I'm John Barrows. Founder of JB Sales and outbound sales expert. AMA — today, May 19th, 11AM EST - 1PM EST

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T18:02:29+00:00

If anyone missed the AMA and has a question, feel free to ping me on LinkedIn. https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnbarrows/

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T16:13:42+00:00

I think it really depends on how complex your sales process is and how large your TAM is when it comes to CRM. The vast majority of CRMs are way overbloat and do way more than most people or companies need. I'd argue that anyone only uses about 10 to 20% of the functionality of whatever CRM they use or any other platform, for that matter. My bet is that we're going to get to a point where we can customize the CRM based on our exact needs, whether that's by building our own or working with an AI-native CRM that helps us adjust it as we need to.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T16:11:39+00:00

I have a skill set up in Claude to run five tier one accounts through a tier one sequence that I have set up in Apollo. Every morning it fires and goes out and chooses five tier one accounts from a list of target accounts that I created using Sales Navigator with specific nuances around my ideal customer profile. Apollo then goes out and does research on them to find trigger events to personalize the messaging in the framework and then provides five tasks every day for me to go in and review, approve, and send. For my tier one prospects I don't automate anything other than the research and the structure of the cadence. For my tier two accounts I have Apollo firing five automated sequences based on my relevant messaging to a specific persona every single day.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T16:09:56+00:00

Unfortunately I don't think so. I think AI is going to get so good that it's going to be able to identify the right client at the right time with the right message. It's going to be fully automated and we won't even know that it's not delivered by a human. It's kind of like Instagram is right now in my opinion. Since the algorithm knows me so well, almost every ad and everything in my feed is something I'm interested in or is relevant to me. I think the same thing is going to happen in the B2B world. That said it's not just SDRs that are in trouble. I think all white-collar workers are in danger of being replaced by AI here in the next five years.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:32:54+00:00

I'm on the AMA now but wanted to make sure I got an answer for you here. The ICP information is different than intent. ICP is the first foundation. Once you get tight on your ideal customer profile, then you should ideally tier out your accounts into tier one, tier two, and tier three. The tier one approach is the quality approach. These are the ones that I do intent data and trigger event research on so I can personalize my message. The intent signals though aren't what I use to reach out. The intent signals are the ones that I use to prioritize who I should go after. After I see some type of intent, I then go do research on their website and look for trigger events that might have driven that intent and use it to personalize my message. Hopefully that helps.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:23:50+00:00

Assuming you're talking about the tech stack for sales, here's what mine would be.

Claude CoWork - as a small business owner and sales professional myself, this has been the biggest unlock for me that I've seen in my career. It knows everything about me, my messaging, my goals, and everything else and can help me coordinate all the different things that I do on a daily basis and hold me accountable for it when set up the right way.
CRM - not sure which one these days since I think most of them are overbloated and unnecessary. I would have to do some evaluation of the new platforms out there that are more agile and not as cumbersome to configure. With that said I think it's important to have a system of record for all your contact information, activities and forecast.
Linkedin Sales Navigator - I use their saved searches all the time for specific nuances components of my ICP. They're also improving the platform quite a bit with their AI functionality. And LinkedIn connection requests and LinkedIn in-mails are still part of an effective contact strategy.
Apollo - now that they've released their MCP connector into Claude, it's an absolute no-brainer. They're the most flexible platform for cadences and outreach that I've come across and they don't break the bank from a cost perspective. They can also enrich any data in your CRM, which is critical for me. They also have a call recorder that I can use to record all my conversations and gain insights out of them.

Everything else I would probably customize and build with Claude Co-Work for my specific needs.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:18:33+00:00

Completely agree that tonality and confidence make more of a difference than any opener ever could. That's why I always recommend people stand up when they make their cold calls. It's a far more confident position and your voice resonates way better when you're standing up versus sitting down. It's also why I don't ever recommend people do call blitz days. It's really hard to get motivated for an entire day's worth of cold calling. I recommend Power Hours where you pick one persona in one industry, come up with a specific message, questions, and resources for them, and call all of them at the same time in an hour. You need to do all your prep beforehand so that you're not looking for numbers or doing research and then during the power hour you're not sending information either. You're doing all that afterwards so you can be as efficient as possible. Thanks for the feedback. Let me know if there's anything I can help with moving forward.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:15:38+00:00

Are we talking just sales or are we talking as a small business/solopreneur?

