Jason Lemkin on 20VC says Resend's MCP calls grew from 106,000 in April to 3 million in September as agents recommended it over SendGrid.
Jason Lemkin said his first agent-driven purchase was Resend for email. Agents kept recommending SendGrid, but he couldn't get it working: free access had been deprecated, he couldn't figure out the key and it kept breaking. When he asked his agent what to use, it said Resend. He cited the MCP call growth as evidence of agents choosing products.
“Resend April, 106 ,000 MCP calls to September, 3 million. That's agents saying to use products.”
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Rick says the budget movement is from Google paid ads toward showing up in LLMs, sometimes called AEO or GEO. He says everyone is experimenting because no one knows the answer for certain. He says ShipHero no longer does paid search at all, and that the company is spending on experimentation in this area.
“We don't even do paid search anymore at all.”
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Alexander gives the example of an IT director with a project from a CIO or CTO who asks an AI tool for solutions. He says the AI researches reviews and feedback across platforms and returns a shortlist, which he describes as about five vendors.
“AI goes and does the research and says, okay, here's your shortlist. Here's the list of five vendors that you should consider for your organization, given your industry, given your size, given your goals”
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Adrian said these prospects are much further down the funnel; Kyle suggested this is because they have probably had an extended conversation with the LLM first. Adrian noted that users increasingly get answers inside the LLM and then type the URL directly rather than clicking through.
“we see typically when someone does get referred, it's about a 6x improvement in conversion.”
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Craig Rosenberg on Topline built Topo's outbound around invitations to curated events walking through prospects' data, saying many companies kill outbound by asking for 30 minutes.
He suggests hosting a dinner in the decision-maker's home city, with Austin as the example, inviting about seven peers to dinner with that chain's leader, and repeating it in major cities. He says this could get to tens of millions of dollars, and that the company would talk about the future of AI in restaurants rather than its own product.
“My guess would be um in-city dinners where you pick”
Rutten says the podcast reinvented, which he describes as fast-growing in 2025, was used to build a forum for bankers to talk about transformation. Guests are now limited to C-suite or operators with the authority to transform the bank. He says a request to the chief AI officer of Westpac was answered immediately, and says the approach is far cheaper than a classic ABM campaign run for months.
“it's seuite only. You need to be the operator, you need to have the number or you need to have the you know actual heat to transform the bank.”
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Craig says Topo's outbound was built around inviting prospects to curated events where the company would walk through their data, rather than asking for a meeting. He says many companies kill their outbound by asking for 30 minutes to show what they can do. He says this is how he thinks many companies should run outbound today.
“The other thing you can learn from our outbound back then was only tour events we didn't try to get a meeting”
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Craig says Topo did not use content syndication or paid search. It ran highly curated events and offered free advisory, and it understood its data well enough to know that prospects who had that experience converted at about 45-50%. Topo then pointed its efforts there and ramped up live events.
“we knew that the odds once those folks touched and have that experience was like a 45 50% conversion that we pointed everything to that”
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Chris Vik said reps struggled on first calls with the response who the hell are you, and that education on open-ended questions did not fix it. The team instead opened with a hypothesis about multi-site, multi-country implementations, drawing on a strategic project Microsoft had told them about, then asked the rep to stop talking. He said they showed some of their work and offered an advisory piece for free in the initial phases, and that this booked many more meetings.
“we start to book much more meetings”
Instead of asking to show a new product, Kerrest suggests offering, for example, an update on the latest in AI and cybersecurity in Silicon Valley, mentioning the product addresses some of those issues, and asking for 20 minutes that start with the trends briefing. He says this two-way framing gets more and better responses.
“Turns out that if you're willing to do something back the other way, making it a two -way street, you'll get a lot more and better response.”
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Kyle Norton on Topline says about 80% of early AI effort should go to pipeline, turning top reps' close signals into digital-footprint criteria AI detects across the market.
Ann says this is the consultative pitch she makes to heads of sales and CROs about Crunchbase's data, and that the edge comes from proprietary data rather than leaving reps to interpret AI output on their own. She presents these figures as the outcome the approach delivers. The company and stage behind the figures are not specified.
“drives pipeline growth 2x in six months and drives top line revenue growth 25 % in that same six months”
Christopher describes using the full customer history to find which customers closed fastest, what they said they came looking for, when the solution clicked for them, what words the seller used and how the prospect reacted. The AI then finds lookalikes. Outreach draws on real customer language and feelings rather than 'a bunch of us sitting in a room coming up with marketing slogans.'
“Okay, so imagine taking the entire history of everything and just extracting from that history just those bits. Who are these people? What are the patterns? And then being able to say, get me 100 more of these.”
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Rick says he can build lead lists, identify ideal customer profiles and find contacts more quickly with these tools, which he calls a cheat code for this part of the work. He says ABM has not gone away but should be more effective because it can layer in intent and signal data. He expects better outbound and event attendance because the team is reaching the right people.
“I can build lead lists better, faster, deeper than ever before.”
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Kyle Norton says most CROs and founders, outside the fastest-growing companies, say their problem is pipeline, and that AI is a good pipeline tool. He gives examples of picking the right accounts, timing outreach, and generating compelling artifacts. His team also built an AI website grader as a lead magnet.
“80% of your AI efforts in your early innings should be pipeline focused.”
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Kyle Norton says he gives this prompt to teams building AI infrastructure: ask the best reps when they know a demo will be a close. He gives an example where a rep watches for three specific website or LinkedIn signals, or for a particular open role. Those signals are then turned into digital-footprint criteria that AI can detect across the market.
“go sit with your very best reps and ask them, when you sit down for a demo, when do you know you're like, I'm gonna close this one?”
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Asked whether AI has changed targeting, Andy Shorkey says Writer layers its own applications and workflows on top of the AI built into its existing go-to-market stack to find warm signals. He gives the team high marks for prioritizing ICP accounts with activity on the website and for tying into LinkedIn to find personas in the roles that typically gravitate toward Writer.
“going after ICP where there's activity where there's signal around website.”
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Gaurav Agarwal on Topline says two ClickUp marketers built a four-agent workflow delivering 70 to 100 campaigns a week versus five to 10 for a human.
Grosser said the BDR function is 'way, way leaner' than at Stripe because agents handle inbound qualification and much outbound. The remaining BDRs either do more complex prospecting into enterprise or are used for hypothesis testing, for example on a new persona or new messaging.
“All the inbound qualification is done with an agent.”
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Tim Rutten, CMO of Backbase, said the team built GTMOS over about a year as a Vercel application connected to Salesforce and finance tools, and that sales and marketing roles all work through it. He said the system dictates how work is done, so account executives, business development reps and ABM managers run the same way. He presented the pipeline doubling as the result of running the business on this system.
“double the pipeline, 25% head cut on my budget still. So with 25% less budgets, I'm actually still doubling the pipeline.”
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Gaurav described separate agents for analysing data, writing emails, creating audiences and sending through Outreach, with the whole chain built by two people. He said a human would typically produce five to 10 campaigns a week. He said ClickUp is now looking at how to add email capacity through tools like Smartlead and Outreach.
“this entire workflow is what delivers about 70 to 100 campaigns a week. Typically, a human would have done about five to 10 campaigns a week.”
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She said they use their own product wherever possible, partly to keep costs down and show that it works. She gave this as a figure from their own operation, with no breakdown of how it was measured.
“like 80 some percent of our pipeline is sourced by Mindy, our superhuman.”
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Kahlow said the superhuman acts as 1mind's top-of-funnel outbound, has held long conversations with CROs and CMOs of public companies, and has taken many deals close to the finish line on its own. She gave one example: the CRO at Ultrix had a 90-minute first call with the superhuman, was then handed to the CMO, and Kahlow said she said about five words on her later call with him.
“Mindy, our superhuman, has sourced 78% of our opportunities that have turned into closed won.”
Ranked by how many independent voices make each point and how specific their evidence is. Co-hosts of a show count as one voice, and a point needs at least two shows to appear here.
What one named guest described doing or seeing. Each is a single account, not a point several operators agree on.
“in past company, I've created an account list that shows our biggest logos. I may do this by Fortune 50 that work with us.”
“we've seen, like, ten x, the amount of traffic to multiple brands websites and their content? Because they actually distributed.”
“So pricing is not a problem if you're just taking down the logos at a fixed price.”
“we actually doubled our pipeline created over emails.”
