#464 - The 10 Brutal Cold Calling Lessons You NEED to Learn Today | 30MPC Playbook (Sell)

The lesson here is just because one person brushed you off, said I wasn't interested, locked your email domain, it doesn't mean that the whole company rejected you. Every single week the kid would show up and he would open his cold calls with the exact same did I catch a bad time opener and the exact same telemunker pitch. And eventually I was like dude, what do you want to change? Your prospect just told you no. And if you immediately go into, oh you told me no let me dig more, come across as a really really pushy and threatening salesperson. And that is a recipe to get rude responses or hung up on. Changing the cold call script is not always the answer. I'm not saying you should go and stare at metrics for 3,000 years and stay away from the sales floor, but you use metrics to tell you what problem you should solve and then you go to the sales floor to solve the problem. I get the email and I'm like oh boy and then I hear my phone ring and I look and it's my CRO Chris. There goes my job. So I pick up the phone and I'm like hey Chris and he goes Nick listen. Good morning everybody and welcome to this Playbook episode of 30 minutes to President's Club. My name is Aron Froke and I'm here with my co-host Nick Skalsky and folks if you're not familiar with our Playbook episodes every 10 episodes Nick and myself or Mark and myself pick one topic to break down beginning to end step by step and for this Playbook episode we're going to take it in a slightly different direction. So Nick and I were texting you the day and both of us have had the opportunity to coach dozens and dozens of reps and sales teams and don't get me wrong like half of the battle is teaching someone how to use the right opener or teaching someone to use the right problem proposition. But frankly there are a ton of bad habits, misconceptions or hard lessons that you'll see reps face when they're picking up the phones and by contrast there are certain things that the best of the best performers do every single time no matter what company you're looking at that you start to see once you've coached 10, 20, 30 different reps. And so we were trading some of these stories back and forth and we were like hey what if our next Playbook episode we literally just took the top 10 stories, the top 10 learning lessons we've had in both cold calling ourselves and also teaching other reps to do the stuff and we broke them down step by step. So that's is this Playbook. Today's show is brought to you by 11X you're all in one digital GTM team handling creating, qualifying and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact linked in posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances and use those as their trigger and we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30MPC or grab it in the show notes. Deal Velocity is a huge driver of win rates which is why Armand and I partnered with the easy and effective CRM pipe drive to film a 60 minute video masterclass that covers all of the different ways that you can drive velocity in each individual stage of your sales process. Literally from opening call all the way to contract review we documented our favorite tactics in this pipe drive and 30MPC masterclass which you can get for free in the show notes. Alright so I'm going to read the first lesson and then I'll expand on it with a story that's like actually happened to me when I was selling. So the first one is just because one person at a company said no doesn't mean that the entire company rejected you. Honeywell didn't say no, one manager said no, it's not companies that reject you, it's just individual human beings. And so this actually happened really recently where I was outbounding an account trying to sell them a sponsorship and I reached out to the director of content marketing and the guy said he kind of a rude response not interested please don't reach out again like this isn't for us. And in the past I would have been like great this account's not a fit sorry Armand we can't sell to them. And I got the rejection from this guy was looking back through my emails April 75 days later April 22nd I get a ping from our marketing machine of an inbound request that we got and what do you know it was literally the exact same company but it was a person above them it was the VP of demand gen. And so we booked a meeting with this guy great meeting it's actually the perfect time for them to be exploring a sponsorship. And so the lesson here is just because one person brushed you off said I wasn't interested, blocked your email domain whatever like it doesn't mean that the whole company rejected you. And so when you're trying to break into an account you've got to take multiple angles and generally you shouldn't just take a singular no as an excuse to not keep prospecting that account. I remember there's this one time a rep was trying to do a big rip and replace deal at my company meaning they were trying to sell to me and at the time I was the director of sales development and they couldn't get to the VP of sales. So they went from me to the head of revops and the head of revops shut down the deal two months later that rep comes back and she reaches out to me she's like hey I want to point my sdr in the right direction I know we got a no from Brendan over at revops. Who do