In today’s issue, I’ll share the exact process I follow to find prospects’ problems. If you can replicate these steps, you’ll be able to catch the attention of your prospects, because you’ll show them you understand what problems they are trying to solve, in details.

Understanding prospects’ problems is a big mindset shift for many salespeople because they are trained to sell a product, and pitch features and benefits, instead of trying to put themselves in the shoes of their customers.

That’s what I’m going to show you, step-by-step:

Step 1: Understand their goals and metrics

Every prospect you are trying to reach has one or more metrics they are evaluated on. A VP of Sales will be evaluated on revenues, a CFO on bottom-line, a CPO on shipping speed and so on. Your prospects get promoted or fired based on their performance against these metrics.

Your goal when finding prospects’ problems is to get a clear understanding of these metrics, and the goals associated with these metrics.

Here are a few places where you can get an idea of these metrics and goals:

• Podcasts/webinars where your Ideal Customer Profiles are interviewed
• Job descriptions
• Current and past customers

When you have an idea of the metrics your prospects are evaluated on, your next step is to understand their goals. You can ask yourself the following questions:

• Are they trying to maximize or minimize this metric?
• What happens if they miss it? What are the concrete consequences on their jobs/lives?
• Do they have stretch goals?

Below are some examples for different types of prospects:

In today’s issue, I will share 5 simple tips you need to follow if you want to make President’s Club. I got these tips while interviewing Jan Mundorf during my first Sales Creator Content Party in Berlin last Friday.

Most salespeople have issues reaching their targets. In fact, between 55% and 69% of salespeople missed their sales targets in 2024, and 2025 is looking to be a really bad year too. It’s harder than ever to reach your targets, so here are 5 tips I got from my conversation with Jan.

Tip 1: Start with a mindset change

When Jan started in sales, he was finding every excuses he could to explain why he was missing his targets. But last year, he decided to take ownership and become 100% accountable for his results, good or bad.

Him and his SDR worked together to keep each accountable on the tasks that were critical to making it to President’s Club. Jan set his goal to make it to President’s Club, and built a plan to make it.

But the execution of this plan is where he made the difference. And this is achieved with strong routines.

Tip 2: Build strong routines

Jan used to compete at high level in sports when he was younger. He learnt how to create routines to make sure he was doing what was important for him to be successful.

And he transposed these routines to selling. Here’s how his workday is structured:

• 8:00: Bike to work
• 9:00: Daily huddle
• 10:00: first call
• 12:00: Lunch break + LinkedIn content
• 13:00: More calls
• 17:00: Follow up on opportunities
• 18:00: Go to the gym or go for a run

Jan also works in batches to avoid context switching. For example, he’s doing all his follow-ups at the same time, and he doesn’t hang out on LinkedIn all day long.

Tip 3: Prospect the smart way

Another important aspect of Jan’s success comes from prospecting the smart way. As an Account Executive, he gets qualified opportunities from his SDR, but he also manages inbound leads.

When he gets an inbound lead, instead of putting it in an automated sequence, he immediately calls the lead to give some momentum to the opportunity. He will literally stop anything he’s doing to prioritize this task.

When it comes to outbound, Jan typically prospects right after lunch or on Friday afternoons, because he gets more people picking up the phone at these times.

Tip 4: Be obsessed with Discovery

Jan is obsessed with structured discovery. Initially, he was winging his calls and not following a specific methodology, but he changed that habit after being torn apart during a forecasting because he had no answers on a deal.

He then started following MEDDICC as a qualification methodology, which allowed him to have more objective data on his deals.

What I loved the most about this part was the way he tests if a deal is really qualified. If you’re working on a deal and you invite your prospect for a coffee while in town, and they refuse, you may not have qualified that deal enough, or built a strong enough relationship.

Tip 5: Build an internal team

This was the most impressive part of Jan’s process, and one I personally need to work on a lot more. Jan creates a whole internal team around him. He doesn’t sell alone, he gets everyone involved, from marketing, to SDR, to legal, and even VPs.

He takes the time to sit down with them in person, go on regular calls to have their backup when he needs help. And to me, this is the biggest reason he’s so successful. He understood that Enterprise Selling is a team sport, and he takes care of his team.

And these are 5 tips you can use to make it to President’s Club this year. These are all things in your control, and they will make the difference between missing and reaching your sales targets, not matter what you sell.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I will share the system that I use to calculate how many prospects I should contact every day. Most salespeople don’t know what outbound activity level is required for them to reach their targets, so they wing it.

