Prospecting and Pipeline Generation Is Hard: Why Your Sellers Need to Be Too Good to Ignore

Hey, sales leaders, sales friends, Weinberg. Hard to believe this is episode 108. I don't know where they all came from, but I guess after all these years, it adds up. I'm having a blast. Last week was our Supercharge Your Sales Leadership event in Atlanta. I think it might have been our 20th event. And I will tell you, I had more fun at this one than anyone before. Some of it was the master's theme and it was the master's week and we had the Porsche catering people bring in things like egg salad sandwiches and pimento cheese sandwiches. But it was this really interesting, eclectic group of leaders. We had folks from the UK and a guy from Guatemala. And I think there were more Canadians in the room. I think we had four or five tables of Canadians. We had more Canadians than Americans. Anyway, just a really fun mix. And I was completely energized. And I want to start out this episode by telling you the last one we're doing in 2026 is October 7th and 8th. If you're a sales leader and you would benefit from a day in the room with me and 50 other driven, hungry sales leader colleagues, all the way from like frontline sales managers through VPs and directors and chief revenue officers. And there were actually a few owners of smaller companies in the room as well. And you want to like full indoctrination into the sales management fundamentals from Sales Management Simplified. At an incredible venue, people, I mean, we just got the results back later. The net promoter score from this event was 94. And the comments about the venue, the food, the interaction, the participants, the hot laps on the track. This is it. We've got, I don't know, maybe 20 tickets left of the 50 for October 7th and 8th. Go check it out, mikeweinberg.com slash Atlanta 2026. And I'll stop the self-promotion there and I'll intro this episode. I've got a special one and it's, man, I can't believe it took me this long to get the great, and I mean the great Jason Bay, the founder and leader of Outbound Squad on the show. Jason is the first person I point Outbound salespeople to today. I have incredible respect for him. In fact, if you just want to get a flavor of his perspective on sales and prospecting and pipeline gen, there's no one on this planet, I think, better suited or more appropriate to point your salespeople to than Jason Bay. Just go look him up on LinkedIn, Jason Bay, B-A-Y, and go back six months, nine months, and just peruse his LinkedIn posts. Watch the few videos, read his articles, get a flavor. The thing I most respect about Jason is his respect for the sales profession and the way he completely acknowledges the traditional methodologies and approaches that people like Jeb, Jeb Blunt, and Anthony Annarino, and I, and others, Mark Hunter, have been preaching for years, like some of the people before us that were popular. And yet, because Jason is a full generation younger and cooler and more invested in tools and going deep, he's got a lot of clients, many in the tech space, but also some in the industrial world like me. And he's got his ear to the ground about what's happening in the world of Outbound today. And one of the most intriguing things about this conversation is he takes us through a little history. And I've hinted at this in the past, And I've shared my perspective, but I'm always more macro and the Mike Weinberg oversimplification of everything. Jason actually went through a little chronology of what's gone wrong in the world of prospecting and outbound and pipeline generation for the last 15, 18 years. Going all the way back to predictable revenue, the book from Aaron Ross and the Salesforce model and SDRs and what happened to that model in the last few years. And then, of course, I went down the path of them pushing about the damage done by automation and sequences and bots and spamming. And this is one of the best conversations about prospecting and outbound. And it leads really to the title of this episode where Jason has coined this phrase because prospecting today and outbound work is so hard because some of it's the technology that's ruined it. Some of it's the behavior of bad salespeople that have ruined it. Some of it is the typical anti-salesperson reflex we get from buyers that have ruined it. It's the abuse. It's the overuse of tools and automation. There's so much there. And Jason basically says that today, for a salesperson to be effective doing outbound, prospecting, self-generating opportunities in the pipeline, they've got to be too good to ignore. I just want you to enjoy this conversation. This is probably one you'll pass along to your salespeople as well. hear his take there's no one on the planet today that i point people to before i point him to jason bay if i can and i share a couple clients where i'm doing sales management work and he's working with the sales team on on prospecting and outbound and just tons of respect for him and you'll be hearing more from me about him in the future but listen this episode he's got great stuff going on and including some really powerful free resources that might be perfectly timed and super valuable for your team. And as I hand you over now to here in the interview with Jason, I will let you know that this podcast and this episode is sponsored by Pursuit Sales Solutions. They're my friends. And they're the premier organization on planet Earth when it comes to recruiting and placing A player salespeople. And just last week, I had Jake Vines, who heads up their partnership relationships with me in Atlanta, where he spent a few minutes sharing best practices for recruiting with the audience at the Supercharger Sales Leadership event. And he shared that statistic that every time I see it from him, it blows my mind. And it was simply this. And it's the reminder that A players are not responding to your job postings. And if your HR people think that they're bringing in the right candidates with their job ads on LinkedIn or Indeed or wherever, they're fooling themselves. Because the pursuit shared is, in the last year, only 9% of the candidates they placed, 9% of the almost 1,000 salespeople they placed, only 9% came from people who responded to ads that they posted about those jobs. 91% of the candidates they placed, the people that qualified, the people that fit, that were the A players that were going to thrive in the roles, they had to recruit them themselves. So I'm not telling you that you should engage pursuit, but I'm telling you to consider it. At least talk to them. Because if you're looking to grow your team and you want the right talent, you need people that know what they're doing because the people you want to hire, are not the ones responding to your job ads. Pursuitsalessolutions.com slash Weinberg. Go have a discovery conversation. And speaking of conversations, enjoy this conversation with the one, the only, Jason Bay. Jason Bay. What's up? I'm not sure I'm going to be able to contain my sales nerd and my excitement as we go in here. A long overdue having you on the Sales Manager Just Have a Fight podcast. Thank you for joining me. Yeah, I'm excited to be here. I would say in the last year we've gotten to know each other, but I've known a few for a very long time. It consumed a lot of your books. I've listened to your podcasts. I think we had you on our podcast. You were very good to me. Your most recent book. First Time Manager Sales. You had a great conversation. I've used that with several people too, just