The Daily Sales Show

Getting ghosted usually is not the buyer's fault. It is what happens when nobody agreed on a date, an owner, or what happens next.
James Buckley sat down with Hannah Ajikawo, CEO and founder of Revenue Funnel, and Elmer Lopez, founder of Contento. Hannah's opening question resets it: are you being ghosted, or reacting to ambiguity you created?
The exercise worth doing today
Hannah called this hundred-thousand-dollar coaching. Take a sheet of paper, draw a line down the middle, write research on the left and review on the right. Plot every open deal by the language the buyer actually used.
Research sounds like exploring the market, figuring out our needs, a few internal meetings. Those people cannot buy. Review sounds like we shortlisted four vendors, we tried building it ourselves, we tried AI and it did not work. Those are your real deals.
Her recent loss went dark three and a half weeks. She knew it was research, and when she sent a breakup message they said Q4, because they need to try it themselves first.
Elmer's critical event test
Same filter, different angle. No critical event, no close. A merger means two messy CRMs, so a data tool becomes urgent next month. A conference makes a badge scanner urgent. Without one, he questions opening the opportunity at all.
The breakup email that keeps working
Elmer's, and he says it gets him hate mail. Subject line: giving up on this project? Body: I have tried text, email, and calls and cannot reach you, are you giving up on this project? That is the entire message.
He starts a new thread rather than replying into the dead one, because the subject line does the work. James's reaction was the tell. He would not want to be the person who gave up on a project.
Send something with no ask attached
Elmer ties the value send to whatever happens next inside their company. Taking it to finance? Send the ROI calculator. Hannah has sent prospects a competitor comparison including where rivals are genuinely strong, which saves the buyer real work and occasionally costs her the deal.
You are probably not being ghosted
Seventy-two percent of deals are lost to no decision, so you are usually in the majority rather than singled out. Hannah's caveat: many were never deals. Her old manager told her the big logos she kept meeting liked her and learned from her, but were never qualified.
Her closing line: stop asking why you are being ghosted, start asking why the buyer thinks it is fine not to reply.
Resources mentioned
Symbiotic Free GTM templates
Turn your LinkedIn into a revenue funnel with Contento

The Speakers:
James Buckley, Host, Sell Better
Hannah Ajikawo, CEO & Founder, Revenue Funnel
Elmer Lopez, Founder, Contento

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The bottleneck in outbound moved. It is no longer how many touches you can send, it is knowing who to call, why, and what to say when they pick up.
James Buckley sat down with Shara Davoodi, Director of Sales at Nooks, on what actually changed. A poll during the show put sixty-one percent of the audience on the volume play and not getting replies.
Habits worth dropping
Shara went after three. Over-personalization, because value beats trivia and an assumption gives the prospect something to correct, which earns you credit when you get it right. Spray-and-pray dialing and mass email, both finished. And local dialing, matching your number to the prospect's area code, which he says stopped working because buyers recognize the trick. James has had people answer thinking he was their kid's school.
The fourth is the introduction nobody asked for. Beyond what the law requires, get to why you are calling. Shara calls the rest wasted space, and James says the same of email: your name is in the signature, and if they want it they will ask.
Assume you have the right person
Shara's tip for new callers. Do not confirm, assume. If you are wrong they will correct you, and assuming lets you get straight to the reason for the call.
The one-two-three, inside five minutes
Call, then email, then LinkedIn, in the same short window. James has run this as his first touch for fifteen years and does not care which channel replies.
Shara's addition is the most actionable thing here: go look at step one of your sequence. Calls are usually buried at step three or four, so reps do all the other work first, when a connect would have made most of it unnecessary.
He also reframes success. A booked meeting is the goal, but learning one thing is gold: who they are with, when they renew, a feature they dislike.
Multi-thread with your own leadership, not just theirs
At Nooks, managers email managers, and the CEO, CRO, and VP reach into deals where a rep has not made contact. James's read: leaders talk to leaders as peers, which is a different conversation than a rep can have.
Their internal mutual action plan includes an org chart the rep fills in, showing how far up the account they have reached and whether the prospect's own leadership knows the deal is happening.
Talk to the room you are in
Frontline people care about features and their day. Managers care about outcomes. Executives care about numbers. Not in the same conversation. James's version, credited to John Barrows: talk about features and you get routed to people who deal with features, talk about business impact and you get pushed upwards.
Two signals that are already stale
Funding announcements are late. By the time it is public the money has been in the bank for weeks. Shara skips the congratulations and goes at what it implies: the targets just went up.
Promotions are worse. Nobody updates their title the day they are promoted, because every vendor in their category descends the moment they do. Assume they got the job six months ago, which makes congratulations on the new role both stale and obviously automated.
What Nooks uses instead is first-party: job postings, which name the tech a team runs and the call volume they expect.
Resources Shared:
How a Rep Generated $3million in Pipeline
How to Master Prospecting as an AE