By following this simple system, you can build the first step of your outreach system and gain a better understanding of your daily activity level.

Here’s the system, step-by-step:

Step 1: Define your goal

Start by defining or reviewing your goal. If you are an Account Executive, your goal may be a booking, MRR, or revenue goal. If you’re an SDR, your goal may be an opportunity or meetings booked. In both cases, having a clear understanding of your monthly, quarterly, or yearly goal is critical to being successful in your job.

You’d be surprised how many reps don’t know this number. Don’t be one of them.

In the example below, the goal is 138 discoveries performed per quarter:

Step 2: Set your conversion rates

Now that you have a clear goal, it’s important to understand your conversion rates. This can be as simple as determining how many meetings you book per prospect you contact, but I recommend tracking the following conversion rates:

• Reply rate: # of prospects who replied / # of prospects contacted
• Meeting booked rate: # of prospects who accepted a meeting / # of prospects who replied
• Meeting held rate: # of prospects who showed up / # of prospects who accepted a meeting

In the example below:

• Reply rate: 38%
• Meeting booked rate: 20%
• Meeting held rate: 80%

Step 3: Add a comfortable padding

Using these conversion rates, you can calculate the number of prospects to add to your sequences in order to reach your targets. However, I recommend adding a comfortable cushion to account for variations in your prospecting system.

For instance, you may not know your conversion rates if you start a new job, prospect into a new market, or simply try a new sequence. Adding a padding of 10% to 20% will reduce the risk of missing your targets.

Step 4: Turn the result into a daily activity

Finally, use your end goal and conversion rates to break down your end goal into a daily activity. In our example, performing 138 discovery calls per quarter means adding 2277 prospects to your sequence for the whole quarter, which represents 35 new prospects per weekday. That’s a lot but still manageable.

And this is how to turn a big goal into a daily activity target. By doing so, you’ll build confidence in your prospecting system and make progress towards reaching your targets.

If you’re interested in calculating this for yourself or your team, you can use my Sales Process Calculator.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I will share my top 3 message frameworks that you can use to book meetings more effectively. I’ve been using variations of these frameworks for years, and they simply work, no matter what you sell.

Salespeople make prospecting more complex than it should be. They try to cram every feature and benefits of their products into one email, and they completely ignore what makes prospects care about their messages enough to reply.

By making these frameworks your own and using them in your outreach, you’ll start more conversations, and turn these conversations into meetings.

Here are the three frameworks:

Framework #1: Question + Teaser + CTA + PS

This framework is incredibly useful because it focuses on a specific problem that a prospect may have and teases a potential solution. Here’s how it’s structured:

• Question: A problem-oriented question to get your prospect to reflect.
• Teaser: An intriguing resource to help your prospect solve a part of the problem you mentioned in your question.
• CTA: A simple question to get the prospect to reply.
• PS: A funny/personal mention to show you prospect you did your research

Example:

• Question: Eric, curious to know how you’re planning on reaching your H2 goals with the RIF that your company went through.
• Teaser: If you’re interested, I can share a short, 7-step playbook to help your AEs go from farmers to hunters, in less than 90 days.
• CTA: Interested?
• PS: Saw you’re into golf. What’s the best part of your game?

Why it works: This framework is effective because it demonstrates to your prospects that you have conducted research. The “Question” refers to a company trigger, while the “PS” refers to a personal detail.

Framework #2: Do the math

With this framework, you can generate interest in a conversation with you using a back-of-napkin calculation.

• Trigger: The reason for reaching out. Better if you have a number.
• Quick pitch: Short explanation of the quantified impact your solution provides.
• Calculation: Back of napkin calculation.
• CTA: Ask for interest

Example:

• Trigger: Mary, saw you acquired your main competitor. Smart move.
• Quick pitch: We help CFOs identify which business units are less profitable, resulting in savings of 3% of your operating costs on average.
• Calculation: With a typical operating cost between €25M – €40M, this would mean saving from €750.000 to €1.200.000.
• CTA: Worth a chat?

Why it works: This framework helps you stand out in the mailbox of your prospect because you identify a problem, quantify it, and then ask for a conversation to discuss in more details. Go check my Cold Message System if you need to find and quantify your prospects’ problems.

Framework #3: Job to be done

This framework is incredibly useful for prospecting with existing accounts or new individuals within an organization with whom you have had contact.

