To this day, the best cold call I ever received is, I picked up the phone and a young man said, ‘Hey, coach, how’s your season going?’ And I said, ‘I don’t know who you are or what you’re trying to sell me, but you just earned yourself a conversation.

There was even one point when Olivier, the CEO said, ‘Hey, I don’t want you to do cold calling. Engineers don’t like to be cold called.’ And I said, ‘Olivier, nobody likes to be cold called. I don’t like to be cold called. But we got to do it in a way that’s professional and differentiating in a way that we show up with our lunch packed.’ Meaning we’ve done research on the person, we’ve done research on the company. We are pithy, concise and compelling in our messaging.

I think when I started in sales, if we were to tell our leaders that we were going to spend more time in preparation than actual selling, it wouldn’t have been accepted because our responsibility was quantity, not quality. It was how many cold calls could we make in a day? We were dialing for dollars back to back and we couldn’t even leave the office until we made a hundred dials, right? That was definitely not about precision, that was about mass connect. So I think our top performers are spending more time on that preparation and they’re thoughtful about the interaction that they’re creating and they’re really working to build trusted scale by multithreading into that account and making sure they have as much information as possible about that buyer before the first reach out.

It’s not just cold calling and emailing, but you’re finding creative ways to connect with the people that you’re speaking with and really helping them understand what the value is that your company has, plus figuring out is it even a good fit, a good solution for them that could help them and their team. So a part of that is a lot of outbounding, and with all the outbounding, it really gives you an opportunity to dive into building out your metrics, to figure out what’s working, what’s not working.