Unlocking A Little Productivity Hack With Mario Martinez Jr.

Skot Waldron (00:00:05)
Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of “Unlocked”, where we talk about unlocking the potential of you, the people you work with, and the people you do life with. At the time of this recording, I'm offering all of you, yes, my lovely listeners, a free 15-minute communication coaching call. You come with some kind of communication problem, and I give you a solution.

My calendar link is in the show notes so check that out.

Mario Martinez Jr. is somebody that I ran across a little while ago, and we were talking a little bit, and I was wondering how his specific tool could help me in what I'm doing in my business. It kind of popped up, and I was like, "What is this thing?" And I was kind of exploring it and looking at it and I said, this is really interesting. But I've seen a lot of tools like this out there. And then I was looking in a little bit deeper and I was like, oh, there's actually some innovative types of things in here.

And therefore, I introduced myself to Mario, and I said, “hey man, this is kind of cool. Let's check this thing out together and I want you on my show to talk about productivity and what productivity really means and how you can specifically help my clients be more productive. And so, he's going to introduce you to his tool. I don't want you to think of this as an advertisement. I don't necessarily do that on my show, but I do want to give people the opportunity to talk about things that can possibly help you. And I don't get anything back from this. This isn't a paid thing or whatever. But Mario's going to introduce you to this tool, FlyMSG, that is Fly Messaging, which is a pretty cool tool in the world of AI.

So, I want you to pay attention as he talks about this. You're gonna be intrigued. He's got a cool story to tell about how it's evolved. So, I also want you to pay attention to his entrepreneurial. How do you say that word? Say that five times fast, his brain. I want you to pay attention to his brain and the way he innovates.

Mario is the CEO and founder of Vengreso. It's the creators of FlyMSG AI, all-in-one productivity assistant that engages types and writes for you and saves you an hour a day. He spent 26 years in B2B sales, marketing and executive leadership. In 2024, he was named the most iconic business leaders to watch by Enterprise World magazine and was selected as one of 20 sales influencers invited to appear in the documentary film, The Story of Sales, put on by salesforce.com.

Mario hosts the popular, the modern selling podcast. If you're a salesperson, this is for you. If you're not a salesperson, this is for you. All right, here we go.

Welcome to the show, Mario.

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:03:03)
Skot Waldron. I'm excited to be here with you, my friend. Thank you so much for having me.

Skot Waldron (00:03:08)
Good. Good to be here. Good to be yet you're here. Good that we're both here. I want to talk about productivity today because I don't know. I think there's some people out there that don't want to be more productive, but I think there are the majority of us that really do want to be more productive. So, let's talk about that.

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:03:31)
I love it, man. This is actually right up our alley. We've spent a lot of time. So, there's a whole history behind how Vengreso was formed. And later on, we created a product called FlyMSG. And the central focus was all around increasing salespeople productivity, which then bled into founders and entrepreneurs and individuals. And later on, and I'll tell this story as well, how it bled into literally every type of line of business you can possibly think of. They're using FlyMSG. And it's such an interesting perspective of how we actually create a FlyMSG. And so let me just tell you the historical part of this, and I think this is very relevant for all of us who are listening, whether you're in sales or marketing or not.

So, one of the things that we were doing is for the sales line of business, the entrepreneur, the business owner, is we were teaching individuals how to go about doing prospecting engagement. So, you target your buyer, how to go about engaging with them to be able to solicit a response. And during our training programs, which is Vengreso Legacy, and that's how we grew as a company, as a sales prospecting training company, we actually were teaching individuals how to go about creating this engagement and we would hand off 60 different types of sales scripts that people can use, everything from happy work anniversary to a cold email prospecting message.

