The Outbound Equation: A proven methodology to secure high-quality meetings in 2026

70% that is how much higher customer acquisition cost has increased in the last six years. Why is that important to know today's episode we're gonna talk all about the outbound equation. So this is a methodology that we've come up with just really in the last three or four years refining the process that we used to help companies like Shopify, Gong, Zoom, Rippling, iHeart Media and a ton more. Really just create a repeatable outbound motion. And there's a bunch of different parts to it that we're gonna cover today. But the reason why it's important to know that the cost of acquisition is increasing is that inbound has just become crazy expensive, especially with AI and people searching for solutions via AI versus going to Google. So SEO, you're paid advertising, all of that stuff has really shifted in a lot of organizations. You're probably feeling it yourself have shifted to be more outbound centric. And the tough part about that is outbound is arguably the toughest that it's ever been for software companies at least. Folks doing it in a digital manner via email, phone call, social. So before we get to today's episode, thanks for checking out out outbound squad. My name is Jason Bay. I'm your CEO and host. We're all about helping you turn complete strangers into paying customers. So if you are an SDR or AE or you're managing folks like that and you're really looking to make a pivot in the organization this year around outbound, you're definitely in the right place. If you have, you know, AEs or account managers or even SDRs prospecting into existing customer accounts to generate opportunities, you're in the right place as well. Today's episode is a, this is an audio excerpt of a webinar that I did recently called the outbound equation. So what I'm going to walk you through in this, there's a nine part methodology that I'm going to walk you through. It's everything from the foundation and key things that the organization needs to provide. There's an org execution component of this. What does the the frontline leadership team need to do on a regular basis and there's a rep execution piece of this. What they reps need to do. We're going to talk about each of those. I'm going to give you the latest and greatest stats. Everything you need to know on on why outbound is so hard right now on what you can do about it. And then I just share a ton of different tactics and things that you can do as a rep or as a leader. Let's get to the show. Today, I am so low. And what we're going to be talking about is what we are calling the outbound equation. This is a methodology that we created. The first and only I believe outbound methodology based on the 200 plus clients that we've worked with in the last four or five years. So if you're just coming across outbound squad for the first time, my name is Jason, I'm CEO at outbound squad. When we originally started back in 2016, we were an agency that would do appointment setting. So we were an outsourced SDR essentially. We would do bulk email campaigns. We would do LinkedIn stuff. This was back in the day when you could do a little bit more mass blast. And that started to quickly go out of style. And what we started doing was training teams and one of the first big customers we worked with was zoom. We've since worked with Gong, Shopify, some of the largest sales organizations out there and some of the startups out there that y'all may have never even heard of before and everywhere in between. And we created this methodology that I'm going to share with you today based on over 200 plus training engagements and consulting engagements we've done in the last four or five years. So my goal for today. We're going to talk state of sales and outbound. So hint it's on hard mode. The second thing we're going to talk about is the methodology and the outbound equation. And what I'm going to give you is three or four areas. We're going to dig deep into the methodology and I want to give away some free stuff for you today. Some tools. One of them is going to be a whole set of AI prompts that we use with our customers to help them do everything from create messaging to emails to research. All of that great stuff. We're going to give you some cold call talk track samples that you can you can take a look at so make sure to stick around for that. Cool. So let's let's dig in. So the first thing that I want to talk about is set the stage for the state of outbound. And I'm just looking through the chat here. Yes, the call is being recorded. And second, if you have a question, there's a Q&A button there at the bottom of zoom. And I can see a few of you have dropped some stuff into there. So let me dismiss the. There we go. If you have a question, feel free. Drop it into the chat or into the Q&A. I'll try to get to as many as I can. I want to make today as interactive as possible. So let's talk about invisible scripts. So the idea of an invisible script. It's it's really this like subconscious belief that really shapes our behavior. So if I was to give you a practical example of that in the United States, we call it college. One of the things that I was conditioned as a kid in middle school and in high school. I was conditioned to want to get a white color job versus a blue color job. And the question was not, are you going to college or university? It was where are you going to college and what will you be studying? There was this in assumption or invisible script in society. And it's still like this in America, at least in probably many other places as well, that you're going to go to college. The reason why I bring this up is our buyers, they bring this same type of invisible script into the interactions they have with people like us. This is where I would love to see some engagement in the chat. Drop your answer into the chat. What invisible scripts do you feel like your perspectives have perspective buyers rather have about people like us. People that sell stuff people that send cold emails people that make outbound calls to people that didn't ask to receive them. Yeah, let me know in the chat. Yes, spam or Justin says pushy. Just wants to sell not real car salesman. Yeah, we get 300 of them. Yeah, Remy says sleazy. Down understand their business. Yeah, Paul says an interruption. Wait, says another insurance man. Is this a sales call Justin says. So I think what's really important is for us to sit in the seat of the people that we are selling to. To really understand like their inner world. What it means for them to be on the receiving end of our outreach. And if we can have a little bit more empathy for that, a lot of what I'm going to share with you today is going to be much more impactful. And everything that you guys share in the chat is absolutely true. All the data would show that three quarters of buyers according to Gardner would prefer a rep free buying experience. This has been a staff that's been going around for a couple years ago now, but this should absolutely scare you in the age of AI. Right, most of our buyers, including mine, if