Your Connection Rate Dropped 80% and Nobody's Talking About It | David Zeff - 2037

Connection rates have dropped roughly five times since before COVID. If ten percent of your calls used to turn into a conversation, you're probably closer to two now. David Zeff https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidzeff/, CEO of Whistle, runs an agency that makes cold outreach work for 350-plus B2B clients, and he broke down exactly what's changed, what hasn't, and the parts of outbound most people are too embarrassed to actually do. Why Connection Rates Have Collapsed Since COVID David's headline stat: connection rates have dropped roughly five times since the early 2010s. If a rep used to get a conversation on ten percent of calls, that number is closer to two percent now. That drops compounds. Fewer conversations means fewer meetings booked from the same amount of effort, cutting a rep's effective output roughly in half even before factoring anything else in. He points out that most investors and boards setting revenue benchmarks don't actually understand how much this single number has shifted, which means the targets built on top of it are often unrealistic from the start. The Four Things Whistle Screens For Before Taking a Client Whistle turns away clients the way a lawyer might turn down a case they can't win. David treats a signed client as the start of the real work, not the finish line. First: does the founder actually know their ICP? If they're still deciding between multiple very different buyer types, that's a major warning sign. Second: is the total addressable market big enough to support a real sales motion, since a market of a few hundred accounts with multi-year sales cycles isn't a fit for most outbound efforts. Third and fourth: is there real marketing support behind the sales effort, and does the product have any real moat, since neither one used to be a dealbreaker a decade ago the way they are now. The New Risk: Can Your Prospect Just Build It Themselves? David's newest red flag: prospects increasingly ask themselves whether they could just build a simple version of the product using AI tools instead of buying it. His own team has looked at some clients' products recently and had the same reaction: this looks like something built quickly with AI, which means the prospect is likely to think the same thing. Sellers need a clear, early answer to that question, since it's showing up at the very top of the funnel now, not just at the negotiation stage. Why Cold Email Copy Isn't the Real Story Prospects often ask David to see a sample of Whistle's email copy, expecting the wording itself to explain the results. His answer is always the same: seeing the email is like seeing the cheese and asking how that made the pizza. The copy alone leaves out everything that actually got the message opened and read in the first place. Highly personalized details, like referencing someone's favorite sports team, used to work well on their own. David is direct that this stopped being enough years ago, even though it still gets attention on LinkedIn as a screenshot-worthy tactic. Stop Separating the Brand From the People David points to Gong as the company that got this right early: during the shift to remote work, they made individual employees visible instead of hiding behind the company logo, including putting reps on billboards. B2C brands have leaned on individual personalities for a long time. B2B is only catching up to that now, and companies that keep everything behind a logo are giving up a real advantage. Donald shared a reference point from a past guest at Chili Piper, who said roughly half the deals in their pipeline had some connection to her personal LinkedIn activity, not because she was directly involved in every deal, but because buyers had engaged with her content somewhere along the way. Build Community Before You Need It David's third layer, beyond the basics and personal branding: building some form of community or network around your business, even a small one. A simple example from one of his own clients: a marketing VP asked if Whistle could bring their clients together to trade notes, which turned into a referral network of consultants and adjacent service providers. It doesn't have to be a massive branded community. Even something as basic as a small referral relationship, a shared cause you donate to together, or a network of people adjacent to your buyer who can talk about your space, counts and compounds over time. The Free Tactic Nobody Will Actually Do David's final, deceptively simple tip: export your personal contacts from WhatsApp or your phone, write one honest message explaining what you do and asking for a referral, and send it to twenty people a day. His prediction is that most people won't actually do this, precisely because it's free, easy, and has no clever trick to hide behind if it doesn't work. He's currently running an open deal that came directly from this exact method, reaching out to a personal contact who referred him to someone else who's now moving through the sales process. "We're in sales. You're always desperate. That's the job." — David Zeff Resources Connect with David Zeff on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/davidzeff/Visit Whistle to learn more about their outsourced sales development services. https://whistle.ltd/Join our LinkedIn cohort and learn to prospect the right way. https://thesalesevangelist.com/linkedin-prospecting-course/Visit Blue Mango Studios for help creating podcast production content. https://bluemangostudios.com/ Sponsorship Offers This episode is brought to you in part by Hubspot. With HubSpot sales hubs, your data tools and teams join a single platform to close deals and turn prospects into pipelines. Try it for yourself at hubspot.com/sales https://www.hubspot.com/products/sales. This episode is brought to you in part by LinkedIn. Are you tired of prospective clients not responding to your emails? Sign up for a free 60-day trial of LinkedIn Sales Navigator at linkedin.com/tse https://business.linkedin.com/sales-solutions/cx/20/09/sales-navigator-podcast?src=re-pod&trk=tse&veh=tse&mcid=6897323946090332160. This episode is brought to you in part by the TSE Sales Foundation. Improve your connection on LinkedIn and land three or five appointments with our LinkedIn prospecting course. Go to the salesevangelist.com/linkedin https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/UCMfjZbX. Credits As one of our podcast listeners, we value your opinion and always want to improve the quality of our show. Complete our two-minute survey here: thesalesevangelist.com/survey http://thesalesevangelist.com/survey. https://tsesales.typeform.com/to/lc5yAa8P We’d love for you to join us for our next episodes by tuning in on Apple Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-sales-evangelist/id788738885, Google Podcast https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3RoZXNhbGVzZXZhbmdlbGlzdC5saWJzeW4uY29tL3Jzcw?sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj5kaXI3Pj2AhVKcjABHW5PDVwQ9sEGegQIARAC, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/show/the-sales-evangelist-sales-trainingspeakingbusiness-marketingdonald, or Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/1NjzsFjQwVrgboUfDvbzd5?si=LdQOJDc1T-WBPMxr1h3RsA. Audio provided by Free SFX, https://freesfx.co.uk/ Soundstripe https://soundstripe.com/, and Bensound http://www.bensound.com/. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and produced by Brightseed and Hill.

