This is why 9 out of 10 sales emails get deleted

Thanks for having me, brother. How we doing today?

Yeah, man. First of all, thank you for having me on your podcast today, Mick. I know we're miles and miles apart from one another, kilometers maybe in your country, but I always love when you know young hustlers like yourself are putting content out there connecting with people like myself, you know, who are double your age and and are willing to just dive in. So nothing but respect and admiration for what you're doing. and I'm a podcaster myself. You know, I started recording episodes, my God, during COVID about six and a half years ago. So I love going on other people's podcasts. love having guests on my podcast. This is really my comfort zone and and where I find piece. You know, I always say with with podcasting, it's this is like the only hour, half hour, fifteen minutes, forty five minutes, whatever it is during the week that I actually put this down. and shut down my browsers and and just focus in and have a real conversation in an undistracted way. So I I love it. a little bit about me. so yeah, my name is Jeremy Funk. I am the CEO and founder of Funk Futures. I'm also a father of three. I have two daughters. they're both in high school. different challenges now, having two teenage daughters for sure. And I also have a son who's about eight years old. he still loves us. I think my daughters, it's a little bit hit or miss with that. and yeah, my story, right? So let me let me kind of give you the the

quick hitter version. So I grew up in New Hampshire in a small town. My wife likes to say the sticks. My parents were both teachers. I never grew up needing more, but I always kind of wanted more. you know, in terms of I'd say like materialistic things and financial achievement. But the business world was kind of foreign to me. You know, growing up where I grew up, you know, very country not a ton of big businesses, no big buildings. You know, it was a beautiful area to grow up in. I have a lot of gratitude and appreciation for where I came from. but eventually did get into the business world and realized very quickly I didn't know what I was doing. You know. went to college just outside of Boston. I went to Brandeis University. I was a history major, American Studies double major. liberal arts, thought maybe I would go to law school. ended up in a sales career in the early two thousands. And really I I'd like to to look back on it, and this was really before you were born. I mean the the the first tech boom, you know, the the internet becoming more of a thing and and actually people using email getting away from from fax machines. I didn't have a cell phone until I was 20 years old. And and even then it was a a Nokia 5160, right? It was basically a brick. Text messaging didn't really become a thing until I was probably 23 or 24 years old, you know, different different era. So I'm really blessed to have seen the world sort of pre-technology, you know, early technology. and then obviously with this sort of crazy evolution of AI, In kind of this this golden age of tech that we're in right now. But technology sales guy have been in oil and gas tech for almost 20 years at this point. didn't know a ton about oil and gas. still learning more about the industry every day, but really have enjoyed it. Very, very cyclical, driven by commodity prices, you know, the oil prices. the price of natural gas. You know, the shale booms and you know horizontal drilling and fracking became sort of key terms in my lexicon as I leaned into the oil and gas technology landscape. Mostly I've worked at startups, you know, small emerging tech companies, really like the energy and the mindset of the early stage, you know, growth, wear a lot of hats, do a lot of different things, you know, sort of figure out how you're gonna find your place in the business world, you know, both personally, professionally, and from a company perspective. After about twelve years in the oil and gas tech world, really seventeen years in a tech sales career, COVID hits. And in twenty twenty, you know, I think everybody had their own challenges and things to deal with. And for me, it was the first time in a long time that I hadn't been on airplanes constantly, you know, as a as a sales guy, as a sales leader, just always in different boardrooms, you know, always pitching different products, always trying to find business opportunities. And then I'm here, right? I'm literally sitting right here in my office and I'm thinking, I'm 40 years old. What do I want to do when I grow up? And And around that point in time, I I decided to start a podcast. I was really fortunate to have some good friends. Jake Corley, Colin McClelland, start up a company called Digital Blogcatters. They felt that the oil and gas industry could use a different perspective, could could use more content, you know, a different brand and breed of of marketing and perspective. Because everybody sort of has their preconceived notions of what this industry is. and it was really, really fun for me with my co-host Tim Lozer on a podcast called Tripping Over the Barrel to kind of focus on the lighter side of the industry and introduce some personalities in the space to the masses. sadly, Tim passed away in 2022. he had cancer and and died, and that was really awful for me. Took a bit of a break from podcasting, sort of went through some personal challenges in 2022. And at that time, I just recently started up my firm, Funk Futures, to help early stage and growth stage technology companies from a sales, marketing, and recruiting perspective. So yeah, really that's a bit of my story. We've we've grown substantially. Five and a half years as a business. I brought on some business partners, actually sold a piece of the business to to gain a different perspective and de-risk entrepreneurship, which is which is an immense challenge. A lot of long days, sleepless nights, transferring money from accounts to to pay bills and wouldn't trade it for anything, lots of lessons learned and Yeah, entrepreneurship, it might not be for everybody. It's not glamorous, but it is rewarding if you can, you know, just eventually get some positive reinforcement for your efforts. So, anyways, man, thanks for having me on. Happy to answer any questions that you have, happy to give whatever perspectives you'd like to hear.

