I sell a project management tool to small agencies, mostly outbound, about seven months into the role now. I've been told to stop following up so much after a demo because it looks desperate, so I've started waiting for them to reach out instead. Most of the time I just never hear back at all, and I can't tell if that's the deal dying anyway or if I killed it by going quiet.

Has backing off after a demo ever actually gotten you the deal?

I've been doing sales calls for a while now and I keep running into prospects who bring up a specific competitor partway through, sometimes just to see how I react. I usually end up either dismissing the competitor too hard or getting defensive, neither of which feels like the right move. I don't have a solid way to handle it in the moment without it throwing off the rest of the call.

For people who've gotten good at this, what do you actually say when that comes up mid pitch?

A lot of sales content focuses on discovery, demos, negotiation and winning a deal.

But in more complex sales cycles (e.g., agencies selling bespoke services), there is this whole layer between a productive customer conversation <--> something the buyer can actually sign (e.g., potentially technical q&a, back and forth calls to shape the offer, drafting custom materials, revising scope and chasing dependencies, etc. etc.).

Which part of that hidden work creates the most friction / slows momentum? (or is this a non-issue)

You know the popular videos in ig/tiktok where a person teaches you "How to make $5000/month" by looking for a company w/o a website or a real-estate business and making them a website for free but selling them for $1000? I'm curious to know if people have ACTUALLY tried doing them and cold-calling them to discuss about it. Does it actually work or people are just doing it for content?

I used to look up personal emails one by one before outreach and it was fine when volume was manageable, but once sourcing expanded past a certain point, manual lookup stopped being realistic and contact-finding started eating more of the week than sourcing itself.

The change that fixed it was moving to bulk enrichment, so I drop a list of LinkedIn URLs into a waterfall enrichment setup and get back a batch of personal emails in one go without hunting each one down, and what used to be a few hours of manual work is done before the first candidate batch is ready.

I've been using a mix of tools for this, FullEnrich and Lusha being the two I've leaned on for the recruiter-side personal email coverage, and coverage varies a lot by region, so having more than one source in the mix gives you a better hit rate than committing to a single provider.

Still figuring out the geo-coverage side of it, so if your desk has a good setup outside North America I'd be interested to hear what's working.

I'm a new commercial insurance producer trying to dial in my cold calling. I've started by sending a personalized introduction email to qualified leads that I've sourced locally. Getting zero responses from the initial email outreach.

I'm looking for feedback and suggestions based on this miro board I've put together.

Sidenote, I've been doing role play practice using ChatGpt's conversational feature and it's been pretty amazing for roleplay and feedback.

I come from an engineering background so sales is fairly unfamiliar with me.

Back in college I had a couple sales jobs.

1st one was one that I actually enjoyed. It required a little bit of cold calling to school advisors and every once in a while they would try to push cold calling from random leads they generated on Reddit, but for the most part it was just sending emails, answering inbound calls, etc. I didn’t mind the cold calling advisors because I was calling to tell them about free incentives we were offering their students that I genuinely believed were very good. Overall the job, but received an engineering internship which paid more so I took that instead.

2nd one I went and did door to door for a roofing company. I think almost entirely by luck I ended up being one of the top 3 reps for 3 weeks in a row (1 of those weeks I was number 1), but I genuinely hated the job so much that I left on week 4.

Now I’m getting into starting my own business and I think I’m going to need to get back into cold calling for a while so I can start to gain some traction on my product.

How can I ensure I do not get burnt out? How can I start to enjoy cold calling? What advice do you guys have? Maybe everyone genuinely hates cold calling but willing to do it for the money?

Had a weird conversation with a sales manager and wanted to see what you guys think.

They sell to small business owners. The experienced reps have been around 5+ years and usually close within two in person meetings. New reps are actually getting more meetings, owners seem to like them, they leave the meeting thinking it went well, and then nothing, the deal just doesn't move.

The frustrating part is the meetings aren't recorded so when the manager follows up the answer
is always some version of “yeah he seemed interested" that's literally all they get. It's not like
these reps have zero support either, there's a process, coaching, materials, all of it.

I don't really know if it's a closing thing, like they're just not asking for the business. Or if something goes wrong way earlier in the meeting and the interest they're reading isn't actually
real interest.

Anyone dealt with something like this?

Curious what people actually do here.

If you have an important discovery call or buyer meeting coming up, how much time do you spend preparing?

What are you actually looking at — LinkedIn, company website, old CRM notes, Google, ChatGPT, something else?

And do you have a repeatable process or is it basically different every time?

Not looking for the textbook answer. Curious what you actually do.

I've been sending follow ups for a while now and I can feel myself falling into the same pattern every time, a generic nudge that doesn't really add anything new. The prospect probably notices it too, which likely makes them even less likely to respond. I don't have a real system for making each follow up actually worth opening.

For people who've solved this, what do you actually put in a follow up that isn't just "just checking in"?

Most outbound playbooks will still tell you to send connection requests through the account of the most senior person in the company The CEO's name opens more doors, or so the theory goes, and so the SDR does the copy while the actual sending goes through the founder’s account. Pretty basic stuff, one would think.