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• 1:53Speaker 00

  Outbound has changed and it's continuing to evolve since COVID, since the AI revolution and today. But how are we making sure that we're standing out? Today, we're going to talk to you about exactly that. How can you get inside of your prospects inbox and to actually get appointments and deals? We're going to give you some ideas and hopefully you can apply one of these. Check it out.

• 2:24Speaker 00

  Hey, hey, hey, everyone. Welcome to another great episode of the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I'm your host, Donald C. Kelly, the Sales Evangelist. And I'm so excited for another great episode. I'm so excited to be here with you today. And on this episode, I have the one and only Mr. David Zeff. David and I connected, he runs an organization, co-founded an organization called Whistle. What they do is they do outbound and they do outbound really uniquely where companies come to them and they say, we need help to do outreach. They will take care of all the outbound, set up the appointment and even do some of the closing for you. He gives us a challenge at the end of this episode with some ideas. And he said, one of them, most people are gonna, easy enough to do, but they're not going to do it.

• 3:04Speaker 00

  And he said, if you do try it and you're not successful with one lead from it, he'll give you a hundred dollars. I mean, that's a pretty, pretty fun and tall statement there for this to, on an episode. And he's going to tell you about it in the episode, but I won't give it too much away from that. But just know this episode is going to be fire. If this is your first time listening to the podcast, I encourage you to subscribe so that I can make sure we notify you every time we drop a new piece of content. And for those who've been listening for a minute, that means a lot. Thank you so much. We have 25,000 people who subscribe to me on LinkedIn and that means a lot that you're coming there and sharing your insights and connecting. But if you have not done so already, subscribe to the podcast on whatever podcast app you listen to or connect with me on LinkedIn or connect with us on YouTube.

• 3:47Speaker 00

  As we dive in, you get a chance to hear what David's method is, why he is so passionate about outreach and how, how they're doing it, which is really unique. Check it out.

• 4:03Speaker 00

  David, welcome to the show.

• 4:04Speaker 01

  Thanks, Donald. Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

• 4:07Speaker 00

  I'm really looking forward to this conversation for us as sales professionals. One of the things that we are desperately doing on a day-to-day basis is trying to get in touch with our prospects. It's getting harder and harder, David, as you work with your agency. I bragged about you in the beginning of the episode there, in intro. You work with clients, you know, in the tech space, just like many of us are in B2B tech sales. And we're trying to figure out, how can we get more in touch with folks? You mentioned that sales has evolved since COVID, but also it's definitely evolved this year. But still, yet a lot of the stuff has stayed the same. And I want to tackle that part, but then go into how can we get in touch with people? But if you don't mind taking a second, David, and talk to us about it.

• 4:47Speaker 00

  When you say sales has changed since COVID and since now in 2026, what is it that's changed? And then also what has stayed the same?

