Cold Calling Isn’t Dead: How To Master Outbound Sales In The AI Era | Patrick Joyce

Tired of hearing that cold calling is dead? Patrick William Joyce, CEO of Outboundless, joins Small Business Pivots to debunk the biggest myths in outbound sales and explain why human-to-human calling is still one of the most effective ways to grow a business in 2025.

From his early career as a math teacher in Boston to running a high-performance outbound SDR agency, Patrick shares how he built resilience through rejection, what most businesses get wrong about outbound sales, and why personalization in AI emails doesn’t equal connection.

We dig into:

• Why cold calling still works in the age of AI and automation
• The “95/5 rule” of rejection vs. success in outbound sales
• How early-stage businesses can use outbound to test their market and build pipeline
• Why the sales development role is one of the most important — yet overlooked — in business
• Patrick’s new book, The Illuminati Sales Manifesto, and the truth about personalization myths

If you’re a business owner, entrepreneur, or sales leader who needs qualified conversations that actually convert, this episode is packed with insights to help you break through the noise and generate results.

Patrick Joyce: CEO of Outboundless

Website: https://www.outboundless.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pwilliamjoyce/

Purchase Book: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH7JC5QQ

#SmallBusinessPivots #MichaelDMorrison #BOSS #OklahomaCity #BusinessPodcast #SmallBusiness #Entrepreneurship #ColdCalling #OutboundSales #B2BSales #LeadGeneration #BusinessGrowth #Outboundless #PatrickJoyce #SalesStrategy 

Chapters

• 0:00 Guest Intro & Origin Story
• 2:16 Teaching, Trucking, and Early Entrepreneurship
• 5:15 From Insurance Cold Calls to Tech SDR
• 8:20 Zipwhip, Specializing in Top-of-Funnel
• 10:58 The Book’s Origin: Illuminati Sales Manifesto
• 13:05 Why SDRs Matter and The Predictable Revenue Problem
• 17:24 Product-Market Fit vs. SDR Reality
• 19:39 Do Cold Calls Still Work in the AI Era?
• 22:25 The Personalization Myth and Inbox Overload
• 25:18 Human Voice Advantage & Industry-Specific Messaging
• 28:03 Opening Lines, Call Frameworks, and Booking Meetings
• 31:15 Metrics That Matter: Connect Rates & Blocks
• 34:21 Outbound vs. Inbound and Adoption Curves
• 37:05 Who Should Hire Outboundless
• 39:19 How to Connect with Patrick & Offers

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

All right, welcome to another Small Business Pivots where we have another special guest from around the world. And if you've listened or watched to the show, you know that no one can introduce themselves or their business like the business owner. So, my friend, I let you have the honors of introducing yourself, your business, and just a little bit about you.

SPEAKER_01: 0:20

Yeah, Michael, thank you so much. Um, glad to be here. Uh, my name's Patrick William Joyce, uh, CEO of an outbound SDR cold calling agency called Outboundless. Um, I've been in B2B Tech for the last 10 years, 100% focused on pure outbound sales roles. So the top of the sales funnel. Um, I made the decision early on to stick um in that area of the business because when I got my first job entry level, I figured nobody I had one of the hardest jobs in the building and nobody wanted to do it. Um, so if I could just specialize there, I'd probably never be out of work. And that turned out to be uh a pretty good bet.

SPEAKER_00: 1:01

Awesome, awesome. And you've recently published uh co-authored a book that we'll talk about here, and we're gonna debunk some myths in the outbound arena. But first, let's introduce the show and we'll be right back. Welcome to Small Business Pivots, a podcast produced for small business owners. I'm your host, Michael Morrison, founder and CEO of Boss, where we make business ownership simplified for success. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at business ownership simplified.com. All right, welcome back to Small Business Pivots. My friend, we have business owners that are listening to the show. And before we get into sales, I know that a lot of business owners got into entrepreneurship for one reason or another. Can you kind of catch us up to where you, you know, maybe up your upbringing, maybe some things that uh triggered you to get into entrepreneurship so that others can kind of relate to your story?