you think would be the best next stab at the account this person or this person. And the reason that she did that is because we were one of 50 accounts in her patch. She had to find a way to get the deal done and Ian coniac in his first episode he talked about how he had a multi-million dollar deal on the table and he literally heard no from the technical buyer and so he called all the way to the C suite and said before I close this deal out here the seven things I found with your team here are the exact reasons that I thought we were going to be a good fit here the exact ways we're going to support your priorities and I just want 30 minutes with you before I close this out to make sure that there's really nothing here and lo and behold a month later Ian closes a multi-million dollar deal because he knocked on another door and so just because one person said no to you and organization in SMB sure you might move on to the next account because there are a million accounts but nine times out of 10 either that person's going to leave or there's another person like that person who can probably drive a sale forward to the end. All right so the second lesson if you're not booking meetings and you're not changing anything this week you might as well write your resignation today so I've got this kid right now who's on pip and he works for this team that I coach and I could have told you four weeks ago this was probably going to be where it landed and the reason for that is every single week the kid would show up and he would open his cold calls with the exact same did a catch a bad time opener and the exact same telemarker pitch and every single week I'll be like hey doesn't seem like this is working are you open to changing something he'd be like sure and I'd be like great let's try this new script he would come in this next week and he would deliver the exact same thing over and over and over again and so week after week after week I was giving in the exact same feedback and I would listen to these cold calls and it was like I was having deja vu each week and eventually I was like dude what do you want to change it doesn't have to be my way it doesn't have to be your way but the definition of this way is a certain path to hitting quota and I know this sounds ridiculous but I see this all the time with average reps where there's someone listening to this call right now who is booked one meeting a week every single week for the last six weeks and has not changed anything and this happens all the time with average reps is if you're not succeeding you can't cling to the script that's getting you one meeting per week because there might be a script that can get you three or four but you will never actually know it unless you try to change one thing so try to change one thing every single week until you get two meetings and then keep what got you two meetings and then try to get a third meeting and then try to get a fourth meeting but if you stick to the exact same playbook that is clinging to the only meeting you're getting you're only going to get one meeting per week one recommendation that I would have is if you are cold calling my guess is not every single call goes your way and so if you have a call that doesn't go your way you get shut down with I'm not interested and you don't know how to respond or somebody hits you with like an objection about your product and you actually don't know like what you need to know to overcome that I would just write that stuff down on like a post a note while you are calling and then the end of your week at the end of your session you'll see all of the areas where you got stuck and then to Armand's point to just pick one and work on that one thing in the next week a lot of folks over estimate how much they can fix in a single week but underestimate how much they can improve if they picked one thing a week and worked on that for a full year. All right number three is rude responses don't actually mean you're doing anything wrong you can have the best opener pitch or even product in the world but you're still going to get punched in the face on the phone and that is frankly part of the game. All right so the story behind this one is this was actually back in 2018 I was fairly new to sales Armand and I was selling legal ERP systems to law firms in Southern California and there was this one competitor of ours that was like a small family run sort of like regional provider and I knew that the owner was going to be retiring and basically winding down the business and that we had actually just won over their biggest client to migrate to our system and it was like a big name like Amla 100 big law firm and I was like okay we've already gotten one I've got like 12 others in my territory let me go run a campaign on all of the people using this legacy competitor and so I go after them hard basically using messaging being like hey we're already migrating some folks over off of your system to ours you want to talk and I hit these folks hard and about two weeks after starting this campaign I get put on an email chain where a prospect I had reached out to forwarded the email to their CEO of this competitor who then forwarded it to our current customer that we had just run, one, who then sent it to our CRO. And it was chewing me out of like trying to steal their clients and this is bad business practice, like