anymore because emails are becoming super crowded and it's very, very hard to actually reach out to people with emails. Leading is great because when you connect with someone, you can connect out of the blue if they accept it's actually legitimate interest or there's really no issue with GDPR. So you don't feel like, okay, I'm going to be in trouble because of that. Because some people feel like using email or guessing emails is not legal, which I think is very much of a gray zone. There's nothing that says you can't. There's all this kind of legitimate interest which is like very important in Europe that in LinkedIn it's not even a question. So basically that's why I do that. We've got a question from Ekaterina about using email. I mean, if you haven't done the connection request first, you will need to do paid email. So what's your take on this? So emails for me are great tools to make money to LinkedIn. LinkedIn, they make a lot of money with emails. You don't. That's the third problem is emails are terrible. The reason is that when you receive an email, it kind of lands in a parallel box. There's a small sponsor and it kind of like screams. I wanna say something to you. So people when they do what they see an email, they ignore it. It's very, very hard. And the thing is the emails are generated as like mass kind of advertising stuff. So you as a marketer, you know about that. So it's kind of like this thing where they sell you as a campaign of hyper-personalized campaign where they send, they blast these similar messages to like a group of people who fit with a personal ICP and they receive that. So you're gonna send, I don't know, 1,000 emails and maybe you're gonna have like one or 2% conversion rate or reply rate.  Not great if you're doing B2B sales because you're gonna have about 30 emails a month. So the idea is like emails are great to make money for LinkedIn, but not for us. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I use it as a marketer and the benefit with emails is often you get a super high open rates, like 50% open rates. But I agree that getting conversions out of it is more tricky unless you're having an amazing offer or very timely. So what you do is the lead doesn't add you to the network. So here that depends. For me, if you have like a sea of prospects, it's fine. The idea is your connection request, you need to optimize it for acceptance, not for reply. So the connection request, there's a very simple rule. If you have something relevant to say, use it. So if you found a very powerful trigger, you say, hey, so you're like here, curious how you're doing this, whatever. So you can do that. Or if you don't have anything relevant to say, just don't add anything. People will based on your picture headline and your name and number of people in common, they will make their decision. And very, very often they will actually accept you more. You know, if you have like a no message compared to a message that is just irrelevant. So that's the idea. With this, you're gonna be between 50 and 70% acceptance rate. This is largely enough in general. So for me, I just basically contact five people, maybe four will accept. And that's largely enough. But if you wanna be a bit more thorough, then you can include emails and maybe calls also to these people. So can you repeat that? So what was your connection request success rate? Was it 80%? So for me, it varies, but around 70%. 70% okay. So I guess this can create a new sub-topic. I guess this could be a follow-up talk even about how to really build your LinkedIn profile and presence because I can assume, I mean, if Elon Musk would reach out to me with a connection request, I would say yes, right? Because of several things, domain authority and I mean, title, job company. So there are things. So I'm pretty sure that we as individuals will say as people can do something with our profile in order to improve this reply rate, right? So the thing is, often people just go and look their LinkedIn when they're on the move, on their phone or whatever. So if it's a long text, it's actually a bigger investment to go and look for it. And if it's the first few lines, it doesn't look relevant, they ignore it. So that's the idea. In doubt, just don't put a message. And it's always great to kind of like, try and A-B test with or without and see what works best for you. But in general, people just write terrible connection requests. So don't include anything. Let's see, we have some questions here in the chat. So... Dunia has a tricky question here, right? I guess it's a typical sales challenge. I mean, sometimes you have people rejecting you or even your sale. And I guess you have something to answer here, but from my point of view, I mean, it's sometimes it is, it's not a good fit, but sometimes they need to know more. They don't have all the bits and pieces connected. So, okay, yeah. Tibor, what's your... People say, no, move on. For me, it's very simple. Like I've never understood why when someone tells you, people feel like they have to go and try to do some objection handling and whatever. They just don't want to talk to you right now. So, fine. Basically, that's when your job as a marketer, Fred, is to make sure that you get these people educated. So if you're reaching out to them and basically you can ask them to say, okay, fine. Is it fine if I drop you a quick resource that you can download so you receive regular emails from our marketing team? You can ask that. It would be like a good kind of reply because people will say, no, not interested. No, oh yeah, maybe not right now, but later. So I'll give you like an example that I receive, like I'm following a lot of newsletters and stuff like that. And it's just like the basic stuff where if you provide value regularly, where you help people do a specific job, these people will see that. And at some point, in most cases, they won't be actually ready to buy because they don't have a problem. But at some point, they will receive that. And when they have the problem, if you provided a lot of value through marketing, through content on LinkedIn, they'll be like the first thing I need to, first person that I will contact because I need to solve this problem is this person.  