Why your sales emails get ignored — Mark Kosoglow (former Outreach CRO) on the fix

The 'Great Ignore' is upon us. After years of lazy, toxic automation, buyers now require 20 to 25 touches just to register baseline interest. Mark Kosoglow explains that salespeople took mildly effective tactics from the 'Golden Age of sales' and scaled them to a point where societal pushback, spam laws, and email provider crackdowns (like Google's new domain rules) have made old-school volume plays completely obsolete. The fix isn't finding technical loopholes like spintax or endless domain warmups—those tactics violate the spirit of the law and inevitably fail. Instead, revenue organizations need to shift from volume to precision. Kosoglow introduces a relevancy quadrant that shows why personalization based on easily accessible data no longer works. The sweet spot lies in combining high-level personalization at the company or individual level with hard-to-find, unstructured data that proves you've done your homework. To thrive in the modern go-to-market landscape, sellers and leaders must embrace the 'Goldilocks zone' of sales activity, balancing the right amount of targeted outreach without boiling the ocean. This means shrinking your focus, treating prospecting like a meticulous college research project, and realizing that a high-converting, smaller pool of accounts will always outperform a low-converting, massive list.

Discussed in this episode

The definition of the 'Great Ignore' and why it now takes 20-25 touches to generate baseline buyer interest.
How powerful engagement tools were originally designed to help but were eventually abused by reps pushing toxic automation.
Why trying to bypass Google's spam filters using spintax and domain warmups violates the spirit of the law and will eventually fail.
The misconception that companies need more accurate data when their real issue is a poor conversion rate on the data they already have.
The 'Goldilocks zone' of sales activity, where doing too much automated outreach is just as detrimental as doing too little.
The hypocrisy of executives who demand mass volume from their sales teams but complain when they receive the same generic spam.
A tactical relevancy matrix that plots your level of personalization against how difficult the insight data is to acquire.
Why the most successful modern reps treat prospecting like a graded college project, prioritizing deep research over volume.

Episode highlights

0:00 — Introduction of Mark Kosoglow
2:30 — Defining the Great Ignore
5:00 — Evolving outreach from banner ads to Instagram ads
8:15 — Why Google's spam updates end lazy automated workflows
11:45 — The true value of Operator AI and unstructured data
14:20 — Data accuracy vs. pipeline conversion problem
16:50 — The Goldilocks zone of sales activity
23:10 — The Relevancy Quadrant: Personalization vs. Data Difficulty

Key takeaways

Stop automating toxic outreach that ruins buyer trust.
Find the Goldilocks zone of volume and relevance.
Hard-to-find data drives the highest outbound conversion rates.
Solve your conversion problem before buying more contact data.
Shrink your TAM focus to act like the mayor of your territory.

Transcript

That's the thing that people don't consider. There is a Goldilocks zone of sales activity. If you automate stuff to the level of toxic automation, and you go past, and now the porridge is too hot, guess what? Nobody eats it.

Welcome back to another episode of the Revenue Reimagined podcast. We have with us today Mark Cosaglow, who is the co-founder and CEO of Operator AI, the former CRO at Catalyst, where he took them from uh I don't know, 5 to 10 million in 14 months in some of the toughest economic times we've seen. And employee number one at Outreach, where uh scaled from zero to over 230 million in revenue. We're talking really small numbers here, Mark.

Um, so I'd say it's safe to say that he knows a thing or two about building and scaling revenue in orgs of all sizes and all economic climates. He's taken all of those years of experience and is now determined to help you break through the Great Ignore. Mark, thanks for joining, man. Wow, I think I need to put that last like five seconds on the on my website.

Like you come in and you hear Adam talking about the great ignoring that nighttime DJ voice. Let's go. So, you know I used to do radio, right? True story.

No, I did not. That's why Dale has me do all the intros. Oh, we we gave So I say I say often, if if I could just do this all day long and make like a reasonable living, I'd be a very happy person. But I'm I'm happy to be your voice over on the website and I won't even charge.

Let's go. Awesome. Thanks for joining, Mark. Like tons of experience there.

So let's kick off with this is a little bit different. What is the great ignore? Let's give the audience like a taste of what you guys are doing. And then the second part of that question is, like, why start Operator?

And I think they probably blend together. Yeah, yeah, I think they do blend together. Um, listen, the great ignore is the fact that it takes 20 to 25 touches now to get somebody's interest. That's not even to book a meeting.