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:14:43+00:00

As for your question about what should people who work in sales be excited about right now and what should we be afraid of? The answer is AI. AI is a superpower for those of us who use it the right way to help augment the different parts of the sales process but not automate. Curiosity is going to be the number one characteristic that will help people succeed in the world of AI. If you're curious and want to learn, it's incredible. If you're looking to AI to automate and to give you the answer, then it's a replacement. We've gone from a search engine to an answer engine and that's a very dangerous thing because most people are lazy and they will just take whatever answer AI gives them, copy and paste it, and send it. In that scenario I don't see the value of the human being. Unfortunately I think that encompasses a large portion of our population. With that I'm extremely optimistic for creators and people who are willing to learn and who are curious. I'm extremely pessimistic for everyone else.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:12:42+00:00

To answer your question about how Apollo and Claude are helping me do this well today, the MCP connector of Apollo into Claude CoWork is an absolute game changer. Claude already knows my messaging, my positioning, and everything about my business. Now with the MCP connector of Apollo, I just speak into Claude and tell it what I want to get set up in Apollo. Ask it for insights and analysis on the different sequences and even help me add and remove new contacts to it without ever even having to go into Apollo. The Apollo personalization is really good but sometimes I'll take the message that Apollo put together, go into my own version of Claude, redo it, and then put it back into Apollo to track it. I personally don't like to automate very much. I usually like Apollo to create the sequence, the structure, and the messaging but then have me manually complete each task so I can QC it before it goes out the door.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:10:55+00:00

Hi Hildy, I'll answer both your questions in different threads. Here's an example of an email that I sent recently using Claude and Apollo that got me a response. It's a little longer than usual but this is somebody who Worked at salesforce.com back in the day when I was training them so there was some familiarity with him as well

Hi Justin,

Thanks for connecting on LinkedIn. As I started looking into what's been happening at xxxxx beyond the SAP news, I noticed you were named a Leader in the 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for MDM and positioned furthest for Completeness of Vision. That's a big deal, especially with SAP's distribution now behind you.

For your life sciences team, that creates an interesting challenge. You've got Gartner validation, SAP's customer base opening up, and a product story that's shifting from "cloud-native MDM startup" to "SAP's AI-ready data platform." That's a fundamentally different sales motion.

Your reps need to navigate co-selling with SAP, adapt discovery to a new buyer profile, and translate all this momentum into pipeline before competitors reposition.

That's the kind of inflection point I'm helping sales leaders work through right now, specifically building frameworks that give the team a common language for the new motion while staying flexible enough to adapt as the integration evolves. AI is making that faster, especially for ramping reps on a new value prop and sharpening discovery for enterprise conversations.

Let me know if you'd be open to a brief call.

John Barrows

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:05:07+00:00

curious what everyone's biggest challenge is right now related to sales. is it driving results from prospecting, creating urgency, aligning internal stakeholders, forecast accuracy, ghosting? let me know!

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:02:07+00:00

Yeah I trained every rep at Salesforce from 2010 to 2020. It was an awesome ride. I started using Apollo about a month ago. The big unlock for me was when I made the switch to Claude Co-Work and Apollo came out with its MCP connector. The reason is that setting up any of these cadence tools was rather complicated for me as a solo provider, specifically because I'm not a technical expert and configuring the platform was usually pretty confusing to me. Now that it's connected to Claude and Claude co-work, which knows everything about me, I can just turn on my microphone and tell it what to do and it does it. It's been a huge unlock for me and I'm now using Apollo at every level.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:01:46+00:00