“that one to one outreach from the CEO like drove the most registrations by a long shot”
Dan said many companies have no programmatic process to operationalize their ICP, which is why it fails demand gen and sales. He said the starting step is creating the definitions and tagging accounts in the CRM, after which you can measure your ability to build quality pipeline and close deals with accounts more likely to renew and expand.
“And it starts with us creating these definitions and then tagging our accounts within the CRM with these labels.”
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Dan says he sees something like 70% of open pipelines outside the ICP, which he links to sellers under pressure to hit their number. He says marketing often lacks the tools to create high-quality pipeline. He wants marketing to produce high-quality ICP pipeline and sellers to focus on accounts that can generate three or four times LTV.
“given the fact that we see something like 70% of open pipelines outside of ICP”
Chuck says the client pitched whoever reached out, with a hit rate of about 5% on the proposals it made. He worked with it to define which customers were poor fits and which needed the product and would pay, then had students at Notre Dame build a precise prospect list, and three years later the sales team's hit rate was 41%.
“They had about a 5% hit rate on their, on the one they tried to pitch.”
Craig says Topo's outbound was built around inviting prospects to curated events where the company would walk through their data, rather than asking for a meeting. He says many companies kill their outbound by asking for 30 minutes to show what they can do. He says this is how he thinks many companies should run outbound today.
“The other thing you can learn from our outbound back then was only tour events we didn't try to get a meeting”
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Craig says Topo did not use content syndication or paid search. It ran highly curated events and offered free advisory, and it understood its data well enough to know that prospects who had that experience converted at about 45-50%. Topo then pointed its efforts there and ramped up live events.
“we knew that the odds once those folks touched and have that experience was like a 45 50% conversion that we pointed everything to that”
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Instead of asking to show a new product, Kerrest suggests offering, for example, an update on the latest in AI and cybersecurity in Silicon Valley, mentioning the product addresses some of those issues, and asking for 20 minutes that start with the trends briefing. He says this two-way framing gets more and better responses.
“Turns out that if you're willing to do something back the other way, making it a two -way street, you'll get a lot more and better response.”
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Chris Vik said reps struggled on first calls with the response who the hell are you, and that education on open-ended questions did not fix it. The team instead opened with a hypothesis about multi-site, multi-country implementations, drawing on a strategic project Microsoft had told them about, then asked the rep to stop talking. He said they showed some of their work and offered an advisory piece for free in the initial phases, and that this booked many more meetings.
“we start to book much more meetings”
Sam McKenna's example: a teammate closes Jones Day, then Jones Day's CFO joins another law firm in her territory; she wants to know because that CFO has probably had a good experience with the product. She sets past company to an account list of her biggest customer logos (for example Fortune 50 customers, or verticals such as law firms or pharma when people tend to move within an industry), current company to her territory, and narrows by seniority and geography to control volume. She says speed matters so you reach them before competitors, and suggests a 'show me you know me' subject line.
“in past company, I've created an account list that shows our biggest logos. I may do this by Fortune 50 that work with us.”
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Sam McKenna describes a variant of the job-hopper list for people who wanted to purchase but couldn't make it happen, for example because the wider buying team went another way. They still know you and want to work with you, so you want to know if they move into your territory. She notes that a manager can track this across their direct reports' deals and help AEs prospect directly.
“you want to think about the people who wanted to purchase from you and couldn't make it happen.”
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Sam McKenna's search is current company = her company, executive seniority, and past company excluding her company, so she sees net-new hires rather than internal promotions or divisional changes. You cannot see someone's connections until you are first-degree connected, so the first step is connecting with the new executive. Once they accept, she compares their network against her territory, saying it helps her build relationships with senior executives and reach people who would not otherwise give her time. She says almost nobody thinks to do this.
“The thing is, you need to be first degree connected with somebody to be able to see their connections first.”
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Sam McKenna sets the current company filter to all of her territory accounts and selects first-degree connections, which gives a list of everyone she knows inside her territory. She says the list is useful, but the real value is saving the search so she is alerted to new matches. The example given: a former AE colleague becomes a CSM at a target company, and you ask them to help you break into that organization.
“for current company is I've listed all of my accounts and I've selected first degree connections. This gives me a list of any first degree connection I have that's within my territory.”
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Sam McKenna's filters: past company includes her company, current company excludes it (which also filters out internal promotions), current company is her territory, and seniority is VP/CXO. She keeps seniority high so she isn't flooded with alerts for every departure (she jokes about being notified of 1,600 people a day). Her reasoning is that departed executives often still want to support their former employer, which makes them a good route in.
“You'll also see I've kept the seniority level high VP CXO so that don't don't get notified of 1600 people a day that leave.”
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Owner matches each prospect's zip code to the nearest existing customer and loads that into Salesforce, then injects an AI pre-call research window into Salesloft. The window supplies a local name drop and the pain point ranked as most broken in the prospect's current setup. Kyle said the result is probably 5x what BDRs did when they first started, when they were just pressing the button.
“So my BDRs make like 150 to 200 calls a day now, and they talk to 20 to 30 decision-makers. And that is uh like probably 5x what what it was when we first started”
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Adrian said the agent enriches data on the company, looks at market activity, applies Webflow positioning and provocative challenger-style ideas, and returns a script. He said the goal is to get people on the phone with more customers; Kyle noted it compresses the time reps need to get ready for a call.
“right when they say that in Slack, they get a message back that says great here's your call script.”
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E-connect is one of several machine learning scores at the top of Owner's funnel, alongside scores for estimated deal size and estimated win rate. Scores feed enrichment and AI pre-call research, which together tell the rep what to say on the call.
“We've got this thing called e-connect now, how what is our estimation of whether or not that person will actually pick up the phone call, which led to like a 2.3x uh lift in decision-maker connects.”
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Justworks had bought strong tools but adopted few of them; about 50% of Gong calls went unrecorded. An earlier parallel-dialer pilot fell flat partly because of overlapping features in tools bought but never properly stood up. She got a dialer into a POC within four days and migrated SDRs to a new engagement platform.
“And the first thing I did was inspect the tech stack and figure out what we can turn on for these guys quickly.”
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SDR was moved under Lauren Hughes about four and a half months before the episode. In the quarter starting in June, she reports 2x productivity on pipeline opportunities by logo count and 2x on pipeline ARR. The four fewer seats came from attrition of SDRs promoted to AE, not intentional cuts.
“we're running at 2x productivity of pipeline opportunities, logo count, 2x productivity of pipeline ARR, and I'm down 4 in seat just from attrition of people moving to AE roles”
This quote could not be matched to the transcript. Treat it as a paraphrase.
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The dialer drove a quick rise in qualified pipeline through volume, seen in a couple-week trial. Other changes were rolling SDR into Claude Enterprise, custom list-building training, and refreshing comp and job descriptions that hadn't changed in three years. She said the team mainly needed focus, someone who understood their daily friction, and a system built for them.
“I wish I could say some, like, big aha thing, but it was really just this team needed focus.”
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Alex Bilmes described a pattern of sales leaders with a pipeline problem who bought about ten vendors, each promising 3x pipeline, and then got 0x. A host noted these tools were pitched as replacing the SDR, and Alex said teams are now at different levels of maturity and leaders need to get more technical.
“And they didn't. You got 0x and you have 10 tools.”
Greg Casale says phone carriers watch dialing profiles, and a call-hang-up-call pattern from a number gets flagged. He says the answer is dialing software that rotates the originating numbers, and that matching the prospect's area code is not the point. He describes deliverability as a field to learn, with dials reaching the endpoint.
“You need software that rotates the numbers that it originates from.”
Greg Casale says his team has never left voicemails, except possibly where the rep has talked to the prospect before. He says younger people barely listen to voicemails or respond to texts, so voicemail is largely finished as a channel.
“We never leave voice messages”
Greg Casale describes the iOS 26 call screener, which asks the caller why they are calling and transcribes the answer live on the recipient's screen. His firm added a training module that calculates how many characters fit on the screen, and crafts and rehearses a sparse message for each go-to-market. He says people are now booking meetings off the call screener.
“you have to be sparse. I mean like no fluff, nothing.”
Greg Casale says that when a prospect picks up an outbound call, the rep is immediately in a live conversation, even if it goes nowhere, and learns something from it. He contrasts this with email, form fills and paid media, which he says leave a rep three, four or five steps away from a live conversation. He also said AI cannot make outbound B2B calls, so he expects this channel to be less exposed to the automation that has saturated email.
“Every other channel, if somebody responds to your email or they do a form fill or they click on your paid media, you're still probably three, four, five steps away from ever having a live conversation.”