to point them to it because I loved our dialogue. And then we had the tamale. We had a tamale lunch like in last fall, which was a highlight for me, minus the Uber ripoff for what the Uber tried to charge me to drive back from the lunch spot to the hotel. All right, I got to ask just real quick. I know you haven't been in Seattle forever, but baseball. So I'm a baseball fan and the Mariners are probably the team favorite, at least from the American League to make it to the World Series and possibly win it this year. I'm just curious, baseball fan at all? And are you into the Mariners? I don't follow sports if I'm being honest as much anymore, but I did growing up. I lived in Oregon and in 98, we took a road trip from Roseburg, Oregon. It's about a six hour drive up to Seattle and I got to see the Mariners play at the Kingdom. I think it was the last year that the Kingdom. So I saw Griffey, A-Rod, Johnson, Edgar Martinez, Jay Buhner. I was a catcher. So Dan Wilson, I don't know if you know Dan Wilson. I'm forgetting there was a couple other people, But that era, dude, Griffey looked back and the outfield a couple times did a little wave. And I was just like, I had the Griffey's when I was in fourth grade at that time. So I was a huge, huge baseball nut growing up. But I have not followed it in a very, very long time. I just thought it surprised you with that. We will move on. Jason, there's a lot of places we could go. This podcast is typically for leaders, but it gets passed on to a lot of salespeople. I'm a sales hunter by trade and background. And while I spent a lot of time doing sales management and sales executive work right now, the reality is in my heart, I'm a salesperson. And if I didn't write New Sales Simplified, nobody would know my name. That's really it. I want to start this conversation because we're going to talk about PipeGen and Outbound and Reality. And I think we would agree that it's quite confusing and it's a little bit of a mess right now today. And to paint a picture of the arc of this conversation that we intend, I would love you to start with what is going on right now and what are you doing today and then let's go back to the history 15 whatever years ago to trace the steps of how we got here and then where we need to go because i'm seeing i just wrapped up q1 sales kickoff meeting season and i'm in a lot of companies whose pipelines don't look like they want them to and while i don't have the tech base of clients that you have i i'm in a handful of sass companies and it's been several years of pain and confusion. And I'm excited to see where this conversation takes us. So yours. When I got into inside sales, it was like 2011, 2012. So the company I was working for was the same one I went door-to-door selling house painting services for in college. So this is like a $60 million company. I was going to go leave and do something else. And I'm like, hey, why don't you be our marketing director? And they've never had a formal marketing director. And then the first project I was tasked with was, why don't you create an outbound call center for us. And I didn't know what a dialer was. I mean, yeah, we had a CRM where we put our stuff in, but I didn't know anything about lists and list management and all of this other kind of stuff. And literally, the way that we are MVP of this was we just had a room with maybe six or seven cubicles in it. We printed out lists on a piece of paper and they had a landline that they would dial in. And you know what? Lots of people picked up the phone. Lots of people. I could manually dial and I would be having in call centers, you want to hear the hum. That's the big thing. It's this nice steady hum of people talking. And we would hear that manually dialing. And we fast forward now to 2026. I mean, do you pick up calls from random numbers if you're not expecting a doctor or I don't know? No. Nothing, right? The irony is I teach cold calling. I don't pick up unknown numbers either. Email, I'll look at every single email that gets sent over to me. But we live in an age right now where the pickup rates, it's like 3%. The average reply rate to an email is less than 1%. So if you think about the math, for me as a full cycle sales rep, and for those of you that are not in SaaS, when you hear all this AE and account executive and SDR, full cycle sales is the rep that has to open, close, and sometimes manage the clients that they close. You're talking someone that might have 60, 90 minutes a day that they can dedicate to outbound, pipe gen, trying to get new meetings. the math equation just doesn't work. If you could make 25, 30 calls in an hour, let's say manually picking up the phone and dialing and you have a 3% pickup rate, you might not talk to a single person during that entire hour. Let's fast forward times five days a week over the course of a month. I mean, you're literally having maybe four or five, six conversations an entire month through all of this dead effort. That was just not the case. Even three or four years ago, people were picking up their phone more. So outbound, you could make an argument that it's the hardest it's ever been since the digital channels have been around. Was it harder back in the day when you had to go door to door and work out of the phone book? Yeah, that was pretty freaking hard. Okay. But since people have been getting lists and access to emails and phone numbers and LinkedIn has been a thing, it's arguably the hardest that it's ever been. And we're seeing that today in the results and in lack of pipeline health. Is that correct? Across the board? 100%. one of my favorite exercises to do is to look at a company and to look at their pipeline progression by stage and to look at the amount of open pipeline they have. And the number one thing I always like to ask is, do you track deal rot? And oftentimes they'll have... Deal rot. You're saying deal rot. Yes. Deal rot. So deal rot, for those listening, it would be, hey, maybe if a deal has been sitting in this stage for X amount of time, we start to flag it so that we can look at it. I shit you not, Mike. I don't know if we can sit. Can we use a little bit of profanity on your show? A little bit. No F-bombs. Okay. When you look at the deal rot in stages one, two, three, you'll see hundreds at some of these companies, hundreds of millions of dollars of quote unquote pipeline that's sitting in these early stages for 12 plus months. It's not real pipeline. So they're living in a fantasy world is what you're saying. It's someone's being deceived by numbers that are not what they, the reality is not what it looks like on the surface. Exactly So VP of sales CRO what do they do They start freaking out And they start saying okay everyone mandatory We going to be in office Tuesday Wednesday Thursday and you going to make four hours of calls each day during those days And we have this never-ending vicious cycle of people putting in a lot of this dead effort, sending emails, making phone calls, and just running the same place from literally a decade ago where they're just trying to work their way through a list. And a lot of how we got here, I mean, predictable revenue we talked about, right i'm actually no no we're going to talk about you and i talked about it when we spoke last week but we are going to talk about it now because i would argue with you jason my audience will not overall will not be as familiar with the history and how we got here so i i would love you to take the time to explain where we started last week because that's where it got me excited because going back through the arc of this modern selling and what happened because it's so funny when you described where you started in 2011. 