SPEAKER_01: 2:15

Yeah, absolutely. I would love to. So I had a very roundabout uh career path where I wasn't sure exactly what I wanted to do. Um, I had taken some time off while I was in college as an undergrad. I took about a two-year break where I worked with my brother full time. My brother's uh was a truck driver at the time uh in the Teamsters Union up in Boston, uh, which was a really great experience um for a lot of different reasons. Uh uh, I'll touch on some of them. Um but my my older brother is somebody that I look up to, and he started his own business and I helped him get off the off the ground after we had worked together for a few years. Um, I ended up going back to school, finishing my math degree, um, and got a job teaching high school math um right out of school. I taught for four years, realized I really didn't like that job all that much. Um, I met my wife there. She was a great teacher. I wasn't excellent at it um for a few different reasons. I liked hanging out with the kids and connecting with them and talking to them and you know, explaining the concepts and whatnot, but there's that's probably 20% of the job. The other 80% of the job is classroom management, which I wasn't very good at, you know. It was a little wild. Um, I taught in a pretty rough district, like a low-income district just outside of Boston. Um, you know, a lot of troubled youth and whatnot. Uh, so anyway, I wanted to get out of there, um, helped my brother build his business. Um, he started his own company. I actually started out in SEO um and just like website marketing, um, helped him, you know, rank on Google. This was back in uh I want to say uh 20 2007, maybe 2010-ish era, um, which Google was a lot different back then. There was um some tricks that you could do. I ran an ad campaign, uh, blew up his business, and you know, he I think that's that's kind of what planted the seed for me wanting to start my own thing. And then I got into uh the tech sales world. So I was a teacher for four years. Um my wife and I met, she's from Anchorage, Alaska, I'm from Boston, um, couldn't be further apart. So we kind of met in the middle in Seattle. We moved to Seattle together. Um, and I wasn't sure what I wanted to do after I was done teaching. Um, I thought I wanted to use my math degree, so I ended up getting a job as uh a marketing analyst at a group health brokerage, um, selling, you know, uh health insurance packages to big companies, um, you know, like uh restaurant chains and whatnot. And I thought I was gonna go down the path of becoming an actuary. Actuaries do statistics for insurance companies. So I thought, yeah, I've got you know a mathematical mind, I could put my analytical skills to good use. Um, but I figured out pretty quickly that I had a very big personality for an actuary. And uh the in in the marketing analyst seat that I was in, I was building proposals for the producers, the brokers, the sales, the closers in insurance are called producers. Um I was building their proposals and then watching them go and deliver it, and they were making a ton of money, and I was not. And I thought, well, I don't know, how do I get your job? So I asked around. I asked a bunch of them, like, what do I do? How do I how do I get your job? And they said, Well, you gotta learn how to cold call. That's just step one to get into sales. So I said, Okay, cool. And I went and uh started selling life insurance from my bedroom. I got my insurance license in the state of Washington, um, signed up for with a family uh uh company called Family First Life, and they trained me, they gave me a lead list, and they said, just go hit the phones, go set up appointments, um, go to the person's house, get them to sign a contract, you get paid. Very, very tough gig, commission only. Um, the leads that I was getting were completely just stepped on. They were like, you know, four-year-old mortgage protection leads. So a mortgage protection lead is when somebody buys a house, they get a letter in the mail from an insurance company uh that says, if you were to die, would your spouse be able to cover your mortgage? If not, you should sign up for life insurance. Yeah. Somebody fills out that form and they mail it back in, and then that's the lead, which sounds great, except the leads that I was getting were up to four years old. So it was every insurance agent in Seattle had called four years, had called them many, many times. Yeah, uh, and you know, tried to sell them life insurance. So that's that's where I learned how to cold call. That's where I cut my teeth. Um, and you've I mean, you've got five seconds. You say the word insurance, and the person just hangs up. Um, but I was able to set a few appointments and go to you know, go drive out to on location, and I was, you know, driving Uber to supplement my income and started to figure out like, okay, maybe working my way up from the bottom in insurance is gonna take too long. See, I had already had a career, I had a math degree, and I already had a career as a teacher, and I was starting over ground zero in a new city. Um, so I thought, well, I'm I'm picking up all these uh tech company executives in the middle of the day, and they're driving from building, driving them from building the building in my car, you know, driving Uber. And I thought maybe I could get a job at one of these tech companies in a sales role. Um, there's a lot of money in tech. Uh, so I applied for a few different jobs, and because I had cold calling experience, like the first interview that I went to, they pretty much just hired me on the spot because I knew how to cold call already. And I was like the my peers that you know, the people that were getting hired in these entry-level roles were kids right out of college. So I was 10 years older than everybody. Um, you know, had already had a career, already knew how to cold call. Um, so I hit the ground running in Seattle. Uh, worked at a very cool company called Zip Whip. Um text message company. Um, got acquired by Twilio a few years back for like, I don't know, 800 million dollars or something like that. Um, so very successful company. I joined when they had just gotten their D round, Series D funding. Um, so they were blown up. Really cool office right across the street from T-Mobile Park in Seattle. Um, they had a kombucha keg on tap. Uh they had scooters in the building, they had company lunch, like burritos every Friday. Very, very cool job, very laid back, very fun environment um compared to being a high school teacher in Boston or working on the back of a garbage truck with my brother, which I had done, you know, while I was in school. So I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. I was hitting the phones, I was booking a bunch of meetings, getting, you know, a base salary plus commission on everything that I set up for the account executives. I was like, man, I'm I I never turned back. I was like, this is the coolest thing ever. Um, and that's where I figured out, like, hey, nobody wants to do this job, I can do it really well if I can just specialize here. Like, I think it's it's gonna turn out okay. Um, so that's sort of how I got into the tech industry. And then I'll I'll pause there and see if you have any questions. But then, you know, there was another there's another 10 years after that that I could go through as well.