• Memory: A past topic of conversation
• Tool: A tool/resource related to the conversation
• Confirm: A question to confirm it is still a priority
• Teaser: A sentence to get the prospect intrigued about the tool

Example:

• Memory: Lizzie, last time we spoke with the person in your current position, they were trying to build an outbound sales playbook.
• Tool: I stumbled on list of 7 common mistakes when building an outbound playbook.
• Confirm: Am I totally off, or is it a relevant topic?
• Teaser: If yes, just hit reply and I’ll share the list with you.

Why it works: This framework is effective because it piques the curiosity of your prospects by offering a specific resource to help them solve a problem.

You can use these three frameworks mostly on email, but they will work on LinkedIn, and even when making cold calls. Give them a try and let me know how it goes by DM on LinkedIn.

I hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I’ll share the top 5 mistakes I see salespeople make when they use AI. It’s no secret, AI is everywhere in our lives. From search and summaries on Google, to vibe coding, it’s part of our daily routine, and it’s just a beginning.

But in sales, AI is a double-edged sword. It’s incredibly useful to brainstorm ideas, summarize massive data sets, or improve your writing. But most sales tools that have added AI features to their products have no clue what they are doing. And as a result, salespeople make a ton of mistakes that cost them deals.

Here are the 5 biggest mistakes I see all the time:

Mistake 1: Confusing AI and automation

We’ve all seen the posts from founders claiming they now have more AI agents than full-time employees. When you dive deeper, you see that their “AI agents” are just simple automations and have nothing to do with AI. For example, they have a LinkedIn connection request agent, which is just a basic tool sending connection requests on LinkedIn.

In most cases, the wild AI claims of these types of businesses make no sense. They confuse automation and AI, and they create a ton of hype for nothing.

Mistake 2: Using AI to write entire emails on your behalf

Using ChatGPT to write your cold emails has been one of the first use cases that was massively used by the sales community. We’ve seen buttons pop everywhere in sales engagement tools, suggesting us to generate messages with AI.

And the messages? They suck.

This is a typical example of tech founders hyping themselves over their “proprietary AI” which is just a ChatGPT wrapper. And it shows most people don’t understand the psychology of selling and convincing strangers to reply to your emails.

Mistake 3: Not training your AI properly

I like to compare an AI with an intern or an assistant. When they arrive for their first day of work, they have a general training and understanding of things, but they are fresh and they don’t know how things are done for you. That’s why you need to train them.

If you don’t share a structured knowledge to your AI (like what a good cold email looks like), your AI while use its basic knowledge and generate something too basic. And that’s something I see way too often in my mailbox. No personalization, generic copy, which are all consequences of not training an AI correctly.

Mistake 4: Not vetting AI features in your tools

This one is the hardest to avoid. Every week, we see a new revolutionary AI feature pop up. From AI concierge, to the ultimate AI agent, product teams in the sales tool space are in a competition to win the AI race.

And most of the feature they come up with are absolutely useless. They make selling more complex, less human, and salespeople end up wasting time training the AI, instead of prospecting, running calls, or closing deals.

Mistake 5: Using AI to comment on LinkedIn

This is the worst use of AI for selling. And it’s something that has considerably reduced the value of spending time on LinkedIn. It’s incredibly easy to see when an AI is commenting. The comment typically paraphrases elements of the post and uses phrases like “How do you balance?”, “Curious, how do you…”, or “That’s impressive!”.

We all know when someone is using AI to comment and it brings zero value to anyone. That’s why I’ve started blocking people who comment with AI on my posts, they hurt my credibility.

And these are the top 5 mistakes with AI in sales. Selling is inherently human. It’s way more complex that just following a sales process, and most people are trying to get AIs to do their jobs for them, instead of using it as a tool.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I’ll share 3 remote selling routines I can’t live without. Summer holiday season is on, and while it’s great for kids, it’s hard for parents who need to keep working, and extra-hard for those who need to work from home, with kids running around.

Between holidays, family reunions, and trips, it can get really hard to keep a healthy routine. I’m really familiar with that, I’ve been moving around a ton in the past two weeks, but it didn’t prevent me from closing $5,000.

All thanks to 3 simple routines:

Routine 1: Daily prospecting

If you’ve been reading me for a while, you know how prospecting daily is important for me. It’s the lifeblood of any business. My prospecting routine is a simple daily procedure:

• start with follow-ups
• find 5 new prospects
• add them to my sequence

I track all of this using Amplemarket (but check this list if you want more ideas).

