This week: the exec referral play that can help cold outbound, plus the cold calling tool that tells you who'll pick up before you dial.
THE SIGNAL
"The AI Job Apocalypse Is Probably BS"
The Follow Up reported this week: every major AI company is hiring sales reps. Anthropic, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Cohere, Mistral. If AI was actually replacing salespeople, these companies wouldn't be scaling their own sales teams.
The Salesforce 2026 State of Sales report backs it up: 87% of organizations are using some form of AI. 54% are deploying AI agents across the sales cycle. And the result? Top performers are 1.7x more likely to use AI agents than underperformers. AI isn't killing sales jobs. It's splitting the field into reps who use it and reps who don't.
Anthropic Beats OpenAI to IPO
The company behind Claude filed for IPO ahead of OpenAI. What makes this interesting: Anthropic also released a Responsible Scaling warning in the same period, essentially saying "this technology is powerful enough to be dangerous" while simultaneously going public. For sales teams, the practical takeaway is simple: Claude isn't going anywhere. If you've built workflows around it, you're on stable ground. The company just bet its future on being a public, long-term player.
Haven't tried Claude yet? Start here. It's free to start and it's what we use to build most of the prompts in this newsletter.
THE PLAY
The 20-Exec Referral Play
Your company's executives are already connected to your buyers. Almost nobody checks.
Open Sales Navigator right now. Click on any executive at your company and look at their connections. Filter by your territory. You'll find prospects you've been cold calling for months sitting right there in your CEO's network. An exec gets a yes from another exec far more often than you do from a cold message. That's the entire play.
This framework comes from SalesDaily, and it's one of the simplest warm outreach systems you'll ever run. No tools. No budget. No AI agents. Just your company's org chart and LinkedIn.
Step 1: Pick your 20 execs. Start with the most senior people closest to sales. Your CEO, CRO, VP of Sales, VP of Partnerships. Then expand to Customer Success leaders, your CMO, product leaders. Anyone with a LinkedIn profile and industry connections. You need 20 names.
Step 2: Check their connections in Sales Navigator. For each exec, open their profile and filter their connections by your territory, your industry, your ICP. You'll be surprised. Most execs have 500+ connections and a chunk of those are decision makers at companies you're prospecting into.
Step 3: Ask each exec for 5 introductions. Not 50. Five. That's a small enough ask that nobody says no. Pick the 5 prospects where you think the connection is real (not just a random LinkedIn accept). Then send this message:
The exact ask (copy and paste this):
"Hi [Name], I'm on [Senior Leader]'s team on the [department] side of the house and wondered if I might ask for your help.
I saw that you're connected to quite a few prospects in my book.
Would you mind if I sent you their names to see if you know them well enough and would be comfortable facilitating an introduction?
I'm also happy to send you more context on the accounts and ghostwrite the email for you.
No pressure, but thank you for considering!"That last line is key: "ghostwrite the email for you." You're removing all the friction. The exec doesn't have to think about what to say or how to say it. They just forward what you wrote.
Step 4: Rotate through your list. Ask exec #1 for 5 intros. Move to exec #2. Ask for 5 more. Keep going until you've hit all 20. Then cycle back to exec #1 and ask for the next 5. You're not burning anyone out because you're only asking for a small batch each round.
Step 5: When the intro lands, move the exec to BCC after the first reply. This is the rule that protects the relationship. Once the prospect responds, reply-all with the exec still on the thread, then BCC them on every message after that. The exec stays in the loop without getting buried in your sales conversation. They'll be more willing to intro you again because you didn't make it awkward.
Add AI to Speed This Up
The play works without any AI. But you can cut the prep time in half by using ChatGPT or Claude for two things:
"I need you to ghostwrite a warm introduction email.
[EXEC NAME] is introducing me to [PROSPECT NAME] at [COMPANY]. I sell [YOUR PRODUCT/SERVICE].
The prospect's company recently [ONE SPECIFIC THING: hired a VP of Sales, raised a Series B, expanded to a new market].
Write a 3-sentence email from [EXEC NAME]'s perspective introducing me and explaining why it's worth a 15-minute call.
Keep it casual and short. No jargon."Second, research each prospect before the intro goes out. Paste the prospect's LinkedIn profile or company About page and ask: "What are three problems this company is probably trying to solve right now that my product could help with?" You'll walk into the intro call with specific talking points instead of a generic pitch.
What this looks like in practice:
❌ Cold outbound: "Hey {first_name}, saw your company just expanded to EMEA. Congrats! I help companies like yours scale their sales team..." (Deleted. Along with the other 40 cold emails they got that morning.)
