In today’s issue, I’ll share the exacts steps I follow to build a remote prospecting system. When selling remotely, it can get challenging to prospect. You don’t have a boss on your back, checking your activity, and you can easily procrastinate. Without the energy of a sales floor, creating consistent prospecting results is a lot harder than it looks.

I’ll show you how you can address this challenge in 3 simple steps.

Why remote prospecting is different from office prospecting?

Remote prospecting is quite different than prospecting from an office. When I started in tech sales in 2015, I joined a team of 30 in Berlin. We were all prospecting from the office. There was a great vibe, and a healthy competition. We were all opening new markets, and the camaraderie helped us book a ton of meetings.

Now imagine prospecting from your home office. You’re sitting alone in your bedroom, only interrupted by the noise of Slack notifications. If you want to speak to someone, you need to send and invitation, jump on a Zoom meeting, and fight with your camera to work. If you start getting tired, you can easily go for a quick nap, or start doing your chores.

This environment is the absolute worst if you want to prospect, which is why you need to create systems and rituals to fix your environment.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Plan your prospecting system

Let’s be honest, prospecting isn’t fun. You keep repeating the same task over and over, you get rejected a lot more than you’d like, and your only reward is a meeting booked (which has less than 30% of turning into business). It’s super hard to do consistently.

If you want to prospect regularly, you need to start by protecting your time. When it’s done, I recommend starting with follow-up messages, then finding new contacts to add to your sequence (determine how many you need here). When you’re done, add these people to your sequence (send them the first touchpoint), and you’re done for the day!

A prospecting system also needs a solid sequence. It’s a set of steps you follow until you either get a reply, or run out of steps. Here’s how I recommend creating your sequence.

When your sequence skeleton is done, you need to define what you’re going to write or say. I recommend using my prospecting template swipe file to do so.

Step 2: Get some quick wins

There’s a crazy misconception about outbound prospecting.

Salespeople believe their meetings won’t be worth as much if they are booked with someone they know, over a total stranger. I believed that for years, and my trajectory completely changed when I started including people I knew. Instead of chasing net new logos, contact past or current customers, lost opportunities, or people you know outside of work (they have to be relevant though).

This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t contact people if you don’t know them, but it will make your prospecting more interesting because you’ll get a few replies and you won’t just get people ignoring you.

Another thing salespeople focus too much on is planning. They get stuck in the ideation phase, tweaking their messaging and channel before getting started. Instead, define your activity target (use the sales process calculator), create a quick sequence, and send messages.

At first, you won’t get much results. Your first two weeks will be the toughest. But if you prospect every single weekday, you’ll reach an optimal activity level, and you’ll gather enough data to understand what works and what doesn’t.

Step 3: Track early signs of success

I remember when I started my first sales job. I was obsessed with closing my first deal. You could feel it in everything I was doing. My prospecting messages where focused on getting people to sign, and all my calls were extremely pushy and aggressive. Josh Braun calls this the “commission breath”. That’s the biggest mistake I see when coaching salespeople.

Instead of obsessing over closing deals, focus on your early signs of success.

When using email, your first sign of success is your email landing in the primary inbox of your prospect (sounds obvious, but a lot harder than you think). If you’re having trouble with this, I recommend checking Maildoso. Your second sign of success with email is the open rate. Anything under 50% has to be worked on.

When using LinkedIn, your early sign of success is the invitation acceptance rate. If people do not accept your invitation, you won’t be able to message them, send them voice notes, or videos.

This is how you can build a simple remote prospecting system. Plan your system, get some quick wins, and track your early signs of success. And if you’ve already tried all this, but you need more advanced support, then I recommend checking my Prospecting Engine.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I’ll share my top 5 sales tools for remote sales. There are over 5.529 sales tools in 25 sub-categories available to help us sell more. Finding the right tool for your need has become incredibly time-consuming. Most tools now claim to revolutionize how we sell with AI (spoiler alert: they don’t).

That’s why I’m going to share 5 tool categories (and examples) that you can’t afford to ignore if you’re selling remotely.

Let’s dive in:

Category 1: Sales Engagement tools

A sales engagement tool helps you structure your prospecting efforts. They can range from a simple sequencer to a full suite of prospecting tools, including lead research, sequencing, auto-reply, AI-assisted lead engagement, etc.