they could buy our stuff without interacting with us, that's what they would prefer to do. But it's absolutely what they would prefer to do. Brain gripped it another big study on what buyers think about the meetings that they hop on. And they said that, hey, 58% of the meetings that I hop on over half, I feel like our complete waste of time. I don't feel like I needed to even be in that meeting. And the one that I feel like we have the most control over, you know, Gong, their studies show that 91% of buyers, they don't even feel like sales reps actually understand their role, what they do, what their company does. And this really kind of sets up a precedent with buyers and sellers, where we're really one of the few professions, maybe besides being a lawyer or being a politician in today's day and age, where we start from behind the starting line. Our buyers are inherently skeptical of us upon meeting with us for the first time. This is a very uncommon experience that people have in most professions. You don't go to the doctor with, well, most people don't with immediate skepticism on whether this person might know what they're talking about, what their intentions might be. We have to do a really good job, especially when we're doing outbound of demonstrating that we are not like all of those other people that have been spamming your inbox that have been calling you repeatedly with no real reason for the call outside of pitching you. So what I want to do first is let's talk about the state of outbound. I want to talk about why it's so hard. And the next thing that we're going to talk about is the methodology and the outbound equation and I want to give you some good ideas and things to think on and ponder and most importantly put into action. So reason number one, it's very hard to do outbound in 2026, even compared to two or three years ago because our buyers are inundated with options. So what you see here, look at all that hair you guys. This is from 2016. My wife and I actually met on Tinder. Let me know in the chat. Give me a yes or maybe give me the platform. Did you meet your other, your significant other on an online dating platform? Yeah, I know as a popular one with the kids these days. Yeah. John says no. It says drunk in a bar. Okay, cool. Yeah, you know, a little bumble. Okay, keep it match. Yeah, through friends Leon. Yeah, Linus, as we work together, Frank says no, I'm 67. So the reason I bring this up as an example is anyone who has met someone through online dating, um, prior to 2010, the majority of couples met through mutual friends. Right? And as of 2025, over half of couples meet online. What does that mean when it comes to dating? It means that the, um, the ability to meet people like the market has expanded drastically because, you know, my, my wife and I never would have ran into each other. We were not in the same social circles. We never would have ran into each other if online dating was not a thing. It would have been a total freak accident. There are an abundance of options and that might sound really great in theory, but I've talked to a couple clients. So these are just examples in the last couple weeks. We work with a client that sells into the restaurant industry. And one of the things I wanted to illustrate to that client is that, hey, restaurant tech is going to be a $315 billion industry in less than 10 years. There are 15,000 tech vendors and over half the people that buy software actually categorize their purchase as high regret. So in other words, they are inundated with options. It's very hard to know what to choose and when they do choose something over half the time, they're going to regret making that purchase. Last week, and I think there's a couple of people from, uh, from the company last week that I was just working with, I made an example in MarTech. So anyone here that sells marketing technology and the same is across almost every category. It's going to be a multi billion dollar or trillion dollar industry is just growing. There are tens of thousands of tech vendors to choose from. And again, over half of the people that make these purchases, they regret making those purchases. So the first key idea around why outbound is so hard is that buyers know that they have a problem. Most of them know that. They're actually sold on changing. But if you look at the latest data, especially from Challenger, for those of you that learned Challenger sound, their latest book, I think, is Jolt effect and there might be a newer one outside of that. But it's really talks about an elaborates on the problem for the buyer being not knowing whether or not they have a problem, whether or not they want to change. It's choosing the right solution, not making the wrong choice. So we really have to show up as, uh, experts, interested advisors. The second thing that's making outbound incredibly difficult right now is there's a lot of economic uncertainty. Let me know in the chat who here is hearing about the economy a lot more in the last year or two in their deals as a reason for not wanting to move forward. People being extremely price conscious. Yeah, whatever it might be. How many of you are hearing that right now? It looks like a lot of you are hearing that. Yeah, Leon says always 100%. Yes, Stephanie says pretty much 100% of the time. Justin says since our favorite person started. Speaks sarcastic. Uh, yeah, Ashley says especially Canada. So there's a lot of economic uncertainty. Uh, I can speak to America and in most of the rest of the world has experienced something very similar, but in America, we had our longest economic bull run in history. From March 2009 to March 2020, we had a little blip with COVID and then it went right back up again. And then it kind of settled down and went back down to 2022. And the reason why I share this is that. If you sold and we're doing outbound during those times, there was a lot of money in the market and a lot of us are selling to PE backed and VC backed firms or publicly traded companies that have a lot of cash that they need to spend. And it's a lot easier to get meetings than a lot easier to sell deals. But the thing right now is it's not 2020. So anymore. Right. The buying environment has changed. Sales cycles are longer. It's 40% longer since 2022. Takes 40% longer to close a deal. There are 25% more stable. There's involved in deals since 2023. And deal sizes have shrunk year over year by 22%. Are you feeling any of this in your deals that you're working right now? It's taken longer to close them. There's more people I need to get buy in from and people want to get started smaller. Yeah, Kales is especially with sled. Yeah, sounds like a lot of this is resonating with you guys. 100% and the key idea here is it's not 22 and you need more like I said, the wall is harder to open. It's got less cash in it. You know, 100 bucks feels more like 50. There's no more easy money to be made right now. We have to connect to business goals and problems in order to get meetings. So we're going to talk about how to do that. The last thing I want to touch on before we get to the