Podcasts about sdrs

AI is not going to replace real sales. It's going to expose who was never really selling in the first place.In this episode, John sits down with Jeff Kirchick, author of Authentic Selling and a sales leader who has closed multi-million dollar contracts without ever going through formal sales training, to talk about why AI made personalization easier to fake and easier for buyers to spot, why authenticity is not the same as being liked, and why disqualifying the wrong buyer matters more than qualifying the right one.If you are in sales, sales leadership, enablement, or RevOps, this conversation gives you a practical way to think about AI-generated outreach, hiring for coachability over polish, the give and get scorecard behind real qualification, and why a smooth call is not always a good sign.Want to build a sales team that stays authentic as AI changes the job? Visit www.jbarrows.com and learn how you can Make It Happen.What You'll LearnWhy AI made personalization easier to fake, and easier for buyers to spotWhy authenticity is about being trusted, not being likedWhy Jeff hires SDRs on exactly two traits, work ethic and coachabilityWhy a smooth sales call without objections is a warning sign, not a good signWhy disqualifying the wrong buyer matters more than qualifying the right oneJeff Kirchick is the author of Authentic Selling and a sales leader who built his career without formal sales training, closing multi-million dollar enterprise contracts through intuition, empathy, and direct relationship building. He hires his team on two filters, work ethic and coachability, and has built his own sales org's AI infrastructure in house, including deal scoring and call coaching.Visit jeffkirchick.com to read more of Jeff's writing on sales, authenticity, and AI.Connect with Jeff Kirchick:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/jeffkirchick Website: jeffkirchick.com John Barrows is a sales trainer, speaker, and founder of JB Sales with over 25 years of experience in the industry. He has made hundreds of cold calls a week, led startups to acquisition, and trained high-performing teams at companies like Salesforce, LinkedIn, Amazon, and Okta. Through JB Sales, John focuses on practical sales execution, helping reps fill pipeline, close deals, and build trust with buyers in today's AI-driven sales environment.Connect with John Barrows:LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows Instagram: instagram.com/johnmbarrows TikTok: tiktok.com/@johnmbarrows Check out John's Membership: https://learn.jbarrows.com/pages/individual-packagesJoin John's Newsletter: https://www.jbarrows.com/newsletter

Imagine doubling your close rate and cutting your sales cycle in half. That's not a hypothetical. It's exactly what Pieter Leenhouts and his team did at Tax Guard, a Cogency Global company that sells to banks and financial institutions. Pieter walked me through exactly how they pulled it off, and it wasn't magic. It was math, structure, and a relentless focus on the front end of the pipeline.Why Their Sales Cycle Was So Long To Begin WithTax Guard's solution was new to the financial institutions they sold to, so reps had to spend real time educating buyers before those buyers even understood why they needed it.That education requirement, combined with deals that stalled out with the wrong contacts, created a long sales cycle and a lower close rate.Fixing it started with the pipeline itself, not with pushing reps to work harder.Give Every Rep the Right Size Pipeline, Not Just More DealsPieter's team found that around 120 opportunities was the right pipeline size for most of their account executives, though the number flexes based on how efficient a rep is.Instead of leaving reps to self source every opportunity, the team loads a portion of that pipeline for them, so reps spend more time working real opportunities and less time hunting for net new business.Their market of five to ten thousand financial institutions is well defined, which makes it possible to plan pipeline size with real precision instead of guessing.Split the Pipeline: 70 Percent Pre-Handraiser, 30 Percent Post-HandraiserOf those 120 opportunities, about 70 percent sit in the pre-handraiser stage, where reps are still working to connect with people.The remaining 30 percent sit in the post-handraiser stage, where there's already an active, ongoing conversation with the customer.That split keeps reps focused on outreach without starving the deals that are already moving.Marketing and Sales Load the Pipeline TogetherPieter is careful to point out that loading the pipeline isn't a sales-only effort. It's a collaboration between sales leadership and marketing leadership.Marketing helps identify and prioritize which accounts and departments actually fit where Tax Guard's solution applies.That partnership is part of why the team can hand reps a healthier mix of fast cycle and slow cycle opportunities instead of leaving it to chance.Why They Kept AEs on the Full Buyer Journey Instead of Handing Off to BDRsBecause their solution requires ongoing education, Pieter's team decided against using BDRs or SDRs to book appointments and hand off to AEs.The same person a buyer starts talking to needs to stay with them as a trusted advisor through the entire education process.Pieter is clear that this only makes sense because of how complex and unfamiliar their solution is. A more transactional sale can absolutely work with a BDR handoff.The Cadence: 17 Touches Over 70 DaysEach opportunity in the pipeline follows a defined cadence, roughly 17 touches over 70 days, with three to five contacts tied to each account.That structure turns follow-up into a math exercise. Once you know the number of opportunities, steps, and contacts, you know almost exactly how many activities a rep needs to complete each day.The cadence isn't automated. Reps still show up and do the work themselves, which keeps the process personal instead of robotic.Personalization Is What Makes the Math WorkPieter gets five to six hundred pitches a day himself, so he knows exactly what gets ignored: generic, unpersonalized outreach.His team uses AI to gather background information quickly, but the personal touch, referencing where someone went to school or what they care about, still has to come from the rep.That combination of structure and personalization is what actually breaks through the noise instead of just adding to it.How They Catch Reps Who Are Gaming Activity NumbersTo catch reps who rack up huge activity numbers without real substance, like hanging up before voicemail or blasting the same email to everyone, Pieter's team looks past raw activity totals.They review call recordings and email engagement to see whether real conversations are actually happening, not just whether the activity got logged.The goal isn't to catch people doing something wrong. It's to find the reps who are getting real engagement and figure out what they're doing differently so the whole team can replicate it.Weekly and Monthly Rhythms Keep the Team AccountableEvery rep gets a weekly one on one that covers both big strategic issues, like what's happening in the market or with competitors, and specific opportunities that need a plan to close.Once a month, Pieter's team reviews the front end metrics as a group: how many people are in cadence, how many emails are opening, how many real conversations are happening.They also track Net Promoter Score to measure how the sales experience actually felt to the buyer, not just whether a deal closed.Their Tech Stack: Salesforce, Gong, Gong Flows, and DelightedSalesforce is their core CRM, and Pieter says most of what makes it powerful is what gets plugged into it.Gong records and analyzes sales conversations, which lets the team track things like how often pricing objections come up and coach reps faster than they could otherwise.Gong Flows adds structured outreach sequences with AI built in, and Delighted measures NPS so the team can see how the buying experience felt from the customer's side.The Numbers Pieter's Team Watches Every WeekClose rate and pipeline velocity are the two headline numbers Pieter checks first, since they show whether the whole system is working.Underneath those, his team tracks how long deals sit in each of their seven pipeline stages, with alerts when something sits too long.They also watch the quality of the opportunities reps are given and how well each rep prospects into the right people, since strong activity numbers mean nothing if they aren't pointed at the right accounts."Activities create opportunities, opportunities create sales. The only thing we control is our activity level." — Pieter LeenhoutsResourcesConnect with Pieter Leenhouts on LinkedIn.Learn more about Tax Guard, a Cogency Global company.Keep track of your sales activity and boost your results with the Prospect Pro sales tool.Step up your sales game with Sales Mastermind. Get accountability, stay motivated, and tackle the blockers keeping you from hitting your goals.Visit Blue Mango Studios for help creating podcast production content.Join our LinkedIn cohort and learn to prospect the right way.Sponsorship OffersThis episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot.With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales.This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn.Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse.This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation.Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin.CreditsAs one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey. We'd love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast,

Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, is driven by a passion for interpreting data and helping marketing leaders Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with greater accuracy. ith a background in sports analytics and journalism, Carlos helps B2B companies identify which marketing activities generate qualified leads, clients, and revenue so they can invest confidently in what works.  In this conversation, Carlos introduces The Condor Pipeline Generation Framework—Understand Current Pipeline Generation, Map the Process, Move Budgets to Their Highest and Best Use, Fix Measurement Gaps, and Rinse and Repeat. He explains why marketers should begin with clients and revenue instead of clicks and impressions, how the Pipeline X-Ray exposes attribution gaps, and why budgets should move toward channels with proven returns. Carlos also discusses using BANT to diagnose conversion problems and why client champions, paid media, and events drive growth in high-ticket B2B markets. — Generate and Measure Your Pipeline with Carlos Corredor  Good day, dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint, and today my guest is Carlos Corredor, Co-Founder and CEO of Condor Digital Marketing, a pipeline generation and measurement firm. Carlos, welcome to the show.  Hey, Steve. Hi, everybody. Thanks for having me. Great to be here.  It's exciting to have you and to learn about your secrets of how you generate a measurable pipeline. But before we get into it, I'm curious: What is your personal why, and how are you manifesting it through your company?  Yeah. So I've always been passionate about sports and the data behind sports, and I actually worked in sports data analysis and journalism. But ultimately, I've been passionate about interpreting data to have an advantage, whether that's playing tennis or doing analysis for baseball teams. And then I eventually started working in marketing, doing sports websites, and I saw the opportunity. In marketing in general, especially with digital, to use data to your advantage. So I would say that's really what I'm passionate about in terms of my professional life and why I enjoy what I do so much and why I get up in the morning and I really look forward to the day and even to Monday. Because obviously, it's not all fun. But ultimately, I think it comes from that passion of liking what you're doing, and the time flies when you work and you like what you do and you see that you're good at what you're doing and it's making an impact. So I would say that's why.  And have you always been a data person? Are you analytical and like to look at the numbers behind things?  Yeah, yeah. It started with sports. That's where I realized that I had, let's say, that passion at the beginning and ultimately that skill. With baseball at the beginning, it was reading the back of baseball cards and then fantasy baseball in high school, and then actually working in that. In kind of like sabermetrics and Moneyball-type analysis in college.  Because I saw, just like it happens in marketing, how back in the old days, even professionals, they were using the wrong type of data or a very antiquated way of looking at things. So it's like understanding really what has an impact and what is responsible for outcomes. That's, I think, the part that I've always thought was what's important and what I had a knack for, a talent to do that better than others. So that's why I went deep into that.  Okay. So how do you do that? So this podcast is a podcast of frameworks. So I wonder if you have a framework of how to create pipeline generation based on data, and perhaps you can share a simplified version of that with our listeners, something that can be explained in three to five steps.  Yeah, definitely. And I'll give you first the kind of like the philosophy or the mental model, and then I'll give you those steps because one comes from the other. So in marketing, with all of the data that's available, especially today, a lot of people start at the bottom. At clicks, impressions, and then they try to build a bottoms-up report to then prove what's generating leads and clients and revenue. But that is always inexact, takes forever.  What I propose is doing it the opposite: a top-down approach where you start with clients and revenue, and then start figuring out where those leads in your pipeline or clients and the closed revenue is coming from. And you will know all of that at the beginning. So that's, I think, how it starts, that framework. So the first step of the framework is to understand, which sounds really basic, but you'd be surprised today how many marketing leaders, marketing VPs, CMOs of especially mid-market, definitely smaller mid-market, and even some enterprise companies, don't have that data readily available to understand how much pipeline did we, as a marketing department, generate, let's say, last year. So that's, I think, the first step, is understanding that. It's asking your team for a report that says that. Now your team's going to come back and say they won't know the full picture. Maybe they know 10%, maybe they know 90%. But they're going to show you something. So then is the second step. You're going to start adjusting your investments to what you're seeing there, and at the same time, you're going to start fixing the dark holes or what you can't see.  And then simply step number three is rinse and repeat every, let's say, quarter at the beginning. And obviously, there's nuances of how exactly you should adjust and what exactly you can fix. But ultimately, that would be the three-step approach that you asked about.  That's fascinating. So the understand piece is understanding your pipeline or how you're generating the pipeline? What is it? Understanding what?  Yeah. So actually we have a name for that first step. We call it the Pipeline X-Ray. So let's say you start a new job as a CMO of a new company. Or simply you've been in the job for a while and you're listening to this and you say, “Okay, actually, I've never thought about it that way.  Let's sit tomorrow with my team and ask the question: How many qualified leads and closed clients have we, as marketing, generated so far this year and, let's say, last year?” That is understanding that. Now, I'll tell you, I'd be very surprised if the marketing person or the marketing team or the leader has that data in a way that they can say with 100% certainty what the answer is. In terms of, “We've closed these four clients, and we've had 72 qualified leads.  And out of the 72, 50 have come from our paid search campaigns, 10 have come from events, and then the others have come from organic.” In an ideal world, that's the type of answer that you want. But in the real world, again, very rarely do you have that clear understanding right then and there. So that's when step number two becomes, okay, let's close the gaps to be able to have an understanding.  Okay. So essentially, when you say adjust and fix, then are you talking about adjusting and fixing the process of generating clients, or actually mapping the gaps in the pipeline first?  Yeah, so that's a great question. The adjust, I mean move budget around. Not necessarily increase budget. You have to prove what's working. And obviously, if you don't have the full picture and understanding, you cannot just go to your CEO and say, “I need more budget.” So with the same budget that you have, what can you pause and move around towards the things that step number one told you with certainty are working. So if, let's say, out of the 50 qualified leads that you generated, you saw that half of them came from your paid search campaigns, then you say, “Oh, okay.” And then you don't see anything, let's say, for conferences, and now you're going to 10 conferences a year and you're spending a million dollars on conferences, and you're only spending $200,000 a year on your paid media spend. Then you say, “You know what? I'm going to stop. I'm going to pause. We're not going to go to these two conferences this year, and I'm going to move those $200,000, and we're going to double our spend in Google Ads,” for example. That's what I mean with the adjust piece. It could be the opposite. It could be pause paid search and then be more aggressive on our conference strategy. It could be, let's start a paid social campaign, whether that's LinkedIn or programmatic ads, or let's be more aggressive on our PR because right now our leads have come from interviews that our subject matter experts have done in certain types of podcasts or YouTube channels.  But that's what step number one is. But adjust is move budget around. Put your stocks where the returns are positive and where you can expect a better return almost immediately, or at least in the next upcoming months. And then the fix is particularly around the measurement gaps. The fix is what you can't see, right, on step number one. Step number one is understanding. And a report with all of that. When the person that does the reporting for you came back, or when you did it yourself or whatever, probably a lot of leads are like, “Ah, now it says direct traffic. What is that?” Obviously, they didn't just come and wake up one day and say, “Oh, I'm just going to go to condoragency.com.” No, they heard you somewhere, but you're still not sure. You won the client, you know you won the client, the client's paying you money, but you're not sure. So maybe, okay, what needs to improve in our measurement framework.  Usually, you can start with your CRM, your HubSpot, Salesforce, for instance, or whatever you use. There's some web analytics that might need to happen. You need to connect your advertising platforms. You're probably going to need to start talking to your sales team so they ask the right questions when they have discovery calls with prospects. I mean, there's a few things you can do, but I'm talking specifically about measurement gaps so you can have the full picture.  So when you talk to new prospects or clients, can they answer one most of the time?  They can partially answer one. I would go a step beyond because, I mean, that's not the sexiest answer. I would say it's usually, let's just say, around 50% of their leads and clients, they can know who was responsible. And then there's a couple of parts there. First and foremost, not only for your sake, but for the sake of your alignment with the C-suite and with the CEO and the CFO and even the sales team. You want to know, is marketing responsible for this? Number one. Because then that's very important.  Because that's what's going to justify the existence of the marketing team. Then later, if it came from a paid search campaign or a paid social or a conference, if those all are in the marketing budget, that's secondary. But most importantly, you want to make sure that, number one, you're bringing pipeline as a marketing department, and number two, you know exactly what pipeline you're bringing. Not only you, but then also your CEO and your CFO. So then it's like a luxury, let's say, to see if it comes from, the tough part is that you won't know that it comes from marketing unless you're tracking paid search and you're tracking conferences in the CRM the right way. So obviously, they are related in that way.  Okay. Love it. So understand your pipeline generation, and then adjust the budget to make sure you're supporting the ones that generate the most, and fix those that are not optimized. So maybe optimize them or replace them or come up with a new one. How else do you fix other than your measurement gaps?  Okay, you fixed the measurement gaps. Now you can measure it. You have a full picture. Then you have a slate of options, and how do you know what to choose if you're not doing enough?  Yeah. So I think there’s a couple of things there. One is understanding if you… Because, obviously, you always want to generate more pipeline. So you have to then say, “Okay, is my problem that I'm not generating any interest in the first place at all?” Like, there's nobody visiting my website. Or even downloading some pieces of content, what traditionally is called conversions or marketing-qualified leads. Obviously, that's not the goal.  The goal is that they turn into clients. But you have to know that if people are not visiting your website and you're not seeing marketing-qualified leads coming into your CRM, then you have to do certain things. Whereas if the problem is, “Okay, no, that's not the problem, Carlos,” and this is actually more common, which is a little counterintuitive, but the more and more that we work with mid-market clients, we realize this is the case.They are generating marketing-qualified leads. There is activity in the CRM. There are companies, new companies, that you see are visiting your website, downloading and consuming content. But then, for some reason, they are not becoming clients. So that's where we have to dig in and understand. Maybe they downloaded a white paper that was very educational in nature. And they're not ready to buy. Which is fine, and I'm not saying you have to not show that white paper, but you know that white paper is not going to bring you ready-to-buy customers.  So that's when we have the concept of what sales and marketing people call a BANT-type of lead, which is a lead that has the budget, the authority, the need, and the timing. You want, obviously, a lead that has the four things. Now you start, you measure. Okay, we had 10 leads, and they had, let's say, the budget and the authority. They were the CTO. The lead of the technology department in the company that we know has the budget. But they just downloaded this and didn't convert. They didn't have, let's say, the timing or the need.  Then maybe you rely more on, for example, paid search, which is a channel that, by searching the right keywords, the bottom-of-funnel keywords, for example, we are a pipeline generation firm. If somebody is looking for, “What is Google Ads?” That's educational. Now, if somebody's searching for “experienced agencies in B2B managing Google Ads.” Now, that's somebody that's ready to hire an agency to manage their Google Ads. So that's why, for example, in this case, if the component that's lacking is the need and the timing, paid search could be a way to do it. Or intent data, which is now something that is out there not only via paid search, but you identify certain signals and you can target them on programmatic ads or YouTube or whatever. That's another alternative. So that's something that you could do, for example, if you have a pain in moving leads down the funnel and closing clients, and you also realize that you're talking to the right people, but then they're simply not converting.  And the opposite. You get a lot of people that need your service. But they may be too small, or they may be just a manager and they don't have the authority to approve a high-ticket service. Then you go towards maybe LinkedIn targeting, or you do a campaign that is based more on account-based marketing, or ABM. Where you know you're talking to the right people. So again, that's another adjustment that you can make. So I don't know if I… Sorry if I deviated a little bit from the question, Steve, but hopefully that's still—  No, it makes sense. It makes sense. So first you want to measure, and then you diagnose. If you've got some activity but it's not converting, why is it not converting? Maybe it's not the right approach to build trust. Maybe there's another approach.  And then you look at the different elements: budget, authority, need, timing. That makes sense. So let me turn it back to you. So what drives growth in your business?  So for us, I would say if we do that, let's say, Pipeline X-Ray. And we actually did. We've been in business for almost 10 years now. And if you would do a Pipeline X-Ray, the number one driver of leads and new clients are, let's just call it, Condor champions that switch jobs. And not switch jobs that were working with us, but they were working with one of our clients.  And they worked with us, and they saw the work that we did, and they ended up moving to another agency within the same space, for example, or in B2B services, or even if it's something a little more niche like tech services, which is an area that we also specialize in. And then they say, “I already worked with Condor for either measurement or paid search campaigns or demand generation in general, and I like working with them, so they're going to call us.” And then some people, they switch multiple jobs. So embracing that and obviously using that to fuel and to focus even more on doing a great job and maintaining relationships with people, obviously most importantly while they're a client, but even if they switch, not forgetting about them. That has been the main driver. Obviously, we don't want to only rely on that. And then more recently, we've given more structure to our own sales and marketing department for that. And, for example, we closed a client that came via a paid search campaign. But that's still… We haven't scaled those yet.  We're still making sure. We're still in that measurement phase where, yeah, we're putting budget behind a few things and some of them seem to be working better, but not yet at the point of truly scaling that. We're ultimately also a relatively small firm, which obviously makes decisions differently than if you are, let's say, a mid-market or enterprise. But those, I would say, in order of importance, have been our three main drivers of growth: the champions that switch jobs, number one, and then I would say secondarily, paid media and events.  Yeah. So these are the three things. And what about the events? Why do you put events as a third? I'm just thinking that you're a B2B company and trust-based. Would events not be better than paid media?  I would say they're not mutually exclusive. Actually, they rely a lot on each other. And honestly, for us, I just put number two and three, but I would say they're tied for second, and then the other ones are four and below. And the reason why I think events are important, what we're seeing not only for us but for our clients, the outbound activity is really saturated.  I think cold email or cold outreach in general, because it used to be via email, now it's on LinkedIn as well, it's really, really saturated. It's really hard to be heard or to get a reply with cold outreach in general. Paid media, you can be a little bit more creative because you have visuals. Whether that's video that hopefully you can leverage. So I'm a believer in paid media more than the actual cold outreach via email or LinkedIn. But then the events are also great precisely because of that.  People are saturated and tired of being bombarded with messages from people they don't know. Whereas especially after COVID, people started going back to both the office and simply going out there. It doesn't have to be a big yearly conference. It can be just a dinner where you invite four or five people and talk about certain topics or any in-person activity. Well, I mean, a webinar can even be considered an event. Where you're educating your audience on certain things. And especially if your target audience is more on the manager side or below, or director and below, webinars can be an avenue.  But to answer your question, I think that personal connection is really, really powerful. And people forgot about it with, let's say, the boom of cold outreach and digital and now AI, and especially during COVID. But definitely in the last few years, we've seen not only that people are more willing or prefer to meet people in person, but we see that in the data as well, We see cold outreach campaigns that are bringing less and less results. And then when you connect in person.  Especially high-ticket. I also give this example. If you're selling B2B services, which are usually high-ticket. It's a project of either $50,000. It could be an engagement of $2 million over two years. Obviously, you want to know the company, but you also want to trust the human that is going to deliver on that promise. I always give the example: If you're selling an iPhone cover that costs $25, yeah, maybe you can get away with a pretty image on an Instagram ad. You click and you buy. Boom. Great. You can fully leverage digital for that.  But when you're selling a cloud migration project of a million dollars, you're going to want to talk to somebody, trust that person, dig in a little bit more, have a couple of meetings. So it's more complex. So in particular for those instances, that's why I think the personal connection, that it's even better if it starts at an event, or however you manage to do it, helps a lot.  So for Condor, do you make a distinction between B2B companies and B2C, and where you can help them the most?  Yeah. We have a couple of direct-to-consumer clients, but the majority of the work that we do is either for B2B or, if not B2B, it's lead generation. So e-commerce, for example, is a different world. E-commerce, as I mentioned, depending on what you buy, it's immediate. You track things. You have a platform like Shopify or something similar. It's a whole different world. Whereas that's immediate, and you can see everything, and it's all kind of automated and based on an inventory.  Whereas in either B2B services or lead generation, it's more about, okay, what happens after the initial action, after that initial either visit or conversion. Because a conversion is not a purchase. In e-commerce, in direct-to-consumer, in the example that I gave you, we made it. We sold the cover. That's our business. In here, it's like, okay, they downloaded a white paper. Or they signed up for a webinar, but that's only the first step of a long journey of closing, again, a $1 million service client.  So we specialize in that. In what needs to happen, not only to generate the initial raise of hand, but to make sure that the people that raise their hands are the right people, because otherwise they're not going to end up buying. And ultimately, the entire process of lead generated to client closed. Which is a big universe in itself. So that's where we want to focus.  So you basically help them not just to get the leads but to convert the leads and turn them into a client.  Right. Right.  So Carlos, if you had a magic wand and you could fix just one thing in your business in the next 12 months, what would you use the magic wand for?  I would say accelerate. I would accelerate by five or 10 years the structure and how mature our sales and marketing team is. I would love to wake up tomorrow morning and have a team of five people in the marketing department and five people dedicated to sales, with SDRs and a sales leader, that is already generating, that we're closing 10 clients a month. So I would say that's… But that obviously takes time.  And you want to go one step at a time, otherwise, to prove ROI and to grow without, let's say, wasting unproven budget or wasting money. But I think a lot of owners—I don't know if it's a cheap answer—but I think a lot of owners would probably answer the same thing.  Yeah. So essentially what you need to do is you need to have scalable sales and marketing so that you can just add people and it's going to—it's like a coin-operated system, right?  Yeah. Yeah.  So if the listeners would like to go through that process and they would like to understand, okay, how do we map our leads, where they come from, evaluate it, and then adjust and fix and scale, where can they learn more and how can they connect with you? Yeah.  So if they go to our website, it's condoragency.com. Condor, like the bird. There are some options there on how to work with us or even some information, even if they want to try and do it by themselves, right? Again, what I mentioned earlier, the Pipeline X-Ray. It's a quick project that we do to get to that, where you can start seeing some valuable information to take action on fairly quickly.  We can get that done in a couple of weeks, the exercise of the Pipeline X-Ray, so then you know what to start adjusting and fixing. And obviously, you can contact me directly also on LinkedIn or via our website. I'm glad to obviously have a subsequent conversation and see if and how we can help.  Awesome. So if you are out there and you want to improve your sales and marketing, then you have to start with the Pipeline X-Ray because you are getting leads, you just don't know where they are from and how effective they are, and then how you tweak the process so that you're putting energy behind the more effective ones and readjusting your budget, and then fix the gaps.  So Carlos can help you with that, right? So make sure you reach out to Condor and get the X-Ray. So Carlos, thanks for coming. And if you enjoyed this conversation, then make sure you subscribe and follow us on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, because every week I bring a couple of entrepreneurs who are sharing their frameworks with you. So Carlos, thanks for coming, and thanks for listening. Important Links: Carlos's LinkedIn Carlos's website

Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.What does it take to run 60% of a company? Garrett Marker, Chief Revenue Officer at Brex, oversees about 700 people across sales, customer success, RevOps, partnerships, enablement, and support - and this year, his goal was to aggressively scale a sales team that industry data recently ranked the third-fastest growing in tech, without letting rep performance slip. It hasn't all gone to plan. Garrett is refreshingly candid with host Josh Schachter, grading the scaling effort a "B" - what held up, what broke, and how his team turned around a slumping segment in dramatic fashion. Along the way, he explains why the battle cards that used to last a quarter now go stale in about a week, why Brex bet on human SDRs while the market rushed toward AI ones, and why the hardest part of AI products isn't selling them at all.It's a look inside the operating decisions of a CRO whose remit spans the entire customer lifecycle - from first touch through renewal and expansion. ---What You'll Learn- How a struggling Brex segment did two months' worth of revenue in eight days and the AI-assisted diagnosis behind the course correction- Why battle cards that used to last a quarter are now stale within about a week- How AI role plays and automated call scoring turned weeks or months of rep ramp into hours or days- Garrett's build-vs-buy rule- What Brex's internally built "narrative platform" does that seller-productivity tools don't (mapping the full buyer's journey across sales, CS, and support)- The question Garrett asked at the end of every demo as a seller and the rep whose career it transformed in three months- How the TAP program works- Why adoption, not sales, is the bottleneck for AI products- How a shift in CS conversations (not product changes) grew book-closing adoption 20% in twelve months- What Garrett believes it will take to increase NRR by 30 points in the next couple of years---Timestamps0:00 - Preview & Intro1:52 - Meet Garrett Marker (CRO, Brex) 4:03 - Why founders buy like consumers5:28 - Scaling the third-fastest-growing sales team in tech7:28 - Solving today's AND tomorrow's problems9:25 - 2 months of revenue in 8 days after a segment course correction11:22 - How AI made competitive diagnosis faster14:37 - Rebuilding enablement around AI and ramping reps in days17:27 - How Brex decides build vs. buy18:35 - Mapping the full buyer's journey across sales, CS, and support21:38 - Success plans and buyer psychology25:56 - Why won't you move forward?27:53 - How SDRs earn on-the-spot promotions to AE32:52 - Post-sale priorities: cracking AI product adoption at scale35:11 - Why CS teams must understand the whole tech stack, not just their product (+20% book-closing adoption)---Josh is writing a book on building customer relationships. Follow his journey and insights at www.joshschachter.com---Where to Find the GuestGarrett Marker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gmarker/---Where to Find the Hosts: Josh's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/

If you work with an agency, there are a few things you usually only learn once the campaign is already running. In this special in-person episode, Michael sits down with Belkins Managing Director Alex Sribnyi to talk about what actually happens behind the scenes of B2B lead generation: why some agency-client relationships work, why others fall apart, what companies often misunderstand about outbound, and how the role of an SDR is changing. Alex has spent more than 10 years in the industry, managed hundreds of SDRs and Account Managers, and worked across thousands of B2B client strategies. So this conversation goes well beyond theory. Michael and Alex get into:

55 personas, 90 clientes entre Europa y LATAM, 8,3M€ de facturación y casi 600.000€ de EBITDA. Y en los cuatro primeros meses de este año ya llevan 3,5M€ y 470.000€ de EBITDA.Álvaro Sánchez empezó Azzgency en 2018 como una agencia de Amazon y en este episodio nos cuenta, sin filtros, cómo lo ha hecho: por qué cada año despide al 10% de sus peores clientes, por qué en su agencia vende absolutamente todo el mundo y por qué eligen ventas antes que operaciones, siempre.

One agency office went from a 7% close rate to 23% in two weeks. Same team. Same leads. We are showing you exactly what changed, live. This is a one time webinar, no replay and no recording, so you have to show up. Thursday, August 6th at noon CST, capped at 100 seats.

In this episode, we sit down with Emanuel Kamau, a powerhouse entrepreneur, networker, and sales expert who has navigated some of the highest-growth spaces in the digital business and fintech world. From his roots in Kenya to managing an army of 50 SDRs during a massive growth phase at Grow Your Agency, Emanuel shares the exact operational shifts, scaling levers, and strategic content plays that took a community from 100,000 to over 4 million subscribers. We also pull back the curtain on the world of Financial Technology (Fintech). Emanuel breaks down how top service-based businesses use "transaction float" and alternative capital structures to solve cash flow bottlenecks and fuel explosive business growth. Whether you are looking to build a bulletproof network, optimize your corporate credit structures, or learn how to scale an agency from the ground up, you will want to grab a pen and take notes on this conversation! If hiring a VA for extra leverage is on your radar, pick a time directly on our calendar: https://bit.ly/4wJR9WA #GrowYourAgency #AgencyScaling #SalesLeadership #CommunityGrowth #CorporateCredit #CashFlowManagement #AlternativeFinancing #BusinessScaling

► kostenloses Startgespräch buchen: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://linkly.link/24kPi⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ► Kickscale - 50 Meetings kostenlos: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://2ly.link/1zdl4⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Neukundenakquise im Software- und IT-Vertrieb scheitert 2026 selten am Produkt und fast immer am Adressaten: In dieser Episode bekommst du vier Akquise-Tipps aus meinen Live-Coachings mit SDRs und Account Executives, die im Outbound am häufigsten den Unterschied gemacht haben. So kann ich dir im Sales helfen:zur Software Sales Formula: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.softwaresalesformula.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠zum Sales Gym: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.sales-gym.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Kickscale:Extended Free Version: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://2ly.link/1zdl4⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Timestamps:(0:00) Warum Entscheider dich gerade vertrösten(2:00) Tipp 1: Message für den Economic Buyer(2:50 Warum Budgets jetzt zentralisiert werden(4:30) Top-down anrufen und trotzdem gewinnen(7:10) Strategische Initiative als Türöffner(9:30) Tipp 2: Beim perfekten ICP kein Aufgeben(10:20) 13 Monate Dranbleiben: der Skilift-Deal(12:20) Der Frontdesk-Hack gegen Ghosting(14:00) Tipp 3: Mailbox raus, Video Prospecting rein(17:20) Video Prospecting Skript in 60 Sekunden(19:10) Tipp 4: Charmante Betriebsspionage(23:50) Bonus: Akquise im August richtig nutzenInfos:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠jiri@softwaresalesformula.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.softwaresalesformula.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.sales.gym.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 

Singapore launches its first Singapore Depository Receipts with SpaceX, Sea and Grab making their SGX debut. We unpack what SDRs mean for investors, look at Wall Street's AI-driven rally, discuss why semiconductor stocks remain the market's biggest debate, and round up the latest movers including Super Micro, General Motors, the Japanese yen and Kubota's breakthrough water-from-air technology.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Headline news for July 22, 2026: Oil prices surged to a five-week high today, as two oil tankers carrying Saudi crude to Asia reversed course in the Red Sea. U.S. President Donald Trump announced that U.S. imported generic drugs will face a 100% tariff in August 2028. SGX will launch 3 SDRs for U.S.-listed companies, Grab, Sea and SpaceX today. Synopsis: A round up of global headlines to start your day by The Business Times. Written by: Nicole Teo (nicolet@sph.com.sg) Produced and edited by: Claressa Monteiro or Nicole Teo Produced by: BT Podcasts, The Business Times, SPH Media Produced with AI text-to-speech capabilities --- Follow Lens On Daily and rate us on: Channel: bt.sg/btlenson Amazon: bt.sg/lensam Apple Podcasts: bt.sg/lensap Spotify: bt.sg/lenssp YouTube Music: bt.sg/lensyt Website: bt.sg/lenson Feedback to: btpodcasts@sph.com.sg Do note: This podcast is meant to provide general information only. SPH Media accepts no liability for loss arising from any reliance on the podcast or use of third party’s products and services. Please consult professional advisors for independent advice. Discover more BT podcast series: BT Mark To Market at: bt.sg/btmark2mkt WealthBT at: bt.sg/btpropertybt PropertyBT at: bt.sg/btmktfocus BT Money Hacks at: bt.sg/btmoneyhacks BT Market Focus at: bt.sg/btmktfocus BT Podcasts at: bt.sg/podcasts BT Lens On: bt.sg/btlensonSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The fastest way to break trust between sales and marketing is to let each team bring its own scoreboard.  Marketing can point to MQLs. Sales can point to missed revenue. Everyone can be technically right, and the business still loses. No wonder Denise Persson and Chris Degnan have little patience for functional victory laps. At Snowflake, the question was never, "Did marketing look good?" It was, "Are reps productive, is new business moving, and are we working from the same plan?"  In this episode, Drew sits down with Denise and Chris, co-authors of Make It Snow, whose sales-marketing partnership shaped much of Snowflake's climb from startup to billions in revenue. They get past the usual alignment talk and into the operating discipline behind it. For the pair, trust showed up in honest feedback, fast action, rep-level visibility, and a shared refusal to declare victory unless the go-to-market motion was actually working.  In this episode:  Denise shares how she earned sales trust by listening to SDRs, AEs, and managers, then building marketing around what each territory needed  Chris explains why sales leaders need marketing partners who roll up their sleeves, take feedback fast, and care more about the shared number than looking right  Together, they show how a CMO-CRO partnership can hold through CEO changes, board pressure, hiring misses, and the politics of a winning company  Plus:  How to push sales-marketing alignment beyond the C-suite  Why "no rep left behind" became a practical GTM rallying cry  What it took to move Snowflake from "data warehouse for the cloud" to "the data cloud"  Where AI fits into Snowflake's marketing team today, from change-makers to workflow automation  Listen in as Denise and Chris share what their Snowflake run taught them about CMO-CRO alignment, sales-marketing trust, and building one revenue-focused go-to-market team.  For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcasts/ To learn more about CMO Huddles, visit https://cmohuddles.com/

Ser o no Ser factura 3 millones con más de 1.000 clientes, un ticket medio bajo y sin un solo contrato de permanencia. En este episodio, Irene Fernández nos cuenta cómo se sostiene ese modelo: puerta fría pura, un equipo comercial que es el motor del negocio y una obsesión por la recurrencia. Y de paso, su salto de becaria a directora general en 14 años.

Inteligência Artificial, Product Management e marketing se encontram neste episódio do Papo na Arena com Marina Moreira, a “Mother of Agents” e AI Ops Tech Lead na Velora. Ela conta como saiu de uma carreira em marketing para criar agentes e workflows de IA para diferentes áreas da empresa.Entramos em casos reais de IA: qualificação de leads para SDRs, verificação automática de ONGs, integrações com Slack e Salesforce, triagem de demandas no Notion e a construção de um Company OS que compartilha contexto entre os times. Também falamos sobre como profissionais de marketing podem ir além da produção de conteúdo e criar landing pages, dashboards, análises de dados e sistemas completos.Na segunda parte, conversamos sobre a semana de quatro dias, os incentivos para adoção de IA nas empresas e o risco de exaustão de quem passa o dia comandando agentes. Se a IA aumenta tanto a velocidade do trabalho, como proteger a qualidade das decisões e evitar burnout e AI brain rot?