And what we came to figure out was that we created this playbook. An individual had a playbook from their manager or from their enablement team, and very specifically, they also had a set of messages that they would utilize with their target buyers, and they would store that on Google Docs, Word Doc, OneNote, Evernote, Notepad, Notebook, Draft, Email, or worse yet, they would hunt and pack for it inside of their sent folder. And what we figured out was that, individuals, sellers in this case, or business owners and entrepreneurs, every time they wanted to use a message, maybe someone asked how to change their plan, maybe someone said, let's book a meeting. They had to go to that Google Docs, Word Doc, OneNote, Evernote, Notepad, Notebook, Draft, Email, or worse yet, hunt and pack for it in their sent folder, find it, copy it, and then paste it over into whatever platform, their CRM, online, through social media, email, etc. And if you added that up, it approximately could equal up to an hour per day, an hour per day that somebody would waste in lost productivity, in trying to find messages they used over and over again.

So, we were using in our training program a free tool, which was later acquired by one of our competitors. And then I said, well, why don't we just build this type of tool? This shouldn't be that hard to build. And we did. We built a tool called FlyMSG. And we put it out there. We launched it in December of 2020. We put it out there into the ether. We loaded up maybe about 400 users from our training program. And a year later, I woke up one day and I had an alert from our CRM that about 35 online digital pharmacists had downloaded FlyMSG. And I thought…

Skot Waldron (00:07:02)
Wait, wait, wait, wait, pharmacists?

Do they own their own businesses as pharmacists or what?

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:07:10)
No, they worked for an online digital pharmacy, and these were 35 pharmacists from around the globe. One day randomly, boom, somebody found it and actually it was 34 because one person had found FlyMSG and had been using it. And then one day at probably some internal meeting, conference, kickoff, annual meeting, whatever might've been someone told about it. And then we had 34 people download FlyMSG. And I thought, what in the world are online digital pharmacists doing with a sales productivity tool? So that's where we had the mind blow of whoa!

And so, what we discovered was that we had about 2,000 users on the platform, and only about 400 of them were from the sales line of business. The other 1,500, 1,600 people were from accounts payable, accounts receivables, lawyers, doctors, physicians, physical therapists, online digital pharmacists, professors, stay-at-home moms who were doing homeschooling, teachers, public works officials that were utilizing FlyMSG and I had no idea that all of these users were on the platform because our focus solely was the sales line of business.

And so, what we came to figure out was all of these other users and these use cases had specific use cases for storing messages and snippets and wanting to quickly deploy them, for example, a college professor who would have thought this. Every week, these college professors would send out a message to their GSIs, graduate student instructors, or the students, and it was pre-written all these messages on a weekly basis. So, they would go in and for each of their courses, they would create a category course 101, call it. And they would create 16 different messages for each week message for the semester. And so, they would put a code called dash week one, dash week two, dash week three. And every time they typed dash WK one, an entire message would pop up on their Gmail that would identify what the program was for the week, what the assignment was for the week, and what they needed to do with all the different individual links. And they would then add everybody's email to the email and boom, send it out.

And so, what we discovered was is on average, we were saving 20 hours a month to across all of our users that were utilizing FlyMSG. 20 hours a month. That was because we were taking the messages that they had, and we would deploy them in a few short keystrokes versus having them go and spend time finding it or typing it out.

And so, significant time savings is what we started seeing inside of FlyMSG for all of our users and that was just one-use case.

Skot Waldron (00:10:21)
Okay. 20 hours over a month and If I sit there and I calculate from a business standpoint, we try to quantify the ROI of things that we do at times. It's going to depend on hourly rates of that employee or whatever, but where are you finding on average people are really valuing? Yeah, I can get more done, my employees can get more done, my team members can get more done, but is it I'm saving money or is it I'm getting more done? What do people value the most when it comes to this whole idea of like productivity and what it really means?

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:11:08)
Great question. The answer is yes to both time and money.

And so interesting, our first iteration of the product was actually centered around how do we calculate time and money for utilizing FlyMSG. So, that was what we went right into and said, all right, what we're going to do is we're going to calculate the words typed for an individual and calculate that against the average typing speeds of 40 words per minute. And a user can go onto our platform, they can change how fast or slow they type, maybe it's 20, maybe it's 60, whatever the case might be. And then we're going to turn around and we're going to calculate that against an hourly rate. And our hourly rate that we use for the global hourly rate is $30 an hour. And in the corporate environment, the corporation can change that, you know, up or down to for individuals if they wanted to change that so they can get a true ROI reflection.