methodology is attention is infinitely harder to capture in 2026. A lot of you probably remember a day where I'm 36, almost 37 now. My first year of high school would have been probably 2003. When I graduated in 2007, I had a cell phone that was for emergencies. So like the cell phone I think had snake on it. It was one of those no kies. I wasn't looking at email. I think I had a my space account maybe as a sophomore. There was no social media. There was so much less digital distractions. Right. And the new gatekeepers really are Google Microsoft. It's Apple. In many cases, it's the US government. Right. It might be the EU if you're in Europe, but there are all of these things that these multi billion dollar companies are doing that actually make our job a lot harder. One of the more recent ones. Let me know the chat. Does anyone here has anyone here turned on the iOS screener? Like the gatekeeper. Yeah, I encountered this a lot in the calls that I make too. Where you call and it asks, hey, the reason for your call, who you're trying to get a hold of Google voice has been doing this for a really long time. But yeah, Apple's got that now. Right. They make it really easy. These features have existed for the last five or six years where they make it really easy to just block unknown collars and have a just go straight to voicemail. I actually believe that the future of cold calling is not booking meetings in a life conversation. I think in three or four years, we're not going to see a lot of that. I think it's going to be your ability to work through that gatekeeper or with the AI assistant or leaving really good compelling voicemails. I think the phone is more alive than it's ever been because people are freaking glued to their phones. But I think the live conversation on a call. It's dying is slow death. That doesn't mean that cold calling is dead or any of that kind of stuff. It just means traditionally how we're using the phone to get calls right now into book meetings. I think it's going to change pretty dramatically in the next two or three years. We're also competing with all of the other apps and all of that stuff, like I said. So what does this mean for Albin? This is a study of 300 million cold calls with gone. What it shows you is that there is a drastic difference between those that are average and those that are very skilled people that are in the top 25%. The average rep rate now has a 5.4% pick up rate and a 4% 4.6% booking rate. The booking rate is the amount of people that say hello versus the amount of people that book a meeting. So to illustrate this for you, the average rep has to call about 20 prospects to get a pick up and they have to talk to 20 prospects in order to book a meeting. Who's alert that is unsustainable? I think all of us are thinking like once the last time I actually talked to 20 people live on a phone call that might take an entire month or if I'm an AE an entire quarter. Average skill just does not scale. It doesn't. You can't be average anymore and make the phones work. You can't be average anymore and this is based off of a big study that outbound squad, strong and 30 minutes to presence club did last year on cold email. We did a study of 85 million cold emails. You can see that the average rep will book three meetings off a thousand emails sent versus 23 in the top 10%. So the key idea here is that average does not scale. It just doesn't. Okay. Like, it doesn't work anymore without bound. Like, we have to be as skilled as the top 25% reps to make it in 2026. We cannot be lazy in the phones. We can't send these mass blast emails. We can't just send stuff that's been AI generated, etc. So the last thing you might be thinking is, okay, Jason, you've just spent the last 15 minutes talking about how hard outbound is. Why should we put all of this effort into outbound? There's a couple of reasons. One, acquiring customers through inbound has skyrocketed, especially with the advent of AI. SEO is much more expensive and oftentimes ineffective and paperclip has become much less effective as well. So serving up ads and googling stuff, customers aren't really looking for information in the same way. So a lot of what they're doing is looking on AI. platforms for information. So the cost of acquiring customers through these inbound channels has become increasingly significant significantly higher. And a lot of what you guys are probably hearing from your orgs in 2026 is that we need to prioritize outbound. Inbound is down. It's become too expensive. And when budgets tighten up fewer companies are proactively looking for new solutions. So the same data still holds true with AES. If you're an account executive on this call, the best ones are self sourcing a third to two thirds of their pipeline depending on their average deal size. And I'll send out these slides to you guys afterwards for some of you that joined late. So outbound allows you to really take control of your destiny. One of my favorite quotes around this is that an inbound lead was an outbound lead yesterday. How do we find those people that we're going to come through inbound or have a problem and get the conversation started early with them? Okay. So let's talk about what to do about this. You probably have been chomping at the bit to get the tactical parts of this. So let's talk about the outbound equation. So there's a couple different sections to this equation that I'm going to give you right now. And then again, we're going to zoom in specifically to some of these sections. So the first thing that I want to do is talk about the three different sections. Okay. There's a foundational layer. There is what the organ needs to execute in order to make outbound work. And there's what the rep. So a lot of you I would imagine two thirds of you on this call are probably reps. The other third are in some sort of leadership position. The most common mistake that we see is that the organization thinks about this backwards. Instead of starting with foundational things that they should provide for the reps, enabling leaders to teach on that, reinforce it, coach it, create culture around it. They start with reps. And they usually say here's a cold calling script. We're going to run enablement sessions around pipe gem for you guys. Here's what that's going to work like. And they do it backwards. So it's very, very important that we think of it in this order. So the first thing that the organization needs to provide is the strategy. I'm going to spend quite a bit of time talking about this and giving you guys some takeaways here. That's ICPs and personas. It's not, hey, here's everyone that we could reach out to. It's, hey, here are the three industry verticals or ICPs that we reach out to that have the highest one rates and highest likelihood of wanting to engage with us. It's account scoring. It's the sales map. The sales map is how do we reverse engineer the number? So if we need to book, if we need to close a million dollars, let's say our quote is a million bucks, how do we reverse engineer that down to the number of deals that we need to close the number of intro