Podcast de ventas B2B y prospección moderna En este episodio de Yo también vendo a empresas hablamos con Clara Sousa, Global BDR Manager en Odilo, sobre lo que significa gestionar con éxito equipos internacionales de SDRs. Partimos de una realidad incómoda: el trabajo de un SDR es uno de los más duros de la organización comercial, sometido a presión constante, muchas negativas y métricas en tiempo real. Cuando además tienes que coordinar personas en distintos países, idiomas y culturas comerciales, la complejidad se dispara. Clara nos cuenta cómo ha evolucionado desde SDR hasta liderar un equipo global y cómo ha aprendido que el rol de SDR Manager va mucho más allá de “mirar KPIs”. Hablamos de selección, onboarding, formación, acompañamiento, motivación y de ese equilibrio entre operaciones, enablement y recursos humanos que requiere este tipo de liderazgo. A lo largo de la conversación vemos: - Cómo definir la estrategia y el go-to-market para equipos internacionales de SDRs, adaptando ICP, señales de intención y priorización por mercado. - Qué canales funcionan mejor según la geografía (teléfono, LinkedIn, email, WhatsApp) y cómo equilibrar cadencias y mensajes. - El impacto de la cultura en la prospección: Europa vs Latinoamérica, países más “fríos” frente a mercados donde la conversación es muy abierta pero aumenta el riesgo de no-shows. - Cómo trabajar el miedo al teléfono, la resiliencia y la gestión emocional de un rol donde se reciben decenas de “no” cada semana. - Qué hacer cuando un SDR no llega a objetivos: diagnóstico, ajuste de canales, revisión de mercado y responsabilidad del manager. - Qué buscar al contratar SDRs: resiliencia, simpatía natural, curiosidad y capacidad de comunicar, más allá de la edad o el salario. Si lideras equipos de SDRs, quieres escalar prospección en varios mercados o estás pensando en dar el salto de SDR a manager, este episodio te ayuda a entender qué pide de verdad el rol y cómo construir un equipo que genere pipeline de forma consistente sin quemarse por el camino. ..................................................................................................................... Y si quieres mejorar tu Maquinaría de Ventas Outbound o formar a tus equipos en #modernprospecting Pues lo tienes fácil: 699 45 85 82 Más en https://outbounders.es/

AI for sales is everywhere right now, but most of it is noise. This episode is about what actually works: AI sales coaching that lives inside a rep's daily workflow instead of sitting unused in a Google Drive.After 18 months of building, Dave, Luigi and Regan officially launch CoachPilot on this episode of Revenue Leaders. It's the AI coaching layer that sits on top of your CRM and coaches every rep on every deal, live.The three of them have spent decades in sales, built hundreds of playbooks, and onboarded over 200 SDRs for companies like Stripe. They kept hitting the same wall: even the best playbook fails because it never lives in the rep's daily workflow. CoachPilot is their answer.What you'll learn:→ Why the number one problem in every sales org is adherence to the sales process, not talent→ The playbook problem: why even great playbooks end up sitting unused→ What a day in the life with CoachPilot looks like: morning briefings, live call coaching, post-call CRM updates→ The live coaching sidebar that prompts you on objections, pacing, and talk ratio mid-call→ Why they built their own call recorder instead of integrating with existing tools→ The four IP layers: forecast score, coaching score, deal score, and methodology score→ Gartner's 2.8x revenue stat: why action-based AI paired with humans beats AI alone→ Why AI can't replace sellers in complex, multi-stakeholder deals→ The 50% unapproved AI usage problem inside sales teams and why governance matters→ Who CoachPilot is NOT for: the honest ICP conversation most founders avoidWhether you're a founder, sales leader, or rep, this is a rare inside look at why three sales veterans killed their own consulting business model to build a product.⭐ Learn more about CoachPilot: https://coachpilot.comFollow us:https://www.instagram.com/davidfastuca/https://www.linkedin.com/in/luigiprestinenzi/https://www.linkedin.com/in/reganbarker/https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidfastuca/

Are your sales demos causing more confusion than conversion? In this episode of ITF Office Hours, Mark Cox and Dave Hanley dive into the trenches of B2B sales to help you stop wasting time and start closing the right deals. We're breaking down actionable strategies to turn your product demos into high-impact conversations, how to coach your SDRs to identify your ideal customer profile, and the art of asking for referrals without the awkwardness. If you're ready to stop the "glaze-over" effect and build a more profitable sales pipeline, tune in for practical, no-nonsense coaching on mastering your sales process.

Subscribe to the Outbound Kitchen newsletter-Florin Tatulea is GTM Engineer in Residence at ZoomInfo, where he builds the AI agents and workflows behind modern outbound. He was Loopio's first sales hire, on the team that grew revenue 65x in six years, and he built the outbound engine at Common Room, where he 4x'd the SDR team, grew monthly outbound pipeline 20x, and sourced seven figures in outbound revenue. He writes Prospecting from the Trenches, and he treats outbound as a system to design, not a headcount number to fill.We discuss:The top-down headcount math that quietly over-hires outbound teamsTAM vs SAM, and why the real number was 6,000 accounts, not 30,000Why you don't need an SDR before $1M ARR or product-market fitHiring two SDRs at once to separate the person from the processThe four things Florin looks for in a first SDR, and how he vets curiosityBuilding the team like a sports team, with complementary skill setsWhat AI and GTM engineering actually change about the team you buildWhy Anthropic, OpenAI, and Clay are still hiring SDRsReferenced:Prospecting from the Trenches (Florin's newsletter): salesflo.substack.comFlorin Tatulea on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/florintatulea/ZoomInfo: zoominfo.comHyperbound (AI roleplay, Florin is an advisor)When you're readyWant to work with me? Send me a DM -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/elriclegloire/Connect with me[Connect on LinkedIn] -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/elriclegloire/[Subscribe on YouTube] -> https://www.youtube.com/@ElricLegloireOutbound[Connect on X] -> https://x.com/elriclegloireChapters:(00:00) Intro: who is Florin Tatulea(01:29) The episode outline(02:21) Where the scaling math breaks(04:55) TAM vs SAM: 30,000 accounts or 6,000?(09:23) What CROs and CMOs get wrong next(13:06) Why you don't need an SDR before $1M ARR(16:25) Hire two SDRs, not one(19:17) What to look for in your first SDRs(22:00) How to actually vet for curiosity(24:53) The prospecting homework task(28:14) Build the team like a sports team(32:55) A better way to interview for passion(35:43) Vetting coachability on a live cold call(38:46) What changed in 2026: AI and GTM engineering(42:18) Why the best AI companies still hire SDRs(46:13) The best AI use cases for SDR teams(51:45) Automating the deal handoff(53:08) Q&A: trade-show lists with Claude Code(54:44) Where to find Florin

Let Us Know What You Think of the Show!SHOW SUMMARY:Date: June 24, 2026Name of Podcast: Backstage Pass RadioS10: E10: Jovana Cubric - From War To WisconsinSHOW SUMMARY:War, immigration, and starting over are not the kind of topics we usually chase on a music podcast, but Jovana Cubric's story is too powerful to keep off the mic. We talk about her move to Sedona and why the outdoors feels like medicine, then rewind to the bigger leap: leaving Croatia during the Yugoslavia conflict, living in Serbia as refugees, and being resettled in small town Wisconsin by pure chance. Hearing how her family navigated uncertainty, separation, and survival puts “stress” in a whole new perspective.  We also get into identity, language, and the quiet tension that shows up over time: parents who keep the native tongue, kids who just want to fit in, and what it feels like when you're translating between generations. Jovana shares how those experiences shaped her independence, discipline, and ability to solve problems without spiraling. If you've ever wondered how people rebuild after trauma or how immigrant families adapt in the United States, this conversation is honest and surprisingly hopeful.  Then we switch gears into practical business: B2B lead generation, outbound sales, and why cold calling is needed more than ever after COVID. We break down what SDRs and BDRs actually do, how to create a repeatable sales development process, and why quality targeting and human connection beat inbox noise. We also talk coffee operations and what scaling cafes taught Jovana about leadership, plus a few coffee facts that will change how you order tomorrow. Subscribe to Backstage Pass Radio, share this with a friend, and leave a review if it helped. What part of Jovana's story stuck with you most?Sponsor Link:WWW.ECOTRIC.COMWWW.SIGNAD.COMWWW.RUNWAYAUDIO.COMBackstage Pass Radio Social Media Handles:Facebook - @backstagepassradiopodcast @randyhulseymusicInstagram - @Backstagepassradio @randyhulseymusicTwitter - @backstagepassPC @rhulseymusicWebsite - www.backstagepassradio.com & www.randyhulsey.comYouTube - https://www.youtube.com/@backstagepassradiopodcastArtist(s) Web Page:www.mpi-impact.comCall to actionWe ask our listeners to like, share, and subscribe to the show and the artist's social media pages. This enables us to continue pushing great content to the consumer. Support Backstage Pass Radio - https://www.buzzsprout.com/1628902/support Thank you for being a part of Backstage Pass Radio Your Host,Randy Hulsey Support the show

If you're making Marketing decisions based on your email open rates and click numbers, you might be working with completely made up data. Jay and Daniel break down the bot problem that's quietly inflating every metric in your ESP, and why those garbage scores are exactly why your BDRs and SDRs hate the leads they're getting. Daniel explains why his newsletter uses a honeypot link at the top just to measure how much bot activity is happening, and why clicks should never be the end goal anyway. They also make the case for zero click content and no agenda Marketing: giving your audience real value without asking for anything in return, so when they are finally ready to buy, you are the first brand they think of. Follow Jay: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/schwedelson/ Podcast: Do This, Not That Follow Daniel: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@themarketingmillennials/featured Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/Dmurr68 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-murray-marketing Sign up for The Marketing Millennials newsletter: https://themarketingmillennials.com/ Daniel is a Workweek friend, working to produce amazing podcasts. To find out more, visit: https://workweek.com/

Subscribe to the Outbound Kitchen newsletter -> https://newsletter.outbound.kitchen/--Will Rohleder is the SDR director at TeachTown, special education software for school districts, where he took over a 4-person SDR team with $200K in pipeline and, within about a month, had the same four reps building roughly $600K a week. Today he leads 14 SDRs at a 92% show rate and 88% conversion to opportunity. He previously built and led SDR teams across fintech and HR software. He hires almost only former teachers and pays his SDRs to move deals forward, not just book the meeting.We discuss:How he rebuilt a four-person SDR team and 10x'd weekly pipeline in about a monthThe territory design and SDR-to-AE alignment behind the numbersHis show-rate playbook: the blank-calendar-invite accept trick, layered reminders, and letting the prospect talk 70% of the timeWhy half of SDR comp is tied to the opportunity reaching stage 3, not just booking the meetingWho owns moving a deal forward, and the six-point qualification gateWhy he almost only hires former teachers, and the one interview question he swears byWhere he uses AI, and the inbound AI SDR that emailed a lawyerReferenced:Will Rohleder on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/william-rohleder-2aa7a9143/TeachTown: teachtown.comSDR Leaders of USA communityWhen you're ready[Want to work with me? Send me a DM] -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/elriclegloire/Connect with me[Connect on LinkedIn] -> https://www.linkedin.com/in/elriclegloire/[Subscribe on YouTube] -> https://www.youtube.com/@ElricLegloireOutbound[Connect on X] -> https://x.com/elriclegloire-Chapters:(00:00) Smile and Dial Fails(01:04) Meet Will Rohleder(02:35) Career Lessons SDR(04:42) Teachtown Turnaround(06:27) Territory Strategy(07:35) SDR AE Pairing(08:41) Show Rate Playbook(13:04) Handoff and Discovery(15:46) Research Led Outreach(18:02) BANT and Conversion(19:24) Comp Plan Incentives(23:33) Quota Quality Focus(24:55) Quota and Payout Tweaks(25:32) SDR AE Collaboration Systems(28:13) Multi Threading District Deals(29:04) Hiring Former Teachers(30:46) Interview for Curiosity(33:30) First 30 Days Ramp Plan(38:56) AI for Research Only(44:44) Cold Call Openers That Work(46:52) Research Driven Outreach Mindset

How do you sell software to an industry where Google Maps and Sales Navigator don't even work?Freddy Galindo built Sprint Suite, a SaaS platform for mining contractors, after watching his family's mining services business get buried in spreadsheets and manila folders. Today he breaks down how to scale a SaaS business in a vertical that doesn't operate like tech at all — including why his team drives around taking photos of companies just to find them.What you'll learn:→ Why Freddy's team prospects by driving around taking photos of companies (no websites, no digital footprint)→ The discovery process that works when your buyer has never used SaaS before→ Why flying SDRs to mine sites changed their entire sales motion→ How AI made development a commodity — and where Freddy is reinvesting instead→ Why "stop managing the process, start managing the business" is the real value proposition→ The hard lesson about saying yes to every opportunity in the early days→ Why being coachable is the one trait Freddy looks for above all else→ What expanding into the Canadian market taught him about adapting a sales motionIf you sell into an industry that doesn't operate like tech — this conversation will change how you think about your go-to-market.

