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THE INTERVIEW
TUESDAY
STATE
OF SALES
The State of Sales right now….
IN THE HOT SEAT
Matt Putnam
Head of Sales
We've come full circle from fifteen years ago. We've now got more AI tools than we can possibly ever purchase, and the basics still work.
THE SETUP
Matt Putnam is Head of Sales at Prospeo, the B2B data platform sitting on 300 million verified contacts. He sits in roughly 60 sales meetings a month and has run AI across more than 300 deals since January. We sat down with him to find out what all that data actually taught him, and why he thinks almost every sales problem traces back to the same root cause.
THE 60-SECOND VERSION
Sales has gone full circle. More tools than anyone can buy, and the phone, a simpler email and a LinkedIn message still carry the top of funnel.
AI's best use is admin. Transcripts, CRM updates and a rolling deal analysis across 300+ deals, so patterns surface without the guesswork.
Your buyers' words are already in your call recordings. Mine them by job title, then write copy in their language instead of marketing jargon.
The offer does the heavy lifting. A quarter of a million emails in 60 days, and it's free credits that turn replies into trials.
3 THINGS YOU'LL STEAL FROM THIS
The method for turning 300 sales calls into cold email copy written in your buyer's own words
Matt's cold email numbers from the last 60 days, and the stricter definition of "interested" behind them
The follow-up question that anchors every deal back to the reason it started
TOGETHER WITH PROSPEO
If your outbound bounces more than it should, the problem is usually the data. In an independent test of 8 providers, Clay ranked Prospeo first for accuracy. Prospeo's 300M-contact database triple-verifies every email, so your messages actually land. Try it for free here →
01 · Sales has gone full circle. The basics won
We opened with the obvious question: what is the state of sales right now? Matt's answer was that nothing about the fundamentals has changed, we just took a fifteen-year detour to prove it.
People are realising, just pick up the phone, simplify the email, send someone a message on LinkedIn. That's really where the top of funnel happens.
His point isn't that the tools are useless. It's that the tools have quietly become the work, and the work was always the conversation.
DO THIS THIS WEEK
Count the tools your team pays for that touch top of funnel. If a tool isn't helping someone make a call, send a shorter email or write a better LinkedIn message, it's overhead.
02 · Let AI do the admin, then steal the data it leaves behind
Sixty sales meetings a month is only survivable if the admin disappears. Matt's transcripts are generated automatically, pushed into his CRM, and rolled into a deal analysis that updates every time a new deal lands. He can now hear certain phrases on a call and know whether it's likely to close, or whether the buyer sits in a category he can't sell to at all.
The idea of analysing 300 plus deals would take forever. That takes so much guesswork out of it.
Then comes the part most teams never get to. Those 300-plus meetings span founders, RevOps, sales leadership and reps, and each group describes its problems differently. Matt mines that language and writes his cold email in it.
His example: a RevOps leader doesn't think "I need better deliverability." They think their domains are getting blacklisted and they don't know why. So the copy stopped making a promise and started making a recognition.
We go from "your emails are going to deliver more" to "you're not the only one who wonders why the email campaigns are getting worse and worse." It's a really small tweak. Same thing, but it's using their words.
The compounding effect is on efficiency, not just reply rate. Matt can now send fewer emails for the same number of meetings, which frees him to send more to people worth calling.
STEAL THIS
Pull your last 50 call transcripts, split them by job title, and list the exact phrases each group uses to describe the problem you solve. That list is your next email sequence.
03 · The biggest problem in sales is still knowing who you're selling to
We asked what nobody's really talking about. Matt picked the least fashionable answer available, and argued it sits upstream of almost everything else that goes wrong.
Companies don't spend anywhere near enough time actually understanding who they're selling to, why they should even care.
His chain of consequences is worth reading slowly. No product-market fit. Emails written about the seller rather than the buyer. Openers that don't earn the next question, so the call fizzles out. Offers nobody wants, because they were never relevant in the first place.
Prospeo's own answer to this is deliberately unglamorous. Data is a crowded, unsexy category, but every buyer needs leads to call in order to book anything. So the offer is free leads, and almost nobody says no to that.
TRY THIS ON YOUR NEXT CALL
Before you pitch, check whether you could describe this person's problem in their words without using a single phrase from your own website. If you can't, you're not ready to make the offer.
04 · A quarter of a million emails in 60 days: what actually drove the replies
Matt walked us through his numbers from the last two months. Roughly a quarter of a million emails sent, a 4% response rate, and around 500 people who went on to either book a meeting or start a trial.
The definition matters more than the percentage. Most tools count any vaguely warm reply as interest. Matt doesn't.
A lot of these apps and tools, if someone responds even slightly positively, that's positive. What we've considered interested is they've booked a meeting in or they've signed up for a trial.
The stack behind it is small. Prospeo for the data. EmailBison for sending across multiple domains and mailboxes, each one capped around 15 emails a day. Aircall wired into the CRM for dialling, though he rates Nooks if you want a genuine power dialler. And no LinkedIn tooling at all: he adds the people he wants to sell to, then messages them himself.
Personalisation is a CSV and a prompt. Matt uploads the Prospeo export into Claude alongside his observation, his problem statements and his offer, and every email comes out different.
Every single one of them is completely unique. That seems really complex but actually it's just upload the CSV and customise the bits we want customised.
He was clear that the offer is what carries the whole thing: 5,000 free credits to test, no obligation if the numbers don't move. And on where this all goes next, he reframed outbound as experimentation rather than persuasion — he's not trying to convince anyone, he's trying to find out whether what he's saying is correct and compelling. His one worry is that the same tools make it very easy to skip the research entirely and send generic volume instead.
THE MOVE
Write down what your prospect gets before they ever pay you. If the answer is "a conversation with me", your reply rate is capped no matter how good the copy gets.
05 · Most people still don't follow up. The ones who do go back to the start
Asked what teams miss once a buyer has actually tried the product, Matt started with the unflattering basic: most people simply don't follow up. Once you're past that, he says the follow-up should always loop back to the reason the first conversation happened.
My follow up is, hey, you've tried it. Did it solve that problem we spoke about? Or can you see it solving that problem you spoke about?
That anchor also explains his lost deals. Either they solved the problem elsewhere, or they decided the problem wasn't worth paying to fix, or they never had the problem and were window shopping. Only one of those is a copy problem.
STEAL THIS
Go through your closed-lost deals from last quarter and sort them into those three buckets. If most sit in "never had the problem", your issue is the list, not the reps.
THE ONE THING
Understand who you're actually selling to. Copy, openers, offers and product-market fit are all downstream of that one thing.
WHERE TO FIND MATT
Matt Putnam is Head of Sales at Prospeo, the B2B data platform whose 300-million-contact database triple-verifies every email before it reaches your sequence. Find him on LinkedIn or visit prospeo.io.
Every week we sit down with the operators actually moving revenue.