And so that was actually one of the first things that we did in evolving the product was to help people understand how much they were in fact truly saving and so we over the last couple of years since we've been tracking it have typed over two billion characters for individuals across millions of different websites. And so, our averages actually went up from about 20 hours a month to actually now what users are saving based upon if you're a salesperson or various different lines of businesses were upwards of 39 hours a month in average time savings. And in terms of cost savings, we're well almost $10 million saved across all of our users for calculating the productivity savings of typing something out for them.

Skot Waldron (00:13:09)
That's pretty smart and pretty brilliant at the same time. Let me ask you this. I feel like I've seen some of these tools before though. I feel like I've seen, you know, some of these messaging tools, I've seen some of these, you know, shortcut keys and things like that that I could use. What makes yours, I mean, as a founding member of this thing, you know this, like you've looked at your competition, you've, all entrepreneurs have to do this, understand the marketplace of what's out there. Why would I pick yours over somebody else's.

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:13:47)
So that's a really great question. And that actually was how we began evolving into the next iteration of FlyMSG and all of its features.

And so, what we did was, is we looked at several of our competitors and their key focus was around text expansion. And mind you, FlyMSG came to market all as a text expander into the marketplace, but we needed to evolve in order to be able to sell into the corporate enterprise. Now, many of our competitors are doing product-led growth and we actually tried that. So, one of the things we did was, is we went from a pure service-based company, I transitioned the company to a SaaS company and that was two years ago. And then in the first year and couple months, we focus exclusively on product-led growth.

Product-led growth is similar to products like Dropbox or Calendly, where an individual is looking for a solution to the problem, and they go out and find a solution, and then they tell Bob, Susie, and Mary. That's product-led growth.

Now, one thing I was never able to master was how do I go from a couple hundred activations per month to 10,000 activations per month? And still to this very day, it has been very difficult to be able to make that happen. So, what we quickly realized was in order for us to move into what's called sales-led growth, meaning selling to the enterprise. So, whether that's 5 users or whether that's 10,000 users, an organization needed to be able to have more meat on the bone than just text expansion.

And so, I started looking at various different companies on why they were succeeding. And if you've ever, in the sales line of business, you may have heard of a company by the name of Apollo.io. And Apollo.io, they actually almost, after raising, I think it was $10 million. They had a million dollars left, which would have lasted six months. They laid off two thirds of the company in order to be able to elongate the runway and then figure out like how did they go to the market. And what they quickly figured out was they couldn't just have one singular focus. It needed to be a two-in-one, three-in-one, four-in-one, and in Apollo's case, a four-in-one. Then after Apollo started seeing massive growth as a result of that other technology companies started following suit.

You no longer could just do one thing. What individual buyers were looking for and corporations were, "I'm looking to solve three things in one, four things in one, five things in one." And so, when I looked at our competitors, there was only one other that was actually doing multiple things all around the activity and mundane activities. Everybody else was very much sticking to their core of text expansion. Then maybe they dabbled into a little bit of AI writing. And I said, all right, let's go back to thinking about the sales line of business, a founder and entrepreneur.

Our roots were developed through sales prospecting training. FlyMSG was developed as a result of that particular training program. 50% of our users at this point in time were the sales line of business, entrepreneurs, founders, etc. And so, in order for me to go sell a sales at growth model, meaning one company to 20 licenses or 100 licenses, I needed to be able to do more than just one thing.

So, in our Legacy Vengreso, we actually had all of our sales prospecting training on demand. It was so popular that the world's largest sales training company by the name of Miller Heiman sales training. A couple of years ago decided that they needed help. And so, for the first time in their 43-year company history, they hired an outside sales training company and that was Vengreso.

And so, I knew what we had was valuable. So, I brought back our sales prospecting training and now was teaching and focused on helping sellers really learn how to go about engaging, how to go about messaging, and then giving them FlyMSG to be able to quickly deploy that messaging across any platform. And you asked a question about what makes us unique.