That's just to like peek their interest. Uh, and uh the great ignore really if I if I boil it down to in essence what it is, it's um the fact that we're sending such lazy, automated, horrible, irrelevant, uncompelling messaging that's so self-centered and so wrong. And we took those ideas that actually were semi-decent and sort of worked back in the day when in the Golden Age of sales before the economic downturn, and we scaled that out of control. And now uh we have things like GDPR, CCPA, and Do Not Call lists, which are societal pushbacks, governed law body people making legislation against our own crappy salesmanship.

That's what that is. And uh that's led to now people, you know, are to the point where rather than kind of try to wade through the noise to find the few signals, they've just given up and they don't care about the signals anymore because there's just too much noise. And so I feel in a way semi-responsible for this uh at because of my role at Outreach. And I and I always like to say this because it's super important.

Uh we talked about this a lot at Outreach in the beginning and honestly constantly about how people would abuse the platform and create this and it's kind of you know, and this is probably controversial. Maybe I shouldn't say this or whatever. But like No, please, please. Let's do some controversy.

It's like a gun. A gun never killed anybody. A person shooting a gun is what killed somebody. Outreach didn't create this.

People using Outreach with ill intent created this despite the fact that we had a myriad of settings and stuff that we put inside the application to prevent people from doing this. And it's funny, we first saw this really quickly with a a guy that named Vlad. We nicknamed them internally Vlad the Destroyer. And we Vlad was the first person to send 1,000 emails in a day, and he broke our system way back when and we're like, "Wait, Vlad, you shouldn't be doing this."

Well, it did pressure test some stuff and led to some, you know, more, you know, interesting and and robust infrastructure. But then Vlad was the first person to send 10,000 emails in a day, and he busted it. And then Vlad was the first person to try to send 100,000 in a day, and that's when we kicked Vlad the Destroyer off the platform. But like, he pushed the limits of this kind of like I'm going to just automate the crap out of everything.

And uh we did a lot of work in the product after that to prevent that. But anyway, that's kind of going down a rat hole. But that's what the great ignore is and the reason that I'm I'm after it is I I love sales. I love sales people.

I I think that sales people are some of the best educators on the planet and introducers of new ideas. And all of that value a part of salesmanship is going away because people are just ignoring us now. And we brought it on ourselves. Uh but uh we can fix it, I think.

And it's not even sales. It's also marketing, right? I mean, it's always like it's the same type of thing. Like if something work is working a little bit, like people always want to push more, push more.

Like, look at what's happening with GPT and chat and all that kind of stuff is is is is making even those messages even worse. Adam loves getting those every day. Send them to Adam more. A good a good metaphor is this.

It's like 10, 15 years ago, how many websites had banner ads? Yep. All of them. And it was just like, what happened, what did we all do with it?

We just started ignoring it. It was just noise except for the punch the monkey one where like you could actually interact with it. No, no. That one became horrible too after you punched the monkey a couple times.

But, you know what? I mean, what it did is it evolved. Something that was spammed to hell on every website on the planet that everybody ignored. What did we start to evolve into?

We've evolved to Instagram ads that I talk to more and more people that are like, "Yeah, I kind of shop on Instagram." I just talked to somebody that's like, "When I shop for something, I actually go on Instagram and kind of trick the algorithm into giving me ads." Yeah, Adam, you're doing it too. That that's where I returned 90% of it, but I I do my my wife will tell you like I'm a market on Instagram.

"Oh, that pan looks cool. Let's order it." But, you know, that that's that's I think where we need to start to evolve as sales people is can we be so relevant, so compelling, so inside what people are doing that what we're presenting to them causes the ads to be valuable. And if you said to somebody five years ago, "Oh, yeah, I love the Instagram ads."

Everybody think you're crazy. Yeah. It's funny because everything has changed, right? Like I get probably 10 to 15 emails a day.

Mark, you probably get more with CEO and co-founder, that's basically, "Hi, Mark, because you're the CEO and co-founder of X, you must struggle with Y and I can solve it with Z." Zero personalization, zero relevance, or my favorite is like, do you need, you know, 20 guaranteed leads a week in your inbox from someone who has 2,000 followers on LinkedIn. Um, and and the world is changing, and I'm super curious to hear how Operator is going to make a difference because we, like you, love sales, love the profession of sales, and certainly think that when you're adding value and you have a relevant offer that speaks to relevant pain in a timely manner, that that is is good cold outreach. What isn't good cold outreach is, "Hi, I have this product and you're a CEO, could you use it?"