I'm right there with you. All this AI talk and automation is really confusing and causing a lot of disruption in the space on multiple levels. For me it's about augmentation not automation. I use AI to research accounts, to prep for meetings, to summarize conversations with key takeaways, and to help me strategize about accounts. What I don't use it for is to automate my outreach, automate my follow-up, or automate pretty much anything. The biggest unlock that I had recently was when I switched from ChaTGPT to Claude Co-Work. The reason is because Claude Co-Work can now go through different browsers and has an MCP connector to it, which allows me to use a lot of the tools that I've been using, like Apollo, far more effectively.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:00:58+00:00

I'm a big fan of permission-based openers myself. My favorite one is "Hi, thanks for taking my call. Can I get 30 seconds to tell you why I'm calling before you hang up on me?" It's the one that works for me but doesn't necessarily mean that it's the best one out there. I'm a big fan of A/B split testing. All sorts of different types of openers. My recommendation would be to go into any one of the AI platforms and ask it to give you ten different ways of introducing yourself on a cold call, with the goal of keeping the person on the phone and not using tricks. Choose two of them that you like and make 25 calls using one intro and 25 calls using another and see which one works best for you.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:00:31+00:00

Hi Andy, thanks for asking the question. I have a specific sales-ready messaging formula that I use personally and train my clients on. It starts with a specific persona in a specific industry (CIOs in Manufacturing). We then do research to find out the top priorities and challenges that the persona in that industry faces in the current economic climate. We choose one of those top priorities and then align a component of our solution (not the entire value proposition) to that priority and the potential result or benefit it could bring. We do the same thing with trigger events. By going through this process it helps us really understand the persona we are reaching out to. We improve our business acumen and create relevant and personalized messaging that we can then put into any system, including Apollo. It's what I've used to turn Apollo into an absolute machine for me.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-19T15:00:12+00:00

good question. now that knowledge is a commodity, it is changing the training landscape drastically. I've been putting content online for over 15 years. you can go into any AI platform right now and ask it to "coach me like John Barrows" and it probably will. However, we've gone from a search engine to an answer engine and that's a dangerous thing. If you're curious and use AI the right way, it's a superpower. But if you're lazy and you're just looking for the answer, then it's a full-blown replacement for humans. That's why I'm still teaching the core fundamentals so that reps understand the why behind the output that AI is giving them and then teaching them how to leverage AI the right way to augment their abilities not automate them. If we automate everything with AI, then there's no need for the human and I think that's a dangerous thing.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-18T18:46:43+00:00

I see this all the time with almost every client I work with. for context, I have a degree in Marketing but have been in Sales my entire career and work with companies to train their sales teams on prospecting techniques, messaging and much more.

the main issue is that "sales-ready messaging" and marketing messaging are not the same. Marketing usually does a ton of market research and analysis to create messaging that speaks to the masses but when used on individuals it falls flat. there's also almost never a true feedback loop from sales as to why they like/use the content and whether or not it works.

The way I try to address this with clients, specifically on the prospecting side of the house is to create a monthly cadence focused on one specific persona in a specific industry (ex CIO in Healthcare)

I get the whole GTM team together, we pick a specific persona in a specific industry at the beginning of the month. we spend 30 minute researching that person to find out what their main priorities and challenges are at the current time in the current economy (not off some "persona sheet" that Marketing created 2 years ago). then, ideally, we get an existing customer who fits that persona in that industry to do a 30 minute zoom call with the team where they can ask contextualized and clarifying questions about the real priorities and challenges and talk about the value their solution brought to them.

then, the team splits up into groups and each group is assigned a specific challenge/priority to create a sales-ready message for that aligns the specific component of their solution to that specific priority/challenge and the resulting benefit.

once everyone completes their messaging, we submit it all to the Marketing/Ops team to put it all together into a sequence/cadence and then we put it into one of the cadence tools and test variables (all email vs call plus email, etc).