calls that we need to run the number of outbound activities we need to do in order to hit those intro call metrics. We need a daily number that says, hey, instead of this arbitrary, you need to make 50 calls per day. It's, hey, you need to make 37 calls per day based on your own metrics and your conversion rates in order to set the meetings that you need in order to take your quota, the sales math, the offer. What are we giving buyers in return for their time? The messaging that we're using, how the AES and SVRs align, the compensation, etc. A big part of this is process. We need to have playbooks plays. We need to have process in place before we started enabling reps. We need to have our tech figured out. That's our data, our AI, our sales engagement platforms, our tools. One big mistake that I see on the tech side of things, let me know in the chat if this is maybe you and you feel comfortable sharing. You're an account executive and your SDR team has access to a sales engagement tool like outreach or sales loft in as an account executive. If you are expected to also do outbound, but you were not given a license for the sales engagement tool, I can't tell you how many times I see this where we're expecting the account executives to do outbound and we don't even give them access to the tools and the data. So that's a really big thing that we need to figure out the tech. The next layer of this is the org execution. Do we have reinforcement in place? Do we have measurement in place? So are we reporting across the funnel? Do we know the conversion rate of our calls, our emails, the show rates who are meetings, the conversion rate of meeting into opportunity, etc. Culture, do we have good top down participation? And then all of the normal stuff that gets a lot of airwaves attention in the airwaves these days, it's the productivity for the rep, how they prioritize their time and their soft skills, which is where we spend a lot of time. The phones, emails, social AI and person, etc. I want to give you you guys a second. When you guys look at your organization, whether from a rep viewpoint or leadership standpoint, which one of these buckets do you feel like has the biggest area of opportunity for improvement? Which part of this methodology you have these nine buckets? Which part of this really needs the most TLC in order for you to be able to really hit your out on targets? I'm seeing rep execution, the soft skills. Yeah, a lot of strategy. Remy says, "Where is your Reza company?" Almost all of them. Love it. Love in the engagement so far. So let's zoom into the methodology. And I want to dig deep into a few critical areas that you absolutely need to nail in 2026 so that you have something actionable. The first thing I want to talk about is the strategy and particularly the offer. Okay, I want to talk about the offer. The reason why the offer is so important is there's really two fundamental reasons why a buyer would take a meeting. One, they want to fix immediate problems. So in our case, we help with pipeline problems. So if there's a gap in pipeline coverage, there is a lack of opportunities being created. There are a lack of meetings especially to create those opportunities. Like that's, if someone's got that problem, it's an immediate thing that we can help with in a liner solution with. The problem is that on average, only 3% of your total addressable market is going to have an immediate problem that they also acknowledge and are also seeking help to solve. There's another big chunk. About two-thirds, half to two-thirds of your market, statistically, that does have the problem, but they're not proactively looking for situations and solutions to fix it. So the other big reason that someone would take a meeting is really phoma. If you're missing out, they want some sort of insight into what appears doing, a competitor, etc. So what we studied with Gong last year is we looked at the presence of an offer and we looked specifically in the email because that's the content that we were creating. We said, when we send cold emails, we look at how the email ended, what the ask was. When someone asked for a meeting and they said, "Hey, are you free tomorrow at Tuesday?" Are you free to on Tuesday at 9 a.m.? Let's say, it decreased the reply rate by 44%. When they asked if the buyer had a problem that they could solve, and typically that was done in an open-ended question, what challenges are you having with your cybersecurity posture that decreased the reply rate by 29%. When we asked for interest, is this something that you're running across? Would you be interested in chatting further that had a 7% boost? And the most compelling part of the data was that when we have an offer present, 28% increase in reply rate when we had something to give outside of just asking the buyer for their time. When we had something to give, we noticed that the reply rate was much higher. So an offer, essentially, what you want to do, I'm going to give you some examples here in a second. The offer, the best way to think about the offer is if the buyer takes a meeting with you and they decide not to buy your product or service, what value will they get outside of just learning about your solution. So an example of that, I have five examples. And this is going to depend on what you sell, and some of you won't be able to do some of these things. One of the offers you can make is experiencing the brand. So if any of you sell to companies that sell business to consumer, you have the experience to go on the website, you have the experience to go into the store, you have the experience in the ability to be able to buy something, right, or rep and Shopify, one of our big clients. They landed a meeting with a huge, retail brand I won't mention, but that we all know and love. And really what she did is she went into the store, talked to some of the staff and all of that kind of stuff. And she just took a selfie in front of one of the stores and dropped it into an email and almost immediately laid into meeting with the marketing exec. So experiencing the brand, you can do this with some B2B brands too. If you sell cybersecurity, it's a little tougher, right to experience their cybersecurity posture. But if I sell to a company where I can actually buy the product or add something to a card and check it out or talk to people that work at their company in the storefronts, think about how you could experience the brand as one of their buyers. That is a really great offer of value that you can share in an initial call with a buyer. The second thing you can do is show the problem. And again, I'm going to give you guys some other stuff because not all of you are going to be able to leverage the same types of techniques that our other customers have leveraged. As Shopify, their marketing and sales teams teamed up. They created like an internal GPT that pulls like account insights into a dashboard. And they also have this audit tool that generates a free report. So in mass, the marketing team was able to create something where imagine if you had 50 accounts to reach out to you and you wanted