SPEAKER_00: 9:44

Yeah, no, that is a fantastic story that people can relate to because my son was in the health insurance industry, which is similar to the life, and you talk about getting your nose bloodied. I mean, these people, so when you were saying like four years old leads, I was like, oh my gosh, my son would would come home or share the stories of like these people call you everything in the book. You know, it's like I wish they would just hang up instead of talking to me. If they're not interested, just hang up. You don't need to tell me what a piece of crap I am for calling you the hundredth hundredth time, take me off their list, all that stuff. So I think we have a lot of listeners' ears, is what I'm trying to say. A lot of people can relate to those cold calls because we hear that cold calls don't work anymore, and that's the kind of stuff you get. But you have a book that you came out with. Let's touch on that real quick because we can debunk some myths, right? On outbound calls and and things. So, what out of this book, can you uh introduce the book to us, how you came up with it, and then maybe pull one of the the myths that you'd really like to address out of that book?

SPEAKER_01: 10:58

Yeah, absolutely. I'd love to. So the book is called the Illuminati Sales Manifesto, which is a little bit tongue-in-cheek. Uh, the the way that I'll give you the origin story. So Justin Michael is a um friend of mine. I actually hired him as a coach um while I was doing enterprise sales. Um, he we ended up working together. Uh, we did a bunch of consulting work together. We were kind of running around as freelancers, like you know, helping each other do projects and whatnot. Um, and we had met up uh down in Santa Barbara, California, got together in a room, and he said, Pat, what's wrong with the B2B tech industry right now? And I just started going off. And he sat down at the computer and just started typing out everything I was saying. So we turned it into this long document and then edited it down and like added to it and kind of turned it into um what you see today. That was the I just released the book that was five years ago. Um, that we so we've been sitting on this document for a long time and finally we're like, man, we should just release this. Um, so the the idea was like you've I I kind of got uh chewed up and spit out by a number of different companies. Um, I worked for some really great companies and I had some other like sort of rough experiences. Um and and the the premise is that the sales development role, the top of the sales funnel, the person that's doing the cold calling has one of the most important jobs in any business to go find new customers where you didn't know you had them. They're not inbound leads, these are like people that don't know you, they're perfect strangers, they weren't planning on buying anything from you, and then they become customers. Like, how do you go and find those people? It's one of the most important functions in any business, but it's treated as this entry-level kind of stepping stone role, which I think is a flawed concept. Like, um, that the the person that's doing that job should be held in high regard. Um, when the opposite is true. The person that's closing the deals gets all the respect, gets all the resources, you know, gets better pay. Um, you know, they their their career path is very different. They get um, yeah, they they get the most money. Um so I I did a lot of thinking about why is that and started writing it down. And I I think some of the problem is this. Um, the the entire model of having a prospecting team, this entry-level sales development position, um, it came from a guy named Aaron Ross, um, who wrote a book called Predictable Revenue. It was released in 2011. Uh, predictable revenue is the Bible of Silicon Valley. Now, where he came up with the concepts that were in that book is he had scaled Salesforce.com from like 1 million to 100 million in revenue as a sales leader there. And the problem that Salesforce was having in the early days, you know, cloud-based CRM, nobody had it, everybody needed it. Um, their account executive team, their closing team, they would have a bunch of deals in the pipeline, and then they would spend all their time closing those deals, and then the pipeline would dry up, and then they'd have no pipeline, the revenue would dip down, and then the sales team would go and spend all their time prospecting and put all these deals in the pipeline, and then the pendulum would swing