The bottleneck in outbound moved. It is no longer how many touches you can send, it is knowing who to call, why, and what to say when they pick up.James Buckley sat down with Shara Davoodi, Director of Sales at Nooks, on what actually changed. A poll during the show put sixty-one percent of the audience on the volume play and not getting replies.Habits worth droppingShara went after three. Over-personalization, because value beats trivia and an assumption gives the prospect something to correct, which earns you credit when you get it right. Spray-and-pray dialing and mass email, both finished. And local dialing, matching your number to the prospect's area code, which he says stopped working because buyers recognize the trick. James has had people answer thinking he was their kid's school.The fourth is the introduction nobody asked for. Beyond what the law requires, get to why you are calling. Shara calls the rest wasted space, and James says the same of email: your name is in the signature, and if they want it they will ask.Assume you have the right personShara's tip for new callers. Do not confirm, assume. If you are wrong they will correct you, and assuming lets you get straight to the reason for the call.The one-two-three, inside five minutesCall, then email, then LinkedIn, in the same short window. James has run this as his first touch for fifteen years and does not care which channel replies.Shara's addition is the most actionable thing here: go look at step one of your sequence. Calls are usually buried at step three or four, so reps do all the other work first, when a connect would have made most of it unnecessary.He also reframes success. A booked meeting is the goal, but learning one thing is gold: who they are with, when they renew, a feature they dislike.Multi-thread with your own leadership, not just theirsAt Nooks, managers email managers, and the CEO, CRO, and VP reach into deals where a rep has not made contact. James's read: leaders talk to leaders as peers, which is a different conversation than a rep can have.Their internal mutual action plan includes an org chart the rep fills in, showing how far up the account they have reached and whether the prospect's own leadership knows the deal is happening.Talk to the room you are inFrontline people care about features and their day. Managers care about outcomes. Executives care about numbers. Not in the same conversation. James's version, credited to John Barrows: talk about features and you get routed to people who deal with features, talk about business impact and you get pushed upwards.Two signals that are already staleFunding announcements are late. By the time it is public the money has been in the bank for weeks. Shara skips the congratulations and goes at what it implies: the targets just went up.Promotions are worse. Nobody updates their title the day they are promoted, because every vendor in their category descends the moment they do. Assume they got the job six months ago, which makes congratulations on the new role both stale and obviously automated.What Nooks uses instead is first-party: job postings, which name the tech a team runs and the call volume they expect.Resources Shared:How a Rep Generated $3million in PipelineHow to Master Prospecting as an AEThe Speakers:James Buckley, Host, Sell BetterShara Davoodi, Director of Sales, NooksCatch The Daily Sales Show liveFollow Sell BetterExplore our YouTube ChannelWatch the replayThank you to our sponsor: Nooks

Outbound rarely fails because reps are lazy. It fails because nobody told them who to target, what to say, or how often to say it.Will Aitken ran this one solo, walking through the outbound system he builds for teams. Almost every broken outbound motion fails at one of three points: weak messaging, targeting that is far too broad, and execution with no system behind it.Your buyer never asked what you doNinety-five percent of the market is not buying right now, so leading with your product lands on nobody. Will's fix is to work out the buyer's status quo first. Competitor, doing it themselves, spreadsheet, or outsourced? Each breaks differently, and those breakages are what you reach out about.His shortcut for any role: every function exists to make the company money or protect the company's money. Work out which, then how that person is measured.The problem identification chartWill's core tool, borrowed from Gap Selling, which he notes he can use since he wrote the sequel. Three columns: the business problem, its impact, the root cause.You fill it in by asking what goes wrong next, repeatedly. His worked example ran from nobody trained to handle a mental health incident, through someone getting hurt, litigation, a PR problem, employees leaving, being unable to hire, to lost revenue. That last link is what a buyer actually cares about.Three kinds of signal, and they are not the same thingCatalysts are events that create the problem. Layoffs mean the remaining team cannot maintain policies across twenty systems. An acquisition means two IT environments getting blended into more chaos.Symptoms are observable directly. A job posting mentioning policy updates across networks tells you they have a capacity problem today.Intent is someone showing interest, in you or a competitor. Downloads, profile views, an old deal cycle, site visits.Start with the people who already half know youWill ranks prospects by familiarity, not fit alone: past users who changed companies, old deal cycles, webinar attendees, anyone connected to your executives or customers. The version that scales is building your list from lookalikes of existing customers. Reach out to Coca-Cola on the back of your PepsiCo work and they do not know you, but they know PepsiCo.He caps research at five minutes for mid-market, and is blunt about personalisation theatre. You cannot connect someone's interest in hiking to a cybersecurity audit. One good business reason beats a full account brief.Know your math before you change anythingHis example chain: two hundred calls, twenty connects, ten conversations lasting over thirty seconds, three meetings booked, two that showed up qualified.Each gap points somewhere different. Few connects means contact data, call timing, or spam flagging. Connecting but not converting means your opener is not creating curiosity. Conversations that do not become meetings means the problems you raise are not the ones they have.Resources mentionedGAP ProspectingProblem Identification Chart TemplateThe Speakers:Will Aitken, Host, Sell BetterCatch The Daily Sales Show liveFollow Sell BetterExplore our YouTube ChannelWatch the replayThank you to our sponsor: Outbound Sales Pro, First Orion, Replay, ZoomInfo