The Speakers:
James Buckley, Host, Sell Better
Shara Davoodi, Director of Sales, Nooks

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Thank you to our sponsor: Nooks

Outbound rarely fails because reps are lazy. It fails because nobody told them who to target, what to say, or how often to say it.
Will Aitken ran this one solo, walking through the outbound system he builds for teams. Almost every broken outbound motion fails at one of three points: weak messaging, targeting that is far too broad, and execution with no system behind it.
Your buyer never asked what you do
Ninety-five percent of the market is not buying right now, so leading with your product lands on nobody. Will's fix is to work out the buyer's status quo first. Competitor, doing it themselves, spreadsheet, or outsourced? Each breaks differently, and those breakages are what you reach out about.
His shortcut for any role: every function exists to make the company money or protect the company's money. Work out which, then how that person is measured.
The problem identification chart
Will's core tool, borrowed from Gap Selling, which he notes he can use since he wrote the sequel. Three columns: the business problem, its impact, the root cause.
You fill it in by asking what goes wrong next, repeatedly. His worked example ran from nobody trained to handle a mental health incident, through someone getting hurt, litigation, a PR problem, employees leaving, being unable to hire, to lost revenue. That last link is what a buyer actually cares about.
Three kinds of signal, and they are not the same thing
Catalysts are events that create the problem. Layoffs mean the remaining team cannot maintain policies across twenty systems. An acquisition means two IT environments getting blended into more chaos.
Symptoms are observable directly. A job posting mentioning policy updates across networks tells you they have a capacity problem today.
Intent is someone showing interest, in you or a competitor. Downloads, profile views, an old deal cycle, site visits.
Start with the people who already half know you
Will ranks prospects by familiarity, not fit alone: past users who changed companies, old deal cycles, webinar attendees, anyone connected to your executives or customers. The version that scales is building your list from lookalikes of existing customers. Reach out to Coca-Cola on the back of your PepsiCo work and they do not know you, but they know PepsiCo.
He caps research at five minutes for mid-market, and is blunt about personalisation theatre. You cannot connect someone's interest in hiking to a cybersecurity audit. One good business reason beats a full account brief.
Know your math before you change anything
His example chain: two hundred calls, twenty connects, ten conversations lasting over thirty seconds, three meetings booked, two that showed up qualified.
Each gap points somewhere different. Few connects means contact data, call timing, or spam flagging. Connecting but not converting means your opener is not creating curiosity. Conversations that do not become meetings means the problems you raise are not the ones they have.
Resources mentioned
GAP Prospecting
Problem Identification Chart Template

