How to Source 7-Figure Deals on Outbound (AI can't do this)
Prospecting from the Trenches, by Florin Tatulea • Guest Post
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Hey y’all! 👋
I’m excited for today’s guest post by Florin Tatulea, author of Prospecting from the Trenches. I’ve been reading Florin’s work for a couple of years (and have been lucky to get to know him personally). He's one of the few people who consistently writes high-quality content while *also* being a top-tier SDR leader (full-time). He is currently running Sales Development at Common Room—my last post was a deep dive about them.
I highly recommend checking out his substack, where he shares “weekly tactical sales tips on prospecting for SDRs & AEs from somebody that is actually doing it successfully on a daily basis” (he just crossed 10K subscribers, so it’s not just me who enjoys his writing):
I talk about AI and automation a lot, but it’s not a silver bullet (duh). In today’s post, Florin illustrates an example of how SDRs should be prospecting when it comes to ways that AI cannot be used. This is especially relevant for teams selling into the enterprise. But, there are nuggets of gold that anyone prospecting today can learn from.
Alright, let’s get into Florin’s post!
How to Source 7-Figure Deals on Outbound (AI can't do this)
If you are prospecting into Mid-Market or Enterprise accounts and you take nothing else from my newsletter this year, take this advice about groundswell prospecting.
Seems like me and Kyle Coleman are on the same wavelength lately. Here’s a post he made recently that I deeply agree with and relates to this topic:
Getting that secret information that’s not anywhere online is the purpose of what we call groundswell prospecting.
It’s actually the secret sauce that has helped us book some of the largest deals my teams have ever sourced.
Here’s a message that I shared internally with our sales team last week:
It's becoming more clear to me that in a world where there are 50+ AI tools that compete with us in some way, the most predictable way to actually gain executive attention is through groundswell prospecting.
What exactly does good groundswell prospecting look like?
When I was at the pipeline conference last week and met with a BDR Director, he shared an image of a slide with me that their CRO shared at their SKO (see below).
We know SDR leaders care about pipeline, AE leaders care about revenue, and RevOps cares about efficiency.
The problem with prospecting in this day and age is that these personas all have 50 vendors promising them that.
Effective groundswell prospecting AT THE VERY LEAST should provide you with a metaphorical slide if not a real one like this one, below.
It allows us to map Common Room to being a "Scientist" and to focus on ramp time when messaging this CRO.
The best shot we have to break into an account that is somewhat cold is to build messaging to a CRO that looks something like this:
Subject Line: Artist to Scientist
Hi CRO, Spoke with [BDR Leader] in Austin last week.
He mentioned a great analogy you used during SKO around turning your sales org from artists into scientists - might have to steal that term!
Sounds like there is a big focus for the org to lower ramp times for AEs.
One problem we typically hear from CROs is that their reps have a hard time prioritizing their book of business.
They don't know what accounts are cold or warm and that typically adds on average of ~2 months to ramp.
An extra 2 months of ramp with your lofty goal of adding a net $100M ARR in 2025 is significant.
Open to seeing how we can automatically listen for signals across your product, website, social channels & community to pin point the exact accounts in [NEW AE NAME #1] and [NEW AE NAME #2] book that they should focus on?
THIS is what it's going to take going to break through the noise in 2025.
This is how you become irreplaceable.
AI can only find information that is online.
It can’t build relationships with people, gain their trust, and give you this sort of “insider information.”
We must leverage our external signals and an orgs internal signals to map our solution to their EXACT priority right now.
It’s the only way to break into an account that we don’t have any warm intros, connections or signals on.
There you have it, folks. Use your people for the work that AI cannot do. Find “insider info” that will help you assign real value to the solution you’re selling.
Thanks to Florin for today’s guest post! And again, go subscribe to Florin’s newsletter:
As always, thank you for your attention and trust.
PS - My next post is about the trade-offs between buying a gtm tool that is powerful/flexible, but hard to use, versus a less powerful/flexible tool, but easy to use. I’m excited to share my thinking on this topic—see you next week!
Have a great weekend,
Brendan 🫡
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Was fun to collab on this. Hope your readers find it valuable :)