back, and then they would spend all their time closing those deals so that there was this up and down kind of revenue motion that was happening. And Aaron's an engineer um from Stanford, and he looked at the problem and said, Okay, well, what if we just have a dedicated prospecting team um and a dedicated closing team so that we can kind of even out and be able to predict the revenue that we're getting um every month, every quarter, every year. Um, which is a genius way to do it. But now the interesting part about that is that Salesforce was dominant in the market. Like they had no problem, they had like perfect product market fit. Like cloud-based CRM was a new concept. Before that, you had a bunch of uh sales reps that had spreadsheets with all their customer info on it. And if the sales rep left and went to a competitor, they took their spreadsheet with them. So the company loses all that customer data. So it wasn't hard to call a business owner and be like, hey, don't you want to copy that spreadsheet that that your sales reps have? Um, so you know, the the the product market fit was established, the reasons why people buy were established, so they were able to train the SDRs and the SDR, you know, the sales development reps, the entry-level reps that were just setting up the appointments for the closing team. Um, and they they you know put a motion in place that was very, very doable. Now, what happened is that that book blew up, sold like whatever, you know, 200,000 copies or however many it sold. Everybody in Silicon Valley that wanted to start a tech company read the book and said, Okay, so I need a prospecting team and I need a closing team. And had, you know, goes out and hires these entry-level reps that don't know anything about the industry, that don't know anything about the product, the product market fit is not established, the ideal customer profile is not established, the founder's not sure exactly who they're selling to or why, because they're just trying to get off the ground. So this model is kind of misallocated to um new companies, right? Like every every tech startup in the valley goes and hires SDRs, and then when it doesn't work out, they fire them. So the SDR turns into this scapegoat kind of role. Um, and that's sort of like the the premises or the things that I was trying to point at um uh uh when when we wrote this book.

SPEAKER_00: 16:45

That's interesting, interesting that you say that because going back to my son's story of getting his nose bloodied a lot in the health insurance, making cold calls, he's now at one of the top cellular companies, and he is number two in sales in the region. So going from bottom of the barrel to feeling like I'm not a good salesperson to going to a desired company, like you said, a product market fit. That's two different things that people don't even think about. So that book is not even applicable to a lot of businesses because you may not have something that's as you know popular as Salesforce, like you were mentioning. So let's get into the cold call outbound process, if you don't mind, because I'd say there's a we can debunk that myth right now, because right now it's Q3 of 2025, and everybody's all about digital sales, they're about AI, cold calls, cold email, all that stuff doesn't work because you got to get on board. But I kind of disagree. So can you kind of go because you also own a company that does outbound, outboundless.com. And so can you kind of help us understand like why it still works and and then maybe how to go about it that might be different from others and maybe why it's not working for others and why it is for you?

SPEAKER_01: 18:06

Yeah. Um, with the advent of AI um and email infrastructure getting easier and easier to acquire, um, there's a lot of agencies that are like mine that have scaled up their business on the premise that you could have a couple of guys, two or three people, um sending tens of thousands of uh emails that are enhanced via AI so that you can inject these personalization points into the email. Now, the problem with that is that there's a bunch of agencies that are all doing this and set all sending tens of thousands of emails per month, and everybody's inbox is flooded. There's there's a lot of ebbs and flows in the in the B2B tech industry, um uh like trends of how people are doing things. Um, the the personalization point that's one of the myths that I talk about in the book that personalization is a myth. Um, the you know, five, six years ago when we wrote this.