What makes us unique is we work on tens of millions of websites. So as an example, you and I were just in the pre-game show. We were talking about, hey, I need some of the information from you and you wanted my social links. So, all I did was type in dash LI and that spit out my entire link for my personal LinkedIn profile and for my company LinkedIn profile. Dash YT, it brought my YouTube site up, right? So, I brought this to market and said we can build this and use it for any messaging that a seller is engaged on.

But then we realized something was missing and that was engagement. We were teaching individuals how to go about engaging on platforms like LinkedIn. For example, I'd go to Skot Waldron's profile. I look at your profile and I start reading all of your different posts that you've written. I want to engage with them, but I don't know what to say. I don't even know how to reply to some of the messages because I don't have domain authority or expertise in that particular segment. So, we went back to our sellers, and we said, why are you not commenting? When we know that this is how you create engagement with buyers.

Funny thing was, sellers said, I don't know what to write. Those that were doing it, which was about 15% of our tens of thousands of users that we've trained, we did a time motion study, and it showed that they were spending 6 to 12 minutes per post, per comment. Why? Because I'd go to Skot Waldron's profile, I would then look at all of his different posts, I'd then read every single one of them. I'd then pick one, I'd then stare at a white comment screen, and I would then think about what am I to say to this when I don't have domain expertise, then I start typing, then I start editing and that's where we said we can solve that problem.

So, underneath FlyMSG, we created a feature called FlyEngage and that's the ability for someone to go to anyone's LinkedIn posts and actually write a curious, optimistic or thoughtful comment to that particular post. Giving some questions that they could ask and writing an entire comment so that it would engage with this particular buyer. And here's the crazy part about what happened. If our growth curve was a slight little growth just like this in terms of number of characters typed, in the first month of releasing FlyEngage, a feature of FlyMSG, we did the hockey stick, boom! That's when we knew we had something.

And so we created that and then we went back and said, well, what about social media posts. Here's something for anybody listening in. Some people may not be applicable, but those that are listening in that in the sales line of business and founders and entrepreneurs, here's a little hack that happens on LinkedIn. Skot, if you and I connect on LinkedIn and I send you a message one time and you reply back to that message one time through LinkedIn messaging. After we connect, for the next four weeks, LinkedIn will serve up my content to you and your content to me and my newsfeed.

Now, why is that so important? Well, as a seller, I want my content showing up in your newsfeed while you're going to bed and you're scrolling on LinkedIn one last time before bedtime or sitting on the toilet going through social media, right? I want that content showing up in your newsfeed, but here's the problem, sellers didn't know how to write the messaging. So, then we said, well, we can teach that because we have our on-demand training content. Sellers needed to quickly deploy that messaging. Well, FlyMSG would solve that problem because you could put your template inside a FlyMSG and do a short code. And then what we would do is to say, all right, well, what I don't have content. So, then we said, well, why don't we create FlyEngage to be able to quickly write comments to people's posts edit them before they post. No auto posting.

And then we said, but something more, and that was social media posts and reps would say, well, I'm a seller to the legal industry, but I'm not a lawyer, so I don't have domain expertise. Don't worry. We'll actually use AI, format it for you and we'll insert it right on LinkedIn for you and then you hit post for social media posts.

So, these four products that I just mentioned, the training, the Auto Text Expander, FlyEngage and now FlyPosts to write your social media posts in the format that we know LinkedIn loves listicles, headlines, emojis, all that stuff. We now do all of that.

So back to the long story of, and the long-winded answer of what makes us unique and different. And what we focused on was the productivity of an individual user. But adding in these features that would increase their productivity, yes, would help throughout the entire process of someone trying to engage in this case with the sales line of business.

And so, it was a four-in-one, soon to be a five-in-one, and in the next three months, a six-in-one product. Meaning we're going to be doing things like similar to Grammarly, Spelling Check, Grammar Check, Punctuation, and AI Sentence Rewrite will be adding in and AI Personality Insights, meaning I write a message to Skot, no matter who I am. I could be a seller, I could be at a doctor, I could be an account payable, whatever the case might be, and I write my message, FlyMSG comes alive and starts reading it and says, whoa, whoa, whoa, you wrote in your message, Hey Skot! But Skot’s kind of an old school type of guy. So, let's change that to, “Hello,
Skot,”.

