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TOGETHER WITH PROSPEO
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STATE
OF SALES
The State of Sales right now….
IN THE HOT SEAT
Shara Davoodi
Director of Sales
Nooks
We have more resources at our fingertips than ever. The whole game is applying them usefully, to buy back time for the one thing that matters: the selling portion.
THE SETUP
Shara Davoodi is Director of Sales at Nooks, the AI dialling platform reshaping how SDR teams run the phones. From San Francisco, where he says the buzz is firmly back, he talked us through what earns a reply in 2026, and why the gap between good and average sellers is about to get expensive.
THE 60-SECOND VERSION
Earn every sentence. Value in the first two lines or the email dies unread.
Make assumptions. Leaders love correcting you, and being corrected earns the next step.
Breadcrumb the account: small constant touches, split leaders-to-leaders and reps-to-reps.
The good-to-average gap is widening. Readers of the room are about to get paid.
3 THINGS YOU'LL STEAL FROM THIS
The "earn it sentence by sentence" rule that fixes most outbound copy
A breadcrumb prospecting motion that maps an entire buying committee
The compensation philosophy that keeps a sales floor genuinely motivated
TOGETHER WITH PROSPEO
Shara's assumption play only works if the assumption reaches a human. Prospeo triple-verifies every email across a 300M-contact database, and Clay ranked it first for accuracy in an independent test of 8 providers. Make the bold call. Just make it to a real inbox. Try it for free here →
01 · Your inbox is judging you sentence by sentence
Shara's filter for outreach is brutal because his inbox is brutal. The fake-personalisation era ("hey, you went to this school") is over.
Get to the value in the first two sentences. Anytime I see unnecessary things, I don't even finish reading it. You literally need to earn it sentence by sentence in this day and age.
His coaching move is to make assumptions. You have the data, so use it to take a position on the business and where it's going.
As sales leaders, we love to correct people if they're wrong. Making an assumption gives you the chance to prove what you've learned. And if it's correct, that's what earns you the next step.
DO THIS THIS WEEK
Rewrite your top-of-sequence email so sentence one contains an assumption about the prospect's business. Wrong is recoverable. Boring is fatal.
The seven-calls-in-a-day motion is done, in Shara's view. What works is smaller and steadier: a LinkedIn add, a call, an email, a comment on a post they're active on. Small pieces, constantly, until you've built a map of the account.
Then comes the part most teams skip. He splits the outreach by seniority, using the above-the-line, below-the-line model:
Above the line: VPs, directors, CROs, CEOs. Leaders reach out to leaders.
Below the line: the reps and ICs actually using the product. Reps reach out to reps.
Nobody is too low or too high to contact. The map matters more than any single thread.
Before you know it, you've reached out to multiple stakeholders across the org. That's our style.
STEAL THIS
On your next tier-one account, assign every stakeholder to a line, then assign the right sender. Like for like.
03 · Enablement's biggest mistake is building a golden rep
Nooks runs an aggressive ramp, and Shara is honest about the industry's sink-or-swim habit. His sharper point is about what enablement teaches once reps are in the water.
Where enablement goes wrong is creating this golden way of doing things. Things change so quickly that a month later, the old way is potentially wrong. Enablement needs to constantly refresh talk tracks: what's working, what's the most common objection today.
Leadership gets the same treatment. The leaders he rates are back in deals, running reviews, selling alongside reps. "You just know your stuff better, if I'm being honest."
TRY THIS THIS WEEK
Replace one static training doc with a living one: this month's top objection and the current best answer, refreshed monthly.
04 · Pay big, and watch for the burnout nobody names
Shara's compensation philosophy is refreshingly simple: attainable quotas, heavy bonus incentives, and pride in big commission cheques.
If you want to motivate salespeople, help them earn the biggest commission checks they've ever earned.
Then he named the problem hiding underneath the money: life burnout. Promotions, pressure, a first house, a growing family, all stacking up while you're expected to be your best self at work.
I've neglected parts I should have focused on more. My personal health, putting space between work. Take care of yourself so you can be your best at work.
THE MOVE
If you lead a team, ask about workload and life load in your next round of one-to-ones. The second one is usually where performance quietly leaks.
THE ONE THING
If you can read the room and change live on the call, you're in for the best twelve months of your career.
Check out Shara here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sharadavoodi/
Every week we sit down with the operators actually moving revenue.