Roberge says that when a company plans to add eight reps next year, it needs confidence it can feed them, so one channel must be proven first. At product-market fit, he says there is no time to build a cold calling program, so he uses professional networks.
“we need at least one scalable channel proven so that when we look at the plan to add eight reps next year, we have the confidence that we'll be able to feed them.”
He gives HubSpot's content marketing as an example, which worked when it sold marketing software to small businesses and VPs of marketing in 2008, and contrasts it with selling cybersecurity software to CIOs at public companies in 2025. He suggests a team brainstorm options, pick two to test with limited time and money, and measure cost per meeting and conversion to pipeline.
“HubSpot was selling marketing software to small business. VPs of marketing in 2008, you're selling cybersecurity software to public companies, CIOs in 2025. It's a different context, right?”
He describes a company where two productive reps' pipeline came from VC introductions, which would not support eight reps. He says demand generation often fails to keep pace with reps, so a team that supported five reps stays the same when the company grows to 20, and the gap is only found at a board review.
“the entire pipeline of those two reps came from VC introductions. And that doesn't scale to eight reps.”
Aviv says that after running campaigns for a while, marketing can say what a meeting costs, and that figure tells him exactly how much budget is needed. He gave $3,000 per meeting as a hypothetical example. He says this lets a CRO tell the CEO how much marketing budget, AEs and solution consultants a target requires.
“Let's say I'm saying like $3,000, you know, a meeting. So then I know exactly how much budget I need.”
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He asks how many net new meetings each salesperson set on a given Tuesday, then re-checks on Friday because much of the Tuesday outreach pays off on Wednesday through Friday, when prospects call back or are finally reached. He treats net new meetings set as one of the two leading indicators he watches for AEs during the quarter.
“on a given Tuesday, how many net new meetings did each salesperson set?”
He said some reps do three a week and some only one. He uses this weekly figure together with visible opportunities as the two leading indicators he watches for AEs.
“if salespeople are able to generate two net new meetings, that's pretty healthy.”
With demand gen budgets nearly flat, Wayland says every dollar of marketing pipeline costs money through SEO, events and so on. By contrast, pipeline an AE creates is 'in a sense, free' because those heads are already in the financial model. Box therefore changed its sales culture so that AEs see pipeline building as part of their job alongside closing and retaining. With about 300 sellers and about 80 CSMs, and a marketing team smaller than either, he says treating pipeline as marketing's job alone would leave Box 'in real trouble.'
“But every dollar of pipeline that an AE creates, in a sense, is free, because those heads are already built into your financial model. So we really had to, like, pivot the culture of the sales team to understand that you are demand creators.”
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Bove argues that a platform is sold across an organisation to many people, not one niche buyer, so reps should prospect to security operations, engineering and the CISO or CTO after each meeting. She says prospecting should happen every day, not only on a set day, and describes the habit as PG Monday and PG Tuesday.
“The second you leave that meeting, you should say, who else can I now prospect to within that company?”
She said the business would look fine for two quarters, but not enough pipeline had been created in Q4 before she arrived, or in Q1, to support the planned ramp. Showing the full-year trajectory early prevented two good quarters from masking a later 'cliff'. Because top-of-funnel was clearly the top issue, she hired the CMO first, within 90 days. By Q4 enough levers had changed that Vercel 'just barely' beat the number, which was kept rather than lowered.
“The first one I hired was the CMO, because it was immediately obvious. Our top issue is marketing, pipeline, top of funnel. Got him in within 90 days”
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Ian says hearing in a meeting that last month's opportunity creation fell short is too late, because he can't afford four weeks of under-generating. He wants alerts when pipeline trends down after 48 or 72 hours. He sees connected systems plus AI as giving him that insight without manually running reports.
“how about if it trends down after 48 hours or 72 hours or whatever. Can we get on there quicker?”
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Bob gave an example of a CEO who might shut down an SDR organization, telling four people they no longer have jobs, just as it was starting to return. He said leading indicators such as calls made, discovery meetings held, and conversion to SQLs and through the sales process show what is coming, and are often overlooked when success is judged only by bookings.
“But there's so much information in the leading indicator form that gets overlooked oftentimes.”
Fred says for every new customer you should know the primary reason they came and bought. If it was referral, he says to put that in the customer relationship system, identify who referred them, and use that root cause as the core of learning and improvement. He says this lets a company grow from its core rather than from marketing tricks.
“make sure you know every new customer, what was the primary reason they came and bought.”
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Freya says the first place to look is sales success data, including speaking to successful customers. She suggests asking how they originally found the company, why they keep coming back, what the company does that competitors don't, and whether the account manager or the price is the reason. She also suggests asking lapsed accounts the same questions, since knowing where you went wrong matters as much as knowing what works.
“I would look initially in that success data.”
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Fred says that across a wide range of businesses, on average about 20% of new customers come through referral, but those referred customers generate closer to 80% of profitable growth. He attributes this to referrals coming from true promoters who act in their friend's best interest. He says his upcoming HBR article makes this case.
“those 20% generate closer to 80% of the profitable growth”
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Adrian said the change came around last August and that each model change alters how sources are shown, which changes prospect behaviour. He said Webflow's referral drop showed up as people typing webflow.com after getting their answers, so referrals alone understate AI-driven discovery.
“we basically saw a pretty significant 30 40% drop in our own referrals, but it just showed up in a different place which was people typing webflow.com as an example.”
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Adrian said these prospects are much further down the funnel; Kyle suggested this is because they have probably had an extended conversation with the LLM first. Adrian noted that users increasingly get answers inside the LLM and then type the URL directly rather than clicking through.
“we see typically when someone does get referred, it's about a 6x improvement in conversion.”
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Rick says the budget movement is from Google paid ads toward showing up in LLMs, sometimes called AEO or GEO. He says everyone is experimenting because no one knows the answer for certain. He says ShipHero no longer does paid search at all, and that the company is spending on experimentation in this area.
“We don't even do paid search anymore at all.”
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said Jason Lemkin (The Twenty Minute VC), Rick Smolen (Topline), Alexander Kesler (Topline), Adrian Rosenkranz (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
Jason Lemkin said his first agent-driven purchase was Resend for email. Agents kept recommending SendGrid, but he couldn't get it working: free access had been deprecated, he couldn't figure out the key and it kept breaking. When he asked his agent what to use, it said Resend. He cited the MCP call growth as evidence of agents choosing products.
“Resend April, 106 ,000 MCP calls to September, 3 million. That's agents saying to use products.”
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Rick says the budget movement is from Google paid ads toward showing up in LLMs, sometimes called AEO or GEO. He says everyone is experimenting because no one knows the answer for certain. He says ShipHero no longer does paid search at all, and that the company is spending on experimentation in this area.
“We don't even do paid search anymore at all.”
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Alexander gives the example of an IT director with a project from a CIO or CTO who asks an AI tool for solutions. He says the AI researches reviews and feedback across platforms and returns a shortlist, which he describes as about five vendors.
“AI goes and does the research and says, okay, here's your shortlist. Here's the list of five vendors that you should consider for your organization, given your industry, given your size, given your goals”
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Adrian said these prospects are much further down the funnel; Kyle suggested this is because they have probably had an extended conversation with the LLM first. Adrian noted that users increasingly get answers inside the LLM and then type the URL directly rather than clicking through.
“we see typically when someone does get referred, it's about a 6x improvement in conversion.”
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said Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling), Tim Rutten (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Craig Rosenberg (Topline), Chris Vik (Revenue Builders), Frederic Kerrest (The Science of Scaling)
He suggests hosting a dinner in the decision-maker's home city, with Austin as the example, inviting about seven peers to dinner with that chain's leader, and repeating it in major cities. He says this could get to tens of millions of dollars, and that the company would talk about the future of AI in restaurants rather than its own product.
“My guess would be um in-city dinners where you pick”
Rutten says the podcast reinvented, which he describes as fast-growing in 2025, was used to build a forum for bankers to talk about transformation. Guests are now limited to C-suite or operators with the authority to transform the bank. He says a request to the chief AI officer of Westpac was answered immediately, and says the approach is far cheaper than a classic ABM campaign run for months.
“it's seuite only. You need to be the operator, you need to have the number or you need to have the you know actual heat to transform the bank.”
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Craig says Topo's outbound was built around inviting prospects to curated events where the company would walk through their data, rather than asking for a meeting. He says many companies kill their outbound by asking for 30 minutes to show what they can do. He says this is how he thinks many companies should run outbound today.
