Coolie

1. Launched in < 4 weeks
2. Acquired 200+ users and paying customers

Co-Founder

Secret

1. Developing business, generating revenue & leading partnerships with top SaaS companies worldwide via cold outreach methods & nurturing inbound leads
2. Responsible for strategizing & executing new business plans with the co-founders
3. Aligning with cross-functional teams to ensure smooth onboarding of the clients, solve business operational issues & share feedback
4. Leading & managing the different stages of the sales cycle
5. Guiding, training & motivating team members

International Sales, Business Development & Partnership Lead

Zapp

1. Evaluated and reported on KPIs, improved process & proposed solutions to increase the output thus achieving 100% SLA
2. Partnered with customer service & cross-functional team to solve operational issues
3. Refined & supervised the operations procedure in close collaboration with the other departments
4. Coached & led a team of 8+ people in the alignment of the company values

Operations Lead

Business Tools Centre - India

1. Exceeded the ARR target of the company by finding new opportunities, opening & managing new and existing accounts, offering suitable solutions, negotiating contracts & closing the deals
2. Customer acquisition of national & international clients (retail & wholesale) by hunting, presenting, educating and demonstrating the company’s products & services via cold calling, emailing, consultation, attending exhibitions & seminars, etc.
3. Amplified ROI of key accounts by ameliorating up-sell opportunities
4. Retained clients by measuring & evaluating their needs and improved the number of referred clients year on year.
5. Launched worldwide business service by initiating B2B & B2C marketing campaigns online that augmented the lead count
6. Managed, reported & forecasted the entire sales cycle by using MS Excel & CRM software
7. Mentored, hired & trained a team of 10 people (SDR & Manager) and retained them with strong work culture & ethics

International Sales, Partnership & Business Development Manager

Moshe Productions Private Limited

1. Developed 3 business projects from scratch, pitched the story line & raised an investment with no prior experience
2. Started online & offline marketing promotions that produced a 15% profitable project
3. Employed & bargained the core team & key personnel fees thus decreasing the expenses by 10%
4. Led & controlled the production’s finances & troubleshot problems that arise during the production with less than 4% increase in the budget by solving problems & taking critical decisions under high duress.

Co-Founder - Sales, Partnership & Business Development

Abercrombie & Fitch Co.

1. Managed & trained a team of 7 stock associates and ensured 100% merchandise flow & presentation standards.

Team Leader

1. Retained efficiency of merchandise flow, filling & presentation standards throughout the store.

Associate

Enabling AI-powered cold (email) outbound strategies to generate revenue for B2B SaaS Companies

Cold email isn’t dead. It's just most people are doing it wrong.

👉 Helping you to book more meetings through hyper-personalized and relevant cold emails that actually get replies using AI.

◼️ Who I help: Sales reps. at fast-growing B2B SaaS companies.

◼️ What I do: Help you write prospect-specific cold email sequence that cut through the noise.

◼️ How I do it: By combining deep cold outreach expertise with AI-driven personalization, delivered inside a simple & scalable workflow.

✅ I’ve spent a decade studying what works in outbound and what gets ignored. Now I’m building the tool I wish every SDR had.

1/ It helps sales reps. write prospect-specific, tailored cold emails in seconds. No more template or ​{​{spintax}}

2/ Help B2B sales reps. turn bland outreach into booked calls, at scale.

SDRs are burning time on low-performing cold emails. I built Coolie to fix that with 10x faster personalization and real replies.

No more templates. No more guesswork. Just cold outreach that works 

Want me to roast your copy? Send me a DM to get started 📧

Shabbir Bhanpurawala

Sales & Marketing Executive

First things first: All joy in the world comes from wanting others to be happy; all suffering in the world comes from wanting oneself to be happy.

Secondly: I am a CRO who still picks up the phone and cold calls - even with > 25 team members. Because it is fun and rewarding. 

In the first 10 years of my BtoB Sales career, I helped several startups in Europe to grow from < 500k ARR to > 10 Mio. ARR within < 5 years as AE, VP of Sales, CSO and CRO, with one Exit so far. More to come.