But before we go there, I actually just saw this the other day, and I don't know if you've seen this or not, and I'm curious how this will play into Operator. Um, because I feel like Outreach has done a lot to not become a spamming tool. There's plenty of spamming tools out there now where it's like, "Oh, get your 170 domains and your 54 emails per domain and, you know, feel free to send them out." But Google has announced that they're starting October 15th, they are stepping up their game with Gemini to identify spam more effectively.

Um, secondary domains, I think they did this like six months ago. And and secondary you did. Hold on one second. I'm going to try not to monopolize, but secondary domains like tribusiness.

com, whatever, et cetera are going to be identified. Redirects from those domains are going to be tracked, um, and ultimately they're going to block you based on that. Warm up tools? Gone.

Like, that shit's not going to work either. So, how do you stay ahead of this curve? Because all these things that tools like instantly and smart lead and warmly and all these ones that are there not warmly, I'm sorry, warm up, that are like, "Oh, we're going to fix it. We're just going to get you all these subdomains and you're good."

You're not. Yeah. What do you do? And how does Operator stand out from that crowd to keep outbound relevant?

A lot of a lot of stuff on that. So let's let's Oh, yeah. unpack it a little bit is like, well, first of all, um there's the letter of the law and there's the spirit of the law. The spirit of spam laws is to keep people from spamming us.

The letter of the law says, you know, if you do these behaviors, we're going to mark you as spam. So just because you find spamish behaviors that aren't listed in the letter of the law and you're not technically spamming according to the legal definition, you're still fucking spamming. You're still violating the spirit of the law. And you know what happens when people find edge cases and cracks to get around the things that have been put in place to protect us and do stuff like that?

Eventually, they get shut down. And like, I said about six months ago, I did a post and I'm like, "Listen, let's take this AI SDR thing all the way to the end." And like, I got ludicrous at the end because I was kind of like, "Listen, in the end, there'll be an AI anti-AI SDR AI that battles the AI SDRs, and what they'll do is they'll start to figure out like, "Oh my God, we got to do this, this and this." And the next thing you know, we got World War III and the terminators are running all over the fucking planet because the AI created a robot to go knock on your door because it circumvented spam law or whatever.

You know what I mean? So, like that that's being ridiculous and I'm a sci-fi geek. So, like of course my brain went there. But like I think that that's uh these kind of cheat your way.

I I'll use that term. I don't know if that's the right term, but that's what it feels like to me. It feels like we're if we're all playing a game and there's somebody sitting across the table from you that's playing by different rules and bending the rules and not quite playing it, it's just not fun for anybody when they're they're they're winning. And so like, you know, maybe those people that use that stuff were winning.

And like the same thing, have you heard of this Spintax stuff too? Yeah, like we were just talking about that with a client yesterday. Yeah, Spintax, domain warmup, all of that stuff is meant to violate the spirit of the law and eventually the technology will catch up to it and it will be obsolete. And if you've built your GTM motion on that, you will start to fail.

And so, what is Operator doing? To me, the thing that I see great growth hackers doing, the ones that actually provide huge value in the outreach that compels people to respond to an offer or a message. The thing that I see the top 10% of sales reps do that you give them 12 accounts, and sure enough by the end of the year, they got opportunities with six or seven of them that are humongous, right? The thing that I've done dozens and dozens and dozens of interviews since I've started since I started to move in the direction of founding Operator, and I've done years and years and years of coaching and helping people that are in those same spots and using some of those services, right?

The core thing I found is they have real business acumen. And what they're able to do is typically find unstructured, extremely valuable data somewhere on the internet or somewhere. They bring it into a place, they analyze it, they take their time, they find what's interesting, and then they get so excited about why this person or company should be a customer that they can't help but figure out a super compelling way to get them into a conversation because they're so excited to share and to teach and to, you know, to give value uh because of what they figured out. That's the process that I think uh Outreach or that not Outreach, CRM, sorry, program.

Uh that Operator is trying to create is uh how do we take a core set of of lists and help you sharpen what your ICP definition is because most people have a super sloppy ICP definition. How do we help them build that good list? How do we then go identify and fetch this unstructured data that we can add to that core data set that is extremely valuable and personable? How do we then analyze that data for insights that are interesting?