“The other thing you can learn from our outbound back then was only tour events we didn't try to get a meeting”
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Craig says Topo did not use content syndication or paid search. It ran highly curated events and offered free advisory, and it understood its data well enough to know that prospects who had that experience converted at about 45-50%. Topo then pointed its efforts there and ramped up live events.
“we knew that the odds once those folks touched and have that experience was like a 45 50% conversion that we pointed everything to that”
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Chris Vik said reps struggled on first calls with the response who the hell are you, and that education on open-ended questions did not fix it. The team instead opened with a hypothesis about multi-site, multi-country implementations, drawing on a strategic project Microsoft had told them about, then asked the rep to stop talking. He said they showed some of their work and offered an advisory piece for free in the initial phases, and that this booked many more meetings.
“we start to book much more meetings”
Instead of asking to show a new product, Kerrest suggests offering, for example, an update on the latest in AI and cybersecurity in Silicon Valley, mentioning the product addresses some of those issues, and asking for 20 minutes that start with the trends briefing. He says this two-way framing gets more and better responses.
“Turns out that if you're willing to do something back the other way, making it a two -way street, you'll get a lot more and better response.”
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said Ann Davis (Revenue Builders), Christopher O'Donnell (The Science of Scaling), Rick Smolen (Topline), Kyle Norton (Topline), Andy Shorkey (The Science of Scaling)
Ann says this is the consultative pitch she makes to heads of sales and CROs about Crunchbase's data, and that the edge comes from proprietary data rather than leaving reps to interpret AI output on their own. She presents these figures as the outcome the approach delivers. The company and stage behind the figures are not specified.
“drives pipeline growth 2x in six months and drives top line revenue growth 25 % in that same six months”
Christopher describes using the full customer history to find which customers closed fastest, what they said they came looking for, when the solution clicked for them, what words the seller used and how the prospect reacted. The AI then finds lookalikes. Outreach draws on real customer language and feelings rather than 'a bunch of us sitting in a room coming up with marketing slogans.'
“Okay, so imagine taking the entire history of everything and just extracting from that history just those bits. Who are these people? What are the patterns? And then being able to say, get me 100 more of these.”
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Rick says he can build lead lists, identify ideal customer profiles and find contacts more quickly with these tools, which he calls a cheat code for this part of the work. He says ABM has not gone away but should be more effective because it can layer in intent and signal data. He expects better outbound and event attendance because the team is reaching the right people.
“I can build lead lists better, faster, deeper than ever before.”
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Kyle Norton says most CROs and founders, outside the fastest-growing companies, say their problem is pipeline, and that AI is a good pipeline tool. He gives examples of picking the right accounts, timing outreach, and generating compelling artifacts. His team also built an AI website grader as a lead magnet.
“80% of your AI efforts in your early innings should be pipeline focused.”
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Kyle Norton says he gives this prompt to teams building AI infrastructure: ask the best reps when they know a demo will be a close. He gives an example where a rep watches for three specific website or LinkedIn signals, or for a particular open role. Those signals are then turned into digital-footprint criteria that AI can detect across the market.
“go sit with your very best reps and ask them, when you sit down for a demo, when do you know you're like, I'm gonna close this one?”
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Asked whether AI has changed targeting, Andy Shorkey says Writer layers its own applications and workflows on top of the AI built into its existing go-to-market stack to find warm signals. He gives the team high marks for prioritizing ICP accounts with activity on the website and for tying into LinkedIn to find personas in the roles that typically gravitate toward Writer.
“going after ICP where there's activity where there's signal around website.”
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said Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Grit), Tim Rutten (Topline), Gaurav Agarwal (Topline), Amanda Kahlow (Topline, Revenue Builders)
Grosser said the BDR function is 'way, way leaner' than at Stripe because agents handle inbound qualification and much outbound. The remaining BDRs either do more complex prospecting into enterprise or are used for hypothesis testing, for example on a new persona or new messaging.
“All the inbound qualification is done with an agent.”
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Tim Rutten, CMO of Backbase, said the team built GTMOS over about a year as a Vercel application connected to Salesforce and finance tools, and that sales and marketing roles all work through it. He said the system dictates how work is done, so account executives, business development reps and ABM managers run the same way. He presented the pipeline doubling as the result of running the business on this system.
“double the pipeline, 25% head cut on my budget still. So with 25% less budgets, I'm actually still doubling the pipeline.”
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Gaurav described separate agents for analysing data, writing emails, creating audiences and sending through Outreach, with the whole chain built by two people. He said a human would typically produce five to 10 campaigns a week. He said ClickUp is now looking at how to add email capacity through tools like Smartlead and Outreach.
“this entire workflow is what delivers about 70 to 100 campaigns a week. Typically, a human would have done about five to 10 campaigns a week.”
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She said they use their own product wherever possible, partly to keep costs down and show that it works. She gave this as a figure from their own operation, with no breakdown of how it was measured.
“like 80 some percent of our pipeline is sourced by Mindy, our superhuman.”
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Kahlow said the superhuman acts as 1mind's top-of-funnel outbound, has held long conversations with CROs and CMOs of public companies, and has taken many deals close to the finish line on its own. She gave one example: the CRO at Ultrix had a 90-minute first call with the superhuman, was then handed to the CMO, and Kahlow said she said about five words on her later call with him.
“Mindy, our superhuman, has sourced 78% of our opportunities that have turned into closed won.”
said Jeanne DeWitt Grosser (Grit), Ian Tickle (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Bob Ranaldi (Revenue Builders), Mark Roberge (Revenue Builders)
She said the business would look fine for two quarters, but not enough pipeline had been created in Q4 before she arrived, or in Q1, to support the planned ramp. Showing the full-year trajectory early prevented two good quarters from masking a later 'cliff'. Because top-of-funnel was clearly the top issue, she hired the CMO first, within 90 days. By Q4 enough levers had changed that Vercel 'just barely' beat the number, which was kept rather than lowered.
“The first one I hired was the CMO, because it was immediately obvious. Our top issue is marketing, pipeline, top of funnel. Got him in within 90 days”
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Ian says hearing in a meeting that last month's opportunity creation fell short is too late, because he can't afford four weeks of under-generating. He wants alerts when pipeline trends down after 48 or 72 hours. He sees connected systems plus AI as giving him that insight without manually running reports.
“how about if it trends down after 48 hours or 72 hours or whatever. Can we get on there quicker?”
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Bob gave an example of a CEO who might shut down an SDR organization, telling four people they no longer have jobs, just as it was starting to return. He said leading indicators such as calls made, discovery meetings held, and conversion to SQLs and through the sales process show what is coming, and are often overlooked when success is judged only by bookings.
“But there's so much information in the leading indicator form that gets overlooked oftentimes.”
He describes a company where two productive reps' pipeline came from VC introductions, which would not support eight reps. He says demand generation often fails to keep pace with reps, so a team that supported five reps stays the same when the company grows to 20, and the gap is only found at a board review.
“the entire pipeline of those two reps came from VC introductions. And that doesn't scale to eight reps.”
said Christopher O'Donnell (The Science of Scaling), Alex Bilmes (Revenue Builders), Ghazi Masood (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Dan Sperring (Revenue Builders)
Christopher says the AI SDR emails he gets mostly just pull from LinkedIn; one confused his Winchester, Mass. location with a cathedral. A caller from a well-known company had shared investors, past demos and a lost deal with him to work with, yet sent generic outreach. He says the models are very good at writing and personal relationships, but they lack the starting material and can't find patterns in everything the company has ever said to anyone.
“If you give them the right starting information, they will come up with something to say.”
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Alex Bilmes described a pattern of sales leaders with a pipeline problem who bought about ten vendors, each promising 3x pipeline, and then got 0x. A host noted these tools were pitched as replacing the SDR, and Alex said teams are now at different levels of maturity and leaders need to get more technical.
“And they didn't. You got 0x and you have 10 tools.”
He said he tried an automated SDR at his last company and it did not work for them, and that a lot of peers he talked to had the same experience, so he does not think BDRs will be fully automated soon. Separately, he said Replit is building an intentional outbound SDR team with an office in Salt Lake City to supplement inbound.
“I tried the automated SDR last company and, you know, didn't really work for us”
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Dan says some automated SDR companies he has spoken with do not know their ICPs, so they can send about 4,000 emails a day yet have abysmal click-through and response rates. He adds that some were interested in licensing his software. A host responds that these companies are making a bad name for all salespeople.