chewing me out for it was pretty innocuous prospecting. And I get the email and I'm like, oh boy. And then I hear my phone ring and I look and it's my CRO Chris and I'm like, there goes my job. I'm done. So I pick up the phone and I'm like, hey Chris and he goes, Nick, listen, I wish our entire sales team was prospecting the way that you are. We are gonna get messages like this just because someone is a jerk here doesn't mean you should change a thing. Maybe cool on some of these accounts for a bit but keep being aggressive with your prospecting. And the lesson that I learned here, I really needed to hear that from him because I was like, oh gosh, maybe I shouldn't have done this, maybe I shouldn't have made the calls but it actually reminds me of something Josh Braun says a lot. And he talks about if you go for a walk in your neighborhood and you walk past your neighbor's yard, there will be a dog in your neighborhood that barks at you sometimes just because you were going for a walk. That doesn't stop you from going up for an evening stroll with your wife to wind down at the end of the day. You don't stop walking just because somebody was rude here or there. And the reality of outbound is you can have the best product in the world. You can have a killer, relevant research pitch. You're still gonna deal with rude people that should not stop you from putting in the effort on outbound. Today's show is brought to you by Insightly, the CRM that helps you spot deal risk early. So pipe reviews actually drive your number. One question I ask in nearly every deal review is, what do we need to get in our next interaction with the customer? If my rep can't answer that question, the deal has a risk and I have something I can coach to. Now we built a guide with our friends at Insightly, CRM on how to run pipe reviews that surface real risk and get deals moving again. And you can get it for free at the link in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by AirCall, the AI-powered communication platform built for sales teams. If you want reps to adopt AI, you have to be intentional about building AI skills. On my team, we wrap our weekly sales meeting with a five minute builder, where each week one person shares one learning that's helping them be a more effective seller. AirCall helps you by bringing AI into real customer conversations that reps are already having. So you can't help but realize the benefits and we partnered with AirCall on a resource for building AI confidence in sales teams, which you can get for free in the show notes. Yeah, there was one steer that I used to coach. And she was cold calling into one of the big four accounting firms, PWC, worse firm in the world. And she reaches out to someone pretty high on the legal team. We were like a financial compliance software. And we literally get an email from the chief legal officer of Price Waterhouse Coopers, claiming that she's going to reach out to our CEO. And I looked over her shoulder and she was freaking out. She was like borderline and tears she thought she was gonna lose her job. And I was like, you changed absolutely nothing. And folks, for anyone listening, I guarantee if you're doing thoughtful outreach and you are working your accounts the hard way, your sales manager is going to be proud of you. And if he or she is not, you should go find another sales manager because the vast majority of people are actually afraid to knock on the doors in the first place. All right, let's go to lesson number four. Every single time you have a bad week on the phones, I'm going to ask you the same two questions. Number one, was it a volume? Connect rate or set rate issue? Number two, what can you do to fix it? Use metrics to identify the problem, do not throw crap at the wall. So this is probably one of the most frustrating things when I see not great sales leaders coaching, is 99% of their answers are make more phone calls or change our cold call script. Contrary to my last tip, changing the cold call script is not always the answer. I'm not saying you should go be a dashboard manager and stare at metrics for 3,000 years and stay away from the sales floor, but you use metrics to tell you what problem you should solve. And then you go to the sales floor to solve the problem. So I was coaching one of the best SDRs I've ever coach, her name is McKenna and she booked, I think it was five meetings in a single week. And she was like coming in and she has a growth mindset. She's like, here are the seven things I wish I should have fixed in these cold calls that I didn't make happen. So I started looking at our numbers and I'm like, McKenna, you set 30% of your connects. What would happen if you became a top core tile cold collar? She's like, I don't know. Said you would set fewer meetings. I was like, we can talk about these two calls that slipped. But the reality is, I listen to those calls. Those prospects aren't booking a meeting with anyone. And you might actually lose one of your meetings by changing the script that you have, which is clearly working. But let's look at your connect rate. Her connect rate was 2%. So McKenna, if you can get your connect rate from 2% to 5% and you don't change a single thing on your script, how many meetings do you book next week? She does the math, 5% versus 2%. That's a 2.5x difference. McKenna goes from booking five meetings to 12.5 meetings