to know the load speed of the site. It pulled all of those metrics for you so that you could use them in your outreach. You could reach out and say, hey, I noticed that your site speed is about three times longer than competitor A, B and C. And statistically, we see that reducing conversion rates by up to 28%. We should talk about it. Right. So it shows that I can show them the problem that they're having. The one that is applicable to every single person on this call is doing what I call selling the blind date. So the blind date. If you think about setting up a blind date, I don't know if anyone here has ever been in a blind date before, but if you're setting up a blind date for one of your friends to meet another one of your friends, you would hype that person up. Right. You would talk about how awesome they are or why you think they might be a good fit or why they would get along like you would hype it up. And you got to sell the blind date. If you're an SDR, the blind date is with the account executive. If you're an account executive, the blind date is with yourself. If you're an account executive, the blind date could also be if you're selling cybersecurity, let's say. Maybe you bring someone technical on that first call. You sell the blind date with the technical resource. So path robotics, they're a company that sells both hardware and software as a service. It's automated well then. So imagine in a manufacturing floor. Imagine a trailer or a large. So imagine a large, I was going to say object. I don't even know if that's the right word for it, but imagine a trailer or something that would be really hard to automate because it's so large. Like imagine on a manufacturing floor, a human is not having to even touch that at all. That's what they sell. The problem really is that there's an extreme labor shortage at least in America of welding talent. I mentioned earlier, a lot of people want to get into white color jobs. So in America, especially right now, they're having a hell of a time getting people to want to do blue color jobs like welding. So a lot of the companies are having this problem. So the SDR would say something like this. Hey, I'd like to put you in touch with David your account executive. He's got about a decade of experience working with manufacturers and most recently working with caterpillar. And we can share some of the insights we're seeing around how they're dealing with the labor shortage, especially with welders and welding talent right now. I also show you how they're automating some of them, the traditionally very hard to automate welding parts. If nothing else, you get some great insight from that call. So think about how can you really hype up the technical person that's going to be on the call. If it's an AE, you're hyping up the AE and their experience, maybe logos that they've worked with. This is something everyone here can immediately put into action right after this call. So hype up the person that they're going to be meeting with when Olo another client. What they would share is the state of the labor and gig economy. So they essentially have this marketplace where a warehouse like Amazon, let's say, could go on and find temporary talent without working through a temp agency. They can literally just like book it like you would an Uber or a lift, but their promise in that first meeting was like, hey, we can share your like out like Amazon and like a few other these folks are thinking about this so that you can be more competitive in the labor market. So really think about the offer assessments are a great way to do this to this requires more partnership from the marketing team. One of our companies client simpler is several years back. They actually mystery shop 200 plus e-commerce businesses. And then they analyze their customer experience. So one of the things they looked at was like average reply time. The hours in which they operated the channels all of that kind of stuff. And one of the things that was really cool is when they would call someone they might say something like, you know, hey, Kate, it's Jason, I was giving you a call because we actually mystery shopped Patagonia and we also looked at North Face and Columbia. And what we found is that your response time via chat was three times longer. And I was calling about the sales that you might be losing on the website right now as a few of your competitors, you got a minute like this is just a very powerful way to open up a call. So Elena in the chat asks, hey, what's the fine line between sharing too much about another company that you work with. Yeah, you might need to leave the logo up. You might need to leave the logo up. You can say, hey, how about working with similar folks like if I, if we worked with Nike, let's say and we couldn't share an I can't say, hey, we can share how we're working with some of the other, you know, fortune 100 to pair, all brands sports, so do any to do their Elena so assessments are great and that if there's free stuff that you can give way like if you're selling zoom info, let's say like you can give away free data, you can give away samples like there's stuff that you can give away for free. My first question for you all, I would love to hear in the chat based on what you saw here. What offer could you leverage in your outreach and again, here was the list. Could you experience the brand could you do a better job of showing the problem could you sell the blind date, let me know the chat. What offer could you do a better job of leveraging in your cold outreach so that there's a reason to take the meeting. Yeah, I see assessments selling the blind date. Yeah, dinner or lunch is great with peers. So Jennifer ball said my fun company dinner lunch like do to peer a peer lunch or dinner would be great too. So if you if you're getting customers together for that, that can be super powerful too. Alexandra asked is a pilot a good example of an offer probably not because you don't want an offer a pilot to an unqualified customer. And you really want there to be more give and take to do a pilot with you. So I would think about what's something smaller than a pilot that's knowledge what's knowledge that you can share. Okay. Cool everyone good so far. Let's talk about the next piece. You know, it looks like we got about 20 ish minutes or so. Yeah, Joseph, once you learn the office, absolutely. So the next thing that I want to talk about is on the org execution level and that's reinforcement. There's a couple of really simple ideas that I want to give every leader on this call. So that you have something that you can bring back to your team. The objective here in key idea is really around like leadership must lead from the front and set the tone for outbound to work. You also have to prioritize regular coaching and reinforcement. There is a moment in my sales career that I just will never forget my old VP of sales a guide. This is when I was a sophomore in college. I was so 2008. I was working for a company. My first sales job was going door to verse line house painting services. I did really good as a rep. I made like 30,000 