Donald Adetoye

Cold calling just got a data upgrade that changes the math. Cognism's 2025 data: verified contacts hit 13.3% answer rates. Warm AE calls? 14.4%. The gap collapsed. Not because reps got better at scripts. Because intent signals and verified data turned cold dials into warm opportunities. This isn't incremental. It breaks the "cold = low yield" assumption that shaped every outbound playbook for the last decade. If your call strategy still treats every prospect as equally cold, you're leaving pipeline on the table. The new constraint isn't willingness to dial. It's access to the right signals before you pick up the phone.

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Everyone’s obsessed with the perfect sales stack. Better tools. Tighter process. Cleaner sequences. It helps, but it’s not what actually wins deals. Two reps can run the exact same play and get completely different outcomes. The difference isn’t the system. It’s the person. The best salespeople aren’t just executing steps. They’re reading people. Adjusting in real time. Picking up on what’s not being said. It’s closer to poker than process. Amateurs play the hand. Professionals play the person. Energy, presence, timing. None of that lives in your CRM. But that’s where trust is built.

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Commercial Performance Tip #9 Speed matters more than most teams admit. Respond quickly to: - New leads - customer questions - complaints Work newest items first (LIFO). Momentum beats perfection. Customers notice speed immediately.

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How should compensation work for fractional sales leaders? If you’ve ever worked in sales leadership, you’re familiar with the basics of compensation: a base salary, commission, and possibly bonuses or equity. Aligning incentives can seem trickier when you’re hiring a fractional sales leader. But a base + commission is still usually the best approach: 1. The base fee covers a leader’s strategic contributions (building systems, designing sales playbooks, leading GTM strategy, etc.) 2. Commission provides upside for hitting or exceeding revenue goals With this structure, both parties benefit: the fractional leader is incentivized to drive sales, and the startup only pays additional compensation when cash actually comes in. The base pay also mitigates risk for the fractional leader while still being a (literal) fraction of what the company would have to invest in a full-time role. With that said: —Commission-only pay can work if the startup is already a well-oiled machine, and a fractional leader is being brought in purely to prospect and close deals. —Base-only compensation can work when the focus is on strategic leadership rather than front-line revenue generation. What matters, in the end, is finding a structure that maintains the core principles of: 1) fairly compensating strategic work 2) rewarding results 3) aligning risk and incentive Whatever compensation structure you choose, it should reflect the strategic value a fractional leader brings, the risk they assume, and the outcomes they drive. 

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Why Sales Leaders Should Seriously Consider Sellers With a Sales + Enablement Background Let me say this louder for the folks in the back: A seller who also comes from sales enablement is NOT “nontraditional.” They’re a competitive advantage. If you’re hiring hunters, farmers, or full-cycle killers… don’t sleep on these candidates. Here’s why: 1. We ramp fast — because we’ve built the ramp for everyone else. When you’ve created onboarding, playbooks, and training programs, you don’t need a 90-day runway. Give us the ICP, the product, the value, and the sandbox — we’re off to the races. 2. We’re natural hunters — with better discipline than your average SDR bootcamp graduate. Enablement exposes you to the habits of the top 10%: How they prospect, how they qualify, how they create momentum, how they build multi-threaded deals. We’ve studied it. We’ve coached it. We execute it… consistently. 3. We make farming look easy — because we understand the whole revenue engine. Expansions, renewals, whitespace, adoption, risk, value realization — when you’ve lived in enablement, you see the entire chessboard. Customers feel that. And leadership feels it even more. 4. We collaborate like adults, not divas. Sales, CS, SEs, RevOps, Marketing, Product… We know how the machine works, how to get what we need, and how to keep deals from stalling in the gaps. 5. We make our managers’ lives easier — yes, really. Clean forecasts. Clear next steps. Real MEDDPICC discipline. Documentation that doesn’t make leaders want to cry. You get someone who thinks like an operator and sells like a closer. If you want someone who: ✨ Hunts with intention ✨ Farms with strategy ✨ Ramps in half the time ✨ Elevates everyone around them ✨ And actually knows how to make selling repeatable… Hire the candidates who’ve sat in both seats. They don’t just sell. They scale. And every revenue team could use more of that right now. #SalesLeadership #HiringSales #EnablementToSales #SalesEnablement #RevenueTeams #EnterpriseSales #SalesCulture #SalesStrategy #MEDDPICC #FullCycleSales #SalesHiring #RevOps #SalesPlaybook #PipelineGeneration #SalesEnablementPros #WomenInSales

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We don’t have a pipeline problem. We have a time problem. I’ve sat in enough deal reviews to see the same pattern. Reps are spending more time updating CRM than talking to customers. Managers are debating forecast categories instead of actually inspecting deal risk. Teams are chasing internal alignment while the customer goes quiet. Then we say we need more pipeline. We don’t. We need more real conversations. A lot of the work filling the day doesn’t move deals forward. It just keeps the system running. That’s the problem. Give a rep a few hours back each week and you’d see it immediately. Better discovery. Risk shows up earlier. Less scrambling at the end of the quarter. Forecasts don’t improve because you add more. They improve when time is spent where it actually matters. That’s where AI actually fits. Not dashboards. Not summaries. It should remove the work that shouldn’t exist in the first place.

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