And then how do we make sure that those insights are actually compelling enough for us to reach out? It's okay to take a list of a 1,000 companies and say, "We don't have something to say to 715 of them." It's okay, y'all. Cuz guess what?

You don't waste time on the 715 that are never going to do anything. You convert the 285 that you can. And this is the number one thing I see when I started Operator. People are like, "Well, Mark, you're going to have more accurate data.

You're going to have better coverage." And I'm like, "No. We're not going to have the most accurate data. We're not going to have the best coverage."

Do you know why you need more accurate data? And they're like, "Why?" I said, "Let me do a math problem for you. How many contacts do you have in your database right now?"

200,000. All right, great. 200,000. What's your data accuracy level?

50%. All right, so that means you have 100,000 people that you know their name and address and phone number and the right job they're at. You can't convert 100,000 people into your next $2 million of revenue? You don't have an accuracy problem.

You have a conversion problem. Or for product problem or product market fit problem, like there's a lot of other problems that you have. Yeah. Yeah.

You don't you don't need more accurate data. You don't need better coverage. You just need to fix this stuff that's meaning that's not letting 100,000 people that you know you can reach out to convert over into customers. And then the last thing is sending that insight off when the structured data to create it into other tools that you can use to, you know, uh, you know, reach out and do all that kind of stuff.

Uh, Operator's fuel, not engine. We want to deliver high octane fuel to the GTM machines that you've created inside your stack. So let's let's bounce off of this one a little bit. Um, you do you do some investing?

You do some investing. Um, you like we're talking to almost individuals now. But it's not really the individual's challenge, right? This is an investor problem because they're like, "Okay, they're they're uh I listened to uh um Kyle Norton and and Jason Lemkin's podcast earlier today."

And what they were talking about was like, "We're we're doing playbooks from like five years ago, which are not relevant today." So investors are like, "More volume, more data, like call out to more people." Then that comes to the CEO or the CRO, and so like the sales people are almost like stuck in between because some sales people are like, "I want to do more quality over quantity." And then you're getting from the top down, "No, you got to do quantity because if we, you know, if we do 100 calls a day and like they start doing this conversion math, which is totally irrelevant."

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Y-y'all have heard the phrase I'm sure sales is a numbers game. Mhm. But most people under only understand half of what that phrase means. The way that most people understand it is if I don't do enough activity, I won't get enough results.

That's like what you'd say 100% of people but you know what the flip side of that coin is? If I do too much activity, I don't get results. Hmm. Interesting.

And see, that's the thing that people don't consider. There is a Goldilocks zone of sales activity. If you automate stuff to the level of toxic automation, and you go past, and now the porridge is too hot, guess what? Nobody eats it.

And if you don't put enough heat on the porridge, the porridge is too cold, nobody eats it because you haven't done enough. There's a Goldilocks zone where that porridge and oatmeal with the little golden raisins and a little brown sugar, mm, let me eat some of that stuff. That's where we need No raisins. No, no raisins.

Come on. No, no raisins. Oh, I like some raisins in some oatmeal. Do you?

All right. Give Adam some beets. He likes beets. Beets?

I like beets too. Oh, I hate beets. They taste like dirt. It's You have to you have to wash them first before you eat them.

Then they don't taste. I mean, you yeah, you definitely do. My wife loves beets. Like she loves a good beet salad.

Like it's no one's business. Um, sales the saying that sales is a numbers game, I I think we hear it every single company with every founder we work with, right? It's get more contacts, make more calls, get more leads, send more emails, and like ultimately if if you send 100 emails, like you're you're going to have more success than if you send five. Yep.

Um, and I would argue the opposite. I would argue that if you send five highly tailored, really relevant emails that touch the pain, exactly what you were saying. I'd rather convert four out of five than two out of 100. Um, and spend that time and spend that effort.

But people don't do that. Out of CEOs, I think have this mindset and when you talk about like the outdated contacts and HubSpot or or Salesforce or whatever your CRM is. Like, so relevant. I literally just sent a Slack to one of my partners.

I'm like, "All right, I I marked 45,654 contacts for deletion. They're in there. They haven't been touched in two years. Half of them, you know, show a shit ton of bad contact data.