And so, these are the types of insights that we'll be bringing. So, in terms of what makes us different, it's now all around focused around the four-in-one, five-in-one, six-in-one, five products in one, six products in one. And everything is centered around how to increase productivity so that I don't have to go out and do individual research to figure out what type of person is Skot Waldron, right? How does Skot Waldron want to be communicated with? FlyMSG will do that. Or how do I quickly get my message out to Skot? Short codes. Or how do I engage with Skot online, LinkedIn commenting with AI? Or how do I actually develop thought leadership so that I as an individual can be seen in a different light?

Whether you are in accounts payable, a lawyer, a doctor, FlyPosts helps an individual in that particular regard by writing the post. And here we go, Skot. The average time it takes a user to write a social media post, 32 minutes to write a story.

Skot Waldron (00:25:03)
Not me, Mario, not me. I don't have time for that, man. I don't have time for that.

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:25:08)
And that's why most people don't post content. With FlyPosts, all you have to do is say, write a post about, and you fill in the blank. You literally double click on the word insert topic, you fill in the blank, and that process went from 32 down to 6 minutes to less than 1 minute to write the post for you and then the next 5 minutes are spent reading it, adding in color, adding in content, maybe it's a story, putting in a link wherever you want people to link to and that's the power of what we brought to the market was all around centered around productivity.

Skot Waldron (00:25:43)
Let me, can I push back on something real quick? I wanna see what you say.

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:25:47)
Of course.

Skot Waldron (00:25:49)
So, in the world of everything going AI and in the world of everything becoming less human, remote work, messaging through Teams or Slack or chat or whatever and then you know online interactions think everything's digital right they were losing the humanity of things. All of this, especially the earlier tools, I'll say I will add that the later tools, I will say, seem to be a bit more less transactional, but I will say the earlier ones seem very transactional. And LinkedIn almost seems a little transactional anyway to a lot of people. Aren't you just increasing the transactionality of the social platforms and human interaction?

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:26:45)
I love that question. And if you look at all of our content and if you look at how we position our technology, it's called human-assisted AI.

Human-assisted AI. We do absolutely no automation whatsoever. And to clarify when I say automation will help you write, but I'm not auto-posting, I'm not auto-commenting, I'm not opening up a list of profiles and saying here are my 20 prospects I want you to FlyMSG to go out and prospect to, no. We've decided that the world doesn't need more automation. The world does not need more spray and pray of messaging.

If I just looked at my inbox this morning, I deleted over 50 messages overnight, 50 messages that were all automated sales messaging into my inbox. None of which got me to say, huh, that's interesting.

So, with that in mind, we developed FlyMSG as a human-assisted AI platform, meaning we're going to help you write. We're going to even help you phrase things better. We're going to help you correct. But the human is required to now read the content for contextual relevance, to ensure they're tagging the individual or addressing the individual correctly. And then it's up to the human to say post, comment, send that particular message. And that's why we do, and that's why we focus on as human-assisted AI versus all of these tools that are out there, which are
trying to drive automation and all the tools that are out there that are driving automation is creating and wreaking havoc inside of many different organizations, as well as being able to drive engagement.

So, an answer to your question, again, a long-winded answer, is I agree with you 100%. Spray and pray is not what we need. Automation that has no regard for the individual and who they are, we do not need. However, what we do need is tools and technology that helps me do my job faster. And now I apply human thinking to ensure that it's relevant and contextually relevant to the individual. And that's what FlyMSG does.

Skot Waldron (00:29:27)
Well said, man. I will give you credit for that. Human-assisted is a good phrase to use there.

All right, so I dig this, man, I dig it. And I think that it's important for people to understand what a productivity means to them and what the value is they're gonna get from using a tool like this and how that's going to help increase the ability for us as a culture to get more done and to feel good about the things that we're doing. 'Cause yes, if I can use the assistant to, and I use AI all the time, to assist me in some of the mundane things like you said, the things that I don't want to have to think about, um, that give me started, I'm a riffer, right? Like I like to riff. And so, if I can use AI to riff off ideas, and I mean, I can't tell you how many good ideas have come off me riffing with AI. Um, and I think that there's some really good value there.