• 4:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, just for context, I've been in, before Whistle, I've been in enterprise sales for about 12 years before starting our company, which is effectively outsourced sales development and offshore GTM talent. So maybe if you were selling before, decade ago, then yeah, you've probably got a different opinion to me. But if I can talk about, let's call it like the early 2010s, right till today, a bunch of things have changed. The most noticeable one is that everyone listening probably agrees to is it's never been harder to get ahold of somebody. I mean, that is already item number one that most people just cannot fathom. And it's a problem that's so big that I don't even know if the investor community actually understands how big a problem this is.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  So when you're a tech company and you're setting benchmarks, right? For what a success look like and what should success look like, et cetera. The vast majority of people that are looking at tech companies and go to market and projections don't comprehend that connection rates, for example, have probably dropped like, I don't know, five times in the last like five, six years now since COVID than what they used to be. And that has a massive knock-on effect. So anything at the top of the funnel that is adversely affected, let's call, let's just stick with connection rates for a second, right? Sure. If your connection rates, if they used to be 10%, right? So let's just hypothetical, you're making a hundred calls a day, you're having 10 conversations a day.

• 6:22Speaker 01

  If you're excellent, you're booking them one meeting out of those 10 conversations. Assuming that your product's right, you've got the right ICP, let's just go with that maths. If it's 5% now, so you're now only having, say, five conversations and you're probably only booking a meeting every two days, which makes you effectively half as good as you were. And those connection rates have just kept dropping. And it's not just the phone, it's email as well. It's become much more complex. LinkedIn's got a lot of limitations as to how much you can reach out. So in the world of B2B, there are only three channels. And if you can't nail those, you can't find a niche or way to get through, a lot of the other stuff doesn't matter. So ironically, the space today is filled with all sorts of providers that talk about things like getting you

• 7:07Speaker 01

  great signals, right? And we can tell you who's in market right now. That's awesome. I can't get ahold of that. Yeah. So that's the battle that most people don't talk about. They'll talk about personalizing messages and getting all sorts of data signals about prospects. The hard part is how do I break through? If you can help me break through, I know what to do.

• 7:26Speaker 00

  All right. So this is very insightful. So, you know, some of the things have been tweaked. We need to become better at the, you know, of grabbing the attention of the person. I'm curious to hear, because you guys, I mean, your team is pretty sizable, you know, 350 clients, I believe you guys are working with and large team. But what is the, clearly something is working for you guys. What is it that's working when it comes to getting ahold of those people? You have signal, you have all of those stuff. What is working right now?

• 7:54Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's sort of like, I'll go through what helps us pick our clients. Okay, that's the first thing. Just keeping it a hundred with you, we're not going to take on companies that we can't help. So we have a screening process.

• 8:04Speaker 00

  Like a lawyer, right? You know?

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Like a lawyer, it's like, I don't want to take on a case that's going to be terrible for me, right? So the truth is like, I always tell my sales team, man, like, the sales process starts once we sign them. Now we actually have to deliver. Now we're in partnership with these companies. It's not like we sold them a pair of Nikes. I don't know if I can mention Nike these days, but it's not like I sold them a pair of Nikes and they're on their way, you know what I mean? So now I'm stuck with them. So here's a few things that we screen for, which I also think would be a pretty good test. Like if you're going for a job for a company and thinking like, should I sell for them? Or if you are maybe in a leadership position at a company and you're like, you're maybe evaluating, how's this going to go? Here's a few things I'd look at. One is the size of the total addressable market. Or actually go one step back. Do you even know who's your ICP?

• 8:49Speaker 01

  So are you walking into a company where the founder goes, look, we could be selling to doctors or we could be sent to plumbers, right? So that's already step one, right? We could be sent to directors of operations or we could be sent to finance. I'm not sure we have to figure that out. If they're not 100% sure, that's a huge warning sign, number one, as far as like your ability to deliver revenue. You can figure out who your ICP is or you can deliver revenue. You can't do both at the same time. That's number one. Number two is, okay, within that ICP, how big is the town? The fact is, and everyone knows this, it is a numbers game. It's a volume game. It really is. Yes, there's an element at a certain point of personalization. Now that I'm actually talking to somebody, how do I stand out?

• 9:29Speaker 01

  We can get into that, but just starting at the very beginning, are there even enough people for me to reach out to? So that I can have a statistical, meaningfully, well, meaningfully statistical chance of even having conversations? Because if you come into a space and they're like, look, there's only 500 companies that we sell to total. How much damage are you going to do? You know what I mean? And those are big contracts then, those are like 10, 15, 20 million dollar contracts. It's going to take you two years to close. Are you going to close it? Are you going to quit before you close any and get any commission? Things people just don't think about. It's the same with us. If we look at a client and they, so let's just say, one, the founder has no clue with their ICPs yet.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Two, the TAM's too small. Those are already big red flags. Three, as much as in sales, we riff against marketing, we need marketing. It's a big one, right? Like, any salesperson in the world would rather work for a company with a great product and great marketing than not. It's just gonna help. So if there's nothing else cooking and they're relying on like one channel only, be it outbound, be it whatever, conferences, and there's nothing else going on, personal network of the founder, that's a big warning sign as far as the risks that this company's going to be able to really grow and generate repeatable sales revenue. You kind of have to be doing a bunch of things. And then today, there's a new layer, and this is the hardest part for software.