SPEAKER_00: 19:07

You're listening to small business pivots. This podcast is produced by my company, Boss. Our business is helping yours grow. Boss offers business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as twenty four to forty-eight hours at business ownership simplified.com. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. Now let's get back to our special guest.

SPEAKER_01: 19:37

The the personalization point, that's one of the myths that I talk about in the book, that personalization is a myth. Um, the you know, five, six years ago when we wrote this, um the the the premise was if you personalize your email to the person, you are going to get a higher response rate. You know, like if I went and looked up uh Michael, what your favorite sports team was, and I use that in the subject line, like that's gonna somehow get you to buy my software more often. Um when the reality is that that is not true. Like, you need to understand um your business, the the workflow that you are trying to impact, like how your business operates, like what your current state is, what your worldview is. You need to understand those things really well. And like the little tidbits about personal interests um aren't aren't as impactful uh as they once were. Now, these AI enhanced email agencies are still like working off of that premise, and they're like pulling these, you know, they're looking at the person's LinkedIn profile and pulling a tidbit from it, and you know, um trying to use um the person's geography, like what state they're in and what city they're in, and and you know, uh use the AI to scale up some level of personal personalization that looks like it's human, like the whole thing is trying to get a computer to appear as though it was a human that was actually reaching out, um, which there's some merit to it. Like, if I get an email from somebody and I think, oh, the a person spent time on this and thought about it and wrote it down, like I might be more apt to at least just reply to them, even if it's not going to be my thing. I might just give them the courtesy of saying, Yeah, no, thanks. Here's here's why we're not gonna do that. Reach back out next quarter or whatever. Um, but the problem is that it's become so prevalent that as soon as you see it in your inbox, like you just know that it wasn't real. And the reason why cold calling still works is because it's a human voice on the other end of the line. There's been billions of dollars invested in millions of lines of code written trying to solve the problem of an AI being able to talk to you, and it just hasn't been done yet. We're just not there yet. Maybe in 10 years it'll be different, uh, but we're just not there. Like when you your phone rings and you answer it, and it's a robot on the other end of the line, not only can you tell immediately, you automatically just want to hang up the phone. Like, I don't want to talk to this person. It's the same reaction when you get an email that was written by AI that's like trying to pull these personal tidbits that they found on my LinkedIn profile. You can kind of tell that it like fit into a template, and sometimes it doesn't even look right. Um, but when the phone rings and it's somebody that has a good phone presence and there's an actual human on the other end of the line, I mean, yeah, we we found that uh people are generally pleased to be talking to a real person. Now, not everybody is, you know, it's still cold calling is a tough gig, it's still yeah, 95% failure and you're having a good day, you know. If you get a five percent success rate, like you're you're doing great. You're you're one of the best in the business. So it's still you know, pretty tough going, but the five percent of those people that you can talk to, um, you know, that you can actually have a conversation with, like that's that's what's driving new business people. Now, you can use the technology to enhance our ability to make the calls faster, acquire the data quicker, find the mobile data, you know, segment our lists really cleverly. Um, you know, we work a lot of the work that we do for our clients is splitting up um our their lead list by industry, and and we have a point of view in that particular industry. Like, for example, construction firms. Hey, we work with construction firms. Um, these are some of the problems that we were seeing with the other clients that we work with. Here's how we solve them. Was hoping we could go over some similar ideas with you. Now I've personalized it to the workflow, I've personalized it to their worldview. Like, I understand what the status quo is. I'm showing them that I understand that stuff. Then I can go to the next industry. Let's say it's IT services companies. Like, hey, we worked with other IT services companies, we've seen they have an issue with cash flow. Um, you know, we've been able to come in and give them fractional accounting help. You know, there's one of the clients that's adding. So that that kind of approach we have found works so much better than trying to personalize based on personal interests with AI.