2011 is when I launched this business. I left my cushy job as a senior VP of sales with a very nice salary and all kinds of opportunity because I couldn't stand it anymore. Coming out of the great recession and then working in a really goofy environment with a strategy that was about as clear as mud. And I said, I want to go back to doing what I love, helping sales teams sell and win more new sales. And that's when blogging was big and everything was email marketing and the beginning of lead gen. And that's what led to a lot of my early days and what I was doing. I want you to go back to what happened and what is predictable revenue and where did it come from and why did it work and why did it die? And just paint the picture. I'm going to just take the brush and paint the whole picture. So I call the predictable revenue, it's 2011 to 2020. Aaron Ross came out with his book, Predictable Revenue. And I'm a very big fan of Aaron Ross and the book and the concept and all of this stuff. And let's be honest, I mean, the economy from 2009 to 2020, it was an all-time record bull run market. People had a lot of money to spend. So the whole concept behind predictable revenue was, how do you really get this outbend engine going? And instead of having a rep do all of their own outbounds, all of their own deals, manage all of their own clients, let's split those into three roles. And this happened really prevalently in tech. Salesforce was really the first one to really adopt this in tech. We're going to have SDRs or sales development reps do all the outbound. Because you know what? A 23-year-old is the one that should be making the cold calls, not the account executive, the more experienced person that's more qualified to have that conversation. We're going to put the youngest people who have the least business acumen, whose first job oftentimes this is, right out of college, we're going to get them on the phone with that senior vice president and that person in the C-suite. And then we're going to have account managers manage all of the clients. And this model worked really, really well. It was highly volume dependent. let's split the roles, let's put people into these positions that can just grind out hundreds of calls per day, send a ton of emails, and it worked until it stopped working. The next thing that came that was really interesting, I call it the sales engagement gold rush. The outreach is the sales lofts of the world in 2016. So the tool vendors, the sales tool vendors, okay. Valued at multiple billion dollars, by the way. Sales loft, I think, was acquired for like $4.5 billion in private equity. Something crazy like that. So the predictable revenue era gave birth to this sales engagement platform. And these companies profited off being able to enable through tech this predictable revenue model. And then by 2024, you can't see a sales tool in 2024, whether it's your gongs, your Zoom infos, whatever it might be. Everyone's got sequencing built into their tool now. So at this point, we collectively shoot ourselves in the foot because with a click up a button or a free trial of account or a Google Chrome extension that costs $10 a month, I can literally hit send on hundreds of mass blast emails at a time. I can load up a dialer and spam through an entire list. And these tools, ironically, that were supposed to make it easier for us to outbound have made it exponentially harder. I mean, it's made Apple, Microsoft... I mean, the US government has a lot of policies now around spam and all of this stuff. They start to put these things into their tools. Like I have the call screener set up on my phone where it's like the AI picks up and it screens it for me. They're spending billions of dollars on technology to make it harder for you to do your job. Can I want to push pause right here and go back and dive into two things you've shared that put us in the situation? I want to talk about them a little deeper because I was not working with a lot of SaaS, software as a service, and high-tech companies in my first decade. But because of the pain in all of those companies the last three or four years, you know, following the big spike in the middle of COVID where there was tons of spending and out of control inflation. So the feds ramped up interest rates, which then put the brakes on everything. And then all that SaaS momentum came to a crashing halt. And I've been called into a handful of large, not a ton, but a handful of some very large, well-known software as a service and tech companies to discover the problems that they have that you just perfectly articulated. And one of the problems is the model of continuing to hire inexperienced 22, 23, 24-year-olds. Maybe this is their first job in sales or their first job altogether to do the outbound prospecting sales development rep SDR role. And you and I laughed about this when you just mentioned it in passing last week when we were preparing. Because in my opinion, as a sales hunter, it's the hardest freaking job in the world is to get a meeting. And we have inexperienced, ignorant, naive, low business acumen, people working from their mother's basements who have never been in an office or around older, more mature business people, people who maybe didn't even go to business school, don't read the Wall Street Journal, don't scan CNBC, talking to high level people, if not C-level execs, at least directors, trying to secure meetings by offering value, except for the fact that they sound like they're barely out of puberty and they have no experience or gravitas when they're having those conversations and they want to know today why that's not working. Do you want to pick up just, can we just talk? Because I think there's this thing that the world is uncovering today that the model worked because there was a lot of momentum in a really hot tech environment and there were tons of inbound leads and there was a lot of money being spent on tools. So there was this gold rush, as you called it. But take us out of that environment to where we are today what makes anyone think that model would be sustainable, particularly at the cost? Because you have some data too from your existing clients too on what SDR teams are costing and the profitability. Could you just wax eloquently about what I just shared about the age, business acumen, and also the cost of the model? Yeah. The party ended in 2022. Emergence Capital put out some data. 36% of teams cut their SDR work. So you had all of these companies where there was like growth at all costs mentality, where it's meeting, meetings, meetings, pipeline, pipeline, pipeline. And then now it's, hey, we actually have to run a profitable company. I mean, the craziest thing in tech is that so many of these multi-billion dollar companies are just breaking even now or haven't even broken even yet. And they started looking at, hey, the SDR team that we have, this function, is it profitable for us or not? Do they actually bring in closed one business? And the answer was no in a lot of these. So where does this work and weird, doesn't it? I think one of the hardest jobs is being an SDR leader. If you're a head of sales development, you're bringing in the most inexperienced people that you possibly could. The turnover is really high. When they do good, they move elsewhere in the org. You only get to keep them for a year. And it's a