in a week just by fixing her connect rate issue. So if we wanted to solve the wrong problem, we could have role played objections for the next 30 minutes. Instead, we spent the next 30 minutes brainstorming why McKenna's connect rate was only 2%. Knowing that if she could even lift it from 2% to 3%, she would go from 4% to 6%, or from 5% to 7%, or from 7% to 12% meetings. And so you don't have to be a data scientist to use basic metrics like a connect rate and a set rate to know what part of your funnel you should fix, and then go and fix it. - I'll add one thing, Armand. We put together a bunch of baseline benchmark metrics for things like set rate, connect rate, et cetera. If you're curious about how your metrics stack up to other people, there's a link to go get that in the show notes. So that should help you figure out what problems you need to fix. Speaking of problems, let's move to the next lesson, which is being curious is a recipe to get hung up on if you don't give them a reason to stay on the line. Most of the time, your reason should be no more cold calls. So I'll explain this one, which is, most sales people, myself included, when they get taught about objection handling, they get told, oh, you've just got to be curious on your cold calls. And I was doing call reviews with a team that I work with, Biteable, and I was working with the best SDR on the team. She's really, really good. And we were listening to a call where she did not book the meeting because she got shut down with a very common objection that they get, which is, oh, we're all set, we already have benefits. And her instinct was right. She knew that in order to overcome that objection, she needed to know what type of benefits plan they actually had in place. The problem was she asked that in response to the objection. So they go, we're all set, we already have benefits. And she goes, oh, yeah, I guess what type of benefits do you currently have? And click, she gets shut down. The reason for this is, you're right with your gut instinct to be curious, but you gotta remember, your prospect just told you no. And if you immediately go into, oh, you told me no, let me dig more, you come across as a really, really pushy and threatening sales person. And so what you have to do is before you ask that curious question, you have to give them a reason to answer the question. You have to incentivize. That's one of the steps in the Miyagi method we talk about Armand. And so before asking that question, I was like, hey, don't change anything. But before that question, I just want you to insert the line. Cool, thanks for letting me know, just so nobody on my team calls you again. Is it that you've got a Mac plan or a big, Blue Cross Blue Shield plan? What type of benefits do you have in place? And when you insert the, hey, I'm asking this question for a reason, just so nobody from my team calls you again. They're like, okay, cool. Let me answer their question 'cause that is the path to not getting called again. And so before being curious and asking that question, you want to use lines like, just so no one calls you again, or just so I know to really mark this one is dead, or just so I know not to follow up in the future, or just so I can tell my manager, you really weren't a fit. So insert that before your curious question. - Today's show is brought to you by Consensus, which helps your demo keep selling, even when you're not in the room. Before I show a demo, I set it up like, it might have to work without me. I include these three slides before I drop in. Number one, the biggest problems I learn in discovery. Number two, how we solve those problems. And number three, a, what does success look like today slide? You can steal that exact 30-MPC Demo Deck template powered by Consensus. Go check it out in the show notes. - Today's show is brought to you by Responsive, which helps sales teams respond to RFPs, security questionnaires, and buyer requests faster so deals don't die at the last mile. One great way to drive your deals faster is to run parallel processes instead of linear processes. For example, in vendor review, work with your buyer to kick off legal security and procurement review simultaneously, instead of doing them one by one sequentially. We built a playbook with our friends at Responsive on different proposal accelerators that you can use to close deals faster. Grab it and the show notes. - Next lesson, this is my favorite lesson of them all. Ask five reps what their product is. You will be lucky to understand one. Nobody wants your single source of truth and optimized business process or leading provider of a product that they never asked for. Pitch problems, not solutions. So we've talked about what we call the problem proposition lot in the past. And I'm amazed no matter how much we talk about why it's important to lead with problems, not solutions, how many people still lead with solutions, but not just solutions, solutions that absolutely no one can understand, even if they are described as solutions. So there are two scripts that I got from the exact same sales team, two different reps on the same sales team. And they're trying to explain what they do. Here's what I got. Wrap number one said, just a high level overview of what we do over at Acme. So we provide online simulations based trainings for facilities, maintenance, slash HVAC, slash