So that's really what I would do is move on, but make sure you don't try and get them to be nurtured or to be in contact with your brand basically. That's a good one. And as an example, I will share just a prospecting tips blog article used to illustrate to Tibor's factor. That's, I mean, as a marketer, I often say that like, it's only one to 5% of your target market is actively looking for a new serum tool or a new consultant or whatever. So the majority of your market is not ready to buy at the moment, right? So, and for us as marketeers, what we need to do is keep on delivering content and build a strong brand affinity. So when people are ready to buy, we are top of mind. This is how it needs to work in Tana with sales and marketing. So marketing being maybe one step ahead and educate the market, nurture the market. And then sales can start the conversation and build a relationship with the individuals. So this is good. Exactly. So now we have a 50 minutes left and we have two more steps to cover, which is navigate the conversations. And this is also part of the sequences and then build a routine. Should we go ahead to the next one? So navigating conversation is what happens when you got a reply. So if your sequence really worked well, so we can basically stop sharing this. So if the sequence worked well, you have a reply. People say, hey, I'm interested or maybe checking the resource you talked about. And here what you need to do is we use what I call the recipe for CT resource. So again, very simple. If you have a marketing team, like even the worst marketing teams are delivering eBooks, webinars, whatever, stuff like that, this is content. Let's take this webinar as an example. If you are reaching out to people to get them to actually prospect better, what you can do is say, hey, if you're interested to have this quick resource on how you can book one meeting every 50 minutes of prospecting.  So to help you actually go and get the most value, at timestamped, the best point. So we take the five steps we had, you timestamp it and say, okay, groundwork, ICP metrics and everything, it's at three minutes, 55, whatever. So you send basically this resource to people and you're curating the resource here. You don't need to reinvent the wheel, like marketers know the problems, they talk about it all the time, that's their job, so reuse their content and you say, okay, so this is the specific thing, this is the resource, this is what you get and if you wanna explore more, you can get the whole thing and you can also book a call with me if you wanna know more. And very often people would just go, check and then they will get to know more about the brand, more about what you do, they'll get a clearer idea. And in some cases they say, hey, I'm interested to talk because I think you can help. In most cases, they won't actually just follow up, so you say, hey, what have you thought of the resource? Is it something that is relevant for you and your team? And very often they say yes, no, they say yes, you say, okay, tell me a bit more. You say, yeah, my team is actually struggling with that, I shared that with them and that's when you can ask a negative, reverse in question where you say, would it be a bad idea to hop on a quick chat? So you can tell me a bit more about that and I can see if we can help. This is a really good way to have conversation. And once you have that, you're really able to book the meeting and have a great meeting because you know someone has a problem, they've self-educated with your content and basically you just have to guide them to the solution. So is this negative psychology? Negative reversing question, we call that. Oh yeah, negative psychology, we call it. Where you say, would it be a bad idea to do that? Yeah. And looking into the routine, so like find out how many prospects to add to your sequence daily, how to let's say execute on it, would you like to bring us on clouds into this? How to put this sequence into action? So this is the most important point. The thing is if you do everything we've talked about but you don't do a prospecting routine, you're gonna fail. If you don't do anything we talked about but you do a prospecting routine, you're gonna succeed. So that's the thing is prospecting routine is just about building consistency. You know, let's say going to the gym, hitting healthy, these are all habits that are hard to make, but once you picked it, it's a lot harder to actually, I mean it's a lot simpler to keep doing it than breaking it. That's the same with prospecting. So the idea of the prospecting routine is first step to define what I call the cruising altitude, which is a number of prospects you need to contact every day to reach your targets. This comes from basically I was a private pilot as you know and when you were doing a navigation, you were always calculating from point A to point B what is the minimum altitude, the cruising altitude you need to have to make sure you don't hit the mountain or the obstacle. The mountain is your cola. The cruising altitude, the altitude is basically the activity level you have. So once you know how many prospects you need to contact, it's really about finding this amount of prospects every day, following up and contacting these new people every day. So really creating the engine where you follow up, find new people, contact them. When you do that, you basically go from let's say having to close I don't know one million a year to having to contact I don't know 20 people every day. And so whatever you're doing this, what you can do is create a time block in your calendar to make sure no one is stealing your time at a regular time every day. For me, it's from eight to nine. So before this event, I was actually prospecting. You know, I did my stuff and it's done. So you do that and every day you execute. And when you're doing this over a few weeks, you'll see you start having meetings regularly, very predictably. And that's how you create like the prospecting routine and you put this system to life basically. Sounds easier, right? It is. So are you doing let's say block your calendar or how do you ensure the consistency? You put the blocker in the calendar and the blocker protects your time from customers but also from your manager, from all the distractions you have. So you make sure that this is there in your calendar and people just can't book you.  And the thing I need right now is to be focused on my prospecting. And this is every time the same time in the morning, afternoon, every single day. And basically I cannot go to meetings. I cannot talk to people. I cannot do interview. I cannot do anything else. Then this, in this time slot.  Yeah, a hundred percent agree, right? This is, I mean, it's crucial to do prospecting to have enough meetings to close and turn into business. But when it comes to, let's say you have, you need to reach out to 20 people a day. That's an example. Would you start doing the search and selection on the day, or do you do it like the day before, or do you do it weekly? So you have, okay, next week, I will reach out to these 100 people and I will just put it into chunks. So I would really recommend doing it every day, where every day you have a bit of, I always recommend you start with follow-ups because that's the easiest.  