Inside the Office
This semester I’m teaching Business & Basketball: The Revenue Playbook For Women’s Sports with Duke’s women’s basketball program. It looks like a sports course, but it’s really a sales course (students won’t register for a “sales” course, so we dressed it up).
Every student team is given some sort of real asset to sell such as single-game ticket packages for community groups, a jersey patch, NIL deals with small businesses around town, etcetera. They have to generate leads, qualify them, get an actual human being to take a call, and try to move that person to a “yes.” In other words, they have to make real asks and experience real rejections, which means it’s hard… and it’s supposed to be!
Last week I introduced them to Clay, which uses AI to scrape information about prospects and fill a funnel faster than the blink of an eye. Then I gave them the assignment of identifying and scoring fifty leads for their projects.
They did it. Fifty leads each, (mostly) on time. Three students in the room used something other than the tool I gave them, and they picked their tools based on what they were actually trying to find. Everyone else took the shortcut I put in front of them, which, honestly, I probably would have done too.
Then I read their lists. Oof!
One team had a lead in Durham. Durham, England. Nobody between the scrape and the submission looked up long enough to notice they were about to pitch community night tickets to someone an ocean away from Cameron Indoor.
The lists were full, but they were full of partial garbage. They weren’t aimed. Few could tell me why a particular name was on the page, what made that person a fit, what the ask would be, or what they hoped to learn by reaching out. Lead generation became free, and the second it was free, the thinking stopped. Nobody stood between the output and the decision.
Here is why that costs more than it appears to.
In sales, your funnel is not a scoreboard. It’s an instrument. You pick a specific person for a specific reason, you make a specific ask, and what comes back teaches you something about the process. Was it the wrong buyer? Was it the wrong price? Wrong moment? Maybe the wrong story? And that feedback is critical… it’s how founders get from guesses to an actual business.
But that feedback loop only teaches you if you put something deliberate into it. In contrast, fifty unqualified names into your sales processes produces fifty non-answers, and non-answers are unreadable. It means you can’t tell whether the pitch is broken or the list is, and what good is that?
Without any data, you simply repeat the same process again… and again… and again. The result, ultimately, is that, while you thought you saved time, you actually wound up wasting more of it. And time, remember, is your most precious resource.
In the case of my students, they only have a singly basketball season to accomplish their goals. Founders have their limited runways. Either way, a funnel packed with unqualified leads might feel like progress, but that’s only true until you realize you spent all the weeks you had sending emails but learning nothing.
I gave my students that feedback, and then I sent them back to the drawing board. However, I also let them use the lists they’d built, meaning the outreach going out this week will mostly land in silence. While that’s not going to generate good results, I’d rather that happen with a ticket package for a class assignment now than with a company later, because it’s an important lesson to learn.
The lesson, by the way, isn’t just a lesson for them. It’s a lesson for all of us about how to leverage AI. It can speed you up, but, if you’re not thoughtful about it, it can also dramatically slow you down. In the case of an AI sales lead-gen tool, sure, it can produce plenty of sales leads, but there’s a difference between good leads and bad leads. Even when AI can fill your spreadsheet, it’s still your job, as the human, to intercede and decide which leads are actually good.
In the past, fifty leads might have taken a week, but that week forcing you to decide who was worth the effort. Now it takes four minutes, and every minute you saved gets spent later, waiting to hear back from people who were never going to answer.
-Jamie
Worth Your Time
This article explaining and celebrating Radical Candor conveniently scrolled into my life shortly after a conversation with a couple of very enthusiastic but very naive founders.
They were telling me about their idea, and every time I offered a critique, they responded by saying, “Well, we talked with so-and-so at such-and-such company, and they told us they loved our idea!”
Finally, I had to tell them those people didn’t actually love their idea. Those people were just being polite. Unfortunately, giving polite feedback to entrepreneurs rarely helps them. What helps entrepreneurs is honest, candid, caring feedback, and this article does a great job explaining why.
Actually… I should be honest… it does a decent job explaining why. But, in this case, decent is good enough.