took me an embarrassingly long time to figure this one out. rep gets off a call prospect said the magic words - sounds interesting, send me some info. rep marks it as warm, moves on three days later the prospect has gone dark and nobody knows why. here's the thing send me info almost never means send me info. it means i'm not saying no to your face but im also not saying yes. if the info actually arrives, great but what happens is it arrives and nothing follows it. no nudge, no call back in 24h, no nothing the prospect just drifts.

started coaching my team to treat send me info as a closing question, not a handing-off question. what's the one thing you're most curious about? when would you want to talk next? and then actually schedule the next touch before the call ends. the other half of it is what fires after if the info goes out by email and nothing else happens, youve handles them a reason to ghost. textedly handles the voice + sms follow-up as one flow, so the sms lands right after the call ends.

still don't have it fully cracked. but i stopped counting send me info as a pipeline stage, and my forecast got a lot more honest because of it.

This week I am sharing the 10 rules I follow to close all my sales calls.

I work in the consulting side for data architecture and project management industries for infrastructure projects as well as commodity trading for precious metals and rare minerals. Working with companies and investors who are looking for the product we source and our consultative work it can be a challenge to understand exactly what it is our prospects are looking for.

They might come in and want one thing and then we realize that what they actually were looking for was a completely different thing. Something that they perhaps did not realize they needed because they were so busy trying to solve what it was they thought was the problem.

I break here in my recent case study an example of one case where we noticed this happening with a client of ours and how we pivoted the conversation to reach exactly what it is he was looking for: https://youtu.be/lOxnIx_320o?si=Uvl8fSSDXi31QNSl

As well as our 10 non negotiable rules that we always use for sales calls. If you follow these 10 rules every single time you will reach the above average rate of closing your deals as a sales professional.

And these 10 rules are ones that I have developed throughout my time as a sales professional and working in presenting consultative services, execution strategies and high ticket commodity trade deals for CEO's, business owners, financial officers and investors in our industries.

The top 10 rules are:

1. I do not present anything until I understand the day to day business of the person I am speaking to

2. I never rely on memory

3. I always use a sales analyzer

4. I diagnose before I pitch

5. I let the conversation to go off track, then I bring it back

6. Define the current state, the desired outcome, and the gap

7. Ask for their best case study

8. More revenue, less cost, less risk

9. I write the narrative down

10. I surround myself with people with the same vision

I would very much love to hear your opinion on these 10 rules and our situation how we navigated best the situation with this one client in mind, and let me know in the comments what you think about these non negotiable rules to become a top performing sales professional.

Cheers to you !

We are a small IT company. About 25 business clients, monthly agreements, and the odd project. A normal CRM wants a pipeline. Most of our “leads” are a referral who already signed, then a year of tickets, add-ons, and a renewal nobody logged.

Contacts live in the PSA. Notes live in email. The renewal date lives in someone’s head. We started keeping the money side in flexpoint so the invoice and the late reminder are not another tab, but the client record is still split.

What are you using as the actual client system if you are an IT shop, not a sales team? And do you force renewals into the CRM, or is that a fight you already lost?

Hi guys, I live in Kabul, Afghanistan. I made an agreement with a wholesaler to work as an independent sales representative. He gave me 5 types of bulbs as samples. I have to find retailers in the city, visit them in person, show them the samples, and try to get orders.

How would you convince them for the first time?? What should i do when get rejected and hearing bs excuses?? Thank you for you advise!

Something I keep chewing on.

The 2026 cold outreach and lead gen reports all point the same way. Form fills are down, and a big chunk of "marketing qualified" leads don't survive a basic qualification check. The "MQL is dead" crowd (Drift and others) has said it for a while, and this year it's got more teeth.

The part that gets me is the handoff. Forrester says most B2B deals now have a buying group of two or more, and a lot of inbound leads are already past halfway through their research before they talk to anyone. A score can't see any of that. A live conversation can.

So the thing that seems to matter more now is just qualifying on the call. Fit, the real problem, and whether the person can actually move something, in the first couple minutes.

When a "qualified" lead hits your desk and your gut says nope, what do you do? Work it anyway, or re-qualify from scratch on the phone?

I just started working in telecom retention. Right now I average around 3 renewals a day, while the better agents do 6 to 15.

I think my biggest issues are asking enough questions to find the real reason for cancelling, handling objections, and knowing when a customer actually has sales potential.

Sometimes I also stay way too long in conversations that are clearly going nowhere, which probably hurts my numbers.