“they can blast 4,000 emails a day. But when you look at the click-through rates, when you look at the response rates, they're abysmal.”
said Ross Simmonds (The Dave Gerhardt Show), Evan Huck (Topline), Jason Dunn ([Un]Churned)
Ross endorses 'white hat' Reddit participation: a brand shows up authentically, discloses who it is (as in Dasha's example, 'I work at…'), and chimes in only when relevant. He says comments that keep saying 'you should buy my software' or 'we are the best', or that pretend to be something they're not, are the practice that needs to end.
“Be transparent add value, educate engage entertain and empower if you do that on reddit, you'll win. But if you go in in every single time, your comment is hey, you should buy my software, hey, we are the best.”
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Evan said he spent a lot of time in specialized Slack communities for customer marketers and product marketers, answering questions adjacent to UserEvidence's product without selling. He said this built a helpful reputation that drove a decent amount of inbound. He said a VP of Customer Marketing at one of the first Fortune 500 deals reached out to him on Slack after seeing his advice.
“I just spent a lot of time in that community early on just answering people's questions, not selling at all”
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Jason Dunn said some companies put community members into the CRM and treat them as a pipeline for communications and marketing, but developers resist this. He said his team deliberately kept the community firewalled from the digital marketing firehose so the email addresses members gave for the program were not used to sign them up for marketing.
“developers are kind of allergic to sales and marketing, right?”
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said Nick Cegelski (30 Minutes to President's Club), Kade Hinkle (30 Minutes to President's Club), Darren McKee ([Un]Churned)
Nick suggests making a LinkedIn connection at the start of sequencing each prospect. Over a year of 30 a day, a seller builds a network of the people they want to sell to, which enables referrals and introductions. He says that had he stayed selling to law firms, this would have built a strong network.
“this starts to accrue 30 connections today over an entire year. You start to build up a network of people that you want to sell to”
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Kade uses Common Room data to choose accounts and people, and prefers companies using a Common Room competitor. He might choose five such accounts a day and send connection requests to the people he wants to talk to. He only connects with below-the-line people when there is a signal, and stresses keeping the 30 connections high quality.
“I'm a big fan of competitor. like reaching out to folks that are using a competitor. So like, let's say I'll choose five accounts for a day that are using a competitor of Common Room.”
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Kade's '30 connection rule' is to send 30 connection requests a day to ICP prospects, engage with their posts, and post his own content. He says at least five acceptances a day is the low end for his industry, selling to go-to-market leaders, and that he isn't sure what the rate would be in other markets.
“if you're sending 30 a day, you're going to have at least five people accepting. And that's the lowest for my industry I sell to. I sell on the go to market leaders.”
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He says the routine means finding buyers, engaging with their content, sending a connection request and a video DM, and then building the relationship. He describes it as 15 engagements every day and says anyone who can't do that shouldn't be in a selling or CS seat. He calls it a methodology, distinct from his company.
“So I focus on a methodology called 531. I'm not talking about the company anymore, but 531 is five companies every single day, three people inside of said company and then one LinkedIn action to those three people inside of those five companies.”
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He says this figure came from what he reported to the board when he was VP of sales at a company he later sold, which he described as about $2 million in ARR. He describes these deals as coming from inbound after a piece of content, from replies to comments that moved into DMs, and from persistent outreach, including emailing one contact 27 times over sixteen months. He says this result is the reason he started his own business.
“81% of our deals were from LinkedIn and social selling.”
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said Evan Huck (Topline), Greg Casale (Revenue Builders), Darren McKee ([Un]Churned)
Evan said the company's first couple of years were an outbound program, which he applied to everything because he was good at it. After outbound's effectiveness declined, the company had to think about other sources of pipeline. A VP of marketing hired a few years in convinced the team to make a long-term bet on brand.
“emails just got so much more noisy and just outbound, so much less effective that we kind of had to think about how to diversify our pipeline generation”
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Greg Casale says tools that automate email and scale sending have multiplied signals by 10x to 1,000x over the last three years into the same total addressable market. He says on average 9 to 14 percent of a company's market is in market at any time, so a large increase in signals into that pool drives conversion down. He cites spam filters and phone call screening as the buyer-side response.
“Big denominator, small numerator, conversion goes to zero.”
He says he has sent thousands of video DMs to VP and C-suite leaders over the years and has sent about 50 DMs a day for the last three and a half years. His reasoning is that a deep, detailed video DM is unlikely to be matched by others, while prospects in his market get 60 to 140 emails a day from sellers. He says the purpose is to get a response rather than to tick a box.
“they're going to get anywhere between 60 to 140 emails a day from sellers in our market.”
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Matt said email worked well at Zenefits, but over the following decade it became much harder as more companies used it. He said that this is the pattern for any growth channel: once it works and everyone adopts it, it stops working, which forces teams to find new creative approaches.
“anything that you do that works, like everybody does it and then it doesn't work anymore.”
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said Michelle Bove (Revenue Builders), Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling), Tim Rutten (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
Bove argues that a platform is sold across an organisation to many people, not one niche buyer, so reps should prospect to security operations, engineering and the CISO or CTO after each meeting. She says prospecting should happen every day, not only on a set day, and describes the habit as PG Monday and PG Tuesday.
“The second you leave that meeting, you should say, who else can I now prospect to within that company?”
He says the team works together on a single account, with the AE attending a trade show where a chain's president is speaking and the SDR cold calling regional directors with different messages. The team acts as one account team rather than separate silos.
“this is almost like a account team where it's like we're working together as as the digital marketer, as the SDR, as the account executive, as the account manager”
He says the team uses Exa to find each bank's senior leadership and decision-making unit members, then looks for named, budgeted strategic projects with an executive owner. Because a bank can have five to ten themes spread across executives, Backbase can campaign against one bank from several angles with different personas, which he describes as one-to-few clusters rather than one-to-many.
“we do it to 30 accounts based on a thematic cluster that we've found”
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Mark says that for these deals you identify all the people who could play a part in the decision and engage them at the prospecting stage, adapting outreach to each one's specific needs. He describes account-based marketing and account-based selling as the purest fit for million-dollar deals, where the point is that different people are involved in the decision.
“we have to be multi-threaded, meaning we have to identify all of the people that could play a part in making this decision.”
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said Dan Lee (The Science of Scaling), Tim Rutten (The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Adrian Rosenkranz (The Revenue Leadership Podcast)
Dan Lee said Nooks reps described spending four or five hours writing around 30 personalized emails, and could now produce that batch in about 30 minutes. He said prospects were replying that it was the best email they had ever received.
“what used to take me like four, you know, four or five hours to go write”
The workflow runs from account research and DMU mapping through strategic narrative, messaging, engagement strategy, frequency and outreach plan, and the ABM manager and AE review it together. Rutten says the output is high quality and that one-to-one campaigns now feel almost cheap, so the bottleneck becomes how many accounts a person can work personally.
“within 15 minutes you have a super strategic plan on a onetoone account level. Prior that was weeks of work.”
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Adrian said the agent enriches data on the company, looks at market activity, applies Webflow positioning and provocative challenger-style ideas, and returns a script. He said the goal is to get people on the phone with more customers; Kyle noted it compresses the time reps need to get ready for a call.
“right when they say that in Slack, they get a message back that says great here's your call script.”
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said Sam Slevin (Topline), Abbas Haider Ali ([Un]Churned), Mark Wayland (The Science of Scaling)
He said CS earns the right to source pipeline by delivering value over time, then asks satisfied customers for introductions to other teammates. He contrasted this with AEs and SDRs, who look for new pockets and soften the ground.
“And so you can't source pipeline if the account isn't healthy and you don't have good advocates and good people working for you.”
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He said the team has to signal opportunity, tying back to the risk and opportunity signals discussed earlier, with those signals showing up as CS-qualified leads. If the team cannot generate those, he said it is not earning its investment within the organization.
“then that should be actually working in the sense that your sales team should be able to run at higher productivity.”
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With demand gen budgets nearly flat, Wayland says every dollar of marketing pipeline costs money through SEO, events and so on. By contrast, pipeline an AE creates is 'in a sense, free' because those heads are already in the financial model. Box therefore changed its sales culture so that AEs see pipeline building as part of their job alongside closing and retaining. With about 300 sellers and about 80 CSMs, and a marketing team smaller than either, he says treating pipeline as marketing's job alone would leave Box 'in real trouble.'
“But every dollar of pipeline that an AE creates, in a sense, is free, because those heads are already built into your financial model. So we really had to, like, pivot the culture of the sales team to understand that you are demand creators.”