And the pushback I get from the CEO is, well, the ones with bad contact data, like, of course, delete those, but the others, like, why aren't we just emailing them?" How do you fundamentally change this mindset of non-go-to-market C-level executives who truly still believe, no matter what the data is, that this is not the way you want to do things? Like, I feel like we need a reckoning. And nothing has changed it yet, which blows my mind.

So, off the top of my head, like, the first thing that pops in is, um, what we used to do at Outreach. And I remember early on at Outreach, everybody would say, "Mark, we have Salesforce for this." That's what people would say. And I'd be like, "What are you talking about?"

They're like, "Yeah, we just I don't see it working." And I have this saying at Outreach, "Let your passion overcome your professionalism." And I also had a little thing that if I didn't get one complaint about a rep a year about them being too aggressive, they weren't being aggressive enough. And so what I would encourage my reps to do is and I I would listen I did this myself.

I'd be like, "Listen, you don't believe what what we do works?" All right, let me just tell you right now, Adam, that's bullshit. I'm about to bring up my screen and show you exactly how I worked you inside of Outreach to get this meeting that you're in right now. All right?

And so there's no argument to that fact, right? Now, let's take that to this. If I take any executive to their inbox and spam folder right now, I'm like, "Do you want this madness to continue?" And what are they going to say?

"No, I don't like that." Well, then why would you do something that you don't like to other people? Like, we just have to get it through our stupid heads that we're not going to be the outliers. We're not going to be the one that everybody loves to get 10 emails from a day or 100 calls a week.

You know what I mean? Like, we got to get that out of our mind. We're just regular people like everybody else. And the things that usually annoy and cause us to ignore buyers, if we do those same behaviors, we'll have that same result in our buyers.

It's not just us, right? So, I think that that's a really important thing for an exec to see like, you you want to get more spam, Mr. CEO? All right, no problem.

We're going to add you into our own cadence and you're going to start to get like lit up by us. Just like everybody else that is irrelevant, uncompelling, and doesn't have anything interesting to say is doing to you, which you say that you hate, but you're asking us to do. I know it's hypocritical, contradicting behaviors that are. But but every day.

It it's it's every day. It's the CEO who hires a BDR team, but then is annoyed with the BDR that cold calls them. Like, that that's my we see it all the time. Adam, you you have heard it.

The VPS sales that you've cold called that said, "I don't take cold calls," but is on the floor yelling at their reps to make cold calls. All day. That those people need to get out. You know what I mean?

Disgusting. Yeah. Disgusting. Yeah.

It's just old school go-to-market. Is is that a modern go-to-market? But That's exactly the same as a CEO that's telling you to spam your TAM when they don't like to be spammed. If they like to be spammed, all right, cool then.

We'll follow your lead, but nobody does. Yeah. And and is this just a symptom of like the real problem, the underlying problem, which is they don't know the ICP. They're just going out after everybody.

They and and they don't really understand how to articulate the value to what they're trying to sell. So we have we have two big challenges. Like, when you go talk to a head of sales, CEO, like give me your value proposition in 10 words or less that no one else can say. Like it's like crickets.

And then it's like, what's your ICP? And it's like, "Well, my TAM is this." And it's like, "No, not your TAM. Like who can you sell to?

What are you trying to sell to? And what's that value to that person?" Like, isn't that the real problem? Yeah, I I I think the real to me the real problem is, um, I did a post on this recently and it's like a little grid like, you know, an axes.

The the Y axis is the level of personalization. And Adam talked about the lowest form of personalization, which is you you have a problem, do you have this problem? Here's how we fix it. One step up from that, but not much better is industry.

All right? Hey, we kind of know that you sell nails. Most nail manufacturers have this problem. The next one is persona.

All right, we know that you are the lead engineer on the machine that makes nails. You they usually have this problem, do you, right? Those things used to work, they don't anymore. The next up though, is company.

Hey, nail, you know, Acme Nails, we see that you've done these three, these things. That starts to get pretty good. And then the last is the person. Hey, Adam, line manager at Acme Nails.

We've heard that you are having a problem with this in your plant on these machines. Okay, that's that that you can the level of relevancy and and how much how compelling it is goes up. On the X axis is how hard is the data to get? Hmm.