• 10:53Speaker 01

  This is the part personally that I spend a lot of time thinking about, like, what do you do about this? Which is the SaaS pockets, okay? Which is the fact that many prospects that we are speaking to on behalf of our clients are effectively now asking themselves, can I Claude code this thing myself? Okay? You have to have a good answer for that, and it has to be very clear. At the top of the funnel, I'm not even talking about like decision stage levels. So increasingly today, we also look at the actual product, and we've got, we've had a bunch in the last few months where the product is clearly like something that they coded themselves on Claude, and my team have gone and said like, hey, we can actually just make this ourselves. I don't know how we're gonna sell this to someone because they're gonna say the same thing, you know?

• 11:38Speaker 01

  So these are like just some basics, you know? So just to summarize, I think, one, clear ICP, two, big enough TAM, three, you've got some, a bunch of marketing activities cooking, and four, the product has some sort of a moat around it, just to kind of be generous. And I think some of those issues didn't exist, let's call it a decade or so ago, as much as they do today. And for salespeople, that's hard, you know, that's much harder because it requires you to do, basically to lean much more into the relationship building side of things versus hiding behind all the features and gadgets and deals and prices, which is what I would say, not the strongest salespeople don't necessarily do, but the average salesperson does do.

• 12:26Speaker 00

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• 13:30Speaker 00

  So I mean, it is very, I think the one that all of these stands out great, but the last year, if you'd brought up the one about the moat, I wouldn't think that would have been an issue, especially with, you know, vibe coding. I would not have, you know, seen that. But not agree that that's something, but like you said, it's been over the year, it's been like, I literally was on a podcast and they were talking about that the other day with another webinar, and we were talking about that with another sales leader. And then I like the idea of you're not shunning marketing, working with marketing, and that TAM, I think most people overlook the TAM. They just feel like I'm a good seller, I can make this happen. But if you don't have a good size base, you can't go after that. You guys now, these people meet your criteria, and you're, you're going after, you're going out on behalf of them to reach their clients.

• 14:14Speaker 00

  This part is where I'm curious as far as what is it that you do differently that's gonna help you to get noticed, especially in a crowded market space at times? Like, what is it that that's gonna help me as a seller to stand out if I'm working for your team to this prospect? Like you said, it's not just personalization, there's more to it than that.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll start with, you know, we have a couple of core values at Whistle. We have seven core values. One of them is, before we get smart, let's get dumb. Okay? And that basically means, what is the dumbest thing, simplest thing that I can do today, right now, to get where I want to be? And today, like, if you're on LinkedIn at least, right, or you're talking to other sales pros or marketing pros, they're gonna tell you about these genius workflows, prompts, whatevers that they built, and it all sounds great. But then, when you ask basic questions, like, how many calls are your team doing a day? There's a lot of silence. So before we even talk about the cool stuff, I'm just gonna tell you the basics that we do.

• 15:13Speaker 01

  We knock out, on average, an average SDR, Whistle's knocking out around 200 to 400 calls a day, minimum. Okay, so again, per SDR. So again, if, if your sales team are not, and I speak to so many, and established businesses that when they we ask them, like, how many calls are you guys doing? They're not even calling. That's gonna be an issue, right? So you can take two salespeople, one's knocking out 200 to 400 calls a day, one's not, or maybe doing 20, 30, 40 calls a day. It doesn't matter how polished you are, it's about how many conversations are you actually now gonna get into? If I'm gonna get into 10 times more conversations a day than you, even if I'm average, I'm going to outperform you because there's not too many people out there that are 10 times better at being an SDR, okay?

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Just on a one-to-one than someone else. So number one is like, the basics matter. You have to put in the reps. The same is for email. I mean, we were riffing before about email as well, like, yeah. If you want to talk about an area that's completely drastically fundamentally changes, are coming back, which is email. My theory is that there's the guise of like all the spam laws, but the truth is that like, we get spammed with ads all the time, and there's no laws about that, right? Like, no one asks your permission, go, you go on a free site and suddenly you see 15 ads blocking their way, blocking your way. That's like, that's totally acceptable. My theory is that, you know, all the inboxes and infrastructures owned by like Microsoft and Google effectively,

• 16:37Speaker 01

  and they're the ones also profiting on all the ad revenue that's being done. So they can't really make a lot of money of you and me emailing each other, right? So, yeah, but email has become like a full-on science. And the fact is that you've got to send high volume to get through. Even if you have a brilliant structured email, you have to send high volume to get through. So just before we even get into the smart stuff, I'm just talking about the reps. Like, you've got to knock out lots of dials a day and lots of emails a day.