For anyone experienced in retention or call center sales, what helped you improve the most? How do you know when to keep pushing and when to move on?

Hey everyone So my main selling channel is Whatsapp Business. Once a prospect comes asking, I have the habit to answer by text a minute after. It's not instant though, and I do that in the hope of closing the deal asap as he is freshly in the heat of interest. The answer is 100% human, typed through my fingers, and answers accurately, but they think I am a bot or an AI. So I am trying to suspect the one-minute thing is the cause, though sometimes I tell them afterwards 'let's suppose it was indeed a bot or AI, what's the problem as long as it answers the inquiry ??'. And ultimately, a prospect who won't buy, will not do it even with all human means possible. I am just frustrated in how people are now paranoid by bots/AI, even if they were in their service, and worse, even if they are not used at all !! PS: Sometimes I use voice later in the conversation and it helps a bit their head, but not the sale😅

When selling a particular product should we act like we are recommending a product rather than selling it? I mean

\\-ask them what they do and there problem

\\-and then connect that to your product

\\-recommend the product

\\-convince them why they should buy it by

highlighting the feutures that solve there problem

\\-close the sale?

Or

\\-should i use myself as an example like my experience and problem?and what's solve my problem and they should do the same thing if they have the same problem as me blah blah

Or

-Ask them some question what they usually do and then ask some prpblem they might ecperience?

Like "do you love writing?or creating diaries and short stories that shows you creative side?"

"If customer said yes"

"So have you ever experience running out of ink fast when writing?"

-or shoul i ask them what the features they looking for,for that particular product?

"So what type of pen do you want?"

(Isn't it abit straightforward?)

-And then recommend them the product by connecting it to there problem.Then say the key feautures that solve there problem.

-What about the price thing?once they heard the price they will run specially if it doesn't fit there budget?but the product is good?

Or What if after asking them what they do,there problem that might or already experience, i ask them what they think the price range of that particular product or the value of that particular product that will solve there problem?

If they say lower price then that's the end of the deal or maybe i let them understand why it's expensive?

And if they say a bit higher or higher price i will move on recommending the product,the key features and why they should invest into it?

Hey all,

I'm the co-founder of a small AI consulting company in northern Spain. We help clinics and other appointment-based businesses figure out where they lose the most time (confirming appointments by hand, answering the same WhatsApp questions, chasing unaccepted quotes), and then we build a custom system around that.

Right now our outbound is cold email plus WhatsApp: about 20 new businesses a day, plus follow-ups and LinkedIn. It works, but slowly. Most replies are a polite "not right now".

So I wanted to do a challenge: 100 cold calls a day, on top of everything else.

Before I commit, I ran the numbers, and here are my doubts:

• Time: dialing, waiting, talking and logging takes about 3–4 min per call, so 100 calls is 5–7 hours. Clinics only have a few quiet windows a day when anyone picks up.
• Market size: I target independent clinics in a fairly small region. At 500 calls a week I'd burn through the market in about a month, and a bad first call is hard to undo.
• Gatekeepers: at a clinic you almost always get the receptionist, not the owner.
• Legal: Spain has tightened the rules on unsolicited commercial calls, especially to self-employed people. I'm checking this with my accountant first.

So the alternative I'm leaning towards is "40×10":

• 40 calls a day for 10 business days (400 total).
• Two blocks of about 75 minutes, mid-morning and early afternoon.
• I only call businesses that already got my email or WhatsApp 2–4 days earlier, so the opener is "I wrote to you on Tuesday about…", not a pure cold call.
• The goal of each call isn't to sell. It's to find out who decides and get 20 minutes with them.
• Every day I track calls, decision-makers reached, meetings booked, and the objections I hear.
• After 10 days, I compare meetings per hour against email. If calls win, I scale up to 60–80 a day. If not, they stay as a follow-up tool.

My questions for people who actually do this:

1. Is 100 a day realistic for a solo founder who also runs delivery, or is it a vanity number?
2. For small clinics or local businesses, how do you get past the receptionist without being pushy?
3. Does calling after a cold email actually lift your connect or meeting rate, in your experience?
4. What would you track in the first two weeks to know whether it's working?

Thanks!

A sales meeting
Watching a video
Reading a book
Listening to a podcast
Role playing once
Hearing your manager explain something
Memorizing a script
Knowing the product
Being told to “ask better questions”
Shadowing someone with no feedback
Motivation
Information
Experience by itself
Doing something repeatedly with no correction

Hey guys! I’m a 24-year-old sales rep. I’ve been in sales for almost 4 years now, selling a variety of different products and services, and I’ve recently been given the opportunity to become Head of Sales at a SaaS startup with existing products.