It's an awesome question. And I and I think the easiest answer is just access to information and the speed with which you can get it. So like to give an example, in 2003, when I first you know had a corporate sales job, my first job, LinkedIn wasn't around yet. You know, Google, you could leverage Google, but maybe there wasn't this deep, you know, breadth of information that was available. It was hard to prepare for a phone call and really know a lot about the person on the other end. And now it's easy. Now now there are tools that you know I can go into Claude or I can go into ChatGPT or I can go into Gemini and I can say, Hey, I'm going to call these five people today. Give me a couple of quick bullet points about them. Boom. It's right there. There's the information, there's your LinkedIn profile. Okay, give me deeper analysis on this. Like that level of information now being available, it's reduced any excuses that could possibly be made about not understanding the person that you're reaching out to on the other end. Like every call that you make from a sales perspective, every meeting that you have, like if you're not prepared, if you don't know. Intimate details about the person or people on the other end, shame on you because there are tools available, not even expensive tools, a lot of them are free, where you can get access to information quickly and frame your messaging in a way that should resonate with the person on the other end because you already have done your research and it did not take you hours and hours or days or weeks to get that information. So for me, early on, man, I was just given like spreadsheets or lists with phone numbers of companies here people to call. And if the company wasn't publicly traded, you know, there wasn't a lot of information out there. LinkedIn was sort of like the first big break I think for salespeople to get access to a little bit more information and see who are your mutual contacts with a person. But now, I mean, especially with AI, When when my team goes out and prepares for their day, I would guarantee almost all of them are leveraging AI pretty consistently to gain information on whoever they're talking to, to understand more deeply about the company, their priorities organizationally, their roles, their histories, their backgrounds, and align solutions to that. So it's just become a more connected world for salespeople, really for everybody. But in sales, having access to information, having it affordably and quickly is a cheat code. And hopefully all salespeople are taking advantage of that right now. It's a different world than it was 23 years ago, man.

Absolutely.

It's not real, yeah. I love these questions, honestly. And and I mean truthfully, there's l let me untangle that question a little bit, because there's actually a lot there. Like for me, right, as as the the CEO of a company, I get so much outreach. People are just constantly hitting me up. And I can tell when a message is AI generated, and I hate it. So I tell my team, like, empathy is really important. It's a really important skill to have in life. It's a very important skill to have in sales. So think about how your messaging is going to be received on the other end. Yeah, can you do more faster because you have more information? You have AI tools that can effectively do your job for you. Yeah, of course. But how will you come across to that person? How will the person on the other end receive the information that you send to them? If they think like I do as a you know mid-40s, you know, business leader executive, it might actually backfire on you if you can tell that a person didn't put in the work in the message that they sent to you on the phone call that they made to you, right? On the Clearly AI generated messaging that they shot over to you because for me, like I didn't have those tools, right? So my emails, my sales emails and content, I built that, you know? And and maybe this is like a bit of ageism for me, but I want people to have to grind, you know. I want you to work for my business. I want you to curate information. And even if you're using AI tools, at least review what you're sending before you send it. Right. And I love when people try to make personal connections, but doing so through AI, it's not perfect, right? AI is only as good as the prompts that you give it. I can sniff through the BS pretty quickly, and that's an auto-delete, right? On the flip side, You can get more information about me very quickly. And if you reach out in a thoughtful way, even leveraging AI, you'll probably get my attention. So, yeah, it's still, you know, hard work and a level of focus and attention to detail is actually more important than ever right now because you can get access to more. And you can look really bad in the process of using overusing AI in your sales outreach.