• 17:08Speaker 00

  And you have to do with that too, I mean, some of the, especially the founders that were founded, led sales, or someone in that category, you can't use your own domain at that point.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Correct. You've got to create separate infrastructure, so separate domains, separate inboxes that you have to warm and you have to maintain. There's a lot of tools out there that can help you with this.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  Maybe post the, in the, you know, post call, I can send you some ideas of what we use, what we've seen work. There's a lot of different tools that help you manage all this inbox infrastructure, domains, warming them up, monitoring them. And then you've got to play around with the copy, obviously, and you've got to play around with the audience and see what lands. So for example, I mean, this is probably very obvious, but don't put any links in your messaging, right? Don't make your messaging very long. A lot of, like, I get this request a lot from prospects where they'll say things like, can I see an example of your email copy? And I tell them the same thing all the time, which is like, if I just show you the email copy, you're gonna miss the whole story. Because the email copy, you're gonna be like, how did that book a meeting? Like, you just said, hey, we help a company, I noticed you guys are hiring SDRs. Can we chat or whatever, right? And that like booked a meeting.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  I'm like, yeah, but you didn't see how, the fact that we actually got through, that's like 99% of the battle that we actually got through, never mind the copy.

• 18:18Speaker 00

  These guys saw all your ingredients and says, what kind of cheese you have? I want to get that cheese. And you're like, no, no. The pizza takes a lot more than just a cheese dough, bro.

• 18:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly it. Can I just see the cheese? Yeah, but. You didn't see the whole pizza. That's exactly it, man. Before I buy a pizza. That's exactly it. And that's, but that's what everyone misses. And that's sort of like the distraction that goes on. It's not their fault because that's also what gets clicks and views on LinkedIn. So you'll get like a screenshot of like this perfect email, you know? And then everyone's like, oh, my God, what a genius thing. Like you mentioned that the guy is like, he's in Florida and you mentioned his favorite football team. Like that stuff doesn't, yeah, it did work, but it doesn't work anymore. Right? It worked like five years ago.

• 18:58Speaker 00

  It worked in 2011, but.

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. It did. Like the first week, right? And everyone was like, oh, my God, how did you know? And now it's like, get away, you creep. Right? So the first thing is like the dumb thing. Okay? Now let's get a little bit smarter. So if you, my point is like, if you're not doing the dumb stuff, don't even worry about the smart stuff.

• 19:16Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 19:16Speaker 01

  It's a bit like those guys who like are always talking about, like if you're going to the gym, I don't know, right? And you're like, all right, what's the best exercise to build my chest? And it's like, dude, have you done a push up? It's like, no, but I already want to optimize like the best, I've doing these like cable incline bench press. It's like, dude, just start with like, if you can't do push ups, don't get into that yet. You have to like, let's nail the fundamentals. So the fundamentals are, the dumb things are get the reps in. Make the dials, get your emails right. Make sure your emails are getting or landing. And now let's say we're doing that. Okay? Now let's also say you've got some sort of marketing. Let's get a bit smarter. Let's say you've got some sort of marketing activity going on. Today, it's not enough to separate the company as a brand and the individuals on your team from each other.

• 20:00Speaker 01

  That's stopped being a thing. I mean, I always look at Gong as like the GOAT of this.

• 20:05Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 20:05Speaker 01

  You know, Gong were just phenomenal, right? In COVID was perfect timing. They got it right. We all went remote. Everyone realized the company actually isn't family. We realized like, hey, what like this whole office thing is not really a thing. Everything changed. And what did they do? They made the individuals in their companies superstars, right? They put them on billboards and stuff. And at the time, I personally had never seen a tech company do that. And I remember the time going like, ah, they've got it because the brand shifted from logo to people. It's all about people, right? Especially B2B, B2C, it's been like that for a while. But B2B was never like that. I didn't know who the CEO of ZoomInfo was or whatever.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Now I do because he posts all the time and not just that, he'll post about like his family life and all sorts of stuff. Like I get a good sense of the person. He's not doing it for likes. He's doing it for leads, you know?

• 20:57Speaker 00

  Yes. Dude, I interviewed, you're familiar with Chili Piper, right?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course.