I went from full-cycle AE to CSO within 6 years - without having a clue about sales the first 2 years.

When I started in BtoB back in 2014, I really sucked at it. I did not reach my targets - not even close.

What did I do wrongly?

👉🏻 ...travelled 8 hours to a 1-hour meeting without prior discovery
👉🏻 ...never picked up the phone. Did everything via Email
👉🏻 ...asked on average 2 questions per meeting
👉🏻 ...did not know any Sales methodologies
👉🏻 ...had no clue how the sales process looked like
👉🏻 ...never booked a follow-up meeting right away
👉🏻 ...thousand of other mistakes 

I was lucky my company brought in two trainers, Max and Mike who helped me tremendously. I was able to completely change the way I sold - but not without heavily resisting that change at first.

I did not believe in discovery calls or asking too many questions - and had done sales too long without.

But I managed to change. And it was the best transformation I could have wished for.

In year no. 3, I reached 158% of my sales target (1.58 Mio. ARR) with a 2-month holiday during summer.

Since then, I have learned a lot more and realized that learning is the most important activity in our profession.

Patrick Trümpi

If you are a sales leader with a sales team >5 reps, I have an offer for you:

You probably have a Sales Playbook. 

Or at least you should have one.

(One that looks like the content in the image 👇🏻)

You might struggle to keep it up to date and have your team actually use that boring piece of documentation.

Am I far off with that assumption?

Because I struggled with that almost all my career as a leader. 

I kept it clean but rarely anyone used it proactively. 

My teams did not learn on their own what was in there. 

Even with an LLM layer on top. Not much improvement.

BUT: This is going to change big time. Right now.

We built an AI Coach that is actually teaching the playbook to reps. In the flow-of-work, without needing to access it. 

Example: 

A rep moves a deal to the next stage in the CRM. 

The AI Coach will reach out to the rep on slack:"I saw you moved deal X to "Priority Agreement" stage. Should we quickly go through a few important considerations you need to know at this stage so that you can increase the likelihood to succeed?"

Rep: "Yes"

AI Coach: "All right. Do you remember the exit criteria?" 

Rep: ...

A quick repetition right when it is needed most. 

Works like a charm.


All of the above will require you have a really sophisticated playbook. 

It is finally worth getting that thing right. 

I have written >20 playbooks myself. 

Therefore, my offer for you: go through your playbook in a 1 hour session, giving some advice and content pieces. 

It will need to be ready for AI soon.

If you are interested, comment "Playbook".

And I will reach out to you.


(Sorry, I hate those "comment" posts but this will actually give you some value 😅)

Sales Leaders: If you call your stages "Discovery, Demo, and Proposal", your reps will exactly do what it says.

They will do a discovery call and think stage one is done. 

They will do a demo and think that stage is done as well. 

They will send a proposal and think they are done again.

But that is not how sales works.

Because it only focuses on what the rep does. 

Not what the reps do together with their buyers. 

If you call your stages "Problem Agreement", "Priority Agreement" and "Power Agreement", your reps will:

Make their buyers agree on a problem. 

Make their buyers agree on priority. 

And make their buyers' budget holder agree on the case. 

A small change with big mental impact.

I do not recommend starting your sales career at an early-stage startup.

For most people. 

Because I did the same.

Guess how much I learned about selling during the first 2 years of my sales career that I still use today?

Not even 5%.

I even learned things I had to actively unlearn later again.

Some issues:

1️⃣ You likely won't get any good coaching and waste precious years experimenting without a solid base.

I pitch-slapped 100 prospects because nobody in our company knew how to ask any questions.

2️⃣ You will not know whether your failure is due to product, market, topic, or yourself. You might be discouraged to continue even though you are skilled at selling.

I did not reach my target in the first 2 years and was doubting whether the job was for me. The only reason I could stay was the hard-working mentality in my 20ties.

3️⃣ The chances of failure are incredibly high because the startups aren't able to hire experienced salespeople but have the most difficult products to sell.