Here are 3 tools I recommend (I’ve tried all of them):

• Amplemarket: If you’re looking for an all-in one sales engagement tool, then Amplemarket is the one for you. That’s the tool I use every day to manage my prospecting, and it has absolutely everything you need. Ideal if you’re a sales leader with a big team.
• Reply.io: If you’re looking for a simple sales engagement tool, Reply.io does a lot of what Amplemarket does, but with a simpler setup and a lower price. Ideal if you’re prospecting by yourself.
• The Prospecting Tracker: The Prospecting Tracker is a simple Notion tracker I have created for salespeople who cannot choose their engagement tool (when their employer don’t want to switch tools). Ideal to get started.

Category 2: A CRM

A CRM is the most important sales tool to help you keep track of your deals. Most remote companies use Salesforce or Hubspot, but here are two simpler CRMs I recommend:

• Pipedrive: If you need a simple system to keep track of your deals, with a simple learning curve.
• Monday.com: Fully customizable CRM. A bit harder to set up, but ideal if you’re managing a team and want fully control on your data.

Category 3: A calendar link

A calendar link is a tool that allows prospects to book some time with you, without having to go back and forth. Here are 3 that I recommend:

• Calendly: I personally use Calendly since 5 years. Really simple, straight to the point, and you can even integrate with Stripe to get paid.
• Chili piper: The best platform to convert demand into pipeline. More complicated to set up, but a must for sales teams with more than 1 person.
• Built in links in Google: A recent feature Google has added to its calendar. Ideal when you’re getting started.

Category 4: A data backup

When using email and phone to prospect, you’ll find a maximum of 70% of the email addresses and phone numbers if you use one provider only. That’s why I recommend using at least one additional data provider to help you find the right data (especially if you’re selling outside of the US).

• Kaspr: The best tool to find mobile phone numbers. I’ve been working with them for a while and they never disappoint.
• Dropcontact: A great tool to find accurate emails, especially if you’re selling in EMEA.

Category 5: An e-Signature tool

Finally, an e-signature tool is a must if you’re selling remotely. Instead of sending contracts, getting prospects to print them, scan them, and send them back, you can use one of these tools to get the contract signed. They often have features for automatic follow-up with prospects.

• Pandadoc: The ideal tool to get contracts signed today. Really simple to set up.
• Docusign: The Enterprise solution you need if you’re selling to traditional verticals.

And these are the tools I recommend when selling remotely. You won’t need much more than that to do what matters in sales; prospecting, managing your deals, speaking to customers, and signing contracts.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s issue, I’ll share how I manage my time as a remote sales guy. When selling remotely, it can get really hard to create a clear physical and mental boundary between your professional and your personal life. You end up working when you should be with your family, or doing chores when you should be working.

I’ll tell you about what you should focus on, how to set boundaries when working remotely, and what tools you can use to protect your time.

Why managing your time is so hard when selling remotely

Back in 2020, I got forced (like everyone else) to work from home. I wasn’t expecting to have difficulties managing my time, but after a few weeks running in circle, I started getting anxious.

At first I didn’t realize it, but the creeping anxiety came from not having a strict routine and no boundary between my work and my personal life. I was sleeping, working, eating, doing sports in the same place, and it drove me crazy.

That’s when I decided to build a routine to build a mental boundary between the important aspects of my life.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Focus on critical activities first

When working in sales, you have different types of tasks and activities. Some are proactive (like prospecting), some are reactive (like taking an impromptu call with a prospect). I recommend listing all the activities that you typically do in one day, and rank them by priority.

Here are my typically sales activities during the day, ranked from most critical to least critical:

• Prospecting
• Running discovery calls
• Following up with active opportunities

First thing I do in the morning is prospecting. I spend 30 to 60 minutes following up with prospects, finding new prospects, and contacting them. Then I have a slot where I group all the discovery calls of my day (typically after the prospecting block). When it’s done, I focus on moving deals further (and disqualifying).

Step 2: Set clear boundaries

When I know what my critical activities are, I create a daily ritual to make sure I’m not getting distracted by other reactive tasks.