seriously mundane thing that we are doing with outbound. I'm not going to pretend like I like making outbound calls. It's not the most fun activity for me to do. I happen to be pretty good at it. We train people that are pretty good at it. But it is not a sustainable thing to just be doing all day, every day. Okay, so the age factor and the models caught up. But can you also just start to touch on what happened with the proliferation of email and sequencing built into all these tools? And I'm not an expert here. Okay, I fully confess that. But one thing I've been able to observe over particularly the last five years or so is with the incredible volume increase. And it happens on LinkedIn in our spam fields. bot-driven inboxes, and it happens in our email addresses, I feel like we've gotten to the place due to volume and abuse and lack of creativity and care and contextualization and any other C words I come up with. They're compelling messaging. How's that one? You shared something that's almost an unfathomable number. Could you repeat the email response rate? And would you just talk for a minute from your seat where what you're seeing, why email marketing has failed as a methodology in and of itself to secure meetings due to AI, bots, lack of contextualization, and just the resistance. I want to hear your smarter, more with it take than mine. I mean, here are the stats. So the average reply rate to an email is 1%. But the more troubling stat is that the booking rate for email, not to get a reply. Like if we just take the total number of emails that we send, it's 0.3%. So that means I have to send 330 emails to book a meeting. The phone is actually worse. Can you say it again? Can you say that? I want people to hear that number because I'm shaking in my chair as I hear it. You need to send 330 emails to book a meeting. That's what the average, that's the average reps experience. It's 0.3% booking rate. For the phone, it's 0.2%. 500 calls to book a meeting when you take in consideration that the average connect rate's around four-ish percent and the average conversion rate into a meeting is around five percent. So I need to talk to, I don't know, let's call it 25. I need to make 25 calls to get one pickup and I need to have 20 conversations to book a meeting. So we've entered this, and I call this the AI era. We've entered this era where you can no longer be average in order to make outbound work. Like you cannot have average skills. There is a huge delta between someone that is average at outbound versus someone that is in the top 25% quartile. I mean, they literally will book eight times more meetings via the phone, six times more meetings via email. And really right now, I call it too good to ignore. You have to be too good to ignore in order to be great at outbound. In order to make it work, you have to... And we can talk about what the methodology is and the certain things that you need to do if you want to get super tactical with it. But you just can't be average. We're not in this mass blasting game anymore where you can just send a bunch of emails or load up a dialer and just overcome the problem with volume. There's too much volume. And AI is like literally click of a button. We can have AI send out stuff that, you know, Mike is honestly better than what the average rep that I see in these companies is able to send. And that's pretty scary, but the floor is raised significantly. Let me ask you one clarifying question. Is part of the problem as well that the pathetic numbers you're sharing in terms of the math has almost been like a self-fulfilling prophecy as the rates of response and bookings dropped, the volume continued to increase because that was where the pressure was. So because of that, the volume is so extreme that we become desensitized. Because I always talk about the human element of selling, which I can't wait to hear from you what you talk about. You have to be too good to ignore. Because I would tell you, like when you say the booking rate across the world may be 20 conversations to get a meeting. But the people I talk to or the people that I coach that are using the, like that's a pathetic number, right? I mean, if you're really talking about how to bounce off the resistance and how we're selling value and what we're doing, that's a very different number. But I'm just curious, is the math part of what drove that exponential increase where just they had to keep feeding the machines? So then the spam and the automation got even worse to the point where it's so bad that nobody wants to even look at it? Yeah. I mean, it's so simple to increase the volume. It just is. To tell you how insane this logic is, think if you were a marketer, and let's say that you had 100 billboards around the country, and none of them were generating any business. And you said, you know what? Let's do 1,000 billboards. Let's see what 1,000 billboards does. And then that starts to work a little bit, but not great. And you're like, actually, let's do 10,000 billboards. You just wouldn't apply the same logic into any other business activity. You wouldn't just say, let's just have more volume with something that is not even working. That's what all these tools have made it really easy to do. The AI and the automation is just to scale really boring, mediocre, really bad emails, phone calls, whatever it is. It's allowed us to scale really mediocre. Okay. So I'm going to say this now. I said it in the intro, but I'm going to say it again. Jason, you're the guy that I point people to. When I'm leading a workshop and anything about new business development or pipe gen or prospecting comes up, I'm like, have you read Jason Bay? have you looked at his last 50 LinkedIn posts like you're the guy that I see that gets it that respects the old school traditional methods that have worked well that I and my colleagues have been preaching for a long time and yet because of where you are generationally and the type of clients you have and your passion for sales you also get what's going on today and this a lot of times I'll point people to you instead of me because you're so much better versed in what's going on and are so in-depth in some of these clients where you're building playbooks and doing significant training So can you share like what has to happen Where are we going What are the best doing If they too good to ignore if that the way you describing what a phenomenal outbound rep is who's trying to, I always say the number one verb is create, right? Create, advance, close, but most people have a weak pipeline because they're not creating opportunities. And today, particularly in SaaS, where the leads have dried up, reps who can self-generate, self-generate opportunities into the pipeline are more valuable than ever. So who is that person? What's their DNA? And what makes them too good to ignore? And what are they doing technique-wise? And to give the audience some perspective, so the types of companies that we work with are like iHeartMedia, Shopify, Zoom. We work with some of the largest sales organizations in software, media, professional services companies. And we've worked with a ton of startups launching their first sales teams too and everywhere in between. Over 20,000 reps, 250 plus client engagements in the last five years. So there's a bunch of data there. There's four archetypes of rep that we see. So one is the grinder. I call it the grinder because this is the person, this is how I did it back in the day. You're always going to hit your activity target. Oh, it's