The go-to-market model most teams are optimizing may be the very thing AI is making obsolete.  Too often, the buyer experience feels like a relay race nobody asked to run. AI is already proving there's a faster, straighter path to answers, value, and outcomes, making the old model a lot harder to defend.  In this episode, Drew talks with Amanda Kahlow, founder of 1mind, about why many of today's go-to-market assumptions deserve a fresh look. Using the rise of AI SDRs as a starting point, they explore human handoffs, pipeline thinking, speed to lead, and why buyer momentum matters more than the internal roles built to manage it.  Best of all, you get to see it play out when Amanda brings in Mindy, 1mind's AI superhuman, for a live demonstration of what an AI-first buying experience can look like in practice.  What You'll Learn:  Why first-principles thinking matters in an AI-first world  When AI should replace parts of the motion, not just support them  Why revenue may be a better measure of success than lead volume or pipeline  How smaller pilots can prove the model before broader rollout  If you're a CMO questioning how much of your current go-to-market motion still makes sense, this one is worth your time.  For full show notes and transcripts, visit https://renegademarketing.com/podcasts/ To learn more about CMO Huddles, visit https://cmohuddles.com/

What this episode is about Most salespeople are pointed at targets without being taught to think about them. That gap — between knowing who to call and understanding why it matters — is what Peter Cleary and Tom Sterns set out to close with their book Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook. The book is unusual. It teaches through illustrated comic strips drawn from real sales disasters, using the Aesop's Fables principle: story first, lesson second. The goal isn't to lecture. It's to help salespeople recognise themselves, laugh at the madness, and do the work better. What Marcus, Peter, and Tom cover Ideal Customer Profile as a foundation — not a filter. The ICP chapter opens the book because everything else depends on it. ICP isn't just demographic targeting. It's understanding the four to six data attributes that signal your solution is genuinely right for a specific buyer — and then thinking critically about what those signals mean in context. Why AI won't solve poor prospecting judgement. Tom shares a cautionary story: he built an AI-assisted prospecting tool for a team, fed it the right signals, and watched conversion rates fall. The problem wasn't the data. It was that automating the research broke the reps' critical thinking. They stopped trusting the information because they hadn't processed it themselves. They started dialling without thinking. Conversion rates recovered only when the reps were given time to verify and reason about the signals themselves. Pre-call planning is a non-negotiable. Hundreds of touchpoints go into booking a meeting. Showing up without reviewing the notes, researching the company, and forming a hypothesis is a dereliction of the role — not just poor practice. The post-call debrief most organisations never do. Standardised post-call analysis is almost universally absent. Marcus describes his red-teaming process: everyone hears the call, debriefs individually, and lessons feed directly into the next pre-call plan. It's how losses become assets rather than embarrassments. Multi-threading vs single-contact selling. SDRs are frequently incentivised to book a meeting with one person and move on. The result is account executives walking into rooms they don't understand, recapping conversations the buyer has already had. Tom and Peter describe pod structures where SDRs and AEs share long-term account ownership — so the knowledge doesn't evaporate at handoff. Meeting buyers where they actually are. Marcus introduces a staged buying journey framework — from centre of dissatisfaction through passive and active looking, to deciding — and maps this against persona data. A buyer who started a new role four weeks ago is in a different conversation than one who looks like they're planning their next move. Timing, relevance, and personal value determine whether a rep gets championed internally. Honesty, pipeline integrity, and what managers actually owe their organisations. Tom shares a pipeline audit story where redefining stage criteria caused the pipeline to drop by two-thirds — and the leadership committee was relieved. Peter and Marcus discuss the cultural cost of managers who manage upwards rather than telling the truth to the people who need to act on it. Key quotes from the episode Marcus: "Haste is different from speed. Most people prospect with haste." Tom: "I don't even care about your product in the first week of onboarding. We're going to focus entirely on your buyer's world." Marcus: "Buyers don't hate being sold to. They hate being sold to badly. And more often than not, the problem isn't laziness or stupidity — it's lack of self-awareness." About the book Graphic Sales: How to Build a Prospecting Playbook by Peter Cleary and Tom Sterns. Available at all good bookstores. About The Inquisitor Podcast Hosted by Marcus Cauchi. Produced by Principled Selling. The show examines what commercial dysfunction actually looks like from the inside — and what honest, buyer-centred selling requires.

▸ Slides + every prompt from this talk (free): mspsalestoolbox.com ▸ Work with us: mspsalespartners.comAI has changed how companies prospect, research, and communicate, but many of the world's largest technology companies continue investing heavily in human sales teams. This episode explores what AI can automate, what it still struggles to do, and why trust, judgment, and complex buying decisions continue to require skilled people.What You'll Learn in This EpisodeWhy automation hasn't eliminated the need for human sales conversationsWhich parts of the sales process AI handles well—and which parts it doesn'tWhat the hiring decisions of major technology companies suggest about the future of sales//Welcome to The Ray J. Green Show, your destination for tips on sales, strategy, and self-mastery from an operator, not a guru.About Ray:→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world's largest IT business mastermind.→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com//Follow Ray on:YouTube | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

CannCon and Ashe in America open Chapter 5 of G. Edward Griffin's The Creature from Jekyll Island and the bailout game goes global. The 1944 Bretton Woods Conference gets a full autopsy: the IMF and World Bank were designed by Fabian socialists and a communist spy, Harry Dexter White, to eliminate gold from international finance and build world socialism one loan at a time. The Federal Reserve is no longer just America's lender of last resort. It is the planet's. SDRs get exposed as bookkeeping wizardry backed by nothing. Nixon's 1971 gold decoupling gets its proper context. And the World Bank's humanitarian branding gets stripped away as the crew walks through regime after regime, Tanzania, Ethiopia, Zimbabwe, Vietnam, all receiving billions while committing atrocities their own governments openly planned. George Bernard Shaw, Fabian co-founder, gets quoted explaining exactly what socialism does to people who are not productive enough to justify their existence. The IMF opposes Bitcoin. CannCon and Ashe are not surprised.

Learn how to use AI to Buy Agencies:https://value.8figureagency.co/MNASystemized Sales (done-for-you sales teams): systemizedsales.comRevphlo.com (post-call sales attribution — works with GoHighLevel & HubSpot)Dylan on X: @sdrwhispererMost agencies are sitting on a goldmine and treating it like a junk drawer.That was the exact problem on the table. A giveaway funnel pulling 100+ emails a week. 300 to 500 comments a post on X. Newsletter readers. Ad clickers who never book. Five different lists, none of them talking to each other. A great setter could go to work on that data and print money — if anyone had organized it.So Jordan brought in Dylan Rich, founder of Systemized Sales. Dylan runs 10 sales teams at once, end to end — name, email, phone number all the way to contract signed and cash collected. In 15 years of sales and seven years working with agencies, this is the most sophisticated GoHighLevel pipeline either of them has seen. They build it live: UTM attribution per post, the "tattoo" rule for tags vs. custom fields, an action-based lead score that pings a setter the second a lead crosses 6 points, a speed-to-lead workflow with 73 million enrollments, and 57 smart lists ranked P1 through P5 so setters never waste a minute guessing who to call.Then Dylan opens up Revphlow — the post-call attribution tool that kills the EOD form forever and tells you your cash per call by traffic source, by closer, by calendar. If you run organic and paid traffic into a sales team, this is the playbook.What You'll LearnThe "tattoo" rule — when to use a tag (permanent) vs. a custom field (rewrites itself), and why getting this wrong wrecks your dataOne pipeline beats five — why segmented pipelines cap your granularity, and how custom fields + tags + stages stack to do the real workLead scoring that runs itself — assign points to actions (email open = 1, application = 3, call booked = 5), and auto-trigger a setter call at a score of 6Speed-to-lead you can actually measure — a workflow that timestamps every lead and counts only during setter working hours, so a Saturday opt-in doesn't blow up your numbers57 smart lists, ranked P1–P5 — how setters work the right leads in the right order and never run dry between fresh leadsAsk for the phone number — "if you won't give me your phone number, you won't give me your credit card," and why fewer, higher-quality leads winPost-call notes (PCN) — auto-dispositioned call notes pulled from the Zoom transcript that update pipeline stages for you, so closers stop skipping the EOD formCash per call by source — the metric that tells you which ads, threads, and posts to make more of (and which to kill)Chapters— Why scaling SDRs is the hardest (and most profitable) thing an agency can do — Who is Dylan Rich: 15 years in sales, done-for-you teams at Systemized Sales — The real problem: a giveaway funnel pulling 100+ emails a week, five siloed lists — How to organize intent leads so setters book more calls per hour — UTMs per post, the Zap into GoHighLevel, and tagging the first click— Live build: one pipeline + custom fields for granularity — Lead categories that follow a contact all the way down the funnel— Tags vs. custom fields: the "tattoo" concept explained — Lead scoring: assigning points to actions and triggering at 6 — The speed-to-lead workflow with 73 million enrollments— Keeping setters organized so they stop thinking and start dialing — 57 smart lists ranked P1–P5, built on filters, not vibes — Why you should ask for a phone number on every opt-in— "Can we blow your socks off?" — the Revphlow post-call attribution demo — PCN, Zoom + Fathom + Slack: clean dispositions on every call — Cash per call by source, by closer, by calendar — Where to find Revphlow and Systemized SalesGo AI-Native in the Next 90 DaysThis episode is the manual setup. The next level is making it run itself.8 Figure Agency installs AI-native systems into 7- and 8-figure marketing agencies — the kind that add $1M in annualized profit. Attribution that tags itself. Pipelines that update without a human touching them. Setters fed the highest-intent leads automatically. If you want your agency AI-native in the next 90 days, start here:→ 8figureagency.coWork With DylanDylan and the Systemized Sales team run your sales process end to end — they listen to your calls, audit your CRM, review your last 90 days of sales and marketing numbers, find your biggest constraint, and fix it.Systemized Sales (done-for-you sales teams): systemizedsales.comRevphlo.com (post-call sales attribution — works with GoHighLevel & HubSpot)Dylan on X: @sdrwhispererTools & Resources MentionedGoHighLevel — the CRM the whole pipeline is built inRevFlow / revphlo.com — post-call attribution and sales analyticsTypeform — opt-in forms (add a hidden UTM source field)Beehiiv — newsletter platform, with email opens webhooked back to GHL for lead scoringHYROS — marketing attribution into the callZoom + Fathom — call recording and transcripts feeding the PCNSlack — where post-call notes drop for closer confirmationVidalytics — VSL view trackingUTM Builder (utmbuilder.net) — Jordan's no-affiliation pick for building UTMs

On this episode, Amy Kramer, Head of the Go-To-Market Operating Group at Level Equity, shares findings from their 2026 Go-To-Market Insights Report—a benchmark study covering sales efficiency, marketing spend, headcount, compensation and AI adoption across their portfolio companies.Amy and Shiv dig into what the data shows: why SDRs are having to reach out to more prospects to book the same number of meetings, how the best-performing teams are breaking through the noise with smarter targeting and more direct outreach, and why companies are shifting more budget toward brand and top-of-funnel. They also cover the rise of AI visibility as a pipeline driver, how teams are restructuring around rev ops and product marketing, and what the shift in go-to-market rhythm means for how companies hire and retain customers.The information contained in this podcast is not intended to constitute, and should not be construed as, investment advice.

Pipeline generation breaks down when sales organizations rely on individual performance instead of building controlled, repeatable systems. In this episode, Greg Casale shares how his background in engineering shaped a system-first approach to sales, applying principles of process control, data capture, and structured training to reduce variability and improve consistency. The conversation explores why outbound phone remains a critical channel despite its difficulty, how over-automation has saturated the market and reduced conversion rates, and where AI fits as a tool to strengthen preparation and execution without replacing human interaction.  Greg Casale is the Founder and CEO of Reveneer Inc., where he leads a system-driven approach to outbound pipeline generation through embedded SDR teams. He began his career as a chemical engineer and brings a manufacturing and process control mindset to building repeatable, data-driven sales operations. Connect with Greg: LinkedIn Resources mentioned: Hyperbound TitanX Key takeaways from this episode:  03:00 – Why many CROs over-index on hiring instead of addressing the system driving performance 33:30 – What it really takes to build an outbound channel competitors can't easily replicate 49:00 – Why leaders risk losing differentiation when AI replaces human-driven sales behavior 01:00:00 – A look inside how top SDRs control conversations in the first 30 seconds of a cold call 09:33 – The mistake many CROs make when relying on fractional SDR models for pipeline generation 01:07:24 – Why cutting SDR capacity during downturns quietly weakens your ability to recover 18:11 – What leaders often overlook when measuring SDR success beyond meeting volume Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

SaaStr 853: The Agents #004: Tragedy Apps, Too Many AI SDRs, and Why Your Next Hire Should Report to an Agent Your AI SDR pitches are getting better, but your AI PR pitches are getting you blocked. Jason and Amelia break down why the gap between good and great agents is the difference between pipeline and the spam folder. Then they introduce "tragedy apps," the term for products that had every advantage in the AI era and blew it. Descript had the customers, the product, and the timing, and froze. Replit waited 10 years for its moment and seized it. The lesson: catching up isn't enough if you're not building something new. Plus, the SaaStr team built an AI API Report Card that grades every major SaaS API on how agent-friendly it is (Stripe got the only A+, Marketo got a C, and no, they're not surprised). Jason and Amelia also get honest about running 4-5 AI SDRs from different vendors, why they'll probably have 6 by year end, and why single-vendor consolidation isn't the answer yet. And the wildest part: their AI VP of Marketing, 10K, now generates 3 actionable campaign ideas a day, runs autonomous campaigns on weekends, and might be a better boss than either of them. They're seriously hiring a human marketer whose primary manager would be the agent. Not a joke. Not a thought experiment. A real job posting. Finally, if your team is resisting AI, stop worrying about change management. Just hire one senior person who's all-in on agents and let the rest sort itself out.