I’ve been following this routine for years and it’s helped me create a steady flow of opportunities. At times, I dropped the ball (holidays, family issues, etc.), but every time I got in trouble and had to build pipeline, going back to this routine saved me.

Routine 2: Daily conversations

This is my most important routine, by far. A lot of salespeople are obsessed with booking meetings with new prospects, but they forget to keep conversations flowing with active opportunities.

I go to my CRM, I check the status of each opportunity, and I check if I have an answer to the following questions:

• Cause: Why are prospects speaking with me, why does the opportunity exist?
• Outcomes: What are the outcomes they want from working with me?
• Decision: When can they make a decision

If I don’t know the answer to these 3 questions, I contact the prospect to get my answer. If I can’t get an answer, I know my deal doesn’t have much energy, and I need to quickly disqualify.

Routine 3: Weekly forecasting

I’ve developed this routine recently with my wife. I was in Paris during the bachelor party of a friend, and we had just gotten out of a €150 brunch (absolute rip-off btw). It got me a bit stressed about money.

So I called my wife, and we started listing all the expenses we had for the summer (health insurance, plane tickets, etc.) and I sent the following list to my wife:

In today’s issue, I’ll share how I work multiple time zones as a location-independent salesperson. I live in Mexico for most of the year, but I spend 2 months working from Europe every summer.

If you’re selling remotely, and want to work from where you want, you need to develop a system to selling, while working on the other side of the world.

Here’s mine:

Step 1: Display two time zones on my calendar

I live in Mexico most of the year. Before that, I used to live in South of France. Depending on the time of the year, there are 7 to 8 hours of time difference between these two time zones. And a lot of my customers are still based in Europe, which means my only window to have calls with them is during my morning, until 11AM Mexico City Time.

That’s why I have added a secondary time zone on my calendar:

In today’s issue, I’ll share how I prospect during the summer months. This will be especially relevant if you have kids, but these tips will help you stay focused during the slow summer months.

Prospecting is already super hard in 2025, it’s even harder when most of your prospects are taking some time off. Between holidays, kids running around your home office, and countless opportunities to relax, it’s hard to stay focused on your outbound efforts.

Here’s how I do it:

Part 1: Mandatory naps for kids

Yes, this is a parenting advice too! If you’re in a part of the world where weather is hot in summer, an after lunch nap for kids is always a great idea. It’s a great opportunity to get them to rest so they have enough energy for the rest of the day.

It’s also a great opportunity to tackle your prospecting routine. The house is quiet, and it’s one of the only times of the day where you have no distractions. You can also block some time early in the day, when kids are asleep to focus on your prospecting.

No matter how you structure your day, find some quiet time to focus on getting conversations started.

Part 2: Stay consistent

This is the hardest part of a summer routine. If you work remotely, your summer can look like a long workation. I can tell you by experience that it makes it really hard to focus on working, and especially hard to focus on prospecting.

Here’s what you can do to fight your natural tendency to skip prospecting:

• update your sequence to keep it lightweight (3 to 4 touchpoints only)
• start with your follow ups
• find how many people you need to add to your sequence (use this to help you)
• add them to your sequence
• repeat daily

The main difference with a standard prospecting routine is the quantity of touchpoints. Instead of actively trying to start conversations with a large quantity of prospects, you focus on lightweight prospecting, so you don’t spend hours sending messages in the void.

Part 3: Focus on expansion, not net new business

Finally, focusing on expansion is a good way to stay productive, and to build pipeline for the early months of autumn.

Make a list of people you know, lost opportunities, active customers and so on. This will do a few things for you:

• you’ll start a lot more conversations (people you already know are more likely to reply)
• you’ll get more motivated because less prospects ignore you
• you won’t have to work so hard to find intent data and triggers

It’s also a great opportunity to restart conversations you wouldn’t necessarily start because you’re too busy in normal times.

And these are 3 tips I can give you to stay on top of your prospecting this summer. This will help you maintain a consistent flow of conversations, and some of these conversations will turn into opportunities (either in summer or when everyone is back to work).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I’ll share 7 tools I recommend when selling remotely. I use most of them daily, and they help me stay structured (and keep my sanity) when working by myself.

