I started my first cold-calling job in 2018 and I was awful at it. So I got in earlier and left later than everyone else, until I was the best on the team. Within a year I was an AE. I made President's Club twice, and in my third year closed a six-figure deal, the biggest the company had ever done.
After four years I left to build my own business and raised over £6m. Now, after a break, I'm back in sales as a founding AE.
Sales has changed. I have far more information than I used to and less time to make sense of it, and AI gives me the answer before I've thought it through. This is where I slow down and write it up: what happened today, what I learned, and what I'd do differently. Mostly it's for me, as a record of what we've done.
It’s a tough market out there in the sales trenches, to be honest. Every day is an uphill battle just for me to even click Start Calls on Nooks.
If it wasn’t so fucking easy to go from one call to the next, I’d probably procrastinate even further and barely make a dial. The fact it will make 20 dials without me even realizing while I’m chatting to Claude and doing some other work is excellent. It’s just a startled tone in my voice when I have to quickly get back to the tab and find the name of who I’m calling, and try and remember what I wanted to say that fucks me up.
It’s really hard to stay and focus on what you want to say when you’re making cold calls and watching your computer dial. It’s literally the modern-day equivalent of watching paint dry.
That said, there was a bit of positivity today because this afternoon I started making cold calls to the US and did about 50. It’s definitely a tougher market to book a meeting, and people really don’t answer their phones, but I had a few good conversations. I feel like it will give me better feedback to perfect my pitch because they just want to hear the pitch and, yes or no, hang up.
Tested messaging to both the IT and the Ops person today. Messaging just lands better with IT. Surprisingly they are far more open to a conversation than Ops are. Makes sense tbh, I have been in ops and always find cold callers very annoying when they are bad. And I’m not any good still. Way too rusty.
I’m 5 weeks into my new job as founding AE at a startup. We’ve got 2 paying customers and a half-baked product that was supposed to be one thing, but now we’re testing lots of different things, as it feels like everyone has moved into the market for what we were originally selling.