Prompt engineering was supposed to be the essential new skill. It was not. Where prompts still matter is work you repeat and need right every time.Jed Mahrle sat down with Kyle Vamvouris, founder and CEO of SalesThread, for part five of the AI Foundations series. Kyle's read on why the hype cooled: the models got very good, and the harness built around them got good enough to absorb sloppy prompting.So when is a real prompt worth writing?Only for repeatable work. Kyle's test is to ask what task needs the output right every single time. For one-offs, a sentence or two is fine. He also notes a prompt and a skill are close to the same thing, a skill usually having a prompt at its base.Stop telling it not to hallucinateKyle's most useful reframe. The entire output is a hallucination. There is no mechanical difference between a hallucination and a correct answer, because the model has no concept of either, so "do not hallucinate" does nothing.His model for why prompt quality still matters: every possible output already exists in the training data, and your prompt selects a region of that space. A vague prompt gets you roughly eighty percent of what you wanted. A refined prompt makes your ideal output one of the candidates the model can pick.The three parts of a strong promptObjective. Give step-by-step instructions, and Kyle's bar is whether a junior colleague could follow them and do a decent job. Focus on the sequence of actions required, and be specific.Data. Only give it the context it actually needs. Kyle is blunt that more context being better is backwards, which is why the field moved to context engineering. Specify the output structure or you get thirty pages. And include examples of the input, not just the ideal output, so it can pattern match.Design. He cites the Lost in the Middle research on models prioritising the top and bottom of the context window while instructions in the middle get missed. So put the important things first and last. His structure: objective, rules, steps, examples, output format.Prompts should be written by leaders and handed to the teamKyle's strongest opinion. Companies should own the prompts and workflows their teams run on rather than leaving every rep to invent their own.The workflow behind a 3.2 million view videoKyle's Instagram case study, and the clearest self-learning loop anyone has shown on this show. Performance data lands in a spreadsheet from the Meta API, no AI involved. One agent analyses it the way he used to by hand. A content strategy agent reads both and Slack messages him each morning with what to film, what to re-record, and what held a video back. A third agent pulls best practices from high performers into a document that feeds back into the strategy agent's context.His floor moved from a few hundred views to six thousand, then fifty-eight thousand, then one at 3.2 million.The caveat matters as much as the workflow. He keeps a human on the best-practices step, because AI judges best practices badly and bad ones poison the loop.Resources mentionedThe Sell Better AI Prompt LibraryFree ZoomInfo MCP Access for ChatGPTThe Speakers:Jed Mahrle, Host, Sell BetterKyle Vamvouris, Founder, SalesThreadCatch The Daily Sales Show liveFollow Sell BetterExplore our YouTube ChannelWatch the replayThank you to our sponsor: ZoomInfo

