May 16, 2026 | Read online
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Garbage In Garbage Out
Last week, I wrote about taking some L's and how I use a decision lens to figure out what's within my control and what isn't.
This week, I want to tell you what I'm doing about it.
I'm in full prospecting mode right now. Not "I should probably make some calls" mode. Full-blown, head down, get after it mode.
Prospecting is the one skill that has carried me through every rough stretch in my career, from doing 400 dials a week at my first start-up to generating 49 meetings in a single month back in 2023 when everything fell apart. I wrote about that on LinkedIn at the time, and I still stand by every word of it. (Read that post here)
Every time the market shifts, I go back to the thing that works.
I tell reps all the time that prospecting is the number one skill you will ever develop. It's why I don't understand SDRs who want to skip the early grind and "get to be a real sales rep (AE)" as fast as possible.
The skill you build as a BDR will feed you for the rest of your career. You'll be a better AE because you can fill your own pipeline on your own effort, and whatever Marketing and SDRs give you becomes the accelerator, not the lifeline.
If I were managing right now and an AE sat in front of me and said the main reason they didn't hit quota was that they didn't get enough leads from their SDRs, I think I'd fire them before that sentence got out of their mouth.
But here's the thing I realized going back into heavy prospecting mode this time.
Working harder wasn't going to be enough.
I looked at the messaging I was running 6-12 months ago, and it was built for a market that doesn't exist anymore. The way buyers are thinking right now, what they're worried about, how they're evaluating, all of it has shifted. My old messaging wasn't bad. It was stale. And stale messaging into any system, AI or human, produces garbage output.
It reminded me of COVID. I remember people saying to me, "I can't wait until things go back to normal." I'd look at them and think, what normal? Nothing was going back to normal. That was a fixed mindset. A defeatist mentality. The people who waited for things to settle got left behind. The people who adjusted survived.
The same thing is happening right now.
If you're running the same messaging, the same talk tracks, the same email sequences you were running a year ago, you are prospecting with outdated ammunition. It doesn't matter how many dials you make or how many AI tools you plug in. Garbage in, garbage out.
That's why I've spent the last few months rebuilding everything. I launched a Sales Leadership Advisory offer to help sales leaders navigate through this transition. I've created prompt packs for all of my training modules. I've updated my content positioning. I've restructured how I approach outreach. And I'm using AI not to generate my messaging FOR me, but to read the market, identify where the gaps are, and adjust my inputs so what I put out actually matches what buyers care about today.
Not six months ago. Not last quarter. Today.
I've been doing a lot of this inside Apollo, testing different sequences, adjusting messaging based on what's getting responses, and learning what's actually resonating with different personas right now. If you want to go deeper on how I'm doing that, I'm doing a Reddit AMA with Apollo on prospecting, sequencing, and anything else you want to ask me about next week.
This is the piece most people are missing. Prospecting is the skill. I will always believe that. But the MESSAGING you feed your prospecting is what determines whether it works or not. And right now, that messaging has to be agile. You have to be testing, reading signals, and adjusting constantly. Not once a quarter when your manager tells you to refresh the battlecards.
I built a formula for this. I call it Sales-Ready Messaging, and there's a linchpin to the whole thing that makes it work.
I'm breaking it down next Wednesday, May 20, at the Learning Lab. Free, live, and I'm going to walk through exactly how I've been rebuilding my own messaging in real time. If your outreach feels like it's not landing the way it used to, this is why. And this is the fix.
Register for the Learning Lab here
Prospecting will save your career. But only if you're feeding it with messaging built for the market you're selling into right now. Not the one you were selling into before.
Get after it.
#MakeItHappen
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