I'm sure you can do that. You look at your list and you follow up and you just like say, okay, this person has been touched last time two days ago. I'm going to send a message because it's step three or whatever, you just do that. See, super simple. Once this is done, you go and look for these 20 new people. Go on LinkedIn, go in your CRM, look at your lost ops and whatever, select the people and then contact them. If you do that every day, you're breaking out the task every day and it's always a simpler task than blocking it whole afternoon to do like 200, find 200 leads. So really when you're doing this, it's a bit of it every day, it's consistency, it's becoming a routine, it's becoming something you're comfortable with and it's simpler. So when I was doing cold calling, for me it was important to block off time when the prospects were most likely to respond. And that was made in the morning. They were maybe driving to work. The managers were sitting in the car or maybe also in the afternoon actually when you're heading back to pick up their kids, et cetera. But when working with LinkedIn, would you say it doesn't matter the same that you do it on the same hour as the prospect work or since LinkedIn is often something you consume when you're a bit bored, you have five minutes or something. Between meetings, you pick up the phone and you scroll through the feed. So an input on that one. So I think LinkedIn is really an asynchronous touch point. So it doesn't matter that much in my opinion. Cold calling is obviously very different. So if you're cold calling, you have to make sure it's at the time where people are most likely to pick up. So you can time block at these things. But for any asynchronous communication, I don't think that matters that much as long as you're doing it every day. And that's just good. Okay, let's see here. So I think you had a slide. Did we show the last slide of your deck here? I think we did, yeah. Okay, that's good. And you shared the deck, that's super. Okay, then we can actually open up for some questions. I know we have someone in the chat we haven't had the time to respond to already. Let me see here. I mean, Ekaterina asked a good question. So what to do if the lead doesn't add you to the network? Yeah, that's the question we were answering. That's the question we answered before where basically what you have to do is you optimize your connection requests so they accept. And if they don't, you try and either move on or try and go through email or calls. And is it all, I mean, I saw some numbers somewhere on LinkedIn that you can reach out to, I think it's like 100 people a week or something. So there's some kind of cap on the number. Yeah, but you cannot go crazy. Above 20 a day is hard, yeah. Okay, so 20 a day is like some soft cap you should think about, okay, that's good. Okay, I see a call. It's capped at around 100, okay. And does anyone know if you have, let's say you reach out to 50 and they all accept, do you get new credits? I don't know. I don't really, the thing is, I think it's not like that, it's just, they are very, it really depends on, that's the thing, it's a social network that is A-B testing on different users. So some may have more, some may have less. So it's very hard to predict. Okay, that's good. Good question from Pierre. How do you ask for our referrals? Good question. So the referral is something, it's more something you will actually ask at the end of, I mean, when you already have like, let's say an ongoing relationship. So a good thing I found, and this is like a really good example I got from Skip Miller, from Brockton Selling, is to go do what you call like a referral email. So basically you do a thank you note, say, hey, thank you for actually reaching out. I would love if you know of anyone who, if anyone you know would have a similar challenge, I would love to actually talk with them. So can you just forward this email and then you end up with email with PS, if this person forwarded you this email, you can reach out to me here, basically. And that's a very simple smooth way because they just have to forward and then it's very simple like that. That's good. Let's see here. Okay, so sales navigator profile with an active profile. Okay, you can get above 100 connects. You need to warm it up basically. So the activity has to stay consistent. So that's the idea. Let's see here. We got a question from Travis. So when using a video outreach, it looks like you pair it with text. Do you use text that match the video content or make it different? So basically some text before the link, I guess. So for me, like the text, I always try to make the text go in the video where the video has a title. So for example, when there's the video, I say name of the person, check this out. So we'll be Fred, check this out. And then I would introduce that by saying, made this for you, you know, made this for you, the link of the video. So then you're like, what is that?  So that's why we use it. And you also mentioned at one point that you should have, let's say, a repository of snippets or some pre-written text so you don't need to put too much time adjusting it. I guess the level of personalization, that also depends at least in my opinion. I mean, if you are selling to large enterprises, so you only need to hit, let's say, one or two meetings to secure your quota. I guess you can put some more time to personalize it. But if you're selling more high volume, you need to find a more... Exactly. And you can personalize the trigger often. That's what is the thing you personalize and the rest is not too personalized. But it's always about being a bit flexible around your sequence. And you know, whenever you have something you're like, okay, that's going to be relevant, feel free to play with that. Let's see here. Name is some last question here. Okay, we have some Carl. Does it matter if you do the invites all in one go? Currently, I'll toss myself a Monday afternoon to send out 100 dark invites all with pitch message. I build my ICP list with sales navigator. Would you say this is an effective method or stick to daily invites from Carl? All in one go. The problem is if you do everything on Monday afternoon, 100 connection requests, you're going to get in trouble with LinkedIn because it's kind of like very, very spammy basically to do like 100 at once. So the idea is if you're playing with LinkedIn, you have to play this kind of consistent game. So for me, I would say that doing it a bit every day, so 20 a day instead of 100 on Monday, it's going to be a lot simpler, a lot healthier and you won't be afraid to be striked or blocked on LinkedIn. So that's what I would say. And I get good one. And yeah, E-Catharina, you mentioned something. Do you think it's important to post frequently as an SDR, like educational posts, attract activities, et cetera? And if I just add in here as a marketer and let's say someone who firmly believe in building your personal brand, I would say it surely helps. I'm pretty sure that, yeah, like YouTube and other people being very active, I know a lot of BDRs, SDRs, account executives, they've managed to build a brand bigger than their executives of the company. So they get a lot of inbound requests and so businesses coming in and on top of this, they will have much easier to get do connection requests with new prospects. So I would say it's a win-win and as a marketer again, use the content the marketing team is producing for you, but also mix it with your own opinion. Maybe you find a Forbes article or a Gartner report or whatever. So often you can just bring the content that is already produced with a small comment. I really love this five-step guide or something. Absolutely. Yeah, and often it's really like, it's a whole other concept, content building, but it never hurts to go and share your experience and how you're going through, like you're just really good, like what you're going through in documenting your progress, it's always a good idea. So, and that was the last question and thank you all for attending this session. So one hour, it goes quickly when you talk about the topic you love. And this is truly a topic close to my heart, working with prospecting and serum, sales, et cetera. Please reach out to myself or Thibault if you wanna connect and I know both of us, we have a lot of content. So on superoffice.com, we have a super popular blog with everything you need to learn about sales and sales and marketing and service. So just have a visit and you also got a link to Thibault and his deck. So thank you for watching. Thanks everyone, enjoy. Thank you.


