Why you should listen to this idiot: I had a 7 figure hospitality business pre covid where I would light cocktails on fire and cook them underwater. I am ugly so I had to do this to get attention. I lost everything during Covid, and went from Amazon warehouse (best/only job I've ever had) to 7 figures liquid in a little under 5 years (surviving the Tate forex program, Singaporean ponzi schemes, Blockfi, and Celsius thanks to @bowtiedbull). I was a top 10 high ticket closer for Coaching Sales (record was 47.5k closed in 24 hours), taught sales/response handling at Client Ascension, probably paid everyone on money twitter for advice at this point @CoachPauI @LogFitz6 @alexfeinberg @KdotUntamed @blackhatwizardd @thedulab (who started me in HTS) etc. I have an outreach agency with my wife, MirraPonte, and I am director of gtm strategy at a healthcare marketing and consulting firm, Manos Health, and we've driven over 105 Million in revenue working with series B funded startups, local clinics, and enterprise clients. Over my career about 145 Million generated. We've done lectures for Yale and Hopkins, and here's our magnum opus on gtm for healthcare. If you need help with lead generation reach out. There is very little that I haven't seen and done. Receipts for everything linked below:

THE Hard Truth of Cold Calling: Cold calling is (I wish this wasn't the case) Psychologically painful  Difficult to implement  Low ROI relative to other activities, and difficult to delegate to first world employees. It's also THE MOST if not ONE of most EFFECTIVE distribution channels. I did it when I was younger, no way would I do it personally today.  There aren't enough hours in the day and I HATE it. It's better to outsource it than to fight this reality, but everyone TRIES and FAILS to do it themselves. Every week I talk to 30 business owners who tell me "I don't want to do it, and my team doesn't do it." Don't be a hero trying to do it yourself or getting your team to do it.  Business owners will outsource everything, get their apartment cleaned twice a week, have their meals prepared, and have a VA for travel, but still INSIST on doing their own cold calling. Just decide to WIN and hire someone. If you need help with it please reach out :)

When we're writing scripts to sell AI for example we're writing for people who use AI but don't really like it. Status is the same way. You use it, but don't really like it. It's pretty rare for someone to like every skill necessary to have strong, healthy, mutually beneficial relationships: 1) Cold calling 2) Small talk 3) Status "games" 4) Follow up 5) Eliminating neediness (especially when you are actually needy lol) You just learn to use it, and as a part of the process, you learn to make peace with human nature. Human nature is like riding a wave, if you stop judging it and learn to work with it, everything becomes easier. If you keep trying to mold it to be what you want it to be, you'll keep crashing out. That's why sales is an easy job that almost nobody can do. It requires a certain amount of PEACE with the way things are, the way people are. Maybe the Neanderthals didn't play status games. That's why we beat them. Who knows? You have to play the hand you're dealt.

these messages are the best :)

How We Sell AI Via Cold Calling in Q4 2026-2027 - 5 Major Changes Somewhere between 50-100% of what we sell is AI or AI adjacent now (is every offer AI?) 1) Sell as a productized deliverable even when the actual goal is consulting.  Find the trojan horse offer that gets you in the door, and then walk them through a diagnostic that shows them all the other areas the revenue is "leaking" on the backend.   2) Use words like workflow/automation especially for industries where they fear being replaced. We used to do this for healthcare campaigns only but we're finding it's just becoming an existential fear everyone has. 3) Using an actual human to cold call is a great way to sell AI because unlike cold email or LinkedIn, it's a real human.  There is a lot of anti ai sentiment by people who ai extensively especially boomers + gen x (We call them the "Anti AI AI Club") 4) The biggest fear with AI is implementation issues/lack of ROI.  If you guarantee the ROI + have a turnkey onboarding your life will get 10x easier 5) Leverage the lower gross margin inherent in these offers to have more risk free trials (this is another advantage the productized deliverable offers have over the consulting ones) AI is one of the easiest things to sell, but it's a lot tougher than it was in 2025 (you could just be an expert), or start of 2026 (you could just be a consultant).  Now it's selling a wraparound process that either empowers the owner directly (SMBs), or cuts costs across the whole organization (Enterprise). If you need help with this, please reach out :)

