The Daily Sales Show

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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One discovery call for six stakeholders is why deals stall. The CFO wants ROI, the end user wants ease of use, and somebody leaves feeling unheard.
James Buckley sat down with Mor Assouline, founder of Demo to Close, and Richard Smith, head of growth at MySalesCoach. Richard is working a five thousand pound deal with six people involved, whose combined time already costs more than the deal is worth. That is the shape of buying now, and not only in enterprise.
Multithreading starts before the first call, not after
Richard's argument is that sellers are too passive, waiting for the prospect to volunteer names. Instead, look at your recent deals, work out which roles get pulled in, and name those roles in your first meeting. Prospects often do not know who they should involve. Mor works the pattern side: if VP of Sales deals reliably loop in a CRO and a head of enablement, find those people on LinkedIn beforehand.
The stakeholder you ignore is the one who stalls the deal
Richard had a deal with the VP of Sales, the CEO, and two sales managers all bought in on quota attainment and pipeline. They added their HR lead to a call and he assumed senior buy-in was enough. Momentum died. His champion later told him she felt unheard: she cared about staff retention and career development, not revenue. The budget was also hers. He got back on a call, admitted he had got it wrong, and saved it.
The VAC framework
Mor's model for whether a deal will close. Visibility, do you know who the stakeholders are and when they enter. Awareness, do they know about the problem, the initiative, and the conversation. Consensus, do they agree it is a problem, worth solving, worth solving now, and a priority against everything else. His question for testing that last part: this is probably not the only thing on your plate, so what else could delay it?
Ask for one-on-ones before the group call
Richard's least intuitive advice, and he says it works about seventy percent of the time. When a champion offers to put five people on a call, slow down and ask to speak with each of them first, framed as protecting their colleagues from a call where they feel unheard. Then build a slide naming what each person cares about.
The blind spot most sellers never sell against
Mor calls it the FUD matrix. Most sellers only sell against the problem list and never address fear, uncertainty, and doubt. He builds one per buying scenario, because someone moving off twenty years of spreadsheets worries about migrating the data, while someone switching vendors worries about feature parity and price. Richard's version: what stops deals is rarely a preference for the status quo, it is the fear of being the person who picked wrong.

Resources mentioned
Mor's 4D Discovery Course
80 discovery questions

The Speakers:
James Buckley, Host, Sell Better
Mor Assouline, Founder, Demo to Close
Richard Smith, Head of Growth, MySalesCoach

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Thank you to our sponsor: 1up.AI, Aligned, First Orion

Building an SDR process is the easy part. Getting reps to follow it after onboarding ends and the manager stops watching is where most programs fall apart.
Will Aitken sat down with David Wilkins, founder of SDR Leaders Global, and Ahmed Abdel-Raouf, head of sales development at Quantcast, to work through the outbound side specifically. Most teams have a methodology for discovery and demos. Almost nobody has documented what happens before a prospect enters the funnel.
Map the process before you buy another tool
David asks the same question at SDR Leaders meetups worldwide: has anyone mapped lead to closed revenue end to end? Very few hands go up. Meanwhile teams keep bolting tech onto processes that were never mapped. Map it first and you may need fewer tools, not more.
Where to start when there is no process at all
Ahmed built the Quantcast function from nothing 18 months ago. His first 30 days were observation: shadowing AE calls, auditing which tools actually had adoption, logging the objections that kept recurring. Then ICP clarity, messaging architecture, operational infrastructure with ops, the playbook, and measurement. In that order.
How prescriptive a playbook should be
Ahmed's runs about 70 slides and is deliberately mixed. Prescriptive where it helps, with a worked email broken into personalization, value, and CTA. It also teaches reps where to find personalization worth using: what someone follows or engages with, not tenure or a new role, which he says have been done to death since COVID. David's caveat is that playbooks go stale. Treat it as a living document with real versions.
Give reps the lane, not the script
David's framing is bowling bumpers. Reps get the lane, leaders are the rails. He pointed to a team running an "F-up page" where reps document what went wrong so everyone can learn from it. Ahmed's split is 20 percent learning, 80 percent falling on your face. His first cohort worked a conference booth on day three.
Coach the behavior, not the outcome
Ninety minutes every Thursday, with the content set by the numbers instead of a curriculum. Reply rate dips and it becomes a messaging workshop. Talk time drops and it becomes an objection gauntlet. Ahmed watches talk time over connect rate and reply rate over open rate, because high open with low reply means the subject lines work and the message does not. He enforces a call minimum for a statistical reason: ten calls and ten connects is an outlier, not a 100 percent connect rate.
He also makes the case for reading what a dashboard cannot show. A top performer's numbers slid for weeks and formal check-ins got nowhere, so he took her for a walk instead. Her grandmother had been in hospital for a month. He gave her the rest of the week off and she finished the quarter around 110 percent.
On hiring
Ahmed screens for curiosity over experience and treats three years as an SDR as a flag worth asking about. His best hires have come out of retail and hospitality. His current top performer came from the Apple Store with no sales background and moves into an AE seat in July. David's rule from his Snowflake days: if there's doubt, there's no doubt.
Resources mentioned
Gong's cheat sheet on 5 reasons deals slip
SDR Leaders Global, communities across EMEA, North America, and APAC

The Speakers:
Will Aitken, Host, Sell Better
David Wilkins, Founder, SDR Leaders Global
Ahmed Abdel-Raouf, Head of Sales Development, Quantcast

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Thank you to our sponsor: Gong

Sequences fail when every touch feels like a copy-paste template with no connecting thread.
Buyers don't respond to volume, they respond to relevance and a message that feels like it was written for them.
This session teaches a repeatable system for building cadences that match how buyers actually decide today. AI handles the research, variation, and follow-up drafts, you stay in control of the narrative.
You'll walk through the cadence blueprint live, from touch count and channel roles to the frameworks that keep each step distinct. Every touch gets a job: add new value, new proof, or a new angle.
You'll Learn:
A cadence blueprint built for today's buyer, including touch count and channel role
3 to 5 email frameworks you can plug into any sequence and use AI to generate variations
How to keep follow-ups from sounding automated and what to do when prospects go quiet

The Speakers:
Jed Mahrle and Megan Huston
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Reps don't get stuck at the gatekeeper because of what they say, they get stuck because of how they sound. In the first five seconds, gatekeepers run an automatic screen, and most sales openers trigger it immediately.
Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson built an outsourced sales agency on a phone-first, psychology-led approach, and their whole method is designed to make reps sound nothing like a typical cold caller. They treat the gatekeeper not as an obstacle, but as a puzzle to solve.
In this session, they broke down the exact language, tone shifts, and pattern interrupts that flip the gatekeeper dynamic, including what to say when you're asked "what's this about?" and how to turn a "they're not available" into useful org intel.
Learn how to navigate past the gatekeeper into the wrong person, and how to use calls, email, and LinkedIn together to eventually reach the right DM.
You'll Learn:
The psychology behind gatekeeper screening and why standard openers get reps shut down immediately
Pattern interrupt scripts and tone tactics that create space for a real conversation
How to map the org through the gatekeeper call and navigate to the actual decision-maker

The Speakers:
Sara Uy, Jack Frimston and Zac Thompson
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Thank you to our sponsors: First Orion, Gong, Aligned and Prospeo