Today we are fortunate to be witnessing not one but two of those once in a generation kind of revolution. First is the computing revolution. As you know we are moving away from the traditional PCs, hardware, data centers into the cloud. Second is the e-commerce revolution that is happening right here right now in Southeast Asia. My name is Surya. Today I am going to talk about how the red mark infrastructure has evolved as we live through this time. You know, you know, living at these times when you know almost every day we see new technologies, new tools coming up with each of these technology, you know, claiming to be performing certain things more effectively, simpler than the others. How do we actually live through that? In this talk we are going to talk about how, what are the kind of challenges that any organization have to face once they say I want to do DevOps and I want to scale my engineering team. First off, let's look at how our infrastructure has changed from the time of monolithic application architecture into the micro-service architecture. Just like any e-commerce startup, Redmart MVP was built on top of Magento. You know the business grew and then we saw customers are taking up the value proposition offered by Redmart and based on the traction and better understanding of what it takes to run a successful online grocery business, we saw these huge potentials but those are problems that can only be solved when you have a strong tech team. So our first version of API was built to create Magento, which was by the way a monolithic application, but by then the direction was set that micro-service architecture is the way to go and since then we never looked back. By the end of 2015 we are close to 100% on micro-services and as of today we have hundreds of our services running on our infrastructure. You know the arrival of AWS actually brings in new computing era where we are fortunate to be part of that early adopters. Now we started off with the classic EC2 models. That was at the time when we have to contend with the fact that most of our servers are residing on the public domain and they are easily publicly accessible. That was until the concept of VPC came about when AWS introduced the VPC and slowly we migrated. It didn't happen overnight. We migrated slowly whatever is in the public space into the private space and today most of our servers are inside the VPC. This is how our tech stack looks like. It is quite heterogeneous. We are more inclined towards open source rather than commercial solutions. We love proven technologies but we keep an open mind when it comes to new and emerging technologies. More importantly is that we believe that there are always multiple ways of looking and solving at the problem. What this means is that we believe that the one size fits all approach to solving any problem is never going to give us the most optimal solutions to the problem. So on AWS side we rely heavily on EC2 instances but we do use some of their other services as well like Kinesis, Redis and even the latest serverless Lambda function. On the development front we are largely Java and ScalaShop. We use both SQL and NoSQL as the persistent storage and then we use Redis as the in-memory cache. With such a diverse stack, one of the first key challenges that you have to deal with is ask yourself how do you actually easily create a feature test environment so that teams, developers can actually collaborate across teams. So in this diagram we see a very typical scenario, pretty much what we will add about a year back. So in this diagram we see that there are multiple developers working on a common feature. That feature happens to touch number of services. So without the kind of proper test environment setup for them, what happens is that you end up, let's say this developer one, he could be running a set of services on his own local machine. So whatever is there is mostly locally configured. And then developer two, the same thing, he might be running another set of services on his own local machines. And then in some cases they might have access to certain servers that is provisioned for them. And what happens is that they might just run any service on these machines. They can be running on any Rb3 ports. And so what ends up happening is developers will finish it and say it works on my machine, but what about the rest? So what happens to the other teams like the QA and even the end user? They will be asking, they will be confused. What exactly gets tested? When was it tested? How was it tested? Those are the kind of questions, problems that people will face. So what are the options we have? We basically have two options. The first option is it's a bit dark here. But essentially the first option is what I referred to as the brute force approach where what we can do is take whatever test environment that we have and replicate it to create a new feature test environment. But you know that is first of all, it's going to be costly and it's going to take time because you have to replicate the entire environment over. What about the second options? The second options require a bit more creativity. What it means is we can take whatever test environment that we already have and then based on the requirement of that new features, we create a delta. And then that sum up, they form a new test environment. This is how it looks like. By the way, we chose the second approach and this is how our test setup looks like. You know on the vertical axis you have four layers. It started with the front end where this is typically the page that you see when you go to redmart.com. So down one layer, we have the public API gateway. So we use NGINX to power our API gateway. So what this API gateway does is to take any incoming traffic and route it to the appropriate back end services. And then we have what we call our poor man's version of a service registry, which we are using Hitchaproxy. So what happens here is that every service is assigned a unique port on this service registry and it's accessible from all the other services through that unique port. What is more interesting is our, this is how the feature test environment looks like. So today entire redmart team, they see that as if we have N number of feature test sites, but actually we are only having one. The trick actually happens on the