⁠⁠⁠⁠Subscribe to the Outbound Kitchen newsletter⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---This episode was originally recorded in French for Cognism's Prospect podcast with Laetitia Fall. The English audio you're hearing is an AI-translated dub generated with ElevenLabs. Original French version: https://youtu.be/DMRO_GGp-1A--If you're new here, I'm Elric Legloire, founder of Outbound Kitchen. I help B2B SaaS companies between $2M and $50M ARR boost their outbound results. My view: in 2026, productivity is the multiplier, not headcount. --We discuss:- Why outbound isn't dead, but pipeline got roughly 10x more expensive (1% conversion in 2015 to needing 1,000 emails per opportunity in 2023, source: Winning By Design)- Why global SDR headcount grew over 20% in a year while public layoffs dominated the LinkedIn feed- The Owner.com benchmark: 40 appointments per BDR per month, 25% close rate, $70-80K sourced revenue per BDR per month- When to hire experienced SDRs vs juniors, and the 12-meetings-per-month threshold that signals your playbook is ready- Why ICP work beats tool selection (Tier 1 closes at 25%, Tier 2 at 5%, you need 5x the volume to compensate)- Snowflake's 140 ICP data points and why 10-15 is the realistic target for most teams- Multichannel orchestration when only 30% of your prospects are reachable on LinkedIn- The data-quality test most teams skip: coverage rate per persona, per market- AI in outbound (January 2026): what actually works, why most LinkedIn AI messages fail, and the foundation AI needs (market, CRM, message principles, signals)Referenced:Outbound Kitchen newsletter: https://newsletter.outbound.kitchenElric Legloire on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elriclegloire/Cognism's original French episode: https://youtu.be/DMRO_GGp-1AHost: Laetitia Fall Sources cited in episode: Winning By Design, Insight Partners (Jeremy Donovan's portfolio data), Owner.com BDR benchmarks, Snowflake ICP methodology----When you're ready⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Want to work with me? Send me a DM⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠---Connect with me⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

Why consistency matters more than ambition How understanding the full sales process makes SDRs more promotable Better coaching questions that speed up growth Why proof matters more than “feeling ready” How to make promotion decisions easier for managers

In episode 108, Mike hosts outbound sales guru, Jason Bay, founder and leader of Outbound Squad. Jason and Mike get in the "Way Back Machine" looking at the evolution of SDRs, what went wrong with that model, and why prospecting is so damn hard today. If your team is struggling to book meetings and create new opportunities, this episode is for you as Jason shares strategies that are working right now and what the very best reps are doing to self-generate pipeline! Learn how to become "too good to ignore" by focusing on the right targets, crafting compelling offers, and creating emotional connections with prospects. Tune in and you'll immediately hear why Mike regularly points new business development sellers and sales teams to follow Jason Bay! RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE: Jason Bay's Free Outbound Masterclass The October 7 Supercharge Your Sales Leadership Event _________________________ This episode is sponsored by Pursuit Sales Solutions. If you are looking for help adding A-player talent to your team, contact Mike's friends at pursuitsalessolutions.com/weinberg  

Are you struggling with misaligned pricing strategies that leave money on the table? Many sales leaders find themselves caught between traditional seat-based models and what customers value. There's a better approach that can increase contract values by over 200% while simplifying your sales conversations. In this episode, Keith Bossier, VP of Sales at SDOCS, shares how his team transformed their entire pricing strategy from user-based to consumption-based models. His insights reveal practical steps for aligning pricing with genuine business outcomes that customers care about most. Keith breaks down the critical misalignments between marketing, sales, and customer success teams that drain revenue potential. He explains how removing traditional barriers—like eliminating SDRs entirely—can create more direct pathways to qualified prospects and accelerate deal cycles. Revenue Operations Framework for Growth Keith discusses implementing a comprehensive revenue operations program that aligns teams around shared goals. He shares how they restructured customer success roles to function more like account managers with implementation responsibilities, creating new revenue streams from existing accounts. The conversation explores building effective partner ecosystems without massive hiring sprees. Keith reveals how SDOCS signed over 50 new partners in 12 months by focusing on system integrators and technology partnerships that amplify reach efficiently. Learning from Sales Failures Keith opens up about a six-figure deal he lost early in his career—not because of product gaps, but because he failed to connect with the customer's real pain points. This experience shaped his entire approach to coaching sales teams, emphasizing empathy over feature presentations. He shares practical techniques for handling rejection and building team resilience. His approach focuses on understanding why deals don't close rather than simply pushing through objections, creating stronger connections with prospects. What You'll Learn: ●       How to transition from seat-based to consumption-based pricing models ●       Strategies for aligning marketing, sales, and customer success around revenue goals ●       Methods for building partner ecosystems that expand reach without adding headcount ●       Techniques for coaching teams to handle rejection and build resilience ●       Why slowing down in discovery can actually accelerate your sales cycles Keith's approach demonstrates that successful sales isn't about perfecting your pitch—it's about genuinely understanding what keeps your customers awake at night and positioning your solution as the bridge to their desired outcomes. Key Moments of This Episode 00:01:46 - Introduction to Keith Bossier and SDOCSKeith Bossier, VP of Sales at SDOCS, introduces himself and explains how his company provides document automation and e-signature solutions that help businesses accelerate contract processes and revenue collection. 00:03:44 - Personal Journey: Overcoming Heart Surgery ChallengesKeith shares his inspiring personal story of surviving two open-heart surgeries and how he's thrived despite health challenges, even competing in triathlons and half-marathons. 00:06:28 - Pricing Strategies in Volatile Market ConditionsDiscussion of current economic uncertainty and how companies must adapt to pricing models. Keith explains the shift from user-based to consumption-based pricing at SDOCS, resulting in significant contract value increases. 00:13:43 - Aligning Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success TeamsKeith addresses common misalignments between departments and shares three key strategies: aligning revenue responsibilities, creating cross-functional accountability, and focusing on lead quality over quantity. 00:17:56 - Customer Success as Account Management with ImplementationExploration of how customer success teams can function more like account managers with revenue responsibilities, requiring sales-minded professionals rather than traditional support staff. 00:29:45 - Building Effective Partner Ecosystems for GrowthKeith discusses partner-led growth strategies, including working with system integrators and technology partners to expand reach efficiently without hiring additional full-time employees. 00:37:02 Learning from Sales Failures: The Power of EmpathyKeith shares a pivotal early career loss that taught him the importance of understanding customer pain points rather than just showcasing product features, shaping his coaching philosophy. 00:41:57 - Building Resilience: Handling Rejection in SalesStrategies for helping sales teams manage rejection, including debriefing losses, celebrating progress milestones, and maintaining emotional equilibrium through the ups and downs of sales cycles. About Keith Bossier Keith Bossier has 20 years of experience in driving revenue growth and optimizing sales operations with a proven track record in diverse industries, Keith has delivered exceptional results and provided unrivaled solutions to customers worldwide. His expertise spans from go-to-market strategy to revenue optimization and practical strategies for sales success. He has significant experience in SaaS sales, having held key roles at Salesforce, NetSuite, and FIS, and holds a B.A. from DePaul University as well as an M.B.A. from the Quinlan School of Business, Loyola University Chicago. Follow Us On: ·         LinkedIn ·         Twitter ·         YouTube Channel ·         Instagram ·         Facebook Learn More About 9-1 FlyMSG Features Like: ·         FlyMSG LinkedIn Auto Comment Generator by Vengreso ·         FlyMSG AI Social Media Post Generator by Vengreso ·         FlyMSG Auto Text Expander by Vengreso ·         FlyMSG AI Grammar Checker by Vengreso ·         FlyMSG AI Sales Roleplay and Coaching by Vengreso ·         FlyMSG Paragraph Rewrite by Vengreso ·         FlyMSG Sales Prospecting Training for Individuals by Vengreso ·         LinkedIn Profile Makeover for Sales Teams ·         FlyMSG Enterprise Sales Prospecting Training Program Install FlyMSG for Free: ·         As a Chrome Extension ·         As an Edge Extension

Send us Fan MailIn this solo episode of Predictable B2B Growth, Javier breaks down why hiring more people won't fix a broken pipeline—and often makes things worse.He walks through the common mistake founders and CEOs make when growth stalls: defaulting to headcount instead of fixing the underlying go-to-market motion. From unclear ICPs and weak strategy to broken handoffs and poor measurement, Javier outlines the real reasons hiring fails.He also shares the five predictable failure modes of hiring too early and explains what a strong go-to-market foundation actually looks like—before you bring in SDRs, marketers, or sales leaders.This episode is a practical guide to building a system that works first—so when you do hire, it actually drives revenue instead of chaos.Key TopicsThe dangers of hiring too earlyImportance of defining go-to-market motionBuilding a foundation before leadership hiresHiring to relieve constraints, not overwhelmMeasuring success before hiringChapters00:00 The Hiring Dilemma: When to Expand Your Team02:53 Understanding the Go-to-Market Strategy05:46 Identifying Failure Modes in Hiring09:10 Building a Strong Foundation Before Hiring11:56 Measuring Success and Defining Roles14:55 Hiring for Constraints: The Right Approach17:46 Final Thoughts on Smart Hiring Practices Thanks for listening to Predictable B2B Growth.Want predictable pipeline (not random acts of marketing)? Run the Predictable Pipeline Diagnostic (15 min): https://boldermediasolutions.com/pipeline Subscribe to the newsletter: https://boldermediasolutions.com/newsletter Book a strategy call: https://boldermediasolutions.com/strategyMore episodes + show notes: https://boldermediasolutions.com/podcastConnect with Javier:LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/javierlozanojr/ Website: https://boldermediasolutions.comIf the show helps, follow + leave a rating/review.

"Wait until you're at $3-5M before hiring an SDR" — Ray heard this from an attendee at a Dallas event who'd been given the rule by an EOS-type advisor. His problem with it: that rule treats the SDR as an expense you need to afford, not a revenue multiplier that helps you generate the money in the first place. "I can't afford to make more money until I've made a certain amount of money" doesn't hold up. At MSP Sales Partners, Ray's first two hires were SDRs — because when you're starting a business and need to drive demand, you hire the person who creates revenue, not wait until revenue shows up on its own.The bigger lesson goes beyond SDRs. Business isn't paint-by-numbers, and most "rules" are just someone projecting their personal experience onto every business. Whether to hire — and when — depends on your demand, your constraints, and what role actually multiplies output at your stage.What You'll Learn in This Episode:Why the $3-5M SDR rule treats a revenue multiplier like a fixed expense — and why that logic breaks downHow Ray's first two hires at MSP Sales Partners were SDRs, and what he learned when organic demand changed the equationWhy most business "rules" are overgeneralizations built on one person's experienceThe real question to ask before hiring an SDR: what's the core constraint in your business right now?//Welcome to The Ray J. Green Show, your destination for tips on sales, strategy, and self-mastery from an operator, not a guru.About Ray:→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world's largest IT business mastermind.→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com//Follow Ray on:YouTube | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

One of our Fractional SDR Management customers — an MSP owner — came to Ray with a show rate hovering just above 40%. The appointments were coming in, but half of them weren't showing up. Ray walked him through the exact diagnosis: go back and listen to the calls, figure out if the bookings are soft commitments or locked-in appointments, and then implement a 5-step pre-call process that covers everything from value-driven confirmation emails to same-day no-show recovery. The part most people miss? Garbage appointments don't just waste time — they push your real prospects further out on the calendar, and more time between booking and meeting always means a lower show rate.If you're running SDRs or BDRs and your show rate is below 60%, this episode walks through exactly where to look and what to fix.What You'll Learn in This Episode:Why a low show rate is almost always a booking quality problem before it's a follow-up problemHow "garbage" appointments silently destroy close rates on your good prospectsThe 5-step pre-call process Ray walks every Fractional SDR Management client throughWhy a value-driven confirmation email outperforms a standard calendar inviteThe no-show recovery window — and why speed matters more than the script//Welcome to The Ray J. Green Show, your destination for tips on sales, strategy, and self-mastery from an operator, not a guru.About Ray:→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world's largest IT business mastermind.→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com//Follow Ray on:YouTube | LinkedIn | Facebook | Twitter | Instagram

Amanda spent 16 years running a services business for Cisco and Intel. When she tried to productize her business, 22 VCs rejected her. That became 6sense, a $200M ARR company. After stepping aside as CEO and taking five years off, she's back with an AI startup called 1 mind. In this episode, Amanda breaks down why she always goes enterprise-first when everyone tells her to start small, how she used an AI clone of herself to pitch 60 VCs and raise 1mind's Series A in three days, and why she believes the entire sales process—SDRs, AEs, sales engineers—is about to be collapsed into a single AI "superhuman."Why You Should ListenWhy 22 VC partner meetings said no—and how one change fixed it overnight.How she used an AI clone of herself to close a Series A in 3 days.Why starting enterprise-first beats moving upmarket.Why outbound AI email is a race to the bottom and what to build instead.Keywords startup podcast, startup podcast for founders, product market fit, AI agents, AI sales, enterprise sales, 6sense, 1mind, finding pmf, B2B SaaS, AI enabled services, net dollar retentionChapters00:00:00 Intro00:05:58 22 VC Rejections—Until She Found the Right Co-Founders00:08:49 Why She Always Starts Enterprise-First00:22:00 Five Years Off—Then the AI Wave Hit00:27:32 Why AISDRs Are a Race to the Bottom00:43:23 Using Her AI Clone to Raise the Series A00:49:52 The Moment of True Product Market FitSend me a message to let me know what you think!