Like me at the me me at this age, if you want to get my attention at funk futures, like you you wanna do business with us, you wanna sell something to me, you wanna get my attention. Right. How would you do that today? first of all, it's gotta be succinct. Like it's gotta be short. Long emails, like maybe it's like the Twitter generation or whatever. Like, I don't have the time. I'm on calls all day. I'm on like high fidelity. business calls. I have to make like tough decisions in a short period of time. When I actually get into my inbox, I'm not even on LinkedIn nearly as much. Like I'm certainly like 100 messages behind right now. But because of that, when I do go in, like I'm probably quickly deleting nine out of every 10 messages and paying attention to one. And why do I pay attention to that one? It's because the message that I received, again, whether it's AI generated or human generated, doesn't really matter to me. Is it researched? Is it well researched about me? Is it well researched about my business? It's probably easier for me to tell you how not to reach out to me, right? And that would be sending a message and saying, pick a restaurant that is in Denver, Colorado, that you know, I make it sound like I went to recently and say that it's my favorite restaurant in Denver.

It's like, who are you? Where are you from? why are you bringing this restaurant up? I don't understand. and that was sort of one hook that some tools had had used and leaned into to like create a localized message. I want people to do a little bit of research, right? Look at look at my background, look at my client base, look at my website, right? Look at my profile, do some digging on me, feed all of that into your AI engine, review what you're sending before you send it, cut it in half, and then send it out to me. Like that's probably the best way to get my attention. And to be honest, like I have filters, man. I have an executive assistant who's monitoring my email right now. I have AI tools that I will go into and say, what do I need to focus on and care about today? Like, I don't have the time straight up to look through and read through every curated message, and a lot of them I'm not even gonna see. So, how are you going to get my attention? How are you gonna get my executive assistant's attention? And she can be found too. How are you gonna get my AI's attention? Like it's harder now, because more and more people are doing outreach to get my attention. So it's hard for me to tell you exactly how. Generally speaking, if it feels like it came from a human, I'm more likely to respond. If it is something that leans into a commonality that both of us have that's a real thing, I'm more likely to read and possibly respond to that message. If it's clearly AI generated, you're getting deleted very fast. And I'm probably not even seeing it. You're getting deleted by my executive assistant very fast.

Yeah. That's a good that's a good point. Like you know, I do get outreach with people saying, you know, something tied into where I went to college. Man, I graduated from college twenty four and a half years ago. Like a lot has happened since. You know, I mean my connection to the university that I went to, you know, while it is is a permanent thing, it doesn't really resonate with me. Like

Yeah, you can get that information. It's there. You can tie something into it. I haven't even been back to the city that I went to college in in years, four years or something like that. So it's changed. The the the old haunts and the restaurants and the streets and the houses, th they're different now, right? Maybe some of them still exist, but It doesn't resonate with me, right? So, how can you find something that might? And it's most likely something to do with where I'm at right now. I listened to this episode of your podcast, and one piece of information that I took that's interesting to me is the fact that you believe authenticity and integrity in a sales position is a key differentiator. All right, okay, now we're talking a little bit. Which episode? I mean, I'm serious. Like, like we gotta we we gotta be better. We gotta really focus on quality over quantity and not be lazy. And it's something I instill in my team all the time that if you are leveraging artificial intelligence. That's not what I'm paying you for. I'm actually paying you for your human intelligence. AI should be a tool that you use to complement, to supplement your human intelligence, which is why I hired you and hire your AI bot.

that Well, first of all, people are very giving with their time. I think they they appreciate having open and honest conversations. that we're all human beings, right? We're not just titles and personas that exist at companies. most of us have families, right? We all have things that that mean something to us, could be religion, could be politics, could be sports, could be cuisine, could be hobbies. You know, and and that I personally really enjoy connecting with people on a human level. I don't think everybody needs to start a podcast. I think there's some stat out there on Exact numbers, but something like 90%, 95% of podcasts end at about 10 episodes. And I get it, right? Because we're all in this mindset of we want this immediate gratification, right? We want an immediate return on our investment for the time that we're putting into something. It's just not how content creation or podcasting or marketing in general works. You have to be consistent, right? You have to stay the course and and realize that you know life in general is not about quick wins and instant gratification. It's about, you know, long-term commitment, you know, success and repeatable habits and patterns that then create and generate long lasting success and opportunity for you. And podcasting's no different. So for me it's stay the course. Like don't necessarily worry about early download numbers. focus on you know interesting and creative content and and finding the right types of guests for your your podcast because plenty of people want to go on I think a lot want to talk about what they have. And I'm in a different situation now where you know more people come to me because I'm just more established as a podcaster within the niche that I play in than me having to go out and curate people to come on the podcast. So you know eventually I think that's just the natural evolution of business, of life, of sales, where the you know attraction magnetism starts to shift direction a little bit.