API gateway layer where we create two separate routes, one that is for the alpha environment and the other one is for the feature routing. So this feature routes is actually configured to be smart enough to determine if a particular request should it be routed to the feature instances or should it be routed to the stable test instances. Because remember that this is just a delta where only services that are required to be modified for that feature will be there. All these things looks good, but it is something that won't be manageable if you don't have a good CI CD workflow. As engineers, we are mostly lazy, right? But for a good reason, what does being lazy mean? It means that we always try to find the most effective way of doing certain things. So what does the developer have to do when they want to create a feature branch? They only need to do two steps. First is, you know, they just need to create a feature branch on their repository and then push it to GitHub. So what happens when they push this feature branch is it will trigger build process. And at the end of this build process, we will determine if this is a feature branch, it is supposed to go into the right feature bucket. Once this whole pipeline is completed, the second step is for them to go into our chat ops and issue a command to say that I want a new feature environment for this service with this feature name. So under the hood, what is happening is that there is a bot that is running behind. So what the bot does is to first create the EC2 instance and then configure this instance to be running a particular service. And it pulls the right artifacts from that feature location and it gets deployed. And then after that is completed, the next step will be to configure the routing itself, which is the API gateway level and then the internal service registry level. What comes out of this whole command is a fully functional test site that everybody can start using. And all these things are actually not possible without the help of good release engineering pipeline. And also we have built a quite significant amount of automation around chat ops. One of them obviously is the creation of this feature instance and then we do have other cool features coming up as well. One of them is actually to create a new service from scratch all the way until they get the instance ready. Our release engineering pipeline has actually come a long way since we first started. We started with the Gitflow model where we basically keep one master branch that gets deployed to the production environment. And then we have a developed branch that gets deployed to the alpha environment or the test environment. And then we have many feature branches that gets deployed to nowhere. That was the pass. And then late last year we started to move into GitHubflow with proper semantic versioning. So what we did is we get rid of the developed branch altogether. So we only have a single master branch. Codes that are sitting in the master branch actually gets deployed to both alpha and production environment. But by default, if a code is pushed into master branch, it only gets deployed to the alpha environment, not the production. So if you want to trigger deployment into production, there is a script that helps you do that. So you just trigger that script. What does script and specify? Whether you want to have, as with semantic versioning, there is major, minor, and patch version. You specify which version bump you want to do. So the version manager will determine. Okay. First of all, the script will actually create an empty commit with attached preformatted commands. So what the commands contain is basically the version bump that you specify when you execute that script. And then at the end of the script, it will see, okay, this is a production release. If it is a production release, I should trigger a release tag and then deploy it into production. Okay. This diagram actually makes it more clear what happens actually below. So the first step is for developers to commit that code. And once that is done, the build process will start. In Travis, we'll download the code and then compile it and then try to resolve all dependencies from the Nexus repository that we have. And then all the various tasks will be executed. And then we have the code coverage analysis. The results will be published into the SonarCube dashboard. The last part is where the version manager comes in. So as you can see, there's a major, minor version patch. So the version manager will determine is this supposed to be a production release? If it is a production release, it will return a release tag into GitHub. And then it will do the necessary bump here, whether it's x, y, z. And then it will actually push the artifacts into the right location. So we have three buckets, one production, alpha, and a feature. And then it will determine which environment it should be deploying to. That's exactly what's happening. So by the time you have this, you are pretty much ready to scale your team. Developers by now will be happy because they will be able to push their code anytime to the feature branch. And they know that it's getting deployed somewhere. And they don't have to worry that they will break something and have someone screaming at them saying something is broken. The creation of microservices will probably accelerate. By the time the next set of challenges will be there waiting for you. With so many microservices running, one of the key issues is how do you monitor your logs? How do you make each service visible? Any time you want to see the state of particular service, how do you do that? And most importantly is for a certain business transaction, how do you actually trace it? Because instead of looking at a single stream of logs, developers now will have to look at multiple streams of logs that is coming from multiple servers. So how do you make sure that it is easily traceable? Before you realize it, you have to deal with this huge mass of tangled services. And by now, when your developers are facing issues, euphoria starts to come down because they will start seeing all these black screens, multiple windows. So what you need is centralized logging. There are some companies actually that offer log management as a SAS. But choosing the log stack itself is just one part of the challenge. The other part of the challenge, which I would say is equally important, is how do you standardize logs across different services? When you have so many people working without proper standardization, everybody will be logging at their own way. This is where Daniel later will be presenting the micro service template that came in. It is a close collaboration with that and then it allows us to achieve what we have here. So for the technology choice, we actually choose the ELK stack if you guys know. Or if you haven't heard of it, it stands for Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana. So if you go to the literature and start searching, this is actually the recommended architecture for ELK. So we have the source that is coming from the application itself. And then we have