SaaStr 848: How AI Is Rewiring Sales: Quota, Retention & What's Actually Working with SaaStr, Salesforce and Mangomint In this episode, three revenue leaders at very different stages of AI adoption get real about what's actually working, what's embarrassingly broken, and why nobody should be doubling quota just yet. Panelists: Greg Beltzer — Chief Customer Officer, AgentForce (Salesforce) Ashley Wilson — Co-founder, Momentum by Salesforce Marchelle Mooney — VP of Sales, Mangomint Amelia Lerutte - Chief AI Officer, SaaStr They cover: Why every company has leads they never followed up on (yes, even Salesforce) The "chainsaw without the cover off" problem with AI tool rollouts How Mangomint uses AI to fix terrible salon logos in minutes — and why it freaks customers out Why Marchelle is not raising quota in 2026, even though she could The real resistance to AI adoption (hint: it's not just the CIO) How Momentum is using AI to democratize language for SDRs in Argentina What retention looks like when AI is listening for slow-drip churn signals Why your data is probably worse than you think — and what that means for agents Key takeaway: AI won't magically fix your sales org. Your data has to be clean, your people need training, and you have to rethink workflows from first principles — not just bolt AI onto the old playbook. Recorded live at SaaStr London. ---------------------   Hey everybody, the biggest B2B + AI event of the year will be back - SaaStr AI in the SF Bay Area, aka the SaaStr Annual, will be back in May 2026.    With 68% VP-level and above, 36% CEOs and founders and a growing 25% AI-first professional, this is the very best of the best S-tier attendees and decision makers that come to SaaStr each year.     But here's the reality, folks: the longer you wait, the higher ticket prices can get. Early bird tickets are available now, but once they're gone, you'll pay hundreds more so don't wait.    Lock in your spot today by going to podcast.saastrannual.com to get my exclusive discount SaaStr AI SF 2026. We'll see you there.

What did Elliot Williams and Al Williams read on Hackaday last week? Tune in and find out. After a bit of news, [Vik Oliver] chimes in with some deep PLA knowledge. Then the topic changed to pressure advance measurements, SDRs, making super-resolution PCBs with a fiber laser, and more. Want to 3D print wire strippers? A robot arm? Or just make your own Z-80? Those hacks are in there, too. For the long articles, we talked about old tech, including the :CueCat and the Iomega Zip Drive. Let us know if you had either one in the comments. What do you think? Leave us a comment or record something and send it to our mailbag.  

What if your marketing team could predict revenue like a finance team predicts cash flow? Daniel sits down with Aviv Canaani (CRO & CMO of DataRails) to break down how to actually build a predictable revenue engine. Aviv shares how he reverse engineers aggressive revenue targets into pipeline, meetings, and budget, and why most companies get this wrong by hiring more reps instead of fixing demand. They go into the mechanics: cost per meeting, conversion rates, tiered lead scoring, and how to align marketing, SDRs, and sales into one machine. Aviv also explains why he eliminated prospecting for AEs entirely…and instead built a system where marketing fills calendars at scale. If you're trying to prove marketing ROI, scale pipeline predictably, or turn marketing into a true revenue driver, this episode is for YOU.  ⁠https://customer.io⁠⁠ helps brands turn data into personalized messages that actually connect, across email, SMS, and beyond. Learn more at ⁠https://customer.io/tmm⁠ Follow Aviv: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/avivcanaani/ Follow Daniel: LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniel-murray-marketing/ Sign up for The Marketing Millennials newsletter: www.workweek.com/brand/the-marketing-millennials Daniel is a Workweek friend, working to produce amazing podcasts. To find out more, visit: www.workweek.com

SDRs often feel disconnected from leadership decisions — especially when it comes to quotas, activity expectations, and pipeline goals. In this episode, Brandon breaks down the leadership perspective behind these decisions, explaining how quotas are built from revenue targets, why activity drives predictability, and why pipeline quality matters more than most reps realize. You'll also learn how leadership balances forecasting, hiring, and performance — and why expectations are often higher than they seem fair. If you want to grow faster in your sales career, understanding how leadership thinks is one of the biggest advantages you can have.

Shaunt Voskanian is the CRO @ Figma, where he has scaled the sales machine to over $1BN in ARR and over 400 people. Prior to Figma, Shaunt was Senior VP of Global Sales at Datadog where he scaled the revenue org to $1BN in ARR.  AGENDA:  04:33 - Are Great Sales Leaders Born or Trained? 06:55 - In a world of PLG, is sales less important than ever? 11:51 - Why does Shaunt not believe in traditional customer success teams? 14:31 - Does the role of the SDR survive in two years' time? 19:19 - When is the right time for sales to intercept in a PLG motion? 21:43 - How to Set Sales Quotas in a PLG AI Sales World? 31:19 - How has what you look for in sales hires changed over time? 42:54 - How do you judge sales performance if not on quota? 54:49 - Quick fire: Outdated sales tactic, What Role Dies, Best Sales AI Tool  

Amanda Kahlow joins Revenue Builders to unpack what happens when AI stops assisting go-to-market teams and starts replacing entire functions. Drawing on her experience founding SixthSense and now leading 1mind, she explains how technology originally built for Alzheimer's caregivers evolved into AI “superhumans” capable of running demos, qualifying buyers, building business cases, and onboarding customers. The conversation gets real about some of the uncomfortable questions facing sales today: what happens to SDRs, how the AE role changes, why traditional handoffs between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success break down, and what “the final mile” of human selling really looks like. For revenue leaders, the bigger question isn't whether AI will impact go-to-market… it's how quickly org design, skill sets, and accountability models need to adapt. Amanda Kahlow is the Founder and CEO of 1mind and the Founder of Sixth Sense. She is a multi time enterprise founder building AI systems designed to transform the full go-to-market lifecycle. Connect with Amanda: LinkedIn 1mind Get the Force Management guide to adapting your go-to-market execution for the AI age: The Predictable Revenue Framework: Guide for Leaders Key takeaways from this episode:  00:00 – How tech built for Alzheimer's caregivers evolved into AI that can qualify buyers, run demos, and move deals forward. 05:09 – What Amanda really means by a “superhuman”, and why it's far beyond an AI SDR bolted onto your website. 06:27 – Why buyers are increasingly more comfortable with AI than humans in early-stage conversations, and what that does to traditional sales handoffs. 16:48 – How automated knowledge ingestion and system integrations are collapsing AI onboarding timelines from ~4 months to ~4 weeks. 30:23 – The GTM shakeup: SDRs disappear, AEs become strategic operators, and humans remain for one thing only… the “final mile.” 46:36 – The ultimate question: can AI replace high-cost revenue roles profitably? And what happens to trust, security, and data ownership in regulated industries? Hosted by five-time CRO John McMahon and Force Management Co-Founder John Kaplan, the Revenue Builders podcast goes behind the scenes with the sales leaders who have been there, done that, and seen the results. This show is brought to you by Force Management. We help companies improve sales performance, executing their growth strategy at the point of sale. Connect with Us: LinkedInYouTubeForce Management

In this episode, Jason breaks down why AI isn't replacing SDRs anytime soon, sharing real hiring data from leading AI companies and explaining why human reps who learn to leverage AI will outperform, not be replaced by it. Check out more free content and get coaching at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://outboundsquad.com.⁠

Ian sits down with Trinity Nguyen, CMO at UserGems, to unpack how modern B2B teams balance AI-powered demand capture with measurable brand building. Trinity shares how signal-based ABM drives pipeline, why SDRs report to marketing, how owned events outperform conference booths, and what it really takes to move fast without losing alignment in an AI-driven go-to-market world. Key Takeaways:  Signal-based outbound wins. Prioritizing who to target, when to engage, and why drives higher conversion than volume alone. · Brand can't stay a black box. Marketing leaders must map awareness to buying stages and find breadcrumbs to revenue. · AI should scale capacity, not replace thinking. Used well, it gives teams air cover when resources are tight. · Owned events create real lift. Even registration alone can significantly increase downstream win rates. · Prospecting is one of the hardest jobs in GTM. SDR roles build resilience — but closing requires a different muscle. · Alignment matters more than speed alone. Moving fast is powerful, but only if marketing and sales stay in lockstep. Episode Timestamps:(02:23) Trust Tree: Demand capture and building brand (18:48) The Playbook: When you depend on your own product Sponsor: Pipeline Visionaries is brought to you by Qualified.com. Qualified helps you turn your website into a pipeline generation machine with PipelineAI. Engage and convert your most valuable website visitors with live chat, chatbots, meeting scheduling, intent data, and Piper, your AI SDR. Visit Qualified.com to learn more. Links: · Connect with Ian on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/ianfaison/   · Connect with Trinity on LinkedIn:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/trinitynguyen/   · Learn more about UserGems:  https://www.linkedin.com/in/trinitynguyen/   · Learn more about Caspian Studios:  https://www.linkedin.com/company/caspian-studios/about/ Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Giulio Segantini is back and this time it's pure objection-handling firepower. If you sell anything over the phone, this is a tactical breakdown of how to handle “send me an email,” “we're already working with someone,” “too expensive,” “not interested,” and every other cold call objection without sounding scripted or desperate. Built around Giulio's 'ACE Framework' (Accept → Consent → Explore), this is a masterclass in real-world objection handling for SDRs, AEs, and sales leaders. These Courses Will Get You to President's Club:

Here’s a question that hits every sales professional right in the gut: What do you do when your email prospecting tanks and you’re staring at response rates that are circling the drain? That’s the question Tara asked on a recent episode of Ask Jeb on The Sales Gravy Podcast, and it’s one I hear constantly from SDRs, account executives, and even sales managers who’ve convinced themselves that cold calling is outdated. If you’re nodding along thinking email is the future and cold calling is dead, you need to wake up. Email efficiency is going down without bound, and if you’re not picking up the phone, you’re leaving money on the table. The Hard Truth About Email Prospecting Let me be blunt: Your email isn’t failing because the channel is broken. It’s failing because what you’re doing is terrible. Before you blame the medium, look in the mirror. Did people ignore your email because you sent them something genuinely personalized and valuable? Or did they ignore you because you followed up thirteen times in five days? Did they ghost you because your seven colleagues already called them that same day? The brutal reality is that most salespeople treat email like a spray-and-pray numbers game. They blast generic messages, add zero personalization, and then wonder why nobody responds. Meanwhile, they avoid the one thing that actually works: picking up the phone and having real conversations. Why Cold Calling Will Always Matter Cold calling isn’t going anywhere. It never has been, and it never will be. You want to know why? Because sales is a human business. People buy from people they trust, and you can’t build trust through automated emails that sound like they were written by AI. A phone call gives you something email never can: the ability to prove you’re a real human being who’s genuinely there to help, not just to pitch and sell. When you call someone and say, “Hey, I sent you an email last week with this case study because I saw you talked about this at the Outbound Conference,” you’re showing them you did your homework. You’re not just another robot in their inbox. Here’s a line I love: “Would I be the worst salesperson in the world if I didn’t also try to call you?” It’s honest, it’s human, and it cuts through the noise. You Don’t Know What to Say? Make the Calls The number one excuse I hear from salespeople: “I don’t know what to say.” Here’s my advice: Make one hundred calls and talk to people. They’ll teach you. You’re going to learn what not to say. You’re going to start seeing patterns in how your prospects think, what problems they face, and what language matters to them. This is how you develop business acumen that separates you from the pack. You can’t learn it behind a keyboard. I was in an alignment call today with a new client, and they said, “You totally understand us.” Why? Because last week I was with a business adjacent to their industry, learned their language, and pulled that knowledge into the next call. Use Tools to Compress Your Learning Curve Use tools like ZoomInfo to accelerate your learning curve. At Sales Gravy, we use it every day to find information about people, see what they’re doing on our website, and get intent signals that build our lists automatically. You can use these tools to learn the language of industries you’re breaking into. You can see company news, understand their challenges, and show up on calls sounding like you belong. But here’s the key: The tool doesn’t make the call for you. It gives you the ammunition. You still have to do the work. Be Strategic and Resourceful Here’s a strategy most salespeople are too lazy to try: If you’re having trouble getting through to a decision maker, call someone else in the company who’ll actually talk to you. Selling HR services? Call a sales rep. They’ll talk your ear off about the company and might even make an introduction. Try this: “Hey, I know you’re in sales. I’ve been trying to get hold of Joseph for nine months. Is there any way you could help me out?” That’s not being cheesy. That’s being resourceful. But you have to be genuine. You can’t just ask for something without building rapport. Your Action Plan If you’re struggling with email effectiveness: Pick up the damn phone. Stop making excuses about why cold calling doesn’t work. It works if you work it. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Introducing yourself to strangers will never be easy, but it’s the price of admission for being great at sales. Use data strategically. Build sequences that interweave multiple channels over 30, 60, 90 days. Email, phone, LinkedIn, video. Give yourself the best odds. Don’t oversell on the cold call. A little interest isn’t an invitation to vomit your pitch. Your job is to earn the next conversation. Make one more call. At the end of the day when you’re tired, make one more call. That’s where discipline separates winners from everyone else. The Bottom Line Email isn’t dead, but it’s not a magic bullet. Cold calling isn’t outdated. It’s the foundation of everything we do in sales. Stop hiding behind your keyboard. Stop blaming the tools. Stop making excuses. The shortest path to a meeting is through a real conversation. That’s how you build relationships, develop trust, and separate yourself from every other salesperson who’s too afraid to dial. Get outside your skin. Be genuine. Be there to help. And pick up the phone. Ready to take your prospecting skills to the next level? Join us at one of our upcoming Sales Gravy LIVE events where you’ll learn directly from top sales leaders and get hands-on coaching to transform your results.