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Ron Gabrisko says Wednesdays were prospecting day at Databricks, with everyone in sales, not just SDRs, prospecting all day. He measured reps every Friday on the meetings they had set, around five to ten a week, and ran contests to make prospecting fun. He calls prospecting the hardest part of sales but the most important part of early company sales.
“Wednesdays was prospecting day for us.”
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Bosworth says that even now that Checkr has a BDR team she still hires AEs with outbound experience. She describes a pipeline mix where half comes from outbound by AEs or BDRs and half from marketing or partners. As you go upmarket, she says the outbound half is probably about 25% BDR and 25% AE. She presents this as the breakdown a company should aim for.
“it really is like 50 outbound by the ae or the bdr and then 50 marketing or partner”
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said Snehal Nimje (Topline), Fred Reichheld ([Un]Churned)
Snehal said the team worked with customers who found the product essential, and they started recommending three or four more customers. That is when the team decided to focus on one sector, because customers recommending customers creates a compounding effect. He described this as a bridge that moves POCs faster and brings enterprise companies into the consideration stage.
“they started recommending three or four more customers.”
Fred says for every new customer you should know the primary reason they came and bought. If it was referral, he says to put that in the customer relationship system, identify who referred them, and use that root cause as the core of learning and improvement. He says this lets a company grow from its core rather than from marketing tricks.
“make sure you know every new customer, what was the primary reason they came and bought.”
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Fred says that across a wide range of businesses, on average about 20% of new customers come through referral, but those referred customers generate closer to 80% of profitable growth. He attributes this to referrals coming from true promoters who act in their friend's best interest. He says his upcoming HBR article makes this case.
“those 20% generate closer to 80% of the profitable growth”
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He says he does not understand why referral requests are not codified into sales methodology more often. He presents Jay LeBoeuf's habit of taking up customers' offers to help as an opportunity that most sales teams leave untapped.
“I don't think I've ever come across a relatively mature sales organization that doesn't have a cold calling script. But it's really hard for me to think about a mature sales organization that has a generate referral script.”
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said Nick Cegelski (30 Minutes to President's Club), Kade Hinkle (30 Minutes to President's Club), Darren McKee ([Un]Churned)
Nick calls random feed scrolling a horrible use of time. With notifications on, you go straight to the prospect's post when it appears and avoid getting distracted by the rest of the feed. He says he never did this kind of warm-up when selling to law firms and wishes he had, because he thinks it would have helped him break into hard-to-reach accounts.
“It is a horrible use of your time to be randomly scrolling your LinkedIn feed, hoping that you see a post from your prospect that you can engage with.”
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When sending his 30 daily connections, Kade checks whether each prospect posts actively and, if they do, turns on their post notifications; he had about 75 prospects on notifications at the time. He uses their activity to judge when to reach out, citing signals such as hiring SDRs, a recent funding round, or an upcoming renewal with a current tool.
“Right now, I probably have like 75 prospects notifications on. And it's just a part of always trying to stay top of mind in their world.”
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He says the list is his ABM model, made up of prospects and the people he wants to keep close, and he imports it into Sales Navigator. He then uses that filtered feed to see who in the list is posting, who is new in role and who used to work at his past companies. He describes Sales Navigator as the greatest tool on the planet for this.
“what you do is you basically have like a list of folks that are your, that's your ABM model”
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said Dan Sperring (Revenue Builders, The Science of Scaling), Mark Roberge (Topline)
Dan says he sees something like 70% of open pipelines outside the ICP, which he links to sellers under pressure to hit their number. He says marketing often lacks the tools to create high-quality pipeline. He wants marketing to produce high-quality ICP pipeline and sellers to focus on accounts that can generate three or four times LTV.
“given the fact that we see something like 70% of open pipelines outside of ICP”
Mark said HubSpot had a very broad market, and about 30% of its inbound leads were ICP. He said he has never seen a business where more than 50% of inbound leads should be sold to. A host added that with outbound you know a prospect fits and must check for pain, while with inbound you must check fit, and that an inbound lead that does not retain is no good.
“30 % of our inbound leads were ICP”
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Dan said that for vertical SaaS companies it is closer to 50% of pipeline and around 60% of the install base. He gave these as what he typically sees when working with clients.
“As we work with clients, what we typically see is less than 20% of the pipeline is with ICP customers.”
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said Ghazi Masood (Topline, The Revenue Leadership Podcast), Mark Roberge (Revenue Builders)
Ghazi said that when he joined, about 90% of pipeline was organic inbound from net-new prospects rather than self-serve upgrades. He built an outbound motion with a BDR hub in Salt Lake City, his third time doing so, and brought over the BDR leader from his previous company. In May, outbound opportunities outpaced inbound. He said whether this is a trend remains to be seen.
“the month of May was the first month where outbound opportunities actually outpaced inbound opportunities”
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Ghazi said that in a PLG business, 90% of pipeline came from people hitting the website wanting a demo, and Replit had inbound SDRs handling it. He is now building outbound to supplement that inbound pipeline.
“when I first got here, I mean in a PLG business, 90% of our pipeline was all inbound.”
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He says companies in growth mode usually need multiple demand channels, and that even big successful PLG companies got to something like $10, $50 or $100 million through product-led growth before needing more. He adds that an SDR channel probably will not scale to a billion dollars, so companies keep testing other channels.
“I've never seen a company go to IPO exploiting just one channel, even PLG companies.”
Loren says he has always believed a team should be going after something new, regardless of how much inbound it has. At Shopify Plus the new effort was cold outbound into verticals chosen from the platform's largest categories, such as fashion and electronics.
“Eventually you're going to run out of inbound.”
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said Dr. Chuck Bamford (Revenue Builders), Dan Sperring (The Science of Scaling)
Chuck says the client pitched whoever reached out, with a hit rate of about 5% on the proposals it made. He worked with it to define which customers were poor fits and which needed the product and would pay, then had students at Notre Dame build a precise prospect list, and three years later the sales team's hit rate was 41%.
“They had about a 5% hit rate on their, on the one they tried to pitch.”
Dan said many companies have no programmatic process to operationalize their ICP, which is why it fails demand gen and sales. He said the starting step is creating the definitions and tagging accounts in the CRM, after which you can measure your ability to build quality pipeline and close deals with accounts more likely to renew and expand.
“And it starts with us creating these definitions and then tagging our accounts within the CRM with these labels.”
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said Mike Carpenter (Topline), Mark Wayland (The Science of Scaling)
Mike said he is not a fan of MQLs and described a marketing team paid a spiff to tag deals as marketing-sourced, which he stopped because it did nothing for lead generation. He argued a lead could have come through friends, website visits, conferences or calls, so attribution to one email campaign is not knowable. He instead counts how many touches it takes to qualify and warm an account.
“Can you really tell a marketing qualified lead came in through an email campaign? You can't because it could be a friend they talked to”
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Wayland and the CMO jointly host Box's pipeline call. They set a goal of building a certain number of hundreds of millions in pipeline, decide where to invest to deliver it, and monitor it week by week through the year, adjusting people or budget as needed. He says pipeline sources should be monitored, but warns against overdoing source attribution 'because then people start playing games.'
“You have to manage what the different sources are pipeline. You want to monitor those things, but you can't overdo it there because then people start playing games.”
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said Chris Vik (Revenue Builders), Mark Roberge (The Science of Scaling), Mark Wayland (The Science of Scaling)
Chris Vik said the mistake sales teams make is pointing fingers at marketing over missing pipeline. He said that after learning from that mistake at earlier companies, he worked to partner with the marketing team on the other side.
“I think the mistake that Sales we can own it together instead of pointing fingers that, hey, I don't have the pipeline”
Roberge says the CMO and CRO cannot be politically at odds. They need to agree on how each department is measured, with no room to blame 'bad leads' or 'bad closers.' That means defining pipeline consistently whether it comes from SDRs, events or content campaigns, and agreeing on a reasonable conversion rate from pipeline to customers to hit ARR targets. Both then take ownership when things break.
“We have to like clearly define what is pipeline. Whether it's created from an SDR or created from an event or created from a content campaign. And we have to agree, what is a reasonable conversion from pipeline to customers to hit those ARR targets?”
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Rather than finance taking the board's budget and splitting it into marketing and sales allocations, Box's go-to-market leadership holds one integrated conversation about the total budget and where to place bets. Wayland describes his CMO Trisha and chief customer officer John as partners in driving the business. He says he knows and agrees with the metrics Trisha runs her business on, she knows his, and no one uses 'funny math.'
