Cold calls come with objections. Guaranteed.
So stop hoping they won’t show up. Expect them.
That shift alone keeps your heart rate down and stops the panic reflex that wrecks most calls:
voice shoots up, pace accelerates, you ramble, or you tap out early.
Expecting the objection flips the script. Y...
Two forces make sales–marketing alignment more urgent than any time in my career:
1. Outbound is harder than ever.
Noise is high. Connect rates are low(er). Pure hustle isn’t enough.
2. AI is everywhere.
Your competitors are wiring AI into targeting, enrichment, routing, scoring, messaging, and exec...
I read Adam Grant’s Give and Take around 2015, a few years into running my consulting business.
I was wrestling with a basic question:
How much should I give away?
Share freely on LinkedIn? Help anyone who asked? Or guard the “secret sauce” and only open the vault for paying clients?
My instinct was...
I’m terrible at shutting my brain off. But every time I do, the big ideas show up or the big course-corrections become obvious.
The grind tricks you into thinking you’re being productive. Step away long enough and two things surface fast:
- You’ve been burning cycles on low-value work.
- Or there’s ...
“It depends.”
A phrase we should hear more often from advisors, consultants, and colleagues.
There’s no universal fix for every business problem. If someone claims there is, they don’t understand how business actually works.
Should you adopt MEDDICC? It depends.
Should account managers sell back...
Most teams skip one of the most valuable habits in sales: the post-deal debrief.
Not just for losses — for every deal.
Ask:
- Why did we win?
- Why did we negotiate?
- Why did it take so long to close?
- Why did we lose?
When you deconstruct deals, you:
- Raise win rates
- Speed up cycles
- Level ...
Sales isn’t complicated.
It’s just often done backwards.
Most reps rush to pitch before they understand the problem.
Slow down.
Dig in. Ask until you fully grasp what’s broken and what it’s costing them.
Then restate it in plain language:
“It sounds like…. Did I get that right?”
Only after that...
Paul Olean taught me a lot early in my career.
Some lessons were about marketing. Some about sales.
But the best ones were about leadership.
Here’s one I’ve carried with me ever since:
If you’re the employee — don’t just bring your boss a problem.
Think it through. Bring ideas for how to fix it.
The greatest asset to any cold caller is…
(sorry, couldn’t resist the dramatic pause)
Research.
Drop a nugget of insight in the first 10–20 seconds and suddenly you’re not “another random caller.” You’re the interesting one.
The best teams either:
- Dig it up themselves and keep it handy (in a ...
AI can send emails.
It can’t save you from your own reply-blackhole.
If you’re using AI to prospect, you need a bulletproof reply-monitoring process.
Speed matters more than most teams think:
- Positive replies: Hit fast → book more meetings.
- Negative replies: Hit fast → win referrals, occasion ...
If you’re a frontline manager, you probably feel buried under rep questions. Most days. Instead of coaching or strategy, you’re stuck in reaction mode.
Reps can be lazy (sorry, reps). When they don’t know something, their first instinct is to ask you.Â
Not to think. Not to check the playbook. Not ...
Culture is defined by how you behave in hard times.
You say you value transparency, then cancel the town hall when numbers drop.
You say positivity matters, then protect the top performer who poisons the team.
You say you don’t discount, then slash prices in Q4 to hit the board target.
Values do...
Real GTM Results. Not Just Theories.
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