SPEAKER_00: 23:58

I will have to agree with you because the same things have happened to me just in the last week. So, for instance, I live in Oklahoma City, and if you follow the NBA at all, we won the world championship in the NBA, and someone just reached out to me, and the first words out of their mouth were, Hey Michael, I'm an Oklahoma City Thunder fan, just like you. I went click, I'm like sales, right? Because you're using that that uh what would you call it? Just kind of that knowing about the person. And I was like, automatic sales, like, no, if you're gonna kind of cheat the system, like if you're I can't trust you already. And so, and then another one is you know, you're talking about those AI tools. A lot of us can tell because if there's like three seconds, two to three seconds of dead air, I'm like, oh, recording's coming, click. So, how does I've got some clients that they're like, I want to make some outbound calls. How does one cut through all that clutter? I mean, you don't have to give industry secrets away, you know, for your company of how you do it, but just what are some things that would be helpful for those that maybe not in a position to hire your company, maybe not in that industry, or maybe don't have the resources, but they want to grow and they're considering outbound calls.

SPEAKER_01: 25:17

Yeah, you mentioned the two or three second delay. What one of the things we found is um it does put somebody's guard up if there's a slight delay on the phone, but as soon as a human voice connects, it it lowers their guard a little bit. They'll at least hear you out. Um, and we open the calls like there's a lot of debate on how to open a cold call, whether to use the permission-based opener, they call it or not. Um, but we we use it pretty effectively. It's like, hey, this is Patrick from Outboundless. Look, I I know I'm calling you out of the blue here, but do you have 30 seconds so I can tell you why I called? Almost everybody is gonna say, Yeah, sure, go ahead. Okay, Michael. Yeah, we work with other business coaches. Um, one of the things that we've noticed is and they could go from there. Yeah, like that's that's how you open the cold call. Now, there's like a beginning, a middle, and an end. Uh the beginning and the end are usually pretty much the same, right? Like the beginning of the call is you get your your script down. Um I hesitate to call it a script, I think of it in terms of like a call framework because I don't want it to be wrote memorized. But the first few sentences that you say are going to be pretty similar across the board. Um, the middle part of the call is where it gets murky, it's never gonna be the same twice. You're gonna actually have to have a conversation with the person that's on the other end of the line. And then the end of the call either ends with, no, this isn't for me, or yeah, sure, let's spend some more time, you know, 20 minutes next week and you book the meeting. Um, so that that middle part of the call is actually like it's the easiest part to do, but it's the hardest to prepare for. And I say it's the easiest part to do because you're just having a conversation with another human being. Um, if you go into it with too much of an agenda in mind, where you know you're the sales rep and you're thinking, man, I really get to close this deal, I really gotta sell this guy. You you don't have to sell the whole thing on the opening call. All you have to do is get the person 51% sure that you might be able to help them with something that they are currently trying to do. Um, and your job is to decide whether or not that's even possible. Um, so it's it's a filtering exercise. Um, what you're trying to do is you're trying to filter through the leaves that you have in front of you and and decide whether or not like there's even potential for you to help the person and then communicate that. And if there is potential, then most likely they will talk to you again. You can book the meeting. Um, you might find out like once you get to that meeting that there were other constraints in place that it's not going to be the case. But I mean, this is this is what sales is. You take a bunch of people on a list at the beginning, you put them into your funnel. At the top of the funnel, you're trying to figure out which one of these people might be a customer, and then at the other end, you get a small amount of that large list that you started with uh that that might end up as a customer. And you do that over and over again. You get more and more clever at it. Um, you get really tight with who your ideal customer is and why you should why they should be your customer. Um, really trying to understand that stuff, spending a lot of time mapping that out and being really deliberate about it, being really intentional about it, you know. Um, segmenting by industry, segmenting by employee size, segmenting by um revenue bands, you know, the companies that make more than a million in a year make sense for you to talk to at the stage that you're at. Um, yeah. So I mean th those are some of the things that I think about when I'm I'm thinking about starting kicking off an outbound motion um with one of my clients.

SPEAKER_00: 28:45

So you mentioned uh 95% rejection, five percent would be a great day. So what would you say on average a business owner should should spend on outbound calls, you know, because they have a business to run also. So what would you say the average is? Like if I made using that percentage as the goal line, I make a hundred calls hoping to get five out of those five. What have you seen on outbound calls like they actually convert to out of those just on average? Is there an percentage?

