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

When I got into inside sales, it was like twenty eleven, twenty twelve.

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 sixty million dollar company.

I was gonna go leave and do something else, and they're 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, [laughs] like, 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-

Yeah

... management and like all of this other kind of stuff.

And literally, the way that we, our 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 wanna hear the hum.

That's the big thing.

The hum.

It's this nice, steady hum of people talking.

And we would hear that, manually dialing.

And we fast-forward now to twenty twenty-six.

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 three percent.

The average reply rate to an email is less than one percent.

When I got into inside sales, it was like twenty eleven, twenty twelve.

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 sixty million dollar company.

I was gonna go leave and do something else, and they're 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, [laughs] like, 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-

Yeah

... management and like all of this other kind of stuff.

And literally, the way that we, our 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 wanna hear the hum.

That's the big thing.

The hum.

It's this nice, steady hum of people talking.

And we would hear that, manually dialing.

And we fast-forward now to twenty twenty-six.

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 three percent.

The average reply rate to an email is less than one percent.