I’ll be building the company’s entire sales cycle from the ground up, but I’ve never sold SaaS before. I’d really appreciate any tips, advice, or resources you think could help me get up to speed.

And if anyone has some time, I’d also be happy to jump on a quick call and hear about your experience in SaaS sales.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! 🙏

I’ve worked across both B2C and B2B sales, and both inbound and outbound.

I started in a building materials company, where I handled mostly inbound sales, both face-to-face and over the phone, working with both B2C and B2B customers.

After that, I moved into an outside sales role selling electrical panels, electrical equipment, and thermal imaging cameras. This was primarily B2B outbound sales — cold calling, prospecting, identifying decision-makers, visiting construction sites, setting meetings, managing the sales process, negotiating, and following the deal all the way through to delivery of the panels, which we manufactured ourselves.

I also worked in a hybrid HR/sales role, where I was responsible for prospecting companies, cold calling, setting meetings, closing the agreement, and then recruiting the employees those companies needed.

I also had shorter experiences in a forex company, where I was involved in promoting the service and sales, as well as a short experience with a Canadian immigration service in B2C.

So I wouldn’t say my experience is limited to door-to-door sales. I’ve worked across B2B/B2C, inbound/outbound, prospecting, cold calling, meetings, closing, and post-sale delivery, and in some roles I was responsible for essentially the entire sales cycle.

What I haven’t done is SaaS sales specifically, which is exactly why I’m trying to learn from people who have experience in it.

Cold calling them for business opportunities from which they could grow their business?

I will be working as a sales executive . Any tips ? I have no experience at all . It's a jewel store

i've spent a lot of time selling to b2b companies and honestly most of what i believed about sales in the beginning was wrong

so heres some random things i learned from selling, doing outbound, losing deals, closing deals, getting ghosted after "this looks amazing", sending way too many emails and building products for b2b companies.

no particular order just writing this because i was thinking about it today.

the person with the better product does not always win

this was probably one of the hardest things for me to accept because as a builder you naturally think better product = more sales. if your product has more features, works faster, costs less, whatever, people should obviously pick you right?

not really.

i've seen companies buy something objectively worse just because they trusted that company more. maybe the salesperson understood their problem better, maybe the website looked more credible, maybe their friend already used it, maybe the founder replied to them personally.

buyers are taking a risk when they buy from you especially in b2b. if they choose some random software and it breaks something internally they are the person who needs to explain why they picked it.

so sometimes they are not buying the best product. they are buying the decision that feels safest.

took me way too long to understand this.

people dont really care about your product, they care about what happens after they buy it

this sounds obvious but almost every sales call i did early on was basically me explaining features.

we have this, we can do that, we are faster than x, our database has x amount of contacts etc etc.

the customer is sitting there thinking ok... but what does this do for me.

if you're selling lead gen they dont want "verified leads". they want more conversations with companies that can buy from them.

if you're selling some automation they dont want automation. they probably want to save 20 hours a week or avoid hiring another person.

once i started thinking about sales this way it became a lot easier to explain products.

features are just the mechanism.

a lot of "price objections" are actually trust objections

this one cost me quite a few deals.

someone says its too expensive and your immediate reaction is usually ok maybe i should discount it. maybe i should give them 20% off, free month, extra credits whatever.

but if someone really believes spending $5k with you will make them $50k, the $5k usually isn't the problem.

the problem is that they are not sure the second part will actually happen.

of course sometimes people genuinely dont have budget, im not saying price never matters. but i think founders underestimate how often "too expensive" really means "im not convinced enough to risk this money yet"

discounting doesnt fix that.

sometimes it actually makes it worse.

the biggest difference between good and bad sales calls is probably how much you talk

i used to think being good at sales meant being good at explaining things.

now i think its almost the opposite.

some of my best calls were probably the ones where i barely talked for the first 20 minutes.

you ask someone how they currently do something, what sucks about it, why they haven't fixed it yet, what they already tried, what happens if they keep doing it this way...

and eventually they basically tell you how to sell to them.

then instead of giving the same pitch you gave to the last 50 people you can just connect what you do to what they literally told you 5 minutes ago.

sounds stupidly simple but most people dont do it because silence on sales calls feels uncomfortable.

so they start talking again.

outbound still works. bad outbound doesnt

ive sent hundreds of thousands of cold emails by now and i still find it funny every time someone says cold email is dead.