bucks over the summer. Like that got me into sales. I was like I freaking love sales right. The second year my sophomore year I became a sales manager. So now it was about like teaching people how to sell. And a big part of that was like going door to door. That's how we got most far leads. Yes, Shane. What's up Shane? So one of the things that Dan had a conversation with me about. It was all of our other sales managers at that time is a big thing in the summertime. When a rep is now running a painting business. Right. And they're having to sell deals and market at the same time. A big deal is to make sure that they continue getting leads and going door to door. And our reps weren't doing that because I would go out in the field and drive out to their territory. And then when it came time for them to go door to door, I would bounce. I would just leave. Right. Right. I'm like, you know how to do this like, et cetera. And what Dan called out was that like, hey, if you're not willing to rub shoulders and do the work with your reps. You're showing them in that moment that you were too good to do that work. And they don't respect you as much for it. And they also don't feel accountable to doing that activity. So for me, the translation was, I got to do it with them. I got a lead from the front. I have to set the example. And I've taken that principle with me through all the work that we do now with all of our clients. And the most successful clients. The most successful ones they rub shoulders with their reps. I have a media company that we did recently a big roll out for their AEs, especially. It's been a big thing that they've been focusing on with their AEs is just making more calls and doing more outbound. And they saw a massive lift when their leaders got in the pit together with the reps. They have to get in the pit, right? So a lot of the stuff, I think, there's three days in the office per week. Like they have sessions, mandatory sessions where all the account executives, they make calls together in the leaders participate. They also run structured outbound blocks. It's literally like an org wide mandatory thing where every rep, regardless of their tenure, is making calls at the same time. Yes, well, absolutely, leaders are calling too. And that's just make sure you were deodorant. The in the pit, if it's in person, what I mean by in the pit is just like doing the calls with the reps. If it's virtual, you've run structured outbound blocks, like get a Zoom call going. Everyone goes on mute and you're just hanging out or you can use like a or on or nooks or whatever you want to use where they have virtual call floors. But you're running structured blocks. Yeah, Leon says my leader calls all the time to fast like you absolutely need to be doing this in the pit with your reps. The other thing that I would recommend is blocking off proactive time for call coaching. We recently wrapped up a project with BuildOps. Their SDR team had the best month ever of sales accepted opportunities. And one thing their managers do is just block off dedicated time for call coaching. In fact, what you could do if you're someone more senior on this call is you could create KPIs around the number of calls that a manager should coach per week. You can see this in outreach, you can see it in GONG. You can run a report to see how many call recordings the managers are opening and providing coaching. So proactively blocking that time off for call coaching is super, super important. Yeah, Ollie says do you mean for outbound blocks like a call blitz? Yeah, call blitz. It doesn't have to be calls though. It could be sending emails during that block too. Okay, cool. Let's keep going. So that's the reinforcement bit. There's so much I can talk about from a reinforcement standpoint, but I want to keep moving just so you guys have some good ideas here. Another thing I want to talk about is the messaging. What I find right now with messaging is during times like this where the economy is doing what it's doing in buyers are not necessarily maybe being as proactive or messaging has to be freaking dialed in. And it cannot be product or solution centric. It can't be we do this. It's got to be we're talking to people like you and here's what we're hearing. With the advent of AI, especially in the last couple of years, it's actually made this extremely easy to speak in the language of our customers. So this next piece I want to dig into, let me show my screen again, is I want to dig into messaging. So the objective here with messaging is we want to sell the buyer on what they are already sold on. We want to sell the buyer on what they are already sold on. You know what they're not already sold on? Your solution, okay? Your product, it's a shiny object. It's the nice to have thing in their mind. What they're already sold on is their goals, what they want to accomplish, their priorities, and then fixing and alleviating any problems that stand in the way. Okay. So when I ask you the question, who are you with and what do you guys do? We cannot answer that question in this way. This is called product voice. So when so solution is a unified commerce platform that offers a seamless customer experience across all retail touch points and centralized data and operations for it, a single source of like, it's such a mouthful to even say, we can't talk in this language. We have to talk more in this type of language. Hey, you know, I was actually speaking with another founder yesterday who mentioned that he was just feeling stuck in the mud. There's so much pressure for them to keep up because things are so competitive right now in their space and their current e-com platform is it's super expensive to maintain and just doesn't play friendly with their point of sale solution. How does that compare to what you're seeing right now? When you bring it up in story form like this, and you talk about the customer problems instead of what you do, customer voice, what we found, especially over the phone we do this, like the stats would tell you that and show that the conversion rate into a book meeting is literally three acts. We'll be speaking customer language and about their problems. So the first idea I have for you here is to assemble a messaging team. We worked with the company GoGuardian. Their BDR and AE teams increased qualified meeting set by 42% quarter of a quarter. Their internal chant or mantra, if you will, was priorities over product. Priorities over product. We're gonna talk about priorities and problems before we talk about our product. So what they did is they assembled a messaging team of around eights, 12 folks. This is top SDRs account executives, leadership, people that had the best knowledge around the buyer and that became the team that dictated the messaging that the rest of the org would use. It wasn't some top down thing where the sales leaders were like, here's how we talked to our customers. Marketing didn't create it. It was a collective group of the best sellers, a marketer or two, coming together and creating messaging. And I'm gonna show you what that looks like here in