For example, I’ll block 60 minutes from 8AM to 9AM for prospecting. I also have a “Sacred Hour” block every day from 11AM to 1PM so I can focus on deep work tasks (the ones where I need to be ultra-focused). Here’s what my calendar looks like:

In today’s issue, I’ll share 3 simple steps to build a solid prospecting routine, using Claude (or ChatGPT). Many salespeople are trying to scale their outreach with the AI tools that are available to them. As a result, prospects get SPAMMED with tons of soulless cold emails, LinkedIn messages, or even LinkedIn comments. It’s tiring for everyone, and we end up asking ourselves if this AI thing is not just a bubble.

Here’s are 3 concrete steps you can follow to build your prospecting routine with Claude:

Step 1: Explain your problem to Claude

When working with an AI, your first step is to explain what you want from this AI. A good way to explain your problem is to follow this 4-step framework:

• Context: Give context about your situation, and what’s your problem
• Role: Give the AI a specific role
• Task: Give a task to the AI
• Format: Format the way the AI will ask you questions

Here’s an example I used, to help me build a prospecting routine if I was an AE who got asked to start doing outbound:

Hi there, it’s Thibaut.

Welcome to the Remote Sales Playbook.

In this newsletter, I primarily cover:

• How to create solid prospecting systems and routines (that get your 30%+ reply rates)
• Concrete tactics to qualify deals, close them faster, while wasting less time with unqualified prospects
• Tips, tactics, and strategies to help you work when, where, and how you want (as a remote salesperson)

But I’ve been writing this newsletter for a while now, over 3 years!

And I want to make it as easy as possible for you to find issues that are most relevant to you.

So, here are some of my favorite issues… organized by topic.

How to create solid prospecting systems and routines (that get your 30%+ reply rates)

The topic I probably write about this most is prospecting.

So, if you’re looking to finally get prospects to pay attention to your messages and/or reach your prospecting targets I’d start here:

• How many prospects you should contact every day: A simple formula to find out how many prospects to contact daily if you want to reach your targets.
• How I booked 12 meetings with this simple LinkedIn connection request: A killer connection request template for LinkedIn.
• 5 steps to building your prospecting routine: A playbook to make sure you prospect the right way.

Concrete tactics to qualify deals, close them faster, while wasting less time with unqualified prospects

Another topic I write about frequently is closing. How to turn a stranger into a customer.

So, if you’re looking to stop wasting time on tire kickers and/or reach your sales targets, I’d start here:

• 3 simple questions to ask to close a deal: A qualification framework I love using to know if I’m talking to people who are serious about a deal.
• 3 steps to close a deal today: A tactic I use all the time to get people to commit to a deal and sign it on the same day.
• 3 steps to fix your pipeline: A methodology I use to clean up my pipeline and make sure I’m investing my efforts with the right prospects.

Tips, tactics, and strategies to help you work when, where, and how you want (as a remote salesperson)

Finally, a personal favorite topic of mine is independence. I love sharing tips to help salespeople diversify their income streams, and get more freedom.

So, if you’re looking to start building a life in your own terms and/or diversify your income, I’d start here:

• If you’re a remote salesperson, you need to read this: A must-read if you’re working remotely and got used to setting your own rules.
• 5 side gigs you can land right now: 5 concrete ideas to start working for yourself on the side.
• How to avoid burning out as a remote salesperson: A simple resource to help you organize your time (and set boundaries) when working remotely.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share my updated LinkedIn Connection Request Guide. LinkedIn connection requests are incredibly powerful for salespeople when used the right way. But most are using them to pitch slap their prospects, and they miss an opportunity to start real conversations.

Here’s how you can solve that, step-by-step:

Step 1: Optimize your LinkedIn profile

Before sending a connection request, you need to make sure your LinkedIn profile is optimized for prospecting. A lot of profiles look like trophy shelves, or provide zero information on how they can help prospects solve important problems.

Here’s what you need:

• A professional profile picture (use Secta to create one with AI)
• A clear headline (what you do, who you help, what’s the outcome of working with you)
• A catchy LinkedIn banner (this guy did mine)
• An optimized featured section (a free resource to help prospects + link to your calendar link)

Don’t miss this detailed guide to optimizing your LinkedIn profile.

