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STATE
OF SALES
The State of Sales right now….
IN THE HOT SEAT
Hugo Wendel
Head of SDR
Understory
I would say the state of sales is delusional at best.
THE SETUP
Hugo Wendel is Head of SDR at Understory, the booking platform for experience businesses, with teams across the Nordics, Italy and Spain. His reps connect on close to 40% of dials. He has been in sales fifteen years, sources his own data, sends almost no emails, and thinks most of the industry has quietly talked itself into a fantasy.
THE 60-SECOND VERSION
Six touches, all by phone. Call, message, call, call, message, call. Then park it.
The follow-up is a text, not an email. Text in the Nordics, WhatsApp in Italy and Spain.
Open weird on purpose. Hugo gets to pitch 95% of the time when he does.
Coach pace, not product. Reps stop booking when they get too formal, not when they forget a feature.
Admin gets a slot, not a day. Two thirty-minute windows. That's it.
3 THINGS YOU'LL STEAL FROM THIS
The six-touch phone sequence behind a connect rate close to 40%
The cold call opener that earns Hugo the pitch nine times out of ten
The daily structure that keeps reps dialling instead of updating records
01 · The sequence: call, message, call, call, message, call
Most teams run a cadence built around the inbox, with a call bolted on somewhere in step four. Hugo runs it the other way round. Six touches by phone before a prospect gets marked unresponsive, and the only thing sitting between those calls is a text message.
Here is the actual motion:
Call. No answer.
Message immediately. Name, I just called you, do you have five minutes. Crucially, no reason given.
Call again that afternoon.
Nothing until tomorrow. No response means wait, not chase.
Repeat the pattern the next day.
Six touches total, then unresponsive.
The channel changes by geography, and Hugo is specific about it.
If you want someone to respond in the Nordics, you use text. If you want someone to respond in South Europe, like Italy and Spain, we use WhatsApp.
Email exists, but only for one job: waking up old prospects. Understory built an internal tool that reads call transcripts, drafts the reactivation email, and pings Hugo in Slack to approve it before it goes. He presses verify. He gets told if they reply. Nobody sits in the CRM writing sequences by hand.
I don't want reps spending a lot of time in HubSpot, sending emails out manually.
DO THIS THIS WEEK
Take one segment and strip the email steps out of the sequence entirely. Replace them with a text sent within sixty seconds of the missed call. Compare reply rates after two weeks.
02 · Open weird, or don't bother
Hugo learned this in estate agency, where you ring people in the evening because nobody has time for you at two in the afternoon. He carried it into B2B and it stuck.
Hey, my name is Hugo. This might be the weirdest call you get all week.
He doesn't always have something genuinely weird to follow it with. That isn't the point. The point is that the prospect now wants to know why. Then he gets hyper specific about their business, close enough that it can only have come from a human looking at them properly.
His example, on a company running surf camps across Spain: my grandmother was in Alicante last week, she walked past your surf school and took a photo, and I found it interesting enough to call you.
He'd be like, oh, that's specific. I get to pitch like 95% of the time when I open like that.
What he is arguing against is the standard B2B frame. The one where you open by announcing that your prospects usually face either problem A or problem B.
These are still normal people. You should relate to them as a person, but on a professional level.
STEAL THIS
Name the call before the prospect does. Flag that it's odd, then earn the next ten seconds with one detail about their business that no tool could have generated.
TOGETHER WITH PROSPEO
A six-touch phone sequence is only as good as the number at the end of it. Prospeo triple-verifies every contact across a 300M database, and Clay ranked it first for accuracy in an independent test of 8 providers. Be as weird as you like. Just be weird at the right person. Try it for free here →
03 · Coach comedic timing, not product knowledge
Ask Hugo what he actually says in a call review and the answer has almost nothing to do with the product.
What they'd probably think twice about is how much I talk to the reps about pace. Almost like comedian timing.
Timing punches. Being a bit silly. Knowing when to leave a gap. And he has found a reliable early warning sign for a rep going cold, which is worth writing on a wall somewhere.
I can tell when a rep isn't booking as much as they used to. They've almost become too formal, which is pretty funny.
He can coach this way because he has the time to. The go-to-market and RevOps teams handle sourcing, routing and reporting, which leaves him doing the job he was hired for. His view on peers who claim the same: most of them say they coach daily. Most of them don't.
TRY THIS THIS WEEK
In your next call review, say nothing about the pitch. Coach only rhythm: where they rushed, where they should have paused, where they were too polite to be memorable.
04 · Keep the rep on the phone
Asked what teams should stop doing immediately, Hugo didn't hesitate.
Spending loads of time on unnecessary admin. The highest performer is the person putting the most time on the phone and the least time on admin.
His fix is boring and it works. Admin gets a box, not a day. Call from nine to twelve. Lunch. Half an hour to clear everything from the morning. Then the same shape again in the afternoon.
The other half is the list. A RevOps colleague scrapes, enriches through Clay, runs a second qualification pass with AI, sorts the output into ICP categories in HubSpot, and drops leads onto each rep's desk at eight in the morning.
A rep can come to the computer in the morning, have a cup of coffee, and have 50 leads they can call immediately, all 100% ICP fit with the right timing.
The tech stack behind all of this is smaller than you'd expect. HubSpot. Gong. Sinch for text and WhatsApp. A dialler he is deliberately unexcited about. No intent data platform. No sequencer. He is not part of the dialler hype and says so.
Which leads to his prediction. Teams get leaner, not bigger, and the SDR army goes away.
I don't think we will see these SDR armies like you've seen before in a lot of the big companies.
In his model, marketing surfaces intent and full-cycle sellers act on it. The rep who survives is the one who can also do a bit of RevOps, a bit of AI tooling, and take charge of their own list. Being good on the phone is now the floor, not the job.
THE MOVE
Count the hours your reps spent on the phone last week. Not dials. Hours. If it's under half their working day, the sequence isn't your problem.
THE ONE THING
You still have to make the call. No tool has ever removed that step, and the teams pretending otherwise are the ones losing.
Check out Hugo here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hugowendel/
Every week we sit down with the operators actually moving revenue.