What the 100m final taught me about B2B sales

Did you watch the mens Olympic 100m final yesterday?

As I was watching it I was reminded of something I see a lot when speaking with B2B founders who are struggling with cold outbound.

I know... I know... but bare with me.

If you watched this race live you might have be confused about who won as both gold and silver medalists finished the race at the same time (9.79 seconds 🤯 ).

When the dust settled it came out that Noah Lyles from Team USA just clipped Kishane Thompson from Jamaica as his torso crossed the line first.

Noah leaned it at the last second and cemented his name in history.

So what's my point?

In B2B sales there is a lot of talk about sales tech, buying signals, enrichment tools like Clay as their products make really really good content.

No hate on Clay btw its a great tool that we use daily

The problem is that I see a lot of sales leaders putting their focus on this stage of the process.

Building fancy tables, AI agents doing research & AI personalisation because it looks and is really cool.

Without having something the market actually wants to buy...

Finding product market fit and offer market fit should be the main goal of sales leaders who want to run outbound campaigns.

Once you find it you'll be able to leverage outbound tech to it's fullest and use it to give you the edge over your competition.

The point: Lean in on your market and watch as you take gold.

Tom

P.S. I released a video today on how to make offers that scale with cold outbound in 2024.

You can watch it here