a second. The second thing that they did was create when I referred to as a messaging matrix. And that looks a lot like this. So what you'll see on this is in the priorities column on the left, you can see all of this is written from the point of view of the customer. When they engage with a director of curriculum and instruction, they're thinking, "Hey, unfinished learning is a big challenge for us right now." How do we structure and focus our curriculum to reach learning targets and prove test scores and increase graduation rates? They aren't thinking about the platform that they're gonna use. They're thinking about that big focus. They're also thinking about, "Hey, the assessment solution "is amusing right now." Like the data, like it's inconsistent and it comes out of time that's too late for us to take action on. And we always get surprised at the end of the year. What would be really nice is if we had consistent data that can drive directional improvements and learning outcomes and help us reach our learning targets and increase graduation rates. There's nothing about the product in there at all. So we have to create messaging like this. The cool part, the cool part is that you don't need to do this from scratch anymore. This would take me an hour per persona to workshop with the customer. The cool part is that you don't need to do that from scratch. I'm gonna show you something. This would be the first kind of thing that I give away to you guys. Let me share my screen. There's some AI prompts that will just build this for you. And it will do it probably better than you could do yourself if I'm being honest. It's really, really hard. I include myself in that conversation. It's really, really hard to create this stuff from scratch. So what I'm gonna give you here in a second, there are some AI prompts where I don't know about you guys. I have recently been sold on perplexity. Who uses perplexity for their AI platform? Who's using perplexity? Dude, it's so money. What I love about perplexity is it's got chat GPT, it's got gem and I, it's got all of them built into one place. So it's really good. I found it to be much better than chat GPT in Gem and I buy themselves. And I found that chat GPT has a lot of hallucinations. So with this AI prompt, what you can do is, you can take transcripts, persona-based messaging from marketing, any marketing materials you have, business cases, et cetera. You can attach that and just have it run this prompt. Hey, take these, turn it into a messaging matrix. Here are the different areas with examples. Here's what we sell to and what they care about. Create a messaging matrix for me. And what's really, really cool is it will spit out something that looks a lot like what I showed you before. It'll spit out something that looks a lot like this. So right there, you don't need to create it from scratch. This is the framework that you're gonna use to have AI. If you want, create your emails, create your talk tracks. Like this makes it super, super tailored and really specific. I'm gonna share, not all of you are gonna be able to access this at once when I share it 'cause there's several hundred people on here. Okay, so just give it a second. You can download and make a copy of the AI prompts here. All right, the link is in the chat. Again, it's not gonna let all of you access it at once 'cause it limits it to about a hundred people at a time. So just have a little patience. I'll share it again. Before the end of the webinar and we're also gonna email out a copy of this so that you have it too. So messaging, super important. Your goal should be if you're in enablement and let's say that you're super strapped on resources 'cause you're a small enablement team. Like this literally takes maybe 10 or 15 minutes per person to create something that would be much better than marketing, doing it themselves or you doing it yourself or something. sales leader doing, it'll be much better than that. It'll use actual customer voice and data in there. It's really badass. Okay, I'll reshare this before the end of the chat so that you guys have it, okay? Okay, create a customer snippet bank. Go on, when we've worked with them, I thought it just did a killer job of this. If you're not already doing this, you need a database. It could be a spreadsheet, it doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be crazy. But think about as a rep, how frustrating it is, when you're trying to figure out, hey, what's another customer we've worked with in this industry vertical? You gotta go to the Freakin website and you open up all these case studies and it's not organized by industry maybe, or I gotta open up the case studies and it's like a whole like pages of information. It's not very usable in that format. So what you can do, and you can have AI create this for you as well, is you want a customer snippet bank that's like customer in one column, industry in another column, and then two or three sentences on like, what was the problem and what did we do for them? That's it, that's all you need. You need something really easy that your AI could call on for the emails, for messaging, for any of that kind of stuff. For you to reference when you're doing account research, you want to be able to easily, easily reference that. All right, so I gave you the bonus AI prompts, so I'm gonna keep moving. Got about nine minutes. Let me think about what I want to share here, 'cause they got a couple things. Let's talk about this piece, and then I'm gonna send the slides out to you guys afterwards too, 'cause there's gonna be some content that I don't get a chance to get to, and I also wanna answer some of your questions. Okay, the next piece I wanna talk about is the AI component. To set this up, I would like to ask you guys in the chat, let's say that your org gave you a budget to hire a personal assistant. What's the first thing that you do with your personal assistant to get them going? Lauren would outline what you need help with. Ryan says roadmap. What else? You would teach it, Melissa says. Yeah, you would schedule time. Keyless says you'd have it get in the pit with you and do cold calls. Well, I guess this is a personal assistant we're talking about, we're gonna talk about AI. Yeah, you would have them do it with you. Okay, my point is that if you had a personal assistant, you wouldn't just like hire them and say, hey, go do some account research for me. You would onboard them, you would train them, you would teach them about the solution, you would do it together with them, you would give them feedback. AI is the same way. Okay, AI is the same way. I think we have this expectation that, oh, I didn't get what I wanted from Gemini or Chat GBT or Proplexity. AI is not very helpful. It gives me generic answers. Like you might be feeling like, oh, dude, it doesn't even, like, it's not even worth learning how to use this stuff because it's so complicated. It's really basic and unhelpful and the information's inaccurate or inaccurate. Maybe it takes you way too long to get what you want. Like all of these things are happening and that's