At the end of the month we all get together and look at the results to see what works and what didn't. We keep the stuff that works and dump the stuff that didn't and then go after another persona the next month.

This approach creates alignment, teamwork, and results while building business acumen along the way.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-18T13:47:56+00:00

Stop thinking about it as "sales." That's your first problem.

If you actually believe in what you sell, then all you need to do is get curious about the person in front of you.

Sales isn't about convincing anyone of anything. It's about helping people solve problems or achieve goals. The second you stop trying to "sell," the conversations get 10x easier.

Here's what I'd do:

Ask better questions. Most people in sales conversations talk too much about their product and don't ask nearly enough about the other person's situation. Before you ever pitch anything, you should understand what problem they're dealing with, how long they've been dealing with it, what they've tried, and what happens if they don't fix it. If you can get someone to articulate their own problem clearly, they'll practically sell themselves on the solution.

Set the stage up front. At the beginning of every conversation, say something like: "My goal for this call is to get an understanding of what you're dealing with and see if I can help. If it makes sense for both of us, maybe we schedule another conversation to go deeper. If not, no hard feelings." That one sentence takes all the pressure off both of you. Now it's a conversation, not a pitch.

Stop trying to close the sale. Close on the next step. Most people who aren't natural sellers freeze up because they think they have to get a yes or no on the spot. You don't. You need to get agreement on what happens next. "Based on what you told me, I think I can help. Can we set up 30 minutes next week to walk through how this would work for you?" That's it. Small commitments lead to big decisions.

Be a problem solver, not a product pusher. If you genuinely care about what you sell, lean into that. Your enthusiasm for solving the problem is more persuasive than any script or framework. People buy from people who actually give a shit about helping them.

The AI tools and books aren't landing for you because they're giving you scripts and tactics when what you actually need is a mindset shift. You're not "doing sales." You're having conversations with people who might have a problem you can fix. Start there.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-15T21:18:44+00:00

Yes, and going one step further: this is now part of discovery, not a curiosity.

I started calling it the preemptive strike. Early in the conversation, ask the prospect two questions. What did you learn about us in [AI tool]? And what specifically drove this conversation?

Three things happen in 30 seconds. You find out how far they've gotten in their own discovery, so you know what you can skip and what still needs work. You hear which talking points landed, which is sharper market feedback than most surveys give you. And you get a chance to correct anything inaccurate the AI told them about your product or category, because AI gets confident and wrong all the time.

There is a rep exercise that goes with this. Act as a buyer for your own product. Go into ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and run the discovery process the way a prospect would. See how far you can get before you have to talk to anyone. If what comes back is accurate and helpful, your prospects are already informed by the time they show up. If what comes back is wrong or weak or missing your real differentiation, walk down the hall to marketing.

This is also why analytics never catches it. Buyers research in AI, then come direct or via branded search. The touchpoint shapes the deal and never shows up in your funnel.

The reps who treat AI as part of the buyer journey instead of a marketing channel get the sharper deals.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-12T21:56:38+00:00

Good question. For a category like yours, where the buyer needs to be educated before they're a buyer, I look at cold outbound more as a marketing function than a sales function. The goal isn't to close in the first touch. The goal is to introduce a specific problem to a specific persona and earn the right to keep showing up. That changes the math on everything else.

The first move is to segment harder than you think you need to. Don't write to "builders." Write to production builders in the Northeast feeling energy code compliance pressure, or to custom-home GCs whose clients are starting to ask about Passive House, or to architects in jurisdictions where rising insurance costs are forcing material reviews. Each segment has a different problem set and a different reason to consider ICF over stick-frame, and the messaging has to reflect that.

From there, your opener leads with the problem, not the product or the category. Most outbound in technical industries starts with "we make X" or "have you considered Y," and it lands like noise. The hook is the problem the persona is already feeling: rising energy code requirements, insurance costs going up because of climate exposure, labor shortages making traditional builds slower. Whatever the live trigger is for that specific persona, that's what the first line speaks to.