Ninety percent of people never answer a number they do not recognize. The problem is not your pitch, it is that nobody knows who is calling.James Buckley sat down with Sara Uy, founder of SellingSara, and Chris Stalnaker of First Orion, on what happens in the two seconds before someone decides not to pick up. Chris's framing: a random ten digit number is about as good as showing up as spam.Two openers Sara uses every dayThe first: hey James, you are totally gonna hate me, this is a cold call. If you give me 27 seconds and what I say is not valuable, I will never call you back again. Her defence is that people who hate it have not tried it, and that it only works if your tone is confident.The second: hey Chris, it is Sara over at SellingSara, what did I catch you in the middle of? Most people answer before they think, then ask how they know her, which is the opening. Even a hang-up is a win if you learned they were walking the dog, because that is your reference next time.Her deadline for both is five to seven seconds to sound like a person, not a bot.The voicemail argumentChris does not leave them, because nobody listens. Sara leaves them because nobody listens and everybody reads the transcription. She reads every one she gets.Hers is built for that: there is absolutely no need to call me back, but I am sending you a LinkedIn video right now so you can reply there. The voicemail is not a request, it is her name in front of them plus a reason to look elsewhere.James stopped leaving his phone number years ago, credits John Barrows for it, and instead names the email he is about to send, sometimes with the subject line, so the reply comes back by email.Nine before nine, five after fiveSara's timing rule. Call your nine hottest leads before 9am and your five hottest after 5pm, and yes, call the same person twice in a day. Her record on the morning block is seven pickups, set at Pareto. Nobody is at their desk yet and nothing has gone wrong yet. She has caught people in the coffee queue and sent a gift card after. Chris runs Tuesdays and Thursdays and avoids evenings.More is the answer, but only up to a pointSara's read: at ten to twenty dials a day, your manager is right. At ninety, pick the twenty you most want and hyper-personalise those, and let the other seventy carry the volume. Chris signed the largest contract of his career on roughly his 270th dial of the day.What to do about AI call screeningSara: get your name and company out in the first few words, because that is all the screen shows. Chris's counterintuitive one: if you have branded calling, say nothing at all, because screening needs something to transcribe and silence lets the branded display take precedence.More answers does not mean more salesChris's own caveat on his category, and the most interesting thing he said. Answer rates can fall while conversation length, engagement, and conversion all rise, because identifying yourself properly means the people who actually want to talk are the ones picking up.The Speakers:James Buckley, Host, Sell BetterSara Uy, Founder, Selling SaraChris Stalnaker, Senior Sales Executive, First OrionCatch The Daily Sales Show liveFollow Sell BetterExplore our YouTube ChannelWatch the replayThank you to our sponsor: First Orion

One discovery call for six stakeholders is why deals stall. The CFO wants ROI, the end user wants ease of use, and somebody leaves feeling unheard.James Buckley sat down with Mor Assouline, founder of Demo to Close, and Richard Smith, head of growth at MySalesCoach. Richard is working a five thousand pound deal with six people involved, whose combined time already costs more than the deal is worth. That is the shape of buying now, and not only in enterprise.Multithreading starts before the first call, not afterRichard's argument is that sellers are too passive, waiting for the prospect to volunteer names. Instead, look at your recent deals, work out which roles get pulled in, and name those roles in your first meeting. Prospects often do not know who they should involve. Mor works the pattern side: if VP of Sales deals reliably loop in a CRO and a head of enablement, find those people on LinkedIn beforehand.The stakeholder you ignore is the one who stalls the dealRichard had a deal with the VP of Sales, the CEO, and two sales managers all bought in on quota attainment and pipeline. They added their HR lead to a call and he assumed senior buy-in was enough. Momentum died. His champion later told him she felt unheard: she cared about staff retention and career development, not revenue. The budget was also hers. He got back on a call, admitted he had got it wrong, and saved it.The VAC frameworkMor's model for whether a deal will close. Visibility, do you know who the stakeholders are and when they enter. Awareness, do they know about the problem, the initiative, and the conversation. Consensus, do they agree it is a problem, worth solving, worth solving now, and a priority against everything else. His question for testing that last part: this is probably not the only thing on your plate, so what else could delay it?Ask for one-on-ones before the group callRichard's least intuitive advice, and he says it works about seventy percent of the time. When a champion offers to put five people on a call, slow down and ask to speak with each of them first, framed as protecting their colleagues from a call where they feel unheard. Then build a slide naming what each person cares about.The blind spot most sellers never sell againstMor calls it the FUD matrix. Most sellers only sell against the problem list and never address fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He builds one per buying scenario, because someone moving off twenty years of spreadsheets worries about migrating the data, while someone switching vendors worries about feature parity and price. Richard's version: what stops deals is rarely a preference for the status quo, it is the fear of being the person who picked wrong.Resources mentionedMor's 4D Discovery Course80 discovery questionsThe Speakers:James Buckley, Host, Sell BetterMor Assouline, Founder, Demo to CloseRichard Smith, Head of Growth, MySalesCoachCatch The Daily Sales Show liveFollow Sell BetterExplore our YouTube ChannelWatch the replayThank you to our sponsor: 1up.AI, Aligned, First Orion