SPEAKER_01: 29:22

Yeah, yeah. So um what we've seen across the board, no matter what way you slice up the data, if you look at it in aggregate in in any time frame, whether it's over the course of a year or a month or a week, the average connect rate is about five percent. So if I make a hundred calls, I'm gonna talk to five people. Um, if I book a meeting with all five of those people and I turn them into customers, like you are the greatest salesperson on planet.

SPEAKER_00: 29:47

You're crushing it.

SPEAKER_01: 29:48

Uh so I would double that. I would want to talk to 10 people and hope that I get one or two of them that might turn into uh potential customers. Now, with the software that's available now, you Could do that in a couple hours. It the hard part is getting the data sorted out. You got to figure out um what your lead list is gonna look like, what your company list is gonna look like, where you're gonna get the data from, um, which is why I would suggest hiring an agency uh like to do this for you because this is all we do, this is what we specialize in. Um, but I mean, if you want to do it on your own, if you're bootstrapped and you know you're just you just want to go and make some calls, like you gotta just set the expectation to um if I can get one customer, one potential customer a day, then I'm absolutely killing it. And I would say set two 45 minute blocks for yourself and be religious about it. Do one in the morning, one in the afternoon, and just call for 45 minutes, 90 minutes a day. If you can spare an hour and a half to go find new customers, you're gonna learn a lot. Once you have that many conversations, if you're having 20 conversations a day and you're learning why people are saying no, um, the it's like compound interest. Every conversation you have adds to your ability to have the next conversation, right? Like this is what we're hearing back from the market. You might actually learn that you might need to pivot your business, you might need to uh change your tack because everybody that you talk to, like you're just getting absolutely brick walled. Um, I I think finding that stuff out is super important.

SPEAKER_00: 31:19

Yeah, and for those that are fearful of picking up the phone and getting rejected, I always use the quote of discomfort means we're growing. So, in other words, you just gotta start doing it. And then once you start doing it, you know, it just now it's a game. Like, how can I learn from the last one so the next one doesn't call me that name or hang up on me or anything like that? And so this has been all very beneficial information. Is there any data out there that you know of that says cold calling? You can there's a greater percentage of converting sales versus filling out the forms or digital leads. Is there any data out there that you know of that kind of shows the success rates of each marketing platform?

SPEAKER_01: 32:10

Um, anecdotally, I have a really good feel for it. I don't know of any particular data on outbound versus inbound. You know, somebody's hand raising and they're coming to you, they've already identified that they're having a problem and they're they've already identified that you were a potential solution for it. Like these are people that go and fill out the form on your website and you talk to them. It is a lot easier to close those deals than it is the stranger that you called that wasn't planning on spending any money on you, that might not have even known that there was a problem, um, that is just being sort of having their eyes open to the idea that there might be a different way of doing it. Um however, like those like in any market, um, if you look at the the especially in B2B tech, if you look at the technology adoption curve, there's it follows a bell curve, right? Like the beginning of it, like the the first few people that you get as customers, like when you're trying to grow a small business, those are the early adopters, those are the people that are right on the bleeding edge of the tech that are looking for new ways to do things. Um, the middle part of the curve is kind of um once you're already established, once it they're they're the trend followers, like once it becomes kind of a trend that people are gonna um you know use this type of solution, like we've seen it many, many times in tech. Things become trendy, everybody starts using them, they don't even know why they're using them, they're just buying the tech because that's what everybody does. Um, and then the end of the curve is is uh uh sort of the laggards, they're called in in the technology adoption curve, where like they just want to do it the way that they've always been doing it, and they'll pretty much they're not gonna change until um it becomes uh runtime critical for them where they're just moving too slow and the rest of the the world around them is moving really fast and they have to change. Um, I was like that buying a cell phone when I was younger. I so I I'm gonna age myself here. I graduated high school in 2003, and I think I I don't think I had gotten a cell phone yet. I was I was the last person out of my friend group to get a cell phone because I said I this thing is ridiculous, and now I can't put the thing down. I'm on my iPhone. Um, so anyway, that when you when you think about it like that, when you think about the technology adoption curve, if you're a new business, you have a new venture, you have a new way of doing things, you are trying to sort out the people that you're talking to. You're trying to find those early adopters, you're trying to find the people that are on the bleeding edge of the technology. And you can figure out if you look at it that way, you can figure out pretty quickly if you're talking to one of those people or not, if they're gonna be an early adopter, a fast follower, or a laggard.