• 21:03Speaker 00

  Interviewed the co-founder. She said that 50% of the deals in the pipeline, as I think we spoke last year, she said about 50% of the deals in the pipeline are being influenced by her LinkedIn.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 00

  And it was super dope. It wasn't like that she was in all of the deals, but people that are the deals that if you go find a deal, five out of the 10 deals in their pipeline, you're going to see that one of those individuals are following her or they engage on her post or whatnot. And it's, it's hard for to get like, forgive the French here, some of the boomers, some of the older generation to see like the relevance of using LinkedIn. I had a CEO I was talking to and he was like, I don't want to go on LinkedIn and share stuff. People trying to show up. Like, bro, it's not showing off. You gotta be visible nowadays. You have to. It just, you can't hide behind that logo. But sorry, that was.

• 21:56Speaker 01

  You can't. Exactly. You're, you are doing your business a massive disservice if you are not active. And I would even extend it past the founding team. So if you're just a founding team in your early stage, yeah, every single one, your CTO, your CEO, everyone's got to be there. But like, if you're calling a list of people and you're emailing a list of people, those same people should be getting connection requests on LinkedIn from key members in your team, right? If somebody lands on your website, that person, someone came to your website and showed interest in coming to a sales meeting, why are they not in an automatic connection request from a whole bunch of your exec team? What does it cost you? Nothing. What? You think you're like, you're too busy for them? Are you too well off for them? You're not, man. You're desperate.

• 22:37Speaker 00

  I need money, man. I need the pipeline.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Like I remember a few, a few years ago, one of my sales team was like, but don't we seem desperate if we're doing this? And I'm like, we are desperate. Of course we're desperate. We're in sales. Sales, you're always desperate. That's what, that's the job, man.

• 22:53Speaker 00

  I think that's going to be the biggest quote from this episode. We are desperate.

• 22:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. What are we pretending, man? That's our job. We're never hungry. The hungry caterpillar that never gets full. So like getting a bit smarter now, now like if you're already hitting these people with ads and with emails and with cold calls, they better be in some sort of social sequence. And if not, why not? And by the way, if you're selling to finance people, your internal finance team's profiles are now sales profiles.

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Think about all the things you wish you had help with in sales. Finding the right buyers, knowing which account to prioritize, reaching out with the right message at the right time. LinkedIn Sales Navigator is built to help with exactly that. It uses AI-powered recommendations to surface leads and accounts that match your goals. So you spend less time searching and more time selling. You get real-time account insights that help you grow your pipeline, personalize outreach and stay informed about buyer activities. It can't replace the work of selling, but it gives you the data and visibility to sell with more focus and confidence. That's what we need. All of this is powered by LinkedIn's network of over 1.2 billion professionals.

• 24:12Speaker 00

  The most dynamic buyer network working just for you. Accelerate your sales with LinkedIn Sales Navigator. Try LinkedIn Sales Navigator now with a free 60-day trial at LinkedIn.com/sell. That's LinkedIn.com/sell. Terms and conditions apply.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  Since 2013, we launched this podcast. The goal of the podcast was to share wealth of information and I feel that we've successfully done so. As a natural byproduct, listeners like you would reach out and ask, could I coach them? Could I train their team? Could I come and speak in an S K O? Could I consult for them? And that is how we gain the majority of our business and still to this day. So in 2019, one of our clients saw what we did and asked, could we do that for them? We experimented with it and we started a podcast production agency. Now we create podcasts for some of the biggest brands in the world and it's amazing. I would love to show you and your team how we can create podcasts for you and use it as an entertaining source, but also educational and a lead generation.

• 25:16Speaker 00

  If you're interested, go to bluemangostudios.com. Again, bluemangostudios.com and our team can show you exactly what we did. It's amazing.

• 25:30Speaker 00

  Yes. Everyone is a seller. Like I had a CEO that tried to teach the team that, one of the companies I worked for, and everyone didn't realize that they were salespeople. And I, just when you shared there with the finance team, like I'm going to go look at those folks if I'm, if definitely if I'm selling something towards finance folks, right?

• 25:48Speaker 01

  A hundred percent because they speak your language.

• 25:50Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 25:51Speaker 01

  Right? So I get it. They, they do other things, but like if I'm selling to finance and I have a team of finance people, I'm leveraging their profile to talk about finance issues and to reach out, whether it's even automated or not, to prospects and say, hey, can we chat about whatever payments? And what are you guys doing? Let's trade some notes. And oh, by the way, we're a payments company and this is what we do about this problem. What do you think? They can talk the talk. They're trusted. Let me connect you now to David. He, he can get you the details of how this all works, right? And kick it over to the sales team. But like this whole like separation of powers is insane. Makes no sense today anymore. The battle is too hard today to keep it to just one, hey, this is the, only this line of business does this.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  It just doesn't work like that anymore. So getting smarter, I would say that's layer two. Okay? All right. Third layer. This is one that's been going on for a while, but not many brands nail this well, which is building communities. Like communities can take different forms, you know, some brands are, it's a huge investment and they've got, you know, adoring, screaming fans. That's hard bar to aim for. Like some products can do that and some products, maybe you're not there yet. So what else can you do? So there's some basics. Like I'll use an example from us. A few years ago, one of my clients, a VP marketing, said to me like, can we create a group where all the other clients can be together? And we can like trade notes and just marketing tactics?