So, if the data is easy to get, if I can just do a ZoomInfo search or a super a little quick uh, you know, Google search and find the data, even if I personalize at the personal level, it's not as compelling. The harder the data it is to find, probably the more interesting that it is, right? So what we're after at Operator, what I think the best reps have always done, what the growth hackers do is they try to get to the company or personal level with hard-to-find data. And when you're in that quadrant, that we're not even quadrant.

I don't know how many squares are in my thing, but when you're that area of the grid, you are you are going to be a high a high converting outbound machine. And if you can do that at scale, you can you should do it at scale. But I would argue that most of the time to reach a level of appropriate relevancy and compellingness that you're you probably need to reach out to a lot less people than you actually think you can. Hmm.

I I think that last sentence is what holds so true to me. You need to reach out to a lot less people. Pick the right people. Maniacally focus on them.

And get rid of the shit that just makes you look busy, right? Are you busy or are you productive? Adam, this just came to me right now because of what you just said. And and it goes back to our CEO thing that we were talking about earlier or VPs that don't like whatever.

So, what does every CRO do over time to the size of territories of reps? Shrink them. They shrink it. Why do they shrink it?

Because So you could be more focused. Be more focused. You're going to get better results. That's what.

Yet, every CEO and board says what? Yep. We need to hire the people. Right.

Expand. Hire, hire, hire. Reach out to more people. That's insane.

That is hypocritical, self-contradictory behavior that is. I I I see a future LinkedIn post coming from you on this of we all start here yet we always end here. That's right. Every company, every time.

Every CEO's like, "CRO, I need you to make those territories smaller. Make them smaller. Get the Make make sure those reps really get every drop out of it." But at the same time, "I want you to reach out to even more, more people."

It's a mixed message. It doesn't make sense. When I, um, when I was at Toast, we started with, uh, everyone everyone's TAM, if you will, was like half the state, right? Like your territory covered half the state.

And then we dropped it down, you know, several times and we ended on if you're a rep in Toast, your territory is 600 restaurants, period, the end. Why? Cuz I want you to know every fucking thing about those 600 restaurants so that when you walk in, you know their business better than them. You know who the manager is, who the server is, who's sleeping with who, who eats where.

You know everything. And when we did that, the reps were like up in arms, right? Like, "What do you mean? I'm not going to be able to make as much money.

I only have 600 restaurants. Like, what am I going to do? I need this grand territory." PS, comp went like this.

Yes, it did. Win rates went like this because now you are the the term we used was the mayor of your town. Like you know everything about everyone and people want to work with that person versus Mark who comes in once a month on his rotation because you are restaurant number 220 and you went from are you went from industry product personalization to restaurant and owner and then from easy to get information that anybody could find on the web to intimate information that only somebody that is that deep can get into. And boom, you were in the you were in the the fun zone where you actually are starting to get results again.

Right? We have to we have to we've we always talk about conversion and maximizing conversion. And but the way that we always talk about it is make the pool as big as you can and get as many fish out of it as you can. Well, sometimes you just need to shrink the the pool.

You're going to get the same number of fish, but you're not like just, you know, going nuclear on a bunch of other people and things that, you know, are never going to happen. You're never going to catch. Yeah. The reality is like how many can you really go after at any given time?

Like, okay, you have 600 restaurants, but like that's a lot of restaurants to go sit in, eat in, look at, take notes on, figure out what people are doing. Like, It was quadruple that before. Yeah. Yeah.

Could you do that to 2,400 restaurants? Like you're leaving a lot of fruit on the tree. Like, pick the right fruit and like move on. So, Yeah.

Yeah, well, you know, there's there comes that stage of a company where you have to start to climb the tree to get the good fruit. The low-hanging fruit is gone. And when people have uh a something that they put in that gathers low-hanging fruit, unfortunately, they they think that that means that it's a really great system when it's just a really great system for low-hanging fruit and then they scale that up. And like, to me, the worst of that is these new AI SDRs.

I'm starting to hear rumbling that like they're uh only converting 20% of their trials over and most of those are people that aren't aren't churning, but they're not paying anymore either. They're on for free while they fix it. And uh like all the oh, we could have a whole pod We could have a whole podcast on counting customers that aren't paying customers. Yeah, right, exactly.

Or listing on your website. I've seen that movie. Facebook is a customer when it's one rep in one city using Facebook. But at at any rate, like that that's what we have to we have to be just so concerned about is like how do you how how are these low-hanging fruit tactics polluting scale of really strong foundational tactics that if you've been in sales for more than a minute, you know work.

