Tell your boss I said "what's up?"

Assume Your Buyer Knows What They Want

I’ve sat on both sides of the phone. Both as a seller and a buyer. I’ll tell you what’s more frustrating than anything else:

When I have to do the selling FOR the seller.

The only time you should be educating a prospect is either:

a. You’re selling completely novel tech - something that’s brand new to the industry.

b. They ask you a specific technical question.

If you’re selling to people who genuinely aren’t picking up what you’re putting down - then chances are you’re talking to the wrong people. (Or your pitch is completely broken)

Get Straight To The Point

“My services reduced a legal clients cost-per-case-closed by 50% last month, want to hear how?” s/o David Caradjov 

“Our creators earned over $1.2M last month, want to hear how?” s/o Beehiiv

Lead with value instead of Salesperson Fluff™️ and, at the very least, immediately improve your conversation quality.

Happy Easter Monday - get out there and go sell something.

The Open: Get straight to it.

The Value Prop: Advocate for yourself - no one will do it for you.

Adding Value: The Deep Dive on Clay.

The Close: The best newsletter for under 20 people.

Being An Advocate for Yourself

When I think of common threads between the most elite salespeople I’ve ever worked with, one of the things that sticks out is that they’re their own top advocates.

First off let’s define what doesn’t count as advocating for yourself:

• Making someone else look bad based on your own accomplishments

• Constantly shouting your wins from the rooftops

• Placing yourself above anyone else

That last one is so important - I vividly remember working on Wall Street working across someone who would eventually become one of my good friends and hearing them say - on a cold call mind you:

“I don’t care if you were the president of the god damn United States, I won’t be spoken to that way”

He ended up closing that deal for 6 figures.

Do I recommend you use that approach in your cold calls? No.

But there’s a reason it worked.

Leveling the playing field

Salespeople have the hardest job in the corporate world and somehow, inexplicably, we’re still widely considered dishonest, shady, unscrupulous degenerates.

(maybe we stop using Wolf of Wall Street quotes/scenes for a bit? maybe?)

The truth is that salespeople:

• Have zero job security.

• Are pigeon-holed into creating revenue for the company

• Have zero control over marketing/product

• Work longer hours than almost everyone else at the company - including executives and management.

Not only are we doomed to push the boulder up the mountain forever in all the above categories, we’re pushing multiple boulders concurrently.

And yet, we f***ing love it.

Here’s what being an advocate for yourself should look like:

• Telling your prospect that “Yeah, it’s a cold call and if you give me 90 seconds - this will be, at the very least, the most insightful call you’ll get this week”

• Asking a prospect that’s ghosting you to “respect your time, just as you respected theirs”

• Instead of loathing your 1:1s with your manager - Make sure you come to each one with a plan for growth and an area for feedback. This plays well long term.

• This one a lot of us learn the hard way but I really can’t stress this enough. Document everything. Sales notes, manager feedback, accomplishments, specific numbers, everything. Keep it all in a place where you can call on it if you need to.

Most importantly: In every single conversation you have - place yourself on the same level as the person you’re speaking to. Trust me, from experience, no one will do that for you.

Clay is a game changer - and this isn’t a paid ad.

I did the deep dive on Clay so you don’t need to.

How Clay empowers salespeople:

Instead of wasting hours researching leads and writing boilerplate outreach, reps use Clay to pull real-time signals from across the web, enrich contacts automatically, and generate personalized emails with AI at scale. Their framework for great prompts (objective, context, constraints, examples) flips the script on traditional prospecting, turning reps into data-driven operators who don’t just send more emails, they send better ones.

Ever wish you had the time to write a personalized email to every single one of your prospects instead of finding the right person and adding them to “Campaign A?”

Clay allows reps to:

• Pull data from multiple sources (LinkedIn, Clearbit, job boards, news, etc.)

• Enrich contacts with real-time info and signals

• Write hyper-personalized emails using AI

• Automate workflows across platforms (CRMs, email, etc.)

Basically, Clay becomes your GTM operating system… data, enrichment, AI copywriting, and automation all in one place.

It’s like using 6 different tools all rolled into one and presented in a format that we’re already familiar with. It’s like using the most powerful Google Sheet or Excel table ever built.

The best newsletter for under 20 people.

It’s dope to write this and see crazy numbers like 88% open rate & 15% click rate. I see a lot of unique views so some of y’all are sharing this around.

If you’re reading this I appreciate you so much. It might be to a small audience right now but my promise to you guys is as long as I’m writing this - It’s going to be written like there are 100,000 people climbing over top of each other to get this in their inbox.

Every time it hits your inbox it’s going to be better than the last one.

That’s both a threat and a promise.

Thanks for being here 🫶