being mandated that I need to make 100 calls a day. I'm going to make 120, right? The grinders. Ironically, you would think that these are the people that are most consistently hitting their pipeline numbers. But in our firsthand observation, the people that are all about the activity target are not typically the people that are doing really great at pipe gen. The second archetype is the procrastinator. This is how most sellers really fit in this. It's I don't pipe gen unless I need pipeline like yesterday. Right? So it's just an emotional roller coaster for these folks. Some of them can be really good. Like we've seen some top performers be some of these procrastinators, but the lack of consistency is really tough. Third is the automator. I call them cyborgs also. These are the people doing everything with AI right now. And I can't send an email unless ChatGPT or Claude writes it for me. And lastly, these are the best ones. We call them owners. It's the rep that does what every sales leader wants them to do. And they treat their territory, their book of business, like it is their business. They are the CEO of their book of business. so they outbound they pipe gen because a business cannot live without pipeline it needs oxygen so grinders procrastinators automators and owners it's a it's an attitude right i'm going i own my pipeline i own my book of business unless you want to dig into those a little bit more there's kind of a three-part framework no i want to hear your framework yeah we don't i don't want to go too deep i may come back and ask you about sales dna but not right now i like that you described it more as an attitude than an attribute, which I think is different. 100% an attitude. And we can adapt our attitude a lot more than we can adapt our wiring. So no, I'd like to hear from a framework, how do they view it and what are they doing? What are the areas? Yeah. Yep. So there's three key parts. There's disqualify, offer, provoke. Disqualify. One of the best lessons that I was taught in sales is you want your pipeline to look more like a martini glass and less like a pipeline. What does that mean? It means I'm going to shrink the top of funnel down and it is more about going deeper into my accounts and spending more time and effort on the right fit accounts than it is spreading myself thin. This is the complete opposite of the mass blast approach. I have 100 accounts in my territory. I want to touch every account. No. These best reps say, you know what, these 80 accounts, because I've done research on their industry, the size of company, they are not as good of an ICP fit. Maybe I don't have great contact data on them. Maybe there aren't active triggers going on in this company. They're not hiring. They're not growing. Whatever it is, I'm going to ignore these 80. Because the average amount of touches that it takes to get in touch with a prospect is 12 to 15 across email, phone, and social. That doesn't count if you're able to go in person and do in-person bits. It's a shit ton of effort to create a meeting. So I'm going to be extremely picky. And I'm only going to pursue opportunities that are worth my time, energy, and attention. So I'm going to disqualify. Is it fair to apply a word that I often use when I'm talking about targeting, finite? Because I will tell you, even going way back as a successful hunter and almost every top producer I've ever met, times of greatest success came from a narrowing of focus where you're putting intentional imbalance of more effort against fewer targets to gain traction because you're committed and you want to communicate to that prospect that you're committed to demonstrating value and working your weight. Am I overstating that? Or is that even what you're saying? It's more true. You use the phrase disqualify. Yeah. I love disqualify because again, it's an attitude. I'm going to... We talk about disqualification all the time during the sales process. I need to qualify. And that's where you hear banj and like all the other garbage out there, right? This is... No, I'm going to disqualify up front. I'm going to decide who's not even worth my time to pursue. And again, it's the attitude around that. I'll give a couple of really tactical cool things that you could do here. So if you're listening to this, I'll give kind of things that you could do as a sales org and as a rep. So if you're a sales org, what I would be looking at is your last six months of closed one and closed loss data. And what you're really going to want to look at is like, what are the types of companies where we have the highest win rates? We close them the fastest, they are the largest deals, they make the best clients, we get the best results, etc. And I'm going to do an analysis on those, I'm going to look at industry, there might be sub industries. So for example, we worked with a company that helps with cybersecurity. They had 11 different industry profiles. And I was thinking, these poor reps, dude. This is an enterprise company. I need to know about fintech and I need to know about retail. Dude, these are completely different industries. So we identified two. One was medical devices and the other was manufacturing plants, essentially. So think of a Costco. And we're like, this is where we get most of our meetings. We're going to say no to those other nine industries. And then on a persona level, we looked at, well, well, hey, there's five different types of personas we could reach out to, but these two are where we tend to win the most when they're in the first meeting. So we're going to ignore the rest. We're going to go after these two types of buyers in these two industries. And in 60 days, it was literally like 30% plus more pipeline like overnight for them. Stop, stop. I want you to repeat that statistic. I want to make sure I'm hearing you right. You're saying that we're narrowing, we're making a tighter screen, we're closing the aperture, we're dialing in the word I use when I talk about targeting, we're being more strategic and more picky as we're looking at, in the old days, I call it the who and the why questions from chapter five and New Sales Simplified. But you've taken this to an entirely different level. Share the number of increase in effectiveness and what is that number measuring when we tighten the focus? Yeah, 30% increase in opportunity. So if we looked at the quarter over quarter, what they were sourcing in qualified opportunities, they measure an opportunity as someone that, not that we've just met with, someone that we've met with that we would want to pursue a sales cycle with. They are qualified. There is a weighted pipeline that we can measure against this, 30% increase. Just with that simple tension. Just to the disqualify, narrow down, laser sharpen the ICP, however you want to talk about it. 100%. The big thing here is that I want to be able to talk to small groups of people as a group. So there's this framework I call the hierarchy of relevance. So if you think from a messaging standpoint, I can speak to everyone in an industry a certain way to everyone that is that same persona, that same job title, right? A cybersecurity manager or a CISO. That's like one-to-many type messaging that I can use. And then right below that is one-to-one, their company, and then them as an individual. When I start to create these pockets, I can hit all four of those, right? And I can speak to everyone in the same industry, even though my product or service solves the same problem across multiple industries. How someone thinks