Building an SDR process is the easy part. Getting reps to follow it after onboarding ends and the manager stops watching is where most programs fall apart.Will Aitken sat down with David Wilkins, founder of SDR Leaders Global, and Ahmed Abdel-Raouf, head of sales development at Quantcast, to work through the outbound side specifically. Most teams have a methodology for discovery and demos. Almost nobody has documented what happens before a prospect enters the funnel.Map the process before you buy another toolDavid asks the same question at SDR Leaders meetups worldwide: has anyone mapped lead to closed revenue end to end? Very few hands go up. Meanwhile teams keep bolting tech onto processes that were never mapped. Map it first and you may need fewer tools, not more.Where to start when there is no process at allAhmed built the Quantcast function from nothing 18 months ago. His first 30 days were observation: shadowing AE calls, auditing which tools actually had adoption, logging the objections that kept recurring. Then ICP clarity, messaging architecture, operational infrastructure with ops, the playbook, and measurement. In that order.How prescriptive a playbook should beAhmed's runs about 70 slides and is deliberately mixed. Prescriptive where it helps, with a worked email broken into personalization, value, and CTA. It also teaches reps where to find personalization worth using: what someone follows or engages with, not tenure or a new role, which he says have been done to death since COVID. David's caveat is that playbooks go stale. Treat it as a living document with real versions.Give reps the lane, not the scriptDavid's framing is bowling bumpers. Reps get the lane, leaders are the rails. He pointed to a team running an "F-up page" where reps document what went wrong so everyone can learn from it. Ahmed's split is 20 percent learning, 80 percent falling on your face. His first cohort worked a conference booth on day three.Coach the behavior, not the outcomeNinety minutes every Thursday, with the content set by the numbers instead of a curriculum. Reply rate dips and it becomes a messaging workshop. Talk time drops and it becomes an objection gauntlet. Ahmed watches talk time over connect rate and reply rate over open rate, because high open with low reply means the subject lines work and the message does not. He enforces a call minimum for a statistical reason: ten calls and ten connects is an outlier, not a 100 percent connect rate.He also makes the case for reading what a dashboard cannot show. A top performer's numbers slid for weeks and formal check-ins got nowhere, so he took her for a walk instead. Her grandmother had been in hospital for a month. He gave her the rest of the week off and she finished the quarter around 110 percent.On hiringAhmed screens for curiosity over experience and treats three years as an SDR as a flag worth asking about. His best hires have come out of retail and hospitality. His current top performer came from the Apple Store with no sales background and moves into an AE seat in July. David's rule from his Snowflake days: if there's doubt, there's no doubt.Resources mentionedGong's cheat sheet on 5 reasons deals slipSDR Leaders Global, communities across EMEA, North America, and APACThe Speakers:Will Aitken, Host, Sell BetterDavid Wilkins, Founder, SDR Leaders GlobalAhmed Abdel-Raouf, Head of Sales Development, QuantcastCatch The Daily Sales Show liveFollow Sell BetterExplore our YouTube ChannelWatch the replayThank you to our sponsor: Gong