the log agent that monitors the output of the log itself. And then it usually sends this to a parser because the logs are usually in a raw format. It has to be parsed before they can be properly indexed and then stored in the Elasticsearch. And we use Kibana for the visualization. What most people will recommend is having this cache in between. But we didn't see this architecture as a silver bullet to all logging problems. And we did certain experiments and this is the architecture we came up with. Of course, if you can see from this diagram, the main thing is we get rid of the cache layer. But to be able to do that and make sure that the stack is still reliable and scalable, we did quite a few things. There were two important things there. First is that we look at the team structure, you know, and then we decided to create the cluster based on the team structure itself. So different teams, they have different scaling needs that allows us to scale the log cluster based on their needs. Second is, you know, instead of sending it in a raw format, we send it in a JSON format. So raw format, what I'm referring to is usually the lines where it is separated by tap. What this two combination does is there are at least four advantages that we get. The first advantage is, you know, with that JSON log format, we can reduce the computation required in the parser. So it does not have to parse heavily, which means that we can run a less powerful instance for the log parser. Second is it gives flexibility to the developers. It means that any time they feel like they want to add certain fields into the log, they can do that without, you know, requiring any changes on the parser side. And the third thing is the multi-line events, which is especially important if you want to see your stack trace print out and all that. Of course, there's a plug-in available for that, but we found it to be quite unstable. But all these multi-line events is taken care when you use the JSON parser. And last but not least is, of course, you know, the cost factor. You know, we are able to run this whole stack at a fraction of the cost of what would have cost if we go with the recommended architecture model. Okay, ELK is good for application logging, right? But what about time series metrics? We tried a couple of options, you know. There are a lot of sexy time series DB solutions and all that. But after evaluation, we decided to go back to the proven stack, rather, because we found that some of those tools are good for, you know, startup to develop, you know, POC and all that. But once you say you want to deploy it into a full-scale production mode, they might not be ready yet. So this is our metrics collection stack. Similarly, you know, we borrowed the concept of team clustering for this. And then we have a stats decollector for each cluster. And then at the back end, we actually scale it according to the team as well. One of the key benefits that we get out of this is, immediately, we get to plug whatever cable monitoring that we have directly into Grafana. And then we get to monitor all these metrics immediately. And the second thing is, it pays the way for us to go into the next phase of release engineering, which is the Canary releases. Okay, so far so good. But what about service discovery? If you have a new service, new instance, how do you actually make sure that is discoverable? So we did also try out a few alternatives for the service discovery, and we choose console over all the other options. But this is how our service discovery looks like before we roll out our console service cluster. So here, Chef is actually the one where it keeps track of the service and all the servers that is running, that is configured to run that service. And then we have the htproxy that checks from Chef directory itself, and it generates the config based on the data that's available in Chef. So this is the process that is going on. If you try to first create a new service, first is you need to update Chef to tell the Chef that, you know, I'm running this service, and then which instance it's running on. And then after that, you have to do in the next step, which is to update htproxy. And then you have the problem of horizontal scaling. If, let's say, certain services requires more capacity, you have to do two steps to bootstrap the EC2 instance and then to update the htproxy after that. So this is what our console cluster looks like. So basically we have three nodes that is acting as the master, which basically manage the cluster management and all that. And then we have the console agent running on all the servers. So what you see here is that the console agent gets to check the application, the health of the application itself. And then the application itself, it is able to check with console if I want to talk to another service, where shall I go to? So the console agent that's running locally will be able to give that information. You know, so earlier I didn't really explain why we chose console, but based on what we have achieved in the completion of phase one, we get at least three additional things out of this. First, of course, is the service discovery itself. When you create a new service, it's immediately discoverable. Second is you get them to do more granular and customizable health check. Previously, we only have two health status, which is passing and critical. By the time it hits critical, maybe everything is too late. So we have right now the warning state where we can monitor not only the service endpoint, but then also the system level indicators like CPU, disk, and memory utilization. And then any instance that fails the health check will get removed from the cluster immediately. The other thing that we get from here is the key value store.  How do you make sure that if you change a config, it gets propagated to all the servers without doing anything? This is the thing that you get with the console key value. You can actually set each agent to monitor a certain key, and if that key is updated, it will immediately, you know, you can update your environment variable or application config and all that. What is next left for us is to figure out the inter-process communications, which is going to be helpful when we do auto scaling and all that as well. So this is the few things that are coming up in our pipeline.   And then, like I said, you know, chat-offs is one of the big initiatives as well. We are adding a lot of capability around that. And then we are going into going into the chaos engineering. Instead of being passive and reactive to failures, we want to be proactive in anticipating failures. And, yeah, Canary releases, you know, instead of doing one shot, updating all the production instances, can we have, you know, certain instances updated, direct certain amount of traffic into the new version? Once we have a certain confidence level, then we will start routing to 100% of the traffic to the new version. Otherwise, we'll fall back. So, yeah, those are some of the things. Okay, with that, yeah, thank you. Do we have time for Q&A or maybe you can continue first. We'll do the Q&A.