✅ Exec referral: "Hey Sarah, quick intro. You and I worked together at [Company] a few years back. I want to connect you with John on my team. His product solves the exact onboarding problem you mentioned at the conference last month. Worth 15 minutes." (Opened. Read. Replied within an hour.)
Try this today. Open Sales Navigator and check your CEO's connections. Filter by your territory. Count how many prospects are already in their network. Then send the ask. 20 execs × 5 intros each = 100 warm conversations. That's more pipeline than most reps build from cold outbound in a quarter.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH HUBSPOT
The GTM bets that shouldn't have worked, and did
One grew revenue 50x after half his team quit over the strategy. One brought in 50K signups in a single day with no paid budget. One generated 100M+ views from a stunt that took 50 hours to conceive. One asked every prospect to demo the product themselves instead of demoing it for them.
None of them followed the safe playbook. They treated GTM like an experiment, moved before they had proof, and made bets most founders would never get approved.
HubSpot for Startups documented all 6 stories in the free Bold Bets Playbook. The risks they took, why it was risky, and what it returned.
THE STACK SWAP
TitanX: Know Who Picks Up Before You Dial
❌ Before: You're cold dialing 100+ prospects a day. Your connect rate is somewhere around 7%. That means 93 calls go straight to voicemail, a gatekeeper, or dead air. Your SDRs burn through lists, get demoralized, and wonder why the phones feel broken. The problem isn't your script or your timing. It's that you're dialing people who never answer cold calls in the first place.
✅ After: You upload your prospect list into TitanX. Their Phone Intent engine tells you which prospects actually pick up the phone and when they're most likely to have a conversation. Your reps dial fewer numbers but connect with 5x more decision makers. Connect rates jump from 7% to 25%+. Same list, same reps, dramatically more conversations.
The tool: TitanX is a Phone Intent platform that predicts which prospects will answer a cold call and the best time to reach them. Instead of spraying dials across a list, your reps prioritize the people who actually pick up. 4.9/5 on G2 (22 reviews). Reps are reporting 4x better connect rates within a single dial session.
What it replaces: The guesswork of power dialing. The wasted hours calling prospects who screen every unknown number. The assumption that "more dials = more conversations" (it doesn't, if you're dialing the wrong people).
Who it's for: Outbound teams doing high-volume cold calling. If your reps are making 80+ dials a day and connecting on fewer than 10% of them, this is built for you. Works with any phone system.
Pricing: Credit-based (not per seat), customized to your team's volume. They run a 30-day pilot with a $10,000 guarantee: if you don't see a minimum 3x increase in connect rates, they'll cut you a check. No risk to test it.
QUICK WINS
1. Signal-based outreach is crushing volume-based. Reps who time their outreach around trigger events (new VP hire, funding round, expansion announcement) are seeing 15 to 25% reply rates. Cold email industry average is 3 to 5%. Before your next outreach batch, run one filter in Sales Navigator: your ICP + "changed jobs" in the last 90 days. Those people have fresh budget, new priorities, and zero loyalty to whoever the last rep was using. That's your list.
2. Stop adding notes to LinkedIn connection requests. Counter-intuitive data from LinkedReach: connection requests sent without a note outperform those with a note (28% vs 24% acceptance rate). The reason: notes feel like a pitch. A blank request feels like a person. Send the blank request first. Personalize your message after they accept. Keep that first message under 60 words.
3. Free prospecting hack: 89 companies closed funding rounds last week. Every company that just raised money needs to spend it fast. They're hiring, buying tools, and building infrastructure right now. Go to Crunchbase and filter recent rounds by your target industry. Those companies have active budget, urgency to show ROI to investors, and decision makers who are open to new conversations. Better than scraping a static list from 2024.
4. Build a "skills doc" for your AI instead of writing one-shot prompts. Create a Google Doc with your buyer persona, product positioning, your top 5 objections with rebuttals, and 3 examples of emails that actually got replies. Paste it at the top of every ChatGPT or Claude conversation before you ask it to write anything. Now every output has your context baked in. Each time you get a great reply from a prospect, add that email to the doc. Your AI gets smarter every week without you changing anything else.
5. Warm intro follow-up template. For the 20-Exec Play above, here's the follow-up script for when the intro lands: "[Prospect name], great to connect. [Exec name] mentioned we should talk because [one specific reason]. I don't want to waste your time. Here's the one thing I'd cover in 15 minutes: [single specific outcome they'd walk away with]. Does Thursday or Friday work?" Short. Specific. One ask.
THE CLOSER
Next week on Sales Bytes: we're diving into the Pipeline/Forecast pillar. One AI workflow that replaces your Monday pipeline review in 10 minutes. If you've got a specific pipeline headache you want us to tackle, reply to this email.
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