about cybersecurity and their manufacturing plant versus a medical devices company is very different. Medical devices is cybersecurity inside of the hospital and the devices. Manufacturing is at Costco, people are hotspotting with their phone like internet for a machine when the internet goes down. That's a completely different language that we're talking there. So if I create these narrow pockets, I can start to speak to people in the same way and I don't have to do so much like individual research every time I reach out to someone. That's the power. You become an expert and you have like vocabulary and your familiarity and use case success stories that are a lot more relevant. I mean, there's a thousand reasons what you're saying, I believe. Okay, so disqualifying and narrowing the focus is attribute or how would you phrase it? That's piece one of the framework. What's the overarching category? These are what the best outbound reps are doing. This is how you be too good to ignore. This is how you stand out in the inbox. This is how you stand out in the phone conversation. This is how you stand out when you're in person, whatever it might be. Disqualify is number one. Number two is offer. Our mutual friend, Anthony Iannarino, is really big on this, right? He calls it trading value for time. He talks a lot about the executive briefing and that's all great. That's one type of offer, okay? So the offer, statistically, just some stats. Rain Group did a study, B2B buyers, and what the B2B buyers reported was that 58% of the meetings that they attend with sales reps are a complete waste of time. I think they're being generous, by the way. I agree. So around half the meetings they attend are a waste of time. Gartner's got another stat. I think it's 56% or 53, one of those, pretty close to the same number, of B2B buyers experience buyer's regret. So in other words, buyers feel like half the time they interact with a salesperson, it's a waste of time. And then a little over half the time they buy something, they regret buying it. So your buyer's jaded. Like they're jaded. They don't want to just take a meeting to talk about your services or your products or in software, it's to do a demo. That is not a compelling enough reason to take a meeting with you. So we did a really big study with Gong last year on 85 million cold emails, and we studied the call to action. And when you had an offer in there, and I'll give a bunch of examples here in a second, when you have an offer, you were 28% more likely to get a positive reply that converted into a meeting. So when you were able to answer the question, what will I get out of this meeting if I choose not to buy your product or service? When you're able to answer that question, you're going to have a significant increase in positive responses in people that want to meet with you. So let me give you some examples of what that looks like and sounds like, okay? The most easiest one that everyone listening to this can apply is what I call selling the blind date. So the blind date is I need to sell the person that they are going to meet with. If I'm a sales development rep, maybe I'm setting a meeting up for you, Mike. And a client would say something like this. They sold an automated welding solution. So think of a welding solution that would sit in a factory floor and automatically weld some of the trailer parts and all kinds of crazy complicated stuff. The number one challenge that they have is no one wants to become a welder. So if they're not using automation in there, they're having a heck of a time filling the seats with welders. So the blind date sounded something like this. Dave, I'd like to put you in touch with Mike. He's been working with a company for about 10 years, companies like Caterpillar, etc. And one of the things he can talk to you about is how they're dealing with the welder shortage right now. Because a lot of companies are dealing with that. And the second thing is, if you've tried automation before in your factory, he's going to share some of the hard to automate, traditionally hard to automate parts that you might not be automating right now and what the opportunity might be there. And if there's a way that we can help you, we'll let you know that as well. So I'm selling the expertise of the person they're going to meet with. Mike's like chomping at the bit because it's like, okay, you've worked with all these cool companies that we like. You know my problem. You're speaking that. And I'm not going to completely waste my time getting pitched for an hour. So the blind date is something you can sell the expertise of yourself. You can sell the expertise of the person they're meeting with. If you bring in a specialist of some sort into that first meeting. It's like a cybersecurity expert or whatever you can sell that. The specificity with which you described that is so powerful. You know, we could go back 20 years to Neil Rackham, right? From spin selling, talking about, you know, are you conducting the type of sales calls that are valuable enough for the prospect that they would write a check for the value of the meeting, even if they didn't buy anything from you? Are we coming across like, you know, we use the phrase consultative or consultative a lot. And will you just put the details around or what that meeting looks like in terms of what the offer is that they're going to get that value? It's super powerful. I love how you frame that. Sorry for interrupting you. Keep going. No, all good. Sell the expertise. Second type of offer, I call this a one-to-many offer. This is a way that you could leverage like a marketing asset. So, dude, one of our clients did something so cool. So they sell outsourced chat support. So think about when you go onto like Patagonia's website and there's a chat there, they have a team that will like man the chat and run it for you. I just like how you pick Patagonia. The guy from Seattle, the cool young guy, Patagonia, I'm like, Peter Millar golf outfits. I'm not on the same websites you are. Continue, Mr. Cool Young, Seattle sales. The funny part is... Yes. I don't even own any Patagonia. I'm scared. That was just worth the whole price submission. Okay. So the Patagonia, continue with your analogy. I just couldn't resist. Because no one has ever accused me of being cool. So they mystery shopped 300 e-com companies that all kind of play in the same space. And what they did when they mystery shopped with the marketing team is they were looking at stuff like response times on the chat. the channels, the hours in which they operated. So they're arming the reps with this information. The cold call sounded like this. Hey, Mike, it's Jason. I was giving you a call because I'm not sure if you're aware of this, but I went to start a chat on the website and your response time is about three times longer than Columbia and the North Face. It's Jason again. You got a minute for me to tell you the reason why I called you specifically And right there and I listened to so many recordings of them doing this there was like an emotional visceral response from the prospect They were like wait wait wait what What are you talking about Who are you with? They're almost like angry, which was like, cool, because I'm able to bring this insight in and educate them around how they fit in and compare. I'm just thinking if someone did that to us and they were like, hey, here's benchmarks on results and ROI that other companies get from participating in sales training with all of these different men. I'd be