Let’s be real for a second. The world of remote sales is a mess. Every day, a new AI agent builder promises us to replace SDRs, or book 57 meetings per week, etc. Most salespeople are wasting way too much time trying these new tools, instead of focusing on what matters: conversations.

These tools will help you do just that.

1st Category: Prospecting Tools

This category is the most important for salespeople working remotely. And by prospecting tools, I don’t mean prospecting channels (LinkedIn, Email, phone), but the productivity tools that help salespeople do their job faster. Here’s my selection:

Amplemarket

Amplemarket is an all-in one sales engagement platform. It’s built to manage everything prospecting related. You can build detailed lead lists, put them into manual or automated sequences, and have automated answers, based on the replies of your prospects.

I’ve been using it every day for the last 18 months, and a lot of my customers have chosen this tool for their sales teams. If you’re managing a sales team or working with other salespeople, it’s simply the best tool I can recommend (check reply.io if you’re working by yourself).

Kaspr

Kaspr is another tool I use daily. I specifically use it when Amplemarket doesn’t find emails and mobile phone numbers in EMEA. Before being purchased by Cognism, Kaspr was a French company, and they worked hard on building an EMEA-focused database.

2nd Category: CRMs

CRMs are the most important tools of a sales organization. This is where all the customer and prospect data is stored. You may not have a choice when working for someone else, but if you do, this is what I recommend.

Pipedrive

Pipedrive is a simple CRM you can use if you’re working in a small organization. There’s everything you need to track your leads and the opportunities associated, and the price is quite affordable. I recommend it if you’re looking for something simple and you want to move fast.

Monday.com

Monday.com is a great ecosystem for project management and all kind of productivity tools. If you’re working in the Monday.com ecosystem, I strongly recommend their CRM product. You have the same logic as in the project management tool, but with templates prepared for sales. Highly recommended if your organization is already running on Monday.com.

Notion

Notion isn’t technically a CRM. It’s a productivity tool to manage everything and anything in your life. I personally use it as a CRM because it’s the environment in which I work every day. I create my content in Notion, I create new products in Notion, and I manage my deals in Notion.

If you’re looking for a simple and cheap option, I can’t recommend it enough. The learning curve can be steep, but I strongly recommend Notion Mastery to build a crazy good Notion dashboard.

3rd Category: Sales Call Tools

This last category is important to turn sales calls into new offerings. It is where AI makes the most sense, because of all the data points I get from conversations with my customers and prospects.

Fathom Notetaker

Fathom Notetaker is free tool (I think it uses your data to train its AI) that is automatically invited to all the calls in your calendar. It acts as a silent participant in your call and it records your conversations, your screen, and creates summaries of your calls, including the action items you committed to.

I use it for all calls with prospects and customers, and then copy/paste the transcript in Claude AI (full use case here). It’s a no-brainer for me because it captures everything and remembers all important points that I tend to overlook.

Claude AI

Claude AI is the smartest cousin of ChatGPT. It’s an AI I use every single day, especially to find patterns in conversations I have with my customers. For example, I launched The Sales Creator Revenue Engine after having dozens of conversations with sales creators. I copy/pasted the transcripts into Claude AI, and it helped me analyze the conversations and find common problems sales creators were having.

And these are 7 tools I strongly recommend if you’re selling remotely. As you can see, most of them aren’t AIs, and they’re focused on helping people do their jobs better, instead of claiming to replace humans.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I’ll take you behind the scenes of my remote work setup. I’ve been working remotely since March 2020, and for the past 5 years, I’ve been doing so from Germany, Switzerland, France, Mexico, and the USA.

Working remotely is something I cherish every day, but it comes with its set of difficulties. I’ve worked from formal offices, my holiday house, my kitchen countertop, or even from a car while my wife was driving from Cancun to Holbox. And I learned a lot about what to do and what to avoid in your remote setup.

Let’s dive in:

Part 1: The place

You’ve seen it everywhere. People posting pictures of themselves on the beach or in front of a swimming pool, with their computer open, pretending to enjoy working remotely.

It’s a lie.

We have a swimming pool at our holiday house (you can rent it btw), and I’ve tried working from there a few times. It’s impossible. It’s too hot, too much sun, bugs bothering you. It’s a big no for me.

To me, a good remote setup is a place where I can be focused, take calls, and have as little distractions as possible. Back in September 2024, we moved from France to Mexico, and since then, I’ve experimented with different places to work from:

The kitchen → too busy, impossible to have a call without getting distracted