Olivier Tytgat 🪖

Co-Founder & Head of Sales

Outbound Catalyst

Outbound Catalyst partners with B2B SaaS companies to engineer predictable growth systems. We use targeted outbound as the validation engine - the one channel that lets you control who you reach and get direct market feedback. Once your messaging and positioning are proven, we help you build the operations, systems, and processes to scale growth across all channels.

From early-stage GTM validation to scaling outbound at volume to optimizing revenue operations for larger teams - we apply systematic thinking to help you grow faster and more predictably.

Founder & CEO

Operated as a co-founder and IC for various B2B tech companies. 

- Leexi.ai (Head of Sales as a service | 1.5M in pipeline in 6 months)
- Butterfly.ai (EU market validation | 250K pipeline in 6 months)
- TIMi.eu (setting up an enterprise SaaS selling motion & validation | 2.5M pipeline in 6 months)
- MyMove (full cycle AE, founding AE | 2.5M in pipeline & €1M ARR in 18 months)
- Ingenix (advisor to founder on lead gen & commercial topics)
- SalesArchitects (co-founder | 0 to 250K in revenue in 20 months)
- SalesNote (co-founder | 0 to 10 paying customers in 6 months)

Solopreneur

Clay

Co-hosting the Clay Club meetups in Lisbon. 
We bring together GTM leaders and Clay enthousiasts to brainstorm and showcase our latest workflows and how to be successful with Clay.

Clay Club Lisbon Co-host

I am the first official Clay Expert in Belgium and Portugal. I was certified in April 2024, after having helped +3 organizations set up Clay efficiently and effectively. 

See my page here: https://www.clay.com/experts/profile/olivier-tytgat

With Clay, you can build workflows that:
- automatically qualify your inbound leads
- research your market at scale for outbound
- waterfall enriches contact data
- helps you prepare for your sales calls
- keeps your CRM clean & up-to-date 
- much more

Certified Clay Partner (#1 in Belgium & Portugal)

IzyCoffee

I own a very small amount in the next European Coffee Empire. The reason for my investment is threefold:
1. I absolutely love coffee
2. I am amazed by the vision of their founder, Bart and believe in him as a founder
3. I tend to back the underdog 

I am not involved in any decisions or operations whatsoever.

Co-Owner

MyMove

Enabling car rental companies, car dealers, and corporates alike to offer an end-to-end digital fleet sharing experience to their users. Either in an open fleet setting that’s accessible by third parties (car rental) or in a pure, closed fleet only accessible by people within a closed network (car-sharing) .

MyMove provides all the technology to have your fleet connected and therefore shared: in-car keyless technology, mobile-app for the end-user, mobile payments (credit cards) in-app, platform & dashboards for the fleet manager(s) and the possibility to integrate with your current systems. All supported with a 24/7 customer support (in-app) for your people/customers for extended live support, whenever, whatever. MyMove, leads the way.
What I'm involved in: 
- managing the outbound process to prospect our target audience
- entering new (European) markets
- direct report to CEO
- lead the outbound efforts towards mid market and enterprise customers
- book and lead meetings with key stakeholders as to identify a valid business case
- following up and following through (super essential!)
- providing our product team with valid input
- help with the scaling and streamlining of processes 

My impact: 
- saw the team grow from 8 to 16 people
- provided product feedback to grow the product
- first sales rep to close deals and bring in money
- created traction in 3 international market (BE, NL, UK) 
- booked over 400 meetings
- advised the CRO on improvements for the outbound process --> led to me being in charge of that.
- worked closely with the CRO to improve Customer Success framework and onboarding
- worked closely with the CRO to setup lead magnets, webinars, etc. via the marketing manager
- my sales efforts contributed to closing a 3.2 million SERIES A funding round

Founding Account Executive (Intrapreneur)

SalesArchitects

Existing start of my career where I got the opportunity to help scale the company to up to 25 ongoing projects, helped implement a project management strategy, and helped multiple companies to increase their lead generation conversion rates, resulting in more revenue.
Some achievements: 
- created a Social Selling Course
- filled in the different offerings and shaped them into valuable packages
- established myself as a thought leader on sales in Flanders
- actively led a team of 5+ interns.
- set up lead magnets
- created and promoted 2 events resulting in +500 subscriptions and leads in less than 2 weeks. (one of them was paid)

SalesArchitects assists businesses in gaining organic and sustainable growth by building a structured sales plan.

We design a blueprint for your sales by challenging your business and assisting you with hands-on methodologies, creative strategies, and by assisting with implementing them. 

No guru talk, no sales talk, pure hands-on strategies which will make you a better entrepreneur and sales person!

Main industries we're active in: 
- SaaS / tech
- IT (hard- & software)
- Insurance
- Wholesale

Always open to discuss any other B2B industry as well!