“We're having one integrated conversation about like here's what the whole budget is for go to market and where should we place our bets.”
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Wayland says that in annual planning, AEs and engineers generally don't get cut while everything else gets constrained. Marketing budgets are hit much harder than AE headcount. As a result, the functional heads of sales and marketing must be very closely aligned. He says that if salespeople think 'the leads are weak' or marketers think 'salespeople can't sell value,' even without saying it, you have a problem, and you need one revenue team rather than separate sales and marketing teams.
“If you have people that say the leads are weak, And if they don't use those words, but if they have those thoughts, you have a problem. Or if you have marketers that are saying, you know, our salespeople can't sell value, that you have to have a revenue team”
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said Keenan (Topline), Ed Calnan (The Science of Scaling)
He described advising his daughter's AI-native company to focus its launch on a single campus. He said he told them to seek banners at fraternity parties, post on Yik Yak and put up flyers to build awareness. He said he had heard that prospects need about seven or eight exposures before anything sticks, but said he was unsure that was accurate.
“they say that nothing sticks for somebody that's new until after the seventh or eighth exposure”
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Ed said the team replicated the investment management use case immediately, with a team that did nothing else. He said the solution alone reached about 250 customers on the financial side, and that the product became the standard on Wall Street. He said the approach was to call only that list of firms.
“They had a list of 350 firms that that's all they could call.”
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Jonathan said Toast chose to go deep in a market rather than wide. Multivariate regression showed proximity to another Toast customer as the number one factor early on. Reps and BDRs are trained to mention a nearby Toast customer by name in prospect conversations, which the conversation noted gets the rep a half hour with the prospect.
“The number one factor early on and who would buy toast was their proximity to another toast customer.”
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said Jordan Crawford (Topline), Kyle Norton (Topline)
Jordan says the conference app was iPhone-only, so he connected the phone to his computer and had an agent scroll the app and take screenshots overnight. AI extracted names and titles, enrichment added photos and LinkedIn URLs, and the attendee list was sorted by who to talk to.
“And so overnight, I had it scroll my iPhone and take screenshots.”
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Jordan describes a competitor whose reset page said it could not find a user with the entered email, rather than giving a generic message. He says he submitted 110,000 password reset emails drawn from the total addressable market and identified the competitor's actual users this way.
“What this one competitor did is they said, uh, we can't find a user with this email. So what I did is I took all of the emails in their tam and submitted 110,000 password reset emails.”
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Jordan describes a client that sits on top of a large vendor and wanted to know all of its users. He says Claude Code determined about 103,000 users and whether each was on enterprise, mid-market or free tiers. He stresses the output is deterministic, so it is easy to check, and that a team would only think to ask this if it knew what the tools could do.
“Claude was basically able to not only determine all 103,000 of their users”
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Kyle Norton gives an example for finding order volume at a business whose data is not readily available, such as a restaurant on third-party delivery apps. He counts new reviews month over month and divides by an assumed share of customers who leave reviews, which he gives as 10%. He says each business's system for this has to be built by the team itself.
“So I'll take that review number divided by 0.1.”
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said Frederik Maris (Revenue Builders), Chris Vik (Revenue Builders)
Frederik says he receives many outreach messages from BDRs and mostly has no time for them. Messages that talk about pains or issues he actually has stand out, while poor messages put him off. He tells his sellers to differentiate by understanding what the buyer is dealing with and what their priorities are, and to do it in a good way.
“the ones that resonate with you are the ones that actually are talking about some of the pains or issues that you actually have.”
Chris Vik said his team gave reps these three steps. First, understand what the company sells and the industry and climate it operates in. Second, follow the money to see how it makes money and where it loses money. Third, read customer reviews to find complaints that form a hypothesis for pain, for example a broken checkout experience.
“there's only like a couple of things you need to know in order to have effective PG preparation. Number one, you have to understand what the company does and the industry that they operate in”
Donald Kelly calls this kind of personalisation garbage and says prospects get five of those a day. He says he can send connection requests without a personalised note because of his reputation, but reps with no recognition in the industry need a relevant message.
“Like, that's garbage. They get five of those a day.”
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Jonathan found that a luxury e-commerce company had only one French phone number while selling through several country websites. He contacted its CMO to point this out and said Aircall could provide numbers all over the world. He positioned himself as a helper or consultant rather than someone with a product to sell, and said the approach showed he had actually looked at the company.
“I'm coming more as a helper, as a consultant to help them rather than, hey, I have a product to sell.”
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Mark described Jonathan's research as going beyond first-party and third-party data, for example checking whether a company has a phone number available or several numbers depending on where callers come from. He said viewing a website's source can show what technology the company uses. Mark added that such signals are not always available, but they help show whether a prospect has the need and let outreach be personalised.
“But look deeply, even little things like if you right click on a website, you can view the source. And sometimes you can tell what tech they're using.”
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said Daniel Simon (Revenue Builders), Greg Casale (Revenue Builders)
Daniel said many sellers now use AI tools to write the perfect email or LinkedIn message, so their outreach sounds the same as competitors'. He said cold calls still get him meetings, and that AI research makes a call warmer because he can open with a relevant proof point.
“The number one way to get meetings still to this day is cold call for me.”
Greg Casale says that when a prospect picks up an outbound call, the rep is immediately in a live conversation, even if it goes nowhere, and learns something from it. He contrasts this with email, form fills and paid media, which he says leave a rep three, four or five steps away from a live conversation. He also said AI cannot make outbound B2B calls, so he expects this channel to be less exposed to the automation that has saturated email.
“Every other channel, if somebody responds to your email or they do a form fill or they click on your paid media, you're still probably three, four, five steps away from ever having a live conversation.”
Actions written 10 Oct 2026 from the most useful of 178 recent insights and checked against them.
Sam says the business would not have happened without LinkedIn, because people started listing Revenue Collective on their profiles. He says it became a badge of honor that the company measured very carefully, and that it produced very strong referrals.
“people started putting revenue collective on their LinkedIn profile and it became a badge of honor”
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Nick calls random feed scrolling a horrible use of time. With notifications on, you go straight to the prospect's post when it appears and avoid getting distracted by the rest of the feed. He says he never did this kind of warm-up when selling to law firms and wishes he had, because he thinks it would have helped him break into hard-to-reach accounts.
“It is a horrible use of your time to be randomly scrolling your LinkedIn feed, hoping that you see a post from your prospect that you can engage with.”
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Nick suggests making a LinkedIn connection at the start of sequencing each prospect. Over a year of 30 a day, a seller builds a network of the people they want to sell to, which enables referrals and introductions. He says that had he stayed selling to law firms, this would have built a strong network.
“this starts to accrue 30 connections today over an entire year. You start to build up a network of people that you want to sell to”
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Kade says everything he does aims to start conversations with prospects and connect with them on LinkedIn so he can book a meeting when the timing is right. He contrasts this with someone selling to plumbers, who live on Facebook. He also notes there is no real way to automate LinkedIn; his engagement is fully manual and he often responds to post notifications within five minutes.
“I think of LinkedIn is like sort of my hub and then there's like emails calls around it”
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Kade uses Common Room data to choose accounts and people, and prefers companies using a Common Room competitor. He might choose five such accounts a day and send connection requests to the people he wants to talk to. He only connects with below-the-line people when there is a signal, and stresses keeping the 30 connections high quality.
“I'm a big fan of competitor. like reaching out to folks that are using a competitor. So like, let's say I'll choose five accounts for a day that are using a competitor of Common Room.”
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When sending his 30 daily connections, Kade checks whether each prospect posts actively and, if they do, turns on their post notifications; he had about 75 prospects on notifications at the time. He uses their activity to judge when to reach out, citing signals such as hiring SDRs, a recent funding round, or an upcoming renewal with a current tool.
“Right now, I probably have like 75 prospects notifications on. And it's just a part of always trying to stay top of mind in their world.”
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Kade's '30 connection rule' is to send 30 connection requests a day to ICP prospects, engage with their posts, and post his own content. He says at least five acceptances a day is the low end for his industry, selling to go-to-market leaders, and that he isn't sure what the rate would be in other markets.
“if you're sending 30 a day, you're going to have at least five people accepting. And that's the lowest for my industry I sell to. I sell on the go to market leaders.”