plumbing folks. And I was calling to see about setting up a time over the next week or so to give you a look at our platform to see if it makes sense to continue the conversation for your team. So Nick, I guarantee you have no idea what they do. Let's see if you understand what they do based on the second script. A platform. Woo. Acme works with enterprise companies in the US such as Amazon and lows. We've seen great success with their facilities, maintenance teams through our online career development platform. The reason I'm reaching out to you specifically is that I notice you oversee operations at insert company here is cross trading your teams and ramping new hires faster important to you. What the hell does this company do? I'm going to rewrite this. I assume like point 0.01% of the people listening have actually sold into the HVAC slash plumbing space. You know how hard it is to get someone to understand how to fix a damper in the AC unit while they're reading a plain text paper manual and pictures on PowerPoint slides. Acme creates a literal simulation of your air conditioning system. So your field reps can practice fixing AC units before they blow out someone's $10,000 rooftop unit. That's really good. If you explain the problem in dumb human language, you only need one sentence to explain the solution and make the problem go away. It's not that hard. Read it out of fourth grade level, cut all of the buzzwords and just explain the problem in dumb human language. It felt like a story to the way that you told it and it got me to actually pay attention because I attached more to stories than what marketing buzz speak sounds like. Alright, so my next one is the best way to get somebody's attention is what you know about them. It's not how is your day going. Instead, it's here's what I saw about you. This one came because this was also from when I was selling the law firms. There was this one law firm in Phoenix. I still remember it. And they had this really like illustrious managing partner who had like been in all these profiles and it was like a pretty big name law firm and I really wanted to win the account. So I started calling the managing partners. I wanted to book a meeting with him and I'd probably called him 20 times over a six month period and he answered the phone. He answered like six or seven times and every time I hit him with a permission based opener and every time he goes nope and hangs up on me. I kept calling and I kept using the permission based opener thinking that my persistence was going to cut through. Nope, nope. Sorry, I'm busy. Click, click, click. Couldn't get through. And I was like, damn, like the reason I was calling this guy was I read an article where he had been interviewed about like growing the firm, adding practice areas, trying to move to like a more digital friendly like law firm tech forward firm, which a lot of law firms were not. They were still very, very paper based and I knew we could help with all this stuff and I just needed to get to the part of the pitch where I was going to tell him I read this thing about you and we can help. But I couldn't get to it because the permission based opener didn't work. And so finally I was like, damn, this isn't working. What if I just opened with I read the interview and I'm wondering if I can tell you what I saw that made me call you. So I call him another time. He answers, he goes, hello, and I go, Dave, I just finished reading your interview in the Super Lawyer magazine and look, I'm going to be honest, this is a cold call, but it is a fairly well researched one. And I'm wondering if I can get half a minute to share what you said in that interview that made me call you in the first place. And he goes, aren't you got 30 seconds? And I booked the meeting. So I learned sometimes if you're not getting through with an untalered PBO, you've just got to lead with this is the research that I saw. Tease it and be like, can I tell you what I saw that made me call you specifically? Number eight, you can say some really stupid stuff on a cold call and get away with it because you're saying it with some confidence. The words you say matter far less than how you say them. Strong and wrong over a weekend. So there's one rap her name's Paige. She's become a director of sales development. And when I first met her, she'll be okay with me saying this. She was like really stiff on the phones, like very robotic and just like no tonation and fluctuation or anything like that. But you'd say the perfect words. So she would say all the right words when she got hit with an objection or she would deliver her opener. And to this day, she says that these are 30 of the most powerful, uncomfortable minutes of her life. I got on to a call and I said great, we're going to role play the same three objections for the next 30 minutes. And we are going to role play you laughing when you hear the objection. And at the end of this, you are going to have the greatest fake laugh ever known to man. And for 30 straight minutes, I would rotate through not interested, send me some information and call me in six months. And she would just laugh and agree with the objection. And at the beginning, she was like, huh, that's a laugh at the beginning. She'd be like, huh, I guess you would have called me if you were interested, be like Paige, laugh a little more. Ha, I guess you would