Chief Sales Architect / Managing Partner

SalesNote

Amazing journey while running another company, to bootstrap this one to their first successes and key metrics. Some things I did here: 
- improved the product via a product development framework
- developed an outbound strategy generating over 5000 leads in total
- spoke with more than 250 sales professionals (from C-level to individual contributors) over 1,5 years talking about their challenges
- conducted customer interviews
- set up and managed a research study on the biggest challenges salespeople face, executed with a university student
- participated in growth trajectories at Startit@KBC and Birdhouse.
- sold the first contracts
- experimented with a lot of growth strategies and tests, quickly iterating when needed

SalesNote is the sales productivity platform to capture data during contact moments with prospect and customers. 
Capture data that is otherwise lost, enabling you to get to know your clients better and sell more!

Our mission: helping SMBs and corporates with implementing new ways of selling combined with using the right tools. Hereby creating the highest sales effectiveness possible at the moment!

My role: finding ways to boost our company in order to help as many organizations and sales professionals as possible.

Head of Growth / Managing Partner

CEO @ Outbound Catalyst | generate pipeline consistently with our revenue systems

👋 I'm Ollie, and here's my journey in a nutshell: 

- Helped over 25+ tech companies get their first 10-50 clients through smart revenue systems
- Trained over 250 people from diverse backgrounds on becoming the best cold callers ever
- Hosting a podcast where we decode B2B Revenue Systems: https://open.spotify.com/show/5LMwgSpPBRfffF4OyQsXC5?si=7bb99931399e40aa

🚀 On a mission to helping another 25+ tech companies increase their pipeline and net new revenue (building out Outbound Catalyst to be the 🥇 GTM agency in the EU).

🧠 Sharing my learnings from generating 100 million plus in pipeline and growing a growth/GTM agency in my newsletter -> https://bit.ly/newsletter-linkedin-website-profile 🧠

What you'll get by following me:

🚀 Actionable tips to grow smart outbound/revenue systems

🔥 Transparent & actionable advice, no fluff

💼 Exclusive updates on Outbound Catalyst's growth 

I’ll be posting growth tips and tactics - so hit that “Follow” button!

Peace, pipeline & revenue ✌️

Ollie

Founding Member

As a Founding Member of the Sales Hacker community, I exchanged ideas on how to provide value for the community. 

Sales Hacker is a community where B2B Sales Professionals share their experiences, best practices and exchange interesting ideas and other content.

Olivier 🔎 Tytgat

Every milestone I chased taught me one lesson: 

Achievement without alignment is just expensive misery.

That realization changed everything.

2 years ago, I was obsessed with one goal: 
scale Outbound Catalyst to $1M in revenue before 30.

I believed hitting that number would make me feel fulfilled. Accepted. Enough.

I was wrong.

But along the way, I noticed something critical:
	•	16-hour days weren’t productivity—they were avoidance

	•	More revenue created more problems, not more peace

	•	I was solving everyone’s problems except my own

At first, I thought: “This is just what it takes. Push harder.”

But then it hit me:
I didn’t believe in myself anymore. And my actions proved it.

Summer 2025: I took 2 weeks off and made a decision.

What if I could:
✅ Build a company that doesn’t require me as the bottleneck
✅ Choose sustainability over urgency
✅ Remove friction instead of powering through it

Fast forward to today:
I’m rebuilding Outbound Catalyst with proper foundations.

Same mission. Different approach.

1️⃣ Remove friction 👉 Wrong-fit clients, toxic patterns, limiting beliefs—all gone

2️⃣ Do less, better 👉 80% done by someone else is 100% awesome

3️⃣ Choose honesty 👉 Hard conversations over comfortable lies

4️⃣ Trust the process 👉 Slow progress beats urgent burnout

5️⃣ Build for me 👉 Journal daily, find clarity, stay true

I’ve spoken to 8-figure entrepreneurs who still chase more, rush everything, and hide behind “hustle harder.”

They’re not happy either.

More money creates more money problems. It doesn’t solve what’s broken inside.

That work? It’s free. And it’s yours alone.

Don’t sacrifice who you are for who you think you should be.

You are enough.

What did you sacrifice to get where you are? And was it worth it?

Olivier 🧪 Tytgat

Engineering growth for ambitious SaaS revenue teams | Founder/CEO @ Outbound Catalyst

No alternative text description for this image

385 contacts.
9.61% reply rate.
16.22% positive reply rate.

1 positive reply for every 64 people contacted.

This was Campaign 1.

Then we optimized.

Campaign 2:
201 contacts.
8.46% reply rate.
29.41% positive reply rate.

1 positive reply for every 40 people contacted.

What changed?

We ran 5 filters before anyone got an email:
→ Sourcing (find buyers where they actually show up)
→ Enriching (layer in signals that matter)
→ Qualifying (filter for must-haves, no exceptions)
→ Segmenting (group by intent, not just job title)
→ Routing (each segment gets its own angle)

Smaller list. Better targeting. Higher conversion.

Precise targeting beats spray-and-pray contacts.

Every. Single. Time.

Engineering growth for ambitious SaaS revenue teams through programmatic GTM | Founder/CEO @ Outbound Catalyst

I just open-sourced our GTM diagnostic framework.

The same one we use with clients paying €3,500 for a full audit.