If people want to, you know test this thing out… do you have some kind of trial period for them or is there something that you can offer?

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:30:34)
Yeah, well first off you can go to FlyMSG.io and you can download the product and use it for free. Now we're there's various different gates and things of free but we will allow you to try the AI out every day we have a lot of free users that are on the platform, and we are trying to figure out how do we actually reduce the amount of free stuff that we give so we can actually drive conversions more conversions that is. But absolutely you can go, and you can try for free. What's currently labeled as the Sales Pro Plan in the coming month or two will be turned into what's called the Business Professional Plan and so that'll be for not only sellers but for also individual business professionals.

If someone were to actually click and say, hey, I want to buy this particular plan right at the top of that screen, there's a trial offer and you can actually try it for no restrictions whatsoever for 14 days, no credit card required. And after that, if you don't buy it, reverse back to a free plan.

So, absolutely they can go ahead and try it. We're now up to over almost 19,000 users on the platform. We've grown quite significantly, and we are continuing to iterate, and our primary focus will be the sales line of business and the individual entrepreneurs and business owners. Our secondary focus is around product-led growth and that is literally everybody else in terms of who are utilizing FlyMSG. About 60% of our users are now the sales line of business and 40% of our users are everybody else, the digital pharmacist, the professor, stay-at-home mom, counts payable, receivables, and everybody.

If you think about it, we've got snippets of text that we store somewhere, somewhere that we have to go find it and this will eliminate that particular problem. So, go for it and let me know what you think.

Skot Waldron (00:32:30)
Cool. Thanks for not letting me put my credit card in. I really appreciate that. So super smart, well done. And if people wanna get in touch with you, what do they do?

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:32:40)
Best way to get engaged with me is to reach out on LinkedIn, make sure you say that you heard me on Unlocked with Skot Waldron. And if you don't do that and you send me a generic connection request, I will decline it unless you have the role of Vice President of Sales, CSO or CRO, then I might accept it.

Skot Waldron (00:33:01)
Yes, you better. Well said. All right, Mario. Thanks, man. Thanks for being on the show. Good luck with the business and as an entrepreneur to another entrepreneur. Well done. And the struggle's real, but that's what keeps us going, right?

Mario Martinez Jr. (00:33:15)
It is. Skot, thanks for having me on the podcast. And I look forward to talking with all of your listeners as well.

Skot Waldron (00:33:27)
I realized that that sounded kind of like a commercial, big, long commercial, but I think that's okay. And I had Mario on for a specific purpose and that was because I wanted you to hear about his tool. Yes, I have been using it as well in my own daily activities. But I also wanted you to hear about his innovative process.

I wanted you to hear his brain. I wanted you to hear the things that he's done in his business to level up to be different than the competition because you can't just be better all the time. We need to be different because different is better than better. If you've never heard that before.

This is something that's really important for us to think about. Our productivity and the way we do things is essential to us thriving and to being profitable in our companies and the way that we innovate in that process is really important. So, we hit two birds with one stone today, right? We had this idea of productivity, yes, but we also got a little glimpse into what it means to be an entrepreneur and what you, I hope you, maybe you're an entrepreneur, maybe you're not, but I want you to have this with thinking, I want you to be thinking like an entrepreneur. If you're not one, if you're inside of a company, you're leading a team, whatever you're doing, we have that mindset. How do we innovate? How do we level up? Do we know our competition? Well, all those thoughts, it's the same for everybody. So, thank you, Mario, for being on.

If you want to find out more information about me or check out the show notes where there's going to be more information and links to the things referenced in this episode, visit skotwaldron.com. And lastly, I'm asking for a little bit of love. Just a little bit. So please take a moment, follow, rate the show, the algorithms like that, it helps me get the word out. I really appreciate it. Thank you. And until next time, stay unlocked.