SPEAKER_00: 34:41

On outboundless, you've mentioned it a few times. What uh what's your ideal client for that business? Who should reach out to you? Who would it be beneficial for?

SPEAKER_01: 34:52

Um, our ideal customer is early stage tech companies. So seed stage, series A funding, series B funding, um, wants to grow, wants to most importantly, wants to find out um what the market is saying. Like we can have 20 live conversations a day on your behalf uh and find out if your assumptions are true about your ideal customer profile. Um I'd say sort of uh another really good client for us would be somebody that has their ideal customer profile sorted out, they know exactly who it is, they just want a cost-effective way to go and and grow into the market segment that they already have established. So you've got maybe one or two sales reps that you've hired. Um, things are going really well. You just you have a long list of here's all of our potential customers. You just need somebody to go and call them for you. Like we can go and set up those appointments in a way that is gonna be more cost effective than you trying to hire somebody internally, man, spend the time to manage them, outfit them with the tech that they need, um, you know, hire an ops person or try to do it yourself, or you know, sorting out the CRM data and the you know, finding all the contact info and building the system in place. We've already got it, it's turnkey. You know, we had a client sign a contract on a Friday, Wednesday they had two meetings booked. Um, so I mean we we move really quickly. You can turn it on, turn it off as needed. Um, you know, we do we do typically three months dents. One, you know, every quarter you can reevaluate if it's if it's working for you or not. Um, yeah, that's that's exactly who we're looking for.

SPEAKER_00: 36:32

So your leads are qualified more than the someone that filled out a form four years ago, is what you're saying.

SPEAKER_01: 36:39

Yes.

unknown: 36:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 36:41

All right. Well, I know you've uh got a lot of listeners here probably wanting to follow you, learn more. What's the best place to do that?

SPEAKER_01: 36:50

Uh go to LinkedIn, Patrick William Joyce on LinkedIn. You can follow me there. Um, there's a link to my substack there where I do a lot of writing. Um, you can find the book, The Illuminati Sales Manifesto on Amazon. Uh the Kindle version is 99 cents if you want to check it out. Um, if you find me on LinkedIn and you have a cold call script you want me to review, send it to my DMs. Send me a connection request, mention the podcast, um, and send me your call script and I'll review it for you.

SPEAKER_00: 37:16

Fantastic. Well, I I work connecting and uh I encourage our listeners to follow or connect with you. You've got quite a following, uh 500 likes, engagements, you know, or more on each post. So you've got a lot of beneficial information that people could learn more. And then on your website, uh outboundless.com, how would they connect with you there?

SPEAKER_01: 37:41

Yeah, there's a leading there's a link to book a meeting with me directly there. Okay. Um just go to the website, you fill out the form, it'll put you directly on my calendar.

SPEAKER_00: 37:51

Fantastic. Well, I know from time to time there may not have been a subject or a topic that I asked about, but I know being on guest on other podcasts, I'm like, I wish we really would have talked on this. Is there anything that you feel like you'd really like to share with our listeners that we didn't discuss already?

SPEAKER_01: 38:10

Yeah, I I would I would end it with this. I I would say that um the most important to think about, most important thing to think about as a small business owner is um to be relentless about understanding your customer and giving them a good experience. I think that that that is the one thing that um shines through in any business that does well. Um and and have integrity about it. Like integrity is really, really important. Um, think if you if you approach every action that you take with every um every customer, with every potential customer, and think about it in terms of how can I best serve this person, um, that will take you really, really far.

SPEAKER_00: 38:52

That's golden advice. Well, Patrick, you've been a blessing to many today. I appreciate you sharing your insights and your time with us today.

SPEAKER_01: 39:00

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. I had a great time.

SPEAKER_00: 39:02

My pleasure. Thank you for listening to Small Business Pivots. This podcast is created and produced by my company, Boss. Our business is growing yours. Boss offers flexible business loans with business coaching support. Apply in minutes and get approved and funded in as little as 24 to 48 hours at business ownership simplified.com. If you're enjoying this podcast, don't forget to hit the subscribe button and share it as well. If you need help growing your business, email me at Michael at michaeldmorson.com. We'll see you next time on Small Business Pivots.