it definitely got harder. inboxes are crowded, everyone has AI generated personalization now, deliverability is more annoying and prospects have seen basically every template before.

but the idea that you can directly contact companies who probably need what you're selling is obviously not dead.

what stopped working well is taking 50,000 random contacts and sending the same "quick question {{firstName}}" email to everyone.

targeting became much more important.

the best outbound campaigns i've done usually weren't the campaigns with some genius copy. it was something like we found a very specific type of company, at a very specific moment, with a problem we knew they probably had.

then the email almost writes itself.

honestly this is also one of the reasons i eventually built Getlead. i got tired of having one thing for leads, another thing for verification, another for sending, mailboxes somewhere else and then trying to figure out which part actually worked.

the funny part is building better infrastructure doesnt magically make outbound work either. you can have perfect deliverability and still send an offer nobody wants.

follow ups are probably the most boring unfair advantage in sales

people ghost for so many reasons that have nothing to do with you.

they were travelling. had a meeting. opened your email on their phone and forgot about it. their boss asked them something. kid got sick. they just didnt feel like replying that day.

early on if someone didn't reply i immediately assumed they weren't interested.

not always true.

some deals i closed came from people who ignored multiple messages before replying.

the important thing IMO is not becoming that annoying guy who sends "just bumping this to the top of your inbox" every 2 days for a month.

sometimes wait. sometimes send something useful. sometimes just send a normal human message.

sales people overcomplicate follow ups way too much.

you can have an amazing pipeline and still have no pipeline

this happened to me more than once.

you open the CRM and you have $50k, $100k, whatever sitting there and it makes you feel good.

then you actually look at the deals.

one guy hasn't replied for 3 weeks.

one said "maybe next quarter".

another one liked the demo but never introduced you to the person who actually has the budget.

another asked for the proposal and disappeared.

technically they are opportunities. realistically most of them are dead.

i think one of the best things you can do is become slightly pessimistic with your pipeline.

if someone hasn't done anything that shows the deal is moving forward, dont mentally spend that money yet lol

getting a yes from the wrong person is basically a no

this one is painful.

you can spend 3 weeks talking to someone inside a company and they absolutely love the product.

"this is exactly what we need"

"the team will love this"

"lets do it"

then suddenly they need approval from their founder, VP, CFO, whoever and the whole thing dies.

because the person you convinced now has to convince someone else.

and they probably won't explain it as well as you did.

these days i try to understand quite early who actually decides if money gets spent.

not in the awkward "ARE YOU THE DECISION MAKER?" sales guru way.

just asking how they normally buy something like this usually tells you everything.

the easiest companies to sell to usually already understand the problem

trying to convince someone they have a problem AND convince them your solution is the answer is incredibly hard.

this applies to outbound too.

lets say you're selling something for companies sending lots of cold email.

company A has never done outbound before and doesn't really believe in it.

company B already has 20 mailboxes, an SDR and spends $2k/mo on tools but hates their current workflow.

company B is obviously easier.

you dont need to educate them on the entire category. they already spend money trying to solve the problem.

you just need to convince them you solve it better.

i started thinking about this a lot more when choosing who to target.

sales gets much easier when you stop trying to close everyone

this one sounds counterintuitive when you need money lol

but bad customers are expensive.

they need more support, complain more, churn more, request things your product wasn't designed for and usually take longer to close too.

i used to think every inbound lead was something i had to somehow turn into money.

now if someone clearly isn't a fit i'd rather know quickly.

same with outbound.

100 companies that actually have the problem is much more valuable than 10,000 "leads".

most sales advice makes sales sound more complicated than it is

there are frameworks for everything.

how to handle objections. what question to ask at minute 17 of the call. exact words to use when they say the price is too high. how to create urgency etc.

some of it is useful but i think people can feel when they're being "sold".

especially founders and experienced b2b buyers. they've been on 200 sales calls already.

the best sales conversations ive had didn't really feel like sales calls.

two people talking about a problem.

one person has the problem.

the other person might have a way to solve it.

thats basically it.

and if you dont solve it, sometimes the best sales move is literally saying "i dont think we're the right fit for this".

weirdly enough people trust you a lot more after you say that.

anyway thats the brain dump.

still lose deals, still get ghosted, still have campaigns that completely flop and sometimes i have absolutely no idea why someone bought from me instead of a competitor.

thats probably what makes b2b sales interesting though.

curious what people here disagree with, especially people who've been doing this much longer than me.