Fuck HS2

... they did reschedule though which was nice of them after i sat there for 10 minutes waiting.

Oh the life of a salesmanperson.

I spent my day really trying to perfect my opener/hook for cold calls. I don’t seem to have too big a problem opening a cold call and getting the prospect to speak with me, but I’m forever unable to really home in on a pain for the prospect.

I’ve decided to experiment with Benjamin Dennehy’s approach, which is to let them know it’s a cold call and they can hang up if they want. This bit’s fine. I’ve tested it before and it works if it’s short and succinct (sometimes I waffled way too much), and it also gets the dick’eads off the phone quicker (Yeah, that’s right, I didn’t want to speak to you either, twat!).

It’s the bit afterwards that’s interesting. It’s the framing around using 3 trigger and symptom pairs. The trigger is the emotive word you use to label how other prospects feel about the symptom (or situation) that similar personas experience. Do this 3 times, with the trigger word getting stronger each time (Frustrated —> Worried —> Irritated), and hopefully you’ve painted a good enough picture of the world they live in to ask for another few minutes to drill into what they have tried, why it didn’t work and if they actually want to fix this problem enough to spend some money on it and give me a commission check.

If not, CYA. Move on to the next.

I interviewed 3 other team members to pull out how they feel about the symptoms that would encourage prospects/customers to use us. Then I ran those interview transcripts from Fathom, along with a link to the original YouTube video, through Claude to help me come up with this line for the CEO, the COO and the CTO.

Going to interview our only real customer tomorrow as well to try to understand and refine this further, and hopefully I’ll be good to smash the phones again towards the end of the week.

Bit of a fuck-up today. My new domain is less than 2 weeks old and I accidentally blasted emails to 100 people within 1 hour, 3 every minute, because I hadn’t calibrated HubSpot’s sending limits correctly for my new domain. 5% of the emails got flagged as spam, which might fuck me forever… Fingers crossed I can climb out of the deliverability cesspit I may have just landed our company in for all eternity.

Had to grab a 4-hour train to Manchester today. This would have been fine if I could have actually done some fucking work on the train. But the signal cut out constantly, and it took me 3.5 hours of refreshing and clicking back into a Fathom interview to watch a 50-minute call because I haven’t paid for premium and couldn’t download it.

I could literally strangle the people who thought HS2 was a better idea than just getting good wifi on trains. Trains go fucking fast if you can dial in and just get work done.

They should put Starlink on the trains and install call booths so I can keep ripping dials while travelling. That was the thing about HS2. It was just a vanity project, because if you really want to get to Manchester quicker, you’d hire a helicopter for whatever the hell they end up charging for that train ticket. And frankly, no one wants to stop in Birmingham, so what a total waste of £100bn that’s been.

Not to mention, no one has heard from our CEO since Thursday last week.