The Speakers:
Will Aitken, Host, Sell Better

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Prompt engineering was supposed to be the essential new skill. It was not. Where prompts still matter is work you repeat and need right every time.
Jed Mahrle sat down with Kyle Vamvouris, founder and CEO of SalesThread, for part five of the AI Foundations series. Kyle's read on why the hype cooled: the models got very good, and the harness built around them got good enough to absorb sloppy prompting.
So when is a real prompt worth writing?
Only for repeatable work. Kyle's test is to ask what task needs the output right every single time. For one-offs, a sentence or two is fine. He also notes a prompt and a skill are close to the same thing, a skill usually having a prompt at its base.
Stop telling it not to hallucinate
Kyle's most useful reframe. The entire output is a hallucination. There is no mechanical difference between a hallucination and a correct answer, because the model has no concept of either, so "do not hallucinate" does nothing.
His model for why prompt quality still matters: every possible output already exists in the training data, and your prompt selects a region of that space. A vague prompt gets you roughly eighty percent of what you wanted. A refined prompt makes your ideal output one of the candidates the model can pick.
The three parts of a strong prompt
Objective. Give step-by-step instructions, and Kyle's bar is whether a junior colleague could follow them and do a decent job. Focus on the sequence of actions required, and be specific.
Data. Only give it the context it actually needs. Kyle is blunt that more context being better is backwards, which is why the field moved to context engineering. Specify the output structure or you get thirty pages. And include examples of the input, not just the ideal output, so it can pattern match.
Design. He cites the Lost in the Middle research on models prioritising the top and bottom of the context window while instructions in the middle get missed. So put the important things first and last. His structure: objective, rules, steps, examples, output format.
Prompts should be written by leaders and handed to the team
Kyle's strongest opinion. Companies should own the prompts and workflows their teams run on rather than leaving every rep to invent their own.
The workflow behind a 3.2 million view video
Kyle's Instagram case study, and the clearest self-learning loop anyone has shown on this show. Performance data lands in a spreadsheet from the Meta API, no AI involved. One agent analyses it the way he used to by hand. A content strategy agent reads both and Slack messages him each morning with what to film, what to re-record, and what held a video back. A third agent pulls best practices from high performers into a document that feeds back into the strategy agent's context.
His floor moved from a few hundred views to six thousand, then fifty-eight thousand, then one at 3.2 million.
The caveat matters as much as the workflow. He keeps a human on the best-practices step, because AI judges best practices badly and bad ones poison the loop.
Resources mentioned
The Sell Better AI Prompt Library
Free ZoomInfo MCP Access for ChatGPT

The Speakers:
Jed Mahrle, Host, Sell Better
Kyle Vamvouris, Founder, SalesThread

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Ninety percent of people never answer a number they do not recognize. The problem is not your pitch, it is that nobody knows who is calling.
James Buckley sat down with Sara Uy, founder of SellingSara, and Chris Stalnaker of First Orion, on what happens in the two seconds before someone decides not to pick up. Chris's framing: a random ten digit number is about as good as showing up as spam.
Two openers Sara uses every day
The first: hey James, you are totally gonna hate me, this is a cold call. If you give me 27 seconds and what I say is not valuable, I will never call you back again. Her defence is that people who hate it have not tried it, and that it only works if your tone is confident.
The second: hey Chris, it is Sara over at SellingSara, what did I catch you in the middle of? Most people answer before they think, then ask how they know her, which is the opening. Even a hang-up is a win if you learned they were walking the dog, because that is your reference next time.
Her deadline for both is five to seven seconds to sound like a person, not a bot.
The voicemail argument
Chris does not leave them, because nobody listens. Sara leaves them because nobody listens and everybody reads the transcription. She reads every one she gets.
Hers is built for that: there is absolutely no need to call me back, but I am sending you a LinkedIn video right now so you can reply there. The voicemail is not a request, it is her name in front of them plus a reason to look elsewhere.
James stopped leaving his phone number years ago, credits John Barrows for it, and instead names the email he is about to send, sometimes with the subject line, so the reply comes back by email.
Nine before nine, five after five
Sara's timing rule. Call your nine hottest leads before 9am and your five hottest after 5pm, and yes, call the same person twice in a day. Her record on the morning block is seven pickups, set at Pareto. Nobody is at their desk yet and nothing has gone wrong yet. She has caught people in the coffee queue and sent a gift card after. Chris runs Tuesdays and Thursdays and avoids evenings.
More is the answer, but only up to a point
Sara's read: at ten to twenty dials a day, your manager is right. At ninety, pick the twenty you most want and hyper-personalise those, and let the other seventy carry the volume. Chris signed the largest contract of his career on roughly his 270th dial of the day.
What to do about AI call screening
Sara: get your name and company out in the first few words, because that is all the screen shows. Chris's counterintuitive one: if you have branded calling, say nothing at all, because screening needs something to transcribe and silence lets the branded display take precedence.
More answers does not mean more sales
Chris's own caveat on his category, and the most interesting thing he said. Answer rates can fall while conversation length, engagement, and conversion all rise, because identifying yourself properly means the people who actually want to talk are the ones picking up.

The Speakers:
James Buckley, Host, Sell Better
Sara Uy, Founder, Selling Sara
Chris Stalnaker, Senior Sales Executive, First Orion

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Thank you to our sponsor: First Orion