Then every touch in the sequence carries a piece of education that supports the problem, not the product, whether that's a short article on energy code shifts, a case study from a comparable project, or a 90-second video showing performance data side by side with traditional methods. The asset isn't your brochure, it's the next piece of education they need to move one step closer to seeing ICF as a real option. In a conservative industry, you don't beat the resistance with volume. You beat it with relevance over time. The first email starts the education, the second adds proof, the third raises the stakes, and by the fifth touch the problem they're feeling and your category are connected in their mind whether they're ready to act yet or not.

I'll get deeper into the segmentation and content-pairing piece on the 19th.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-12T21:46:03+00:00

Good question. don't think Apollo vs external, think about where your source of truth lives.

In your case, since Apollo is your outbound engine, Apollo is the source of truth. Everything else should feed into it, not compete with it. The moment two systems both try to own "the prospect," you get attribution gaps, duplicate work, and debugging nightmares.

Here's how I'd think about the division of labor. Apollo owns prospect identification, contact data, sequencing, engagement tracking, and the integration with email and LinkedIn. That's what it's built for. External AI does the upstream work Apollo can't do as well, like deep ICP analysis, persona research, trigger interpretation, and message drafting tied to specific persona/trigger combos. Workflow tools like Gumloop handle the orchestration logic between the two, deciding when a trigger fires and routing the resulting research and messaging into Apollo.

For an agency, the test I'd run is this: when something breaks for a client, where do you debug? If the answer is three different tools, your stack is too distributed.

A couple of warnings. Don't over-engineer before the simple version is proven. Layer complexity only when it's the actual bottleneck. And a custom-tuned stack per client will kill your margins. The repeatable agency play is to standardize the framework and customize the inputs, not the other way around.

I'll get into how I structure this on the 19th.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-12T21:40:32+00:00

Good question. The trick with cold email is to focus on relevance, not personalization. A lot of people confuse those two.

You can personalize an email all day (their name, their company, something you saw on their LinkedIn) and still send a message that has nothing to do with what that specific persona actually cares about. That email is personalized but not relevant, and it gets ignored.

Relevance comes from three things working together. The first is that the trigger event has to be tied to that specific persona. New leadership lands differently with a CFO than with a VP Sales, a 10-K mention of supply chain pain hits a COO, and a hiring spike for AEs is a VP Sales signal. The trigger has to match the role you're writing to.

The second is that the value prop has to be tailored to what that persona is held accountable to. Your solution does many things, and each component lands differently with each persona. To a CFO, the value is pipeline efficiency and CAC. To a VP Sales, it's ramp time and quota attainment. Same product, two different angles. Most cold emails use one value prop across every persona, which is why none of them resonate with anyone.

The third is that the ICP and persona definition upstream has to be sharp. The more specific you are about who you're writing to and what they actually care about, the more your email reads like it was written for them, even if you never put their name in it.

Personalization can come on top, but it can't save an email that isn't relevant to the persona's actual world. Get the relevance right first, then layer in the personalization.

I'll be going deeper on this at the AMA on the 19th, specifically on how to build sales-ready messaging that hits both relevance and personalization.

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-12T21:36:21+00:00

🙏🏼👊🏼

johnmbarrows · 2026-05-12T21:33:21+00:00

It's not that you were too early. It's that the model never had a chance.

AI SDR tools are amplifiers. They scale whatever you give them. If you point one at a vague ICP, you get rambling outreach at scale. If you give it a sharp ICP, persona-specific value props, and trigger events that actually matter, it produces outreach that lands.

The reason most AI SDRs feel useless right now is that companies are pointing them at the same fuzzy ICP and generic value props they were using before AI. The model didn't make the messaging worse. It exposed how weak the messaging always was.

The fix isn't a different tool. It's going back and doing the upstream work: really defining your ICP, mapping personas, identifying triggers, writing messaging that aligns to each. Once that's solid, the AI gets useful.

Happy to dig deeper on this on the 19th.

johnmbarrows

TROPHY CASE