Really?

Gracias.

Probably not. Probably not. I mean, my my sixteen year old I guess it's most relevant too. She's a junior. so you know, we're at the stage where we're thinking about college a little bit. you know, hopefully it's somewhere local like University of Colorado, but we're not gonna restrict where she wants to go to school. I think it's My kids are bilingual. They've been really fortunate to be able to attend bilingual schools speaking English and Spanish, right? Public schools actually. So they're fluent in two languages, which is awesome. So I think that there's this natural draw and attraction for my kids to maybe be in a world where they can leverage that bilingual quality. and maybe that's staying in education and being teachers of some kind, maybe country. maybe it's in the business world, right? Where you're doing business internationally or in the Latin American community, and in the US. So I don't know, it's early to say. Like when I was sixteen, I didn't know. I was focused on, you know, sports and girls and, you know, SATs and grades and college. And I didn't really have a very clear view of what my life would be. I think kids will leverage technology more and more. and certainly it's advantageous for them to understand how to leverage and use AI technology and technology in general as they move forward. But I don't know, I'd be surprised if they go into energy or oil and gas. It's a good question, though.

well I'd say for the younger listeners, right? Like the people who are closer in age to you, whether it be your classmates or early college graduates, right, who are dealing with that kind of quarter life crisis and trying to figure out their place in the world. I would say like be yourself, you know, be authentic to who you are. Don't don't try to be something that you're not. And I think that's played well for me. I think ask for help, ask questions, right? Like for me, getting into the business world when I did, it was almost I felt like it was looked at as a sign of weakness to ask for help. And then what I would do is try to figure it out myself and make stupid mistakes and get in trouble. Like if I were to tell my younger self, it's it just ask for help. Right. There the odds are somebody else has the experience that's around you and wants to give you that guidance to get you that help and that support that you need. So don't hesitate to ask for help. And I would say like the world is more connected than ever right now. So to think like, you know, you and I are connected and and we're, you know, massive oceans in between us. Right. And we don't even really know each other all that well. But clearly you were able to generate a message and send something to me that got my attention enough for us to get on a podcast together. Right. So opportunities are more available than ever right now. And I would say just try different things, right? You have less to lose when you're younger. Like find your heart, find your passion, be authentic, you know, be yourself and don't be afraid to fail. and you'll ultimately find something that speaks to your heart. And I think once you love what you do, you ultimately find success with it.

Yeah, probably email for me since I'm on LinkedIn a little bit less. Honestly, the the noise, ever since I flipped my title to CEO of the company that I founded, I get so much junk, man. Like I'm just behind on LinkedIn messages. So shoot me an email, right? Jeremy at funkfutures.com. It's pretty easy to find me. I'm available. Jeremy at funkfutures.com is is the easiest. Certainly LinkedIn, you can try, but you've got to send a pretty good message to be able to get through to me. I'll say that. And then our website is funkfutures.com, www.funkfutures.com. You can always send a message. you know, via the channels there and typically those hit my inbox and I'll pay some attention to those. So I'm not hard to find. it may take a few different shots. You know, I I respect persistence and trying to get through in a way that might resonate with me. Doesn't necessarily mean we're gonna do business together or that I'm gonna buy from you or that it's gonna result in the job. But at a minimum if I'm responding to what you're sending, you did something right.

Mick, my man, thank you so much for having me on. I love what you're doing, man. Keep leaning into this content creation. Keep keep putting the messages out there to get the right people on your podcast. Hopefully people listen to this and it continues to grow your exposure into different markets, different industries, different geographies, all of that. And if you're ever in the US, let me know. If I'm ever in your part of the world, I will let you know. But go get some rest. I know it's late your time, brother. Thank you for having me on.