Step 2: Understand the connection request process

Most people use LinkedIn on their mobile phones. There’s just one problem; 99% of salespeople prospect with their computers. Here’s what your connection requests look like on both formats:

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share what you should be focusing on as you restart your prospecting in 2025. If you took some time off (I did), you most likely stopped sending prospecting messages to your prospects, and restarting can be a struggle.

The struggle is even harder in 2025, as outbound results have massively dropped in 2024. Here are 3 steps to help you restart and focus on what you can.

Step 1: Optimize for open rate and connection requests

Most salespeople have the wrong expectations when it comes to prospecting. They think they can send a few emails here and there, and they’ll be able to book meetings quickly. That cannot be farther from the truth, especially when you stopped reaching out for a few weeks.

When restarting your prospecting, the most important is to focus on leading indicators of success. Here are two you can’t ignore:

• Email Open Rate: This indicator shows how your domain is performing, and the quality of your subject line. If it’s low, you may have an issue with your domain (check Maildoso to fix it), or your subject lines suck (fix it here).
• Connection Requests Acceptance Rate: When working with LinkedIn, the first thing to focus on is your connection requests. If your requests aren’t accepted, you won’t be able to keep prospecting that person on LinkedIn. You can fix your connection requests here.

Run your sequence for 2 weeks to get enough data before moving on to step 2.

Step 2: Optimize for replies

When your email open rates and LinkedIn connection requests acceptance rate are at an acceptable level, you know your prospecting does its first job: get the attention of your prospects.

But attention isn’t enough to book meetings, you need to get replies. Most salespeople write their prospecting messages with the goal of booking a meeting, or closing a deal. That’s the biggest mistake I keep seeing, customer after customer.

You can fix this by working on your messaging, and making it intriguing so people reply to learn more. I call that The Netflix Effect, and your goal is to get prospects to reply to solve a specific problem, with a specific solution. Go check my Prospecting Template Swipe File if you want concrete examples.

Run your updated sequence for 2 weeks to get enough data before moving on to step 3.

Step 3: Optimize for meetings

When your sequence generates replies, you’ve done the hardest part. Now you can start working on turning these replies into meetings. Unlike what most people think, meetings aren’t booked in your prospecting messages, but in the conversations you’re running.

You need to navigate the conversation to turn it into a meeting. Here’s how it’s done:

• Step 1: Use a problem question
• Step 2: Tease a reciprocity resource
• Step 3: Ask for feedback
• Step 4: Use a negative-reversing question
• Step 5: Drop a meeting link

You can check my detailed guide to get more details on turning replies into meetings.

And these are the 3 steps I recommend you follow as you’re restarting your prospecting in 2025. Keep in mind that your month of January won’t be representative of the rest of 2025, as you’re ramping up your prospecting.

And if you need a concrete system to help you do just that, go check my Prospecting Engine (it’s 25% off until Friday the 10th of January).

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share my retrospective on 2024, what worked, and what didn’t. This will be more personal than other newsletters, but I promise I’ll get back to more sales-oriented newsletter after this one.

Let’s dive in:

Q1: Business as usual

Q1 2024 was quite similar to most Q1s since I started working for myself. I launched The Prospecting Engine. With 65 customers and around $20,000 in sales, I was pretty happy about the results.

I also ran a few sponsored posts, and trained a few sales teams with the content of The Prospecting Engine. In terms of revenues, the first quarter was pretty similar to most other first quarters.

Q2: Darkness

At the beginning of Q2, we went back to France after spending 3 months in Mexico. My wife was pregnant of 6 months, and everything was all right. That was until we went for the third trimester echography, right before our flight back to France.

We discovered that our daughter had a life-threatening malformation, which made it impossible for her to live.

We lost our baby.

This was the worst time of my life. From April to June, my wife and I fell into a dark hole, and our lives were completely turned upside down. We kept working to numb the pain, but it was impossible to function normally in these few weeks after loosing our baby.

If you’re ever in this situation (or was), and you need to talk to someone, please reach out, you’re not alone.

Q3: Doubt

As a result of these tough 3 months, I wasn’t able to create quality content like I used to. Couple that with the summer, an algorithm change, and my LinkedIn performance tanked. I went from having 50+ reactions on my posts to 2, 3 reactions.