JJ Watt, out for the rest of the season. Wow. It was a crazy turn of events. He was out for the game. I was originally reading. And then Adam Schefter put out a tweet to say, hey, this is a bummer. OK, this is an absolute bummer. But we think JJ Watt's potentially getting shoulder surgery. He's going to be out for the season. This magical run that he had with Phoenix. And his magical run he had as a member of the Cardinals in his first year of his multi-year deal that he signed after getting released from his contract with the Houston Texans in the big workout up in Wisconsin. He was squatting. He was getting numerous shirts delivered to other people so that nobody could break the story of where he was signing his first time being a free agent. But him goes to Arizona. Owner flies a jet to Wisconsin to go pick him up and fly him back and sign him. It was a beautiful thing. They got off to the hottest of hot starts. JJ Watt was a part of a defense that was dominant that could keep up with an offense that was consistent. And now here we are.


Welcome folks, we at the Dow Industrial has finished up 37 Nasdaq down 144 S&Ps down 11.5. Gold. Gold contract up $17.30 trading at 18.21 an ounce. It's silver up 32 cents, $24.24 an ounce. Light sweet crude up 12 cents, $79.68 a barrel. Notes and bonds. A 10-year note down 22.6 trading 112.12, 30-year off a full point plus 26.6 at $125.11 and $Kingdala. $Kingdala down 127.6 trading 104, 187, Euro is at 106, yen is at 133.54 and the British pound is at 120 to 1 US dollar. Let's get over and take a look at the first. We're going to go into the bonds because the bonds are making the run once again for lower price higher yield. Right now the 10-year folks is at 3.78, bottom line you're into the strength, the strength bar, the top of the strength bar is 112.27 into it. This thing's going down to 110.24. That's going to put our 10-year over 4% once again and we'll see how the rest of this shakes out. We go to the spy, the cues, they're all in ABC structures on the way down. The differential is that the spy is a complex one. It goes above the B point which is 377.85. You went sideways, you have light volume down a buck and a half. Inside the cues, different ballgame. Inside the cues what you have here is confirmed ABC structures down to 244. You're at 263. The B point on this is 266.95 and you're going to be making your way down there. This is going to blow away and I'll tell you something, if in fact we do blow away the October lows, inside the MDX 100 you are going to see the next leg down happen because this has been here long enough that people are not as worried because it's a year later that they've lost the money, but this is strictly, it did a 50% bounce of the last move, meaning the last leg down, but if we take a look at this on the full move, what you're going to see here is that you did a .236. That's about as weak as you can get. So the bottom line is that there's still a lot of selling pressure out there. Inside the MDX 100 today, the move is that was shaking it down with Tesla, Moderna, Lucent and Rivian. Big numbers and of course Tesla is on the monster ABC structure down. That baby is pretty tough. Have a great one. Have a safe one folks. Come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning 9 o'clock. Great show folks.