have called me if you were interested. And by the end of it, she's actually cracking up because it's ridiculous how many times I've made her do the exact same fake laugh to the point where any prospect who could have possibly thrown not interested at her, she probably literally would have laughed because the moment she heard it, she would have imagined my face instead of the prospect. And so low and behold, Paige becomes one of the best cold colors on the team. And moving forward every single time we would do the objections training, she would tell this exact story and she would tell every single person in the room that I'm coming for you. I'm going to listen for your fake laugh. And if you do not have a good fake laugh by the time you cold call on my team, you and I are going to do the exact same drill. And so a lot of people they're obsessed with the perfect cold call opener, they're obsessed with the perfect pitch, but the reality is a partner of a law firm, a CRO, they can sniff out junior in the first five seconds of you picking up the cold call. And it doesn't matter if you use the heard the name, toss around opener. If you sound like, hey, Nick, we work with a few other injuries in portfolio companies. It's arm-un from Pave. Have you heard her name, toss around? I sound junior, but I could use an idiotic cold call opener and be like, yo, Nick, catch at the worst possible time. And you're going to be like, okay, at least this guy's like sort of on the same business stature as me because he's not trembling in his boots, calling me or sounding super junior and robotic. So 90% of the battle is how you say it. 10% of the battle is what you are saying on the phones. And so if there's one thing to practice, practice the script on autopilot and try saying it 50 different ways until you listen to that and you listen to a recording of you talking to a friend. And those two things should sound exactly the same. The point of fake laughs arm-un, that's actually something that I've really drilled in response to the terrible jokes that you tell. So that's a learning for you today. Still working on mine for ones like that. Yeah, you can do if you're struggling to get the right tonality out of yourself. Everybody's heard the advice of like, oh, you got to stand up when you're making your calls. But also think about like what your facial expression and what you're doing like with your hands and your body movement does for your tonality. So there's some quick tonality tips for you. All right, my last one here, Armand, is you're asking to be no-shod if you don't get them to accept your calendar invite on the cold call. Before you hang up, you've got to ask them to accept the meeting invite life. Do not drop the baby. So this happened to me when I was prospecting a COO of a big law firm in Chicago. And they were like a dream account for us. I knew the ERP system that they had and it was like, I think they were end of lighting it. So they literally had to change software. And so I called this woman and literally first call she answers. And I give her my pitch and she's like, yeah, this is actually good timing. I'd love to meet. And I'm like, woo, oh, that was easy. Awesome. I'll send you an invite later. Paying up the phone, go send a really nice email. Cause we like a good probably two, three minute conversation. Click send and I get a response right away. And I'm like, oh, this is a hot one. And the response is from Google domain DNS being like your email bounced. And I'm like, it's my caller. She doesn't answer. She doesn't accept the calendar invite. Obviously because it bounced. And I must have called this woman like 15 times over the next two weeks to try to be like, hey, you didn't get my invite. Like, I still want to meet with you because she had never heard from me before. And I never ended up getting her on the line again. And so sort of a freak incident, but this has actually become an even bigger problem. Something that we learned from Jason Bay Armand is Google has changed the way that it handles calendar invites. And if you're not a dummy like me and you send it to the right email address, if you haven't engaged with that person on email before meaning they haven't responded to you, your email or rather your calendar invite won't show up on their calendar unless they actually hit accept on the invite. And so at the end of the cold call, what I should have done and what you will may choose to adopt is before you hang up, say, hey, I'm going to send over a placeholder invite right now, just so it ends up hitting the calendar. I'll add zoom details, I'll add a or I'll add like an agenda later. Just so I make sure it actually hits here in box. Sometimes these things land in spam. Would you mind hitting accept on that invite for me? And I promise if you do that, you will be able to squeeze out more kept meetings with the exact same number of dials and conversations and to bring it home, what better than a lovely leadership tactic, which is the really unsexy way that I turn around most SDR teams. I can turn around the vast majority of SDR teams by number one, teaching them how to call the right prospects. Number two, giving them a context first opener in a problem proposition. Number three, mandating 200 dials per week. Half of the battle is giving them the tools. Half of the battle is simply raising the standard. So when I was first