But, you know what? You you got to hire the right people that can do that work. They got to have the right business acumen. They need to have the right data to do it.

And I'm I'm what I'm hoping Operator can do is provide some of some help on that. And this is the one of the travesties to me is like if you're in college and your sales professor gave you a list of 100 accounts and the the goal of the project was for you and a small team a group like a little group project was to deliver, "Here's the the 20 accounts that are most likely to convert. Why? What we're going to do?"

You would have three or four meetings with your group. You would sit down. You'd do it. You'd have an idea.

It might not be right, but it would be logical and you'd think through it. Do you know how many reps do that? Maybe 10%, maybe Yeah. Yeah.

Very, very small. Yeah. Yeah. But they would for a grade in college, but they won't do it for money in their bank account.

I'm confused. Well, it once again, that's a leadership thing because they're talking volume, they're talking like and and we see it all the time. Like we go to coach people and we're we're like like as simple mark as send a recap after you have a call. Like, what are the action items?

Who's got the action items and what are you going to do? And then like I I look at the recap and it's like, "Thanks for joining us on the call." No, like no action, nothing else if they even send it. Like ridiculous.

Like sales, one-on-one stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, when you did you if you don't do one-on-one, you never get to two-on-one, three-on-one, four-on-one.

And unfortunately, right now, it takes a PhD, which is like six-on-one level stuff to get results and, you know, I think we need to try to level that down a little bit. But like, um, you know, that's why the great reps, you know what? They're not talking on LinkedIn about how they're not not making money. They're not talking about how they don't have pipeline.

Like I love uh reading Brian Lamanna's stuff. Brian's awesome. That dude's crushing. Yeah.

And he but he's out there hooping it, and he is in the 400 level classes doing that kind of stuff. And you know what? He hasn't been in an AE that long. You can get there.

You just got to try. You got to work. You got to treat your job like it's college. You got to treat getting a good grade like it, you know, like or you have to treat making money like getting a good grade.

You got to work for it. You you nailed it. This uh this was the 101 of this show. I feel like there's so much more that we can get into and hopefully you will bless us with scheduling a 201 follow-up because we are just about out out of time.

Um, outbound is changing, outbound has changed, um, and if you are not adapting with the times, not only are you not going to sell, your domain's going to get blocked, your company reputation's going to get ruined, um, and then you're not going to be able to email your customers. So then you're going to have a whole lot more issues. Uh, Mark, before we wrap it up, are you are you game for some rapid fire? Yeah, hit me.

All right, here we go. 10 words or less. Early bird or night owl? Uh, neither.

I work about 8 to 5, and I crush it inside that time period and I don't work really early or really late. Cool. That's awesome. Uh, if you weren't in tech, what other trade or or activity would you would you do?

Uh, my favorite thing to do on the planet is coaching youth sports. I uh have more fun doing that as a parent than anything else and if I could make a living coaching youth sports teams, I'd strongly consider it. That's incredible. What sports?

Uh, I did basketball and soccer but basketball is my is my it's my favorite. I love it. Other than your iPhone, uh, what's the one tech tech gadget you can't live without? Hmm.

Uh, I don't think I have one besides that. I could do without anyth I could do without my phone to be honest with you. What what's your most used uh emoji in in work? Slack text.

Ooh, great question. Um, I'm not sure if it's green check mark, thumbs up, Green check mark or thumbs up. Okay. What um, But my favorite email is Yeah.

ghost emoji, apostrophe D, space, sad face, space, Mark. That's my that's my ghost email to get people re-engaged. 80% reply rate. Is that the sub is that in the subject line or in the body of the text?

That's the body of the text. It says, "Adam, empty line, ghost emoji, apostrophe D, line, sad face, line, Mark." One more time, is that good? I like it.

Last one. Let's let's wrap this baby up. Dream vacation destination. Uh, I'm going to go uh Bali.

Bali. Nice. Yeah, I want to stay in one of those huts on the Yeah, I love that. I'd love to do that.

I love it. Mark, thank you so much for joining, man. Uh a ton of value, super excited uh for Operator AI. Um, can't wait to learn more and can't wait to have you back on the show, man.

Thanks, y'all. Appreciate it. Thanks, Mark. Appreciate it, man.

Cheers.