really interested in seeing that and hearing that. And then lastly, there are one-to-one offers. So these things are a little more custom. So if there's something that you can offer that's like a workshop where you can help them plan out something, if there's something on their website, let's say you sell SEO services or you're an agency, and there's something you can see on their website, you can do an audit and offer that to them. I mean, there's so many things that you can do there. But the best reps that really stand out, again, too good to ignore, they're making the buyer feel irresponsible for saying no to a meeting. It would be irresponsible for me not to know what 300 of my competitors are doing from a customer support standpoint. Love it. It's so compelling. The messaging is so compelling because any buyer, they would feel irresponsible for not taking that meeting because they're not doing their job, honestly. Yep. And this is more focused at the leaders because this is where marketing and sales have to work together. This is really from a marketing standpoint, you should be looking to arm the reps with these types of insights, not the shitty blog posts and the webinars that no one attends and all of this other stuff that no one really cares about. How am I giving them true insight? Challenger calls it commercial insight and they talk about it a lot. I've never really seen very many examples of companies that have true insights that they bring to the conversation. And that's why their sales... I talk a lot about the sales story a lot of times that it's pathetic because it's boring. And it's not ringing the bell. It's not hooking anybody because we're not talking about the issues in the marketplace or someone else's desired outcomes. It's just blah, blah, blah, education. So disqualify. So the best disqualify. The best have compelling offers that ring the bell. What else do the best do when they're too good to ignore? Last but not least is provoke. So you have to, through your message, you have to provoke and create some sort of emotional response. So we do this through what we call the three T's. It's trigger, tension, trust. So these are the universal three here. This is the three-pronged fork, I guess you could call it. Say the three T's. Say them again. I didn't catch all those. The three T's. Trigger, tension, trust. Okay. Trigger answers the why now. It's what did I find going on in your business or in your industry, really, it could be. Tension, what is the challenge, problem, thing that you might be wrestling with because of that? Trust. How should I trust you? This is the why you question, right? Who have you worked? This is the customer story. So an example of this might sound something like this. And again, the three T's can be applied. That could be your email. It could be a part of your cold call opener. It could be the thing you say in person when you do an office visit. It could be the thing you say at conferences, whatever it might be. So if we're using that automated welding example, the trigger might be, Hey, Mike, I noticed that you guys manufacture a lot of really large trailers that are probably hard to automate from a welding standpoint. Two, I'm not sure if you're running into this. This is the tension. But almost every manufacturer we're talking to right now is having a heck of a time finding welders. Trust. We recently worked with Caterpillar on something similar. We were able to help them find a bunch of parts that they weren't automating already to reduce the reliance on welding talent. And then I need some sort of call to action. If it's an email, hey, would this be worth a quick chat? Or hey, can I put you in touch with my counterpart, Mike, who's working with Caterpillar right now? If it's a cold call, I could say, hey, I don't want to make any assumptions. How does that compare to what's going on in your world right now? Bigger attention, trust. Why you? Why now? What's going on in their world? Tension. That's the why change question. What's the tension that they're feeling? And then trust. Why you? Why should I trust you? Who are you? You've randomly called me. I didn't ask you to call me. The prospector that I am is drooling listening to this and almost want to stop. If we weren't recording, I would stop and go back and listen to what you just said for the last two minutes or so. And I would challenge every sales leader that's listening to this. You have to share what Jason is articulating here with your people because those types of outreach attempts are not what's the norm today. I am not seeing that type of compelling messaging where there's a trigger and we're creating tension and we're developing trust. And all of those are the key to compelling messages and getting someone to say, yes, I'll see you. And I want to make one more point and then we'll kind of bring this around before we put a bow on it. Jason, you said enough things here today that made me come up back in my mind with this line that I will use every once in a while. I remind salespeople that it may not be your fault, but it is your problem. because other crappy salespeople have poisoned the water. You said the statistics. They have wasted people's time or they have been manipulative or they have given buyers reason to be wary to not engage with you when you're prospecting. And if they do engage with you, they're going to tell you no because they've got lots of mental baggage around other non-value creating salespeople. So that may not be you, but if you're selling in that environment, you have to realize that's the sensitivity you're up against and the cynicism and what I call the buyer's automatic anti-sales reflex. And everything that Jason just articulated here, it would help sellers overcome that challenge that they're facing that other salespeople have poisoned the waters and there's this resistance to us. And imagine if everyone prospected with the value and the care and the contextualization and the legitimate effort that the way he described it, that our sellers were too good to ignore, that prospects had to respond to them, what would the difference be for the reputation of the professional seller? We're all proud to be in sales. Like how much more proud would we be if that was the behavior coming out of our sales reps? So I'm curious for your reaction to my reaction there, Jason. And then we'll talk about what you're doing right now to help people significantly raise their game when it comes to outbound and creating pipeline. Word that comes to mind for me is conviction. You talked about feeling good about what you're doing to have conviction. And in order for me to feel convicted in what I'm doing from an outbound standpoint, I need to disqualify and get anyone out that I don't think is a good fit. So I know that what we have is a great fit for them. I need to come in with a world-class offer. I know that what I'm presenting to them here is like, it'd be irresponsible for them to say no and then provoke. I know that this message here that I'm putting in front of them, it's gonna create an emotional response. That gives you the conviction when you have this stuff. When you don't have that conviction, because you've just been handed a talk track or a cold call script from someone who's never made cold calls before and a sequencing template from your marketing department, of course you're not going to do outbound. You're not convicted that it's going to work. This stuff gives you the conviction and that belief. You've been in the game a long