It's called the GTM Scan.

Here's why I'm giving it away:

Most B2B SaaS companies approach outbound wrong.

They blast emails. Pray for replies. Wonder why nothing converts.

The problem isn't outbound.
It's their GTM foundations.

The GTM Scan evaluates 6 dimensions:

1️⃣ ICP & Targeting
→ Is your ideal customer clearly defined and validated?

2️⃣ Signals & Triggers
→ Are you reaching out at the right moment?

3️⃣ Data Infrastructure
→ Is your prospect data reliable and enriched?

4️⃣ Messaging & Positioning
→ Does your message resonate with buyers?

5️⃣ Outbound Execution
→ Is your sequence structure optimized?

6️⃣ Process & Measurement
→ Are you tracking what matters?

Score yourself across 23 questions.
Get your GTM Readiness Score.
Know exactly what to fix.

Takes 10 minutes.

If you're a B2B SaaS founder or revenue leader, comment whatever you want below OR just DM me & I'll send it to you. 

Stop hoping for growth. Start engineering it.

Here's how Frank Sondors 🥓 and his team book 500 meetings/month with only 5 reps 📈

2 months ago, Frank launched 5 million pages for SEO.

Here's the controversial part: they auto-dial visitors who scroll past 50%.

Most companies spend months driving traffic to their site, then just... wait. 

Wait for form fills. 
Wait for demo requests. 
Wait for someone to raise their hand.

That's like throwing a party and hiding in the kitchen.

Frank took a different approach:

The Strategy:
Generate massive programmatic content from directories and datasets (anywhere there's structure + search volume).

The Twist:
They proactively call visitors based on intent signals.

Low intent page (blog, "top 10 tools" lists):
- Visitor scrolls past 50% depth → auto-dial triggered
- Shows genuine interest, not just bouncing

High intent page (competitor comparison, alternative searches):
- Visitor lands on page → immediate dial
- They're already evaluating options

The Result:
Thousands of calls initiated automatically. 

Real conversations with people actively researching, not cold prospects.

Think about it: 

You invest everything into generating traffic. SEO. Content. Ads. Distribution.

Then they finally arrive on your site and... nothing happens?

You spent months getting people to show up. Don't let them walk into an empty house.

The traffic is already there. 

The intent is already there. 

The only question is: are you going to wait for them to reach out, or are you going to start the conversation?

What's stopping you from engaging visitors while they're hot on your site?

p.s. you can use Nick Tomic's Face2Face.io for this

There's 3 main areas you need to be on top off as a GTM team in 2026:

1. Data

2. Strategy

3. Infrastructure

Let's break them down 1 by 1:

1. Data

Historically, data has been immensely overlooked and ignored. People bought Apollo or Zoominfo, perhaps a lusha on top, and thought it would do the job. 

Little did they know they can't trust that data and they didn't do their own research. 

Result? Spam city, bounces, etc.

The fix? THE 5 FIRST PRINCIPLES OF LIST BUILDING
1) Sourcing
→ use all relevant places to find potential clients & data (not only 1 database, use multiple)

2) Enriching
→ Enrich for all minimal required data so you are not excluding companies because you don't have the domain, or LinkedIn company page. (I like to use real-time APIs here & AI does an awesome job at searching the web here too).

3) Qualifying
→ Based on the enriched data, you can now go a layer deeper and enrich for specifics that indicate whether or not they are an ICP company. 

4) Segmenting
→ Stack signals, intent, triggers & different ICPs (some would call this "scoring")

5) Routing
→ Determine which lead you'll send to which campaign (I love to use Clay formula's for this)

2. Strategy

This is evolving continuously based on real time experiments and feedback. It covers who you are for (AND NOT FOR!), which problems you solve & why that matters to your buyers (if you can explain it better than they can, you are winnning). 

This comes down to campaign management:

- choosing your evergreen campaigns

- your always on campaigns

- your seasonal campaigns

- your signal-led campaigns



3. Infrastructure

The architecture behind it all. Covers all the systems to execute on the process. 

- Lead management & follow-up

- Automatic workflows in your CRM

- Extract relevant info from sales calls, replies, etc. and feeding it into your knowledge hub

- Automatic task creations

Over the next 5 weeks, I will break down in-depth systems to cover all these areas. 

Subscribe to my newsletter (link in comments) to be the first to receive them.

Most outbound teams are stuck in an endless loop 🔁

Building lists. Testing campaigns. Nothing sticks. Deliverability tanks. Repeat.

Here's what 1500+ campaigns taught me about sustainable outbound:
Stop thinking about "campaigns" and start thinking in buckets.

1️⃣ Evergreen Campaigns (Every 3-6 months)
↳Your predictable plays. 
・First-degree connections. 
・Event targeting. 
・Closed-lost revamps. 
・Pain-based messaging. 

⟹These work because they tap into recurring patterns.

2️⃣ Always-On Campaigns (Set and forget)
↳Automate the obvious. 

・Profile viewers. 
・Post engagers. 
・Competitor followers. 
・Website visitors. 
・Pricing page views. 