Here's a question that hits every sales professional right in the gut: What do you do when your email prospecting tanks and you're staring at response rates that are circling the drain? That's the question Tara asked on a recent episode of Ask Jeb on The Sales Gravy Podcast, and it's one I hear constantly from SDRs, account executives, and even sales managers who've convinced themselves that cold calling is outdated. If you're nodding along, thinking email is the future and cold calling is dead, you need to wake up. Email efficiency is going down without bounds, and if you're not picking up the phone, you're leaving money on the table. The Hard Truth About Email Prospecting Let me be blunt: Your email isn't failing because the channel is broken. It's failing because what you're doing is terrible. Before you blame the medium, look in the mirror. Did people ignore your email because you sent them something genuinely personalized and valuable? Or did they ignore you because you followed up thirteen times in five days? Did they ghost you because your seven colleagues already called them that same day? The brutal reality is that most salespeople treat email like a spray-and-pray numbers game. They blast generic messages, add zero personalization, and then wonder why nobody responds. Meanwhile, they avoid the one thing that actually works: picking up the phone and having real conversations. Why Cold Calling Will Always Matter Cold calling isn't going anywhere. It never has been, and it never will be. You want to know why? Because sales is a human business. People buy from people they trust, and you can't build trust through automated emails that sound like they were written by AI. A phone call gives you something email never can: the ability to prove you're a real human being who's genuinely there to help, not just to pitch and sell. When you call someone and say, "Hey, I sent you an email last week with this case study because I saw you talked about this at the Outbound Conference," you're showing them you did your homework. You're not just another robot in their inbox. Here's a line I love: "Would I be the worst salesperson in the world if I didn't also try to call you?" It's honest, it's human, and it cuts through the noise. You Don't Know What to Say? Make the Calls The number one excuse I hear from salespeople: "I don't know what to say." Here's my advice: Make one hundred calls and talk to people. They'll teach you. You're going to learn what not to say. You're going to start seeing patterns in how your prospects think, what problems they face, and what language matters to them. This is how you develop business acumen that separates you from the pack. You can't learn it behind a keyboard. I was in an alignment call today with a new client, and they said, "You totally understand us." Why? Last week, I was with a business adjacent to their industry, learned their language, and pulled that knowledge into the next call. Use Tools to Compress Your Learning Curve Use tools like ZoomInfo to accelerate your learning curve. At Sales Gravy, we use it every day to find information about people, see what they're doing on our website, and get intent signals that build our lists automatically. You can use these tools to learn the language of industries you're breaking into. You can see company news, understand their challenges, and show up on calls sounding like you belong. But here's the key: The tool doesn't make the call for you. It gives you the ammunition. You still have to do the work. Be Strategic and Resourceful Here's a strategy most salespeople are too lazy to try: If you're having trouble getting through to a decision maker, call someone else in the company who'll actually talk to you. Selling HR services? Call a sales rep. They'll talk your ear off about the company and might even make an introduction. Try this: "Hey, I know you're in sales. I've been trying to get hold of Joseph for nine months. Is there any way you could help me out?" That's not being cheesy. That's being resourceful. But you have to be genuine. You can't just ask for something without building rapport. Your Action Plan If you're struggling with email effectiveness: Pick up the damn phone. Stop making excuses about why cold calling doesn't work. It works if you work it. Get comfortable being uncomfortable. Introducing yourself to strangers will never be easy, but it's the price of admission for being great at sales. Use data strategically. Build sequences that interweave multiple channels over 30, 60, 90 days. Email, phone, LinkedIn, video. Give yourself the best odds. Don't oversell on the cold call. A little interest isn't an invitation to vomit your pitch. Your job is to earn the next conversation. Make one more call. At the end of the day, when you're tired, make one more call. That's where discipline separates winners from everyone else. The Bottom Line Email isn't dead, but it's not a magic bullet. Cold calling isn't outdated. It's the foundation of everything we do in sales. Stop hiding behind your keyboard. Stop blaming the tools. Stop making excuses. The shortest path to a meeting is through a real conversation. That's how you build relationships, develop trust, and separate yourself from every other salesperson who's too afraid to dial. Get outside your skin. Be genuine. Be there to help. And pick up the phone. Ready to take your prospecting skills to the next level? Join us at one of our upcoming Sales Gravy LIVE events where you'll learn directly from top sales leaders and get hands-on coaching to transform your results.

Jason Lemkin is the founder of SaaStr, the world's largest community for software founders, and a veteran SaaS investor who has deployed over $200 million into B2B startups. After his last salesperson quit, Jason made a radical decision: replace his entire go-to-market team with AI agents. What started as an experiment has transformed into a new operating model, where 20 AI agents managed by just 1.2 humans now do the work previously handled by a team of 10 SDRs and AEs. In this conversation, Jason shares his hands-on experience implementing AI to run his sales org, including what works, what doesn't, and how the GTM landscape is quickly being transformed.We discuss:1. How AI is fundamentally changing the sales function2. Why most SDRs and BDRs will be “extinct” within a year3. What Jason is observing across his portfolio about AI adoption in GTM4. How to become “hyper-employable” in the age of AI5. The specific AI tools and tactics he's using that have been working best6. Practical frameworks for integrating AI into your sales motion without losing what works7. Jason's 2026 predictions on where SaaS and GTM are heading next—Brought to you by:DX—The developer intelligence platform designed by leading researchersVercel—Your collaborative AI assistant to design, iterate, and scale full-stack applications for the webDatadog—Now home to Eppo, the leading experimentation and feature flagging platform—Transcript: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/we-replaced-our-sales-team-with-20-ai-agents—My biggest takeaways (for paid newsletter subscribers): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/i/182902716/my-biggest-takeaways-from-this-conversation—Where to find Jason Lemkin:• X: https://x.com/jasonlk• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonmlemkin• Website: https://www.saastr.com• Substack: https://substack.com/@cloud—Where to find Lenny:• Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com• X: https://twitter.com/lennysan• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/—In this episode, we cover:(00:00) Introduction to Jason Lemkin(04:36) What SaaStr does(07:13) AI's impact on sales teams(10:11) How SaaStr's AI agents work and their performance(14:18) How go-to-market is changing in the AI era(19:19) The future of SDRs, BDRs, and AEs in sales(22:03) Why leadership roles are safe(23:43) How to be in the 20% who thrive in the AI sales future(28:40) Why you shouldn't build your own AI tools(30:10) Specific AI agents and their applications(36:40) Challenges and learnings in AI deployment(42:11) Making AI-generated emails good (not just acceptable)(47:31) When humans still beat AI in sales(52:39) An overview of SaaStr's org(53:50) The role of human oversight in AI operations(58:37) Advice for salespeople and founders in the AI era(01:05:40) Forward-deployed engineers(01:08:08) What's changing and what's staying the same in sales(01:16:21) Why AI is creating more work, not less(01:19:32) Why Jason says these are magical times(01:25:25) The "incognito mode test" for finding AI opportunities(01:27:19) The impact of AI on jobs(01:30:18) Lightning round and final thoughts—Referenced:• Building a world-class sales org | Jason Lemkin (SaaStr): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/building-a-world-class-sales-org• SaaStr Annual: https://www.saastrannual.com• Delphi: https://www.delphi.ai/saastr/talk• Amelia Lerutte on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amelialerutte/• Vercel: https://vercel.com• What world-class GTM looks like in 2026 | Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Vercel, Stripe, Google): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/what-the-best-gtm-teams-do-differently• Everyone's an engineer now: Inside v0's mission to create a hundred million builders | Guillermo Rauch (founder and CEO of Vercel, creators of v0 and Next.js): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/everyones-an-engineer-now-guillermo-rauch• Replit: https://replit.com• Behind the product: Replit | Amjad Masad (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-product-replit-amjad-masad• ElevenLabs: https://elevenlabs.io• The exact AI playbook (using MCPs, custom GPTs, Granola) that saved ElevenLabs $100k+ and helps them ship daily | Luke Harries (Head of Growth): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-ai-marketing-stack• Bolt: https://bolt.new• Lovable: https://lovable.dev• Harvey: https://www.harvey.ai• Samsara: https://www.samsara.com/products/platform/ai-samsara-intelligence• UiPath: https://www.uipath.com• Denise Dresser on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/denisedresser• Agentforce: https://www.salesforce.com/form/agentforce• SaaStr's AI Agent Playbook: https://saastr.ai/agents• Brian Halligan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianhalligan• Brian Halligan's AI: https://www.delphi.ai/minds/bhalligan• Sierra: https://sierra.ai• Fin: https://fin.ai• Deccan: https://www.deccan.ai• Artisan: https://www.artisan.co• Qualified: https://www.qualified.com• Claude: https://claude.ai• HubSpot: https://www.hubspot.com• Gamma: https://gamma.app• Sam Blond on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sam-blond-791026b• Brex: https://www.brex.com• Outreach: https://www.outreach.io• Gong: https://www.gong.io• Salesloft: https://www.salesloft.com• Mixmax: https://www.mixmax.com• “Sell the alpha, not the feature”: The enterprise sales playbook for $1M to $10M ARR | Jen Abel: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-enterprise-sales-playbook-1m-to-10m-arr• Clay: https://www.clay.com• Owner: https://www.owner.com• Momentum: https://www.momentum.io• Attention: https://www.attention.com• Granola: https://www.granola.ai• Behind the founder: Marc Benioff: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/behind-the-founder-marc-benioff• Palantir: https://www.palantir.com• Databricks: https://www.databricks.com• Garry Tan on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/garrytan• Rippling: https://www.rippling.com• Cursor: https://cursor.com• The rise of Cursor: The $300M ARR AI tool that engineers can't stop using | Michael Truell (co-founder and CEO): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-rise-of-cursor-michael-truell• The new AI growth playbook for 2026: How Lovable hit $200M ARR in one year | Elena Verna (Head of Growth): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/the-new-ai-growth-playbook-for-2026-elena-verna• Pluribus on AppleTV+: https://tv.apple.com/us/show/pluribus/umc.cmc.37axgovs2yozlyh3c2cmwzlza• Sora: https://openai.com/sora• Reve: https://app.reve.com• Everything That Breaks on the Way to $1B ARR, with Mailchimp Co-Founder Ben Chestnut: https://www.saastr.com/everything-that-breaks-on-the-way-to-1b-arr-with-mailchimp-co-founder-ben-chestnut/• The Revenue Playbook: Rippling's Top 3 Growth Tactics at Scale, with Rippling CRO Matt Plank: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3eYtzBpjRw• 10 contrarian leadership truths every leader needs to hear | Matt MacInnis (Rippling): https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/10-contrarian-leadership-truths—Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com.—Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed. To hear more, visit www.lennysnewsletter.com