Fifty Dollar Lunch 🤦 😂

AI, Cold Calling and the K Shaped Economy  Because we are in an environment with higher inflation and strong tech growth, and have been for a while, that means that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer because assets like stocks, bitcoin, or owning a business act like a raft, and if you don't have that raft and water comes in (inflation), you drown, and if you have it, you float effortlessly. So it's becoming more and more important to sell to rich people because the middle class and the poor are struggling more than ever, and that volatility means they are less likely to stay customers, and more difficult to sell to. And if there's one thing that all rich people seem to have in common, it's a hatred of ai slop. Why rich people hate AI and poor people are okay with it...AI signs and the "good enough" effect (see @AJA_Cortes tweet below) Why cold calling and manual follow ups work better than ever even the cringe ones The role of AI in a human centric organization is to INCREASE how human it is through automation and a smaller, more cohesive culture  Cold and warm calling is the single cheapest, best way of doing this. And if you need help with it please reach out

Why your BEST callers and employees can BETRAY you, and why it isn't your fault:

When I was 18 going to school in Philly the homeless made me sad. I bought a pack of my favorite granola bars and kept it in my backpack. I couldn't give them away. They didn't like smores (shocking!). They didn't like peanut butter (!!!). They didn't even like chocolate chip. They asked me for money. That was the first moment the real world really hit me in the face and I never forgot it.

First back straddle lever on aerial straps!

Don't work with your spouse: You make surprise reservation Don't tell her where She sees it in your shared calendar 🤦

Why Are Enterprise Companies So BEHIND At Cold Calling? When I give them normal numbers, they are like...Shocked Was talking with a client today and this is our theory:

update on this was a grade 2 calf muscle sprain started rehabbing day of Should have been 2-4 month healing process tons of ankle circles (both closed an open kinetic chain) lots of band work/weight shifting ordered crutches but by the time they came I didn't need them (overnighted them lol) Can now run on it. Almost all function restored. Will try sprints next week. Other training milestones hit while "injured" 5 consecutive clean full ROM muscle ups on rings First ring rolls Lost another 2 lbs You can do more than you think

got off a call with a super successful ai engineer (who doesn't train hard): "I'm convinced there's a 50/50 chance we're going to have a mass casualty even in the next 12 months based on these models" love you guys, but a lot of you need to run sprints on grass and do some gymnastics rings never heard someone who is training hard talk like this

Yeah, the best practice with outbound is to run channels independently and just monitor CAC + LTV you'll watch it go down across all channels the more you add, but integrating them into very precise waterfall enrichments looks good on paper, but always seems to underperform in practice

This is an unpopular opinion but I am happy for the occasional bad client. Good clients are almost effortless. Bad clients make you feel it. They come in all flavors but usually the business has been going downhill for a while, and they want you to save it, and go from wanting to expand your services to crashing out when a client leaves or they can't close enough deals. You can learn a lot from them, and it's a good reminder that even know we're talking into a computer screen, sending emails, and making phone calls, that making money is hard, and we shouldn't take it for granted. If I didn't have bad clients once in a while I would probably invest a lot less than I do.

a lot of issues that seem interpersonal or quality related can be solved by increasing or reducing friction lead quality getting worse, add ONE qualification question follow up stagnant, add a DRI (directly responsible individual) and a swipe file of best practices and follow up with your sales team once a week not everything needs a grok bot or a new hire

show rate kind of an irrelevant metric in 2026 half my new clients "no showed" we just called them/nailed human follow up, pitched them quickly on value prop, and then took them through a respectful sales cycle (2-4 calls) they closed just fine

With some offers B2C calling to aged opt in leads in real estate for example The ONLY moat is cheap volume Everyone is dealing with stagflation and a hawkish fed Nobody wants to get sued and prospect leads that didn't opt in Only solution is to grind In a bear, every dollar counts

Cold Calling VS Direct Mail Why Cold Calling CRUSHES How to do Direct Mail the right way

How we booked 4 meetings in 2 hours for a dungeons and dragons dice offer and the #1 lesson I've leaned selling cold calling over the last 3 years