⟹Low maintenance, steady results.

3️⃣ Signal-Led Campaigns (Your experiments)
↳The LinkedIn darlings everyone talks about. 

・Custom research. 
・Deep personalization. 
・Breakthrough potential. 

⟹ But here's the truth: they rarely keep working.

The mistake? Most teams live in signal-led chaos.

They over-engineer everything. 

They chase the next shiny tactic. 

They burn out building campaigns that die in 30 days.

The real ROI? It comes from boring, scalable, systematic approaches.

We've proven this across dozens of B2B companies. 

The simplest campaigns consistently outperform the complex ones.

But nobody wants to hear that building a foundation is sexier than chasing signals.

What's your current split? 

Are you running all three buckets or stuck in experimental hell?

I made a 10-minute in-depth video on this (linkedin comments). 

Steal my insights for free.

Why do most outbound agencies price based on contact volume?

(The answer reveals a fundamental misalignment with B2B success)

I've been reviewing agency proposals with founders all month, and I keep seeing the same pattern:

"We'll reach 5,000 contacts per month."

"We'll contact 10,000 people."

"Our premium package includes 20,000 outreach touches."

Here's what they think they're buying:

More contacts = more opportunities
Volume drives pipeline
Scale equals results

But here's the reality for most B2B SaaS companies:

Your TAM is 500-2,000 target accounts, not 20,000 contacts
Success means account penetration, not contact volume
Quality of targeting matters more than quantity of touches

When we audit clients' actual ICPs, we rarely find more than 1,000 ideal accounts to pursue.

Think about it: If you only have 1,000 target accounts, why would you pay for an agency to contact 10,000 people per month?

This creates two distinct approaches:

Volume Play (makes sense when):
▪️ You serve a horizontal market (like local printing services)
▪️ Your solution works for almost any company
▪️ Your TAM is genuinely massive
▪️ Broad outreach yields consistent conversion rates

Targeted Play (makes sense when):
▪️ You're building for a specific vertical or niche
▪️ Your ICP is tightly defined
▪️ You have limited high-value accounts
▪️ Personalization and account strategy matter

The misalignment happens when agencies sell volume pricing to companies that need targeted strategies.

Before you sign with any outbound agency in 2026, answer this question:
Do you have 10,000+ potential customers, or 1,000 target accounts?

Your answer should determine which agency you choose and how they should price their work.

Are you buying contact volume or account penetration?

2 weeks ago, I attended Tectonic in Wintercircus Ghent. 

Always great to be there whenever I'm in Belgium. Such a vibrant tech scene. 

Even though I usually don't like to smell the breath of VC money, I was super pleased to hear some awesome wisdom. 

Pieterjan Bouten said this:

"We like to give money to talented founders who know what to do, so we do what we do best (inject capital) and then get out of the way, so they can do what they do best (build the company)". 

It's paraphrased, but he basically said that what he learned during his time at Showpad is kind of obsolete in a way. 

The game evolves and changes, and therefore the advise you get from someone who did it years ago, might not be relevant at all. 

I thought this was worth sharing, because I see many founders and revenue leaders making these mistakes:

- following people who aren't in the trenches

- paying multiple 5 figures for advise that leads nowhere

- allowing others to create urgency and pressure in the organization instead of protecting the team & trusting the process 

- hiring expensive sales reps who sold for Microsoft or Salesforce but never took a company from 0 to 1 or 1 to 10 before 

And now with AI, the game is evolving SUPER fast. 

Imagine that we sometimes feel behind, let alone if you're not doing this every day... 

TL;DR: be careful with who you take advice from, and don't let FOMO eat you up inside.

Focus on getting your basics right first. 

Let me know if you want to talk about real-time and effective revenue systems that generate and convert pipeline in 2025.

Here's how I build lead lists programmatically. 

(after spending 7+ years, I am close to perfecting the perfect system). 

1. Start with accounts. Go to Clay (https://lnkd.in/ep8Dhw-m) and create a workbook. Call it “ACCOUNTS” 

2. Pull in companies using their find companies. They have AI filters that you can use to get more afcurate results.

3. Enrich for qualification criteria & double check info like industry, company activity etc where necessary. First use formula’s, only then use AI (one task per column). 

4. Once you have all criteria, you can filter for ICP accounts. 

5. Write those to another workbook, call it ICP accounts. (Congrats you now mapped your ICP accounts and have something 90% of companies don’t have). 

6. Repeat this process for leads, start by finding leads in sales nav with the same filters you used for your account search. It's better to scrape broadly (use Icypeas to export without getting your linkedin banned). 

8. Use formula’s to filter out irrelevant titles.

9. Enrich for account info (company ID or domain) 

10. Lookup in ICP accounts table. Also lookup from ICP accounts table to leads to see how many leads you are still missing (across accounts). 