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Jason Lemkin said his first agent-driven purchase was Resend for email. Agents kept recommending SendGrid, but he couldn't get it working: free access had been deprecated, he couldn't figure out the key and it kept breaking. When he asked his agent what to use, it said Resend. He cited the MCP call growth as evidence of agents choosing products.
“Resend April, 106 ,000 MCP calls to September, 3 million. That's agents saying to use products.”
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The host argues cold outbound takes huge effort, has falling reply rates, and puts reps in the same pond as everyone else. In his view, the useful version of social selling is monitoring constant changes in your network and your network's network (job moves, shared conference panels, online engagement) through alerts. He says the alerts covered are the highest performing based on Sam McKenna's work with thousands of sales teams.
“Most social selling advice is garbage. We are not going to sit here and tell you to go post content and wait for the leads to roll in.”
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Sam McKenna toggles 'viewed your profile recently' and sets current company to her account lists, which shows anyone in her territory who looked at her profile. She deliberately ignores seniority: a BDR, an AE or a marketing coordinator in the UK all count. She uses the view to ask what brought them by and whether their team is discussing using her product internally.
“If it's a BDR, great. If it's an AE, great. If it's a marketing coordinator in the UK, don't care.”
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The host describes a third version of the job-change list: enthusiastic users of the product, not just buyers or deal stakeholders. When these super fans change jobs, 30MPC wants to contact them. The setup mirrors the other job-change searches.
“So these are people that are like power users at 30MPC. We call them super fans.”
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Sam McKenna describes a variant of the job-hopper list for people who wanted to purchase but couldn't make it happen, for example because the wider buying team went another way. They still know you and want to work with you, so you want to know if they move into your territory. She notes that a manager can track this across their direct reports' deals and help AEs prospect directly.
“you want to think about the people who wanted to purchase from you and couldn't make it happen.”
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Sam McKenna's example: a teammate closes Jones Day, then Jones Day's CFO joins another law firm in her territory; she wants to know because that CFO has probably had a good experience with the product. She sets past company to an account list of her biggest customer logos (for example Fortune 50 customers, or verticals such as law firms or pharma when people tend to move within an industry), current company to her territory, and narrows by seniority and geography to control volume. She says speed matters so you reach them before competitors, and suggests a 'show me you know me' subject line.
“in past company, I've created an account list that shows our biggest logos. I may do this by Fortune 50 that work with us.”
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Sam McKenna's filters: past company includes her company, current company excludes it (which also filters out internal promotions), current company is her territory, and seniority is VP/CXO. She keeps seniority high so she isn't flooded with alerts for every departure (she jokes about being notified of 1,600 people a day). Her reasoning is that departed executives often still want to support their former employer, which makes them a good route in.
“You'll also see I've kept the seniority level high VP CXO so that don't don't get notified of 1600 people a day that leave.”
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Sam McKenna's search is current company = her company, executive seniority, and past company excluding her company, so she sees net-new hires rather than internal promotions or divisional changes. You cannot see someone's connections until you are first-degree connected, so the first step is connecting with the new executive. Once they accept, she compares their network against her territory, saying it helps her build relationships with senior executives and reach people who would not otherwise give her time. She says almost nobody thinks to do this.
“The thing is, you need to be first degree connected with somebody to be able to see their connections first.”
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Sam McKenna sets 'connections of' to a senior leader and runs it against all her accounts, then saves it so she is notified of each new connection that leader makes in her territory. Because a company may have 1,400 executives, she prioritizes those whose networks keep expanding, such as frequent conference speakers or people attending events like the World Economic Forum. She then uses the fresh relationship (a shared panel, meeting at a conference) to ask for an introduction that peers likely aren't asking for.
“What you want to look at is your senior executives that speak often or travel often.”
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Sam McKenna explains that all saved lead searches are listed in one place in Sales Navigator. Weekly updates on new matches go to your inbox. Each search also shows a count of new results since a given date; her example had 22 new results.
“on a weekly basis, you're going to get updates every single time there's an update to the save search that'll be delivered directly to your inbox.”
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Sam McKenna sets the current company filter to all of her territory accounts and selects first-degree connections, which gives a list of everyone she knows inside her territory. She says the list is useful, but the real value is saving the search so she is alerted to new matches. The example given: a former AE colleague becomes a CSM at a target company, and you ask them to help you break into that organization.
“for current company is I've listed all of my accounts and I've selected first degree connections. This gives me a list of any first degree connection I have that's within my territory.”
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Ross endorses 'white hat' Reddit participation: a brand shows up authentically, discloses who it is (as in Dasha's example, 'I work at…'), and chimes in only when relevant. He says comments that keep saying 'you should buy my software' or 'we are the best', or that pretend to be something they're not, are the practice that needs to end.
“Be transparent add value, educate engage entertain and empower if you do that on reddit, you'll win. But if you go in in every single time, your comment is hey, you should buy my software, hey, we are the best.”
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Ross cites a brand that spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on a white paper covering design, stats and surveys. It promoted the paper once on LinkedIn and got about six leads. He says distributing and amplifying it through his playbook is what makes leads 'start to trickle in.'
“we've seen, like, ten x, the amount of traffic to multiple brands websites and their content? Because they actually distributed.”
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Ross makes sales outreach one step of his blog-post distribution playbook. The sales team is asked to send the piece to their contacts, specifically including prospects in the pipeline who have gone silent.
“You're also gonna tap to your sales team and hopefully ask them to send it out to their contacts. Anybody who's the pipeline that might have gone quiet.”
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Joubin, whose own company planned to grow headcount 6x in nine months, said Rubrik's CEO pushed him to grow even faster. According to Joubin, the CEO's first four sales hires at Rubrik were BDRs, meant to 'suffocate the company in demand'. When they later hit an air pocket it didn't matter, because the goal was to become relevant as quickly as possible. Joubin framed this as an interesting counterargument to running lean.
“the first four hires that I made were in sales were four BDRs. And I just like literally tried to suffocate the company in demand, in pipeline.”
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She said the business would look fine for two quarters, but not enough pipeline had been created in Q4 before she arrived, or in Q1, to support the planned ramp. Showing the full-year trajectory early prevented two good quarters from masking a later 'cliff'. Because top-of-funnel was clearly the top issue, she hired the CMO first, within 90 days. By Q4 enough levers had changed that Vercel 'just barely' beat the number, which was kept rather than lowered.
“The first one I hired was the CMO, because it was immediately obvious. Our top issue is marketing, pipeline, top of funnel. Got him in within 90 days”
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Grosser said the BDR function is 'way, way leaner' than at Stripe because agents handle inbound qualification and much outbound. The remaining BDRs either do more complex prospecting into enterprise or are used for hypothesis testing, for example on a new persona or new messaging.
“All the inbound qualification is done with an agent.”
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Early-stage companies take logos quickly at fixed prices and box themselves in. When the first renewal conversation comes, often around Series A or B, they realize the deals signed the year before are about to renew with no room to grow. Paid doesn't engage companies that haven't felt this pain yet.
“So pricing is not a problem if you're just taking down the logos at a fixed price.”
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Dan Lee said Nooks reps described spending four or five hours writing around 30 personalized emails, and could now produce that batch in about 30 minutes. He said prospects were replying that it was the best email they had ever received.
“what used to take me like four, you know, four or five hours to go write”
Dan Lee said Nooks moved its sales team's pipeline generation from Outreach, a sequencing campaign tool, to Nooks. He said this doubled the pipeline created over email. Asked why, he said writing good AI-generated emails is very hard and that Nooks invested heavily in the product experience, including the style and strategy of what gets written.
“we actually doubled our pipeline created over emails.”
Dave says demand outgrew the Hula venue, which led the team to look for a bigger space. This year's event sold out, with capacity for over 400 attendees, and he says some people doubted the sellout was real.
“We sold two hundred tickets. Like, a hundred and fifty people on the waiting list”
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Dave says Drive started at Hula, a Burlington, Vermont event space with a 200-person maximum, where booking cost about fifteen hundred dollars, though he said 'something like that.' The team picked speakers they already knew and did not run a large production. He says the first day's buzz from people meeting in person led them to take the event more seriously each year.
“Basically, you know, put fifteen hundred bucks on your credit card and, like, you can host an event here.”
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She gives two reasons: a calendar link is presumptuous, and it puts the work of scheduling on the buyer. To those who say links are convenient, she says they let the buyer book over your own commitments, such as one-on-ones. She would rather ask the buyer when they're free and make that time work.
“if you send a calendar link, it is presumptuous. Number two, you're putting the onus on the buyer to schedule time with you.”
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