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Because we're all basically with similar problems. And at the time I was like, really? Like I just, wow, I don't know if one of my clients in one group, are they going to complain about me?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  But then I got over it and I was like, all right, listen, maybe they weren't all, you know? But, and so we started to build it like that. And then we realized like, wait a second, there's people that feed into the space that we're in. Maybe you're a consultant, right? And you're helping clients and then your client could really benefit from getting, let's say, SDRs. And if I can then make your client successful from the referral, then it's just a no brainer. There's so many little wins like that and it can be very basic. One, it can be very transactional. Hey, John, you know, for every lead that you send me, if they sign, I'll kick you back X. We also have referral partners where we donate. So if this, if we say, hey, if they do sign, we'll donate X to this cause, you pick a cause. It can just be just off past the goodwill forward type of thing, just off the relationship.

• 28:14Speaker 01

  But like, if you're not building, so let's say, again, let's use finance. Let's say you're building a fintech software. If you don't have good relationships with a whole bunch of accountants, you are crazy. You should be building a network of accountants that even if they personally, it will never be a client, they are going to have clients or at the very worst, you're going to be able to interview them and create all sorts of content about the problem that you're solving that is going to be relevant to your audience. So I think sometimes people think of things like communities as like a massive, you know, big thing that you have to build and you have to keep engaged. No, like sure, if you can do that, obviously great. But if you can't, because you don't have unlimited resources or time, or maybe it just doesn't apply,

• 28:57Speaker 01

  then like ask yourself, well, what is like, what's the basic version of that, you know? What is the basic licensing in community building get me? Can it just get me some referrals? Can it just get me some content? Can it just get me some goodwill? I don't know. Let me just start to build some network there. And I think, again, just coming back to my point, like today, the battle is much harder than it's ever been. So give yourself as many tools as you can. I would say that is like a third level up that brands really have to leverage as much as possible. And actually I would say that's not even optional. It's becoming not even optional.

• 29:32Speaker 00

  It's required now.

• 29:33Speaker 01

  It's too competitive. Yeah, it's required now. You've got to build some sort of fan base, community base that you can work with. If their customer is great, if their customers plus potential partners also great, it doesn't really matter. And maybe you can use them in different ways, right? Prefer us business, help us generate content, just help us elevate our status because by association with you, people think that we're, you know, worth talking to. All of that's good. You just never know where it will lead.

• 30:01Speaker 00

  Dope. Love it. This is awesome. Is there, and there's a lot probably we can go further in, but is there anything else that you would add that we need to do? We talked about the fundamentals. We talked some of those basics, the, you know, the dumb questions, so to speak. We went into a little bit of the advanced, talking about some of the things that we need to do when it comes to social. And then we went into the creating community. Anything else that we need to do when it comes to us doing our outreach?

• 30:27Speaker 01

  I'm going to give you a tip that everyone can do right now.

• 30:29Speaker 00

  Let's go.

• 30:30Speaker 01

  No one's gonna do it. Okay?

• 30:31Speaker 00

  Oh, great.

• 30:32Speaker 01

  No, and I was gonna tell you why no one's gonna do this. Ready?

• 30:36Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 30:36Speaker 01

  No one's gonna do it because it's easy to do. Because it works, because it costs nothing, and because you have no excuse to do it. Okay?

• 30:44Speaker 00

  All right. Let me hear this. You said it.

• 30:46Speaker 01

  This is what you're not gonna do. If you have WhatsApp, you're gonna open up your WhatsApp messaging. You're gonna open WhatsApp on web. You're gonna download all your contacts into an Excel sheet. You're gonna create a message that says, "Hey, long time no speak. Hope you don't mind the hustle. I'm looking for leads for my XYZ business. This is what we do. We help companies with this, this, this. If you need this, let me know. If you know someone in your network who could benefit, I would love a referral. Thanks so much." And then what you're gonna do is every day, you're gonna send 20 people in your network. Okay? And you're not gonna stop. And you're not gonna stop after you get ignored for the first day, or you get a couple of those, "Oh yeah, hey, man. Long time no speak. All good. I don't have anyone to send you." You gotta just keep going.