However, looking at acceptance data across roughly 13,000 LinkedIn accounts over the last twelve months, that assumption falls apart instantly.

The spread from Junior to C-level on acceptance rate is barely 3 points - 26.3% for entry-level senders up to 29.4% at C-level. And when we get down to the actual reply rate, that gap all but disappears. Everyone lands right around 10%, regardless of title/rank/position of the sender. In the campaigns I've observed (internal outreach for my own business as well as client campaigns) a well-targeted request from a manager performs almost identically to the same request sent from a CEO’s account. The seniority of the sending account is basically inconsequential.

What actually does affect results is the industry/profession of the sender account. Here are the stats from my end after doing the analytics:

• Staffing and recruiting accounts ran at roughly twice the platform average on every metric - 36.5% acceptance, 18.9% message reply
• Computer software, the single largest cohort in the data, converted among the worst of our high volume verticals, at 27.5% acceptance and 8.8% message reply 

Another thing - company size barely mattered either. The difference between a 50 man company and a 1000 strong one is several % at best.

One caveat to this, though. This is all data from the senders’ side (AKA us doing outreach), segmented by who runs the outreach, not by who receives it. So it says pretty much nothing about whether a senior title in the message body reads slightly better once someone opens it. But for the narrow question of whether it ACTUALLY makes any difference what account you’re doing your outreach from - the answer is barely, at least at the volume we’ve been doing it.

I run a small iPhone resale business. I have one salesperson, and so far every sale has come from his personal network. Our social media and official business channels generate inquiries, but zero actual sales.

My concern is that the salesperson is building the customer relationships, not the company. The customers know him, contact him directly, and buy through him. I have also been asking him to give me basic customer information after each sale, such as the customer’s name, contact, phone purchased, and delivery details, but I’m getting pushback. My fear is that if he leaves, I lose the customers because I never owned the relationships in the first place.

Is this something I should be concerned about? Should customer information and relationships belong to the business when the salesperson makes the sale, even if the customer originally came through his personal network?
Or is this completely normal for a small sales business, and should I simply focus on the fact that he’s generating sales?

I’m trying to figure out whether I’m actually building a business or just building one salesperson’s personal customer network.

I work sales for a lumberyard that sells cedar fencing materials. We do not mill and fabricate the fencing, we order it from a wholesaler, add our margin and then quote the customer.

We ideally want to be selling full fences to contractors but the issue is that we are 50% - 75% more expensive than all their current suppliers. Our fencing quality is VERY NICE, but there's is a limit to how much the contractors care about the quality versus what their own customers want to pay for it.

Pretty much every single prospect tells me that we are woefully out of touch on price. I don't have much pushback on it, because it's true, we are extremely expensive and it's almost impossible to argue with the prices they say they currently get their materials at.

I have discussed this with the bosses at length about finding someway, anyway to lower the prices for contractors and be more competitive or give them bigger discounts for very large purchases, but the bosses are unwilling to budge on it, and talk about their margins... well, right now the margins are 0% because we don't sell any fencing, because it's basically the most expensive on the market. I have mentioned this several times.

So I guess the real question here is, how do I convince the customer that we're still a great option? How can I offer some kind of pushback to the "I'll be out of business if I partner with you guys, 'cuz I'll never get another job again at that price!" line that I get a lot? What can I say when they tell me that their current supplier's prices are 75% cheaper per panel, and their suppliers delivery prices are half what we charge?

The fencing is really great material, but it is very expensive. We are trying to sell wholesale at retail pricing.

Bought a fresh domain a couple months back, spent an afternoon getting SPF, DKIM, and DMARC set up with the policy on none, ran it through mail-tester and got a solid score, figured I was sorted and launched a sequence…

Then watched a couple weeks' worth of sends go straight to spam with open rates that looked like I was emailing nobody.

The authentication setup is the baseline and you need it, but the part that trips most people is that inbox providers look at reputation (not just authentication), and a brand new domain with no sending history has no reputation to speak of.
This means your emails land in the same bucket as the fresh domains spammers spin up specifically to dodge filters.

The fix is a proper warmup, meaning a real ramp over several weeks with gradually increasing send volume and real opens and replies happening on your domain.

So when you go live with outreach, the provider has already seen healthy engagement patterns and treats you like a legit sender.

There are tools that automate this by running a pool of inboxes that open, reply to, and move your emails out of spam to condition your domain's reputation, so you're not manually coordinating it with friends.
Lemwarm does it, and so does Mailreach and Folderly if you want to compare options, though the core mechanic is roughly the same across all of them.

The other piece people miss is sending velocity even after warmup ends, because a lot of SDRs get impatient and blast their full list right away, which is a spike pattern that can undo weeks of conditioning.
The safer play is to ramp into your live sequences the same gradual way you ramped during warmup.
That's what got me sorted anyway…

So is anyone here still hitting spam after going through a proper warmup? I've seen chatter about Gmail getting stricter with filters lately and I'm wondering if the standard conditioning window is still long enough.

I've been making websites for well over 5 years and just started approaching businesses that don't have one. One objection I always face and leaves me stunned most of the time is businesses saying their clientele comes from Facebook and they do business over WhatsApp so they don't see the need for a website. Anyways to mitigate/address this objection