turning over the card to SDR team, I got thrown frankly like a warm bag of dogs. And so of the team of 18, one of the managers got fired, five of the reps were underperforming. And the top four reps had all just been promoted to AE. So I was left with a handful of underperformers and a bunch of pretty average performers and basically what was a hollow hold out culture from the previous leader. So the first thing I did is I went around the room and I tried to find two or three people who were actually willing to do something differently. Because the average cold call count on the team was no more than 50 cold calls entirely. So I had to just like find someone who was even willing to pick up the phone. And so I found one or two people on the team that were willing to hit 200 dollars a week and just entertain it because I had done the same as a rep and I had at least shown that it was possible. So you flipped one, flipped two, and then I hired one to two reps who were also willing to do the same. From there, we ran what I call shuttle runs with the team. If you're familiar with a shuttle run, it's when you run to the five yard line, you run back. You run to the 10 yard line, you run back 20 yard, 30 yard, etc. until you go across the football field. And so with every single rep on the team, we would do working sessions and I would be like great. Find five accounts that you think are eights here accounts. Show me the five accounts. Great. Before you move on, let's make sure that these are the right accounts. Show me who you're going to reach out to on the accounts. Great. Now that you have the right prospects, cool. Show me the first emails you're going to send to each of these prospects. Great. Now go dial them. Okay. You dial the prospects. Great. Let's listen to these calls. Now I've done checkpoints for three critical pieces. Number one, I've made sure that you know how to contact the right accounts. Number two, I made sure that you know how to contact the right people on those accounts. And then number three, I made sure that you know what to say to those accounts. And then at that point, I would just tell the team every single week, I don't want to talk about activity. It's just the expectation that you make 200. And because I had two or three reps who were willing to make the change and lead from the front and half success at the beginning, it looked like 200, 200, 200, 50, 50, 50, 50, 50. And then the next week, it was 200, 200, 200, 100, 100, 100, 150. And then soon enough, the entire team was doing 200. And when they ramped up the volume, they were doing 200. On the right prospects with the right talk tracks. So half the battle is giving them the right tools to just know this is what a good lead looks like. And this is what a basic opener looks like. And then half the battle is just making sure that people actually pick up the phone every single week and make a culture where there are no excuses to put up a low activity number. Today's show is brought to you by Titanx, which helps you connect with prospects instead of dialing into the void. So if you can make 100 cold calls a day, but if nobody picks up your burning time. So Titanx literally guarantees you will triple your cold call, connect rate or they will pay you $10,000. So the link in the show notes down below will show you that they match literally 5,000 credits for every 5,000 you buy. Go check it out. I use it personally and it's a phenomenal way to get more conversations on the phone. Today's show is brought to you by Textus, which helps you keep deal momentum moving at every stage of the sales cycle. Texting is one of my favorite ways to sell between meetings. I use it for post big team meeting debriefs and also for game planning with my champions about how to navigate the politics of their org. And I've found that when you move somebody off company email, it makes folks a lot more open and honest. Now we put together a guide with our friends at Textus on how to revive ghosted deals and keep your deals moving at average stage with the funnel with texting that you can get for free in the show notes. Alright, so that's it. Those are the 10 brutal hard limiting beliefs and lessons that Armand and I have had to learn about cold calling and outbound prospecting. This was a new format for us. And so we'd love to hear from you. If you liked it, loved it, hated it, want to see a different format. If you go to the show notes and you're listening in Spotify, there is a place in the show notes where you can give us feedback on this episode and Armand and I will be looking at that to determine what we do for our next playbook episode. So the ask today, the way that you can help us out is go give us some feedback in the Spotify app and the show notes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next week on the show. Today's show is brought to you by Unify, which helps you prioritize the right accounts at the right time. Try this. Stack your tier one highest intent leads at the front of your morning dial block. So if someone signs up for a trial, visits your pricing page, dial them first before any other accounts before you open your Slack, your email before anything. Unify makes it stupidly simple to surface those tier one accounts automatically. We built a guide with you to find on how to get 100% of BDR's to quota in 2026. Go check it out in the show notes.