No other sales rep reached their target in the first company I worked.

The odds in an early-stage startup are heavily against you.


Yes, there are also a lot of positives about the experience as well.

You can learn a lot of different stuff and you have to build processes from scratch. 

If your goal is to be an entrepreneur one day and you do not mind an environment without structure, I might recommend the startup.

If that is not the case, a startup is not for you.

You could even waste your time if nobody knows how to sell or you do not get any external coaching.

A small hack changed my life a few months ago. 

Like for real.

For those who have heard me talk about it know what I mean:

After putting our son to bed, I’d sit down to work again.

Specifically, I was meant to write my book and articles for Substack.

But I struggled heavily with this. 

Sitting down in the evening to write down my thoughts in a structured way was always the most painful exercise for my brain. 

I dreaded the evenings because it was so hard.

Writing stuff down after a full day of work?

Not easy. 

I regularly skipped to do something else. 

But then I discovered the "dictate mode" in ChatGPT. 

And realised I can actually talk to ChatGPT.

For hours. 

(even though I have to re-start the dictation every 10 minutes)

And have it structure the whole text for me.

Talking is really easy for me. 

Writing is a pain. 

The thing with LLMs: If you give it 2 hours of context in the form of a transcript, the content turns out to be really good.

And that is not just my opinion. 

Stephan kindly shared his feedback with me. 👇🏻

Now, I am actually excited to sit down again in the evening.

And that is such a huge difference in my life.

People are still discussing whether we should leave em dashes in the texts we write with the help of LLMs.

I find that such a dumb discussion. 

For two reasons: 

1/ In 2 years, nobody will care anymore. It will be so common - like in normal books. Just read one of those 😅

2/ Why judging a text according to how many em dashes it has and not how much you learned from it? It really does not matter how it has been written if you take something from it.


What do you think?


PS: Thanks to this hack, I will be finishing my book very soon.

I am on my way to the yearly army service.

For Swiss men that is quite a normal thing to do as it is still mandatory in this country.

Ok, 99% at my age are actually done with it, I must admit 😅

Thanks to the army, I was in my first leadership role at the age of 19, leading a platoon of 40 men.

And boy was I a bad leader.

The only thing I did intuitively right was leading by example. 

The rest was a disaster.

Some soldiers in my platoon behaved badly? 

I would get them out of bed at 1 am and take them on a run for an hour. 

Did it help with their behaviour? 

Nope. 

Only later did I understand that instilling fear and pain won't bring any lasting results.

And guess what: I learned that in the army too. 

From a really good company leader who taught me the most important lesson in leadership: 

"Make sure you talk to every single soldier in your platoon. At least 30 min. Be curious about their lives. Have an ear for their problems at home. If they understand that you have their interest at heart, they will make sure to protect yours during the service."

The exact opposite of what I had done naturally. 

And it changed everything. 

Could not have been more true.

Grateful for that lesson to this day Claude.

This week was cold calling day with the team. 

I reached two prospects. 

One I disqualified after 3 min. 

And the other I booked after 7 min.

Because I found so much useful information on their LinkedIn profile, I started the call differently: 

Prospect: "Hello?"

Me: "Hey Sandra, it is Patrick Trümpi calling from Taskbase, good morning"

Sandra: "Hey Patrick"

Me: "Hi Sandra. We do not know each other, calling you out of the blue. Do you mind giving me 30 seconds so that I can explain why I call you right now?"

Sandra: "Sure, go ahead"

Me: "I actually read on your LinkedIn that you focus with your team really on the skills of discovery and "ask before you tell". I like that, really what makes salespeople successful. I also saw you actually have a coaching certificate so I assumed you coach your 15 reps personally?"

Sandra: "Yeah I did for a while but let it slide a bit for a time."

Me: "Let it slide for a while?"

Sandra: "There was a time when I almost stopped and then I handed it over to an external coach who regularly coaches the team on their calls and interactions based on skills I provide."

Me: "All right, so you have an external person who does that full time?