It was hard.

But I started recording videos for LinkedIn, worked on my copywriting, and my post engagement came back to a normal level. I also noticed that my engagement fell, but I was still able to turn conversations into revenues (coaching, online courses, sponsoring, etc.).

I also worked really hard on a course called Close Your First Side Gig. I set up a segmentation survey on my website, I ran interviews with salespeople who wanted to work for themselves, and I created a waitlist.

This launch was a flop. I made less than $600.

Q4: Rebuilding

Q4 was much better than the rest of the year. My wife became pregnant again (we’re having a boy in May 2025), and we moved to Mexico. We decided to leave France because our life there wasn’t nearly as fun an interesting as what we’re building in Mexico. We’ve been there for 3 months and we’ve experienced more than in two years in France.

I have also launched a 1:1 coaching subscription where my customers and I work together for 1 hour per week, while having unlimited WhatsApp access to me.

Another great success of 2024 has been the revenue I was able to generate for affiliate partners. In total I generated over $96,000 of revenues for my partners in less than a year. If you want to discuss how we can do this together, go check my sponsor page. I’m looking for long term sponsors for my newsletter and a new show I’m launching next year.

In conclusion, 2024 was the worst year of my life. My wife and I have been through hell, and our professional lives have suffered immensely. 2024 has also been the worst year in terms of revenues since I started my business in 2018. But in all that darkness, it was a year of learnings, transition, and resilience.

I have learned that nothing is constant, and you need to keep reinventing yourself if you want to keep paying your bills. I’m now more grateful for what I have, and I cherish every moment I get to spend with people I love, while building my business.

Happy New Year to you and your family!

Cheers,

Thibaut Souyris

In today’s newsletter, I’ll share the exact system I’m using to restart my prospecting as I’m back from the holiday break. If you can replicate these steps, you’ll already be ahead of your fellow sales reps, as they are emerging from the holiday season without a plan.

Here’s how, step-by-step:

Step 1: Define your ICP and their problems

Start by building your ICP matrix. The ICP matrix is composed of your Ideal Customer Company (ICC) in columns, and your Ideal Customer Title (ICT) in rows. Your ICC is the type of company you’d like to go after, and the ICT is the type of job title you’d like to go for.

When your ICP matrix is done, focus on understanding the problems of your prospects. If you need to go further, I recommend checking the Cold Message System.

Step 2: Find where they hang out

Humans are social creatures, and they typically hang out with other humans who have the same interests. Nowadays, they mostly do it online, on social networks.

For most salespeople, LinkedIn is a great place to find prospects, and identify triggers to help them start conversations.

I recommend following these 4 steps to identify where your prospects hang out, and create personalized messages at scale.

Step 3: Enrich data

Now that you know where to find your prospects, you need to find the correct emails and phone numbers of your prospects, on top of their LinkedIn profiles. You can use the Kaspr extension to do so (+ you’ll get 25 free mobile credits when you sign up with my link).

Step 4: Build a problem centric sequence

You now have all the information you need to start reaching out to your prospects. Before doing so, you need to build a sequence to maximize your reply rate. I did a quick video to help you create a sequence from scratch, with ChatGPT.

When the sequence is ready, you’ll need to use messages that stand out from the hundreds of outbound touchpoints your prospects have to deal with. Here’s a collection of top-performing templates.

Step 5: Restart your daily prospecting routine

All these steps will result in nothing if you don’t create a daily prospecting habit. This step is by far the most challenging, since humans have a hard time building and keeping healthy habits.

I recommend doing the following:

• Step 1: Identify the time when you’re the most productive
• Step 2: Put a recurring blocker of 60 minutes
• Step 3: Follow the steps in this short guide
• Step 4: Repeat until it becomes a habit (at least 21 consecutive days)

You can also try my Prospecting Engine if you need a more in-depth guide.

And these are the 5 steps I am currently following to restart my prospecting for 2025. Here’s a quick video example I did last year if you want to learn more.

 If you follow these 5 steps, you’ll be in good position to grab your prospects’ attention, engage them in conversations, and book meetings with people who are trying to solve a problem you can help with.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,

Thibaut