Sequences fail when every touch feels like a copy-paste template with no connecting thread.Buyers don't respond to volume, they respond to relevance and a message that feels like it was written for them.This session teaches a repeatable system for building cadences that match how buyers actually decide today. AI handles the research, variation, and follow-up drafts, you stay in control of the narrative.You'll walk through the cadence blueprint live, from touch count and channel roles to the frameworks that keep each step distinct. Every touch gets a job: add new value, new proof, or a new angle.You'll Learn:A cadence blueprint built for today's buyer, including touch count and channel role3 to 5 email frameworks you can plug into any sequence and use AI to generate variationsHow to keep follow-ups from sounding automated and what to do when prospects go quietThe Speakers:Jed Mahrle and Megan HustonIf you want to catch The Daily Sales Show live, join hereFollow Sell Better to get the latest actionable tactics from sales pros at the top of their gameExplore our YouTube ChannelThank you to our sponsors: ZoomInfo

Reps don't get stuck at the gatekeeper because of what they say, they get stuck because of how they sound. In the first five seconds, gatekeepers run an automatic screen, and most sales openers trigger it immediately.Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson built an outsourced sales agency on a phone-first, psychology-led approach, and their whole method is designed to make reps sound nothing like a typical cold caller. They treat the gatekeeper not as an obstacle, but as a puzzle to solve.In this session, they broke down the exact language, tone shifts, and pattern interrupts that flip the gatekeeper dynamic, including what to say when you're asked "what's this about?" and how to turn a "they're not available" into useful org intel.Learn how to navigate past the gatekeeper into the wrong person, and how to use calls, email, and LinkedIn together to eventually reach the right DM.You'll Learn:The psychology behind gatekeeper screening and why standard openers get reps shut down immediatelyPattern interrupt scripts and tone tactics that create space for a real conversationHow to map the org through the gatekeeper call and navigate to the actual decision-makerThe Speakers:Sara Uy, Jack Frimston and Zac ThompsonIf you want to catch The Daily Sales Show live, join hereFollow Sell Better to get the latest actionable tactics from sales pros at the top of their gameExplore our YouTube ChannelThank you to our sponsors: First Orion, Gong, Aligned and Prospeo

A stalled deal isn't a dead deal. But it does require a different kind of selling to get it moving again.Yael Morris (buyer psychology expert, Founder of Decode Insights) and Tania Doub (20+ years in enterprise SaaS, CEO of Mindful Quadrant) bring two lenses to the same problem: what reps think is happening in a stalled deal, and what's actually going on with the buyer.Together, they broke down how to diagnose the real reason a deal went quiet, re-engage without being ignored, and prevent the next stall before it starts.Walk away with a clear playbook for turning silent deals into active ones.You'll Learn:How to tell the difference between a paused deal and a dead one, and what to do with eachA re-engagement approach that leads with value so you restart momentumThe discovery habits that keep deals from stalling in the first placeThe Speakers:James Buckley, Tania Arakelian Doub and Yael MorrisIf you want to catch The Daily Sales Show live, join hereFollow Sell Better to get the latest actionable tactics from sales pros at the top of their gameExplore our YouTube ChannelThank you to our sponsors: Quotivity, Replay, Aligned and Prospeo

C-suite executives don't ignore cold emails because of bad timing. They ignore them because the email was never written for them in the first place.Pranam Lipinski and Junior Lartey broke how executives actually read cold outreach and what separates emails that get deleted from ones that get forwarded internally.Learn how to structure a C-suite email from subject line to CTA, and how to follow up in a way that adds value instead of just checking in.This session is about writing emails that sound like they came from someone who understands the business, not someone trying to sell into it.You'll Learn:The mindset shift executives need to see in your email before they read past the first lineA structural framework for C-suite cold emails, from subject line through CTAA follow-up strategy that keeps doors open instead of burning themThe Speakers:Will Aitken, Junior Lartey and Pranam LipinskiIf you want to catch The Daily Sales Show live, join hereFollow Sell Better to get the latest actionable tactics from sales pros at the top of their gameExplore our YouTube ChannelThank you to our sponsors: ZoomInfo, HighLevel, Parakeet