valid, but I just wanna make sure that we have the right expectation here that like, AI is not gonna do your job. It's not going to replace people anytime soon, but a rep whose master at AI will, okay? But it's just not gonna do your job for you. You have to work with it. You gotta train it. You gotta give it good prompts. You have to tell it what you do. So the action here is you really wanna create custom GBT's or projects or if you're using Gemini, create gems in Gemini that do a lot of the work for you. I'm gonna show you that spreadsheet again. Like you really gotta take the time to make sure that you master this stuff and that you train it properly. So if we're looking at the prompts that I just shared with you, there's a whole set of account research prompts too. So right now the way that this is being presented, you would have to individually copy these prompts. But what you can do with Gemini is like, you can build a gem that has these prompts built into it where all you'll need to do is just drop in a website URL and it'll do all of it for you. In chat GBT you can create projects and you can add this information into a project file and then have it do it for you in one sitting. So Hans, I would, yeah, Hans says I'm very disappointed with that, I would encourage you to give it another look. And I would encourage you to think about like how you could do this in a way that's much easier for you. Okay? I don't have examples of this that I can show you because it's like so client-specific. But there are ways that you can just through a project in chat GBT, just create a project and create project files that have these prompts built into it and just have a prompt that says, hey, reference the account research project file prompts when I drop in this account, T-Mobile. And it'll just run all of these prompts for you without having to copy and paste back and forth a shit ton. Gemini is the same exact way. Just create a Gemini gem. It's super, super impactful. If you were the org, you should be creating this stuff for your reps. But there's all kinds of stuff in here that's super cool. There's like closed, lost re-engagement messaging. If you want to do exec to exec, like if you want your VP, let's say to write a cold email to another exec for you, that's in here. There's email prompts in here that follow all of the data back things that we teach. There's phone call scripts. For those of you that are doing full cycle sales, I use these prompts personally when I want to summarize where it deals at. When I want to create a follow up email, this is the prompt that I use. When I want to create a quick business case and table format, I use this. So there's all kinds of really, really, really good stuff that you could be using AI for to make your life easier. And we're sort of beyond this time where you have to do all of this copy and pasting prompting. Okay. So look at ChatGPT projects. Look at Gemini Gems. Like look at how you can create something that just requires one or two inputs and doesn't require a lot of copy pace. Okay. Let me show you one more thing. Just so you know what's in this deck and we're not going to be able to get to it. The next thing I was going to give you was a bunch of like soft skills stuff. So what you'll find in here is like state of cold calling. You'll see like our cold call framework in there. We talk about state of cold email. We talk specific like emails and what looks good and you know having an email with an offer in it like this one here, all of that stuff's in the slide deck. So I'm going to share the slide deck in the chat with you guys so that you have it. And again, you might not be able to actually download it with all of the people on the call. I will send it out afterwards as well. So there's the slide deck. Now, because we got a couple minutes, I just want to answer a few questions that you all have put into Zoom for me. Lauren asks, "What happens when people are simply not picking up "the phone at all? "Example, I have a career as the RMI team. "He's been doing this for 20 years and loves it." And it's excellent at it. He crushed it last year, but in January, he has hardly anyone pick up the phone. How do you get around that? And when isn't about his quality or ability? So two things to learn. Pick up rates of the phone are going down every single year. There's just no way around that. Fewer people are picking up unknown calls. Type "next." So that's T-I-T-A-N-X. I would check out. They are not a sponsor. They are not sponsored. They do not pay me to say that. Type "next" is a great solution. It's going to, basically, what they can do is they can validate a list. So imagine you gave them a list of 1,000 people you want to get a hold of. They could find the 2,300 that are picking up the phone at 25% plus pickup rates. So "T-I-T-N-X" is super sick. I used it for an hour. I was calling CROs and BP's of sales. I literally had 10 pickups in one hour off of 30 calls. If I was mentally exhausted, actually, at the end of the session, because I had talked to so many people, I was like, my brain needed a break. That is what I would recommend. And then I would also look at the pickup rate reports. So see when that rep is making calls. Compared to when the pickup rates are the highest, and make sure that they're strategically making calls around when the pickups are highest. Let's do one more question. Melissa asks, "What is the appropriate amount of time to reach out to a potential DM that has accepted my LinkedIn connection when I can't get them on the phone? And they have AI call blocker. I feel like I'm seeing them reaching out right away." Don't wait. Time is your best friend when it comes to this. So soon as someone reaches out or they get some sort of engagement, they open up an email, they accept a LinkedIn connect, like just call them right away. Just call them right away. It's the best thing that I could recommend. Don't wait. You don't need to. All right. One last thing I want to share with you all, we are doing free audits right now. So I just dropped into the chat. If your team qualifies, this would be something to send to your sales leaders if you're a rep. We are doing free cold calling audits. So I just dropped a link for that in the chat. So this is me eating our own cooking. This is our offer right now. So if you want us to benchmark how your team does outbound piped in, especially over the phone, phone compared to some of the cool clients that we've gotten to work with and how to get AES to self source more pipeline. I open up about three spots or so per month, but you must be a sales or enablement leader with 20 plus reps. So just fill out that form. If you meet those requirements, I would love to talk with you and help you benchmark what your team is doing, how it compares to others and gave you some really good simple takeaways that you can take back to your team. So make sure to check that out, sign up if applicable, and it's all I got for your team. We should be sending out a follow up email probably one zero Thursday so that you have it. That's all I got. Later everyone. Appreciate the time.