11. Now look for extra leads using Icypeas database, apollo & enrich the leads with real time linkedin APIs to check accuracy 

12. Enrich for qualification criteria per persona

13. Segment per persona

14. Push them to a new table, name it ICP Leads. (Again congrats, something 99% of companies don’t have)

15. You can now build signals, triggers, intent on top of them

16. You can now segment for different campaigns

17. You now know what you’re working with in terms of market cap and can draft a campaign strategy that is actually sustainable. 

This is how you avoid building lists for campaigns, how you free up your sales team to focus on selling instead of admin & how you become independent of obsolete databases.

"Most sales leaders don't interview their customers—and that's why their outbound engine fails."

This brilliant insight from Mafalda Johannsen should make you rethink how you build your outbound foundations.

Marketing teams interview customers for case studies. 

Product teams interview them for feature requests. 

But sales leaders? Crickets.

Mafalda explained that before obsessing over cold email copy or video prospecting, you need to answer three critical questions through customer interviews:

1️⃣ When did they buy? What was the trigger event that created urgency?

2️⃣ Why you vs. competition? What made your solution the clear choice?

3️⃣ What situation were they in? Context reveals targeting opportunities

"If you don't know what's important to your customers, how do you know what to say on a cold call?" she shared.

This is how you build strong hypotheses instead of guessing.

The companies seeing breakthrough results from this approach:
👉 Find lookalike accounts in similar situations with similar triggers

👉 Hook prospects with the same reasons that made existing customers buy

👉 Speak their language because you know exactly what resonates

Stop building outbound campaigns on assumptions. Start building them on customer intelligence.

Are you interviewing your customers before launching outbound campaigns?
(We both know you're not)

Full episode in comments 🎙️

Your AI agents when Cloudflare decided to take a break today.

Every early-stage founder makes the same mistake.

They assume why they built it is why the market needs it.

I learned this the hard way in 2019.

I was selling sales conversation AI before AI was cool.
My assumption: "Reps spend too much time on admin."
Reality: They weren't doing admin at all.

The real problem? They forgot 90% of what happened in their calls.

It took me 3-6 months and my first 10 customers to figure this out.

Here's what that taught me about GTM:

1. Your hypothesis is probably wrong
2. The market will tell you, but you have to listen
3. Outbound is the fastest way to validate (you control who you talk to)
4. Don't scale before you've validated

That lesson became the foundation of everything we do at Outbound Catalyst.

Design → Validate → Scale

What's a GTM assumption you had to unlearn?

"If I'm sending let's say 10 emails today, I'll be lucky to get one reply back."

This pivotal insight from Frank Sondors 🥓 (Salesforge 🔥 and a bunch of other forges) on today's Revenue Systems Decoded podcast stopped me in my tracks.

The fundamental issue isn't bad leads; it’s channel fatigue. Our audience knows everything is automated, even when it’s disguised. They are savvy, which means we must pivot where we engage them.

Frank explained that the path to higher engagement is about radical channel iteration:

• Identify the channels that are completely saturated (like many outbound emails).

• Find where your target customer actually does business (e.g., WhatsApp in many European markets).

• Switching channels can drive up to 10x more replies by meeting the customer where they are.

"People are not stupid; they’re very savvy," he shared.

The companies seeing the best results prioritize collaboration over pure automation:

Mobile Enrichment: Integrating mobile number enrichment into the sign-up flow.

Hub-and-Spoke: Pushing all non-email replies (e.g., WhatsApp) immediately back into a collaborative hub (like Slack).

Decentralized Response: Enabling any human team member to reply from the hub, making the interaction fast, authentic, and scalable.

Is your team still reliant on email, or have you found your 10x channel?

Full episode with Frank Sonders in the comments. 

p.s. know anyone who should be a guest on our podcast? Tag them below or send me a DM.

Outbound isn't dead.

Bad outbound is dead.

Here's the difference:

❌ Bad outbound:
- Spray and pray
- Same message to everyone
- "Hope you're doing well"
- Pitch on first touch
- Activity metrics over results

✅ Good outbound:
- Research before reaching out
- Segmented by intent, not just title
- Lead with insight, not pitch
- Multi-touch, multi-channel
- Obsessed with positive reply rate

The companies saying "outbound doesn't work" are doing bad outbound.

The companies crushing it? They treat outbound like science.

Test hypotheses.
Validate with real buyers.
Scale what works.

Outbound isn't just a channel.

It's your controlled laboratory for testing before you scale everywhere else.

Which type of outbound are you doing?

Sales & Marketing Executive

First things first: All joy in the world comes from wanting others to be happy; all suffering in the world comes from wanting oneself to be happy.

Secondly: I am a CRO who still picks up the phone and cold calls - even with > 25 team members. Because it is fun and rewarding. 

In the first 10 years of my BtoB Sales career, I helped several startups in Europe to grow from < 500k ARR to > 10 Mio. ARR within < 5 years as AE, VP of Sales, CSO and CRO, with one Exit so far. More to come.

I went from full-cycle AE to CSO within 6 years - without having a clue about sales the first 2 years.

When I started in BtoB back in 2014, I really sucked at it. I did not reach my targets - not even close.

What did I do wrongly?