Hey guys, welcome back to come again TV the only place on YouTube. We're all geek culture collides. I'm Shannon and today on the show We're taking a look at the new masters of the universe battle cat All right, so on the back. We have the instructions on how to change cringer into battle cat We've also got The we've got he man Teela man-at-arms with the mustache Skeletor evil in beast man battle cat Prince Adam sky sled So I don't have any of these figures yet other than battle cat One of the Walmart both Walmart's were pretty much sold out Near me they had battle cat one of them had just battle cat the other one had battle cat Skeletor and he man I Didn't really see a point in getting Skeletor or he man since I just purchased The vintage collection he man and Skeletor What was it like a year or two ago? So I don't really see a point in getting these new ones Except maybe if I want to what if I want the battle axe I might get he man But other than that I don't really Need to pick up the entire set. I do want to get teela man-at-arms Evil in and beast man though, and I may get Prince Adam in the sky slip So let's go ahead and turn this back around first as you can see there There's he man and battle cat attacking Skeletor and there's the vintage he man next to battle cat Modern posing Retro play So let's go and move he man out of the way. We'll bring him back in in a little bit Let's go ahead and take battle cat out of the box and Check him out. Now as a kid. I was never able to get battle cat Never had battle cat never had Panthor either I Had almost all the entire masters of the universe collection except for battle cat panthor Snake mountain and castle grayskull my older brother on the other hand had two castle grayskulls We lived in different houses growing up He had one at my dad's and then one and my grandparents. He lived with my grandparents. I lived with my mom and So Anytime I went over to my dad's and my grandparents. I would play with his castle grayskull and his snake mountain Because he did have them Some friends of mine had panthor and battle cat Respectively and so I got to play with him that way but Here is the new Battle cat You go ahead and tip this down a little bit. There we go And I have to say he he looks really nice. I'm loving the posability of him a lot better than that solid piece of plastic that we got in the 80s Very nice detail to take off his saddle and his Helmet it just slides right off It's like that and the eyes are Painted on the helmet and then for the saddle. It's strapped just like the old masters of the universe figures And so there we have cringer and he looks really nice I Do think though. I wish they would have maybe Made him look a little bit more cowardly maybe more Scared Without his helmet and harness on because that's how cringer was in the original TV show and in the 2000 X TV series Now for Positability excuse me his tail is on a hinge as well as on a Ball joint or peg.  You can look up that far Well, I guess it's not on a ball joint. I think it's just a hinge he So it's not It's not bad He can turn his head slightly So yeah, it's not bad He has a jaw which can open and close then his legs are He's got a hinge peg Here so his legs can turn around spin around at the knee as well as move up and down and then at The joint here They can just move back and forth then The back legs are the same way only the hinge is in the opposite direction and they can move a little bit further back Well, maybe not I think I'd say it's about the same now. Let's stand Cringer here Move that out of the way next to he-man and he's the perfect size I have no problems with his his size his scaling with these vintage figures Let's go ahead and put on his Saddle put a saddle back on Just sits on there and you just run it Through if we can get it over that peg as you can see there is a peg right there, which does kind of Present a problem when you're trying to get it in But then it just hooks right over the peg We'll go and put his helmet on so I need to open his mouth if we're gonna do that Okay, and There is battle cat in all his glory We'll go ahead and use this vintage style he-man from Was it two years ago? I want to say See how he rides and he's perfect on there he is Perfect he fits perfectly He looks nice And I just so happen Here to have the She-ra. I just I just so happen to have She-ra here from the same vintage toy line as he-man With Swiftwind from the original Princess of power toy line and They look really nice together Aside from the solid plastic of Swiftwind you can't really tell they're from separate toilets all all four of them He-man and She-ra are the only two that are from the same toy line Battle cat is from the most recent toy line Swiftwind is from the original toy line So you can't really tell much of a difference other than the articulation in battle cat So I really like this figure. I'm gonna display him. I'll probably display him just like this with In fact, in fact, let's go ahead and display them with Skeletor from the same vintage toy line and Hordak Also from the same vintage toy line Tell me that does not look awesome That's that's a really nice display look right there. Um Actually, I don't think I'll get uh the new he-man or Skeletor, um I can probably find the battle axe online probably on ebay So there's really no need for me to get the new style he-man because The vintage style he-man And I'm sure the original he-man all ride Are all you know the same on uh battle cat and clincher same uh Fit same size and everything So there's really no need So I'll just get the rest of the figures Leave out he-man and Skeletor And they'll display just as nicely hopefully As long as the joints on the new figures Don't make them Larger than the vintage vintage line So anyway, there you have it guys. This has been my review of battle cat from the new retro play modern posing Collection of he-man and the masters of the universe I've been shan and this and kind of coming in tv the only place on youtube where all geek culture collides Take care geeks If you enjoyed that video make sure you hit the subscribe button right there So you stay up to date on all things geek culture Also, go ahead and check out one of these two playlists on the side for more videos just like the one you just watched I'm shan for coming in tv the only place on youtube where all geek culture collides Take care geeks


When most people think of measuring one's age, they think of chronological age. But how old am I really from a biological and scientific perspective? Scientists have recently developed a new aging clock that is transcriptome based instead of methylation based. Aging clocks are tests that attempt to determine a living creature's biological age as opposed to a chronological age. Aging clocks can tell how quickly the body is aging. The new clock was tested on C. elegans worms which mostly lack DNA methylation. After training in AI on 900 worm transcriptomes, the scientists tested it on another 100 worms. The clock proved very accurate. It correctly predicted the lifespan altering effects of genetic variations, environmental factors, various stressors, and combined effects of different drugs. Hopefully this method will be an improvement over our existing methylation clocks and help better determine an organism's true biological age so we can better test what things may slow, stop, or even reverse biological aging. See the full video at youtube.com backslashx10show.


Activity for teaching the simple present for the ESL classroom, classmate interviews. This activity is useful for new classes where the students aren't too familiar with one another. Set up your students in pairs, and have them ask each other about their families, hobbies, and interests, using the question do you like? And what do you like to do in your spare time? After a certain amount of time, have each student introduce their partner to the whole class. Here they practice using the simple past in the third person singular, saying things like Bobby likes to play football in his spare time. Thanks so much for watching, we are ITTT, the leading provider for TEFL and TESOL training courses. If you like this video, please subscribe by clicking the button down here, and click on any of the videos here on the left for more interesting teaching tips for getting certified to teach English abroad and online.