time. The conviction is like half the battle with stuff. You want people to be like, I want some of that. Whatever that guy drank this morning, I want some of that. 100%. And on top of that conviction, there's this passion where you actually get to the place where you want to make the call because you see yourself as this value creator and you feel like you would be irresponsible if you weren't offering this value and this help to the prospect because they're stuck or trapped and you have the fix. And because you know you're targeting so specifically, you're not random dialing the phone book. You've not only like strategically selected this, you've pruned it down to the specific ICP. And so you've got a reason and you're excited to call them because you know they need you. You're not, sometimes I'll tell salespeople from a mentality perspective, Stop viewing yourself as a pest and a nuisance. You're not calling to bug them. You're calling to rescue them because they're stuck. And what you've given us here is the meat on the bone for why and how that can play itself out. So bring it all back. What are you doing right now? And how are you helping sales teams radically raise their game so that the reps are too good to ignore? So I think the big thing right now is outbound has always been treated as this afterthought. It's always been relegated to a talk track, a script, and a list. And maybe if you're lucky, we'll give you some software to help you out with it. We believe that Outbound and PipeGen deserves the same level of respect and energy and focus as your sales methodology. You need a methodology. That's what we help. It's not just training. It's not just a couple scripts. You need to install a methodology at your org. That's exactly what we help companies do. It's the infrastructure. It's the strategy. All of the stuff that we talked about today, you need to provide that to the rep. The rep shouldn't be sitting at your org thinking about what to say and who to reach out to. Like, you should be training them on this. You should be enabling them around this. Is it their responsibility from there? Yes. But they need coaching. They need reinforcement. That's the system that we help companies install. How can we build an engine and give our reps the playbook and the training and all of the things that they need in order to succeed at this? Because Outbound right now, it takes a village to make it work. we could go a lot of places from here i want to save a few thoughts to get you back and go a little deeper in the future possibly even on some technique do you have any resources right now or any place you would like to point people if they're looking to learn more about you or outbound squad and the work you're doing and i also and what and the longest you're i'm giving you the free flow here to be unashamedly self-promotional for a minute and i'm all for that because i'm a huge fan of yours so please do that i also want you to address something because i'm curious you're not Not exclusively working with high-tech companies. Is that correct? I know you have a lot of software as a service and tech, but you also have some more industrial-type clients more in the world I play, yes? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, one of them, like I said, sells a welding solution. So anything that's business-to-business where it's like, hey, I'm trying to get a meeting with someone that's pretty busy. I sell product, service, whatever it might be. Like, absolutely. So any place you want to point people? Yeah, and there's two things. The first thing is free. So one of the things that we've been really putting out into the marketplaces, I really believe that all of this information in detail should be free for people to access to. So we put together a free outbound masterclass. I literally sat in a studio for an entire day. There's almost three hours of content in it. It's got everything from how to disqualify and avoid wasting time on bad fit accounts, how to leverage AI, controlling the phone conversation, owning the inbox, handling objections, building the offers. Everything that we talked about is in that course and there's a workbook. So if you're like the DIY type, and you just want to get started with something for free, outboundsquad.com slash masterclass. That's the best way to grab that. So it's outboundsquad.com slash masterclass. Go get it. It's free. I'm going to get it. I didn't even know you had that. I'm going to go get that. Okay. That's great. The second way is if you're a leader or you're a trainer or enablement leader and you're like, hey, it'd be kind of cool if we got help implementing that stuff. Outboundsquad.com is the best place to go for that. That's our website. Go to the contact form, fill it out. And I run all the sales calls at our company. We have a team of trainers right now, but you'll get to meet with me. So if you're like, how do I do some of the things that Jason talked about today and create that strategy and really give the reps what they deserve to do this properly, just go to outboundsquad.com and hit the contact page and reach out. We'd love to talk to you. Awesome. Absolutely fantastic. I'm smiling. I'm also thinking about our mutual client. And I don't know why I didn't think about this sooner. Jason and I actually share a client that came to us completely independently. And I'll just take 30 seconds to tell the story. It warmed my heart because it was funny. I'm talking to a chief revenue officer that I know because I did some significant work for her in a different organization. And she went to this new SaaS company for her. And I was brought in to do a little bit of sales management effectiveness work, kind of sales management simplified slash the first time manager sales and just get the managers doing some basic stuff in terms of accountability and coaching and talent management. And in the middle of the conversation, they shared how they were creating more of an outbound sales motion. and trying to convert this reactive, lead responsive sales team to be more proactive and outbound. And before she said another thing to me, I said, you need to talk to Jason Bay. And then there were like four or five people in this discovery meeting with me where I was talking about sales management. And they all smiled. And I said, why is everybody smiling at me? And they said, because we've already engaged him. And it has been really fun, Jason, hearing the feedback from that client. And I mean, I've kept in touch over the last year since I've done my sales manager work about the impact that the training that you made there and what's going on and the rep. And funny, even earlier today when we're talking about SDRs with no experience, I actually placed a friend of mine at that company because I was so excited about what they were doing and knowing that they were engaging you for training that the person would get equipped to do their job on this. Yeah. This is not a rookie. This is a person who's 33. Now I think he's 34 years old now. And he is kicking ass two quarters in a row. Let's go. He is their outbound rep of the quarter. doing the stuff that you teach. So lots of success. Yeah, lots of success and it's fun. So I would just share that I would point people to, what's the masterclass again? Where are they going to find it? OutboundSquad.com slash masterclass. I'm headed there right now. Jason, thanks for joining us. Cool. Thanks for having me, dude. This is fun. Oh my gosh. We wish everybody more new sales. Go get them. you