👉🏻 ...travelled 8 hours to a 1-hour meeting without prior discovery
👉🏻 ...never picked up the phone. Did everything via Email
👉🏻 ...asked on average 2 questions per meeting
👉🏻 ...did not know any Sales methodologies
👉🏻 ...had no clue how the sales process looked like
👉🏻 ...never booked a follow-up meeting right away
👉🏻 ...thousand of other mistakes 

I was lucky my company brought in two trainers, Max and Mike who helped me tremendously. I was able to completely change the way I sold - but not without heavily resisting that change at first.

I did not believe in discovery calls or asking too many questions - and had done sales too long without.

But I managed to change. And it was the best transformation I could have wished for.

In year no. 3, I reached 158% of my sales target (1.58 Mio. ARR) with a 2-month holiday during summer.

Since then, I have learned a lot more and realized that learning is the most important activity in our profession.

Patrick Trümpi

If you are a sales leader with a sales team >5 reps, I have an offer for you:

You probably have a Sales Playbook. 

Or at least you should have one.

(One that looks like the content in the image 👇🏻)

You might struggle to keep it up to date and have your team actually use that boring piece of documentation.

Am I far off with that assumption?

Because I struggled with that almost all my career as a leader. 

I kept it clean but rarely anyone used it proactively. 

My teams did not learn on their own what was in there. 

Even with an LLM layer on top. Not much improvement.

BUT: This is going to change big time. Right now.

We built an AI Coach that is actually teaching the playbook to reps. In the flow-of-work, without needing to access it. 

Example: 

A rep moves a deal to the next stage in the CRM. 

The AI Coach will reach out to the rep on slack:"I saw you moved deal X to "Priority Agreement" stage. Should we quickly go through a few important considerations you need to know at this stage so that you can increase the likelihood to succeed?"

Rep: "Yes"

AI Coach: "All right. Do you remember the exit criteria?" 

Rep: ...

A quick repetition right when it is needed most. 

Works like a charm.


All of the above will require you have a really sophisticated playbook. 

It is finally worth getting that thing right. 

I have written >20 playbooks myself. 

Therefore, my offer for you: go through your playbook in a 1 hour session, giving some advice and content pieces. 

It will need to be ready for AI soon.

If you are interested, comment "Playbook".

And I will reach out to you.


(Sorry, I hate those "comment" posts but this will actually give you some value 😅)

I do not recommend starting your sales career at an early-stage startup.

For most people. 

Because I did the same.

Guess how much I learned about selling during the first 2 years of my sales career that I still use today?

Not even 5%.

I even learned things I had to actively unlearn later again.

Some issues:

1️⃣ You likely won't get any good coaching and waste precious years experimenting without a solid base.

I pitch-slapped 100 prospects because nobody in our company knew how to ask any questions.

2️⃣ You will not know whether your failure is due to product, market, topic, or yourself. You might be discouraged to continue even though you are skilled at selling.

I did not reach my target in the first 2 years and was doubting whether the job was for me. The only reason I could stay was the hard-working mentality in my 20ties.

3️⃣ The chances of failure are incredibly high because the startups aren't able to hire experienced salespeople but have the most difficult products to sell.

No other sales rep reached their target in the first company I worked.

The odds in an early-stage startup are heavily against you.


Yes, there are also a lot of positives about the experience as well.

You can learn a lot of different stuff and you have to build processes from scratch. 

If your goal is to be an entrepreneur one day and you do not mind an environment without structure, I might recommend the startup.

If that is not the case, a startup is not for you.

You could even waste your time if nobody knows how to sell or you do not get any external coaching.

A small hack changed my life a few months ago. 

Like for real.

For those who have heard me talk about it know what I mean:

After putting our son to bed, I’d sit down to work again.

Specifically, I was meant to write my book and articles for Substack.

But I struggled heavily with this. 

Sitting down in the evening to write down my thoughts in a structured way was always the most painful exercise for my brain. 

I dreaded the evenings because it was so hard.

Writing stuff down after a full day of work?

Not easy. 

I regularly skipped to do something else. 

But then I discovered the "dictate mode" in ChatGPT. 

And realised I can actually talk to ChatGPT.

For hours. 

(even though I have to re-start the dictation every 10 minutes)

And have it structure the whole text for me.

Talking is really easy for me. 

Writing is a pain. 

The thing with LLMs: If you give it 2 hours of context in the form of a transcript, the content turns out to be really good.

And that is not just my opinion. 

Stephan kindly shared his feedback with me. 👇🏻

Now, I am actually excited to sit down again in the evening.

And that is such a huge difference in my life.

People are still discussing whether we should leave em dashes in the texts we write with the help of LLMs.

I find that such a dumb discussion. 

For two reasons: 

1/ In 2 years, nobody will care anymore. It will be so common - like in normal books. Just read one of those 😅

2/ Why judging a text according to how many em dashes it has and not how much you learned from it? It really does not matter how it has been written if you take something from it.


What do you think?


PS: Thanks to this hack, I will be finishing my book very soon.