• 31:31Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:32Speaker 01

  And I guarantee you, and the reason I'm saying this is, my brother, Yana, who's our co-founder, right? He's the CEO at our company. He came up with this for me, and he's like, "You gotta do this." And I was like, "Come on, man. I'm not gonna do this." And I do it now. I crank. I just did, I did 50 today. Okay?

• 31:48Speaker 00

  He did 50.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  I'm cranking through. And I just copy paste, send that message, send that message. You will not believe how many people, and again, the reason why many people here won't do it is because it doesn't, it's nothing fancy. It doesn't cost you anything. You could do it right away. It's gonna get you, it's, I guarantee it will get you results. Okay? You're not gonna do it, probably because it's right in your face. You can't hide behind anything. Guarantee you'll be surprised how much money is sitting in your personal WhatsApp network or messaging, whatever messaging app you use, right? Whatever you're using to keep all your contacts, your SMS network.

• 32:24Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Open up your iPhone or whatever. Open up your app that you use for your messaging, and just start messaging your network, your personal network, saying, "Hey, this is what we're doing. If you know anyone, or if you think you could use it, feel free just to be in touch. You will be shocked." I have an open deal now from two days ago. Actually, it was like Thursday last week. I just pinged someone. He sent me to somebody else. That guy got on a sales call with me that day. He went into the next stage. We're nearly at contract sent. Like, hopefully by the end of this week, we'll be contract sent. It cost me nothing, man. It cost me nothing.

• 32:57Speaker 00

  Oh, my goodness.

• 32:58Speaker 01

  I could have made a thousand excuses. I could have done a lot of clever things. So that's my special final tip for everyone this thing. Give it a go. Try it for a month, and I promise you, if you didn't get one lead in a month of trying that 20 a day, ping me, and I'm gonna make a promise. I will send you a hundred dollars.

• 33:16Speaker 00

  You have a month. You probably don't have to send out too much hundred dollars to people.

• 33:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 33:21Speaker 00

  I'm even thinking, I did something similar on LinkedIn, and I think that could work great with it, my network there.

• 33:28Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. Of course you can. And again, what does it require from you? Nothing. Dude, you make a, make a copy paste message, and just hit copy paste to your network right now.

• 33:37Speaker 00

  My executive assistant could do that.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. 20 a day. Do that. Do it for a month. If you don't get one positive lead after a month.

• 33:43Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Head over to me. Show me the receipts. Give you a hundred bucks.

• 33:48Speaker 00

  David, this was a great episode. A lot of great insights here. Sales has evolved. Email definitely has evolved. A lot more we can do with that. Appreciate your insights. If folks want to get in touch with you to learn a little bit more about you or your organization, or to get your contacts so that they can hit you up for their hundred dollars, what's the best way to do so?

• 34:05Speaker 01

  Number one, head over to, if you want to get ahold of me, probably LinkedIn's probably the best. David Zep at LinkedIn.

• 34:10Speaker 00

  At Whistle.

• 34:11Speaker 01

  If you want to learn more about Whistle, whistle.ltd is our site. And yeah, feel free to poke around with absolute pleasure.

• 34:18Speaker 00

  David, thank you so much for coming on the show, man.

• 34:21Speaker 01

  Thanks, Don. Appreciate it.

• 34:28Speaker 00

  Hey, that was David Zep. If you haven't done so already, connect with him. Tell him you heard him here on the Sales Evangelist Podcast. I know he will be super stoked and super excited for that. And yeah, try to challenge. I'm gonna do it with LinkedIn. We're gonna test that out. I have a lot of people, like over a thousand people on my iPhone. So I'm gonna hit some of those folks up as well and test this out. We have a production agency called Blue Mango Studios, and that's our new baby that we've been working with. Some of you have heard about that over the years, and it's a production agency. So if you know someone that needs help producing podcasts or producing content, or want to get on podcasts, our agency can do that. So I'd love to help you out there. See, I'm doing a first one with you guys. But listen, check it out. Find more details at bluemangostudios.com. As always, I want you to thrive. I want you to succeed. I want you to

• 35:11Speaker 00

  raise your level of thinking. I want you to make more money. But most importantly, I want you to go out and do big things. Connect with David. We got all the links down below. See you on the next one.

• 35:26Speaker 00

  The Sales Evangelist Podcast is created by the Sales Evangelist Sales Training Organization. It is produced by TSC Studios. Our podcast production manager is Nancy Paul. Our audio engineer is Jershun Obayal. Our video engineer is Dasan Kunado. Guest management is done by Jill Vito and Kristy Virtus. Our content writer is Carlisa Galberith. Our graphic designer is Yurvish Savalia. And I'm your host and executive producer, Donald C. Kelly.

• 36:00Speaker 00

  Sales Podcast Network.