Sandra: "Not full time but we do invest significantly"

Me: "Do you have an idea around what the amount per rep is?"

Sandra: "Not on the spot, no"

Me: "No problem, we can figure that out later in our discussion. I have a suggestion: We could actually clone that trainer to an AI that is trained on her training methodology, you playbook and knows exactly what skills you want to develop within your reps. The AI will then automatically check calls, emails and the sales process acumen of your reps and proactively approach them, like 'hey Thomas, I saw your call with client X, can I give you some feedback on your discovery questions?' through Slack or Team. The AI continuously improves your reps at a fraction of the costs. Does that sound interesting?"

Sandra: "Yeah that does not sound un-interesting"

Me: "All right, another suggestion then: Let's book a call next week and dive into some skills and use case. When works for you? Tudesday afternoon?"

Meeting booked.

Seeing the LinkedIn profile, for some prospects I can say with 90% confidence that I am going to book the meeting. 

This was one of them. 

Know that feeling?



PS: I had to work on the release of the new website as well - not a great role-model.

In the last 6 months, we halved our sales cycle.

What did we change?

The ICP.

We sold a nice-to-have use case to publishers for a few years.

Now, we sell a proactive AI Sales Coach to sales organisations of software companies.

Something every sales org needs or already does (sufficiently or not) with human effort.

Sometimes the biggest improvements are not done by improving the sales team.

They are done by choosing a better focus for the product & team.

Mario won the Swiss Sales Trophy. Congrats on that, Mario!

If he were not a founder, he would have a prestigious sales job real soon. 

The same goes for Simone (2nd, already works for a fantastic company hypt),

and Dominique (who came 3rd).

Dominique is actually looking for one right now.

What company would I recommend to a seasoned SaaS seller like him?

blp.

1/ Fast-growing. 

2/ Future unicorn.

3/ PMF and 8-figure ARR.

4/ Best Leadership team.

5/ Prospects who say: "I waited for your product for years".

6/ And soon, with one of the best sales academies in the world (more to come).

It is the opportunity I would have wanted a few years into my career.

A seller's dream.

Interested?

They are hiring.

Write to me and I will personally intro you to the leadership team. 

Curious to see where Dominique ends up. 

If you had participated, that could have been you. 

Maybe next time. 

No. 

Not maybe.

For sure next time?


Stefan, you have done such an incredible job with the organisation of this event, I am completely blown away. Besides sales, you also have an organisational talent. Something I never had or will have, which makes me admire the skill even more. Well done.

No rep ever told me:

I actually changed my practice thanks to the feedback from our recording tool.

None. Zero.

More often than not, reps actually lose trust in so-called “AI coaching”, a name role-play and recording tools attribute to themselves. 

But these tools rarely impact the reps’ behaviour.

Which coach listens to a recording (or does a role-play) and tells the rep:

Your talking speed is at 189s per word, but it should actually be at 120.
You asked 19 questions, but 30 would be great.
You answered 5 of 10 questions well.
You talked 50% of the time, but it should be at 20% (Which is wrong anyway).
Your longest monologue was 107 seconds, but it should be 98 seconds.
You could have personalised more.
You could have asked an impact question.
You did not summarise the call.
You did not set an agenda.
You found a pain point.
You talked about decision criteria.

I mean….what?

This has little to do with either coaching or learning.

Zero didactical value. (Using some learning jargon, for you, Maren 😃).

A coach/teacher has a different approach:

1/ Listens to a call.
2/ Finds 2 areas they want to give feedback on.
3/ Schedules a coaching session with the rep.
4/ Plays those two sequences.
5/ Asks the rep: What would you do differently? (to make them think first)
6/ After the self-reflection, give the feedback.
7/ Then says: Let’s quickly practice that.
8/ Does a role-play.
9/ Does another self-reflection exercise. 
10/ Gives another 2 points of feedback.

That his how coaching is done. 

That is how people can put learning into practice. 

Not 37 points you did well and 12 points you could improve.

I am probably exaggerating, and some people actually learned something from those role-play or recording tools.

