Patrick Trümpi

"Cold calling" as a rep at Salesforce:

Prospect: "Sofia"

Rep: "Hi Sofia, it is Tony at Salesforce, hi"

Prospect: "Ah hi Tony, thanks for calling. I have been thinking of our CRM lately"

Rep: "Great. What have you been thinking about?"

Prospect starts talking

--

Cold calling as a rep at a Startup:

Prospect: "Sofia"

Rep: "Hi Sofia, it is Tony at {unknown company}, hi"

Prospect: "What was the company's name?"

Rep: "{unknown company}"

Prospect: "What do you want?"

Rep brings a great challenged-focused pitch.

or is screwed.

--

Spot the difference?

👏🏻 Kudos to everybody who is cold-calling for an unknown brand

I cold called mainly in Switzerland, Germany, UK and the US.

Those countries are quite different.

Switzerland is a paradise.

The US is hard.

And the rest is in between, check it out 👇🏻


What was your experience?

I f*cked up a demo yesterday.

And lost a prospect because of it.

They do not want to move ahead.

I don't remember the last time this happened.

I mean loosing a client because of my handling of the demo.

I am sure I lost clients because of my demos but very often it is some kind of mix of what is possible with the tool and what I show.

This time, I think we definitely could have won them.

The tool was not the problem.

I was.

How do I know?

My champion took 30 min after the demo to give me his non-sugarcoated feedback:

1/ My 5 min intro was way too long for 10 people. People wanted to see the demo.

2/ The recap of the challenges was too long. They knew what the problem was and did not need much rehearsal.

3/ I first explained our concept on a slide. Again, too long. People wanted to see the demo. It was hard to feel the participants because everyone was in one room, and I was remote on a screen.

4/ The AI Coach demo through our Slack channel felt overwhelming for them. They felt too much stuff is coming through that channel and will overwhelm the reps.

The last one got me thinking.

My biggest problem here:

I use my coach 50-100 times a day.

If people only see me scrolling, they think that is overwhelming.

For me it is just pure value. Every single interaction.

And I cannot hide because I show people how I use it and how it coaches me.

That is not good.

I need to think of a better way to do this.

More learnings from this:

1/ I had a preparation call with my champion but did not rehearse the demo. Should have done that and show him what I would say.

2/ I actually did not ask how many people were invited in total and did not see it on the invite. Next time, for a demo in front of 10 people, I will do it physically so that I can feel the room.


Guess what I did after the feedback from my champion?

I took a break. Went for a walk.

None of that "the best sales reps go back to work directly" bulls*it.

MEDDPICC is overengineered for deals < 50k ARR.

BANT is useless for outbound generated deals.

SPICED is not sophisticated enough for deals over 500k ARR.

Do you have to work with any of these?

Not necessarily.

I studied most existing qualification methodologies (NEAT, SNAP, ANUM, etc.) and found they have four main factors in common:

1️⃣ They are using an acronym to highlight the importance of focusing on the Need/Pain/Problem of the prospect. Why they need to buy anything at all.

2️⃣ They want to describe the impact of not solving a problem and/or building a quantitative business case for larger deals. They stress the understanding of what happens if the problem is not solved in the near future. The why NOW.

3️⃣ They highlight the importance of a salesperson knowing with whom they talk. They use words such as “Authority”, “Economic Buyer”, “Decision maker”, Champion” and other roles.

4️⃣ They highlight the understanding of the process and/or timeline to get the signature of the prospect. Some only use “timeline”, some use “Decision Process” and others “Mutual Action Plan”.

If you do not somehow direct the focus of your sales team on those four, you are probably doing something wrong.

And what about other criteria?

Add them if you think they are important for your process:

"Competition"
"Paper Process"
"Competitive Event"

How do you know they are important?

Answer these three simple questions:

- Why do we win deals
- Why do we lose deals?
- Why do deals slip?

That is how MEDDIC came to life.

Prospect at the end of a recent call:

"I will talk internally and get back to you"

Me: "Great, who are you talking to?"

Them: "My boss and a few other Sales Directors"

Me: "With what goal?"

Them: "Find out whether they would support this"

Me: "Super. Can I make a suggestion on top of that?"

Them: "Sure"

Me: "How about we book a meeting next week with those directors first, presenting the use cases and business case we built today. This way, you won't need to do a lot of internal alignment work, which is usually very time consuming. I gladly take that job as people very often ask many different questions that will be hard for you to answer. You can happily tease them before that meeting. If the directors support it as well, we can go to your boss. When would work next week?"

Next meeting booked.


Salespeople: You have to stay in control of that process.

Build alignment among directors first, then go to the EB.

With all the support, you hardly are going to fail.

5 months ago, we started to pay our employees for posting on LinkedIn:

Every employee who can show 20k impressions in the past 28 days will get $350.

Every employee who can show 100k impressions in the past 90 days will get $550.

And every employee who can show 1'000k impressions in the past 365 days will get $4'000.

The results?

1️⃣

Three team members already achieved at least one of the levels.

Two team members post almost every day, one landing his first brand collaboration outside the company.

Congrats to Sebastian and Samir for pushing though. You guys made it.

(Give them a follow if you haven't yet)

2️⃣

Many members of the leadership are leading by example and post at least once or very regularly as well (Samuel & Sonja 👏🏻👏🏻).

3️⃣

The first inbound generated opportunities in my 15 year sales career that helped us reach our best quarter in Q4/25.

Additional benefits:

👉🏻 All of them learn faster.
👉🏻 Better alignment of the company.
👉🏻 Brand building


PS: There is one simple rule to posting: It should be somewhat connected to their jobs or the company. Personal posts here and there are ok too.

My second son was born this week.

I will be mostly off the coming 2 months to enjoy time with my family.

It really is fascinating how babies and kids completely shift priorities…at least for me.

In my 20s and early 30s, everything was about work.

That is what our society does to us.

Give us the feeling we have to be productive.

All.the.time.

With old age, I realised how crazy that hamster wheel actually is.

Even if you are building your own companies, you get stuck in it.

Running after money, fame, IPOs and personal brands is not what we are going be proud of at old age.

At least most of us, I think 😅

Let‘s see how badly I want to be coming back in 2 months…or I will have to rethink career choices altogether 😅

Maybe I am going to post about cooking as that is what I am going to do a lot in the coming weeks.

See you soon 👋🏻

Claude Code seems to be a good occupation for reps that (still) do not want to cold call.

The only problem with that:

The one tasks that remains after automating everything (like we did with our Taskbase AI Coach) is actually cold calling.

That's where all the remaining reps on the field will land.

I look forward to see more of you banging the phones soon 🙌

If we are two sales reps in a call with a prospect, we have one rule:

The person who is not leading the call is only allowed to ask questions.

They are not allowed to add more information.

Sales reps already tend to talk too much.

Including myself.

It does not help if there are two sales reps in a call, both talking.