I am on my way to the yearly army service.

For Swiss men that is quite a normal thing to do as it is still mandatory in this country.

Ok, 99% at my age are actually done with it, I must admit 😅

Thanks to the army, I was in my first leadership role at the age of 19, leading a platoon of 40 men.

And boy was I a bad leader.

The only thing I did intuitively right was leading by example. 

The rest was a disaster.

Some soldiers in my platoon behaved badly? 

I would get them out of bed at 1 am and take them on a run for an hour. 

Did it help with their behaviour? 

Nope. 

Only later did I understand that instilling fear and pain won't bring any lasting results.

And guess what: I learned that in the army too. 

From a really good company leader who taught me the most important lesson in leadership: 

"Make sure you talk to every single soldier in your platoon. At least 30 min. Be curious about their lives. Have an ear for their problems at home. If they understand that you have their interest at heart, they will make sure to protect yours during the service."

The exact opposite of what I had done naturally. 

And it changed everything. 

Could not have been more true.

Grateful for that lesson to this day Claude.

This week was cold calling day with the team. 

I reached two prospects. 

One I disqualified after 3 min. 

And the other I booked after 7 min.

Because I found so much useful information on their LinkedIn profile, I started the call differently: 

Prospect: "Hello?"

Me: "Hey Sandra, it is Patrick Trümpi calling from Taskbase, good morning"

Sandra: "Hey Patrick"

Me: "Hi Sandra. We do not know each other, calling you out of the blue. Do you mind giving me 30 seconds so that I can explain why I call you right now?"

Sandra: "Sure, go ahead"

Me: "I actually read on your LinkedIn that you focus with your team really on the skills of discovery and "ask before you tell". I like that, really what makes salespeople successful. I also saw you actually have a coaching certificate so I assumed you coach your 15 reps personally?"

Sandra: "Yeah I did for a while but let it slide a bit for a time."

Me: "Let it slide for a while?"

Sandra: "There was a time when I almost stopped and then I handed it over to an external coach who regularly coaches the team on their calls and interactions based on skills I provide."

Me: "All right, so you have an external person who does that full time?

Sandra: "Not full time but we do invest significantly"

Me: "Do you have an idea around what the amount per rep is?"

Sandra: "Not on the spot, no"

Me: "No problem, we can figure that out later in our discussion. I have a suggestion: We could actually clone that trainer to an AI that is trained on her training methodology, you playbook and knows exactly what skills you want to develop within your reps. The AI will then automatically check calls, emails and the sales process acumen of your reps and proactively approach them, like 'hey Thomas, I saw your call with client X, can I give you some feedback on your discovery questions?' through Slack or Team. The AI continuously improves your reps at a fraction of the costs. Does that sound interesting?"

Sandra: "Yeah that does not sound un-interesting"

Me: "All right, another suggestion then: Let's book a call next week and dive into some skills and use case. When works for you? Tudesday afternoon?"

Meeting booked.

Seeing the LinkedIn profile, for some prospects I can say with 90% confidence that I am going to book the meeting. 

This was one of them. 

Know that feeling?



PS: I had to work on the release of the new website as well - not a great role-model.

In the last 6 months, we halved our sales cycle.

What did we change?

The ICP.

We sold a nice-to-have use case to publishers for a few years.

Now, we sell a proactive AI Sales Coach to sales organisations of software companies.

Something every sales org needs or already does (sufficiently or not) with human effort.

Sometimes the biggest improvements are not done by improving the sales team.

They are done by choosing a better focus for the product & team.

Mario won the Swiss Sales Trophy. Congrats on that, Mario!

If he were not a founder, he would have a prestigious sales job real soon. 

The same goes for Simone (2nd, already works for a fantastic company hypt),

and Dominique (who came 3rd).

Dominique is actually looking for one right now.

What company would I recommend to a seasoned SaaS seller like him?

blp.

1/ Fast-growing. 

2/ Future unicorn.

3/ PMF and 8-figure ARR.

4/ Best Leadership team.

5/ Prospects who say: "I waited for your product for years".

6/ And soon, with one of the best sales academies in the world (more to come).

It is the opportunity I would have wanted a few years into my career.

A seller's dream.

Interested?

They are hiring.

Write to me and I will personally intro you to the leadership team. 

Curious to see where Dominique ends up. 

If you had participated, that could have been you. 

Maybe next time. 

No. 

Not maybe.

For sure next time?


Stefan, you have done such an incredible job with the organisation of this event, I am completely blown away. Besides sales, you also have an organisational talent. Something I never had or will have, which makes me admire the skill even more. Well done.

No rep ever told me:

I actually changed my practice thanks to the feedback from our recording tool.

None. Zero.

More often than not, reps actually lose trust in so-called “AI coaching”, a name role-play and recording tools attribute to themselves. 

But these tools rarely impact the reps’ behaviour.