But there is a much better way AI can coach.

The same way a human would do it. 


What was your experience with the feedback from those tools?

With one of our recent clients, we had 3 discoveries with the champion, one prep and a C-level meeting - all within 2 weeks. 

But after the first call, we really were not sure if we had a case. 

I could not wrap my head around what has been said because there were many different, sometimes unrelated topics.

I started the second discovery with a recap.

I repeated all the things I felt were important regarding challenges and potential impacts. 

We added some more information but it still did not click.

Then I asked: "Between 0 and 10, how important are these topics we are talking about for you?" 

The answer: An 8. Very important.

Me: "What makes it so important?"

Them: "We transfer the whole business to be more profit-driven"

There it was. 

The missing puzzle.

A business initiative that was driving the whole thing. 

And I did not capture that earlier. 

The question "from 0 to 10" saved us. 

Which happened often in my career.

It helps quantify something that is hard to quantify.

I reached 158% of my target in 2018 (1,58 Mio.), with one deal accounting for 41% of the total number.

That was by far my largest deal to date, and I closed it without any of these:

👉🏻 Sales Process
👉🏻 Champion rehearsals
👉🏻 Proper Business Case
👉🏻 Qualification Methodology
👉🏻 Talking to the Economic Buyer

We simply had nobody in the company who knew about any of that. 

Does it mean these are useless?

No, it means I got incredibly lucky. 

I would not want to risk another deal for not understanding how sales works.

And thinking in frameworks and steps is a big part of that.

Julius and Dominic talked about my favourite prospecting trick in the last episode of Sales & Pepper:

1️⃣  Choose an Account you really want to get into.

2️⃣  Buy a pair of shoes. 

3️⃣  Send one shoe in a box to the C-level persona you want to talk to.

4️⃣  With a letter that reads like this: "Now that I already have one shoe in your door, shouldn't we meet so that I can bring the second one as well?"

This trick never failed Lars (from whom I learned about it) 😃 - he even built a 9-figure business on its pillars. 

Okey, that is a bit of an overstatement. 

(the fact that this trick was an important part of his business) 

But still kind of true. 😅

It clearly reflects Lars' personality to try literally anything ethical to succeed. 


PS: I can definitely recommend the podcast episode with Julius. So much prospecting value in 30 min.

When I started my career in B2B software sales more than a decade ago, my manager told me: 

"Cold calling does not work in B2B." 

He did not say this because he had tested it, measured it, and seen the numbers. 

He said it because he didn’t like it. 

To him, sales was an elite profession, a career built on prestige and intellect. 

Picking up the phone and dialling strangers didn’t fit into the image.

Isn't that really weird?

All elite sellers I have seen actually all pick up the phone. 

😅

I also learned the craft a few years later.

And realised it was actually the best way to generate deals.

Not only that. 

I learned it really fast because I love the script I was using. 

Still today. 

And that is what I am going to share today. 

This time, not for free, though.

I often hear "you give way too much for free", which I actually don't mind. 

But this one will be a chapter of my book, which I shouldn't give away for free, I have been told. 

So here it is. 

Enjoy the (very long) read:

Open article: The Only Cold Call Script you will ever need. by open.substack.com

The Only Cold Call Script you will ever need.

In 2018, gatekeepers were a big topic when cold calling. 

Later on, mobile numbers became wildly available and I did not need that skill in my teams anymore.

That is why I rarely write about it today.

In some industries and for some personas, however, gatekeepers still play a big role. 

In logistics, for instance.

Now that I am working a lot with Felicia and REP - Revenue Excellence Partners, I wanted to have someone with real practice to write something about the topic:

How do you navigate gatekeepers today?

That is what you can read in Feli's article on my substack:


Thanks for your amazing insights Feli.

Open article: Gatekeepers in Cold Calling: How I Play My Way Through Level by Level. by patricktrumpi.substack.com

Gatekeepers in Cold Calling: How I Play My Way Through Level by Level.

taplio

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Shabbir Bhanpurawala

Patrick Trümpi

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