Which coach listens to a recording (or does a role-play) and tells the rep:

Your talking speed is at 189s per word, but it should actually be at 120.
You asked 19 questions, but 30 would be great.
You answered 5 of 10 questions well.
You talked 50% of the time, but it should be at 20% (Which is wrong anyway).
Your longest monologue was 107 seconds, but it should be 98 seconds.
You could have personalised more.
You could have asked an impact question.
You did not summarise the call.
You did not set an agenda.
You found a pain point.
You talked about decision criteria.

I mean….what?

This has little to do with either coaching or learning.

Zero didactical value. (Using some learning jargon, for you, Maren 😃).

A coach/teacher has a different approach:

1/ Listens to a call.
2/ Finds 2 areas they want to give feedback on.
3/ Schedules a coaching session with the rep.
4/ Plays those two sequences.
5/ Asks the rep: What would you do differently? (to make them think first)
6/ After the self-reflection, give the feedback.
7/ Then says: Let’s quickly practice that.
8/ Does a role-play.
9/ Does another self-reflection exercise. 
10/ Gives another 2 points of feedback.

That his how coaching is done. 

That is how people can put learning into practice. 

Not 37 points you did well and 12 points you could improve.

I am probably exaggerating, and some people actually learned something from those role-play or recording tools.

But there is a much better way AI can coach.

The same way a human would do it. 


What was your experience with the feedback from those tools?

With one of our recent clients, we had 3 discoveries with the champion, one prep and a C-level meeting - all within 2 weeks. 

But after the first call, we really were not sure if we had a case. 

I could not wrap my head around what has been said because there were many different, sometimes unrelated topics.

I started the second discovery with a recap.

I repeated all the things I felt were important regarding challenges and potential impacts. 

We added some more information but it still did not click.

Then I asked: "Between 0 and 10, how important are these topics we are talking about for you?" 

The answer: An 8. Very important.

Me: "What makes it so important?"

Them: "We transfer the whole business to be more profit-driven"

There it was. 

The missing puzzle.

A business initiative that was driving the whole thing. 

And I did not capture that earlier. 

The question "from 0 to 10" saved us. 

Which happened often in my career.

It helps quantify something that is hard to quantify.

I reached 158% of my target in 2018 (1,58 Mio.), with one deal accounting for 41% of the total number.

That was by far my largest deal to date, and I closed it without any of these:

👉🏻 Sales Process
👉🏻 Champion rehearsals
👉🏻 Proper Business Case
👉🏻 Qualification Methodology
👉🏻 Talking to the Economic Buyer

We simply had nobody in the company who knew about any of that. 

Does it mean these are useless?

No, it means I got incredibly lucky. 

I would not want to risk another deal for not understanding how sales works.

And thinking in frameworks and steps is a big part of that.

Julius and Dominic talked about my favourite prospecting trick in the last episode of Sales & Pepper:

1️⃣  Choose an Account you really want to get into.

2️⃣  Buy a pair of shoes. 

3️⃣  Send one shoe in a box to the C-level persona you want to talk to.

4️⃣  With a letter that reads like this: "Now that I already have one shoe in your door, shouldn't we meet so that I can bring the second one as well?"

This trick never failed Lars (from whom I learned about it) 😃 - he even built a 9-figure business on its pillars. 

Okey, that is a bit of an overstatement. 

(the fact that this trick was an important part of his business) 

But still kind of true. 😅

It clearly reflects Lars' personality to try literally anything ethical to succeed. 


PS: I can definitely recommend the podcast episode with Julius. So much prospecting value in 30 min.

When I started my career in B2B software sales more than a decade ago, my manager told me: 

"Cold calling does not work in B2B." 

He did not say this because he had tested it, measured it, and seen the numbers. 

He said it because he didn’t like it. 

To him, sales was an elite profession, a career built on prestige and intellect. 

Picking up the phone and dialling strangers didn’t fit into the image.

Isn't that really weird?

All elite sellers I have seen actually all pick up the phone. 

😅

I also learned the craft a few years later.

And realised it was actually the best way to generate deals.

Not only that. 

I learned it really fast because I love the script I was using. 

Still today. 

And that is what I am going to share today. 

This time, not for free, though.

I often hear "you give way too much for free", which I actually don't mind. 

But this one will be a chapter of my book, which I shouldn't give away for free, I have been told. 

So here it is. 

Enjoy the (very long) read:

Open article: The Only Cold Call Script you will ever need. by open.substack.com

The Only Cold Call Script you will ever need.

In 2018, gatekeepers were a big topic when cold calling. 

Later on, mobile numbers became wildly available and I did not need that skill in my teams anymore.

That is why I rarely write about it today.

In some industries and for some personas, however, gatekeepers still play a big role. 

In logistics, for instance.

Now that I am working a lot with Felicia and REP - Revenue Excellence Partners, I wanted to have someone with real practice to write something about the topic:

How do you navigate gatekeepers today?

That is what you can read in Feli's article on my substack:


Thanks for your amazing insights Feli.

Open article: Gatekeepers in Cold Calling: How I Play My Way Through Level by Level. by patricktrumpi.substack.com

Gatekeepers in Cold Calling: How I Play My Way Through Level by Level.

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